ABSTRACT
The period between 1916 and 1956 may be seen as the apogee of the ‘NorthcoteTrevelyan’ ideal. It opened with the belated establishment of a central machine for the effective exercise of political and administrative power.1 The Cabinet Secretariat was established in December 1916 formally to record and monitor the implementation of Cabinet decisions for the fi rst time. Then in 1919 the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury was offi cially recognised as Head of the Civil Service, with explicit responsibility for the structure, pay and conduct of ‘His Majesty’s Civil Establishments’. Building on these reforms the Service, by common consent, enjoyed its fi nest hour with the orchestration of the War effort between 1939 and 1945. ‘We have in Britain’, concluded a 1947 Fabian study, ‘what is probably the best civil service in the world.’2 The ‘golden age’ then concluded with the retirement of Sir Edward Bridges as Head of the Civil Service. He has justifi ably been described as ‘the twentieth-century incarnation of the Victorian ideal’; and his retirement was swiftly followed by the Suez debacle, which fatally undermined both within and outside government the conventional morality and respect for authority upon which that ideal was based.3
