Stamp was born in Hampstead, London, the third of seven children; his youngest brother L. Dudley Stamp became an internationally renowned geographer. At the time of his birth his father owned and managed a provision and general shop in London. Educated at a private Baptist school, Bethany House at Goudhurst, Kent, Josiah left school at 16 and joined the Civil Service as a boy clerk in the Inland Revenue Department. With a brief interval in the Board of Trade, he rose to assistant inspector of taxes at Hereford in 1903, an inspector of taxes in London in 1909, and assistant secretary in 1916. Meanwhile, he was studying economics as an external student. He was awarded a first class degree by the University of London and a doctorate by the London School of Economics. The thesis, published as British Incomes and Property, became a standard work on the subject and established his academic reputation. Stamp met his future wife, Olive Jessie Marsh, a soprano and student teacher, when he was seventeen. Pursuing their work and studies separately for several years until their marriage in 1903, they engaged in a correspondence that gives us a rich sense of Stamp's formative years. Between 1904 and 1917 they had four sons, Wilfred, Trevor, Maxwell and Colin. It was as a result of this marriage that Stamp, son of a Baptist father and Church of England mother, converted to the Wesleyan Methodist Church. A few of his writings, such as Christianity and Economics, discuss the relevance of Christian values to contemporary economics systems. In 1919 Stamp changed career, leaving the civil service for business, to join as secretary and director of Nobel Industries Ltd, from which Imperial Chemical Industries developed. In 1926 he became Chairman of the LMS and was instrumental in getting William Stanier appointed in 1932 as Chief Mechanical Engineer to resolve the locomotive problems of the Company. In 1928 he was appointed a director of the Bank of England. . Stamp was often called to serve on public commissions, committees and boards: he was a member of the Royal Commission on Income Tax, 1919, the Northern Ireland Finance Arbitration Committee, 1923–24, the Committee on Taxation and National Debt, 1924, the Dawes Reparation Commission's Committee on German Currency and Finance, 1924, the Young Committee in 1929 and the Economic Advisory Council, 1930–39. From 1927 until his death he was Colonel commanding the Royal EngineersRailway and Transport Corps, and became Honorary Colonel of Transportation Units in the Royal Engineers Supplementary Reserve in 1938. Stamp was widely regarded as the leading British expert on taxation, and took an active part in the work of the Royal Statistical Society, serving as president from 1930 to 1932. Stamp was invested as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1918, Knight in the Order in 1920, and Knight Grand Cross in 1924 and Knight Grand Cross of the Bath in 1936. He was a Knight of Grace of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. He also held the Grand Cross of the Austrian Order of Merit and the Afghan Order of Astaur. He was raised to the peerage on 28 June 1938 as Baron Stamp, of Shortlands in the County of Kent. He was first Mayor of the Borough of Beckenham, Kent, within which he had settled at Shortlands, in 1935. He was made an honorary Freeman of the same borough in 1936 and of Blackpool in 1937. In 1936, he served as President of the Geographical Association, his brother L Dudley Stamp, also later became President of the GA in 1950 - the only brothers to hold this honour. Stamp refused to be moved out of his house, 'Tantallon', in Park Hill Road, Shortlands, because of German bombing during The Blitz. He, aged sixty, and his wife, aged sixty-three, were killed by a bomb's direct hit on the air-raid shelter at their home on 16 April 1941. They were buried at Beckenham Cemetery. Ironically in 1935, he had been a founder member of the Anglo-German Fellowship and had made low key visits to Nuremberg in 1936, and 1937, to view the Nazi Party Congress with the unspoken support of the then Foreign SecretaryLord Halifax. Stamp's son Wilfred was killed at the same time and in the same place, but English law has legal fiction that in the event of the order of deaths being indeterminable, the elder is deemed to have died first. Legally therefore, Wilfred momentarily inherited the peerage: and as a consequence the family had to pay death duty twice. The peerage passed to the second of Stamp's four sons, Trevor.
Quotes
A well known quote from Stamp is: Another quote often attributed to Stamp is:
