High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  A comparatively small class of established clerks, with high salaries, fixed tenure, and pension selected by open competition of a high class.

  An intermediate class of established clerks with lower salaries, but with fixed tenure and pension, and also selected by open competition, though of a lower kind.

  A class of writers with 10d an hour (or 30s per week), selected by the Civil Service Commissioners, but without fixity of tenure, pension or possibility of reward, or prospect of any kind.

  Those who enter each of these classes will do so on their first entering the service; they will remain in the class to which they are to belong as long as they remain in the public service, and there is to be no possibility of promotion to a higher class or degradation to an inferior class.27

  Lowe stipulated that before anyone could compete in classes 1 and 2, he had to take a preliminary test to prove a sound basic level of education. The tests for the top grade included English composition, language and literature; English history (notably constitutional history); Greek and Latin language, literature and history; and the language, literature and history of France, Italy and Germany – though the modern languages carried only half the number of marks of the Classics. Mathematics and natural sciences were also tested, as were the moral sciences, jurisprudence and political economy. Those aiming for the second class were faced with far fewer demands, such as handwriting, indexing and docketing, spelling and arithmetic. Lowe limited his meritocracy to the university-educated: for only they would manage to wrestle with the subjects in the examination for the top grade, and therefore only they would have the chance to progress to the highest levels in the Civil Service. However, he ensured that only the most intelligent and best educated would go to the top. It was then up to society to engineer reforms elsewhere – notably in admissions to the universities from a wider range of schools and therefore backgrounds.

  Farrer’s point about the impossibility of promotion was well made, but Lowe would have shrugged it off. He understood that in the highest ranks of the public service intellectual ability was important: but so were savoir faire and social skills. Those with an education that would allow them to enter the middle grade would almost certainly not have the background to allow them to rub shoulders with the highest in the land with complete ease: so it would be out of the question to promote them. Lowe expressed his views on this to a select committee in 1873: ‘The education of public schools and colleges and such things, which gives a sort of freemasonry among men which is not very easy to describe but which everybody feels: I think that is extremely desirable: there are a number of persons in those offices who are brought into contact with the upper classes of this country and they should be of that class in order that they may hold their own on behalf of the Government.’ He added: ‘Supplementary Clerks might be found wanting in the very things to which I attach great value in the upper class; perhaps he might not pronounce his “h’s” or commit some similar solecism, which might be a most serious damage to a department in case of negotiation.’28

  Farrer said that while competition was sound, other aspects of the new rules ‘will make things much worse than they are’. He said the divisions between the grades were ‘arbitrary’. He argued that some who passed into the highest grade would ‘go back rather than forwards, and they are more likely to do so if they know they cannot be passed by those below them.’ As for those further down the chain, ‘there are sure to be some men of energy and ability, who have not been able to pass a first-rate examination at the age of twenty, but whose education, ability, and character develop as life goes on. These are, in my experience, some of the most valuable men in the service; but against such men the new scheme shuts every door of promotion and hope.’ He condemned the plan for its ‘aristocratic or rather plutocratic character. It selects men by a competitive examination, demanding an expensive education in high subjects in early years, which only the rich can afford.’29 He accepted that a more fluid promotion scheme would be open to abuse, but something more flexible had to be tried. This, however, was as far as Gladstone could go.

  For the ‘writer’ grade, boys between fourteen and eighteen would be tested on ‘Handwriting, orthography and arithmetic (elementary)’ and men over eighteen in those subjects too, together with ‘copying manuscript’ (fiendishly difficult given the illegibility of much contemporary handwriting) and an optional ‘Proportion, practice, and Vulgar and Decimal Fractions.’30 At the other end of the scale, Lowe’s reforms provided a new impetus to universities to improve their teaching to a level where their graduates would be able to enter this high-status and well-paid career. It broadened what they normally did, which was to prepare men to be schoolmasters, dons or clergymen: they became more outward-looking, more modern, and more relevant. They, like the schools he had so firmly supported, became the great engines of the meritocracy that would secure Britain’s prosperity and success into the twentieth century.

  II

  The Crimean War was fought between an alliance of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire against the Russians between 1854 and 1856. France and Russia had fallen out over which of them had the divine right to protect Christians in the Ottoman Empire, which was in steady decline. Britain, at that stage in a strong imperialistic mindset, saw opportunities to secure influence in the Middle East. Its Army was, however, appallingly led, quite often by stubborn and stupid old men who had bought their commands. As a result, some of the fighting had been a debacle, as depicted by Tennyson in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: his immortal line ‘someone had blundered’ serves as a useful motto for the entire war. Support was so poorly organised that in the early months, even after Florence Nightingale took control of the medical treatment there, more men died of disease than of wounds. There were 21,097 British dead altogether: 2,755 were killed in action, 2,019 died of wounds and 16,323 died of disease. The war was, as has been mentioned, one of the main causes of reform of the Civil Service. It would also become a main cause of reform of the Army, whose inefficiency and mismanagement it had exposed.

