From Operational Research Quarterly to Journal of the Operational Research Society: The early editors

Abstract

As the 75th anniversary of the Journal of the Operational Research Society is celebrated, the opportunity is taken here to reflect on the contributions made by the six editors of the first 35 volumes. During this time the journal changed from a 15-page Operational Research Quarterly issue containing one paper, which was published four times per annum, to a journal, published twelve times per annum, whose typical issues contained eight papers in 100 pages, with several book reviews. The work of Davies, Eddison, Lawrence, Cuninghame-Green, Haley and Amiry is worthy of acknowledgment and celebration.

KEYWORDS:

• Operational Research Society
• Operational Research Quarterly
• Journal of the Operational Research Society
• history of OR

The term “Operational Research” (OR) was devised in the UK in the late 1930s, as preparations were made for the Second World War, to describe the application of science to the improvement of military operations. During the war, OR sections were set up in various branches of the British Armed Forces. After the War, OR was applied in nationalised industries, civil government and the corporate sector.

In the autumn of 1947, at an informal dinner at the Athenaeum Club in London, a decision was made to form an OR club, which came into being in April 1948 with an initial membership of fifty. The driving force behind this initiative was Sir Charles Goodeve. Goodeve, born in Canada, was knighted in 1944, for his service during the war, when he had encountered OR and been impressed, but had not himself worked in it, and had been appointed Director of the newly created British Iron and Steel Research Association (BISRA). The Club typically held four meetings each year, with an emphasis on discussion following a talk.

The oral dissemination of benefits of OR was soon complemented, in 1950, by the world’s first journal of OR, the Operational Research Quarterly (ORQ). Again, the initiative was taken by Goodeve, but was inspired by a series of lectures organised by Professor ES Pearson at University College, London in 1949. Goodeve asked two of his colleagues to be joint editors. Max Davies, the Chief Public Relations Officer, was appointed as business editor and Roger Eddison, who had been appointed Head of Operational Research in BISRA in 1948, became technical editor (Kirby, 2003, p368). Their joint editorship ended in 1958: it was not until the beginning of the twenty first century that there was another joint chief editorial appointment. During the rest of the twentieth century there were only two editors with academic affiliations at the time of their appointment, even though the first University departments of OR were created in the mid-1960s. The Quarterly continued as such until 1978, after which time it was rechristened the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) with twelve annual issues.

In addition to individual subscriptions at an initial cost of 10 shillings (£0.50) per annum including postage, the journal was financed through revenue being raised by further lectures arranged by University College, London. These lectures made a considerable profit as they were hugely over-subscribed, and because the lecturers waived their fees. The surplus was placed at the disposal of the club to fund the official quarterly journal (Haley, 2010).

Roger Eddison (1950–1963) and Max Davies (1950–1958)

The first issue of the ORQ was published in March 1950, consisting of 15 pages. In the editorial notes of that first issue, Max Davies and Roger Eddison clearly set out the reasoning behind the quarterly (Eddison & Davies, 1950).

The main purpose of the ORQ is to assemble in one place as much as possible of the information that operational research workers now find (or fail to find) scattered widely over the very large body of the scientific and technical literature. The method is to provide a quarterly collection of abstracts of relevant papers and articles, taken from as wide a field as possible.

The first article to appear in the ORQ was “Operational Research” by Professor Patrick Blackett, the “father” of OR (Blackett, 1950). In this he gave his ideas on the application of OR in relation to the scientific method and his own wartime experience. The first issue also contained nine pages of abstracts of papers published elsewhere, including on the role of statistical methods in industrial production and research, the study of road traffic, the definition of OR and men’s and women’s foot statistics.

The majority of contributions in the first five years were of a practical nature, describing a problem and the solution approach. In 1953, for example, Eddison and Owen wrote about Discharging Iron Ore (Eddison & Owen, 1953). One exception was an article in 1954 by Jackson who wrote on Queueing Theory (Jackson, 1954).

Several of the authors produced definitions of OR but since there was no agreed body of techniques it took some time for any theoretical subjects to become the basis of the articles. By the mid-50s, short courses for industry were being offered on OR at the University of Birmingham, UK and at The Case Institute, USA in which several common areas such as Stock Control, Queueing, Linear Programming, Replacement, Forecasting, Bidding and Search were defined. Although many papers began to appear as advances of theory, the ORQ maintained the requirement that its papers should reflect the practical use of any technique (Haley, 2010).

The OR Society hosted the first International Conference in Operational Research in Oxford in 1957, when Eddison and Davies, with Page from the United States, undertook the mammoth task of editing the proceedings (Davies, Eddison & Page, 1957). They had the additional burden of ensuring that all participants received copies of preprints of all the papers before the conference. This conference was the inspiration for the establishment of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) in 1959, which took over the publication of an existing abstract journal, International Abstracts in Operations Research (IAOR), thus removing the need for abstracts of papers to appear in the Quarterly (Haley, 2010).

