In 1944 after D. day when it was obvious that the end of the war was just a matter of time, I was informed by the Chairman of Ekco, as a result of a paper I had submitted on the Post War Radio Industry, that the Board would like to see me to take over the Commercial Management of the Company on cessation of hostilities. I was not too happy at this, as I had become very interested in Industrial Management Studies, but provisionally agreed. This involved me in representing Ekco at the monthly Council meetings of the Radio Manufacturers Association, in company with Walter York who during the war had looked after Public Relations and Commercial and Service Depts.
This Association had been largely ignored during the war by the Ministries, who quite rightly preferred to deal with individual companies, but with the approach of peace, the RMA which consisted of Sales Managers and Managing Directors keen to get back to Commercial work, had put up a scheme to the Government to allow production of Utility Radio, as no sets had been produced during the war. The quality was not very large, and I was disgusted to find that each of five or six firms were to produce identical sets in their factories, and even make their own complete sets of tools.
As tool makers were still on one of the scarcest categories, and the whole production could in any case have been produced easily in one factory, I fought hard against this - a lone voice I am afraid - and earned the intense dislike of some of the Council members, so I made it my business to find out how these people had managed to bamboozle the M.A.P. who had overall control of the Radio Industry. The story is very interesting as history repeating itself ten years later when the same people perpetrated a much bigger "scoop" when Commercial Television was foisted on the British public.
Some time after he had been appointed Minister of Aircraft Production, Beaverbrook brought into the Ministry Sir Robert Renwick Bt to cut through red tape which was impending the completion of the Coastal Radar Chain. He was a very forceful character, - a sort of charming rogue, aptly described by Sir Robert Watson Watt - "The Father of Radar" - in his memoirs as living up to his "Mediterranean Piratical Decent".
He duly went through the bureaucracy like a dose of salts, as it was described to me by one of his associates at the time. Some time later in the war, he was made "Supremo" of the whole Radio and Radar war effort, as Director of Communications at the M.A.P. This, it was said at the time was Churchill's personal decision, and involved the setting up under direction of two Directors, and in charge of Communications Development, Air Commodore Leedham, who was thus demoted, and the other Director of Radio Production who was Freddie Tomlinson seconded from Standard Telephone Ltd.. Renwick thus had under his control the whole industry as well as research and development in so far as Communications, Radio and Radar were concerned - some quater of a million people all told.
Exercising as he did, power of life and death over the whole industry, he naturally became closely involved in its internal "Politics" and it was he who was persuaded by the Commercial interests involved to agree to the decision to allow the wasteful duplication in the production of the "Utility Radio".
After the war, the Labour Government nationalised the Electricity Industry and with it Renwick's Electric Power company which was one of the largest in the country and being a man of boundless energy, he established a close association with leading radio manufacturing companies. Being also a leading figure in the new-style Tory "City Establishment" (he was a partner in a leading firm of stockbrokers) he was the driving force behind the campaign to establish what Ford Thomson described as "Commercial Television - that licence to print money".
In this, Renwick (who later became Lord Renwick) was supported by a lobby of advertising agents who smelled blood, and some of the leading figures in the Television Industry, particularly C.O. Stanley, then Chairman of Pye Radio. The Tory Government hastened to reward their supporters including this Commercial T.V. lobby, and quickly passed the Act of Parliament foisting this somewhat mixed blessing on the British Public. It is no exaggeration to say that the trivialisation not to say debasement of the BBC services (following Cresham's Law that "the bad always drives out the good") partly owes its origin to the political manoeuvrings in the Ministry of Aircraft Production during the war!
