The Permanent Under-Secretary of State: A Brief History of the Office and its Holders

History Notes Issue 15 [January 2002]

The Permanent Under-secretary of State: A Brief History of the Office and its Holders

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Foreign & Commonwealth Office

History Notes

HE PERMAN UNDERSEC YO S

~

A Brief History of the Office and its Holder.

路 torians,

o.15

THE PERMANENT UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE A brief history

of the qffice and its holders

FCO Historians Records and Historical Departinent April2002 I BN 0 903359 85 5

Cover: Photographs of the Permanent Under-Secretary )s Office today.

Foreword This history, now revis d and reissued as a History Note, was initially prepared to mark the r tirement of Sir John K rr as P rmanent Und rSecr tary of State for Foreign and Commonw alth Affairs. A 1 ath rbound copy was present d to Sir John by th S cretary of Stat on 7 January 2002. Although this was n ver intend d to be more than a v ry brief survey of the office of PUS, a number of am ndments hav b n made to the original text, and th last two chapt rs hav b n expanded in order to take account of th work of some of ir John Kerr's more recent pred c ssors. W are grat ful to all thos who hav offered advice on mat rial for inclusion

Christopher Baxter Keith Hamilton

11

CONTENTS •

Foreword

1

Prelude to Permanence

1

Clerks, Constructs and Diplomacy, 1827-93

3

The Last Super Clerk, 1894-1906

13

The New Bureaucracy, 1906-20

18

The New Diplomacy, 1920-46

23

Fusion and Cold War, 1946-62

32

Reports, Reform and Retrenchment, 1962-82

37

The Modern PUS

44

~uotations

51

Chronology of Pennanent Under-Secretaries

55

Bibliography

56

111

IV

LIST OF PLATES

Extract from Treasury minute, 1831

1

Edmund Hammond

5

Foreign Office staff (c.1861-66)

6

Lord T enterden

8

British delegates to the Congress of Berlin

9

Philip Currie

11

Lamps without Lamps: Thomas Sanderson

14

Thomas Sanderson

16

Charles Hardinge

19

Arthur Nicolson

20

The Diplomatic Apprentice: Eyre Crowe

23

Eyre Crowe

24

William Tyrrell

26

v

Vl

The For ign Office in th 1930

27

Robert Vansittart

28

Al xander Cadogan

30

William trang with Fi ld Mar hal Montgomery

33

Ivon Kirkpatri k

35

Paul Gore-B th with Paul S holefield: 'The fir t Fight at th Falls.'

38

D ni Gr nhill

4

Micha 1 P lli r

42

Ant ny A land

44

Patri k Wright

45

David

46

illm r

John C 1 Th P rm n nt

47 nd r-

r tary' offic today

JhnKrr

48 49

vii

Vlll

Prelude to Permanence he post of Permanent Under-Secretary of State (PUS) in the Foreign Office was not, in the first instance, the creation of any administrative ordinance. Like much else in British public life it evolved. When, on his appointment as Secretary of State in March 1782, Charles James Fox assumed sole ministerial responsibility for foreign affairs, he had a staff composed of two Under-Secretaries, a Chief Clerk, seven

Extract from Treasury minute of 15 April 1831, distinguishing between political appointees and permanent Under Secretaries '.

Junior and Senior Clerks, two chamber keepers and their deputy and the 'necessary woman'. The Under-Secretaries drafted despatches, superintended foreign correspondence and divided up the other work of 'Mr Fox's Office' amongst the clerks. Initially, both were political appointees, but from 1795 onwards it became cu tomary for only one Under-Secretary to be replaced with a change of ministry. As a result, the office of Permanent Under-Secretary emerged, although for many years it was usual for holders of it to regard themselve simply

1

a senior Under-Secretaries. John Backhouse who prior to hi appointment a Under-Secretary in April 1827, had been associated politically with George Canning and had served as his private secretary both before and during hi term a Foreign Secretary (1822-27) remained in po t after the withdrawal of the Canningites from the Duke of Wellington's Government in 1828. Able and industrious he came to see his position as 'permanent' and he en ured that his successors would have virtually exclusive responsibility for the manag ment of Office business.

Formal recognition was given to Backhouse' po ition a well a to that of hi counterparts in the Home Office and the War and Colonial Offic

in a Trea ury

minute of 15 April 1831. Although this was primarily concerned with propo al for reducing the salaries of the three principal Secretaries of tate

it dr w a cl ar

distinction between these political appointment and the 'perman nt Und r Secretaries' who remained in office 'during different chang

of Admini tration

and who thus [made] a profes ion of Official life'. And wh n in March 1 42 Backhouse retired, George Lenox-Conyngham the then

hi f l rk d cribed hi

successor Henry Unwin Addington, as 'Permanent Und r-

cr tary f tat . A

salary differential was meanwhile establi hed between the two U nd rand the second or junior Under-Secretary became ver mor cl

cr t ri

ly id ntifi d

with the Secretary of State and wa expected to part office when he did. the nineteenth century, when a succe ion of Foreign Governments found it necessary to have an Under-

cr tari

at r in

wer p

cr tary in th

u

r of

Commons, and the title of Parliamentary Under- ecretary already appli d in th Treasury minute of 1831, pa sed into popular u age.

2

Clerks, Constructs and Diplo~acy, 1827-93 uring the early- and mid-Victorian eras the PUS's role was in part fashioned by the personalities and ambitions of holders of the office. But it also grew in response to new demands on the time and energy of Secretaries of State, political developments abroad, advances in communications technology, the emergence of a career civil service and parliamentary pressure for more efficient and more rational administrative structures. Backhouse, though dogged by ill-health and frequently forced to take long periods of leave, established the principle that, as the senior official, it was the PUS's duty to preserve Foreign Office traditions, whether these related to uniformity of rule and practice or the maintenance of regulations. He also claimed ascendancy in matters affecting the establishment, including the handling of clerks' petitions for extra payment for extraordinary duties. Hi functions were, however, chiefly administrative. Thus, while he appears to have been the first Under-Secretary to issue letters written on his own initiative, but o tensibly under the direction of the Foreign Secretary, where questions of policy were concerned neither he nor Addington were much more than intermediaries. Backhouse occasionally offered an opinion to Lord Palmerston, who was Foreign Secretary during 1830-34, 1835-41 and 1846-51. He conferred with Palmerston on the American boundary problem in 1835 and again on events in Constantinople in 1836. Nevertheless, Palmerston generally preferred to keep his own counsel and he was cautious in devolving work to Under-Secretaries. 'Lord Palmerston', noted Sir George Shee his political Under-Secretary during 1830-34, 'never consults an Under Secretary. He merely sends out questions to be answered or papers to be copied when he is here in the evenings.'

Palmerston was even less inclined to seek advice from Addington. The latter, whose diplomatic career Palmerston had terminated in 1833 on the grounds that he was too stupid and too ill-willed, owed his appointment to the patronage of Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary in Sir Robert Peel's second administration (1841-46). Nicknamed 'Pumpy', he seems to have been generally disliked within

3

the Office. He, nevertheless, had Palmerston's support in hi quarrel with the possibly still more detested Chief Clerk. The two official had clashed openly in

1846 over Lenox-Conyngham's efforts to enforce Aberdeen' ban on rooking in the Office. After returning to the Office one evening to find it in a di gu ting condition from the smell of Tobacco', Lenox-Conyngham proposed to summon each of the clerks in order to identify the delinquent for reprimand. But Addington considered this too severe a course, and that while it wa 'a very good thing sometimes to take the bull by the horns', it was 'generally wiser to get out of his way'.

When [he continued] an abuse has become an use by prescription, it i not quite fair, nor is it wise, to up with the club and knock it down.

Smoking at [the] F.O. is in this category; and we must deal gently with those who have had their long allowed enjoyment suddenly cut off and who shew some temper at the prohibition.

Two years later, when Lenox-Conyngham declined to implement m a ure Addington had ordered for the defence of the Office again t po ibl violence, Addington took this as a challenge to hi seniority. Th

harti t

hi

insisted that such specific actions required prior instruction from the ecr tary of State. But Palmerston backed Addington, and the net r ult of the di put wa a reaffirmation of the PUS's absolute authority over

njor per onn l.

Addington and his colleagues were also pre ented with mor

pportuniti

for

influencing policy after Palmerston's resignation in D c mb r 1 51. The thr relatively inexperienced Secretarie of State who followed in rapid ucc Lord Granville, Lord Malmesbury and Lord John Ru ell w r f: r m, r inclin d than their illustrious predecessor to look to their official for advic . M anwhil increased business, particularly in the admini tration of con ular w rk plac d n w demands on staff. Addington's re i tance to Trea ury pr personnel policy and recruitment wa

ur for chang

1n

however to en ure that th cl rk in th

Office were to continue to spend much of their tim carrying ut uch

ntially

menial duties a the copying docketing and filing of d patch . In hi

nd av ur

to promote comprehensive reform of the Civil Servic

rev lyan the

Secretary to the Trea ury, sought to root out dead wood wh r v r it c uld b found. But Addington and his succes or

ucc

fully pp

d p n c mpetitiv

entry to the Office and any mea ure which might di tingui h b tw

4

n taff

engaged in intellectual and mechanical tasks. They insisted that the work of the Foreign Office was different from that of other Government Departments, that it was of a more confidential nature, and that it was therefore only possible to employ clerks who were absolutely trustworthy. They would have to be gentlemen either known to the Secretary of State, or recommended to him, and as such they must be paid a salary commensurate with their social status. It was an attitude of mind which profoundly irritated those pressing for greater economy in Government. It also denied the Office the chance to recruit copying clerks, and condemned many of the bright, and not-so-bright, young men who joined it during the next half century to years of employment in work which was very often neither satisfying nor intellectually challenging.

Edmund Hammond, who succeeded Addington as PUS in April 1854, was equally opposed to Treasury proposals to bring the Foreign Office into line with the rest of the Civil Service. The son of a career diplomat, a Fellow of University College, Oxford, and the choice of the Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon, for PUS, he was, unlike either Backhouse or Addington, drawn from the ranks of the Foreign Office clerks. However, he too had firm ideas on how the Office should be staffed.

'There is', he contended 'no department that at all resembles it [the Foreign Office] in the character of the work or in the manner in which it must be done.' The absence of routine work in the

Office, the irregular hours that clerks frequently

l

had to work, and the need for speed and accuracy

)

y

in the despatch of business, meant that much depended on the maintenance of a certain esprit

Edmund Hammond

de corp to which Hammond felt the 'pariah'

class could not contribute. A vigorous administrator he believed that the primary requirement of a Foreign Office clerk was that he should write 'a good bold hand forming each letter distinctly'; and he resisted the introduction of electric telegraphy into the Office, complaining that 'nothing is sufficiently explained by it. It tempts hasty decision. It is an unsatisfactory record for it gives no reason.'

