Under-Secretaries for India, most notably Edwin Montagu. In October 1911 he was promoted to HM Treasury as private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, at a time when Lloyd George was introducing his controversial National Insurance Bill. In November 1912 Lloyd George appointed him to the National Health Insurance Commission, as one of a team of promising young civil servants (including John Anderson, Warren Fisher, Arthur Salter, and Claud Schuster) nicknamed the "Loan Collection" as they had been hand-picked from across the civil service. Gowers wrote later, "This gigantic task of bringing the National Health and Unemployment Insurance Acts into operation taught the Service what it could do, and the control of the whole of the social and economic life of the nation during the war drove home the lesson." The members of the loan collection were deployed to other departments during the First World War. While nominally continuing to hold his post, Gowers was attached to the Foreign Office working under Charles Masterman MP at Wellington House, Britain's top-secret wartime propaganda unit. Grappling with the coal industry In 1917 Gowers was appointed secretary of the Conciliation and Arbitration Board for government employees. In 1919 he began a 25-year involvement with the coal industry, joining the Board of Trade as director of production in the mines department. The following year he was promoted to head the department as permanent under-secretary for mines, a position he retained throughout the Miners' Strike. In 1927 he became chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. In 1930 Gowers was appointed chair of the newly established Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission, set up under the Coal Mines Act of 1930, in an attempt to improve the efficiency of British coal mines, but deficiencies in the Act soon became evident. The Times commented, "Sir Ernest Gowers and his colleagues struggled manfully with their difficulties, but Parliament had inadvertently tied their hands behind their backs." A new and more powerful body, the Coal Commission, was set up in 1938, with Gowers as chairman. In July 1942 all unmined coal in Britain ceased to be the property of the colliery owners and was vested in the Coal Commission. Senior Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence, London Region Throughout the 1930s Gowers and his colleagues had also been involved in preparing for possible war, and invasion. From 1935 onwards he combined his frustrating work with the coal