  As in the Civil Service, change would not come quickly. Various inquiries after the debacle in the Crimea recommended reforms, but by 1868, a dozen years after the last shot had been fired, none of any depth had been completed. This was thanks to the entrenched resistance of the officer class, whose vested interests were an immoveable obstacle. Army pay was reasonably good, but money was made by selling promotions. When a man wished to be promoted, he bought a place in the next rank up from an officer who was either retiring or moving up himself. When an officer finally retired he could sell his place and, depending upon his seniority, expect to be set up nicely in old age with the proceeds. The smartness of the regiment also affected the price: Lord Cardigan, a commander in the Crimea, bought the colonelcy of the 11th Hussars for £40,000, a vast fortune at the time. Those who retired after twenty-five years did so on half pay; after thirty years, full pay.

  A Royal Commission of 1857 had decreed the practice of selling commissions ‘repugnant to the public sentiment of the present day, and equally inconsistent with the honour of the military profession’.31 It had continued that the system gave ‘an undue pre-eminence to wealth, discouraging exertion, and depressing merit.’ Also, since a man’s commission died with him, soldiers went into battle knowing that apart from death they often had to fear the loss of a sizeable asset for their families. In the market for commissions, honour and disinterest were sacrificed to a commercial consideration. Cardwell also echoed the report’s belief that some positions in the Army were so important, with the lives of countless men depending on the exercise of sound judgement by a senior officer, that they should be filled only on merit, not on the basis of who could afford them. Palmerston, in 1860, had accepted the burden of these criticisms; but eleven years later nothing had been done, usually because of the cost.

  Not the least resistant to change was His Royal Highness Prince George, the Duke of Cambridge, a cousin of the Queen and Command
er-in-Chief since 1856. Merit had not really entered into the Duke’s military career. A colonel at eighteen, he was a major general by twenty-six. He had commanded a division in the Crimea, though poor health cut short his campaign there. In 1862 he became a field marshal. The Duke regarded the officer class as socially exclusive and intended it to stay that way. Theoretical questions of warfare or organisation were of no interest to him, and he gave no encouragement to anyone else to pursue them. The idea of a meritocracy in the Army that might improve it was anathematical to him. However, he had been an early advocate of the breech-loading carbine in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and instituted annual manoeuvres to keep the Army on its toes. He supported the creation of the Staff College and the Royal Military School of Music, and he had, before it was limited by law, restricted flogging to habitual offenders.

  Gladstone appointed Edward Cardwell to the War Office, and he set about reform. The penal character of the service (with flogging and other brutal punishments) had been alleviated by the outgoing government, whose Mutiny Act abolished flogging except in military prisons after a court martial, putting the punishment on a par with that awarded in civilian courts for violent offences. There had been resistance in the service to this – the Duke of Wellington had been a committed flogger and, although dead since 1852, his model was one adhered to by the Duke of Cambridge and the senior cadre in the service. Cardwell’s main target was something even more entrenched: the purchase of commissions. He wanted to ensure that advancement in the Army was by ability and not birth, as was happening in the Civil Service. He did not want this just for its own, egalitarian sake: but because all other structural reform of the service flowed from the establishment of a meritocracy within it.

  George Otto Trevelyan, then a young Liberal MP, had written a pamphlet on the subject, which he had also sent to Gladstone in July 1868, advocating the abolition of purchase ‘on the ground of public morality quite as much as on that of national defence.’32 He and Florence Nightingale had corresponded about the inadequacies of the Army. In November 1868 he said he was glad she saw ‘the indefensible character of the present army system and the necessity of modifying it, whatever the difficulties may be.’33 She had complained to him of how ‘an enormous amount of confusion, complication and means of jobbing exists in the present system’ and how ‘this is traceable upwards to the purchase system.’ However, she worried whether ‘our army can exist without purchase’. Trevelyan said ‘the practical effect of purchase is to confine the Army to aristocrats, or persons who wish to take rank as such, and the residuum and waifs and strays of society. The middle class and the real working class have at present no place in the army, which offers them neither remunerative wages nor an open career.’ He continued, on the subject of the costs of messing, that ‘the only way to reduce regimental expenses of all kinds is to increase the proportion of officers who enter the army as a profession and live by it, which can only be done by the abolition of purchase.’

  Nightingale was concerned about the social consequences: and he reassured her that ‘Earls would not have to meet labourers’ sons as fellow-officers, if by labourers’ sons [we mean] persons of inferior education and coarse vulgar manners, who are unfit for the society of gentlemen.’ There would, though, be a rule that ‘a fixed proportion of the vacant commissions in each regiment should be given to non-commissioned officers provided candidates are forthcoming who are in every way qualified to bear Her Majesty’s Commission. Of this the officers themselves would be the judges, as they are in the highly aristocratic Austrian and Prussian armies where the majority of officers are promoted from the ranks.’

