Economics is now central to health policy decision making, within government departments and the National Health Service. We examine how and why a health economics academic unit -- the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) at the University of York, England -- was created in 1983, funded and commissioned to provide research evidence to the British government, specifically the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) and its successors. Building on the knowledge transfer literature, we document the origins of this relationship and the different strategies deployed by successive governments and researchers. This paper demonstrates the value of historical methodologies such as oral history and textual analysis that highlight the limitations of existing knowledge transfer theories, by foregrounding the role of politics via the construction of individual relationships between academics and policy-makers.