The publisher became Pergamon Press towards the end of 1958. Robert Maxwell was setting up his publishing company and was interested in developing a stable of scientific journals. The ORQ was the second one that Pergamon took on. The number of pages per volume had grown from 72 to 286 and there was an increased size of page. This change of format gave rise to the payment of annual royalties, which continues to be an essential contribution to the Society’s revenue (Haley, 2010).

Max Davies stepped down as joint editor of the Quarterly at the end of the ninth volume in 1958. In his appreciation of his contribution, Roger Eddison commented in the first issue of Volume 10 (Eddison, 1959) that:

When it all began he [Max] comforted himself (and me) with the conviction that it could not possibly survive more then a couple of years – one of his very rare errors of judgement. The way in which the circulation has steadily built up is a tribute to his enthusiastic success in proving himself wrong; it has also meant a relentlessly increasing burden of work for him. He has set a high standard for our new publishers to emulate.

At that time an editorial committee was established, with Eddison as chair. His colleagues included a future president of IFORS, Roger Collcutt and the “father” of American OR, Philip Morse.

In 1961 Mrs Margaret Kinnaird became secretary to the Society. She introduced a monthly newsletter that provided members with a service that originally was a feature of the Quarterly. It was the source of announcements of meetings, courses, jobs and general information about the Society (Haley, 2010).

At the end of 1963 Roger handed over a journal that had gradually changed in form and content and now concentrated on papers, comments and book reviews that reflected the growing number of text books. It was well established and had steadily increased in size, by now 417 pages, and influence (Haley, 2010).

The new editor, John Lawrence, in his opening editorial (Lawrence, 1964) said:

The Society owes Roger Eddison a great debt and I take it upon myself to thank him on behalf of the Society and Council for what he has created over a period of 14 years.

Eddison has been the longest serving editor of the journal. But he wasn’t finished in his contribution to the OR profession. He was President of the OR Society in 1966–67, visiting professor of OR at Sussex University, as he had earlier been at Lancaster University, from 1968-75, and was very involved with the establishment of EURO, the European Association of OR Societies, in 1975, and became its first secretary, a position he held until 1980.

Although he left BISRA in 1955, he was appointed by the President of the Board of Trade as a member of his Advisory Council on Research and Development for Iron and Steel until 1969. He joined NAAFI in 1955 as Manager of Plans and Methods Department. In 1961 he then joined Stafford Beer at the consultancy Sigma as Operations Director, and when Beer left in 1966 Eddison took over as Managing Director. He continued until 1970, when Sigma was closed down. Then he was involved in setting up Novy, Eddison and Partners. Harlands of Hull was an old client of Sigma’s and he became a Director and assisted them for several years (Beer, 2000).

Jonathan Rosenhead, who joined Sigma in 1963, recalls someone who was unfailingly courteous and polite, whose natural facial expression was a tendency to smile. He lived at Horstedpond Farm, near Uckfield, which Beer describes as “a wonderful old Elizabethan house. Roger experimented with his crops… and he was very fond of his dairy herd. When they grew older, they sold the house and moved into the adjacent oast house, skilfully adapted.”

Eddison did not quite see in the new millennium, dying in November 1999 at the age of 83.

John Lawrence (1964-68)

After Roger Eddison’s long run as editor, John Lawrence, from Richard Thomas and Baldwins’ (RTB) Spencer Works Operational Research Department near Newport, took on the responsibility of editing the journal. Before RTB, he had been a member of the famous Coal Board OR group, the Field Investigation Group, or FIG, as it was known. He later took up a senior appointment in OR in the Paints Division of ICI. In the March 1979 OR Newsletter, it was reported that he had been appointed head of ICI’s Brixham Laboratory concerned with the treatment and disposal of effluent, the effect of ICI’s products on the environment, and related work. He was vice-president of the Institute of Personnel Management in 1977–78.

A feature of his editorial reign was the lengthy editorials he, and guests, wrote. Some concerned the journal, but others were on issues of concern to the Society, and indeed some on political issues. This would not be possible with 12 issues a year, nor would it probably be welcome, with now there being no problem in finding sufficient papers to publish. It was then a major challenge to obtain sufficient papers of practical relevance.

In his first editorial (Lawrence, 1964) he commented on the developments since the journal began.

The first issue of the Operational Research Quarterly was published in March 1950 by the Operational Research Club. It was a slim pamphlet of some 15 small pages of which an editorial occupied 2, an article by Professor Blackett, entitled "Operational Research," a further 4, and miscellaneous abstracts a further 9. The first 12 issues carried 13 rather general descriptive papers, totalling 216 pages. …… Quantitatively the last volume carried about 30 papers varying widely in subject matters and totalling not far short of 500 pages.

