SIR ERIC GEDDES

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3194, 19 September 1917, Page 5

SIR ERIC GEDDES

BRITAIN'S NEW FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY AN APPRECIATIVE SKETCH Mr. A. H. Pollen, tho well-known naval critic, and inventor of many of tho range-finding devices now in use, said in a recent interview that the appointment of Sir Eric Campbell Geddes as First lord of the British Admiralty v-as "the most important 6ingle political event that has taken placc since the beginning of will'. It has been quite obvious _ from the beginning," ho said, 'Hat tile ablest man Great Britain, oould jjroiluce ought to be the First Lord of tna Admiralty. Tho miracle is that the ablest man is now First Lord of the Admiralty. Carson has gone, and Geddes, proved In four other crucial tests, has now a freo hand to concert a, naval polfcy with the "best advice that oould be gotten, and to choose his colleagues, and name those who are to o.tecute their plans.

"And he comes to tie task assuming the chief strategic and political guidance of tho Navy after tiro months spent ill mastering tho civil purchasing and manufacturing side of the Admiralty's business. When Mr. Lloyd George intervened in May, and, in response to vigorous criticism of expert writers in the Press, intervened to reorganise the admiralty from within, I pointed out that putting G«dde3 in command of tho material side of tho Navy was the cne step in which Lloyd George oould be-(aire of himself. The man who created the Munitions Department know exactly what he was doing in giving Geddes omnipotent power to do for the Navy what the Prime Minister had done for the Army. I wont on to say that a more important thing to do was to see that our naval forces were rightly used in war. I thought it natural that Lloyd George would hesitate before intervening too drastically on this side, but I believed nevertheless that ho would intervene as soon as he saw his way clear. "We havo 'now reached the next step. Geddes has made good, and the final 6tep will not be long delayed. We shall see a rejuvenation of many branches of Admiralty activity, and once officers ■of the younger generation, trained in better principles of war, their judgment ripened by the innumerable errors wnich- the older generation have committed in the. last few years, are given definite tasks by Geddes. they will, I think, work wonders. For the first time since February it seems to me reasonable to say that while the submarine may cause us costly losses in shipß and goods and harrowing losses in men we can definitely heps that it will now be impossible for tho submarine to end the war in Germany a favour. I do not see this piece or news can be exaggerated." Mr. Pollen spoke of the noiseless and compelling personality of the man who will rule the British Navy. a "Geddes w an engineer and manager/' he said. "The curious thing is that he was taken from the North-eastern Railway, where he was not even the general manager. He was second in command. But his ability was recognised not only by the railway world but by oil who fold . ft general understanding of tho brain resources of the Empire. The secret or his success seems to be in that rarest of all gifts—the power of perceiving the essentials of any situation, however complicated, with extreme simplicity. If genius is the gift of seeing things as they are, Geddes is a genius of the iirst order, and he is a genius entirely impersonal in his handling of men and things, quite fearless and quite relentless in seeing that what he wants done is done." A New Admiralty. "It was said before ne '-'.id been in. the Admiralty a week, the ulMe had Income unrecognisable. Tho tangled K™ l ™ 1 of a hundred yeai'3 was swept off the ground as by a prairie five, so tliat. heads oi departments actually iound tmit tfiey'could communicate with each othur by telephone, or by walking from one room to another across the corridor, inu decisions were made in. seconds that used only to be made in minutes. Ihose minutes were not minutes of time, however, but minutes of paper that passed from hand to "hand and grew as each man consulted added an inclusive opinion. Urgent matters of policy thus often took ton days, or a fortnight, not before being Seemed, but before the opinions wero obtained. The curious thing about Itedd'es Is that he excites no opposition, and mates no enemies. He spatters traditions, blows office rules into the air, and robs heads of departments of a thouB and cherished adjuncts to their authority, and yet the whole thine K<Kfl through wituout resentment, the truth is fnat where Geddes goes, everyone, from the highest to the lowest, for the first time pulls his weight in tho boat, and it is a curious trait of numan nature that if you wisli to excite the gratitude of your fellow men, the surest load to '•winning their esteem is to make them work tea times as hard as they have ever worked before, but with one hundred times the visible result and success. It is Geddes's clarity of "wisdom, his strength of will, and _ his singleness of purpose that make him so great tin Exponent of the art of leadership.