5

Dreame~

of the Sixtie

Foreign Office staff (c. 1861-66). This photograph was taken in Whitehall Garden during the period when the present Main Building wa under con truction. It includes three future Permanent Under-Secretarie : sixth from left (seated) i Charle Abbott (Lord Tenterden); twelfth from left (leaning on rail) i Philip Currie; and eated on the ground immediately below him is Thomas Sanderson.

But while Hammond with the aid of Clarendon and the Prim Mini ter ultimately triumphed over Treasury reformers, the bu ine (1854-56), subsequent war in

gen r ted by th

rimean War

urope and pe dier communication

ssistant Under-

rc d

fie g in d

change upon the Office. he political (geographic) divi ion of th in importance; an

~

cretary wa appoint d and m re clerk w r

recruited, so that by 1 58 the Office had an

t bli hm nt

f

rty-thrce,

approximately the arne as it till had in 1 02 路 and th Parliam nt ry

n

r-

Secretary became so preoccupied with the growing int r t of MP in for ign affairs that Hammond accumulated even gr ater re p n ibiliti

within th

By the end of the decade he wa supervi ing four out o fiv of th political divi ions.

Hammond s period as PUS also coincided with the t mporary rcl cation o th Office in Whitehall Gardens whil t th pre nt building in Downing 6

being constructed during 1861-68. Little escaped his attention, though it was the Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell, who was responsible for reprimanding the Office Keeper and Assistant Doorkeeper, who during supper on the night of 6 April 1862 transformed one of the public rooms of the Office 'into a scene of riot and debauchery'. Of more immediate concern to Hammond was the appearance of rooms, corridors and staircases of the new building, whose care was entrusted to Mary Langcake, the Office Housekeeper. A formidable lady, Mrs Langcake had already quarrelled with the Chief Clerk over the extent of her responsibilities, warning him on one occasion 'that she would rather go and keep a lodging house' than take on extra work in the Office. But Hammond was far from satisfied with her conduct. In a minute of 10 March 1871 he protested that he had just heard that the 'generally filthy state of the Office attracted attention from guests at Lord Granville's party on the

4th

instant, and that great complaints were made of the

damage sustained by ladies' dresses in consequence'. There was, Hammond felt, no excuse for this state of affairs. 'The duty of the housemaids and charwomen in the Office', he insisted, ' ... is little more than can be done by broom and duster, and soap and water; and it is the housekeeper's duty to see that this work is properly done; and more particularly when there is a party in the Office, the Housekeeper, as such a servant in a private family would do, should be throughout the day looking to the state of the rooms.' And much to the evident irritation of the delinquent Housekeeper, he insisted that she henceforth go everyday before noon through all the passages and rooms, and satisfy herself that the maids had done their work properly.

The nineteen years during which Hammond was PUS witnessed both a clear acceptance of his authority in the Office, and the beginnings of the PUS's modem advisory function. Indeed, to the consternation of some social observers, he was on retirement at the age of seventy-two, one of the first Victorian bureaucrats to be rewarded with a peerage. But Hammond had also tended to concentrate allimportant work in the Foreign Office in his own hands, and this left other officials with little opportunity to demonstrate and develop their talents. 'I think', complained one disgruntled colleague, 'that when Mr Hammond retires we shall find that with many very competent men in the Office there will not be one ready to take his place.' This may help in part to explain the appointment, in October 7

1873 of the thirty-eight year old Lord Tenterden as his successor. A nephew of

the second Baron Tenterden he had, as Charles Stuart Aubrey Abbott joined the Foreign Office as a clerk in 1854. His career might have been unremarkable had it not been for the untimely death of one Assistant Under-Secretary in 1869 and the rapid translation of another to the Embassy in Berlin. In consequence Tenterden became Assistant in the Far East and American division and was able to win recognition for himself as secretary to Lord de Grey s mission to Wa hington during the Alabama arbitration proceedings. Two years later he was appointed A si tant Under-Secretary over the heads of all the other Senior Clerks.

Tenterden appears to have adopted much the arne approach to the running of the Office as did Hammond. He wa however, soon to discover a probl m that wa to beset many of his succes ors notably that there wa 'routine work in th Offic and that it ob tructed trategic thinking. It ha

he noted on 17 January

'occurred to m facilitate bu in

76

that it would much and ave orne tim and

troubl to th Head of D partm nt if w re to

t a ide a tim

during th

ay

which I could d ot to int rvi w and th di cu ion with the important

pt. of

matt r

with ut

b ing

int rrupted by routin work. H th r for decid d to

t ap rt two hour

in th

aft moon leaving th r mainin tim

r

1gntng and g ing through m r d tail work'.

Lord Tenterden

In other r

p ct

r th r

con rvative figur , h managed to displea e the

njamin Di raeli.

onservative Prim

latter s di astrous ceptici m about Ottoman trociti attributed to the failure of th Foreign

ffice to

tn

h

ulgaria in 1 7 wa

nd him the r 1 vant d patch

and telegram . And Tenterden s ub qu nt critici m of th p r on 1dipl macy of

the Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury

was denounced by Disraeli as

'Tenterdenism-a dusty affair not suited to the time and things we have to grapple with.'

The

ear Eastern crisis underscored the Office s need for immediate and reliable

legal advice. Until the mid-1870s it had relied for legal advice upon the Queen s Advocate and the Law Officers of the Crown. But in 1876 a Parliamentary Committee recommended the appointment of a Legal Assistant Under-Secretary, and Sir Julian Pauncefote was selected for the po t. A former Attorney-General for Hong Kong and Chief Ju tice of the Leeward I lands Pauncefote had only recently been appointed to a similar po ition within the Colonial Office. Hardly however, had he taken up his new job in the Foreign Office before he found that in addition to hi legal work, he wa e pected to assume re pon ibility for superintending a good deal ofth Department political work. Tenterden declined to support hi plea for th upgrading of hi post to a full Under-S cretary hip. v rthele

wh n after a long illne

T nterden died in Sept mber 1

2

olvin the a tern Que tion Briti h delegate to the ongre of Berlin of 1 7 . From left to right: Arthur Jam Balfour; Franci Bertie; Philip Currie, future PU but at the time Private ecretary to Lord ali bury; Eric Barrington; Le Marchant Had ley Go elin; and Charle Hopwood.

9

Pauncefote was, despite the objections of those who believed a career official should have been appointed chosen as his successor.

The business of the Office meanwhile continued to expand and the complex geographical, legal and political issues raised by the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-85 placed severe strains on its limited resource . True the official six-hour working day of 12 noon to 6 p.m. might seem short by modern standards. Indeed, Pauncefote complained vigorously to the Chief Clerk on 8 January 1886 when, after having arrived 'early' at 11.45 a.m. , he found himself unable to summon an Office Keeper. But Clerks were not usually released from their attendance until all the day's work was complete which often meant their working until 7 or 8 p.m., those in charge of divisions were required to do a good deal of work at home and, unlike other Whitehall Department there was no halfday holiday on Saturdays. Granville, in any event, heaped ful orne prai e upon the Office when he resigned as Foreign Secretary in June 1

5. 'I doubt' he wrote to

Pauncefote, 'whether the Department was ever o well-manned as at pre ent & it is to that fact that I ascribe that with no increase of number , they hav been o able to deal so efficiently with an increa e of work. It i certainly th b t type of the be t civil service in the World.'

Prior to Tenterden's death the old political divi ions of th

Offic

were

reorganised into larger departments. The French and German divi ion thu became the Franco-German, or Western, Department, and th Ottoman Empire and its neighbours became the responsibility of the Ea tern Department.

Pauncefote 's decision to continue providing the Office with legal advice required a greater devolution of work to the two As istant UnderSir Philip Currie, eventually replaced him when in 1889

cretarie . On of th ali bury who wanted to

honour the Americans without demoting an Amba sador, appointed Paunc fot British Minister in Washington. Four year later, when th Briti h Legation in Washington was raised to an Embassy Pauncefote became Britain'

fir t

Ambassador to the United State . He is also remember d by diplomatic hi torian a the head of the British delegation to the fir t Hague Peace

onference of 1

9

at which he played a leading role in ecuring agreement to the e tabli hm nt of a

10

permanent court of international arbitration, and as the co-signatory of the HayPauncefote Treaty of 1901 which sought to regulate rights of passage through the Panama Canal. A lawyer who stumbled into the rough and tumble of diplomacy, Pauncefote, made no great changes in the administration of the Office, but he was a conciliatory force during a troubled and stressful period in Anglo-American relations.

Currie was an official much more in the mould of Tenterden. He had entered the Foreign Office in 1854 and served as Precis Writer to Lord Clarendon during 1857-58. But he was also endowed with a private fortune and was socially wellconnected. His cousin was the Earl of Kimberley (Lord Wodehouse), to whose special mission to St Petersburg in 1856 he was attached, and he was on close terms

with

Salisbury whom

on

Tenterden' s

recommendation

he

accompanied to the Constantinople Conference in 1876, and whose Private ecretary he subsequently became. Mary, hi wife was the novelist Violet Fane.

His contribution to the running of the Office

was

nonetheless

hardly

impre sive, and Currie was better

Philip urrie

remembered for the tricks performed by hi pet dog 'Pam' than for any administrative initiative. He adopted a distinctly negative attitude toward the Royal Commission on the Civil Service which began it

enquiry into th

oreign Office in 1 90

and cho e to ignore it

r comm ndation that econd di i ion (copying) clerk handling non-p litical corr pond nee.

hould be employed for

e likewi e allowed the implementation

of the oyal ommi ion' other main recommendation for the amalgamation of the

oreign Office with th Diplomatic

ervice to become bogged down in

t cbnicalities. Yet, the la t year of Currie' career would seem to suggest that tho e rai ed in the Victorian or ign Office were not th best uited for service abroad.

urrie' rigid manneri ms did not endear him to foreign courts.

11

either in

Constantinople, where he was appointed Ambassador in December 1893, nor in Rome to which he was translated in 1898, did he succeed in advancing British influence or interests.

12

The Last Super-Clerk, 1894-1906 ~....................

urrie owed his elevation to his intimacy with Lord Salisbury. Sir Thomas Sanderson, his successor as PUS, owed his to his good sense, sharp intellect, and devotion to duty. The second son of the Conservative MP for Colchester, at sixteen years of age Sanderson

had been forced by his father's bankruptcy to quit Eton in order to find some form of remuneration. Two years later, in 1859, he sat the recently instituted Foreign Office competitive examination and secured himself a junior clerkship. He remained in the Office for the next forty-seven years, his only service abroad being with Lord Wodehouse's mission to King Christian IX of Denmark in 186364, and at Geneva during the Alabama arbitration in 1871. His qualities were amply recognised in a despatch from Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, the British arbitrator, to Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary. 'His perfect mastery of the subject of the Alabama claims', Cockburn observed, 'extending even to the minute details路 his general information, his great intelligence, his indefatigable industry, his readiness, only excelled by his ability, to afford assistance, have excited my warmest admiration and deserve my sincerest acknowledgements.'

