Pre-war After Ireland and Bengal, the British government could find no more dangerous assignment than
Palestine, and on 24 October 1937, the prime minister,
Neville Chamberlain, offered Anderson the position of
High Commissioner for Palestine, but he declined. Another opportunity soon presented itself. The sudden death of
Ramsay MacDonald on 9 November 1937 created a
casual vacancy in his
Scottish Universities seat in the
House of Commons, and the
Unionist Party now needed to find another candidate. Sir
John Graham Kerr, another member for the Scottish Universities, discussed this with Sir
Kenneth Pickthorn, one of the members for
Cambridge University, who suggested that Anderson might make a worthy candidate. Kerr contacted Katie Anderson, who informed him that Anderson was still en route for the UK on the liner SS
Comorin. Anderson arrived back in London on 11 December 1937. He spoke to Kerr, and agreed to stand for election as a
National Government candidate without a party label. His candidacy was announced on 4 January 1938. Voting was by
postal ballot, which meant that Anderson did not have to campaign but only needed to provide a statement of his political philosophy. In this he affirmed his support for the National Government and gave a qualified support for
Scottish nationalism. The results were announced on 28 February; Anderson received more votes than any other candidate, and was declared the winner. He took his seat on 2 March and, after a holiday in
Switzerland with Mary Anderson and Nellie Mackenzie, made his
maiden speech in the House of Commons on 1 June. The occasion was a debate over the provision of funding authorised under the
Air Raid Precaution Act 1937, a subject that he had previously been involved with and with which he would come to be identified. Mary Anderson and Nellie Mackenzie had preceded Anderson to England and rented a house at 11 Chepstow Villas in
Notting Hill for nine
guineas a week (). Although this was a bargain, Anderson feared that his income would not be sufficient to keep up the rental payments. Before leaving Calcutta he accepted a directorship from the
Midland Bank, and after his return to England he joined the boards of
Vickers,
Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and the Employers Liability Assurance Corporation. The directors' fees gave him an annual income of around . He was approached by members of the board of
Imperial Airways who were seeking a new full-time chairman with an offer of more than twice that amount. However, Chamberlain stipulated that if he accepted then he would have to resign his other directorships and his seat in the House of Commons at the next general election, which was due in 1940. Anderson therefore declined the appointment. He would sometimes go horse riding in
Hyde Park with Mary Anderson, but sought a more rural environment. He disposed of the house in Chepstow Villas in October and bought a property near
Merstham in December. During the week he lived with William Paterson and his wife. In May 1938, Hoare, who was now the
Home Secretary, appointed Anderson to chair a new Committee on Evacuation to examine the problems involved in
evacuating people and industries from densely populated industrial areas in the event of a war. Over the next eight weeks the committee held twenty-five meetings and examined fifty-seven witnesses. The committee submitted its report in July. The scheme outlined in the report was implemented when the
Second World War broke out in September 1939. Meanwhile, in October 1938 Anderson entered Chamberlain's ministry as
Lord Privy Seal. In that capacity, he was put in charge of civil defence. He initiated the development of a type of air-raid shelter, and engaged William Paterson to design it. Paterson worked with his co-director, Oscar Carl (Karl) Kerrison, and together they devised a small sheet metal cylinder made of
prefabricated pieces which could be assembled in a garden and partially buried to protect against bomb blast. It became known as the
Anderson shelter. When war broke out in September 1939, some 1.5 million Anderson shelters had been delivered.
War time , 25 February 1940 Under a pre-arranged plan, on the outbreak of the
Second World War on 3 September 1939, Anderson exchanged places with Hoare and became Home Secretary and
Minister of Home Security. In the wake of the
Norwegian campaign Chamberlain resigned on 10 May 1940 and Winston Churchill became the prime minister but Anderson stayed on as home secretary and minister of home security in the new
coalition government. Measures taken in Ireland and Bengal were now applied to the UK. Anderson created special tribunals to assess the reliability of
aliens resident in the UK. He informed the House of Commons that of the 73,353 aliens in the UK, no less than 55,457 were refugees from Nazi oppression; only 569 were interned. However, as the tide of war turned against the UK, the pressure to act against aliens grew, and on 16 May some 3,000 men whose reliability was classed as uncertain were interned, and in June 3,500 women and children were sent to the
Isle of Man. Anderson then decided to intern refugees previously considered reliable, and some 8,000 were transported to
Canada and
Australia. One transport, the was sunk by a
U-boat. Members of the
Communist Party of Great Britain, the
Peace Pledge Union and the
British Union of Fascists were rounded up. In June 1945, there were still 1,847 persons held in detention under
Defence Regulation 18B. Once
the Blitz began, the contingencies that Anderson had been preparing for were realised, and Anderson came under heavy attack in the press and the House of Commons over the issue of not providing deep shelters. On 8 October 1940, in a reshuffle precipitated by Chamberlain's resignation due to ill-health, Anderson was replaced by
Herbert Morrison, a less able administrator, but a more adept politician. Anderson became
Lord President of the Council and full member of the
War Cabinet. The Lord President served as chairman of the
Lord President's Committee. This committee acted as a central clearing house which dealt with the country's economic problems. This was vital to the smooth running of the
British war economy and consequently the entire British war effort. Anderson had no staff of his own, but used that of the War Cabinet, particularly its Economic Section. As chairman of the Manpower Committee, he controlled the allocation of the most critical of wartime resources: people. ,
Lord Beaverbrook,
Anthony Eden,
Clement Attlee,
Winston Churchill, Sir John Anderson,
Arthur Greenwood and Sir
Kingsley Wood. In 1941, Anderson began courting
Ava Wigram, the daughter of the historian
John Edward Courtenay Bodley, and the widow of
Ralph Wigram, a senior civil servant who served in the British Embassy in Paris during the 1930s and died in 1936. Their only child, Charles, was born severely disabled in 1929. Anderson arranged with King
George VI for himself and Ava to be married in the
Chapel Royal at
St James's Palace. The ceremony was officiated by
Edward Woods, the
Bishop of Lichfield; Alastair Anderson was the best man; and while John's father felt that he was too old to travel, Mary and Katie Anderson were there, as was William Paterson. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon at
Polesden Lacey. They now owned three houses between them, so they sold them and bought the Mill House at
Isfield in September 1942. As Lord President of the Council, Anderson was the minister responsible for several scientific organisations, including the
Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the
Agricultural Research Council and the
Medical Research Council. In August 1941, Anderson became the cabinet minister responsible for the oversight of the British project to build an
atomic bomb, known as the
Tube Alloys project. A special section of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research was created to manage it, under the leadership of
Wallace Akers. Anderson negotiated cooperation with the
United States at the
Second Washington Conference in June 1942, but after the establishment of the
Manhattan Project later that year cooperation broke down. In response to a request from the Americans, Anderson flew to Washington, D.C., on 1 August 1943 for negotiations with
James B. Conant and
Vannevar Bush. He had to reassure the Americans that Britain's interest was in winning the war, and not in profits to be made from
nuclear energy afterwards. He then moved on to Canada for negotiations with officials there. The culmination of his efforts was the signing of the
Quebec Agreement on 19 August 1943, which paved the way for the
British contribution to the Manhattan Project. In 1945 Anderson was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society under Statute 12, which covered those who "rendered conspicuous service to the cause of science, and whose election would be of signal benefit to the Society". , 8 May 1945.
Ernest Bevin stands on the right. In January 1945, Churchill wrote to
King George VI to advise that should he and his second-in-command (and heir apparent)
Anthony Eden die during the war, John Anderson should become Prime Minister: "it is the Prime Minister's duty to advise Your Majesty to send for Sir John Anderson in the event of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary being killed." Although not a member of a political party, Churchill thought Anderson had the abilities to lead the National Government, and that an independent figure was essential to the maintenance of the coalition. During the
Yalta Conference Anderson opposed the Soviet Union's demands for
war reparations from Germany because of the role
World War I reparations played in the Great Depression and the
collapse of the Weimar Republic. After
Germany surrendered on 7 May 1945, Churchill unsuccessfully attempted to broker a continuation of the wartime coalition government until after the end of the war with Japan, which was thought at the time to be over a year away. On 23 May Churchill then submitted his resignation to the King, who called an election for 5 July. Anderson retained his role of Chancellor of the Exchequer in the
Churchill caretaker ministry, and remained in the post until the
Labour victory in the
general election in July 1945. He was returned in his Scottish University electorate, along with Sir John Graham Kerr and Sir
John Boyd Orr. On 29 June 1945, Churchill had initialled a minute from Anderson, seeking "authority to instruct our representatives on the
Combined Policy Committee to give their concurrence for the
use of the atomic bomb against
Japan." After the
bombing of Hiroshima, Anderson gave a broadcast on the
BBC Home Service on 7 August 1945 in which he described the challenges and potentialities of
nuclear energy in layman's terms.
Post-war The new prime minister,
Clement Attlee, appointed Anderson the chairman of the new Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy on 14 August 1945. On 9 November, he accompanied Attlee to Washington, D.C., for talks on atomic energy with President
Harry S. Truman and Canadian prime minister
Mackenzie King. Talks took place on the
presidential yacht . The President and the two Prime Ministers were joined by Anderson; the president's
chief of staff,
Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy; the
United States Secretary of State,
James F. Byrnes;
Lord Halifax; and
Lester B. Pearson. They agreed to continue the Combined Policy Committee and the
Combined Development Trust, and agreed to collaborate, but the Americans soon made it clear that this extended only to basic research. The 1946
McMahon Act ended all cooperation on nuclear weapons. On 7 January 1948, with the post-war
British atomic weapons project in full swing and being managed by other committees, Anderson tendered his resignation from the Advisory Committee. Anderson left the Commons on 23 February 1950 at the
general election, when the university constituencies were abolished. He declined offers from the
Ulster Unionist Party to contest a safe seat in Northern Ireland, and from Churchill to contest the blue-ribbon Conservative seat of
East Surrey. At
the Boat Race 1951, Attlee tried to get Ava to persuade Anderson to accept a
peerage, but Anderson still hoped that
university constituencies would be restored and he could contest his old seat. He rejected an offer to become the
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in
Churchill's peacetime administration when it was formed in October 1951; Churchill had wanted Anderson to be an "overlord" of the Exchequer, Board of Trade and Supply, but he declined thinking such an arrangement inappropriate in peacetime. He was created
Viscount Waverley, of
Westdean in the
County of Sussex, on 29 January 1952. Meanwhile, Anderson had become Chairman of the
Port of London Authority in 1946 and Chairman of the
Royal Opera House in March the same year. He also became a director of the
Canadian Pacific Railway and the
Hudson's Bay Company. He resumed his membership of the boards of ICI, Vickers and the Employers' Life Assurance Corporation that he had given up when he became a minister, but not the
Midland Bank, which in those days would have been considered improper for a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. The
Port of London Authority chairman had often been part time and unpaid in the past, but now that a full-time role was called for Anderson insisted on being paid, and was given an annual salary of . The job was an immense one, as the port had been badly damaged by bombing during the war, and a major reconstruction effort was called for. Ava used the Port Authority's yacht, the
St Katharine, to hold party cruises on the river around the
London Docks for special guests, and invitations were highly sought after. He died on 4 January 1958 in St Thomas' Hospital, and was buried in the churchyard in Westdean. ==See also==