Foreign News: Energetic Ernie

The man who has been making more headlines than anyone else in Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's government is a most unlikely Tory up from the working class, and his achievement has come in an odd field for a Cabinet Minister. The field: traffic.

"The heart of London is suffering from traffic thrombosis," booms Britain's bustling Transport Minister Ernest Marples, 52. Since Macmillan gave him the tough job eleven weeks ago of easing the prosperous crush of new cars in Britain's tight little streets, Minister Marples has been brewing dramatic anticoagulants for old London's clotted arteries.

First he designated most of the capital's West End section as "Pink Zone" (nonparking towaway area) for the holidays. It was shocking pink to householders, who believe that an Englishman's castle extends at least to his curb. But housewives agreed it made their Christmas shopping the easiest in years. By last week Marples was taking measures to give him more direct control over traffic police and to build vast garages under Hyde Park, increase traffic fines, rebuild roads. Most of his proposals, though shocking to the British, are old remedies in the U.S. But he had a few touches of his own, including buying World War II surplus Bailey bridges from the War Office to throw across congested road crossings.

Housing Built by Two. The son of Socialist parents, and brought up in the poverty-stricken back streets of Manchester, Ernest Marples left grade school to become an apprentice accountant, got into real estate and contracting in London, "and could have retired at 31." Marples is a self-made standout on a Tory Front Bench otherwise filled entirely by university men and Establishment types. He gets down to any problem personally, whether donning a diver's suit to examine the Thames's muddy bottom before his firm drives piles for a London power plant, or cycling through Burgundy to select casks of wine for later bottling in his West End cellar.

After he won a House of Commons seat in 1945, some Tory bluebloods sniffed at "that rather revolting little man with the spotted bow tie who is always getting himself in the newspaper diary paragraphs." But when Harold Macmillan as Housing Minister fell heir to the almost impossible job of keeping the Tory campaign pledge to build 300,000 houses in a year, he shrewdly selected energetic Ernie as his No. 2. It was a strange team, but they did' the job.

Shunted to a lowly post when Eden succeeded Churchill, Marples came back when Macmillan became Prime Minister and appointed him Postmaster-General. Marples moved right in again, helped sort letters, traveled on all-night mail trains, walked the rounds with letter carriers, painted and rebuilt sagging post offices, revamped the telephone system and cut long-distance rates. Then he became Transport Minister, in charge of the nation's road, rail and sea services.