Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace by Keith Grieves

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 161 Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace. By Keith Grieves. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and St. Martin’s Press (distributor), 1989. Pp. xiv+188; bibliogra­ phy, index. $59.95. Keith Grieves’s biography, the third commissioned volume in the Manchester Business and Society series, is a concise and readable account of the dynamic North Eastern Railway deputy general man­ ager and later chairman of Dunlop’s and Imperial Airways. Its aim is to dispel the unfavorable image ofSir Eric Geddes as the man who fired Sir John Jellicoe as First Sea Lord (1917), wielded the Geddes ax on the armed services (1922), and ran Imperial Airways—the “chosen instrument”—in too commercial a manner (1937). Grieves succeeds in showing us that Lloyd George was correct when in 1915 he picked Geddes as one of his men of “push and go,” for here was a dynamic manager of technology who could see the whole problem. An unsuccessful public school boy, Geddes tried his hand atvarious odd jobs in the United States and learned to speak with the common man. Then through family connections he went to run a narrow-gauge railway in India for eight years before returning home to settle down as a man­ ager on the well-run North Eastern Railway. With his lifetime sidekick, Sir George Beharrell, he soon took up graphing and statistics as a means of determining that longer and heavier goods trains were more efficient. This in turn led to the demand for larger wagons and stronger locomo­ tives. Geddes sensed the need to recognize the whole business in order to understand what drove demand. Soon he was one of the Railway Executive’s planners for the coming World War I. Once it broke out, he found himself called on to rationalize his 1915 shell shortage, which he saw as another goods traffic tangle, and he solved it successfully. Soon he was the fourth important member ofGeneral Headquarters in France as director-general oftransport for Sir Douglas Haig, seeing that munitions got from British factories to allies against Germany as efficiently as pos­ sible. Then it was on to the Admiralty to sort out shipbuilding and finally to a postwar career in the rubber and airline industries. Grieves compresses all of this story from published and archival sources into narrow compass with admirable focus. He raises inter­ esting questions along the way about who taught the managers of technology how they should undertake their diverse tasks. Certainly, from this account it would appear that Britain owed a great deal to the management-training program of the North Eastern Railway and its willingness to pay its staff on loan to the government for the duration of World War I as managers of technology. Robin Higham Prof. Higham teaches aviation in military history at Kansas State University. He is currently working on a book on the technological infrastructure of the Royal Air Force, 1935-1941. ...