Granville, to whom he was Private Secretary, during 1880-85, was also impressed by his talents. Indeed, in 1882 he considered Sanderson a suitable successor to Tenterden as PUS, but dared not press his case for fear of the disruption that was likely to be caused by passing Sanderson over the heads of so many of his more senior colleagues.

'Lamps' or 'Giglamps', as Sanderson was known to friends and colleagues because of the heavy spectacles he usually wore, was a frequent guest at Granville's home in Carlton House Terrace. There he joined younger members of the household in games of drawing room cricket. He also wrote short stories for children and played the flute. His playful gestures were not, however, invariably appreciated. Once, whilst staying at Walmer Castle, he was party to some charades in which he was required to impersonate an acrobat and much alarmed Lady Granville by appearing in his under-shirt and drawers. The poor woman could not be consoled with assurances that Sanderson's underclothes were the nearest approach to a professional acrobat's attire that could be attained. Others 13

by contrast

were irritated by bureaucratic

Sanderson s

strictures. His eye for detail and refusal

to

abide

the

lea t

inaccuracy in terminology or drafting meant that many clerks lived in terror of him, and in later year he was regarded by juniors as a martinet of the old order . It is however quite impos ible to read the memorandum which he wrote as

s istant Und r-S cretary

in October 1 91, 'Ob ervation on the U

and Abu e of Red ape for

th Junior in the and

Lamp without Lamp

American

D partm nt

without recogni ing

Thomas ander on, seated on the left, explaining the u e and abu e of red tape to younger colleague .

capacity

to

bring

intellig nc

subj cts. And his pap r' penultimate admonition would

t

he

ander n wit dri

an t

of

m t b lie th v rdict

of orne of hi contemporarie that he wa out to tifl indi i u 1 initi tiv I hould [he wrote] be glad t think that I could at any m mcnt r fi r t any member of the hinese partment for the respective wh reab ut of Honan and Hunan or a certain from a Juni r lh We tern Department what are the i of the ari u island in th am an Archipelago and wheth r the inhabit nt d , r d n t wear tr u r .

But I am afraid that to many of u amoa only r pr nt c pyin and sections of blue print. hi I think i a mi ~ rtun 路 i turn ur daily bread into dry bon and after a tim th t 1 p n nt r int th ul, and the individual become a m re fficial (who i a very di mal creature), or lo e all vigour, and inks i to h p 1 m di crity.

ander on had however a rather mor cautiou vt w o orne of hi

succe or .

January 1 94 wa followed flnal term a

ore1gn

i

appointrn nt a

P rm n nt

ighteen month lat r by

cretary. ali bury like and r p ct

14

th n h cr t ry in r tum

nd r n but

r hi

pt

the overall making of policy very much to himself and treated even his closest officials as though they were instruments rather than advisers. Indeed, Salisbury could sometimes be more open in expressing his views to foreign Ambassadors than to either colleagues or staff. Pressure of business during the late 1890s, a time of crisis and conflict in Africa and Asia, nevertheless, left senior officials with more opportunities for debating policy, and Salisbury was content to leave them to deal with matters of detail. When in April 1898 Salisbury fell ill and his nephew, Arthur James Balfour acted as Foreign Secretary, it was Sanderson who was summoned every morning to assist him with the matters of the day. 'I am now a sort of standing dish at Arthur Balfour's breakfast', noted Sanderson.

'When his attention is divided, as it was this morning, between me and a fresh herring there are alternatively moments of distraction while he is concentrating on the herring and moments of danger when he is concentrating on foreign affairs.'

Later that year, at the height of the Fashoda Crisis, Sanderson also served as a convenient negotiating buffer between Salisbury and the French Ambassador in London. Sanderson had nonetheless to reckon with constant criticism from colleagues who were anxious to have more say in the direction of policy. Much of this was the result of personal and bureaucratic rivalries. Francis Bertie, who had joined the Office only four years after Sanderson and who doubtless envied him his position, was in the words of one new entrant to the Diplomatic Service 'always turning Sander on into ridicule in front of us'. He also condemned Sanderson for his 'red tapeism', and reluctance to countenance change.

'Sander on', noted Cecil Spring-Rice, one of Bertie's young friends, 'never listens to anyone: has no personal knowledge of Europe and no general ideas: is an ideal official for drafting despatches and emptying boxes . . . As long as he is there the officials at home & abroad are simply useful as machines and the Foreign Office i like Johnson's definition of fishing: a line with a fool at one end and a worm at the other.'

This was neither accurate nor fair. Sanderson, who was by his own admission an 'official and narrow-minded', was extremely circumspect in devolving work from Under-Secretarie and heads of department downwards. His first concern was with the proper transaction of business in an office in which a blunder could have 15

more senous con equences than in any other Department of State, and he believed not without good reason, that 'constant practice . . . [was] ... necessary to ensure methodical attention to matters of detail'. But he was prepared to consider and inculcate such changes as he considered necessary, especially when Lord Salisbury's replacement by Lord Lansdowne in November 1900 provided an impetus to reform. From the start the new and inexperienced Foreign Secretary sought advice in summary form from within the Office and encouraged more specialisation on the part of officials. But it was Sanderson who assumed responsibility for initiating reforms which would relieve able and talented young recruits to the Office of many of the more mundane and menial tasks with which they had previously been assigned, and which would leave it to heads of department to devolve policy work to subordinate members.

He was instrumental in securing the appointment of the Cartwright Committee in 1903 to look into the reform of the administration of the Office, and with the aid of both Francis Villiers, Assistant Under-

ly

Secretary since 1896, and the indefatigable

.!

CJ .

Eyre Crowe, who was then an Assistant Clerk,

Thoma

ander on

he eventually overcame Treasury quibbling over the Committee's proposals. As a result, the Office acquired a General Registry, a Registrar, an Assistant Registrar, two staff officer , nine second division clerks and four boy clerks. The additional appointments were sanctioned from 1 December 1905 and the new scheme was put into operation on 1 January 1906, a month before Sanderson's retirement.

Sanderson's last eighteen months in the Office were unfortunately marred by illhealth. Problems with his eyesight forced him to take extended leave in the summer and autumn of 1904, and Bertie, who in the previous year had replaced Currie in Rome, returned to London to assume temporary charge of the Office.

16

Sanderson had hoped that 'in the Italian climate and with much less work some of [Bertie's] asperities from which we have suffered [would] disappear'. They did not. Nor did Bertie's penchant for intrigue. He had already succeeded in furthering the diplomatic careers of several younger men who shared his increasing Germanophobia- a reaction in part to the Germans' adoption of French and Russian methods in their dealings with the British- and in London Bertie began to work for the nomination of his second cousin Sir Charles Hardinge, who was then Ambassador in St Petersburg, as Sanderson's successor.

Sanderson would have preferred Villiers to be his heir. But Bertie and Hardinge were both on excellent terms with Edward VII and with the King's support they were able to win the appointments they desired. There was indeed a certain sad irony in the fact that it was those who looked to Bertie as their mentor who were ultimately to benefit most from Sanderson's reforms. And in retirement Sanderson was left to ponder on the increased influence on policy of former colleagues whose views on relations with Germany he evidently perceived as dangerous and misplaced. His observations on Eyre Crowe's celebrated memorandum of January 1907 offered a balanced, but too often ignored, corrective to Crowe's historical analysis and the growing tendency within the Office and outside to portray every German action as a threat British interests. ' It has sometimes seemed to me', he observed, 'that to a foreigner reading our pre s the British Empire must appear in the light of some huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fmgers and toes stretching in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream.'

17

The New Bureaucracy, 1906-20 ardinge was surprised at Sanderson having 'taken up the cudgels for Germany'. He should not have been. Sanderson had worked closely with Foreign Secretaries who had looked to Germany almost as a natural ally in their dealing with older and more dangerous imperial rivals. But Hardinge was very different in background career and character from Sanderson. His paternal grandfather had been GovernorGeneral of India, and his maternal grandfather, Lord Lucan, had led the Light Brigade in its ill-fated charge in the Crimea. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge, where he gained a third class honours degree in mathematics he entered the Diplomatic Service in the spring of 1880 and erved ucces ively in Constantinople, Berlin, Washington Sofia, Bucharest Paris Tehran and St Petersburg, and he was briefly Assistant Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office during 1903-04. And although in 1905 he quibbled over the pecuniary acrifice involved in exchanging an Embassy for the Permanent Under-Secretary hip, he had by then come to realise, as he later acknowledged in hi memoir , 'that the only way to get on in the ervice wa to disregard material advantages and to eek only for power'. Hardinge was the first PUS to be drawn from the Diplomatic Service, and he was the only PUS to hold the office twic .

Hardinge's appointment as Permanent Under-Secretary coincid d with thr e significant developments in Foreign Office hi tory: the collap e of th U nioni t Government in December 1905 and the formation of a Lib ral admini tration with Sir Edward Grey a Foreign Secretary路 the opening of the Alg cira Conti renee which was intended to settle the int rnational cri i r ulting from G rmany' championing of Morocco's independence again t the expan iv d ign of Franc and the challenge this apparently po ed to the recently-conclud d

nt nt

cordiale路 and the implementation of the Sander on/ rowe r form for which

Hardinge was later to claim credit. Grey wa much more inclined than Lan downe had been to regard the maintenance of th Anglo-French ent nt a a fundam ntal element in British foreign policy, and over the next few year th r lation hip wa transformed from an understanding on colonial issue into what wa in ffl ct a quasi-alliance. Thi wa very much in line with Hardinge' own thinking and a 18

relatively inexperienced Grey, who, unlike his immediate predecessors, had to defend policy in the Commons, came to rely increasingly on his advice and that proffered by other senior officials. Despatches from missions abroad were henceforth regularly accompanied by minutes and Office memoranda analysing and summarising international developments and recommending appropriate courses of action. In addition, Hardinge corresponded by private letter with all of Britain's major Embassies in Europe Charle Hardinge

conveying both Office gossip and detailed information on current preoccupations in Whitehall.

Hardinge's burden of work steadily increased in a period which witne sed renewed crises in the Near East, the seemingly relentless expansion of German naval power, and the achievement of a rather less than successful accommodation with Russia in Persia and central Asia. The King's enthusiasm for foreign travel also expanded the role of the PUS. On no less than eight occasions between April 1906 and February 1909 Hardinge accompanied Edward VII on official or semiofficial visits to foreign Heads of State. That to Carthagena in April 1907 opened the way to the conclusion of the Mediterranean Accords with France and Spain an event which was perceived in Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg as evidence that the King was pursuing a policy aimed deliberately at encircling Germany; and that to Reval in June 1908 appeared to confmn the new understanding with Russia and the emergence of what was sometimes referred to as the 'Triple Entente'. The meeting between Edward VII and Nicholas II at Reval might also be classed as a minor triumph for Sir Arthur Nicolson, who, after succeeding Hardinge as Ambassador in St Petersburg, was also to succeed him as PUS, when in November 1910 Hardinge was appointed Viceroy of India.

