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After the transformative crisis of 1914–18, and despite the widespread earlier qualms about Victorian imperialism, most of the administrative leaders who helped to govern inter-war Britain believed that they represented a civilizing force in the world: ‘all my life and all my strength’, as Eric Holt-Wilson declared with staunch sincerity of his work for MI5, ‘were given to the finest cause on this earth – the ennoblement of all mankind by the example of the British race’. There were self-seekers and time-servers, of course, but also efficient, modest men, who took pride in doing the best possible job that they could. Sir Alan Brooke, the most effective Chief of the Imperial General Staff in history and afterwards Lord Alanbrooke, wrote on New Year’s Day of 1944: ‘Heard on the 8 am wireless that I had been promoted to Field Marshal! It gave me a curious peaceful feeling that I had at last, and unexpectedly, succeeded in reaching the top rung of the ladder!! I certainly never set out to reach this position, nor did I ever hope to do so, even in my wildest moments. When I look back over my life no one could be more surprised than I am to find where I have got to!!’43
Such men as Holt-Wilson and Brooke were convinced upholders of values which required the practice in their working lives of such personal virtues as pride in service, individual self-respect and group responsibility. Cynicism was thought a sign of mediocrity. It is easy to scoff that these beliefs covered hypocrisy, selfishness, bullying, prejudice and inefficiency; but many public servants upheld these beliefs, which were at the core of their self-identification and a vital motive in their work. They were rich in the social capital of group loyalty, and therefore rich in trust. Although the British Empire rested on force, and its diplomats exerted coercion, it was the pride of Whitehall that it worked by influence rather than power.
‘Power’, to quote Lord Beveridge, ‘means ability to give to other men orders enforced by sanctions, by punishment or by control of rewards; a man has power when he can mould events by an exercise of will; if power is to be used for the good, it must be guided by reason and accompanied by respect for other men.’ Beside the power of money, exerted by giving or withholding rewards, stood governmental power: ‘making of laws and enforcing them by sanctions, using the instrument of fear’. In contrast, Beveridge continued, ‘influence … means changing the actions of others by persuasion, means appeal to reason or to emotions other than fear or greed; the instruments of influence are words, spoken or written; if the influence is to be for good, it must rest on knowledge’. It was believed that the official integrity and impartiality of men of good influence would not be warped by personal preferences. When Burgess and Maclean disappeared from the Foreign Office in 1951, the former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the Commons that all ministers trusted the neutrality of their officials, and felt sure ‘that the civil service has no part in political views’. His apparent implication was that it was irrelevant if the two missing diplomats – or any of their colleagues – were secret communists, because their partisanship outside the Office could not have tinged decision-making within the Office.44
In 1940 the Home Defence (Security) Executive, newly constituted by Churchill’s War Cabinet to oversee the defence of the nation from fifth columnists and best known as the Security Executive (SE), recommended that a regulation be implemented making it an offence to subvert government authority. This was opposed by Sir Alexander Maxwell, the PUS at the Home Office, as ‘inconsistent with the historic notions of English liberty. Our tradition is that while orders issued by the duly constituted authority must be obeyed, every civilian is at liberty to show, if he can, that such orders are silly or mischievous and that the duly constituted authorities are composed of fools or rogues.’ Maxwell had a first-class degree in politics and ancient philosophy from Oxford, and was married to a Quaker physician: together they gave an annual party for the Home Office charwomen with their sons acting as waiters. He was humorous, gentle, unruffled and a model of upright neutrality who always remembered that Home Office decisions affected, not an undifferentiated mass of citizens, but individual lives, each of which had peculiar problems and potentialities. Maxwell respected, as few officials in his department have done since 1997, ‘historic notions of English liberty’. Activities which showed the authorities as contemptible were not necessarily subversive in Maxwell’s judgement. ‘They are only subversive if they are calculated to incite persons to disobey the law, or to change the government by unconstitutional means. This doctrine gives, of course, great and indeed dangerous liberty to persons who desire revolution … but the readiness to take this risk is the cardinal distinction between democracy and totalitarianism.’45
A description of Algernon Hay, chief of the Foreign Office’s Communications Department during 1919–34, shows the Whitehall ideal personified. Hay mastered ‘the supreme art of making others obey him without knowing they were obedient’, recalled one of his subordinates. ‘He knew how to talk, not merely to those in his own station of life but to everyone, from a royal duke to a scullery maid. He never let anyone down or gave anyone away … true loyalty, such as his, needs qualities of the head as well as of the heart.’ Hay and his kind inculcated an esprit de corps that had admirable elements. What distinguished the Office in 1936, so Gladwyn Jebb recalled, ‘was an intellectual liveliness and complete liberty, inside the machine, to say what you thought and press your own point of view, provided that outside you were reasonably discreet about the official line’. No one questioned the motives – as opposed to the judgement – of colleagues in public service, or impugned their loyalty. Colleagues ‘regarded themselves as a band of brothers who trusted each other … the great thing was that all, however junior, would express an individual view which, if it was intelligently voiced and to the point, might come up to the Secretary of State himself’.46
The fact that senior members of the Diplomatic Service were classically educated has been condemned by later generations, but it had advantages. ‘Latin is a thrifty language and demands a keen eye and ear for the single word which contains so much,’ as John Drury has written. Latinists were invaluable in finding and making sense of the key words embedded in the evasive rigmarole of diplomatic exchanges: trained too in detecting fallacies, making distinctions between major and minor propositions, and giving clarifications in eloquent, impartial prose. A tone of festive irony was not inimical to these exacting standards. Junior officials who were verbose, or offered fallacious reasoning, found that their seniors could be crushing. Ivone Kirkpatrick, who joined the Western Department of the Office in 1919, had his draft papers returned with cutting comments: ‘rejected with contumely’; ‘this seems to me the bloody limit of blatant imbecility’. On one occasion Kirkpatrick was telephoned by the PUS, Sir Eyre Crowe, about a draft memorandum. ‘Either you do not mean what you say, in which case you are wasting my time,’ Crowe snapped at him, ‘or you do mean it, in which case you are writing rot.’ With that, Crowe put down the receiver. He was anxious that his young staff would not be disillusioned by exposure to politicians. When Lloyd George asked that a junior official should attend meetings of a Cabinet committee, Crowe demurred: ‘if young men from the Foreign Office go to Cabinet committees, they will learn what Cabinet ministers are like’, Crowe warned.47
These vivacious exchanges were enabled in the Office and other departments of state by an admirable tool of orderly, discriminating administration: the circulating file. All but ultra-secret dispatches, telegrams and incoming letters went first to the most junior official in the responsible department, who read the document, wrote a minute (that is, a comment or preliminary recommendation) and perhaps made annotations. Then the document would rise through the hierarchy, with each official adding comments, exploring alternatives, adding emphasis or making retractions, in order to improve the recommendation. Having started at the bottom, the file would finally reach the Secretary of State. Evidence and arguments were sieved, weighed, evaluated and refined like rare metals. In some ways the ministries resembled the court of a Renaissance humanist monarch in which learned experts proposed, replied, explained,
