High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  The main problem with the Civil Service was that men entered it so young that it was often impossible to get an estimate of their ability: and if they were third-rate, it was impossible to be rid of them. The private sector, at least, embraced stiff competition, and if a man was a drain on a business he was usually sacked. However, in the Civil Service many of the young men appointed spent years copying papers and advanced no further beyond that, leaving them bored and depressed. Promotion was based on Buggin’s turn. When a really senior post became available there was often no one within the service with the skills to fill it: therefore someone from outside had to be promoted over the heads of long-term civil servants, who were demoralised as a result. Nor were men moved from one department to another, which made them narrow in outlook and restricted their chances of advancement.

  The Crimean War was handled disastrously by Whitehall, and made its own case for radical change. But there was also evidence in many of the questions of the day, domestic as well as foreign, of inconsistency and incompetence making things worse. As the population grew, and with them the wealth, reach and influence of the country, and the demands being made to handle that expanding population, the old Civil Service was no longer up to the job. Only gross misconduct could result in a civil servant being sacked, and few seemed to have either the wit or the energy for that. As an official report of 1853 into the Civil Service said, ‘The feeling of security tends to encourage indolence, and thereby to depress the character of the Service.’1

  There was strong resistance to the idea of Civil Service reform, and not merely from nepotists and reactionaries who saw career opportunities for mediocre gentlemen disappearing into the hands of talented men on the make. In 1854 Sir James Stephen, a former under-secretary at the Colonial Office and Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge, had said he felt work in the Civil Service was insufficiently demanding to be given to men of outstanding ability, who would be bored by it. He had found his former colleagues to be of a low calibre, but to have done, nonetheless, what was expected of them. With a senior clerk earning between £700 and £1,000 a year, but junior clerks on between £160 and £300, they were not paid well – nor, in his view, should they be – and he asked ‘why expect to attract, by such inducements as these, any man of eminent ability to whom any other path in life is open?’2 The dull man was suited to it because ‘he labours in an obscurity as profound as it is unavoidable’, and it was as well he might not understand much that he was asked to do, for if he did he would probably disapprove of it. Also – and displaying the brutal cynicism inherited in such large measure by his distinguished son Fitzjames, whom we shall encounter later – Stephen could not understand why the Civil Service should regulate entrance on merit, since in most of life merit did not come into it. This was not merely for corrupt purposes. ‘It is not without some reason that in all other pursuits in life, patronage, exercised in the spirit of nepotism, is made the shelter of the weak and otherwise helpless. Those whom nature and training have made strong can usually help themselves.’3

  There were also radicals who made their less urbane voices heard every bit as loudly as Sir James Stephen had: such as the Irish journalist Matthew Higgins, who wrote in his Letter on Administrative Reform of 1855 that there was an ‘upper ten thousand’ who had ‘hitherto monopolised every post of honour, trust and emolument under the Crown, from the highest to the lowest. They have taken what they wanted for themselves; they have distributed what they did not want among their relations, connexions and dependents. They have all in turn paid their debts of friendship and of gratitude, they have provided for their younger sons and their worn-out servants with appointments in the public service.’4 Another critic, W. R. Greg, announced that ‘every Englishman is proud of his country. No Englishman is proud of his Administration.’5

  Gladstone shared that view. After becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in late 1852, he had commissioned a report into Civil Service reform from Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote. Northcote had been Gladstone’s private secretary at the Board of Trade – recruited by the meritocratic method of Gladstone’s having written to a friend at Eton and asking him to recommend one of his most impressive former pupils. The two men had formed a high estimate of each other. Northcote had been a scholar at Balliol with Clough, whom he got to know only a little because of Clough’s incipient shyness.

  Succeeding his grandfather in the baronetcy in 1851, he would become an MP in 1855, serve as Disraeli’s Chancellor for the whole of the 1874–80 government, and be Foreign Secretary briefly in 1886–7 under Salisbury, dying in office. In the later 1850s, he would steer through legislation to improve reformatories and set up industrial schools, so that young criminals could learn a trade and contribute to society, rather than face a lifetime of crime and an early demise. When Chancellor he would regulate and ease the path of friendly societies, which won him the affections of many of the working class who, especially through the formation of burial societies, had attempted to help themselves in difficult circumstances. Most recently, he had been a highly effective secretary of the 1851 Commission.

  Trevelyan was older than Northcote – forty-six to his thirty-five when they began their work – and had been a distinguished colonial civil servant before becoming Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, its most senior permanent official. He had coordinated relief for the Irish Potato Famine, for which history has not, with good reason, treated him kindly. He was strongly influenced by the thought of Thomas Malthus, the economist, and believed the Famine had been a ‘mechanism for reducing surplus population . . . the judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated . . . The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’6

  Their report, signed off in November 1853 and published in 1854, was entitled The Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service. A masterpiece of concision – it runs to just twenty-three pages, a model for public documents on great subjects – it sought to end admission by patronage and instead admit according to merit proved through competitive examination. ‘The great and increasing accumulation of public business’ made reform a necessity: the responsibilities of the State had grown with prosperity and expansion and the present forces were ‘far from perfect’ and unequal to handling them.7 The supposed ease of the work meant that there were ‘strong inducements to the parents and friends of sickly youths to endeavour to obtain for them employment in the service of the Government’, and the report commented that the number of civil servants on sick pay or on pensions drawn early, at the public’s expense, had to be seen to be believed.8 The authors sought not to damn all civil servants, but did observe that ‘there are probably very few who have chosen this line of life with a view to raising themselves to public eminence.’

