16 - Recruitment in 1945 and ‘Peculiar Personal Characteristics’

Summary

[2019]

In the last months of 1945 two senior British civil servants corresponded about the size, structure and pay of the post-war Sigint organisation that was to become GCHQ, the continuation of the pre-war Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and its greatly expanded wartime version at Bletchley Park. One of the officials, J. I. C. Crombie, was the Foreign Office's Principal Establishment and Finance Officer with the grade of Assistant Under-Secretary of State, the antique title of Chief Clerk, and an annual salary of £1,700. In considering Bletchley's post-war resources he was continuing the Foreign Office's pre-war sponsorship of GC&CS, though unusually for its Chief Clerk he was a home civil servant with a Treasury background and not from the diplomatic service. The other civil servant, A. J. D. Winnifrith, was younger though still quite senior: an Assistant Secretary in the Treasury, on a scale of £1,150–£1,500, who exercised the Treasury's responsibility for controlling Civil Service costs and numbers. They had been to Cambridge and Oxford and had joined the Civil Service through what was then its annual academic competitions, and were fliers rising to the top. Sir James Crombie retired in 1962 after eight years as Chairman of the Board of Customs and Excise; Sir John Winnifrith was Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1959 to 1967 before taking a clutch of post-retirement appointments.

Thus, in their careers they were exemplars of the subsequently maligned mandarins or ‘gifted Oxbridge amateurs’ of the British administrative class, at the top of the Civil Service tree, and were creating a virtually new peacetime organisation in 1945 at a time of extreme national stringency. Bletchley's post-war bid was for 260 ‘officer grade’ staff to replace the 1939 complement of 35, and 750 subordinates replacing 133. (Bletchley's maximum official wartime complement was quoted as 8,902 civilians and military.) The country was economically and financially ruined, with rescue from Marshall Aid not yet on the horizon: food rationing was to continue well into the next decade. The historian coming to this correspondence might therefore expect these standard-issue mandarins to greet Bletchley's proposal with disdain and questioning, penny-pinching and cutting everything by half; but this view could not be more wrong.