Part 1: Why on earth did I join the civil service? The job of the civil servant is not the most glamorous career choice, yet it is an essential role in a much bigger purpose - and it allowed me to spend over 16 years abroad travelling to 28 countries on 3 continents.
Why on earth did I join the Civil Service?
In my last year at University, like all my contemporaries, I had to decide what I wanted to do after I had graduated. We were in the early sixties. There was full employment, so there was no question of not finding work. My criteria were:
I wanted to use my French;
I wanted to work abroad;
I would prefer not to spend most of my time in an office.
I soon realised that there was something missing there: work as a Parisian dustman would meet all the criteria!
I went along to the University Appointments Board. The man in charge suggested the Home Civil Service. My response was a resounding “No”. What about the Foreign Office? That appealed, but, as a village blacksmith’s son, I didn’t think I came from the right background. “You won’t get in if you don’t apply” came the reply.
So I sent off for the forms. In the same pack, one could apply for the Administrative Class of the Foreign Office, the Home Civil Service and the Northern Ireland Civil Service, as well as an intermediate level called the Special Departmental Class, which was a graduate entry level for the Post Office, the Inland Revenue and the Ministry of Labour. I went through the procedures for all of these, which included a degree level plus examination (seven papers) which I took immediately after my final degree examination. I also applied for the Executive Class (A-level entry). I went for an interview for the Special Departmental Class. On my original application form I had put my choice as
1. Post Office;
2. Inland Revenue; and
3. Ministry of Labour.
On the long train journey down from Manchester to London for the interview, I looked at my choice again and decided that I would prefer the Ministry of Labour to the Inland Revenue and told them so at the interview.
The allocation of places was made on a competitive and strictly statistical basis, based on the examinations and interviews. When the results came I didn’t have enough marks for the Administrative Class or the Post Office, but I did have enough marks for both the Inland Revenue and the Ministry of Labour. So, if I had not changed my mind on the train, I would have become a Tax Inspector!
I received the results while I was working in a colonie de vacances at Belley in France. In the meantime my options for employment had been narrowed down to
An international salesman for Bata shoes;
A Management Trainee at an insurance company in Manchester;
Executive Officer in the Ministry of Power; and
A Cadet in the Ministry of Labour.
I had already turned down a place at Manchester for a Teaching Diploma. I decided to join the Ministry of Labour and was ‘posted’ to Nottingham Employment Exchange as a trainee.
Life on (the other side of) the dole: 1 - Nottingham
I started work at the Midlands Region Staff Training Centre in Birmingham on 22 October, 1962. I feared that my career in the Civil Service might be short. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in full swing and there was a real risk that the Americans and Russians would start throwing nuclear bombs at each other with catastrophic consequences for everyone. Fortunately, there were some cool heads in the White House, who found a way out of the crisis.
Three days later, I went to Nottingham, for a five month training programme, where I did all the clerical and sub-clerical work that I was going to have to supervise later on. For the first six weeks, I worked on the Men’s Employment Section – finding unemployed people jobs. As part of my training I went on a number of training courses in Birmingham. On the first of these, I met Geoff Davies, with whom I’m still in contact. (I next met him in a dance hall in Walsall and he invited me to join the Civil Service Sports Club in Wolverhampton, where I used to play table tennis and badminton. In 1968, I went to Wolverhampton as a Deputy Manager and Geoff became Finance Officer.)
Before I started work I had had four or five weeks kicking my heels, while the formalities were sorted out. However, towards the end of November, the Finance Officer came to me and said that I had three days leave, which I had to take before the end of the month. I said I didn’t want them. Five minutes later, his boss, Wilf Tyas, came down to see me and said: “You’ve bloody well got to take them – the unions have fought hard for this and we don’t want people not taking them”.
There was a good atmosphere in the Nottingham office. Having been a student and often staying at the University late into the evening, I was quite shocked to find that by twenty past five in the evening the office was deserted and everyone had gone home. The exception was Fridays, when Unemployment Benefit was paid until six o’clock (for those who had recently found work). After that a number of us (all male, I think) retired to The Royal Children, a very old and substantial pub, about 300 yards from the office. Most stayed there until closing time, but I had to leave before a quarter to ten to catch the last bus to my home village of Wymeswold, twelve miles away. I often had difficulty keeping awake on the bus and, on one occasion, I woke up in Loughborough five miles past my destination.