Nicolson was not well-suited either in stamina or temperament for the post of Permanent Under-Secretary. A career diplomat, before taking up his post in St Petersburg he had been Britain's Minister in Tangier, Ambassador in Madrid and Head of Delegation to the 路Algeciras Conference. But while he was a skilled 19

negotiator and adept reporter of events, he never developed the makings of a good administrator. Anglo-Russian differences over Persia, a fresh crisis over Morocco, and war in the Balkans, placed new burdens on the Office, and Nicolson was evidently overwhelmed by a system which required him to act as filter between energetic departmental heads and the Secretary of State. Moreover, he never achieved the close working relationship which Hardinge had established with Grey. The latter, with whom he quarrelled over Ulster, relied increasingly upon his Private Secretary, William Tyrrell, for advice, and Nicolson was accused of excessive Russophilia. In ill-health and anxious to leave London, Nicolson began in August 1912 to hanker after a posting abroad. After having

been

refused

the

Embassies

at

Constantinople and Vienna, both of which became vacant in 1913, he set his sights on Paris. Bertie, who had been Ambassador there since January 1905, was due to retire when he reached seventy in

Arthur Nicol on

August 1914. But Bertie was reluctant to go, and certainly had no wish make way for Nicolson whom he feared 'would be an out and out advocate at Paris and in London of Rus ian view '. At a time when Austria-Hungary and Russia seemed set on a collision cour e in the Balkans Bertie thought there was a need to have in Paris omeone who would moderate French zeal for supporting their Russian allie . H wa therefore particularly irritated when Nicolson, 'the little blue eyed rogue', began making enquiri

about

re-furnishing the Embassy.

In the end Nicolson was denied the opportunity to move by the outbreak of the First World War and a request from Grey to Bertie to ' tay on and ee th war through'. He spent another two unhappy years as PUS confining him elf to helping Grey with the routine work of the Office and neither attempted nor desired to take a leading part in the conduct of war-time diplomacy. 'Hi whole attitude towards the war was', in the words of hi biographer, hi son Harold Nicolson, 'indeed, old fashionable. He objected to the blockade: he hated the secret service work and spy-fever which it produced: he wa particularly

20

distressed by the excesses of war-time propaganda. ' Yet, the exigencies of total war required the mobilisation of all the resources of the state and increasingly involved other Whitehall Departments in the conduct of foreign relations. Senior officials in the Foreign Office continued to exercise considerable influence on the Foreign Secretary, but foreign policy was no longer his exclusive preserve. Grey willingly accepted a subordinate role in the Cabinet, deferring to the wishes of the Admiralty and the War Office, and Balfour, his successor in Lloyd George's Government, was not even a member of the War Cabinet. On the eve of Hardinge' s return to London as PUS in June 1916, Bertie wrote from Paris to warn him: 'I think that you will find that the Foreign Office is in great part a "pass on" Department viz. it issues instructions at the issue of other offices often without considering whether such instructions are advisable or feasible and sometime in ignorance seemingly of what has already been said by some other Departments of the Foreign Office.'

Hardinge was also not the man he had once been. Prior to his departure for India he had been raised to a peerage and had taken the title of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst. But personal bereavements, public criticism of his part in the disastrous Mesopotamian campaign, and the shock of being blown up on an elephant, had all seemed to weaken his resolve. He soon had to cope with an Office in which there was an uncertain division of responsibility between Balfour and Lord Robert Cecil, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary and Minister of Blockade, and with a Prime Minister who had little respect for traditional institutions, distrusted intermediaries and preferred to engage in his own brand of personal diplomacy.

His colleagues hoped that when peace came the Office would be able to reassert its central role in directing policy. Elaborate preparations were made for a peace conference, and the newly-established Historical Section produced over 180 Handbooks containing background information on issues likely to be considered.

Hardinge was not however permitted truly to play the part of organising Ambassador during the negotiations at Paris, and Lloyd George looked to his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, to provide what central coordination the British delegation possessed. Moreover, the effective division of the Office into two parts in 1919, one with Balfour in Paris, and the other under his successor Lord Curzon in London, helped further reduce its influence on policy.

21

Hardinge was also faced with implementing the report of the pre-war MacDonnell Commission on the Civil Service, whose recommendations included the fusion of the Foreign Office with the Diplomatic Service and the introduction of an entry system which would attract candidates from a broader social base. This was to involve Hardinge in long battles with the Treasury, which favoured reform but was reluctant to pay for it. In consequence, only a partial merger of the two services was achieved up to First Secretary level and, while entrance procedures were liberalised, conservatives in the Office were to insist on a method of selecting candidates separate to that applied elsewhere in the Civil Service. There would, as one official remarked, otherwise be no way of excluding 'Jews, coloured men and infidels who [were] British subjects'. Hardinge nonetheless gave oblique recognition to the shortcomings of such selection procedure . When in June 1920 Sir Auckland Geddes, then British Amba sador in Washington, suggested that the ideal senior staff in his Embassy should consi t of at least one Roman Catholic, a Jew, a Scotch Presbyterian, and an Anglican, Hardinge confessed: 'We could not find enough Jews and Scotch Presbyterians to go round!' Meanwhile, the PUS failed to establish a modu vivendi with George Curzon. It was difficult for one former Viceroy to reconcile himself to taking instructions from another, and their relationship was characterised by per onal bickering and deep-seated animosity. 'They were', Lord Van ittart later recalled, 'connected by a broad old speaking tube, and when George blew down Charlie blew up.' Relations between them only improved after Hardinge managed to fulfil one of his long held ambitions by securing appointment as Amba ador to Pari in November 1920. There, much to Curzon's evident disgust, he set about furni bing the beautiful Hotel de Charost with tiger skins, elephant tu k and ilver ca kets.

He was replaced as PUS by Crowe, a survivor of the old diplomacy and an unacknowledged progenitor of the new.

22

The New Diplomacy, 1920-46 - - ew Permanent Under-Secretaries have received a more favourable press from the historians of their day than Sir Eyre Crowe. Even fewer have earned more praise and affection from those who served under them. Crowe, whose long career in the Office spanned forty years and culminated in his appointment as PUS in

ovember 1920, was rarely

without his critics or rivals. But in 1932 George Peabody Gooch and Harold Temperley, the Editors of the British Documents on the Origins of the War observed that it was impossible to read Crowe's memoranda 'without receiving the impression that they [were] the utterances of a man of uncommon powers of mind and capacity to take wide views when immersed in disputes of the moment'.

The son of Joseph Crowe, the British Consul at Leipzig, and his German wife Crowe received his schooling in Germany and was eighteen when he first visited

Th e Diplomatic Apprentice The young Eyre Crowe, econd from the left, ca ts an eye over office memoranda.

23

England in 1 82 to start tudying for the Foreign Office examination. Ther , impecunious in Wimbledon, he struggled to overcome his imperfect knowledge of English. When in 1 85 Lord Granville was abl to offer him a junior clerk hip in the Office, Crowe informed his father in a letter which betrayed his still uncertain gra p of the idiom of his adopted land, 'I am to have an appointment is that not so?' Family ties, which were reinforced when in 1903 he married his widowed cousm

lema von Bonin kept

rowe in clo e touch with German politic and

ociety. He could count among t hi relatives two German admiral , one of whom became wartime Chi f of the German

aval Staff and a Prus ian gen ral.

In lat r years he was to uffer for the e German connexions and when in March 191

a hostile and xenophobic mob of uffragettes d cended on hi hom 1n hel ea demanding hi

di mi

loaded a pi tol for hi wife wa

All thi rowe

al

h

prot ction.

particularly ironic

tnc

con i tent d t rmination t

what he perceiv d a the thr at po d t Britain'

imperial

curity by th

defin d but

ermany and th pr

a A i tant

nd r-

f an anti-

rm n. In t ct enti lly

int 11 ct and methodology. He wa thoroughly imbu d with th id a hi torian . He devoured the weighty volume of Rank ybel Treit chke and

h w v r rm n in hi f

nd in ad ition t

ichte h r ad th

mu t work th ir w y'. Di

what he regarded a the hand-to-mouth diplom cy ab ence of planning in Briti h policy-m king

f

24

th

f: c ti fie

with

li bury and the

rowe had

m re hi torical pirit' into the Office. In a p p r f Janu ry 1

rman

a

Kapital. Wa it any wond r that in Augu t 1 14 h fllt him lf t b of big force of n tur and [th t] th

iti n

am d [! r him th r pu ti n

rowe r main d

work of von

r y

r nge Brit in

ranc and Ru ia in pp

rm ny

to

f

ur h

cr t ry put n

umm r of 1 14 t

al ng id

Eyre rowe

mbiti n

Wi lh lmin

in the

ill -

intr duce 5h

tr

th

inadequacy of a system which allowed hardly anyone 'the time or opportunity to engage on that wider survey of affairs and duties which [seemed] the only satisfactory basis on which to establish the management' of foreign policy, and he advocated the preparation of annual reports by heads of mission a a means both of assembling information and of appraising their author for promotion or transfer. Much to the dismay of the Treasury, he also suggested that the Foreign Office Library employ young university men with 'historical training' to compile 'histories of certain events or incidents of importance' for the guidance of the Foreign Secretary. Crowe himself made full, if not always accurate, use of historical analogies to substantiate his analyses of Macht- and Weltpolitik.

Characteristically, when Grey seemed to hesitate in the war crisis of 1914 Crowe cited the example of Prussia which, having opted for neutrality in 1805 had succumbed in the following year to Napoleon's might. And he warned colleague who contemplated resignation that 'their supreme duty [was] not to Sir Edward Grey and to his Cabinet but to the state', a doctrine which, though constitutionally sound was surely expressed in terms more appropriate to the Wilhemstrasse than Whitehall.

Bertie subsequently noted that he had learnt that Crowe's 'Prussian blood' had come out and that he had been 'insubordinate and insolent' to Grey. Nevertheless Crowe's wartime supervision of the Office's economic departments allowed him to carve out a key role in the formulation of commercial policy, and provided him with a good grounding in dealing with the kind of commercial and financial is ues which were so important in the diplomacy of the early 1920s.

During his first three years as PUS he also, like Hardinge, had to contend with the demands and daily tantrums of Curzon, who repeatedly complained about the functioning of the Office. Curzon would deliberately ask for him on the telephone at times when Crowe could not reasonably have been expected at his desk and would ask for his return. 'Can't the man realise', Crowe complained, 'that long after he has gone home in his Rolls-Royce, I have to catch a No. 11 bus for ElmPark Road and sup off sardines or cold sausages before dealing with the evening' telegrams.' The formation of the fust Labour Government in January 1924 and Ramsay MacDonald's arrival at the Foreign Office may therefore have come a 25

something of a relief to Crowe. And although they differed over relations with Soviet Russia, MacDonald was personally committed to more open diplomacy and gave his support to a project long favoured by Crowe_the publication in documentary form of the Office's historical record. Crowe believed that Britain had nothing to lose and much to gain by giving the widest possible publicity to its transactions with foreign countries and, from 1908 onwards, he had supported the notion of giving historians freer access to Foreign Office records. He thereby inadvertently ensured that his own dialectic would help shape the history, as well as the course, of British foreign policy.