He continued by giving his personal views on what the Journal should be.

The Journal fulfils two broad functions. The lesser is as the voice with which the Society speaks to members of management, that is those whose interest is sufficiently deep that they pay us the compliment of being prepared to read papers that go beyond the superficial explanations that appear in "selling" documents. This is the lesser function since the Quarterly is primarily a professional journal; nevertheless, it is the only written word published regularly by the Society, and non-practitioners do take it. The major role of the Journal is as the most important communication channel for the dissemination of ideas between members. It is the place where they can set down the complete logic of their views and methods so that others can submit them to the most searching scrutiny and criticism.

The past is, indeed, a foreign country. He then set out his views on the content of papers.

The broad content of papers should be a reflection of the industries in which operational research is working, the types of problem it is studying, the level at which it is working and the methods that it is using. This can only be done by all groups reporting a representative sample of their work. Often papers that are written are not a true representation of the real contribution being made by the groups from which they emanate. What is written up is what fits into a convention of what constitutes a suitable paper-perhaps the neat self-contained piece of essentially mathematical work. Of course, these papers have their place, but they are not enough. They sometimes read as a completely logical sequence of steps which had only to be thought about to fall out. Science is seldom like that, least of all operational research with its many problems of formulation and implementation.

In his first editorial the following year (Lawrence, 1965), he reinforced many of these points and indicated the directions in which he wished to move the journal with respect to style and content, by setting out a statement of editorial policy that had been produced by the Editorial Committee and accepted by Council. He explained that he had been keen to stimulate particular types of paper by direct request and this was being done in a series of papers describing the structure and work of OR for a representative selection of groups. The series had already covered steel, coal, defence, and “will cover Institute for Operational Research, electricity, Consultancy and some smaller industrial groups in future papers.”

An award, annual if possible, for the best published paper by a member of the Society was instituted. The "ideal" paper in the minds of the Awards Committee, (Beer et al., 1966), was a case study discussing origin of problem, its formulation, its solution and the implementation. They were only once able to recommend this award, the Bronze Medal, in three years, for an analysis of criteria for capital investment (Adelson, 1965), even though this one winner was not of the "ideal" type! In 1966 there was again no award. This was described by the Awards Committee (Beer et al., 1966) as “a deplorable state of affairs.” They concluded “The award must surely be a matter of considerable prestige in the profession—it is there, waiting to be won.”

It was in 1967, for two papers. The first, (Burgin & Wild, 1967), summed up the authors’ experience of attempting to apply generalized stock control procedures to a succession of installations. The second (Stringer, 1967), analysed the problems of decision making and effecting operational research in what are called "multi-organizations."

The December 1966 editorial, (Lawrence, 1966), discussed the relative state of OR in the UK and the US. One aspect of comparison was publications on both sides of the Atlantic. In referring to the American journals Operations Research and Management Science Lawrence commented that the

percentage of authors from academia in both of these journals is very high, one hundred per cent being not uncommon for individual issues. Our own journal, on the other hand, has a tradition of practical emphasis, a broader interest in the problems of management, but doubtless only a very modest reputation for the mathematical/technical calibre of its papers. A very high proportion of its authors are industry based. There are many reasons for these differences, and in any case it is completely right that journals should, through their editorial policies, concentrate on different aspects of the subject. But is the lack of academic-technical papers in the United Kingdom a symptom of weakness in British operational research?

He put the responsibility for changing that lack down to the newly created university departments of OR.

The veracity of his comment about the institution base of ORQ authors is seen in the most cited articles published in this period. Palmer (1965) from Marconi wrote on sequencing jobs, Maranzana (1964) of IBM in Italy wrote on location and Trigg and Leach (1967) from Kodak contributed on exponential smoothing.

The success of the Oxford Conference in 1957 had inspired the Society to run its own annual national conference. This was a source of many papers that Lawrence felt were suitable for publishing and so he instituted a fifth Issue in 1968. The five issue Quarterly was welcomed, but only lasted for four years, ceasing when Brian Haley became editor in 1972. The conference supplements were the source of several papers based on case studies that otherwise would have only been heard as a short talk by some at the conference.

Sadly, Lawrence resigned from the Society after picking up a 1982 issue which contained an article on how to win at darts (Kohler, 1982). “Nothing to do with management” was his verdict. Others will understand it had much to do with decision-making. In fact, this paper resulted in a special award, of £25, by Pergamon Press to the author. The announcement said that “whilst the paper did not fall strictly into the category for which the Pergamon Prize was originally intended (i.e., "good, practical case studies"), it attracted considerable interest from readers and was generally felt to merit special consideration.” Given this unfortunate end to his association with the Society, it was a particular pleasure that Lawrence attended a lunch to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the journal.

