James Stevenson (1873-1926)
James Stevenson, 1st Baron Stevenson, GCMG, (2 April 1873 – 10 June 1926), known as Sir James Stevenson, Bt, between 1917 and 1924, was a British businessman and civil servant. [1]
1873 Born in Kilmarnock, son of a grocer[2]
1901 James Stevenson 27, distillers' manager, lived at Cardhu, Kings Norton, with Jessie B Stevenson 27[3]
1911 James Stevenson 37, Director Of Distillery Company, and Jessie Stevenson 35 were boarders in Walton on the Hill, Epsom.[4]
Chairman of the standing committee for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition
1926 died in Hambledon, Surrey[5]
1926 Obituary
"Although Lord Stevenson was not an engineer, it is fitting that his death on Thursday 10th June, should be recorded in our columns, for in many directions the work which he undertook in the last ten or eleven years of his life brought him into contact with, or reacted upon, the engineering industry. He was born at Kilmarnock, Scotland, in 1873, and eventually rose to be managing director of a whiskey (sic) distilling firm. When war broke out, in 1914 he offered his services gratuitously to the Government in any capacity in which they could be usefully employed. He was not left long in idleness. Under the Ministry of Munitions he was from 1915 to 1917 Director of Area Organisation, and subsequently vice-chairman of the Ministry of Munitions Advisory Committee, a member of the Central Reconstruction Committee, and a member of the Munitions Council for Ordnance. After the was he was appointed chairman of the Committee on Demobilisation and Reconstruction, and from 1919 to 1921 served as Surveyor-General of Supply to the War Office, as a member of the Army Council and the Air Council, and as vice-chairman of the Advisory Committee on Civil Aviation. In 1921 he became the personal adviser on commercial affairs to the Secretary for the Colonies and in that capacity acted as chairman of the Rubber Investigation Industry, which produced the celebrated plan for the restriction of rubber output, a plan which is commonly held to have saved many plantation in the East from ruin. His most conspicuous work was still to do. As chairman of the Standing Committee of the British Empire Exhibition, his forceful personality led more than any other factor to the opening of that great undertaking on the day appointed in spite of difficulties which at one time seemed insurmountable. In a tribute to his memory, Mr. Winston Churchill has remarked that during his ten years of public service for honour alone Lord Stevenson wore out the whole of his exceptional strength of mind and body, and exhausted in the service of the State the vital forces by which an easier and less disinterested career might have been carried to a long old age.[6]