  Trevelyan, however, was sanguine about fluidity in society. ‘I cannot admit that the upper classes in this country shew any indisposition to associate freely with the lower classes as such. On the contrary, it is the glory and strength of our aristocracy that they are constantly undergoing a process of renovation from below, and that they mix without reserve in Parliament, in private society, in the Church, the Law, the English and Indian Civil Services, in associations for public and private objects of every sort, with persons of inferior rank. There is no such thing as a hard and fast line between our aristocracy and the rest of the community.’34 He added: ‘In spite of the exclusive system upon which our army is founded, the generous open-hearted manners of English gentlemen prevail there as everywhere else, and nothing can be more remarkable than the welcome uniformly given to deserving non-commissioned officers who are promoted to commissions. This is so even now when the persons promoted are in large proportion of inferior education and manners.’ Nightingale still feared that abolition of purchase would imperil the aristocracy, but Trevelyan informed her that ‘if there were no such thing as an army the aristocratic principle would still be strong in English society. Real equality is impossible in human affairs, and least of all in this country of increasing personal activity and competition.’

  At Cabinet level, the main consideration was what to do about the Duke of Cambridge: and if he could not be removed, how best he could be circumvented. Gladstone knew that the Duke ‘is appointed not for any limited period but during HM’s pleasure’.35 There was always a difficult relationship between him and the Secretary of State. Cardwell submitted to Gladstone in February 1870 that if Army discipline were thought to be unsatisfactory, and ‘if there were anything in the conduct of the Commander in Chief, which required the interference of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of State has not only the right, but it is his bounden duty to interfere’.36 He concluded: ‘It will be desirable that you should submit your views upon the subject to the Queen.’

  The Duke was touchy. When Trevelyan, in a speech in Hawick early in 1869, said that ‘I do maintain that it is not right that a Royal Duke should be placed permanently in such a situation as that of Commander-in-Chief’, the Duke and the Queen were outraged.37 Trevelyan was a Civil Lord of the Admiralty, appointed just a few weeks earlier. Gladstone felt constrained to write to Sir Charles Trevelyan, his father, on what he called this ‘embarrassing and grave matter’ to try and engineer the required grovelling apology.38 Cardwell then spent the best part of a fortnight hosing down the Duke and the Queen while the right level of contrition was obtained from young George. His father helped him: as he told Gladstone, with mandarin ambiguity, ‘no one can feel more strongly than my son the mistake he made in alluding to His Royal Highness’.39

  The miscreant himself wrote to Gladstone on 8 January partly blaming the press. The comments were ‘copied into the Pall Mall Gazette: a form in which those remarks appear even more indiscreet than they in fact were. I enclose a full report: but even in this shape I feel – and felt the moment the words had been spoken – that they were unwise in the highest degree.’40 However, his main wrath was reserved for ‘journalists’, since ‘the idea of anyone except the Commander-in-Chief being alluded to never seems accordingly to have occurred to them.’ However, resuming contrition, he added: ‘I have received a lesson I shall never forget,’ and offered his resignation. ‘Whatever course you consider it best to adopt I shall readily acquiesce in . . . it is for you to judge in what capacity I can do it [the government] the best service and the least damage.’

  Gladstone reassured him. He had had ‘one of those lapses of tongue to which as I well know we are all liable.’41 He added that trying to explain what he had meant would only compound his fault. It would be best simply to apologise unreservedly, ‘freely, I mean unsparingly, in a letter to me.’ He would then have the letter sent on to Osborne. Trevelyan did just that, apologising again to Gladstone for his ‘exultation’ in the matter of Army reform that had caused this excess of zeal.42 He was helped by the fact that Gladstone agreed with every word he had said. That was the Queen placated: the Duke was another matter, and Trevelyan and Cardwell had to discuss how to deal with him: Cardwell would, as the senior minister, present Trevelyan’s contrition on his behalf.

  Cardwell raised the question of Army reform in the spring
of 1870. It became far more pressing with the instability of the near Continent, caused by France’s declaration of war on Prussia on 19 July that year. On 1 August Gladstone gave Disraeli notice that, as a result of the emergency, he would ask Parliament to approve an extra £2 million for the two Armed Forces, and the recruitment of another 20,000 men for the Army. It was feared Britain might, as would happen in 1914, have to respond to an attack on the neutrality of Belgium, of which it was guarantor. It was also felt that a larger military establishment, with greater demands made on it, could not exist side by side with so antiquated a system as that of purchase regulating commissions and promotions. A Royal Commission that year found that there had been a ‘habitual violation of the law by officers of all ranks under that of major-general, supported by long-established custom and unchecked by any authority’ in the matter of regulating the prices of commissions.43

  Gladstone and Cardwell started to discuss details of the abolition of purchase in the autumn. For Gladstone, abolition was necessary not merely to raise the standard of the officer class, but also to remoralise a class that had become indolent and was contributing insufficiently to society. He wrote a lengthy memorandum about this on 13 October 1870, an interesting example of how his mind worked. If one part of the Army’s organisation were to be reformed then, he felt, the whole institution should be reformed in a way that was ‘complete and definitive’.44 It was not just the home Army, but the Indian and Colonial Armies and the militia too that required modernisation. Given the crushing success Prussia was having, that state’s army was taken very much as the model for what Gladstone desired, especially in the arrangements for officering the Army.