In 1962 unemployment had already become quite high for the post-war period, but still well below 2% in Nottingham. In December, I transferred over to the Unemployment Benefit section to learn the mysteries of computation and payment of that benefit. On Boxing Day 1962 a big freeze started, which was to last until March or April the following year. In contrast to other parts of the country, there was very little snow in the Nottingham area, but all the construction workers were laid off and entitled to unemployment benefit.
Previously, unemployed people had been required to sign on Wednesdays and to come in on Fridays to be paid their benefit in cash – normally about £4 a week. The system could not cope with the increased numbers and so additional signing and pay days were introduced on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There was a convention that the same person could not act as pay clerk more than once a week. Consequently, they were scratching around for additional pay clerks and one week they had the bright idea of asking me to do it. I was very slow and had a queue stretching right out into the street. I also had an overpayment of £1 10 shillings, which did not go down very well. They never asked me to do it again!
Life on (the other side of) the dole: 2 - Walsall
In February 1963, I was told (there was no discussion or negotiation) that I was being “posted” like a letter to Walsall Employment Exchange. Having found it on the map, I made my way by train to Walsall on the first of March. There was thick snow on the ground. "Digs" had been arranged for me with Helen Cooper, who was a nice lady, but a terrible cook.[1]
[1] It was common practice in those days for single men working away from home to take lodgings – bed, breakfast and evening meal, plus full board at weekends – in private houses. Helen Cooper lived with her husband Ron and three children in a pleasant three- or four-bedroomed terraced house about 10 minutes’ walk from the centre of Walsall. She had one other tenant. During my first two years at Manchester University I had lived in similar accommodation. There three of us shared one bedroom, two Laotian students shared a second bedroom, while an older Indonesian student had a single bedroom. In addition, three other students had a flat in the attic!
At Walsall, my job title was “Employment Section Supervisor”. It was a very good job. I was in charge of six staff. Our job was to try to “place” the 2000 people who were unemployed into jobs. I was 23 years old, but looked about 16. Two of my staff were over twice my age and approaching retirement, one was in his thirties and the others were under 21. The size of the section was perfect for a first supervisory job: I was a “manager” – there was little personal performance – but it was manageable. Under the guidance of the Deputy Manager, Don Young, who had been a former staff inspector, I was very strict – much stricter than I would dare to be in later life!
I did not like Walsall all that much, as a place to live, but from a professional point of view, it was ideal. I learned quickly that the people of Walsall did not consider that they lived in the Black Country. Indeed it was remarkably self-contained. It had a population of about 100000. There were only two firms who employed more than 1000 people – Talbots, who made steel tubes and Crabtrees, who made electrical goods. There were several firms employing between 200 and 500 people, mainly in foundries or engineering industries. Walsall had traditionally been a leather town and there were still a few tanneries and many small firms producing leather goods. (They were always short of workers – the jobs were skilled and not very well paid!) Apart from Avery’s factory, making weighing scales, just over the border in West Bromwich, nearly everyone worked in Walsall. Geographical mobility was almost non-existent, to the extent that people in the suburb of Bloxwich did not want to work in the main part of Walsall and vice versa. However, this simplified our task, which was to find workers for the employers in Walsall and to find work for the workers in Walsall.
By the time I went to Walsall, the unemployment situation had deteriorated. We were into the third month of construction lay-offs and the underlying economic conditions were unfavourable. There was talk of half a million unemployed nationally.[2] In those circumstances, it was very difficult to place anyone in employment. Part of my job was to get to know the employers in the town. I had not been there too long, when I went to see the Managing Director of Frosts, a medium-sized company that made electric fires. The winter was over, but the national economic situation was gloomy. He asked me if I had seen the figures for the construction industry (which, of course, I hadn’t). He said that they were beginning to improve and that the rest of the economy would follow. He was right: three years later, Roy Jenkins, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had to take measures to damp down the economy.
[2] I have been unable to check this assertion: I have only been able to find detailed records going back to 1971!
Throughout most of 1963, the employment situation remained difficult, particularly for unskilled workers, who formed the majority of our clients. Towards the end of that year, we received an “order” (a request for workers) from McAlpines for 400 workers to work on the new motorway junction (between the M5 and the M6) that was being built just south of Walsall. This was an unbelievable bonus. From then on the employment situation improved rapidly. As a consequence, until the staff inspectors caught up with us, there was a surplus of staff on the Unemployment Benefit Section. One day, early in 1964, Don Young asked me what I would do, if I had an extra member of staff. I said that the staff I had could cope with the normal work, but an extra person could do development work contacting employers for vacancies, give more publicity to our services and interview all the long-term unemployed. A bright and dynamic young woman called Jenny came to work for me and did all those things. Word soon got round about the interviews and, miraculously, many people found jobs and ceased to claim Unemployment Benefit.
