‘Not Quite a Gentleman’: The Desk Diaries of the Assistant Private Secretary (Appointments) to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1899–1915

English Historical Review

Volumn 117, Issue 472, 2002, Pages 622-633

  Kirk Greene, Anthony ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 46849109623     PISSN: 00138266     EISSN: 14774534     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ehr/117.472.622     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. For instance, Robert Heussler, Yesterday’s Rulers: the making of the British Colonial Service, London, 1963; David Potter, India’s Political Administrators, Oxford, 1986; Anthony Kirk-Greene, Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1858-1966, Basingstoke, 2000, Nile Gardiner, ‘Sentinels of Empire: the British Colonial Administrative Service, 1919–1954’, unpublished Yale Ph.D, 1998.
2. The System of Appointment in the Colonial Office and the Colonial Services, Cmd. 3554, 1930.
3. ‘The present system is open to criticism, first and foremost, as being, at any rate in theory, a system of patronage’ – Cmd. 3554, p. 20.
4. In his biography of his grandfather, the colonial governor Sir John Pope Hennesy (generally thought to be the prototype of Phineas Finn), James Pope Hennesy quotes The Times obituary comment that his career ‘says very little for the intelligence or discretion with which the Colonial Office exercises its patronage’. – Verandah, London, 1964, p. 22.
5. Heussler emphasizes that the Patronage Committee dealt with promotions and transfers, not with appointments. That was the responsibility of the Private Office staff of the Secretary of State for the Colonies. As one of the appointments secretaries involved somewhat ingenuously put it, ‘Our system might be called ‘‘patronage’’, but it was never abused’ – R. D. Furse, Aucuparius: Recollections of a Recruiting Officer, London, 1962, p. 19 (cf. his description of the system at p. 17).
6. Anne Thurston, Sources for Colonial Studies in the Public Record Office, vol. I, London, 1995, p. 348. See also Confidential Print No. 118 in CO 885/7.
7. Rhodes House Library, mss. Br. Emp. r.21, lacking the years 1900–01 and 1913.
8. Furse, Aucuparius, p. 16. The Eastern Cadets sat the same Civil Service Commission examination as the Home Civil Service, and did not take part in the Colonial Service selection system of interview and referees alone until 1933.
9. Robert Kubicek, The Administration of Imperialism: Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office, Durham, N.C., 1969, p. 59, n. 60. I am grateful to Dr Mandy Banton of the PRO for her guidance on these files.
10. Kubicek quotes a minute by Joseph Chamberlain declaring his ‘prejudice against applicants who fancy that a letter from a nobleman or MP who knew their aunt’s cousin three times removed, will naturally assist’ – ibid. p. 53. Furse recounts his own scathing reply to a MP who had asked Lewis Harcourt, the Secretary State, to give a certain young man a colonial appointment because ‘his mother was a charming woman, with whom I often used to dance’ – p. 20.
11. Kubicek, p. 55 In a CO memorandum of 1909, the ‘rule’ was confirmed that ‘recruitment decisions are taken in the Department without troubling the Secretary of State’, i.e. by the appointments staff in the Private Office – CO 323/12. No. 36808.
12. Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Empire and its Civil Service, Cambridge, 1938, p. 6.
13. Colonial Appointments, Misc. 96, 1921, p. 26.
14. Furse describes the later ones as ‘a small, green Letts diary’, p. 18.
15. For instance, The Colonial Office List for 1900 shows one private secretary to Chamberlain (Lord Ampthill) and four assistant private secretaries, one of whom, G. E. A. Grindle, was a CO civil servant.
16. Furse, pp. 9–10.
17. Sir Cosmo Parkinson, The Colonial Office from Within, London, 1947, p. 43.
18. In addition to the Furse autobiography quoted, Sir Edward Marsh wrote his memoirs, A Number of People, London, 1939. Both give excellent descriptions of the private office and its work. Kubicek, however, reckons Marsh’s account is misleading and his job ‘more humble’ than his memoirs suggest – p. 57, n. 52.
19. Furse, pp. 18–19.
20. The P/1 is described in detail in Heussler, pp. 17–18.
21. Colonial Office List, 1900, p. 328. para. 21.
22. Colonial Appointments, para. 25.
23. Furse, p. 228.
24. On the ‘amateur, happy-go-lucky way in which things [initial colonial appointments] were done’, Furse, the typical country squire, argued that ‘sportsmen take far more trouble, and are far more skilful in choosing their hunters and gun-dogs’ – p. 18.
25. C.S.R. (Colonial Service Recruitment), 1953, p. 8.
26. Marsh, pp. 123–4.
27. Furse, p. 17.
28. Anthony Kirk-Greene, On Crown Service: a History of HM Colonial and Overseas Civil Service, 1837-1997, London, 1999, p. 16.
29. Kubicek identifies a comparable comment from CO 429/19: ‘Mr Castor called today. He is certainly not a pure European, but his colour is not pronounced – he might almost be a well-tanned West Indian planter’ – p. 59, n. 60.
30. Heussler concludes of the decisions of the Appointments staff up to 1914 that ‘their values were the major determinants of administrative ethics, if not practices, in the Colonial Empire. Recruitment for the Colonial Service was intuitive and elitist’ – p. 25.
31. Marsh, in his account of the work as AS (Appts.), spells out the critical value of the initial impression, whether projected or received – p. 123.
32. On the hours the Private Office kept, see Furse’s comment that 11a.m. was ‘the hour at which the office came to life in those days’ – p. 22.
33. See Lugard, Annual Report for Northern Nigeria, 1904, para 121.
34. The Warren Fisher reforms are usefully summarized in Jeffries, ch. 5 and Furse, ch. 11.
35. Furse, p. 228.
36. Kirk-Greene, On Crown Service, p. 98. He went on to say ‘To be Head of one’s House, Captain of Boats or a Cricket Blue is in the long run a fleeting distinction, yet it may be at once a test and a presage of character’.
37. J. Millard, Never a Dull Moment, Swavesey, Cambs. 1996, p. 164.
38. Heussler, who once described Sir Ralph Furse (originator of the passage quoted below) as ‘largely an unreconstructed Victorian country gentleman’, concludes that ‘their methods in 1930 were just as intuitive as those of Chamberlain’s time’ – p. 72. A CO official who serviced the Colonial Service Appointments Board after World War II told me of a comment on the impression made by a bedraggled, unkempt and unshaven Scots youth: ‘He said he had just come down in third class on the overnight train from Glasgow. He looked it.’ Plus ça change?[,]
39. Colonial Office Appointments Handbook (Confidential), 1948, pp. 13–14.