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HHiissttoorryy NNootteess IIssssuuee 1155 [[JJaannuuaarryy 22000022]]

The Permanent

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

Holders

Foreign & Commonwealth

Office

History Notes

HE PERMAN UNDERSEC YO S ~

A Brief History of the Office and its Holder.

· 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

Edmund Hammond

Foreign Office staff ( c.1861-66)

Lord T enterden

British delegates to the Congress of Berlin

Philip Currie

Lamps without Lamps: Thomas Sanderson

Thomas Sanderson

Charles Hardinge

Arthur Nicolson

The Diplomatic Apprentice: Eyre Crowe

Eyre Crowe

William Tyrrell

v

1

5

6

8

9

11

14

16

19

20

23

24

26

Vl

The For ign Office in th 1930

Robert Vansittart

Al xander Cadogan

William trang with Fi ld Mar hal Montgomery

Ivon Kirkpatri k

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

D ni Gr nhill

Micha 1 P lli r

Ant ny A land

Patri k Wright

David illm r

John C 1

Th P rm n nt nd r- r tary' offic today

JhnKrr

vii

Falls.'

27

28

30

33

35

38

4

42

44

45

46

47

48

49

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 r- cr t ri

and the second or junior Under-Secretary became ver mor cl ly id ntifi d

with the Secretary of State and wa expected to part office when he did. at r in

the nineteenth century, when a succe ion of Foreign cr tari wer p r

Governments found it necessary to have an Under- cr tary in th u 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 Palmers ton, 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 harti t

violence, Addington took this as a challenge to hi seniority. Th 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 ur for chang 1n

personnel policy and recruitment wa 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 n taff

4

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

had to work, and the need for speed and accuracy

in the despatch of business, meant that much

depended on the maintenance of a certain esprit

de corp to which Hammond felt the 'pariah' Edmund Hammond

l )

y

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 gen r ted by th rimean War

(1854-56), subsequent war in urope and pe dier communication ~ rc d

change upon the Office. he political (geographic) divi ion of th fie g in d

in importance; an ssistant Under- 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 · 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 all­

important 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

Lord Tenterden

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 7 6

'occurred to m that it would much

facilitate bu in 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 pt. of

important 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'. In other r p ct r th r

con rvative figur , h

managed to displea e the onservative Prim njamin Di raeli. h

latter s di astrous ceptici m about Ottoman trociti tn ulgaria in 1 7 wa

attributed to the failure of th Foreign ffice to nd him the r 1 vant d patch

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

day 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 Under- cretarie . On of th

Sir Philip Currie, eventually replaced him when in 1889 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 Hay­

Pauncefote 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 well­

Philip urrie

connected. 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

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 hould be employed for

handling non-p litical corr pond nee. 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. either in

11

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 1863-

64, 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· 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

Lamp without Lamp

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

by contrast were irritated by

Sanderson s bureaucratic

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 American D partm nt

without recogni ing ander n

capacity to bring wit an

intellig nc t he dri t of

subj cts. And his pap r' penultimate admonition would 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 · 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 th n h

orne of hi succe or . i appointrn nt a P rm n nt

January 1 94 wa followed ighteen month lat r by

flnal term a ore1gn cretary. ali bury like and r p ct

cr t ry in

r tum r hi

nd r n but pt

14

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

Eyre Crowe, who was then an Assistant Clerk,

he eventually overcame Treasury quibbling Thoma ander on

CJ . 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 ill­

health. 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 Governor­

General 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· 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· 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

Charle Hardinge

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

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 semi­

official 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 · 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

August 1914. But Bertie was reluctant to go, and

Arthur Nicol on

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

The 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 a val 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

Eyre rowe

hel ea demanding hi di mi al h

loaded a pi tol for hi wife prot ction.

All thi wa particularly ironic tnc

rowe con i tent d t rmination t

what he perceiv d a the thr at po d t

Britain' imperial curity by th ill -

defin d but mbiti n f

Wi lh lmin ermany and th pr ur h

a A i tant nd r- cr t ry put n r y

in the umm r of 1 14 t r nge Brit in

al ng id ranc and Ru ia in pp iti n

to rm ny am d [! r him th r pu ti n

f an anti- rm n. In t ct h w v r

rowe r main d enti lly rm n in hi

int 11 ct and methodology. He wa thoroughly imbu d with th id a f rman

hi torian . He devoured the weighty volume of Rank nd in ad ition t th

work of von ybel Treit chke and ichte h r ad th a

Kapital. Wa it any wond r that in Augu t 1 14 h fllt him lf t b f: c

of big force of n tur and [th t] th mu t work th ir w y'. Di ti fie with

what he regarded a the hand-to-mouth diplom cy f

ab ence of planning in Briti h policy-m king rowe had

li bury and the

intr duce

m re hi torical pirit' into the Office. In a p p r f Janu ry 1 5 h tr th

24

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 Elm­

Park 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 Under­

Secretary. 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

suffered a breakdown following the death of his William Tyrrell

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

Robert Vansittart

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 ecember 193 5,

he wa more 'a 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

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 newly­

created 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 AI and r ad an

was adamant that minute hould be kept hort.

