Josiah Charles Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp, (21 June 1880 – 16 April 1941) was an English industrialist, economist, civil servant, statistician, writer, and banker. He was a director of the Bank of England and chairman of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway. Life and career Stamp was born in Hampstead, London, the third of seven children; his youngest brother L. Dudley Stamp was known as a geographer. At the time of his birth his father owned and managed a provision and general shop in London. Stamp was educated at Bethany School, Goudhurst in Kent. He left at 16 and joined the Civil Service as a boy clerk in the Inland Revenue Department. With a brief interval in the Board of Trade, he rose to assistant inspector of taxes at Hereford in 1903, an inspector of taxes in London in 1909, and assistant secretary in 1916. Meanwhile, Stamp was studying economics as an external student. He was awarded a first class degree (1911) by the University of London and a doctorate (1916) by the London School of Economics. The thesis, published as British Incomes and Property, became a standard work on the subject and established his academic reputation. In 1919 he changed career, leaving the civil service for business, to join as secretary and director of Nobel Industries Ltd, from which Imperial Chemical Industries developed. In 1926 he became Chairman of the LMS and was instrumental in getting William Stanier appointed in 1932 as Chief Mechanical Engineer to resolve the locomotive problems of the Company. In 1928 he was appointed a director of the Bank of England. Stamp was often called to serve on public commissions, committees and boards: he was a member of the Royal Commission on Income Tax, 1919, the Northern Ireland Finance Arbitration Committee, 1923–24, the Committee on Taxation and National Debt, 1924, the Dawes Reparation Commission's Committee on German Currency and Finance, 1924, the Young Committee in 1929 and the Economic Advisory Council, 1930–39. In 1935, he was a founder member of the Anglo-German Fellowship and had made low key visits to Nuremberg in 1936 (when he met Adolf Hitler – whom Stamp noted was a "statesman and demagogue combined" – and Franz von Papen), and 1937, to view the Nazi Party Congress with the unspoken support of the then Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. From 1927 until his death Stamp was Colonel commanding the Royal Engineers Railway