By the summer of 1964, the employment situation had completely turned round and employers were desperately short of labour. The owner of the printing firm next door to the Employment Exchange told my manager, Mr Arnold, one day in my presence, that this country would never be any good until there were ten men for every nine jobs! The situation in the printing industry was very difficult at that time: the trade unions operated a strict “closed shop”, which stifled most changes in working practices.
It was about that time that the Personnel Manager from Avery’s telephoned me to say he was so desperate for labour that he would take on anyone who could walk to the counter. It so happened that the previous week, George Burdett, the supervisor of the Unemployment Benefit Section, had brought the “claims unit” (or file) of an unemployed man to me. This man had been unemployed continuously since the mid-fifties. He asked me if there was anything I could do. With that in mind, I arranged for this man to be sent to Avery’s. The Personnel Manager never spoke to me again. Sometime later my deputy, Lilian Jones, confided in me, with some satisfaction, that the man from Avery’s had told her that he preferred to speak to her, because she understood better what he required.
After two years doing that job, I was told it was time for a change “in the interests of my career”. (How often did I hear that over the next thirty years?”) There had been a staff inspection and it had been decreed that the Unemployment Benefit and Finance Sections would be combined into one post. (The number of unemployed people claiming benefit had fallen from over two thousand to about 250.) I was to occupy this new post. Whereas my previous job was self-contained and easily manageable, this new job was messy. I had two offices, one above the other. The staircase was about thirty yards along corridors from each. The peak time for each was Friday, when Unemployment Benefit was paid. While the inspectors were right, that it did not warrant two full-time people, it was a big job for one.
The staff numbers had been cut right down, so I had to “muck in” with some of the clerical work. I didn’t mind that, because I had learned to do that at Nottingham. There were some difficult computations which had to be certified by a supervisor (i.e. me) but, as I never understood them, I had to take the word of the clerical officer who did. The reduction in staff numbers also meant that, on one occasion – and for the second time in my career – I had to act as pay clerk. I made at least one overpayment and I decided that I was going to get the money back. So, foolishly, one dark Friday evening, I walked round the back streets of one of the poorer parts of Walsall and knocked on a door. An ‘old’ woman, who I assumed was the claimant’s mother, invited me into the living room. There was a coal fire with a metal fire-guard. On the fire-guard were half a dozen unwashed babies’ nappies, hanging out to dry. I didn’t get the money, but I can still remember the stench!
The finance part of the work was interesting, at least with hindsight! Everything was paid in cash. Every night before going home, I had to count the money left in the safe physically. If there was sixpence missing, it had to be found; likewise, if there was sixpence too much, it had to be explained. If, after several hours of searching, it could not be found, an error sheet had to be made. Such sheets were a mark of incompetence and severely frowned upon. The safe had to be locked at all times, when I was not in the room. Don Young, the Deputy Manager, made regular checks of that and random checks of the balance in the safe.
It was my job to estimate the imprest, which was the amount of money we needed to get from the bank each week. During the year I was there, it did not vary very much – between £700 and £800. Again, it was severely frowned upon, if on Friday evening, there was too much money left in the safe. Against that possibility had to be weighed the extreme embarrassment of running out of money. Fortunately, I never heard of that happening to anyone! Every Thursday I had to go to the bank with a colleague. The colleague was not there for my protection, but to make sure I did not run off with the money. We had a taxi and were supposed to vary our time and route. (The latter was difficult, as the bank was only about 500 yards away.) Once we had got the money, it was put in a leather bag. This was locked and chained to my wrist with another lock and key. My colleague had the keys. At that time, the protection of public money was more important than the protection of employees. (I’m pleased to say that policy was reversed some years later.)
I had not been doing these two jobs all that long, when the “Powers That Be” decided that they wanted to send a young woman, who had not successfully completed her probation, to do the Unemployment Benefit part of my job. I was left as Finance Officer, which was less than half a full-time job. Throughout my career, I was always able to see things that needed doing, so I was never left with nothing to do. On the whole I think in that way I was able to make a positive contribution to whatever I was doing. Critics might say that this was a means of avoiding things I did not want to do. For the only time, in my career this ability to find things to do was severely tested, but I still didn’t get round to sorting out the pile of spare keys, which were in the old safe and which Don Young asked me to sort out.