Ray A. Cuninghame-Green (1969–71)

In March 1968, it was reported that a Dr. R.A. Cuninghame-Green was elected to the Society under Regulation "A" (Anonymous, 1968). In September he was chair of the committee for the 1968 conference which was held in Edinburgh University and attended by 600 delegates. Three months later he was editing the journal! In his final editorial, Lawrence (1968) said that he had “concluded that after five years the time had come for a change and was extremely pleased when I was able to persuade Ray Cuninghame-Green to accept the nomination to take over in January.”

Haley (2010) reported in his summary of the journal’s history that Cuninghame-Green took on the editorship at an inauspicious time. It was a time of unrest in Universities worldwide and the flow of academic papers began to slow down towards the end of 1968.

Unfortunately this was just the time that the reins of editor were being handed over to Dr Ray A. Cuninghame-Green …. (Sheffield Regional Hospital Board) who had just accepted an appointment as Professor at the University of Twente in Holland. At the same time as taking the editorial office to Holland he was faced with a major national financial crisis that resulted in postal strikes in the UK and caused difficulties in obtaining access to authors and publishers. Indeed for several months it was not possible to communicate with the editor by letter or telephone. His personal efforts however enabled the Quarterly to remain a leading international journal that had a rigid selection policy and provided a valuable service to its readers. A major attitude survey was conducted and influenced a new publications policy. By the end of 1971 Ray had formalised a manual system of control of the process of receiving manuscripts, refereeing, editing and producing the Journal efficiently. The refereeing system was based on edge-punched cards and continued for many years.

His very first word in the journal, the title of his first editorial, (Cuninghame-Green, 1969a) appears to be made up: procrustenation. In the editorial, he likened the dilemma of conference committee to a Procrustean bed. The Oxford Concise dictionary says that procrustean means “enforcing conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality.” Its origin is Procrustes, a robber in Greek mythology who fitted victims to a bed by stretching or removing limbs. His concern was that the committee “in order to give structure and standards to their work… tends to begin by seeking terms of reference, themes and purposes; then, in trimming the material to fit, some vital matter might be lopped off, and the conference may end by presenting an emasculated image of an actually virile society.”

His second editorial, (Cuninghame-Green, 1969b), was entitled “Quantifying the Quarterly.” In it he announced the survey of members, to which Haley had referred, and included several graphs to illustrate his points about the current state of the Quarterly. These were that the time a successful author had to wait between a paper’s final acceptance and its appearance in print was increasing (to 30 weeks—if only that were still the case!), that this was partly due to the reduction in refereeing time, down to five weeks, and also due to the publication rate being lower than the acceptance rate, the traffic intensity in queueing terms being 1.3. He noted though that the submission rate was decreasing, despite an increase in Society membership. The acceptance rate had increased: “a paper submitted in June 1966 had about a 30 per cent chance of acceptance, whilst one submitted in June 1968 had about a 40 per cent chance.”

Cuninghame-Green had intended to present the new editorial policy in his December 1969 editorial. An editorial conference had taken place at the Society’s national conference at Eastbourne. The analysed results from over one thousand questionnaire forms were considered, and the new policy formulated, to be implemented in the 1970 volume. However, this policy could not be announced in the December issue because of various long lead times. Instead, he took the opportunity to encourage the Society’s Council to be more effective. The editorial is entitled “Turning Pro” (Cuninghame-Green, 1969c).

The new policy was announced in the March 1970 editorial, Plus Ca Change (Cuninghame-Green, 1970).

Of radical changes, there are none. The results of the readership survey amounted to a clamant endorsement of most of the principles which have underlain editorial policy in recent years. This, naturally, is cause for pleasure, not disappointment; more, it has helped to bring these principles into stark focus. …. The keystone of the policy is that the Quarterly is intended for the practitioner of operational research.

In this editorial the results of the survey were set out in some detail.

A year later, his editorial (Cuninghame-Green, 1971a) was short and to the point, expressing his frustration with the effects of the postal strike.

It is a bitter thing for all of us to have completed our work on the material of the present issue many months ago to know that even as I write these words the date when this copy will come into the hands of the subscribers is still in doubt.

Whatever the arguments for or against the postal strike as a piece of industrial action, it has certainly had a devastating effect on the production of this Quarterly. The distribution of the December 1970 issue was held up because the strike threatened; the due date of the March 1971 issue arrived with the end of the strike not yet in sight; and all correspondence, refereeing procedures and flow of new and corrected material from which the June issue should emerge ceased completely.

Please bear with us, though the fault is not ours. You may be sure we are working hard to restore good order.

This frustration, and the lack of supply of papers, is again evident in his final editorial, “Swan Song,” in December 1971 (Cuninghame-Green, 1971b).

