About the civil service
The evolution of the United Kingdom Civil Service 1848-1997
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3. The administrative class
Fifty years after Northcote-Trevelyan the system that they had sought to introduce was in full flow. The Tomlin Royal Commission 1929–193113 examined the British Civil Service and found it good. At that time there were 424,000 civil servants (of whom 122,000 were “industrial”, involved in for example supporting the Armed Forces, and the rest "non-industrial") and of which 79,022 were women. Most civil servants had been appointed after competitive examination for "the Civil Service Commission’s certificate is an essential preliminary to any employment in the civil service". There were at that point six classes
- the Administrative Class
- the Executive Class
- the Clerical Class
- a writing assistant class
- a shorthand -typing class
- a typist class
and for each class an appropriate examination had to be passed. In the case of the Administrative Class this was at the level of an honours degree in a university and at age 22-24, in the case of the clerical at age 16-17 and at the level of a secondary school. Women, as Anson put it "are in general admitted on the same terms as men, but they must be unmarried or widows" and a single woman on marriage was obliged to resign. Movement between Classes was rare although not impossible, given that a requisite examination had to be passed.
The heart of the system was the Administrative Class, those who were recruited and trained especially to deal with Parliament and Ministers and to make policy, products of the best university education and not ashamed to live with the title of "mandarin". In general, in order to avoid the narrowness and provincialism of which Northcote had so disapproved, good and promising officials were rotated quickly between posts, both in the same department and, in the case of the very best, between departments. In 1920 it was decided that the Prime Minister was required to give his assent to appointments in top posts in all departments, so that in filling such posts it would be clear that the field of selection would be the whole service.
Those who ran the system from the late 19th-century onwards would have described themselves as professional administrators. It was a class with great pride in its achievements and a sure grasp of its practical skill. Lyndall Urwick, in 1942, at which time there was a great practical need for competence, wrote that14
The ability to administer other people is a skill, an art...it is not just a body of knowledge...Broadly speaking, administrative skill is very comparable with medical skill. It is a practical art, and practice is essential to make it perfect...
But the most perfect statement of the administrative ethos was to be found in the Rede lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1950 by Sir Edward Bridges, onetime Cabinet Secretary and the son of the poet Robert. His "Portrait of a Profession" is a perfect cameo of both the attitudes and the literary style of the Administrative Class at the height of its pride. It had, after all, just won the war and built the Welfare State15
By degrees, then, as Civil Service organisation has got into its stride, there has been built up in every department a store of knowledge and experience in the subjects handled which eventually takes shape as a practical philosophy... departmental point of view....it is the duty of a civil servant to give his Minister the fullest benefit of the storehouse of departmental experience; and to let the waves of the practical philosophy wash against ideas put forward by his Ministerial master...
or to take another example
Few Civil Servants are ever completely responsible for the work they are doing... he has much less consciousness than other professional men that the work he does is his own individual achievement, and is inevitably far more conscious than others that the work he does is part of something greater than himself...
and another
a Civil Servant is bound to be well aware of the political content of his work... at the same time he is the least political of all animals...Detached, at times almost aloof, he must be if he is to maintain a proper impartiality between the many claims and interests that will be urged upon him...
Sir Edward’s effortlessly olympian (and to a modern eye unconsciously masculine) style speaks of a sense of the British Civil Service as an achieved state of excellence, arrived at after long evolution, based upon accepted truths, validated by a victorious experience in "the last war". The era from which he spoke lasted all through the 1950s, with men from the ministry running the Commonwealth and avoiding European entanglements. Like so much in British life these certainties did not survive the 1960s.
Notes
14 Quoted in ‘Style in Administration’, ed. Chapman, 1973, p.20.