Personality of the Week
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Riau
mes Ellery
THE boy from Truro School looked out upon th beauty of the Cornish scene and decided he must nc be bewitched. Life for him at 18 was real and carries Man cannot live by natural beauty alone and young Eller wanted to get on. The Duchy offered little prospect of th kind of advancement he was so ambitious to achievi Fortunes, it seemed, were made in London and, even if th topmost rungs were not for him, to London he must go an take his chance.
As it turned out, the topmost rungs were indeed for him and today, 37 years after he (temporarily) forsook hi native heath, he's director of some 20 companies, chairmai of seven more, a member of the Council of the Institut of Transport, and chairman of the Public Transpor Association, whose conference opens at Harrogate ilex week.
Why did he enter the transport industry when at lengtl he arrived in the great city? Partly, he says, by chance though he goes on to add that the double-decker, London style buses which made their appearance around his home town in the mid-twenties had something to do with it The ancients of the countryside may have resented thi usurpation a the hitherto unchallenged empire of till horse, but to the youngsters it was a glimpse of the outsidl world. Those vehicles, to them, Were •a symbol o twentieth-century progress in a quiet land of cream am pasties.
British Electric Traction welcomed him, trained him am nurtured him. As to early training, he got that in th■ department of the chief accountant. But to be on ail 8.E.T. staff is itself a training to whatever departmen youngsters may be posted. It is a tough school. Am although R. J. Ellery denied, in response to my question
that the B.E.T. is a hiring and firing organization and told me emphatically that the company always looks after its own people, he did agree that you have to be pretty good to become the company's own. Young men have got to the top at Stratton House and will continue to do so—
but only when they have proved beyond any possible doubt that the genuine stuff of success is in them.
Later on he was on the administrative staff of Tilling and British Automobile Traction, Ltd., returning to B.E.T. headquarters in 1938. For a time he was mainly engaged in a sphere no longer of interest to B.E.T. and one which, I suspect, never really gave them cause for rejoicing—air transport. Ellery still talks of famous names in the aviation world (at that time he joined the Royal Aero Club, where well-known air transport people used to forgather, and still do)----Cobham, 011ey, LarnpIugh, Witney-Straight, Haridover and others. They were tough days for British civil aviation, however. No fortunes were ever made by the private operators in the 'thirties. Few companies formed before 1939 survive today, none in its pre-war form, And for R. J. Ellery, the former B.E.T. interest is now purely a matter of the company-s history.
More significant in his personal . story of progress was his appointment as secretary of the BET. company -itself. Now he was at the very heart of affairs, the widely spread affairs of B.E.T. The list of the organization's interests reveals astonishing variety and a no less astonishing. (to the lay observer at least) disparity. Where is the affinity of Rediffusion with Canadian Motorway, or Advance Laundries, Ltd., with Jamaica Omnibus Services and Eddison Plant? The answer, since no commercial company is a wholly philanthropic concern, is simply that any enterprise which shows a reasonable profit-making• potential could find a place within the B.E.T.. citadel. The underlying affinity is provision of services to, the public.
• R. J. Ellery declares he is no world traveller. That may be. None the less, he's pretty familiar with the Jamaican scene and his directorship of Canadian Motorways Management Corporation, Canadian Motorways and Hill the Mover (Canada), Ltd., take him frequently across the Atlantic. B.E.T. interests also took him to South Africa.
Jamaica Omnibus Services may not be the most important of the enterprises whose fortunes are guided by R. J. Ellery, but it certainly indicates very vividly what B.E.T. can do for a chaotic set-up like the pre-B.ET. Kingston and St. Andrew public transport. In those days time-expired vehicles crashed through the narrow city streets jam-packed with perspiring Jamaicans. For passengers to collapse because of heat and fumes was commonplace. Servicing was usually a matter of amateurish afterthought. But when James and Ellery, representing B.E.T., and Watts, of United .Transport, came along, they brought a revolution with them. Now the bus services of Kingston, Jamaica, do credit to the capital city.
Like all the BET. directors of associated companies. Ellery is a man of great agility of mind. Not otherwise could he—or they— turn from the specialized business Of, say, Advance Laundries, Ltd., to the equally specialized business of the Trent Motor Traction Co., Ltd.
Small wonder that he says, but not complainingly, that the normal working day is not long enough and that even when he manages to escape to his Cornish home at a Weekend a briefcase of documents almost invariably goes with him. And, of course, his chairmanship of the Public Transport Association, an extra-company activity, is almost a full-time job in itself.
Yet when he runs over the names of the companies on whose boards he has a seat it is not at the most powerful that he pauses and elaborates. No, he spoke with affection, I thought, of Meceano and with pride of the Camborne. Newquay and Truro Water companies. These Cornish enterprises are unlikely to contribute much to the fortunes of R. J. Ellery. But they show that the county which bore him reciprocates his warm feelings for it. And he is proud of that. H.C.