at Chester. There he dealt with refugees from The Blitz. After refusing the governorship of Burma, in January the following year he accepted the role of director of public relations at the War Office. He also sat on the Scottish Council of State established by Churchill's Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, since Elliot was himself a former Scotland Secretary. In May 1941, during the London Blitz, Elliot chanced to be nearby the Palace of Westminster during a heavy air-raid which damaged the building. In the fire that followed, he was able to direct the London Fire Brigade to focus their efforts on saving the centuries-old Westminster Hall, with its unrivalled medieval hammerbeam roof, rather than on the Victorian Gothic chamber of the House of Commons, which was destroyed. During his time at the War Office, Elliot commissioned war artists in co-operation with Kenneth Clark, the Surveyor of the King's Pictures, director of the National Gallery, and instigator of the War Artists' Advisory Committee. He also commissioned war-work from writers, including Eric Linklater. At the end of the year Elliot left his job at the War Office; he retired from the British Army having been promoted Colonel. He was chair of the Public Accounts Committee, a powerful House of Commons select committee, in 1942. During his chairmanship, he handled an inquiry examining deals between the Marconi Company and the Air Ministry; the investigation ended in the company forfeiting the proceeds. In the beginning of 1943, Elliot suffered serious injury in an accident at the railway station at Hawick, while boarding a train on the Waverley Route between Edinburgh and Carlisle. He took the rest of 1943 to recover. In this time he was chair of committee on herring fisheries and published a collection of broadcasts he had made the previous year as Long Distance. In early 1944 Elliot travelled to British West Africa, where he was instrumental in the eventual establishment of universities in the Gold Coast, the Sierra Leone Colony and Protectorate, and British Nigeria. The commission established to deal with higher education in West Africa was chaired by Elliot. Elliot had a meeting with Joseph Stalin as part of a parliamentary delegation to the Soviet Union, one of the Allies, in spring 1945. In the 1945 general election which brought the Attlee ministry to power, he lost the Glasgow Kelvingrove constituency to Labour's John Williams by just