A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IF the Commonwealth Civil Aviation Conference was to be on an official, rather than a Ministerial, level—no doubt there were good reasons for that decision—no better representative of Great Britain could have been found than Sir Arthur Street, who has been Permanent Secretary of the Air Ministry and Member of the Air Council since 1929. Sir Arthur, who has been in the Civil Service since he left the Army (with an M.C.) at the end of the last war, has the reputation of being the most efficient civil servant in White- hall, and few who know Whitehall will question his title to it. He has earned it by great ability combined with a prodigious capa- city for work and a gift for organisation so unusual that he some- times gives the impression of being almost leisured. His early career was at the Board of Agriculture, where he left a permanent mark as the architect of the Marketing Board schemes. He has suffered a heavy -blow in this war. One of his sons, in the R.A.F., after being shot down over Berlin, was found subsequently to be a prisoner and safe. Since then his name appeared among the victims of the murder of British airmen at Stalag Luft III.
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