Background
His birth was not registered with the Ukrainian government because his mother didn"t want him to be naturalised and thought that this was mandatory.
director president Central Bank
His birth was not registered with the Ukrainian government because his mother didn"t want him to be naturalised and thought that this was mandatory.
He attended the Xaverian College Catholic high school in Brighton. Grebenik went to the London School of Economics in 1935 aged sixteen, and graduated with a first-class degree in economics (with statistics and demography as his special subject) at eighteen.
He had a sister, Renata Rosalie. The family moved to Danzig in 1920, then to Berlin, and finally, after the rise of Adolf Hitler, to England in 1933. Grebenik could speak several European languages but none like a native.
All his life he was known as Grebby, because he never liked the association with eugenics born by the name "Eugene".
He earned the Farr medal and prize. After a brief spell working in the City of London, he returned to the London School of Economics as research assistant to Arthur Bowley, and then moved to Bristol to work with H. A. Shannon.
Their book, The Population of Bristol, was published in 1943. Rejected by the army due to his foreign birth, Grebenik returned to the London School of Economics in 1940 and graduated Master of Science in 1941.
Promoted to lecturer in statistics in 1944, Grebenik was seconded to the Admiralty for the final year of World World War II as a statistical officer, where he worked with William Brass.
He was then seconded for a year to the secretariat of the Royal Commission on Population. He was naturalised on 23 November 1946 and shortly afterwards married Virginia Barker. Grebenik worked with David Glass, editor of Population Studies, from its inception in 1947—and continued to be associated with the journal as joint and then sole editor for fifty years.
He was promoted to reader in demography at the London School of Economics in 1949.
His work with Glass on the 1946 family census, published in two volumes as The Trend and Pattern of Fertility in Great Britain (1954), was a landmark in cohort analysis. In 1954 Grebenik was appointed professor of social studies at the University of Leeds.
In 1970 Grebenik was appointed the first principal of the Civil Service College at Sunningdale. He left the college in 1976 to conduct research at the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, working with Abraham Manie Adelstein and John Fox, where he remained until he retired in 1984.
Grebenik was secretary-general of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population from 1963 to 1973.
He organised three of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population"s four-yearly general population conferences, including the one held in Belgrade in 1965 in conjunction with the second United Nations world population conference. He was also president of the British Society for Population Studies from 1979 to 1981. He and Virginia had three children: Michael, Peter and Catherine.