Charles Frederick Carter

Who was Charles Frederick Carter?

Professor Sir Charles Frederick Carter was an academic known primarily for his role as the founding Vice-Chancellor of Lancaster University.

Carter was born in Rugby to a father who was an electrical engineer and the developer of the Carter coefficient, and a mother who was an active member of the Society of Friends. He was educated at Rugby School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read Mathematics and Economics and attained a First.

In World War II Carter refused to fight, being a conscientious objector, and because he refused to accept any conditions for his exemption he spent three months in Strangeways Prison, Manchester. When released, he joined the Friends' Relief Service, where he met Janet Shea, whom he married in 1944.

In 1945 he returned to Cambridge, where he became a lecturer in statistics and, from 1947, a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He remained at Cambridge until 1952, when he took the Chair of Applied Economics at Queen's University, Belfast. Whilst in Northern Ireland he became a student of The Troubles, and concluded that a Protestant monopoly on power was unacceptable and could not be sustained. He also chaired the Northern Ireland Economic Development Council. In 1959 he moved to the Stanley Jevons chair in Manchester, remaining there for four years.