Sir Howard Kingsley Wood (19 August 1881 – 21 September 1943) was an English Conservative politician. The son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, he qualified as a solicitor, and successfully specialised in industrial insurance. He became a member of the London County Council and then a Member of Parliament.
Wood served as junior minister to Neville Chamberlain at the Ministry of Health, establishing a close personal and political alliance. His first cabinet post was Postmaster General, in which he transformed the British Post Office from a bureaucracy to a business. As Secretary of State for Air in the months before the Second World War he oversaw a huge increase in the production of warplanes to bring Britain up to parity with Germany. When Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, Wood was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which post he adopted policies propounded by John Maynard Keynes, changing the role of HM Treasury from custodian of government income and expenditure to steering the entire British economy.
One of Wood's last innovations was the creation of Pay As You Earn, under which income tax is deducted from employees' current pay, rather than being collected retrospectively. This system remains in force in Britain. Wood died suddenly on the day on which the new system was to be announced to Parliament.
Famous quotes containing the word wood:
“He will not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in the short days of winter; but every stroke will be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and so will the strokes of that scholar’s pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died away.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)