G. Barrie Wetherill (1932–2022)

G. Barrie Wetherill, known as Barrie, was born on 6 April 1932 and attended the Mundella Grammar School in Nottingham. He was a Professor of Statistics at Bath, Canterbury and Newcastle Universities and specialised in industrial statistics with practical applications to process improvement. He revolutionised the attitude to measurement in chemical production and helped businesses focus on performance at all stages with his innovative statistical process control methods. He was elected a member of the RSS in November 1953 and served on RSS Council from 1967 to 1976 during which time he was Honorary Secretary (1967–1972) and Vice President (1974–1975). He was an enthusiastic author and published widely in JRSS A and B, Applied Statistics, Technometrics, Biometrika and many other journals. He served on the RSS Series A Editorial Panel from 1961 to 1966, Series C Editorial Panel from 1963 being editor from 1965 to 1967 and The Statistician Editorial Board from 1978 to 1986. He was active in the Research Section Committee (1963–1967) and Statistical Computing Section (1982–1985), being Chair from 1985 to 1987. He was also interested in teaching, chairing the Committee on the Teaching of Statistics in Schools from 1966 to 1968 and organising a special issue of The Statistician on ‘Statistics teaching in higher education’ in June 1976. He graduated with first class honours in Mathematics from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London in 1953 and also received his PhD in Statistics in 1957 from there. His first job was as a scientific officer at the Department of Operational Research in the Admiralty, Whitehall, London (1955–1958). However, he returned to academia and was swiftly promoted starting at Birkbeck College, London as a lecturer in Statistics, then becoming a senior lecturer, rejoining Imperial College in 1966 and becoming a reader in 1967. He was a professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematics at Bath University from 1968 to 1973 where he became interested in applied statistics. He moved on to be Professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury (1973–1984) where he developed close contacts with the research departments of local industry. He specialised in research with practical links, for example ‘Biometrical techniques to aid intercropping research’ funded by the Overseas Development Administration and ‘Statistical aspects of radioimmunoassay’ with Amersham International plc. He sought funds and set up the Applied Statistics Research Unit (ASRU) which started many statisticians’ careers and has served industry well, especially the health sector, for many years. Barrie took over the chair of Statistics at Newcastle University (1984–1992) after the untimely death of John Anderson in 1982 and after the retirement of Robin Plackett that year. He continued his interest in practical statistics, setting up the Industrial Statistics Research Unit (ISRU) in 1984 as a result of his consulting work with Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Barrie was a brave proponent of the virtue of applying statistics to real life practical problems and overcame some resistance to raise its profile at Newcastle University. This brought him into some conflict with the more theoretical members of the Mathematics and Statistics community, earning him nicknames relating to what would now be called his disruptive innovations. Nevertheless he persevered and was extremely successful in promoting the role of Practical Statistician—the forerunner of today’s Data Scientist and the rise of the ‘sexy’ profession. Some members of the Statistics department were happy to be part of ISRU’s external consulting work, others were not so keen. After a while Barrie accepted an invitation from the Department of Chemical Engineering and moved ISRU there. He worked extensively with Don Brown and other statisticians at the Teesside ICI works and helped ICI make fantastic improvements in their productivity, efficiency and development costs throughout all their plants in the UK. He specialised in using Statistical Process Control Shewhart and CuSum charts and running statistically designed experiments. After his retirement from the Statistics department at Newcastle University in 1989, Barrie concentrated on directing ISRU and acquired substantial funding from the Department for Trade and Industry for knowledge transfer partnerships (KTPs) with ICI, Boots Pharmaceuticals and other companies. ISRU expanded and has been extremely successful, securing European funds to promote the European Network of Business and Industrial Statistics, carrying out consultancy, continuing with KTPs and contributing to Newcastle University’s impact case studies. Barrie retired fully from Newcastle University in the early 1990s and went to live in Cheadle Hulme. Barrie was a visionary for the importance of applying statistics for the benefit of business and industry and put his belief into practice with his very successful University based consultancy units. He was delighted by his sequential naming of the research units and also by living in each of the four corners of England: Bath, Canterbury, Newcastle, and eventually, Cheadle Hulme. He was a prolific writer with a very clear style so that his statistics books were widely used and appreciated, running to several editions. His books were full of real life data and examples drawn from his extensive consulting especially in the chemical process industries at ICI, for example his book Statistical Process Control – Theory and Practice, 1990, written with Don Brown. His statistical books had the rare quality of readability; they were comprehensive and accessible whilst still treating in some depth many interesting extensions to theory in practice not covered in other books. They combined clear messages of the main facts with additional extra interesting details, often as worked examples or in footnotes making the books really useful as well as engaging and uplifting. These books included Elementary Statistical Methods, 1967 and Intermediate Statistical Methods, 1981. He enjoyed working in the computer language APL (A Programming Language) and was a keen innovator. Barrie attracted some gifted researchers including Marie South, who used the Beagle computer program while developing her ground breaking PhD thesis on genetic algorithms. He also supervised Jim Rowlands and David Baillie in their PhDs on quality control. He composed some excellent short courses for industry including real data worked examples that appeared in his books, Sequential Methods in Statistics with Kevin Glazebrook, 1967, Sampling Inspection and Quality Control, 1969 and Regression analysis with applications, 1987. Barrie was married with three children. In 1992, he set up a Christian charity called Wycliffe Associates (UK), and he and his wife, Marie, became the Joint National Coordinators. While living in a large property in Jesmond, Newcastle, Barrie and Marie kept open house and had many fellow Christians visiting and staying with them. They dedicated a lot of time to volunteering, especially in promoting Bible translation into many different languages. Barrie had been a preacher since 1957 as a reader in the Church of England and continued in retirement until old age intervened. He used his astute and versatile mind for a wide range of activities and had an extremely active and inspired life. He passed away peacefully on 21 February 2022.

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