Crowe had to oversee the Office's transition from war to peace. Its wartime structure was dismantled and by 1922 there were, in addition to the PUS three Assistant Under-Secretaries, one of whom was from 1925 termed Deputy UnderSecretary. In addition, Crowe's efforts to promote the accords which were eventually concluded at Locamo in October 1925 helped defuse a Franco-German cold war on the Rhine and restored a sense of 'normality' to relations amongst the European powers. Unfortunately, by the time of their signing, Crowe wa no more: in declining health, he died on 28 April hartly before hi sixty-first birthday.

His successor, Sir William Tyrrell, was also very much a product of the pre-1914 Foreign Office.

Born in India, the grandson of an Indian princess, he was brought-up in the household of his uncle the distinguished Prussian diplomat Prince Hugo von Radolin, and educated at the University of Bonn and Balliol College, Oxford. He joined the Foreign Office in 1889 and was Private Secretary to Sanderson and later to Grey, and briefly Second Secretary to Bertie's Embassy in Rome.

His career was interrupted in 1915 when he William Tyrrell

suffered a breakdown following the death of his youngest son in battle. But he returned to work in 1916, was appointed head of the newly-formed Political Intelligence Department, and wa promoted to A si tant

26

Under-Secretary in October 1918. Urbane, charming and an inexhaustible source of information, Tyrrell worked well with Sir Austen Chamberlain, who was Foreign Secretary for all of the time that he was PUS. He had, however, neither Crowe's eye for administrative detail, nor his proficiency in extensive and profuse minuting. He shunned the drudgery of departmental drafts and was highly selective in his reading of files, and preferred to rely on personal contacts rather than commit his views to paper. Once, in response to a reminder from his Private Secretary that a decision was required on a particular issue, he simply noted: 'Yes, it is.'

Tyrrell was nonetheless quick to stake a claim to the Paris Embassy when it became vacant in July 1928, and he won Chamberlain's backing for his appointment as Ambassador. He was replaced by Sir Ronald Lindsay, an aristocrat and professional diplomat who, apart from a short spell as Assistant Private Secretary to Grey and three years as Assistant Under-Secretary during 1921-24, had spent most of his career in posts abroad. During his eighteen-month tenure as PUS, he seems not to have made a great impression on the Office, and his relations with Arthur Henderson, the new Labour Foreign Secretary, were

The Foreign Office in the 1930s

27

strained. In June 1929 he persuaded Henderson, against the latter's better judgement, to remove the British High Commissioner in Egypt; and later that summer he was particularly critical of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Snowden, whose robust defence of Britain's financial interests had threatened to bring about the collapse of the reparations conference at The Hague. Evidently relieved by Henderson's offer to him of the Embassy in Washington in January 1930, Lindsay assured his successor Sir Robert Vansittart: 'The staff will carry you.' His language doubtless betrayed his own state of mind. But it was not advice which Vansittart was in any mind to follow.

Vansittart' s appointment was not in itself controversial: his opinions and conduct were. Known as 'Van' to his friends, the forty-eight year old Vansittart had served at home and abroad and had had a career which was as varied as that of most modem Permanent Under-Secretaries. As an assistant clerk in 1914, he had been first British delegate at the Conference for the Protection of the Elephant and Rhinoceros in Africa and since 1928, with the rank of Assistant Under- ecretary he had served as Private Secretary to Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Ram ay MacDonald. He was a man of trong opinion , which he firmly expre ed in correspondence heavily lard d with wit and metaphors. According to Anthony den, who became Foreign Secretary in he wa more 'a

ecember 193 5,

in cere, almo t fanatical

cru ader than 'an official giving cool and disinterested advice'.

i minut

could b

allusiv , amu ing and contort d and hi immediat

succ

or had g od rea on to

complain of hi 'dancing lit rary hornpip

'

Only three month after hi appointment a Robert Vansittart

PUS, he circulat d hi

Old

dam'

memorandum, a paper in which he bemoan d the reversion of Europe to 'pre-war thought' or what he pecified a the old diplomacy with its alliances insurance and reinsurance tr atie , balance of pow r, military values, and the economic theories represented by tariff wall and tariff 28

combinations'. Yet, within three years, he was warning colleagues against Nazi Germany's loosing off another war, and urging the need for large-scale rearmament and the closest of relationships with France.

As, however, Vansittart was soon to be reminded, much would depend on the Treasury's willingness to sanction expenditure on armaments. The Treasury, which had already expanded its influence over foreign policy during the 1920s, strengthened its position in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1929-31 and jealously guarded its role in international financial and economic relationships. Its pressure together with the strongly held views of the Service Departments considerably curtailed the independence of the Foreign Office, which during the 1930s was increasingly divided on the policies to be pursued towards the continental dictatorships. Vansittart was eventually to emerge as an opponent of further attempts to achieve a modus vivendi with Germany in Europe, but he did not rule out colonial concessions and meanwhile he made a determined effort to keep Mussolini on the side of Britain and France. It was his discussions with the Italian Foreign Minister in the autumn of 1935, during which he held out the prospect of an under tanding with Italy on Ethiopia, which led ultimately to the Hoare-Laval accord and, following a public outcry, the forced resignation of the Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare. After this debacle, Vansittart's dismissal was seriously considered by Ministers. Eden, Hoare's replacement, decided this would be improper since Ministers were responsible for policy. But both Baldwin and Anthony Eden tried subsequently to persuade Vansittart to give up his post as PUS for the Emba sy at Paris. And when Neville Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister in 1937 he too pressed for Vansittart's removal, a course which Eden did not oppose. In December 1937 Vansittart was 'promoted' to the newlycreated post of Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Government. Thereafter, he was to pose as an 'anti-appeaser', though he remained convinced that Britain could not risk war with Germany until1939.

Eden made Vansittart's future role in the Foreign Office clear when he stated that the incoming PUS, Sir Alexander Cadogan, would receive all papers and then forward them directly to the Secretary of State. On 22 January 1938 a document, signed by Eden, stated: 'In the event of a paper requiring urgent action, it will be 29

sent by Sir A. Cadogan direct to the Under Secretary concerned with a slip bearing the words "Sir R. Vansittart after action'.' Cadogan, who had joined the Diplomatic Service in 1908, and who had been in the Briti h Emba y in Vienna when war was declared on Austria-Hungary in Augu t 1914 had spent all but two of the following years in the Foreign Office. Between 1934 and 1936 he was first Minister and then Ambassador to China, and since October 1936 Assistant Under-Secretary in London. Crowe had thought him 'the best man in the Office , and during the 1920s he had headed the Foreign Office's League of Nations Section. But he took comparatively little interest in the formal machinery of the Office or its proc dure valuing promptitude

efficiency and good

drafting. Like many of his predece or h wa concerned about the quality of handwriting and

ad

an

A PUS during the Second World War h faced the Blitz with c mp

ur

ft n

refu ing to take shelter. On a different front h had to r ck n with th

thr at

was adamant that minute

AI and r

hould be kept hort.

posed by the Prime Minister Win ton

hurchill. Th latt r wa

n avid criti

f

the Office which he con idered cumber orne and alway equiv c I policy. Fortunately, with Cadogan, Lord Halifax ( or ign

f

7-4

cr tary

Eden at the helm, the Office maintained a farm r promin nt p

nd

iti nth nit h d

done during the Great War. During a conflict which the Minister Jan Smut once aptly d

crib d a

accompanied Eden at the major gath ring

war by c f th

e tabli bing for the PU the po ition of r ving dip lorn ti and knowledgeable a loyal coll agu

wh

d g n

trmly dvi

r. H w i ly

would n t

u

r bu t

urn

t

Churchill's bullying tactic .

Cadogan al o presided over an Office facin fundam nt 1 dmini tr tiv

In conversation with Cadogan in th lat autumn f 1 4

rn

Mini ter of Labour, urged on him th n

ffi

d [! r th

30

h n

vtn th n w

t t

tak

interest in industrial and labour matters. And Bevin subsequently addressed a memorandum to Lord Halifax in which he repeated a criticism made often of the Office and the Diplomatic Service both before and since 1914: that diplomacy had 'moved in far too narrow a circle and the reactions of [British] policy on the wellbeing of the people of other countries [had] not been comprehended'. This appear to have initiated the process which led to the White Paper of January 1943 and the introduction of the Eden Reforms. As a result, a single Foreign Service was established, and the former distinctions between the Foreign Office, the Diplomatic Service, the Commercial Diplomatic Service and the Consular Service were abolished. New methods of selection were also introduced so as to encourage recruitment from a much broader social base. Bevin's suspicions of the Office seem, however, to have disappeared following his appointment as Foreign Secretary in July 1945, and he soon recognised Cadogan as an adviser of exceptional value. Both men were concerned about the Soviet Union's ultimate intentions and, after taking up his new post as Britain's first Permanent Representative to the United Nations in February 1946, Cadogan was drawn into the politics of ideological confrontation. Deeply pessimistic about the new diplomatic institutions at New York, he dubbed the Security Council a 'tiltyard' and could see little chance of it being used for any other purpose.

31

Fusion and Cold War, 1946-62 ir Orme Sargent, Cadogan's heir as PUS, inherited an administratively unified Foreign Service, but faced an ideologically divided world. He had joined the Office in 1906 and, after spending almost two years as Second Secretary in the British Legation in Berne, had been attached first to the Peace Delegation to the Peace Conference in 1919 and subsequently to Britain's Embassy at Paris for the work of the Ambassadors' Conference. The remainder of his career, from November 1925 onwards, was spent in Whitehall, and as superintending Under-Secretary of the Central Department during the 1930s, Sargent was instrumental in helping to frame British policy towards National Socialist Germany. Nicknamed 'Moley' and with a tendency to suffer from claustrophobia, Sargent resisted any suggestions that he might be posted abroad. After promotion to Deputy Under-Secretary in September 1939, he superintended both the Office's Northern and Southern Departments. During the war he became increasingly concerned about the way in which Britain' mounting indebtedness was likely to impact upon its foreign policy. It might well, he forecast, 'involve a change in our diplomatic method ' since Britain 'could no longer rely on the weapons of the rich man'. And, as author of the influential po twar memorandum, 'Stocktaking after V-E Day', he wrestled with the problem of how to maintain Britain's position in the world through Big Thr e cooperation, without abdicating Britain's status as a great power through the abandonment of its interests in eastern Europe. Later, as PUS, he ominou ly pr dieted: 'The Far East seems destined to be the principal scene of a conflict of intere t b tween the Soviet Union and the United States.' Sargent al o ob erv d that Soviet and American policies in Korea had now become contiguous and that a dir ct cla h between the two powers was to be expected. He was not howev r, inclined to press his views on ministers. As Vansittart later ob erved he wa 'a philosopher who strayed into Whitehall. He knew all the an wer 路 when politician did not want to hear them he went out to lunch.'