When I first took up the Editorial pen, I did not realize that half-way through my term of office I would accept an appointment in another country. In the event, editing-at-a-distance has turned out to be a task of great difficulty—letters take twice as long to deliver, and the use of the telephone becomes costly and inconvenient. Good housekeeping can minimize the effect of these things on routine matters, but the handling of emergencies becomes much more difficult.

During the British postal strike, it was impossible to communicate with England from my part of Holland, either by letter or telephone. The effect of this complete break of communications between the Editor and his authors and publishers has been woefully apparent in the lateness of each issue this year. The current issue is the first for which it has been possible, for many months, to meet without exception all the publisher’s copy dates.

My editorial successor is Professor Brian Haley….Although he inherits a journal once more running to schedule, he faces severe problems. The statistics which I published in the Society’s Annual Report for 1970 give cause for very great concern about the Quarterly, which sets itself the policy of reflecting the pragmatic tradition of British Operational Research by favouring papers concerned with the practice of O.R. In spite of hortatory leading articles, conference resolutions, letters to large O.R. departments, Editorial Advisers and Study Groups (to name a random tithe of the efforts made) it remains the case that during a year, insufficient articles falling within this policy are submitted to fill one-third of that year’s volume, even if none was rejected on grounds of quality.

Make no mistake about the seriousness of this. No journal can survive unless the writers write what the readers want to read. When all the excellent excuses in terms of commercial secrecy and shortage of time have been made, it remains the case that the future of this Quarterly rests in the hands of the practitioners of applied O.R. to support as both writers and readers.

By some considerable margin, the most cited paper during Cuninghame-Green’s time as editor was by Bates and Granger (1969) of the Department of Economics at the University of Nottingham. The authors combined two separate sets of forecasts of airline passenger data and concluded the composite set of forecasts can yield lower mean-square error than either of the original forecasts. It was not awarded a Bronze Medal, however. In 1969 that went to Cantley for a paper “A Long-range Planning Case Study” which appeared in the conference supplement (Cantley, 1969). In 1970 the Bronze Medal was awarded for a paper not published in the Quarterly and in 1971 it was not awarded.

Ironically, given all the problems with communication he had experienced when based in Holland, in 1975 Cuninghame-Green went to the University of Birmingham as Professor of Industrial Mathematics, a post he held until 1999, where he laid the foundations of management mathematics. He was a pioneer of max-algebra, apparently also known as tropical mathematics. His first paper on max-algebra was published in 1960. Ray was probably the first who realised that the maximum cycle mean is the principal max-algebraic eigenvalue of a matrix. Among his numerous other achievements, Butkovic (2013) highlighted

the analysis of max-algebraic linear systems, linear independence, rank, residuation, duality, maxpolynomials, the discovery of the characteristic maxpolynomial, rational functions and the proofs of several results for irreducible or finite matrices proved in full generality in the 1980s and 1990s by other authors, such as the complete description of (max-algebraic) eigenspaces, the cyclicity theorem or spectral projector. Most of these appear in his publication Minimax Algebra, Lecture Notes in Economics and Math. Systems 166, Berlin: Springer, 1979. This work has been cited by hundreds of authors worldwide and contains material that is still relevant for researchers in tropical linear algebra today.

After his short stint as ORQ editor, in 1986 he joined with OR Society Past-President, Roy Stainton, to be the first editors of the IMA Journal of Mathematics in Management (this later was retitled IMA Journal of Management Mathematics). Their first editorial (Stainton & Cuninghame-Green, 1986) made it very clear that “the central position of mathematics and the equal valuation of theory and practice shall be the hallmarks of [the] new journal.” It is argued that the position that mathematics should be at the heart of research published in the journal is what distinguishes management mathematics from OR and management science (Mamon et al., 2020). As was the case with the ORQ, Cuninghame-Green served only three years as editor of this journal.

Ray Cuninghame-Green died in June 2013, a few months short of his 80^th birthday.

K. Brian Haley (1972–80)

Brian Haley gave over 60 years of substantial involvement and dedicated service to the OR Society and to the worldwide OR community. No other editor contributed so much to the profession. His involvement with the OR Society dates from 1954 when he became an associate member. In 1959 he became a full member and founded, with Neil Jessop, the Midlands OR Society, becoming its first Secretary. His report of the first meeting stated that “about one-third of the membership is actively engaged in operational research work and the other two-thirds are interested people from other professions” (Anonymous, 1960). He was President of the OR Society from 1982-83, and of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS), from 1992-94. Only one other person has been President of both organisations. Further to these leadership roles, his focus of service was publications. He was the first UK contributing editor to International Abstracts in Operations Research and then became Editor of JORS in 1972. (The date of 1971 in my obituary of Haley is in error, Rand, 2017). In these roles he was a member of the Society’s Publications Committee for over 20 years. He edited the proceedings of two IFORS’ conferences: those held in Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan (1975) and Toronto, Canada (1978) (Haley, 1976, 1979). Following his retirement from academic life in 1999, Brian continued to be involved in the OR Society’s affairs, most notably as Chair of the Publications Committee, a position he held for a period of 11 years. During his time as Chair, the journals in the Society’s portfolio flourished, and he oversaw the development of a variety of initiatives, including the birth of the Journal of Simulation. Not surprisingly, the OR Society bestowed honours on him, first with the Companionship of Operational Research in 1996, and, in 2010, the Beale Medal. Only three other Presidents have received both these honours.

