Tim was unlucky in that during his term of office the Government decided that it was necessary to drastically curtail the expense of running the Public Service. This was after the re-election of R. G. Menzies as Prime Minister in April 1951 when Mr (later Sir Wilfred) Kent-Hughes was chosen as Minister for the Interior. The new Government believed that overall Government spending should be reduced. The Bureau was just one of many Government organisations whose budgets were affected. Bureau staff, which had numbered 222 in 1940, had increased to 647 in 1950 but was progressively reduced to a total of 555 by 1954.

Reduced staff numbers and restrictions on Bureau expenditure made it difficult to maintain the momentum developed in the Warren years. A further difficulty was that Wilfred Kent-Hughes, a man with a distinguished war record and a pillar of the Liberal Party, had a particularly arrogant and disdainful personality which made life difficult for Tim.

This contrasted with the situation in the Warren years when the Bureau had cordial and generally sympathetic support from the Ministers of the portfolios and heads of the Departments in which the Bureau was located. The relatively small and comparatively insignificant Meteorological Branch within the Ministry and Department of the Interior had little political or administrative impact during the Curtin, Chifley and Menzies Governments. The Permanent Heads of the Public Service Board, Treasury and other relevant Departments were not particularly concerned with the Bureau.

Another development which was to add to Timcke's worries was the highly secret decision of Prime Minister Menzies to accede to the request of UK Prime Minister Atlee that British atomic weapons tests should be conducted in Australia, a matter which receives more mention later in this chapter.

Bureau of Meteorology