W. D. Ross - Life

Life

William David Ross was born in Thurso, Caithness in the north of Scotland. He was a cousin of Berriedale Keith. He spent most of his first six years as a child in southern India. He was educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh. In 1895, he gained a first class MA degree in classics. He completed his studies at Balliol College, Oxford and gained a lectureship at Oriel College in 1900, followed by a fellowship in 1902.

Ross joined the army in 1915. During World War I, he worked in the Ministry of munitions and was a major on the special list. He received the Order of the British Empire in 1918 in recognition of his service during the war, and was knighted in 1938.

Ross was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy (1923–1928), Provost of Oriel College, Oxford (1929–1947), Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1941 to 1944 and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (1944–1947). He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1939 to 1940. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and was its President 1940-1944. Of the many governmental committees on which he served was as chair of the Civil Service Tribunal, on which one of his two colleagues was Leonard Woolf, who thought that the whole system of fixing governmental remuneration should be done on the same basis as the US model (of dividing the civil service into a relatively small number of pay grades). Ross did not agree with this radical proposal. In 1947 he was appointed chairman of the first Royal Commission on the Press, United Kingdom.

He married Edith Ogden in 1906 and they had four daughters, Margaret (who married Robin Harrison), Eleanor, Rosalind (who married John Miller Martin), and Katharine. Edith died in 1953 and he died in Oxford in 1971.