A British Minister

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30823, 7 August 1965, Page 4

A British Minister

A Companion of Honour. By Colin Coote. Collins. 271 pp. and Index.

The subject of this biography is the late Walter Elliot, whose fine brain and unquestionable integrity might well have taken him to the head of the British Government. Without excuse or undue adulation, Sir Colin Coote, who was his friend, traces the reasons why a man who many believed would one day be Prime Minister was not in the Cabinet at the time of his death in 1958. The son of a successful business man Walter Elliot received his education in Glasgow, graduating at the University there as a B.Sc in 1910, and as an M.B. in 1913. When he first entered Parliament as member for Lanark in 1918 he had served as medical officer to the Scots Greys through the war, winning the M.C. and Bar, and though in the years 1940-41 he was to don his uniform again, the main business of his life was politics. A patriotic Scot he refused to stand at any time for an English constituency, and for most of his Parliamentary career was member for Kelvingrove for which he first stood in 1924. A rugged, bluff smiling figure he won the hearts of his constituents by his personal concern for their welfare, and they stuck to him for 21 years. It was between the wars that he showed the energy and grasp of detail which promised to take him to the heights, and in the troubled administrations of the 1930’s he reached Cabinet rank. From being Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1931 he became Minister of Agriculture at a time when British farming was facing a grave crisis, and by his skilful handling of a desperate situation saved the industry from bankruptcy. This accomplishment was followed by a term as Secretary of State for Scotland, but his organising powers showed to the full when as Minister of Health in 1938 he prepared the scheme for a rapid evacuation of civilians from danger areas in the war he felt sure was coming.

In 1939 a most complicated operation went without a hitch. This achievement was the apogee of his career, for, reluctantly, he supported Mr Chamberlain at the time of Munich, and as he had never been on very good terms with Mr Churchill the fact weighed against him in the post-war years. In 1944 he nearly ended his life under the wheels of a train which he attempted to enter while it was in motion, and for four months lay with a broken pelvis in great pain and dis comfort, but he was well enough to be included in the Conservative Shadow Cabinet which was formed during the post-war Labour Government. In this he was the chief spokesman, and heckled the Government on such vulnerable points as the ground-nuts scheme and a totally unneccessary fuel crisis. Probably I his most notable achieve-

ment, as a late Minister of Health, was to cross swords with Aneurin Bevan on his housing programme which fell so far short of the Ministerial forecast that Elliot dubbed him “The Dalton of Housing,” since the Chancellor of the Exchequer was floundering badly in a similar doctrinaire quagmire. He could be said to have earned his spurs in the formation of the Conservative Government of 1951. In the event he was one of the two members of the Shadow Cabinet to be dropped from Mr Churchill’s list. This was a heavy blow, and on the face of it, undeserved. Beverley Baxter writing some years later to a friend said; "When Churchill formed his Government in 1951, and left Elliot out, the House watched him take his seat among the rank and file, and suddenly realised that this Ministerial cast-off was a great man whose presence in the Chamber added dignity to us all.” Two minor posts were offered to him, but, as he remarked to his wife “Better to be at the head of the tenants than at the tail of the gentry.” In 1952 some public recompense for his treatment was accorded to him when the Queen made him a Companion of Honour—the only really high honour in the whole List, and one exclusive to the Sovereign and 49 others. In a nation of 56 millions this did indeed constitute a tribute to the value of his services to his country. Sir Colin Coote gives a fulllength portrait of the man as well as the politician. He cites his chronic unpunctuality as a possible cause of his being overlooked for high office in the Churchill administration, though the Prime Minister’s near enmity must have been a contributory factor. In his early Parliamentary career a few rough corners were rubbed off by his friendship with those higherplaced socially, and after a tragedy in which he lost his young wife at the outset of his political life, he married Katharine, one of the staunchly Liberal Tennants, whom he triumphantly converted to his Conservative faith. Walter Elliot travelled very extensively, and his views on Palestine and Ireland, to mention only two of the countries presenting British Governments with nearly insoluble problems, ran counter to the excepted policy, and were subsequently proved to be right. His popularity in his own undemonstrative country was deep, and his little slogan at Kelvingrove; “Do not falter, vote for Waiter,” though not profound, evoked a hearty response. After refusing the office during his active political career he became in 1956 Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland. He died suddenly two years later, and Michael Foot, a man not given to eulogies, referred to him in an obituary notice as “Yesterdays man of Tomorrow.” It seems a fitting epitaph.