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

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 f

policy. Fortunately, with Cadogan, Lord Halifax ( or ign cr tary 7-4 nd

Eden at the helm, the Office maintained a farm r promin nt p iti nth nit h d

done during the Great War. During a conflict which the

Minister Jan Smut once aptly d crib d a war by c

accompanied Eden at the major gath ring f th

d g n

e tabli bing for the PU the po ition of r ving dip lorn ti dvi r. H w

trmly

r bu t

and knowledgeable a loyal coll agu wh would n t i ly u urn t

Churchill's bullying tactic .

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

In conversation with Cadogan in th lat autumn f 1 4 rn t vtn th n w

Mini ter of Labour, urged on him th n d [! r th ffi t tak

30

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 well­

being 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 t­

war 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 · 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 ub equent career had

32

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 Inner Circle (London, 1959).

l vone Kirkpatrick

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

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 wa now an

established member of the Foreign Service and it wa not for the 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 1966-

68 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,

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

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 Whitehall­

wide 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

Michael Palliser

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

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

constitutes the 'national interest' and on the Antony A eland

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 non­

nuclear 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

Patrick Wright

Committee, for example, occurred at least once

a year. Sir Patrick Wright, PUS during 1986-

91, 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'.

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

John Coles

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

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· 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 eland'

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

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.

He rea ert d the PU role as the Foreign Secretary's principal adviser on

foreign affair maintaining that in one of his various gui es he could when on

John err

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

pr umed to hold· but Hardinge,

Van ittart and many of their uccessor

could have described them elve a

uch. The office has evolved and

r main without a job de cription.

r anality and the relation hip

tabli h d b tween the PU , the

cretary of tat and their ubordinate

h a much a political

circum tanc h lp d d t rmin th

fi 1n u nc n p li y. t i n tabl that rr claim d that what ha

him m t nur ha b n £ mal , Firecr t and

im d

th m th-running

c ntributi n t p li y h

ti n o om n to n1or p ition in the ervice the

n w com ut ri d communication y tern and th gras

rna ping ut th tur of the 0 fice. All three relat d to

f th dipl matic m chin upon which the PU s

ry oft n d p nd d. an while th F 0 ha it lf had

u h r intru ion of oth r ov rnm nt D partment into the

m n g m nt t rn 1 aft ir n In rlier p riod , o. 10 has sometime

4

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111' 111 l lu 1 111

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. '

'Th th

Sir Michael Palliser, 1999

m n wh n I a v ream with complet t rror at f d ing it. '

Lord Gillmore's recollections on becoming PUS, 1996

'Th j v ri th p r n

f P rm n nt in my vi with

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. '

Sir John Kerr, 2000

rly t -d y [11.45 a.m.] having an appointm nt m - 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 li th t l n aft r h ha gon hom in hi Roll -R y , I h v t t h .11 bu f r Elm-Park R ad and up off

r ld b f r d aling with th ev ning'

Sir Eyre Crowe on Lord Curzon, c.1919-1924

'T m ny p pl tayin t o lat in th Offic . To do o i not virtu . h

1 v th ffi 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 £700 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 xplain 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 .'

'A hil h n

Sir Thomas Sanderson, 1891

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 ~...,., ... ~ ..... t 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 .'

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 2

Mar 1842-Apr 1854

Apr 1854- ct 1873

ct 1873- p 1882

p 1 2-Apr 18 9

Apr 1 89-D c 1893

Jan 1894-Feb 1906

F b 1906- v 1910

ov 1910-Jun 1916

jun 1916- ov 1920

1920-Apr 1925

M y 1925-Jul 1928

1929

jan 1930-jan 19

J n 1938-J n 19

19 - b 49

F v 1 5

v 195 -F b 19 7

1957-F 19 2

Jan 962-May 9 5

M y 19 5- 19 9

1 9-

v 1973-

73

1 75

v 1 75-Apr 1 2

Apr 1 2-Jun 19

jun 19 -Jun 1 1

jun 1991-Jul 1 9

Au 199 - ov 1 97

1997-Jan 20 2

jan 2 2-

Backhou e, john

Addington, Heruy U.

Hammond, Edmund (later Lord)

Tenterden 3rd Baron Charles Stuart Aubrey Abbott

Pauncefote, ir Julian (later Lord)

Currie ir Philip (later Lord)

ander on, ir Thoma Oat r Lord)

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

icol on, ir Arthur (lat r Lord Carnock)

Hardinge of P nshur t, 1 sr Baron

row , ir Eyr

Tyrr 11, ir William (lat r Lord)

Lind y, ir Ron ld

V n ittart, ir R ert Oat r Lord)

ad gan, ir Al xand r

ar nt, ir Orm

tran , ir William (lat r Lord)

Klrkpatri k, ir Iv n

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

ir Har ld 1 t r L rd

r -B th, ir Paul (lat r L rd)

r nhill , ir D ni lat r Lord)

Brim low, ir Thorn Oat r Lord)

P lli r, ir Mi ha l

A land, ir Antony

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

illmor , ir D vid later L rd)

ol , ir john

K rr, irJ hn

J y, ir Mi ha 1

55

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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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]. Coles, Making Foreign Policy: A Certain Idea of Britain (John Murray, 2000).

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56

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ir I. Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle London, 1959).

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]. Till y and 1 , The Foreign Office (London, 1933).

ir R. Van itt rt The Mit Proce ion London 1958).

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57