MAY BRINGS CHURCHILL AS P.M.

Shaking Up the War Cabinet

We have long celebrated May as the month in which Winston Churchill rose to become Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, on May 10, 1940. From Churchill’s first day in charge, onwards to victory (on May 8, 1945, VE Day), his profoundly humane spirit led the British people, and the world, through World War II.

It is more vital now than ever to recall how Churchill stood up to Fascism by appealing to the best in all of us, not the worst. He immediately shook up Britain’s war cabinet in a constructive, not destructive, spirit, always with the objective of defeating evil, not condoning it. 

Max Beaverbrook was a central part of this governmental shake-up. On the day Churchill became Prime Minister, he offered his old friend (and nemesis), Lord Beaverbrook, the position of Minister of Aircraft Production — a post that Churchill basically created for him.  Beaverbrook held the post for what he later called, “twenty-one months of high adventure, the like of which has never been known,” as he built up almost by himself a ministry that had never before existed. Churchill simply referred to it as “Beaverbrooks’ Hour.”

Among papers that we acquired from the estate of Churchill’s wartime private secretary John Peck, we came across an extraordinarily rare and personal internal wartime “Minute” to Winston Churchill from his new Minister of Aircraft Production that Peck apparently held onto — undated, typed on a pale blue sheet of paper typed-headed Ministry of Aircraft Production, Millbank S.W.I. The presence of typos suggests that it may, in fact, have been typed by Max Beaverbrook himself. It reads:

THE PRIME MINISTER:

You are the Captain of our Team, and the Minister of Aircraft Production salutes you.

But this Ministry can only provide aircraft if the War Cabinet does not lack confidence in it.

And Sir Archibald Sinclair, Mr. Purvis, Sir Kingsley Wood, Mr. Greenwood, and Sir Hugh Dowding are symptoms of a lack of confidence.

They all want to do their own work.

But I will do it for them.

And better.

B
[in ink, in Beaverbrook’s hand]