Sir William Strang replaced Sargent as PUS in February 1949.

ducat d at

University College, London, Strang had entered the Diplomatic ervic in 1919 after four years military service in France and Flanders. Hi

32

ub equent career had

included postings in Belgrade and Moscow, and, following his transfer to the Foreign Office, he accompanied Neville Chamberlain to Berchtesgarten Bad Godesberg and Munich, and travelled to Moscow in 1939 in a vain effort to achieve an agreement with the Soviet Union. From 1945 to 1947 he was political adviser to the Commander-in-Chief Germany, Field Marshal Montgomery.

Around the time of his appointment as PUS Strang was described by a journalist as being 'over six feet tall, slim, with a brown moustache, shy and correct . Strang was widely regarded as a first class administrator, and on his retirement The Times commented that he 'coupled a capacity for hard work and very long hours with the analytical mind of a mathematician'. One of his principal achievements as PUS was the establishment in 1949 of a policy planning body called the Permanent Under-Secretary's Committee (PUSC). One of the most important recommendations made by the PUSC was that neither the Commonwealth nor Western Europe or the two combined, could stand on their own against the Soviet Union without the full support of the United States. In 1949, the Attlee Government effectively adopted this line of argument.

Berlin 1945: William Strang with Major-General Lyne and Field Marshal Montgomery

33

Unlike Sargent, Strang was willing to travel the globe in an effort to ascertain where Britain commanded influence and where it might be challenged. He undertook a tour of the Middle East and Asia in 1949 to this effect and his analyses of these regions were frequently reflected in the papers of the PUSC. As Foreign Secretary, Bevin was impressed by his judgement and the care and earnestness with which he submitted his recommendations. The PUSC was eventually discontinued by the incoming Conservative administration in 1951.

Strang remained PUS until November 1953. After leaving the Office he published a number of works on diplomacy, including The Foreign Office (London, 1955) and Home and Abroad (London, 1956). In Home and Abroad, Strang concluded: 'My years as Permanent Under-Secretary were the happiest years of a happy career: and yet I will confess that of all those days perhaps the happiest was that on which I laid down my charge.'

Strang's immediate successor, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, fully appreciated this paradox. In his memoirs Kirkpatrick later recalled his thoughts on taking up his new position: From my long years of previous service in the Foreign Office I knew what was in store for me and, like any athlete, went into training. I gave up smoking and drinking, went to parties as little as I could and took a brisk walk through the park to the office every morning. Only so was I able to last the course.

Kirkpatrick was related to a former PUS, his mother being first cousin to Charles Hardinge. He joined the Office in February 1919 after spending the previous three years in wartime intelligence and propaganda work, an activity to which he returned when in 1941 he became foreign adviser to the BBC. Serving as head of Chancery in Berlin during 1933-38, he made clear his detestation of the Nazis. His views seem not, however, to have made any great impre sion on the British Ambassador, Sir Neville Henderson. After 1945 he was again very much involved with German affairs, serving for a year in the Office's Germany Section and then, during 1950-53, as High Commissioner in Bonn. Kirkpatrick had a reputation as a combative, even aggressive, Irishman, who had little time for discussion. He was not, according to some of his former colleagues, the easiest of men to work with, and in Lord Gladwyn's opinion he would have made 'an excellent general'.

34

Kirkpatrick's difficult period as PUS culminated in the Suez Crisis of 1956, an event that was little referred to in his memoirs, The Inn er Circle (London, 1959).

Convinced that the nation's survival was dependent upon the exercise of great power responsibilities, he encouraged the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, in his dangerous fixation with Nasser as a Middle Eastern Hitler. The experience of the 1930s had led both men to oppose any 'appeasement' of Nasser. Kirkpatrick's closeness to Eden was reinforced by the Prime Minister's dissatisfaction with what he perceived as a l vone Kirkpatrick

pro-Arab stance held by his Foreign Office subordinates during the last Churchill administration.

As a result, Eden increasingly used Kirkpatrick as an intermediary between himself and other senior officials in the Office. This close relationship took an ominous turn when the PUS found himself obliged to exclude the Foreign Office from the decision-making process during the final crisis. For Kirkpatrick, the Suez debacle was a test of Britain's great power status, leading him later to reflect that: No country [in the Western world] can any longer pursue an independent foreign policy. The liberty of action of each is in varying degrees restricted by the need to obtain the concurrence of one or more members of the alliance

Suez sullied Kirkpatrick's reputation as PUS, though he may have been guilty of no more than fulfilling a civil servant's duty of loyalty to his political chiefs.

It is perhaps hardly surprising that in the wake of Suez, Sir Frederick Hoyer

Millar, who succeeded Kirkpatrick in February 1957, should have sought to encourage greater inter-departmental coordination in policy planning. The administrative basis for such coordination already existed in the form of the Permanent Under-Secretary's Department, a body first established in October 1949 and later developed into the Policy Planning Department. This provided a centralised policy planning structure and avoided tackling problems department by department. Hoyer Millar nonetheless also came close to being at the centre of a Middle Eastern disaster when, in the summer of 1958, airborne support was despatched to the King of Jordan without the British having gained prior consent

35

from the Israelis for the overflight of their territory. Hoyer Millar had seemed quite sure that Israeli consent would be forthcoming, but the matter was still not resolved when British troops began landing in Amman.

A bluff, relaxed and much loved figure, Hoyer Millar was, in the words of Alistair Home, 'as contented on a grouse-moor as his predecessor Kirkpatrick had been burrowing about in the corridors of power'. When Douglas Hurd became Foreign Secretary in 1989 he told Sir Patrick Wright that his ideal PUS was Hoyer Millar, who left the Office on Friday afternoon, and only returned from Scotland on Monday afternoon. Whether Hoyer Millar's relaxed style could have spared him the boxes that his predecessors and successors had to take home nightly and over the weekend is open to question. Hoyer Millar's first experience of diplomacy had been in 1922 when for a year he acted as Honorary Attache at the Briti h Embassy in Brussels. He later went on to serve in Berlin, Paris and Cairo and a Minister in the British Embassy in Washington in 1948 he famou ly baulked at the Foreign Office's proposal to appoint Guy Burge s to the Chancery, exclaiming: 'We can't have that man. He has filthy fingernail . ' Whether Hoy r-Millar knew of an alleged remark made by Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham

ollege,

Oxford that Burgess 'had shit in hi fingernails' wa not clear. The refu al produced a sharp rebuke from London to the effect that Burge established member of the Foreign Service and it wa not for the

wa now an mba y to

refuse to accept him. In 1952, Hoyer-Millar became Britain' first Permanent Repre entative to NATO and as Kirkpatrick's ucce or at Bonn, he wa al o Britain's Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. Hoyer-Millar wa a good committee-man and, after retirement in January 1962 becam a member of the Plowden Committee which reviewed Briti h repr sentation overs a .

36

Reports, Reform and Retrenchment, 1962-82 he Plowden Committee, together with the Duncan Inquiry set out to modernise the Foreign Office in view of Britain's rapidly changing position in the world. Indeed, by the 1960s the Office had come under repeated attacks for its social exclusiveness and lack of sympathy with the commercial needs of the country. In 1964 the Government accepted the main recommendations of the Plowden Report in particular that the separate Foreign and Commonwealth services should be merged. The single service came into existence in 1965 , but the institutional adjustments took several years, with the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Office merging in 1968 to form the present Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). The Duncan Inquiry was aimed specifically at the need to find possible economies in overseas representation. Overseeing these important changes as PUS was Sir Harold Caccia who arrived at his post in January 1962. Of Italian descent, he spent the most exciting part of his career in the Mediterranean, becoming involved in the forced escape of the British Legation from Athens in 1941 and the rescue of the Greek King from Crete. After the war, he chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee, and was subsequently High Commissioner at Vienna and Ambassador at Washington. As PUS, he was to be the first head of the newly unified Diplomatic Service, and applied his robust common sense to tackling the problems associated with implementing the recommendations of the Plowden Committee. Caccia was one of the few Diplomatic Service officers who excelled in many ports including shooting and rugby football. It was not unusual , therefore for the PUS often to use a sporting phrase in response to anyone seeking advice on an intractable problem, his favourite being 'kick it into touch'. Caccia was also responsible for the creation of a daily meeting headed by the PUS to discuss affair of state which survives until this day. The situation had arisen during Patrick Gordon Walker's short spell as Foreign Secretary. In the three month prior to the latter's second electoral defeat in 1965, Caccia deemed it essential to keep Gordon Walker up to date with a daily account of international development while he was campaigning. Caccia and senior officials met every

37

morning and this proved to be so valuable that successive PUS's continued with the practice in order to set out the agenda of the day.

In 1965 Sir Paul Gore-Booth replaced Caccia as PUS. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, Gore-Booth had served in Vienna, Tokyo and Washington, leading to his appointment flrst as Deputy Under-Secretary from 1956 to 1960 and then as High Commissioner at Delhi in 1961. After returning to the Office in 1965 as PUS, he oversaw its merger with the Commonwealth Office.

The Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, described Gore-Booth as 'wise and urbane', while his manners and intellect were considered to be in the best Balliol and Foreign Office tradition. Unlike some of his predecessors, Gore-Booth had a

Foreign Affair and Public lntere t (Left) {The first Fight at the Fall '. Paul Gore-Booth with Paul cholefield (Right) Pocket Cartoon from The Daily Express. Courtesy of The herlock Holme ociety.

wide knowledge of the world outside the United

tate and

urop . H 1 ter

recollected in hi memoirs, With Great Truth & Re pect (London, 1974) that during his time a PUS, apart from the Foreign ecretary, he was the only p r on

38

in the Office whose obligation it was to have some knowledge of everything.

However, his relationship with George Brown as Foreign Secretary during 196668 was extremely strained. Brown was abrasive, abusive and ebullient, and this contrasted sharply with Gore-Booth's old Etonian Christian Scientist outlook.

Listening to reports of the resignation of George Brown, after the latter had accused the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, of running his Cabinet in a dictatorial fashion, Gore-Booth also heard with considerable surprise, the last sentence of the Downing Street statement: 'The Prime Minister proposes to bring about the amalgamation of the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Office into a single Office'. The announcement of the amalgamation came as a complete surprise to Gore-Booth. But he was well aware that the unified service could not remain subject to differing routines and disciplines. Very different filing systems, 'a more intimate and sensitive feature of most people's daily lives than the making of high policy', required attention and considerable patience. Along with Sir Saville Garner the PUS at the Commonwealth Office, Gore-Booth had done sterling work in bringing both the Services together into what was known as the Diplomatic Service Admini tration Office (DSAO), and with Gamer's retirement on 1 March 1968, Gore-Booth became 'Head of the Diplomatic Service'. The full amalgamation of the two Services would have to await Sir Denis Greenhill's arrival a PUS in 1973. Meanwhile, Gore-Booth also set out to establish his own form. of 'joined-up government' by inviting Permanent Secretaries from various Department aero

Whitehall to regular meetings in his office. This pioneering

work in bringing Whitehall together aimed to involve other Departments in the bu ine

of foreign economic and trade policy, and was the forerunner to the

regular meeting of Permanent Secretaries now held by the Cabinet Secretary. It wa , however hi v nture into amateur dramatics for which he is probably best remember d by the public. Hi performance in the spring of 1968 as Sherlock Holme in a re-enactment of the great detective's combat with Professor Moriarty on the narrow path overlooking the Reichenbach Falls attracted widespread media attention. Upon learning of Gore-Booth's intentions, Michael Stewart wrote, 'All right. But don't return in two years' time via Tibet'. Gore-Booth did return rather more quickly unfortunately to witness gloomier events including the Soviet intervention in Czecho lovakia and the continuing Nigerian civil war. On 15 39

January 1969 Gore-Booth retired to be replaced by Sir Denis Greenhill in the following month.