Haley was born in November 1933 in Smethwick, near Birmingham where he spent nearly all his life, attending King Edward’s School, Five Ways, before starting at the University of Birmingham in 1950 to study mathematics. On graduating in 1953, he became a research assistant in the University’s Department of Engineering Production, obtaining his doctorate in 1956, for a thesis on industrial applications of linear programming. His subsequent work always involved OR applied to a wide variety of real problems. As his period as research assistant came towards a close in 1957, he was faced with the prospect of National Service. However, the National Coal Board OR Group (called FIG—Field Investigation Group) was one of very few acceptable alternatives to the Army and offered an outlet for his OR ambitions. In 1958 Birmingham University established the UK's first MSc Course in OR in the Department of Engineering Production and, in 1959, after two years at the NCB, this attracted him back to his home city to become the UK’s first designated lecturer in Operational Research. In 1968, he became Professor of Operational Research.

He attended the first international OR conference, held in Oxford, UK, in September 1957 and presented a paper (Stringer & Haley, 1957), on the application of linear programming to a large-scale transportation problem. The paper discusses solving transportation problems of size 32 × 130 by hand, and also presents a photograph of an analogue computer consisting of pulleys and strings to solve 4 × 3 problems. The authors point out that the application of this analogue is subject to difficulties with friction and extension of the string and say that “a second machine is being constructed which incorporates a low-friction polythene (Fluon) as bearings and pulleys, and braided Terelyne for the strings, which are kept taut by graduated spring-loaded reels.” The Oxford conference led to the creation of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) on 1^st January 1959. Later, Haley became successively Vice-President (1983-85), Chairman of the Publications Committee and, from 1992-1994, President.

He made us of his OR skills in his private life. When treasurer of his local Church, a time series analysis of weekly collections was developed to decide the optimum timing of special appeals for donations. A major activity for nearly 40 years was as a governor of Bromsgrove School, for whom he created an L.P. model to evaluate alternative fee-structures. He died on Christmas Day, 2016.

Haley’s predecessor as editor, Cuninghame-Green, introduced him to readers as a person “well known to the Society as a teacher of Operational Research, as a member of Council and as an active figure in IFORS. I … know that he will bring to the job of editing the Quarterly a diligent and creative intelligence” (Cuninghame-Green, 1971b). He did! Haley’s review of 60 years of publishing by the OR Society (2010) concentrated on the problems faced by the editors of JORS and the evolution of its contents. Commenting on his own tenure he referred to a steady flow of manuscripts from North America turning into an avalanche because American academics were being required to prove their scholarship. As a result, the referee base needed to be greatly expanded and a part time paid assistant was required. A two-issue cushion of accepted papers became a potential 12-month backlog, so it was decided, in 1975, to double the total annual size by dividing each issue into two parts making an eight-issue Quarterly! When, in 1978, it was decided to move to twelve issues, the Publications Committee struggled to find a word beginning with Q to represent twelve and so the ORQ became JORS.

Haley’s successor as editor, Peter Amiry, summed up his contribution as editor (Amiry, 1981a):

at the start of his editorship this publication was a quarterly with an occasional extra issue of conference proceedings, and in total about 400-500 pages were published annually. At the end of his tenure the Journal is published monthly, and in 1980 (Volume 31) will have published 120 full papers totalling approximately 1130 pages. …… his is a real achievement in that this Journal is now the O.R. publication with probably the largest circulation in the world. However, mere figures do not do justice to the quality of Brian’s editorship. There is something about a great editor which enables him to stamp his personality on his publication, and this Brian has done. His insistence on the highest standard in the text of the papers accepted for publication is a feature that is obvious to any reader, but it is more difficult to appreciate the amount of hard work involved in maintaining such a standard. Quality of material is one facet of editing; the other is the production process. The fact that issue after issue has reached readers on time is usually taken for granted, but again it involves work and effort, and Brian’s consistent success in this respect should be recognized.

