HMT Permanent Secretaries Seminar Series 2022
Charles Trevelyan, the Irish famine and the birth of the modern civil service
Dr Charles Read, University of Cambridge
Thursday 8 September 2022
Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury 1840-59, is usually treated by historians as either a hero or a villain. In Britain and the Commonwealth he is often seen as the hero who established the modern civil service’s values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. In Ireland, however, he is widely seen as the British official who presided over the Treasury’s parsimony during the Irish famine of 1845 and 1853, becoming a folk villain that Irish nationalists love to hate. Since Jenifer Hart’s and Cecil Woodham-Smith’s work in 1960s, he has been described as a Whig ideologue, an austere political economist obsessed with laissez-faire and the person who was not simply director, but architect and dictator, of the government’s mean-fisted relief policy.
But who is the real Trevelyan of history rather than myth? What were the intellectual influences acting upon him and the Treasury at the time? Is it possible to reconcile the view of him as a villain in Ireland and as the founder of the modern civil service in Britain? This talk uses the latest research on Trevelyan’s career to argue that his experience of the Irish famine played a critical role in the modernisation of the British civil service. Trevelyan’s policy role during the famine has been exaggerated by historians—he is in fact a red herring rather than a villain—as politicians and Parliament made the critical decisions about famine relief which he was then directed to implement. Even so, Trevelyan’s interpretation of the policy errors made during the famine were an important influence on his subsequent reforms at the Treasury and the wider civil service in the 1850s and 1860s. The Irish famine’s legacy lives on very notably in the institutions of the modern British state.
Sir Warren Fisher and the interwar British economy, 1919-1939
Professor Eunan O’Halpin, Trinity College Dublin
Thursday 13 October 2022
This presentation discusses the role of Sir Warren Fisher (1879-1948) as Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and Head of the Civil Service from 1919 to 1939, with particular reference to economic, financial and industrial issues. My overall argument is that, while Fisher never claimed to be a financial or economics expert – although he had made his name in the backwater of the Inland Revenue from 1903 to 1919, and so clearly knew a lot about taxation – he was a robust and influential champion of colleagues who specialised in these areas. He took over a department in 1919 which had just been restructured by Sir John Bradbury along lines which gave three ‘Controllers’ of Finance, Supply Services, and Establishments, exceptional autonomy. People such as Sir Basil Blackett and Sir Otto Niemeyer were not disposed to defer to higher administrative authority, while in his own quiet way Sir Richard Hopkins was later to prove equally sure-footed. In one key area – the financing and direction of rearmament from 1934 onwards – Fisher used the authority of the Treasury to argue for expenditure and choices well beyond what his specialists may have thought prudent.
The discussion is largely based on research completed four decades ago for my PhD (1982) and resulting book Head of the Civil Service: a study of Sir Warren Fisher (London, 1989). It draws both on archival work and on interviews and correspondence with old Treasury hands such as Sir Edward Playfair and Sir Thomas Padmore who made their names on the finance and economics side of the Treasury in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as others such as Sir John Winnifrith, Sir George Dunnett and Sir Robert Fraser (who joined the Treasury as long ago as 1913).
Sir Douglas Wass and the end of the postwar settlement (draft title)
Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court and Sir Nigel Wickes
Wednesday 9 November 2022
A panel event discussing Sir Douglas Wass and HM Treasury in the 1970s and early 1980s.