It was during this period that I was asked to go to Darlaston, a few miles down the road, to work as Manager for two weeks: the Manager and his Deputy were both going to be away. (I think the Manager was sick and his Deputy on leave.) The Darlaston office was very small: there were two members of staff, apart from the two who were away. On the other hand, Darlaston was home to one of the largest heavy engineering firms in the Black Country – Rubery Owen. One of the responsibilities of the Manager was to keep on good terms with their Managing Director and I could expect a phone call from him at any time.
I felt quite important being a Manager, but was soon brought down to earth. Normally, in order to prevent fraud, three people needed to be involved in the computation and payment of Unemployment Benefit, but exceptionally this can be reduced to two. The most junior member of staff asked me politely, which part of the computation process – a routine clerical job – I wished to do. When I said I didn’t mind, he explained that if I did one of them, I would have to be pay clerk as well. With my Nottingham experience in mind, I said I would do the other one!
I was disappointed to receive a phone call at the end of the first week to say that they were short of staff at Walsall and I had to go back.
***
During my three years at Walsall, my personal circumstances changed considerably. I had been living there for less than a year, when, on two of my rare trips back to my parents’ home, I met my future wife, Jennifer, who lived in Nottingham. The consequence was that, every Friday evening I caught the blue number 6 Walsall Corporation bus to Sutton Coldfield in order to connect with the Midland Red X99 bus to Nottingham, which, conveniently, passed near to Jennifer’s house. The fifty mile journey took three or four hours! The following day, we took another two buses to go to my parents’ house in Wymeswold – 12 miles in an hour and a half! On Sunday afternoon and evening I made the return journey to Walsall!
I proposed to Jennifer, before she had ever been to Walsall. That may have been a good move on my part, because, when she visited it the following week for the first time, she was not impressed. We married in February 1965 and rented a flat in an old house in Glebe Street, Walsall. It was only about 100 yards downhill from our front door to the office, so I could almost literally roll out of bed and into work.
Away from the coalface
After three years in Walsall, I was posted to the Midlands Regional Office in Birmingham. This was a big region, stretching from Ross-on-Wye in the south and west to Boston in the east and Chesterfield in the north. For planning purposes, there were two regions: East and West Midlands. I was allocated to the Statistics and Regional Planning unit. I was in charge of a section with seven or eight Clerical Officers. Our main responsibility was to collect and collate the unemployment and other manpower statistics for the two planning regions. My team was responsible for the East Midlands and for combining these with those collected by Gerald Bodley’s West Midlands team to produce a Midlands Regional figure. This figure had to be telephoned through to Headquarters in Watford by 5:00 p.m. on a Monday evening. I quickly realised that 100% accuracy was not possible, but I expected 99%. I expected the Clerical Officers to be 90% accurate with their first figure. These were checked and I expected the check to eliminate 90% of the errors.
We were not given expensive equipment. Each Clerical Officer had a large mechanical adding machine. As the main use for such machines in the rest of the Ministry was in Finance Offices, some of these machines were made to add up pounds, shillings and pence. The system for producing the regional unemployment figure usually worked perfectly, without my involvement. However, one evening, after 5:00 p.m., Stan Bates, the man responsible for producing the final figure, was left on his own, trying to make the figures balance. I offered to help. I picked up an adding machine and typed in the figures which he read to me. The result was a regional unemployment total of, something like, 195 pounds 17 shillings and 9 pence!
In July 1966, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, announced severe economic restrictions to damp down the economy, which was overheating and so creating inflationary pressures. These measures had an immediate impact on the car industry, which employed thousands of people in the Midlands at that time. (It also had an impact on my meagre salary, which was frozen at around £1100 per annum gross for two years.) Most factories went on short time, which meant that the workers could claim Unemployment Benefit for the days they weren’t working. I had to produce a daily report for the Deputy Regional Controller, Sandy Cowie.
We had in the office a manual calculating machine, with a handle, which only one or two people knew how to work. For a short time, we were given an electric machine, which did the same things, but made a loud noise. After a few months, I was offered a new machine on a trial basis. This was an electronic calculator, called Anita. It cost £2500, which was just under two and a half times my annual salary and about two thirds of the price we paid for our first house at about the same time. It was a beautiful machine, but was nearly as big as an old-fashioned portable typewriter. It could do exactly the same things as I can do now on the calculator app on my mobile phone!
