Abstract
THERE were precious few fleshpots in the life of the two young Civil Servants — Alexander Gray had been appointed a clerk in the office of the Local Government Board — when they took up their quarters in London in the late October of 1905. Having no local knowledge, they elected to return to the crowded, though welcoming, hospitality of Mrs. Cliff in Gratton Road, but they soon tired of these not very salubrious surroundings and began to look about for better quarters. It was John Anderson who found them. By good fortune he discovered that the son of an old family friend at Eskbank, William Paterson, whom he knew and liked well, was living in rooms at 14 Killarney Road, Wandsworth Common, and it was amicably arranged between him and his landlady, a re- doubtable lady named Mrs. Annie Nelson, that Anderson and Gray should move in with him. The transition took place in the early months of 1906 and the three settled down very contentedly together under the motherly care of Mrs. Nelson, whom they addressed, to her intense delight, as ‘Madame Annie’.
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Notes
‘The House of Commons was a wonderful sight’, that indefatigable commentator, George Riddell, recorded. ‘The Tories were almost as enthusiastic as the Radicals, and treated L. G. as if he were the saviour of mankind. Arthur Balfour all smiles and cordiality’ (Lord Riddell, More Pages from My Diary (1934), p. 33).
Malcolm Thomson, David Lloyd George, the Official Biography (1948), pp. 199–202;
Frank Owen, Tempestuous Journey: Lloyd George, His Life and Times (1954), pp. 203, 206–209.
R. W. Harris, Not so Humdrum, the Autobiography of a Civil Servant (1939), p. 123.
It should be explained that the machinery set up under the Health Insurance Act consisted of four Commissions for England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales respectively, with a co-ordinating Joint Committee under the Chairmanship of the responsible Minister, the Rt. Hon. C. F. G. Masterman. Since the Scottish, Irish and Welsh Commissions had really only been created to satisfy the national sentiments in those countries, the major bulk of the work fell upon the English Commission, which was composed of members with very different origins, temperaments, interests and outlooks. They were Sir Robert Morant, Chairman, Sir John Bradbury, David Shackleton (Trade Union), Lister Stead (Friendly Societies), Dr. Whitaker (British Medical Association) and Mrs. Mona Wilson (Women’s Trade Union League). The appointment of Secretary to the English Commission was therefore an English, not a United Kingdom appointment, and, on the day that Anderson was appointed, a Scottish Commissioner came to Arthur Salter (then Private Secretary to the Minister) with the remark: ‘This is a feather in the cap of Scotland. The English Commission has been obliged to go to Scotland for its Secretary.’ ‘No,’ replied Salter, ‘the English Commission was not obliged to. It appointed Anderson because he was the best man available without regard to the fact that he is not “English”. Now, I will put a direct question to you. If the Scottish Commission find that the best man available for its Secretary is an Englishman, just as much superior to the next candidates as Anderson was, will you appoint him?’ ‘No, of course we shall choose a Scot’, was the reply. ‘Then’, said Salter, ‘don’t you think that what has happened to-day is at least as much to the credit of England as of Scotland?’ (Letter from Lord Salter to the author, June 23, 1959; see also Lord Salter’s Memoirs of a Public Servant (1961), p. 54.)
David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties (1938), i, pp. 451–452.
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© 1962 Sir John W. Wheeler-Bennett
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Wheeler-Bennett, J.W. (1962). A Civil Servant in Peace and War 1905–1920. In: John Anderson. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81765-8_2
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