| John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley |
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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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