In memory of Dick Fleischman, 1941–2020

Abstract

I first met Dick in the mid-1990s after he unexpectedly phoned me up at home. He and his friend Richard Macve were coming to Newcastle to do some archival research on the coal industry (Fleischman and Macve 2002), and knowing that was one of my interests, wondered if I would like to meet and show them round the local record offices. That was the beginning of a long friendship, working together on many projects, mostly with his great friend Tom Tyson. Like Tom, he was also a great supporter of Newcastle University, regularly visiting the department to present seminars and discuss research. He died in 2020 after a couple of years’ illness which spelled the end of his writing career, and for me and others who knew him as a friend and co-supporter, not just coauthor, a light went out. Enthusiastic to the end, the great thing about Dick was that he imbued his work with a huge sense of enjoyment. The obituaries by Tom Tyson and Robert Bloom contain detail on his career and writing interests, his work on the British Industrial Revolution, plantation accounting under slavery, and the influence of scientific management in US industry especially (Bloom 2020; Tyson 2020), so I shall confine my comments to other aspects, notably his legacy to the writing of accounting history. Dick’s first maxim was that there is no need not to enjoy oneself too. Setting out on a new project was for him an adventure. Accommodation booked, car loaded with cigars, archive offices alerted, he would set forth with a sense of anticipation about the discoveries lying in wait in the records. He invariably liked to stop for lunch over a pint of ale, several cigar breaks during the course of the day, a few pints and new restaurants to explore in the evening. The cigars he favoured tended to be large, Bill Clinton specials, Mexican in origin, and costing a dollar each which appealed to his sense of economy. I remember on one occasion working on some coal mining records in the university library in Sydney, Nova Scotia, where they were very strict about discouraging smoking. There was a painted line twenty feet from the building, on the other side of which smokers were required to stand. Mid-morning Dick would get out his cigar at his desk and trim the end off with his clippers in anticipation, and you could see the librarians muttering amongst themselves and giving him frosty looks, mouthing, ‘American, he thinks he can light up in here!’ To touch base with the hands of individuals long dead and ruminate over the meaning of their words appealed to Dick’s sense of history. He was first and foremost a historian, and was proud that all his academic qualifications, Harvard and Buffalo, were in history. Indeed, his first teaching post in Hawaii was as a lecturer in history. Coming from a history rather than social science background influenced his work in two main ways. First, he had an innate suspicion of the sort of interpretive history which relies on monochrome theoretical perspectives. He himself was labelled as an economic rationalist, a term which he accepted because he had an inherent belief that people tend to respond to economic incentives, a bias he