Although Greenhill had not served as a head of mission in any Embassy and had no great flair for languages, his term as PUS was a successful one. Liked and respected by his colleagues, Greenhill fought hard to preserve the integrity of the Diplomatic Service in a time of economic belt-tightening. During the war, Greenhill had served with the Royal Engineers in Egypt, North Africa, Italy, India and Southeast Asia. He entered the Foreign Office

in

1946,

serving

in Sofia,

Washington, Paris and Singapore, and then as Minister in Washington. After two years as Assistant Under-Secretary, he was appointed Deputy Under-Secretary in 1966.

Greenhill had a good relationship with the incoming Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, recounting in his memoirs,

Deni Greenhill

More By Accident (York, 1992), that 'my

role as his Permanent Under Secretary was to be full of excit ment and enjoyment'. An established and respected expert on the Soviet Union and Ea tern Europe, in 1971 Greenhill was famously instructed by Douglas-Home to inform the Soviet Embassy in London that 105 Rus ian diplomats and official were to b expelled for spying.

During the Governments of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, it was the accepted practice for the PUS to travel with Ministers. According to Gr enhill, it wa . .. unwise for either the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary to build up a monopoly of knowledge by failure to hare hi experiences with some ofhis senior staff. From his point of view, he has a second opinion of experienced people. From the officials' point of view, it is of great help. It enables the official to understand better the minds of his own ministers and of hi foreign opposite numbers.

40

By 1972 the Office also had a Planning Staff that reported to the Planning Committee, which comprised the PUS, Deputy Under-Secretaries and the Head of Planning Staff. The Committee was an important link between the Planning Staff and senior officials at a time when the complexity of foreign policy had intensified as a result of Britain's entry into the European Community (EC).

Sir Thomas Brimelow, who succeeded Greenhill in November 1973, was, unlike his immediate predecessor, an outstanding linguist. Raised in a Lancashire working class family, he spoke French, German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Swedish and superb Russian. He was once asked in Moscow, 'Mr Brimeloff, where did you learn to speak such good English?' Self-effacing and well-mannered, the PUS possessed a formidable intellect that put those who worked with him on their mettle. He was also probably the first PUS - at least until the introduction of word processors to type his own drafts at office meetings. During 1942-45, as head of the Consular Section in the British Embassy in Moscow, Brimelow had on more than one occasion a face-to-face meeting with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin.

After the war in Europe had ended, he returned to the Office in the summer of 1945 to play a role in the implementation of repatriations to the Soviet Union already agreed by Britain. After spending a period in Ankara, where he learnt Turkish, he returned to London in 1956 to act as interpreter during the visit of Khrushchev and Bulganin, and became head of the Office's Northern Department.

Brimelow also served as Counsellor in Washington, Minister in Moscow, Ambassador to Poland and Deputy Under-Secretary during 1969-73. Once described as 'the toughest-minded and most intransigent of all the Cold Warriors', Harold Wilson valued Brimelow' s counsel when it came to pursing a tough line with the Soviet Union. His tenure as PUS, however, was a brief affair, lasting barely two years.

Brimelow's successor, Sir Michael Palliser, was in post until 1982, the longest serving PUS since the Second World War. Formerly Britain's Permanent Representative to the EC at Brussels, he soon had to grapple with the Whitehallwide impact of Britain's membership and strove to maintain the Office's influence over policy co-ordination. At the same time he was fully alive to the need to

41

maintain personal contacts with posts abroad and travelled widely. He later remarked: You've got to know people, you've got to know their family life, you've got to know a lot about them and the other thing, which is certainly true in the army, I found that you could almost tell when you walked through the door of an Embassy whether this place was being well run or not.

The appointment of David Owen as Foreign Secretary in 1977, led to what Palliser termed an 'extraordinary' relationship. Palliser considered Owen to have a real feel for foreign policy, but in order to get a decision from him, 'you had to have a row'. However, hard-talking did not damage Palliser's relationship with Owen and in reply to a letter from the latter on the role of the PUS with his Foreign Secretary, Palliser remarked: I greatly appreciate what you say about my advice. I am convinced that the public servant has the duty to advise as his conscience and experience dictate. It is good of you to make clear that that is what you want. It is also our duty, once you have taken your considered decision to support it to the hilt.

The arrival of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979 was also a difficult and challenging time for Palliser but he remembered that 'you simply had to argue the toss with her'. Palliser felt that one of the paradoxes in Thatcher's attitude to the FCO was that she presumed the establishment would be prepared to sell the country out to foreigners on almost any issue. On the other hand, she respected and indeed paid a lot of attention to the views of a number of very senior people in the diplomatic service. Sir Percy Cradock and Sir Anthony Duff both became foreign affairs advisers to her. Palliser presumed she thought he was 'a dangerously committed Federalist', but this did not prevent her asking him to come to the Cabinet Office at the outbreak of the Falklands Michael Palliser

War and be her principal adviser. Palliser, by a

most unfortunate coincidence, reached his 60th birthday retirement on the very day 42

that the Argentinians invaded the Falkland Islands - indeed, his farewell party was cancelled in favour of Lord Carrington's resignation drinks. Although Palliser was appointed a member of the Privy Council, he never received a peerage and as Thatcher's antipathy towards the Service grew such diplomatic elevations appeared to be a thing of the past. Only after John Major's appointment as Prime Minister was the practice revived in the 1990s.

43

The Modern PUS he demands on the PUS from the 1980s to the 1990s remained enormous. Modem Permanent Under-Secretaries have, however, frequently found that the provision of policy advice has taken second place to resource management. The balance between the two has very often depended on the relationship established between the PUS and the Secretary of State, and upon the latter's experience and inclinations. John Major was new to foreign affairs and during his brief spell as Foreign Secretary in 1989 he clearly had in the first instance to rely upon the expertise of his permanent staff. As so often in the past, it fell to the PUS and his senior colleagues to provide continuity of advice on foreign policy. The responsibility of officials has in this respect been eased by the political consensus which has tended to prevail on what

Antony A eland

constitutes the 'national interest' and on the obligations imposed by Britain's overseas alliances and alignments. There were, however, occasions during the 1980s when the bipartisan approach to foreign policy appeared to be under the severest of strains. As leaders of the Labour opposition, both Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock advocated alternative nonnuclear defence policies and a withdrawal from membership of the European Community. Quite how officials might have responded to this agenda was never tested but, speaking in the 1980s, the meticulously professional Sir Antony Acland, PUS during 1982-86, made the following point: I think that if a government were to decide to take Britain out of Europe, that would be very unsettling and worrying for a large number of members of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and I think for home civil servants as well. But there are other issues too which would cause them great anxiety: I think the withdrawal from NATO, or going wholly unilateralist, would also cause great anxieties in the minds of quite a number of us.

But I suppose in foreign affairs there has been a greater tradition

44

of bipartisan policy over the years than on other issues, and it may have been comforting and consoling for us.

Nonetheless, there was never a suggestion that Acland would have worked in opposition to his political masters. The PUS can put forward alternative policies yet in the final analysis, he has to implement the policy propounded by the government of the day.

Parliament also started to play a greater role in the life of the PUS from the 1980s.

Appearances before the Public Accounts Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, for example, occurred at least once a year. Sir Patrick Wright, PUS during 198691, was astonished to be told by Denis Greenhill that he had never once appeared before the Public Accounts Committee.

Wright's successor, Sir David Gillmore, found such Committees extremely daunting and recollected from his time as PUS that: 'there were moments when I was overcome with complete terror at the whole idea of doing it'.

Patrick Wright

Gillmore's only solace was that he became 'so damn busy' that he didn't have time to be

frightened. Many modem PUSs would regard their primary role as being to run the Service, and to promote its interests. Wright estimated that running the Service took up about 65% of his time, adding: I remember reading Sir Alexander Cadogan's diaries and realising, rather to my shame, that my personal, written contributions of policy advice (as opposed to the submissions emerging from the Department or the PUS's Planning Committee) had been few and far between - as compared with the magisterial minutes on Foreign Policy which Cadogan addressed regularly to his Ministers.

Wright's greatest concern as PUS was the lack of resources to maintain Britain's position in the Security Council, and to conduct a global foreign policy. He argued in particular that the FCO should be allocated sufficient resources for information

45

techno] gy in which he con idered the Office to be woefully behind. Like his pred ce or

Wright had al o to respond to social changes which affected the

a pi rations and requirements of staff and career patterns within the Service. He had to tackle the problem posed by diplomatic spouses (of both sexes), with car er of their own. Many of them were increasingly in well paid professions at home, and less than enthusiastic about joining their Service partners on postings abroad. By the time his tenure as PUS came to an end, Wright believed there was 'a much better appreciation within the Service that our job is, and must be seen to b , the vigorous and skilful promotion and protection of British interests, rather than some woolly objective called "good relations"'.

Gillmore was also a resolute guardian of the Service's welfare and reputation. In giving evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 1993, he explained 'when we lose a mission on the ground, we lose information, we lose an ability to assess the policies of that government and we lose the ability to foresee problems which could be caused for Great Britain'. By 1991, the FCO employed 6,400 people in 220 posts around the world but faced competing attractions from what Gillmore called 'giddy times in the City with black Porsches and black filofaxes'.

During a time of rising political tensions in Europe, Gillmore proved to be a calm and clear communicator, while forging a good working relationship with Douglas Hurd. He had himself followed an unconventional path to the post of PUS. One of his first jobs was with a plastics company in Paris and after several years in France he went on to teach in the East End of London. It was only at the age

David Gillmore.

Courtesy of the Press Association

of 36 that he joined the Service by the late entrants' examination. He made his name during 1978 when he went to Vienna as Counsellor and Deputy Head of the British Delegation to the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks. However

'

apart from postings to Moscow in 1972 and Kuala Lumpur in 1983, Gillmore, unlike many of his more recent predecessors, did not have a series of important 46

positions abroad. On his return from Malaysia in 1986 Gillmore b cam D puty Under-Secretary of State with responsibilities for the Americas and A ia.

