A Room with a View

Colonel Wilfred Mark Lapper, 58, chairman of the board of the Yorkshire area of Britain's nationalized electricity industry, always wanted a room with a view. He and his staff saw no reason why working folk should labor in smoky towns, if they could do their jobs equally well in nicer surroundings. Especially if the working folk were Colonel Lapper & Co.

When the Yorkshire Electricity Board was appointed in 1947, the colonel knew just the right spot for its headquarters. With a little remodeling, stately Scarcroft Lodge, a 120-year-old mansion overlooking 160 acres of rolling farmland, would be absolutely top-hole. It was situated well beyond the industrial smog of ugly, workaday Leeds (pop. 510,000). There was a little matter of building permits before Scarcroft could be remodeled, but the colonel soon fixed that. He had a word with the Ministry of Fuel and Power, got permission to spend $112,000 on scarce building materials for his new offices.

The colonel spared the Ministry of Fuel no expense in redecorating Scarcroft. A spacious new dining room was added, with fluorescent lighting. There was a smart new boardroom, deep red carpeting to cover the floor, a new $1,500 clock in the lodge tower and a $420 television set in the private staff dining room.

Unfortunately for the colonel, workmen's tongues began wagging in Leeds, where 28,000 people were waiting for permits to build homes and where factories are often short of electricity. Their complaints about Scarcroft's blazing floodlights, its elaborate wrought-iron gateway and its superb kitchen reached the receptive ears of Tory Donald Kaberry, M.P. Kaberry denounced Lapper and his board in the House of Commons as "little tsars of the government's creation [who] build their Kremlins . . . and shrink from the wrath of public opinion." The Attorney General ordered an investigation.

The result shocked Britain. The colonel had overspent his building allocation by some $115,000. It was a rare and serious crime in Britain, where such things are simply not done. At Leeds Assizes, it was punished accordingly. This week, the Yorkshire Electricity Board was due to pay a whopping $56,000 fine for misusing public funds--the fine, as well as the overspending, eventually to come out of the consumers' pockets. Rueful Colonel Lapper, who had wanted nothing more than a room with a view, begins a six-month stay in a former Army detention barracks, now used as a county jail.

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