Woolton Moves Up

Winston Churchill had long kept a wall between himself and postwar planners. Recently he breached it, put Lord Beaverbrook to work on international aviation. Last week he leveled it, created a Ministry of Reconstruction to oversee and coordinate the knotty, contentious task of providing peacetime "food, work and homes."

The job will be big and difficult. To fill it Churchill named popular Lord Woolton, Minister of Food since April 1940. Woolton had proved himself an adroit administrator, a skillful user of press, radio, cinema to keep the public informed. Born Frederick James Marquis in Manchester 60 years ago, Lord Woolton is a onetime Liverpool settlement worker who turned to merchandising, became chairman of Lewis's Ltd. (department stores). As a Minister he had achieved the seemingly impossible, made people like him while he tampered with their eating habits.

It was the major item in a minor Cabinet shift. Into Woolton's vacated place went handsome, plodding Colonel John Jestyn Llewellin, resident Minister in Washington in charge of supply. His Washington post will be taken by rugged "Big Ben" Smith, 64, ex-sailor, ex-dockworker, ex-organizer of Ernest Bevin's Transport and General Workers' Union. Ernest Brown, criticized for lack of imagination particularly in housing matters, was replaced as Minister of Health by hardworking Conservative Henry U. Willink, a King's Counsel who thus rose to Cabinet rank after only three years in Parliament. Brown moved into little, vague Alfred Duff Cooper's place as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; Duff Cooper became envoy to the French in tempestuous Algiers.

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