ORGANISER OF TRAFFIC

Greymouth Evening Star, 1 October 1928, Page 9

ORGANISER OF TRAFFIC

CAREER OF LORD ASHFIELD. Lord Ashfield greets you heartily. If you are his friend he may very likely slap you on the back. He is 100 per cent, genial. He speaks with a strong American accent, not the thin drawl of New England, but the round full tones of the Middle West. You might take him, on first acquaintance, for a buoyant American business man. He is 54, well preserved, round featured, fresh complexioned. His twinkling eyes, boyish energy and optimism are all typical of the United States. He even “hustles.” As you know, of course, Lord Ashfield takes London to work in the morning and home again at night. He controls the London General Omnibus Company, its associated concerns and the Underground group which comprises all the tube and underground railways in London, excepting the Metropolitan Railway. Fie has tried to amalgamate the Metropolitan with his companies, but Lord Aberconway, who presides over its destinies, has not agreed—yet. He started life in Derby as A. H. Knattries, the son of a poor man who emigrated to America, and settled at Detroit. Here the boy attended the State schools until he was 14, and acquired the ordinary education purveyed by such institutions. During his school days his father changed his name to Stanley, thinking so odd a name as Knattries might be a hindrance to his son’s progress in the world.

So it was as Albert Stanley that the boy started on his career, determined to do “big things.” He applied to the minister of his church to find him his first job, and was nearly persuaded to study for the ministry himself in the process. He escaped, however, and became a messenger boy on the Detroit Street railways. There never was such a messenger boy—so alert, so breathless, so indefatigable. No one, in fac£, could keep him a messenger boy, so he was transformed into a clerk, taking money from the tram car conductors at the terminus. His hours were from 6 a.m. till 10 p.m. He flourished on them, and filled his “spare time” making an exhaustive study of road transport technique. You see, he had already decided to control the transport of a great city in the future. The employees of his company went on strike. Young Stanley walked into the general office and remarked: “I can settle this if you make me- manager.” They laughed at him, but as ho says, “I have never lacked selfconfidence and egotism,” and he persuaded them to give him a trial as manager. Of course, he settled the strike, ’and succeeded brilliantly. The next, years of his career are monotonously brilliant. At 20 he earned 5000 dollars a year; at 28 he managed the New Jersey Public Service Corporation, controlling 25,000 men, drawing a salary of 15,000 dollars. At 33 he was invited by Sir Edgar Speyer to go to London as general manager for the Underground. He so impressed the world in his new position that Mr Lloyd George appointed him president of the Board of Trade in his War Cabinet. He was then 42 years old. Politics did not amuse him; he was glad to return to business after the Armistice. What is lie really like? Just like his career —bustling, direct, straightforward, successful. He has no illusions about himself, he never imagines he is a genius or a “man of destiny.” “I have prospered through hard work and luck,” he will tell you: “Every young man with determination can adopt the same moans. He must dare, he must throw all his heart into his work, and the rest will follow.” There is a Peter Pan streak in his character. He likes practical jokes and romping with children. He loves a. game of rounders with them, and insists on calling it baseball. He plays golf with intense energy, and with infinitely less success than he controls London’s traffic. He is a discriminating and keen collector of antique and works of art.

Although so large a part, of his career was made in America, he is the most English of Englishmen.. He refused many times to become a naturalised American citizen, although he served through the Spanish-American War as a volunteer on the U.S.N. auxiliary cruiser Yosemite. He believes tremendously in Britain’s industrial future; he thinks Britain can give the United States points in “hustling”; he looks forward to Britain’s re-estab-lished commercial world supremacy. He has many interests in British industry, yet transport remains the absorbing interest in his life. The L.G.O.C. and the Underground are his hobbies as well as his work. He loves to gloat over statistics of increased service, increased • efficiency, increased revenue.

He may be sitting opposite you in a London bus or tube, studying the working of his system and the courteous efficiency of its staff on his own account. It is practically impossible to tear him away from his work. Lady Ashfield herself has to command him before he will consider taking a holiday.

It. is a good test, of a man that he cun tell a story against himself. Lord Ashfield revels in so doing]

You can not meet him many times before he will tell you of the London. taxi driver who silenced him. He was driving in a taxi which collided with another. The two drivers started the usual slanging match in the road. Lord Ashfield got out of his cab, and started telling the driver who was at fault that he did not know the elements of his job, nor even the rules of the road. His own driver stopped in the full flood of his invective, and turned to his fare: “ ’Ere you,” he remarked. “You silly Yankee, ’op back into my cab. What the h do you know about London traffic?”