After 29 years of public life gaunt, gout-ridden Neville Chamberlain retired last week to nurse his failing health. To the once bitterly critical Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, who succeeded him as Prime Minister, Chamberlain addressed a letter in the tone of the adviser and friend he had become in recent months. It began "Dear Winston," explained his reasons for retiring, concluded "Yours ever." "Dear Winston" replied with equal gallantry in the prose for which history undoubtedly will remember him.
Bevin Up. The Chamberlain exit put into the all-powerful War Cabinet a patient, stubborn slab of a man named Ernest ("Give 'Itler 'Ell") Bevin. As the National Government's new Minister of Labor he has so ably unmuddled his department that his hold on the popular imagination is the greatest political phenomenon of the war. Built like a beer barrel, ungrammatically eloquent Bevin wedged himself into the revised Cabinet as the apex of pyramiding trade-union strength. No mere pub gabble was the talk of Bevin as "our next Prime Minister." However, there were no signs last week that Prime Minister Churchill was missing any political busses.
New Jobs. Upstairs to Chamberlain's old job as Lord President of the Council stumbled Sir John Anderson, whose experiences as policeman in Ireland, Bengal and the General Strike gave him poor training for the job of Minister for Home Security.
Into Sir John's old job went weak-eyed, strong-willed Herbert Morrison, a Laborite who knew London's problems from having lived in its slums and having battled to get rid of them while running the London County Council. Succeeding Morrison in the key post of Minister of Supply was cold, shrewd Sir Andrew Rae Duncan, chairman of the Executive Committee of the British Iron and Steel Federation, who moved up from Presidency of the Board of Trade. Into the Board of Trade went handsomely mustached Captain Oliver Lyttelton, who, before the war, was managing director of British Metal Corp. and held enough other directorates—including one with the German Metallgesellschaft A.-G.—to bring in £20,000 in annual fees. Viscount Caldecote, who as Sir Thomas Inskip did more to prevent changes in the Anglican prayer book than he did to increase colonial plant production, was sidetracked to Lord Chief Justice. Brought in out of the rain was thin-faced, properly cravated Viscount Cranborne, Anthony Eden's "Foreign Office twin" whose loyalty was at last rewarded when he was named to Lord Caldecote's vacated post as Dominions' Secretary. Sir John Reith, having done little but look sour and unapproachable as Minister of Information and then as Minister of Transport, was tossed a baronetage and for equally inexplicable reasons named to a new post as Minister of Works and Public Buildings, charged with the eventual rebuilding of London. In as new Minister of Transport went sporty Lieut. Colonel John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon, holder of the Royal Aero Club's No. 1 flying certificate, twice Parliamentary Secretary to the Transport Ministry, who is known around his greyhound racing tracks (in 1937 they paid 40% dividends) as "Brab."