ABSTRACT
Metropolitan Structures e Colonial O ce was created in the mid-1850s when the War and Colonial Department was divided in to two departments. It was a comparatively small department in Whitehall; in 1903 it had a sta of 113, by 1935 this had grown to 372 and by 1939 it had reached 450. Colonial O ce sta belonged to the United Kingdom Civil Service and, unlike the developing Colonial Service, appointments were based on competitive examinations. In 1907 a separate Dominions O ce was created within the department to deal with the a airs of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the four self-governing South African colonies. ese ‘white dominions’ received their own Secretary of State and Dominions O ce in 1925.1 However, the positions of Secretary of State for the Colonies and Secretary of State for the Dominions were rst held by di erent people in 1930 and in theory all but the most senior sta in the two departments were interchangeable until a er the Second World War. is should have led to a close relationship between the two departments; however, this was not the case.2 As the late Imperial and Commonwealth historian Nicholas Mansergh, who had previously worked in the Dominions O ce, reminisced in the 1950s ‘between these two departments, divided geographically only by the width of a Whitehall quadrangle, there was surprisingly little contact and a marked di erence of outlook’.3