Appointed PUS only after the Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatch r had overruled the nomination of another candidate for the post, Gillmore pre id d ov r the Office at a time when political differences over Britain's future role in th were becoming ever more apparent. He also set in hand the fundamental r form of the structure and management of the FCO, and encouraged the greater u e of th latest information technology within the Service. A clear and calm communicator he was the first PUS to have a word processor on his desk. He later observed: It's fine to make brilliant policy, but if you have no means to carry it out, or can't produce the means, or don't know how the means can be extracted from the system, then you're whistling a bit in the dark.

Gillmore did not forget policy but recoiled from asserting any right to be the funnel through which all advice should reach the Foreign Secretary. And at a time of radical change abroad, he remained confident of Britain's global role.

'Wherever I go', he remarked in 1994, 'I'm instantly struck by the continued attention paid to our views, the continued interest in what is going on in thi country and the passionate devotion to our institutions in countries where you'd least expect it.'

By the time of Sir John Coles's appointment as PUS in 1994, the time and effort devoted to Parliament, the media and public opinion in general had spiralled to unprecedented levels. The demands of public diplomacy coupled with the impact of the latest communications and information revolution meant that Coles felt himself unable to devote the attention he would have wished to policy matters. He later recalled in his book, Making Foreign Poli y: A

Certain Idea of Britain (John Murray 2000) that mor than one Cabinet Minister had lamented thi John Coles

development. It might indeed be argued that a century of

47

reform, restructuring and retrenchment has still left unresolved the fundamental problem that Tenterden confronted in 1876 and Eyre Crowe addressed in 1905.

The routine administration of business has left senior officials with insufficient time in which to focus upon broader considerations of policy.

Crowe's prime concern was not, however, so much with the role of the PUS as with the advisory functions of the Office as a whole. And while officials in Whitehall may nowadays still feel themselves overburdened by the pressures of current business, administrative reform and modem technology have relieved them of many of the tho e essentially clerical dutie which Crowe's generation considered both onerous and demeaning. One of the ach路 evements of the Crewe/Sanderson reforms was the establi hment of a General Registry-a repository of information which in contemporary office-speak might be classed as an innovation in knowledge management. Yet by it nature thi

till left a fund of

knowledge inadequately utili ed by a mall team in Whit hall. Since tenure a PUS, Permanent Under- ecretari

have grappl d with the ne d to

introduce an effective and up-to-date communication

The PU ' office today

4

eland'

Office and with po t abroad. oon after his appointment as PUS in 1997, Sir John Kerr recognised the need for the FCO to acquire an information technology system which would allow a policy paper destined for the Foreign Secretary to be constructed on-line between the Department and the experts in the post'. He went on to champion a policy which ha helped to transform 'the FCO from an HQ with outstations into a ingle on-line global organisation .

In triking the balance between management head and policy adviser Kerr also attached great weight to policy content and the elling of it through presentation. role as the Foreign Secretary's principal adviser on

He rea ert d the PU

foreign affair maintaining that in one of his various gui es he could when on missions abroad be said to be acting in some sen e a 'deputy foreign minister .

The latt r i not a position which either ammond or

ander on would have

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uch. The office has evolved and r main

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QUOTATIONS

'From my l ng y ar of pr viou ervice in th Foreign Offic I kn w what wa in tor f r m and like any athlet , went into training. I gav up moking and drinking, went to parti s a little as I could and t ok a bri k walk through the park to the office every morning.

Only o wa I abl to 1a t the cour e. '

Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick's thoughts on taking up his position as PUS, 1959 'Y u can't ju t it in th t big offic on th ground floor of th F r i n ffi and run th diplomatic ervice without actually going

ut int th fi 1 and

ing what c nditions ar like. '

Sir Michael Palliser, 1999 m n wh n I f d ing it. '

'Th th

a

v ream with complet t rror at

Lord Gillmore's recollections on becoming PUS, 1996 'Th j th p r f P rm in my vi

v n

m, and it vari d p nding on f t t ' offic up tair . Th job f p Hey and admini tration, but 1 p li y cont nt. '

ri

n nt with

Sir John Kerr, 2000 m

-

rly t -d y [11.45 a.m.] having an appointm nt nd I h v b n ringing in vain for an Office

Sir Julian Pauncefote to the Chief Clerk, 1887 n t th t m n r

R y

,I h v t r

th t l n aft r h ha gon hom in hi Roll t h .11 bu f r Elm-Park R ad and up off ld b f r d aling with th ev ning' li

Sir Eyre Crowe on Lord Curzon, c.1919-1924 m ny p virtu . h 1 v th ffi 'T

pl

tayin t o lat in th Offic . To do o i not tiv ffic r ar n t n c arily th who

Lord Gillmore, 1992

51

'Vacancies are of rar occurrence and a Foreign Office Clerk is lucky if he obtains a Senior Clerkship of ÂŁ700 a year in twenty years.'

Lord Tenterden, 1877 'If you do not have sufficient people to do the job, tho e who e responsibility it is will either do the work inadequately or will work exces ively long hours in trying to do it adequately, with the risk of mistake being made.'

Sir John Coles, 2000 'The recruitment numbers are sp ctacular, with 100 applicant f r ev ry plac ; and the head-hunter report that w ar curr ntly th No.1 career of choice for final year tudents in Briti h univ r iti '.

Sir John Kerr, 2002 'Red Tape in the Public Office , like drill in an army, i only th mean to an nd. It i the m thod by which a hug machin i mad to move - rather pond rou ly - but t adily and without c nfu i n. It is our duty to mak our lves rna t r f it, in ord r th t th direction of our chi fs may b carri d out pr p rly in th ir d tail .'

Sir Thomas Sanderson, 1891 'Although, ideally speaking, verything h uld b "d wn n pap r" and ea ily traceable - fil d and ind xed, that i , with ampl references - the actual manipulation of much p p r i n y task.'

Lord Strang, 1955

'It's fine to make brilliant policy, but if y u hav n m n t rry it out, or can't produce the m an , or don't kn w h w th m n be xtracted from th y t m, th n you'r hi tling a bit in th

Lord Gillmore, 1996

52

'I conf I di lik th t 1 graph v ry much. In the fir t place nothing i uffici ntly x plain d by it. It t mpt ha ty decision. It is an un ati f ctory r cord f r it giv no rea on. '

Edmund Hammond, 1858 'You cann t inv nt a machin into which documents can b put at on nd nd on lu i n ground at th oth r by turning a handle. If uch a rna hin w r po ibl , it would be wept away by popular indign ti n. v ry y t m f gov rnm nt, how v r perfect in theory - nd ur lay n laim to th or tical p rf ction - mu t depend m inly f r i u n th po ion and x rcise by its employ' s n t m r ly f indu try nd int grity but al o of intellig nee, ym hy nd d r d common s n .'

Sir Thomas Sanderson, 1891 'A hil h n

d int Whit hall. H kn w all th an w r ; nt t h r th m h nt out to lunch. '

ir Robert Vansittart on Sir Orme Sargent, 1958 h rw m n , n ith r will I allow any of th f th r id nt cl rk' rvants unt. Th y mu t b c nfin d to , nd front do r , i. . und r P rk, l in th ar a and t p .'

~...,.,. . ~ ..... t

Edmund Hammond, 1868 h w rld in whi h a man' w rk i o much m rri d dipl m t' by hi wif ... Th r h r in th diplomatic v r n b f r tho who might

Lord Tyrrell, 1933

53

'If asked what pleases me most in the record of the last few years, I think I'd say f males, Firecrest and foresight. I've been lucky enough to b at this desk as a brilliant generation of women break through to the senior ranks: in 1996 there were 3 women Heads of Mission, there are 16 now, with 9 more already appointed. And it really does a make difference: not just to how we're perceived, but also to how well we work.'

Sir John Kerr, 2001 'When an abuse has become an use by prescription, it is not quite fair, nor is it wise, to up with the club and knock it down. Smoking at [the ] F. 0. is in this category; and we must deal gently with those who have had their long allowed enjoyment suddenly cut off, and who shew some temper at the prohibition.'

Henry Addington's clash with the Chief Clerk in efforts to enforce a ban on smoking in the Office, 1846 'I became "chain-smoking John Kerr". It didn't do me any harm, politically or diplomatically.'

Sir John Kerr, 2000 'My years as Permanent Under-Secretary were the happiest year of a happy career: and yet I will confess that of all those days perhaps the happiest was that on which I laid down my charge.'

Lord Strang, 1956

'When I retired from the service people used to ask me, did I miss the Foreign Office, I said, it depends on what you mean, if you mean, do I miss one box every night and two boxes at week nds the answer is absolutely not for one second, but if you mean, do I miss my friends and the people I knew and o on, the answer is yes.'

Sir Michael Palliser, 1999

54

CHRONOLOGY OF PERMANENT UNDER-SECRETARIES, 1827-2002 Apr 1827-Apr 1

Backhou e, john

2

Mar 1842-Apr 1854

Addington, Heruy U.

Apr 1854- ct 1873

Hammond, Edmund (later Lord)

ct 1873p 1

Tenterden 3rd Baron Charles Stuart Aubrey Abbott

p 1882

Pauncefote, ir Julian (later Lord)

2-Apr 18 9

Currie

Apr 1 89-D c 1893

ander on, ir Thoma Oat r Lord)

Jan 1894-Feb 1906 F b 1906-

Hardinge, ir Charles (later Lord Hardinge of P n hur t)

v 1910

icol on, ir Arthur (lat r Lord Carnock)

ov 1910-Jun 1916

Hardinge of P nshur t, 1sr Baron

jun 1916- ov 1920

row , ir Eyr

1920-Apr 1925

Tyrr 11, ir William (lat r Lord)

M y 1925-Jul 1928

Lind y, ir Ron ld

1929

V n ittart,

jan 1930-jan 19

J

b

-

F

tran , ir William (lat r Lord)

195 -F b 19 7 1957-F

19 2

Klrkpatri k, ir Iv n Hoy r Mill r, ir red ri k lat r Lord Inchyra)

Jan 962-May 9 5 M y 19 5-

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v 1973-

1 75

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ert Oat r Lord)

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ar

49

v 1 5 v

ir R

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n 1938-J n 19

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ir Philip (later Lord)

v 1 75-Apr 1

Apr 1

2-Jun 19

jun 19

-Jun 1

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ir Har ld 1 t r L rd

r -B

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th, ir Paul (lat r L rd)

nhill , ir D ni

Brim low, ir Thorn

Oat r Lord)

P lli r, ir Mi ha l A land,

1

lat r Lord)

ir Antony

W ri ht, ir Patri k Oat r L rd)

jun 1991-Jul 1 9

illmor , ir D vid later L rd)

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, ir john

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1997-Jan 20 2 jan 2

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J y,

ir Mi ha 1

55

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Th author wish to thank the Master and Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge for the p rmis ion to reproduce extracts from an interview with L rd Gillmor conducted under the auspice of the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme (DOHP 8). We would also like to thank Sir Michael Palli r GCMG for allowing us to u e extracts from his interview within the am programme (DOHP 37).

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57