Splendid item presented to Geddes “by his former Directors of the Gun Ammunition Filling Department” at their First Anniversary Dinner in 1917. Geddes had a fascinatiing life, having been educated at Oxford Military Academy, Cowley, he decided against joining the Royal Engineers instead leaving for the United States. For the next four years he filled a variety of unusual posts, as a brakeman on the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, as a lumberman, and as a labourer in a steel works. He later went to India where his position as manager of a forestry estate gave him experience in running a light railway. The railway was amalgamated with the Rohilkhand and Kumaon Railway and he became traffic superintendent, in 1906 he returned to England to improve his prospects with N.E.R.. By 1914 he was Deputy General Manager, nominated as a future General Manager.
At the outbreak of the Great War Geddes took charge of the mobilization movement in Northern Command, raising a Battalion from N.E.R. employees, later the 17th Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. In 1915 he was Deputy Director-General of Munitions Supply and was asked to report on the obstacles impeding the flow of munitions to the Front. In this he won the complete confidence and friendship of Lloyd George and was consequently appointed Director-General of Transportation on the C-i-C’s Staff in France and later Inspector-General of Transportation for all theatres with the honorary rank of Major-General. In May 1917 he was appointed Controller of the Navy and an additional member of the Board of Admiralty with the temporary and honorary rank of Vice-Admiral, but at Haig’s insistence was liable to recall to the C-i-C’s Staff, thus being one of the few to hold senior naval and military rank at the same time.
Geddes was appointed to the Imperial War Cabinet from 1919 to 1921 as Minister for Transport, conducting the legislation providing for the amalgamation of Britain’s railways and the payment of compensation for the suspension of ownership during the conflict. But it is for his Chairmanship of the National Expenditure Committee - the wielders of “Geddes Axe” - that he is most remembered. Assembled to find cuts totalling £100,000,000, the Committee’s Report detailed cuts amounting to £87,750,000 with further recommendations that would reach the projected target. On the break up of the coalition in 1922 Geddes left the House of Commons turning his attention to industry and transport, his principal chairmanship being that of the Dunlop Rubber Company. He was to be the first Chairman of Imperial Airways expanding its remit from a cross-Channel ferry service to the “all-up Empire air mail”. “Geddes achievements in war were undoubtedly very great. His capacity for hard work, physical and mental, was abnormal: he asked a great deal, but never more than he gave.” [DNB]