In his final editorial (Haley, 1980), Haley’s own assessment of his term as editor was that:

The Journal which I hand on is a decade different from the Quarterly I received. The subject of O.R. is ten years older, and the contributions are both older and younger. The Society has lost a number of its founders and elder statesmen and has moved its headquarters to Birmingham. I believe the centre of gravity has also changed, and more members are concerned with their Journal and the Society’s image. The growth of the EURO organisation has seen the introduction of a new journal, a new conference activity and a phenomenal increase in written papers. Pressure to publish exists, and more journals are available. It is therefore vital for the O.R.S. to maintain its standards of both academic excellence and practical usefulness. …… Although the Journal can only publish what it receives, I have been fortunate to have seen a fivefold increase in submissions. This has enabled me to select more case studies in any period of three months than were published in one year prior to 1970. The same statement can of course be applied to any category of paper. There are many statistics that I could quote, but perhaps the most staggering one to me is that I have read and edited over 2 million words in the last 2! years and selected over 600 papers from 1700 submitted.

Haley faced issues common to many of his successors. Writing a leader to celebrate the silver jubilee of the journal (Haley, 1974), he pleads that

members will, I hope, continue to be kind to the Editor and sympathize with his difficulties, especially when faced with referees’ reports which read “a first-class paper, publish,” “the worst paper I have read, reject” and a third … “I cannot make up my mind.” He comments that he has been attempting to ensure that all papers contain a statement, by example, of how the theory can be used. …. The Operational Research Society has amongst its members at least two opposing factions. …… A significantly large group expect publications to be rigorous, correct and logically and concisely argued and to be concerned with valid and worthwhile “mathematical argument.” …. The alternative view is that we should only publish papers which grow from and depend heavily on practical problems. If the protagonists of this view would persuade their employers to give them permission to publish, or would even put pen to paper, we might be able to include a few more papers of this type. I have become almost immune to the criticism that we do not publish enough practical work—this almost invariably comes from those members who have never written a paper themselves.

An innovation introduced by Haley in his December 1972 editorial (Haley, 1972) concerned “the first ‘student’ paper. These are intended to summarize the work of postgraduate student projects and to be of a practical case study nature. They will not often contain any new developments but will mainly be concerned with applying well-known techniques perhaps in unusual areas.” That first student paper was by Ray Bentley of the University of Lancaster (Bentley, 1972) in which the out-of-kilter algorithm was used to solve a complex assignment problem involving interacting and conflicting personal choices subject to interacting resource constraints. An example of successful use is given and extensions into the corporate and social planning fields were suggested. The most significant, oft cited and infamous papers published during Haley’s editorship were by Russell Ackoff. Ackoff’s presentations at the Society’s 1978 conference in York caused quite a stir, which did not abate when his two papers “The Future of Operational Research is Past” (Ackoff, 1979a) and “Resurrecting the Future of Operational Research” (Ackoff, 1979b) were published the following year. Many saw Ackoff’s arguments as a key moment in the history of OR in the UK. He argued that the problem-solving orientation of OR should be replaced by a focus on the planning and design of systems. In his presidential address to the Society, George Mitchell launched an explicit attack on Ackoff’s appeal for a wider remit for OR: “if the so-called ‘crisis’ in OR was the result of the discipline’s inability to tackle ‘wicked problems,’ then it might legitimately be argued that the ‘crisis’ was the product of ‘overambition’” (Mitchell, 1980).

Haley had a lengthy dispute with the author of one of the papers (Rosenhead, 1978) he published. The paper concerned Jonathan Rosenhead’s stepdaughter’s education. When the proofs came back from the printers all the ‘she’s had become’ he’s. Rosenhead (2023) assumed it was the fault of the typesetter, but Haley responded that he had made the changes himself as the editorial policy was that all decision-makers were male! The outcome was that the ‘she’s went back in, but there is a note on the first page saying’ The present case study concerns the educational choices of a school-girl. The same general approach should, however, apply to pupils of either sex.’ The following year Rosenhead was awarded the President’s Medal for the paper.

Peter Amiry (1981–84)

For someone who was editor for only four years, and who followed the magisterial Brian Haley, the number of innovations that Peter Amiry introduced to the journal is perhaps surprising.

First, he organised a move of the assistant-to-the-editor, Marilyn Shaw, from Birmingham University into the Operational Research Society office, where she became the Society’s Publications Manager with added responsibility for the Newsletter.

Second, the JORS computer was used as a word processor to produce camera ready copy for certain types of content. Acknowledging that the appearance of the pages would not be as good as that of material printed by the conventional means, Amiry argued, (Amiry, 1981c), “the advantage of being able to reduce a production cycle of 12/16 weeks to one of 4/6 weeks clearly outweighs the disadvantage of appearance where the topicality of the material warrants it.”

The April 1981 issue introduced a third innovation: single topic issues, what are now known as special issues (Amiry, 1981b). The first of these appeared in that issue: the topic being Management, Operational Research and the Micro. This was an introduction to "The Year of the Micro," so-called by the National Events Committee, which, as it turned out, lasted two years. The microcomputer was seen to provide an opportunity for OR to recover some of the ground lost two decades previously, when, for the most part, OR people left the writing of software (in those days called programs) to programmers. It was realised that, “instead of installations costing millions of pounds and requiring special buildings and staff etc., equipment costing only a few thousand pounds can carry out the majority of O.R. and many management computing requirements.”

Fourth, acting on a suggestion by the then President of the Society, George Mitchell, who felt that the Journal should be an organ of record for the Society as well as a medium of publication, starting with the 1981 National Conference, the journal included the chairman’s report and a full set of abstracts, whilst continuing to publish as many conference papers as possible. For other events, the material published varied from a few abstracts and an overall commentary to an almost complete record of the proceedings.

Fifth, he introduced the Pergamon O.R. Prize (Amiry, 1982a, Anonymous, 1982), aimed at encouraging good practical case studies. “The generosity of the publishers enables a prize of one hundred pounds to be awarded three times a year to the best paper published in this Journal in the preceding four months.” The first prize, covering the January to April issues of 1982, was awarded to Hilarie Sutlieff (1982) for her paper “Forecasting emergency workload for day ahead.” A voting slip was enclosed with the 5th, 9th and 1st issues of each volume and readers were asked to return these with their votes before the end of the month following the prize period. The final decision was made by Amiry, but a small panel of readers met three times a year to discuss the recommendations and advise the Editor.

A sixth attempted innovation failed. Amiry argued for a change of the journal’s name, to the Journal of Operational Research and Systems (Amiry, 1981d). The change was to indicate that the study of systems was a legitimate area of attention for OR scientists. He argued that it had been the distinguishing feature of an OR study that it looked at the "system as a whole" and that the problem was "studied in the context of the system within which it existed." In other words, systems analysis was an integral and necessary part of the science of OR. Since then data processing has purloined the use of the term "systems analyst" (Amiry, 1982). He canvassed, via the Society Newsletter, members’ opinions. Apparently, the response, all of 20 replies, “was an almost total polarisation, with the older writers being in favour and the younger ones against the change, presumably because of potential confusion with computer systems” (Amiry, 1982). Instead of changing the name, he enlarged the aims and scope of the journal, and published an invited paper by Rolfe Tomlinson on his own and associated work at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (Tomlinson, 1982).

One of the notable features of Amiry’s contribution to the journal before he became editor is his reviews of four French books. In 1977 Amiry was Chairman of the Fellowship of Operational Research (FOR), arguing, in a July letter to the OR Newsletter (Amiry, 1977), that “FOR is not a splinter group set out to rival the OR Society, but a subset of Society members who happen to believe in the need for both learned societies and professional organisations.” Professionalisation of OR in the early 70s was a deeply divisive episode in the history of the Society. Leading members of the Society argued strongly both for and against. Maurice Shutler had stated that the main argument in favour of a professional register was that it was for those ‘who see O.R. as their career, who are committed to O.R. as a way of life, and it is especially for the subset of those people who have not yet achieved professional fame and success’ (Kirby, 2006, p1168). Those arguing against such a move thought that professionalisation would tend to draw fixed boundaries round what constituted the core methods of OR; and that it would establish a hierarchy within the Society. As a result of the rejection of the proposals by an overwhelming majority of the membership of the Society, FOR was set up separately to the Society, though it did not attract a significant membership. It was wound up in 2003 when the Society established a professional register of Fellows and Associates and agreed that Fellows of the FOR could be transferred into the Society’s register.

Amiry was born in Egypt in 1919 and named Armenag Aveclis Amirayan. In I927 the family settled in Manchester. In the early fifties he changed the family name to Amiry and adopted the name of Peter—thus creating the initials APA by which he later became often known.

He went to Manchester Grammar School and then in 1938 on to Manchester University, reading Physics. At the start of World War 2 he joined the RAF and in 1941 was sent to Malta on one of the first major convoys to reach the island. He then spent two and a half years in Malta and returned to the UK in 1944.

His first job after the RAF was at Sednaoui Shipping Co. Ltd. in Manchester. In 1954, he started work at National Gas and Oil Engine Co Ltd, Ashton-Under-Lyne as a statistician and then moved to The Steel Company of Wales in 1957. However, early in 1958 he moved on to the United Steel Companies Ltd, in particular to a distinctive department—the central Operational Research group set up by Stafford Beer and best known by its Sheffield location, Cybor House. His admittance as a Full Member of the Society was reported in 1964. In the 1970s, he was moved to the role of OR Coordinator for the whole of British Steel, based in Birmingham, though he continued to live in Sheffield. He retired early in the 1980s and died in October 2004 (Hollocks, 2006).

Personal reflection

Those editors, including myself, who followed these first six, were handed a thriving journal. It had annually developed from 70 or so small pages to 1200 pages in the 35 volumes they oversaw. The six editors whose work is acknowledged here created, nurtured and expanded the world’s first OR journal. Some types of content were dropped, others brought in. Their work is certainly to be celebrated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).