  The key question they asked was in two parts: ‘What is the best method of providing it [the Civil Service] with a supply of good men, and of making the most of them after they have been admitted?’9 Admission by examination, followed by a period of probation, and with it being understood that advancement would ‘depend entirely on the industry and ability with which they discharge their duties’, were all deemed essential.10 Some form of examination already took place in several departments of State, including the Treasury, the War Office, the Board of Trade and the Colonial Office (the Home and Foreign Offices were notoriously resistant to anything that might undermine patronage). This new admissions process had to be centrally administered (though it should, they argued, be held in regional centres to encourage wide entrance), held at a fixed time, and not left to individual departments. It also had to be independent, and with a wide range of subjects examined – not merely Latin and Greek, which would favour a narrow group of men. The report stressed ‘the importance of establishing a proper distinction between intellectual and mechanical labour’.11

  Northcote and Tr
evelyan had made a powerful argument for reform. The report also made a distinction in Civil Service work between high-level policy-making and the simply clerical. This distinction, while sensible, tended to restrict the upper levels of the Civil Service to the aristocratic and well-to-do who could afford a decent public school followed by Oxford or Cambridge. Trevelyan admitted this but defended the proposal on the grounds that those aristocrats who made the grade would at least be ‘worthy’, rather than being ‘the idle, and useless, the fool of the family, the consumptive, the hypochondriac, those who have a tendency to insanity’.12 Trevelyan intended that the country would ‘invite the flower of our youth to the aid of the public service’.

  The question of ease of promotion had arisen earlier, according to a letter from Cardwell to Gladstone in January 1854, when the former had some vacancies to fill at the Board of Trade. ‘I agree in the wisdom of making broad lines of demarcation, between the different classes: but I doubt the policy of making these lines impassable.’13 He added: ‘If the juniors are not to be gentlemen, they will never in any case be fit for promotion; their powers derived from education and training will not be suitable for superior work. If, on the other hand, you establish hard work, low pay, no claim to promotion, and a probationary year, then I think you will do much to exclude fine gentlemen, while real, hardworking gentlemen will come in, relying on their own powers to free themselves upwards on the ground of superior merit.’ Cardwell had also recommended varying the composition of any board of examiners that was set up, and creating ‘a greater degree of strictness in the service: and to this the abolition of Patronage would tend – for it is difficult now for the head of a department to dismiss incompetent, or unwilling, men.’ Northcote and Trevelyan wanted promotion to depend on ability, hard work and results, a revolutionary concept.

  Gladstone drafted a memorandum on Civil Service reform in response to Northcote and Trevelyan, noting that ‘candidates for those grades in the Civil Service to which appointment takes place in youth with a view to succession, will be examined in groups: the examinations being open to all qualified persons. A number corresponding with the number of vacancies will be selected by the examiners, according to merit.’14 Gladstone understood how destabilising this would be to the old hands: ‘Nor is it unnatural that the man who has been brought into the service by favour in preference to other men of superior merit should resent the attempt to stop his promotion upon a plan which if good at all should have prevented his admission.’

  Trevelyan told Gladstone on 8 July 1854 that an article about Civil Service reform had appeared in the Westminster Gazette ‘saying that our plan is a great improvement upon the present, but that it is pregnant with danger. No better arrangement is, however, suggested.’15 Trevelyan kept up the pressure, telling Gladstone in a letter of 17 January 1855: ‘It is generally admitted that the incompetent youth of the country gravitate towards the public services. To whatever degree, therefore, a check can be put upon this tendency, the public good will be promoted. At present the object is admitted to be very imperfectly attained by means of departmental examinations. And it is also admitted by all the best authorities that it is desirable to substitute for departmental examinations the superior security of the agency of officers appointed expressly for the purpose and acting according to prescribed rules.’16

  He conceded a difference of opinion as to the best kind of examination: but urged that whatever it was ‘the examinations may be conducted either wholly or partly on the principle of competition’. The Committee of Inquiry into the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service had recommended that ‘a central Board should be constituted for conducting the examination of all candidates for the public service whom it may be thought right to subject to such a test. Such board should be composed of men holding an independent position, and capable of commanding general confidence; it should have at its head an officer of the rank of Privy Councillor.’17

