John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley
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- For the New Zealand businessman, see John Anderson (New Zealand businessman). For other people with this name, see John Anderson.
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John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley,
GCB,
OM,
GCSI,
GCIE,
PC (
8 July 1882 –
4 January 1958) was a
Scottish statesman. He was born in
Edinburgh and studied at the Universities of
Edinburgh and
Leipzig. He entered the British civil service in
1905, joining the Colonial Office. Later, he served in Ireland as Under-secretary, and became
Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the
Home Office in
1922, where he had to deal with the
General Strike of
1926. His career in the civil service was capped by a posting as Governor of
Bengal from
1932 to
1937.
In early
1938, Anderson was elected to the
House of Commons as a
National MP, a nominal non-party supporter of the
National Government, for the
Scottish Universities. In October that year he entered
Neville Chamberlain's Cabinet as
Lord Privy Seal. In that capacity, he was put in charge of air raid preparations. After the outbreak of war in
1939, Anderson returned to the Home Office as Home Secretary, a position in which he served until he entered
Winston Churchill's
War Cabinet as
Lord President of the Council in October
1940, succeeding Chamberlain. Following the unexpected death of Sir
Kingsley Wood, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anderson was appointed to that office, in which he served until the
Labour victory in the
general election of
1945. The University constituencies were abolished at the
1950 general election, and so Anderson left the Commons. He turned down an offer to join Churchill's peacetime administration that was formed in
1951, and was created
Viscount Waverley, of Westdean in the County of Sussex, in
1952, dying six years later.
Anderson was in charge of preparing air-raid precautions immediately prior to the outbreak of World War II. He initiated the development of a kind of air-raid shelter named the "Anderson shelter". This was a small sheet metal cylinder made of prefabricated pieces that could be assembled in a garden. It was eventually replaced by a larger model and in parts of the capital by more organized mass sheltering in the London underground.
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