Bill Luttrell and his wife Margot, an artist, lived for most of their married life at 182 Kew Road, adjacent to Kew Gardens.
WILLIAM LUTTRELL, BORN 1908
ECONOMIST
Born in Devon, Bill Luttrell's family roots had strong radical traditions – his father was Liberal MP for Tavistock and a vegetarian campaigner; his mother, Dorothy Hope Wedderburn, was descended from William Wedderburn, one of the founders of the Congress Party in India. Bill was educated at Malvern and at New College, Oxford, and went on to work for Shell in the Middle East. In Jerusalem he met Margot Raitan, the painter, who came to England to marry him in 1940. During the 1930s, Bill Luttrell joined the Communist Party for which he was active in the engineering firm, CAV, which he played a large part in unionising. After the war, he studied economics at the London School of Economics and worked at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. He left the Communist Party after nearly two decades, and joined the Labour Party. Running his own economic consultancy, which developed into a successful business, he was involved in many economic planning projects, including the planning of Telford new town, and operated in Canada, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. He was vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association in retirement, and died aged 90 in 1999.
Source: Archived in 2021, with acknowledgement and thanks, from internet sources. Also from the account of their childhood at Lives Retold by Bill Luttrell’s sister Louisa Reid.