It seemed as though some odd fate prevented the chief new instrument of our new time from reaping its due commercial reward.
What changed all this was the taking of the whole thing in hand by two men of genius, Henry Trefusis and his brother, both of them sons of a Hamburg merchant who had come to this country in early youth, married here and established the great firm which is known under his name. The brothers had chosen different paths in life, the one had preferred Public Service, the other, affairs. But when Henry first began to set in order the finance of Rotors Charles, though not neglecting his political duties, could not but take a certain interest in the boundless opportunities offered.
It was but three years before Mr. Petre’s unfortunate and inexplicable accident that the first amalgamation took place. Everything had been straightened out by the amazing organizing power of the younger Trefusis, and though the new enterprise, taking in the whole British field, had not yet turned the corner by the end of 1952, there were already being prepared the last two necessary steps without which no great modern public service can function properly: a public charter and a concealed, but effective, monopoly.
The small and hopelessly mismanaged competing interest which the Saillant French group still controlled in this country were bought out on very favorable terms about ten days before the shocking suicide of Saillant himself, which, as the Frenchman had chosen to commit it in the middle of St. Paul’s Cathedral at the most solemn moment of the Memorial Service for Lord Winnipeg, could not be kept out of the papers, and is fresh in the minds of the public.
“One had chosen Public Service, the other—Affairs.”
What still hindered the final successful establishment of Rotors under a National system was the network of local companies and conflicting sectional contracts, of which nothing but an Act of Parliament could compel the purchase and settlement.
The elder Trefusis had felt a very honorable scruple in directly promoting such a measure; he left it in the hands of his two most intimate associates in the Cabinet. But there was no doubt about the Bills going through, especially as it could not, of course, be submitted to public debate; it was quite unfitted for treatment of that kind, dealing as it did with a mass of scientific particulars and equally technical and difficult financial details, which a large assembly is quite unfitted to discuss.
It is true that Lord William Mawson, who had been a director of the old Saillant wreck, put down something on the paper which might have led to a discussion at some impossible hour of the night towards the last days of the session. But luckily so futile an intervention was rendered impossible by his Lordship’s appointment to the little-known post of Sub-Controller of the Chains and Liveries: a coincidence worthy of the good fortunes that have latterly attended the Trefusis scheme in all its activities.