THE winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics spent much of his childhood in Bowden.

Professor Angus Deaton, who celebrates his 70th birthday on Monday, was nine-years-old when his parents - Leslie and Lily (need Wood) – moved to the village from Edinburgh in 1955.

His father, who worked as a water engineer based at Melrose, died in 2008 aged 98, and his mother, who hailed from Galashiels, passed away five years earlier.

Educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh and at Cambridge University, Angus Stewart Deaton is now professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey and holds both US and British citizenship.

In awarding him his prize – worth £640,000 – the Royal Swedish Academy acknowledged that he had made “clear and lasting impressions in practical economic policy and in modern economic research – of immense importance for human welfare, not least in poor countries”.