Reviewed by R. S. Waldron Employment Conditions Abroad, Ltd.
Frank Sewell Bray was a unique blend of practical accountant and academic. To many of the current generation of professionals, his “Design of Accounts,” written in collaboration with Basil Sheas-by, was a landmark of understanding; and accountants looked with eager anticipation for the books that followed it.
This work traces the development of Bray’s thinking and writing, not only in his eight books published between 1944 and 1957, but also his contributions to professional journals. R. H. Parker examines his developing views on the relationship of economics and accounting, his approach to inflation accounting, and his place among academics, and tributes from such eminent contributors as Professor Chambers, Ian Hay Davison, James Risk, and Louis Goldberg are included with a very excellent compilation of works by Bray himself. These last cover published writings within the period described above, a number of them from Accounting Research, a journal sponsored by the Society of Incorporated Accountants that died on the integration of members of that body into the Institutes of Chartered Accountants. Editorship of this magazine, possibly ahead of its time in the U.K., and being Stamp-Martin Professor at Incorporated Accountants’ Hall were challenging and fulfilling tasks, and the profession in England was poorer for their disappearance. Bray himself was bitterly disappointed and many people, both within the profession and without, shared that keen sense of disappointment and disenchantment.
From the description of his life, his practical work as a busy partner in a growing practice, his sincerely-held religious views, his work for the community, and from the representative selection from his writings, the reader begins to see a picture of the man himself. He was criticised by some as guilty of tautology in his style of writing. But he was a catalyst to many whose thoughts were turning to new methods of reporting income, to economic bases of judgment, cash flow significance and the presentation of balance sheets in meaningful terms.
He wrote with Basil Sheasby, C. V. Dawe, Richard Stone (in books on a wide variety of subjects) and partnered Leo Little in the editorship of Accounting Research. His in-fluence on his profession, in the end, was greater than he perhaps knew himself. There are, indeed, areas where his ideas (e.g., on the overriding importance of National Accounts) have not been re-ceived into mainstream philosophy, but even there, one must believe that the theory has not been without some influence in the development of accounting thought.
This book is a fascinating reflection of a man and of a time. As so often in life, they met because they were needed. The pebble dropped in a deep well does spread its ripples over the water even if one cannot see them clearly.
