John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley

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For the New Zealand businessman, see John Anderson (New Zealand businessman). For other people with this name, see John Anderson.

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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