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From Office-Holding to Civil Service: the Genesis of Modern Bureaucracy The Prothero Lecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2009

Extract

One of the historian's most difficult tasks is to distinguish between mere alterations of idiom, fashion or expression, and substantive changes of attitude and behaviour from one epoch to another. Efficient reforming ministers and officials can be found at work in English central government in (I should guess) every century from the twelfth (if not earlier) to the twentieth. Yet are these men and their achievements as important in explaining the development of administration as technological innovations such as new kinds of paper, the printing press, shorthand writing, the typewriter and the duplicating machine, and finally the telephone and its electronic successors? The most characteristic features of bureaucracy in the everyday, commonsense usage of the term—pen-pushers at desks, jacks-in-office, delays, high-handedness, form-filling, record-keeping, and so on—can of course be found many centuries before there was a modern civil service; that is, one with competitive entry examinations, grades, salaries, security of tenure, retirement pensions and the rest. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the description ‘persons in offices’ or simply ‘officers’ was normal, rather than office-holders, while the designation ‘civil servants’ was slow to take hold even during the nineteenth century.

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Research Article
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Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1980

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References

1 See New English Dictionary, ‘Civil Service’, ‘Public Office’, ‘Public Servants/Service’. Young, D. M., The Colonial Office in the Early 19th Century (London, 1961), pp. 8, 163Google Scholar, gives the earliest known use of the term ‘civil service’ from a Treasury letter of 1816; Blackstone's well-known definition of an office as ‘a right to exercise a public or private employment, and to take the fees and emoluments thereunto belonging’ is quoted in Cohen, E. W., The Growth of the British Civil Service 1780–1939 (London, 1941; repr. 1965), p. 20, n. 1.Google Scholar

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13 Or from 1759 if his time as Private Secretary to Lord Halifax, then President of the Board of Trade, is excluded.

14 The Memoirs of Richard Cumberland (1st edn., London, 1806), p. 291Google Scholar. Before this, when Lord Hillsborough's influence had secured him the Clerkship of the Reports in the Office of Trade and Plantations (after his breach with his original patron, Halifax), Cumberland records that Pownall did most of the work, so leaving him freer for his literary pursuits.

15 Besides general histories of the Royal Navy, see Wickwire, F. B., ‘Admiralty Secretaries and the British Civil Service’, Huntington Library Qtrly., xxviii (19641965), 235–54Google Scholar; Baugh, D. A., British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965)Google Scholar; Crimmin, P. K., ‘Admiralty Relations with the Treasury, 1783–1806: The Preparation of Naval Estimates and the Beginnings of Treasury Control’, The Mariner's Mirror, liii (1967), 6372CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘The Financial and Clerical Establishment of the Admiralty Office, 1783–1806’, ibid., lv (1969), 299–309; Haas, J. M., ‘Royal Dockyards: The Earliest Visitations and Reforms, 1749–1778’, Hist. Jnl., xiii (1970), 191215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Naval Administration 1715–50, ed. D. Baugh (Navy Ree. Soc., vol. 120, 1977)Google Scholar; Webb, P. L. C., ‘The Rebuilding and Repair of the Fleet, 1783–93’, Bull. Inst. Hist. Res., 1 (1977), 194209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gradish, S. F., ‘Wages and Manning: the Navy Act of 1758’, Eng. Hist. Rev., xciii (1978), 4667CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There are many, earlier articles in the Mariner's Mirror still of relevance. Of the older works, Robinson, C. N., The British Fleet (London, 1894)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hamilton, R. V., Naval Administration … (London, 1896)Google Scholar, are among the most useful; also Briggs, J. Y., Naval Administration … 1827–1897 (London, 1897).Google Scholar

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18 See The Manning of the Royal Navy: Selected Public Pamphlets 1693–1873, ed. J. S. Bromley (Navy Rec. Soc., vol. 119, 1976).Google Scholar

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24 He had paid the whole of it by 11 August (Peter, 7th Lord King, The Life of John Locke (2 vols., London, 1830)Google Scholar, ‘Notes of Domestic and Foreign Affairs during the last years of the reign of George I and the early part of George II’ [by Peter, 1st Lord King], appended to vol. II).

25 D.N.B., art. ‘Peter 1st Lord King’ (no specific source is given; this is not mentioned in his ‘Notes’).

26 None had been sold within the times of the then holders, though some officers were reluctant to disavow a theoretical right to such venality; the Usher denied that he had sold the three places in his gift, but said that his own position had been purchased (Parliamentary Papers, Reports from Commissioners, 1810, IX, pp. 125–72).Google Scholar

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36 And the alcoholic father of another popular radical, Richard Carlile: see D.N.B., art. ‘Carlile’; Cole, G. D. H., ‘Richard Carlile’Google Scholar, Fabian Pamphlet, 1943, repr. in Writers and Rebels, ed. Katanka, M. (London, 1976)Google Scholar. The sources on Paine and Burns are sufficiently well known. In the earlier eighteenth century note also John Warburton, the Yorkshire antiquary, afterwards a herald (D.N.B., art. ‘Warburton’).

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