  Northcote and Trevelyan had said in their original report: ‘We are of opinion that this examination should be in all cases a competing literary examination. This ought not to exclude careful previous inquiry into the age, health and moral fitness of the candidates . . . We see no other mode by which (in the case of the inferior no less than of the superior offices) the double object can be attained of selecting the fittest person, and of avoiding the evils of patronage.’18 They were also keen to ensure that the entry requirements should therefore include physical fitness. ‘Nothing is commoner than for young men to be got into the Public Offices expressly on account of their having a weakly inefficient physique,’ he told Gladstone on 9 February 1855, ‘and this may not always be detected by the single medical examination.’19 Trevelyan tried to find a chief examiner; but first Benjamin Jowett, at this stage in his career a tutor at Balliol and one who had sat on the Reform Commission, and then Frederick Temple, a school inspector who was a former fellow of Balliol and a future Archbishop of Canterbury, declined. Jowett – probably the country’s leading don, with his pupils routinely picking up strings of firsts – strongly supported reform, imagining (correctly, as it turned out) that it would give an enormous boost to university education.

  The Commons expected to be consulted, but Gladstone and Trevelyan hoped the changes could be made by Order in Council. In May both the Westminster and North British Reviews praised the reform, which cheered Trevelyan considerably. The reform was debated and on 14 July Trevelyan wrote to Gladstone to thank him for ‘your great personal kindness in defending and doing justice to me.’20 Once the principle took hold in the Home Civil Service pressure was placed on the government to introduce it for entrants into the Indian; and for entrance for potential officers in the artillery and engineers to find young men ‘advanced in mathematics’.21

  Competitive examination got off to an uncertain start in 1855, being used to sift out a pre-selected group of candidates rather than opening the field. In 1857, when he wrote Little Dorrit, Dickens satirised the workings of the Civil Service in his account of the Circumlocution Office, staffed in its highest ranks by connections of a self-perpetuating oligarchy. By judicious oiling and greasing to the grandee Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle, using his wife’s salon in Harley Street, the fraudster Merdle obtains a position for his stepson. The youth has no merit or qualification whatever, and is in his way as much an impostor as his stepfather; and the purpose of the Circumlocution Office, to achieve nothing, to throw a spanner into all available works, but merely to provide a living for the meretricious, is further served by his appointment. ‘In a day or two it was announced to all the town, that Edmund Sparkler, Esquire, son-in-law of the eminent Mr Merdle of world-wide renown, was made one of the Lords of the Circumlocution Office; and proclamation was issued to all true believers, that this admirable appointment was to be hailed as a graceful and gracious mark of homage, rendered by the graceful and gracious Decimus, to that commercial interest which must ever in a great commercial country – and all the rest of it, with blast of trumpet.’22

  Inevitably, the logic of what Trollope sneeringly called ‘the grand modern scheme for competitive examinations’ was extended, and not just to those whom the heads of department wished to invite in to take the tests.23 But before it could be ‘destined to revivify, clarify, and render perfect the Civil Service of the country’, as Trollope also put it, many old prejudices had to be broken down.24 This took until 1870, when Gladstone, the godfather of Northcote-Trevelyan, finally decided to bring the system into kilter with modern demands.

  The engine for this second tranche of reform was Lowe. His first attempts to bring meritocracy into the public service were in 1853, when he joined the campaign for open competition in the Home Civil Service sparked off by the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. Gladstone, as Chancellor and the sponsoring minister, had had to abandon plans for such reforms because of overwhelming opposition in the Commons and the Lords in the late spring of 1854. A Civil Service Commission was established by an Order in Council in 1855 to approve new civ
il servants, but open competition was conducted in less than 30 per cent of vacancies between 1855 and 1868. Lowe had a deep-seated conviction that further reform was essential, but there was no support for it in the country, Parliament or in Gladstone’s Cabinet. He wrote to Gladstone on 10 November 1869 to say that ‘as I have so often tried in vain will you bring the question of the Civil Service before the Cabinet today. Something must be decided. We cannot keep matters in this discreditable state of abeyance. If the Cabinet will not entertain the idea of open competition might we not at any rate require a larger number of competitors for each vacancy, five or seven or ten?’25

  He forced the issue with Gladstone about his own department, arguing that the Treasury should recruit through open competition. Gladstone conceded that this strategy was ‘very likely . . . to be the right one’.26 He was worried about strong objections from Clarendon and Bright, and wished to avoid resignations. He proposed widespread consultation with other ministers, and the maximum of flexibility. In December 1869 the Cabinet agreed each department of State could decide for itself whether to use open competition: only the Home and Foreign Offices declined to do so. Any department that started to backslide was told by Lowe that the pension entitlements of civil servants not recruited by this method would be refused. This ended the old system of patronage except in the Foreign Office, which did not change until after the Great War: though appointments by nomination were made in the Education Department as late as 1911.

  Lowe drew up regulations for the examinations at three different levels of entry. In June 1871 Thomas Farrer, the Permanent Secretary at the Board of Trade, drew his colleagues’ attention to implications of the changes in the rules for the organisation of Civil Service departments, according to Lowe’s arrangements. He outlined the three classes of civil servant that Lowe proposed: