Claus Adolf Moser, Baron Moser, born on November 24, 1922 and died September 4, 2015 in Switzerland following a stroke.
He was a British statistician who made major contributions in both academia and the Civil Service.
He prided himself rather on being a non-mathematical statistician, and said that the thing that frightened him most in his life was when Maurice Kendall asked him to teach a course on analysis of variance at the LSE.
Claus Adolf Moser was born in Berlin in 1922. His father was Dr. Ernst (Ernest) Moser (1885–1957), owner of the Bank “Ernst Moser & Co.” in Berlin (est. 1902, liquidated in 1937).
His mother was Lotte (née Goldberg, 1897–1976), a talented amateur musician. In 1936 he moved to England with his parents and his brother Heinz Peter August.
He went to Frensham Heights School and the London School of Economics (LSE). Despite being Jewish, in 1940 he was interned as an enemy alien in Huyton Camp.
After four months he was released and served in the Royal Air Force, 1943–1946. He then returned to LSE as Assistant Lecturer, then Lecturer, in Statistics, 1946–1955; Reader in Social Statistics, 1955–1961; Professor of Social Statistics, 1961–1970; Visiting Professor of Social Statistics, 1970–1975.
He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1965 New Year Honours, and in 1965, he applied for a job at the Central Statistical Office but was rejected, as a former enemy alien.
However, this did not seem to be a problem when in 1967 Harold Wilson appointed him Director of the Central Statistical Office.
He was made a Knight Commander of the Bath (KCB) in the 1973 New Year Honours. He resigned as Director in 1978.
He was made a life peer with the title Baron Moser, of Regent’s Park in the London Borough of Camden on 23 June 2001.
Other honours included the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts, 1996, Commandeur de l’Ordre National du Mérite (France), 1976; Commander’s Cross, Order of Merit (Germany), 1985.
Claus Moser died in Switzerland on 4 September 2015, following a stroke.