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For the same reason, they once mistrusted Winston Churchill. But last May, when the House of Commons preferred the nighty brilliance of Mr. Churchill to the dignified ineffectuality of Neville Chamberlain, it acquiesced in a revolution in British politics. It was the beginning of the end of the Old School Tie.* Lord Beaverbrook was a part of the revolution. At that time the British wanted things done, and the Beaver proceeded to do them. They remembered that it took a Welshman to win their last war for them.
Lord Beaverbrook moved his new ministry into the Imperial Chemical Industries House on Millbank, beyond Whitehall, and promptly turned the nea flawlessness of the building into something resembling the newsroom of his Express. Doors were left open, telephones rang like bedlam. Once-prim civil servants were told to take off their coats, roll up their sleeves. In the midst of it all, often from 8 a.m. until past midnight, Lord Beaverbrook sat breathing deeply in the atmosphere he liked best.
Before he took charge, the job of producing airplanes rested in many hands, largely military, and could proceed only after endless consultations. Lord Beaverbrook took everything into his own hands, then parceled out responsibility to committees and personal advisers, largely outsiders. As committee heads and advisers he picked his own men, many of them self-made like himself. He chose Canada's onetime Prime Minister Richard Bedford Bennett, an old friend, to advise him on Canadian and U. S. affairs; calm, bald Albert Henry Stanley, Baron Ashfield, an asthmatic expert on guns to tackle industrial and production problems; a onetime office boy named Frank Spencer Spring, managing director of Hawker Siddeleys Aircraft Corp., to supervise airframe production; Motor-magnate William Edward Rootes, son of a garage owner, to head the aero-engine committee; British Woolworth's Chairman William Lawrence Stephenson, who began work at 13 earning five shillings a week, to buy all British aircraft equipment. One of the Beaver's most successful appointments was of a sailor, Admiral Sir Edward Ratcliffe Garth Russell Evans ("Evans of the Broke"), to look after the security of aircraft factories and airdromes.
"Spur, Whip, Oats." To get raw materials quickly Lord Beaverbrook jumped into the scramble that had preceded him, emerged with a system of portioning out materials as they became available, giving plants what they currently needed. One Saturday soon after he went to work he discovered that he needed some cotton material to complete the manufacture of a batch of planes. His underling telephoned the mills in Lancashire, found them closed for the weekend. So the Beaver called the police, ordered them to round up mill managers and workers. Police nabbed the mill executives on golf courses and tennis courts, searched parks, pubs and cinemas for the workers. By Sunday morning the mills were going and Lord Beaverbrook got his cotton on time.