One of the “Grade 4s” (Higher Executive Officers) was promoted and I had a long spell doing his job. I was expected to get promoted at the next promotion panel, but didn’t. I had to revert to my old job and Dora Hyrnkievitch (I have been unable to check the spelling) was brought in from managing one of the Black Country offices to be my boss. She was a jolly lady and we got on well together.
Every month, there was a Senior Officers’ Meeting, chaired by Sandy Cowie. The participants were all the Grades 1, 2 and 3 in the region (Senior Principal, Chief Executive Officer and Senior Executive Officers – the latter included senior Employment Exchange Managers, covering the whole of the Midlands). The main purpose of the meetings was for the Regional Office staff to provide information which could then be disseminated to all the Employment Exchanges in the region. While I was on temporary promotion, I was secretary for this meeting and I was required to produce the minutes of the meeting, within a very short time frame. The first time I did this, I met the deadline and took a day’s leave the next day. I got a message from Sandy Cowie to go and see him as soon as I got back. When I did so, he told me in no uncertain terms that there were a number of inaccuracies and that I should check the minutes with all the Regional Office speakers before sending them out. That lesson stood me in good stead in future years.
Life on (the other side of) the dole: 3 - Wolverhampton
At the second attempt, I was promoted in the spring of 1968, the spring of (failed) revolutions, in particular in France and Czechoslovakia. Before the results of the promotion panel were announced, Sandy Cowie called me to his office and enquired where I would like to go, if I was promoted. (This was the first time I had ever been consulted on a “posting”!) I said that I didn’t mind, providing that I wasn’t sent to somewhere like Wolverhampton. Asked why I said that, I replied that we had just bought a house in South Birmingham. Wolverhampton was considered to be within daily travelling distance and consequently didn’t qualify for removal expenses. Outcome: I was “posted” to Wolverhampton Employment Exchange as a Deputy Manager responsible for three Unemployment Benefit sections in three different locations, Finance, Redundancy Payments, repayments of Selective Employment Tax and Passports. The journey to Wolverhampton involved a train from King’s Norton to Birmingham New Street and a second train from Birmingham to Wolverhampton. (The train that I often took ended up in Perth, but fortunately I always remembered to get off at Wolverhampton!)
The job was similar in scope to the last one I had at Walsall, but one rung further up the management scale. Since Roy Jenkins’ July measures, unemployment had increased considerably: at £7000, the weekly imprest was ten times greater than at Walsall. All the other procedures were the same, except that it was now me who did the checks and someone else (the Finance Officer, Dave Bryan and later Geoff Davies) who was chained to the money bag during the journey back from the bank.
The Selective Employment Tax had been introduced by the Labour Government to favour employment in manufacturing industry. All employers paid the tax in respect of each employee. Employers in some industries, like transport, had their tax refunded, while those in manufacturing had their tax refunded with a premium. Large sums of money were involved, which it was the responsibility of the Executive Officers in charge to calculate. The classification of employers by industry gave rise to a large number of problems and disputes. A Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) had existed for many years and had been used for statistical purposes, in particular for the annual count of employees in employment. It was a good tool for that purpose, but was nowhere near precise enough to withstand legal challenges over large sums of money.
Manners were very formal in those days. I was “management” and the junior staff all called me “sir”, including women who were thirty years older than me. (Thirty years later, secretaries thirty or more years my junior called me “Jim”, if I was lucky!)
It was in Wolverhampton that I had my first, and possibly most serious brush with the National Press. The first Deputy Manager was on leave and the Manager, Reg. Pike, had asked me if I minded if he took the afternoon off to play golf, leaving me in charge. Wolverhampton had two MPs. Enoch Powell was the right wing Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West and Renée Short was the left wing Labour MP for Wolverhampton North East. Enoch Powell had been a Minister in the previous Conservative Government, but was now best known for his views on (or against) immigration. On the day in question, it was Renée Short, who had made some comments on the radio about the employability of young black people. Staff in local offices were not supposed to speak to the Press. I went to visit one of my Unemployment Benefit Sections which was outhoused in a different part of Wolverhampton. When I got back to the main office, a scruffy reporter from The Sun was firmly ensconced in the office of the third Deputy Manager, who was even less savvy than I was in that situation. He had been talking to the reporter and had said some things that I thought he ought not to have said. I did my best to retrieve the situation and, in fact, the report that appeared the next day was not too bad.
It was normal throughout my Civil Service career, for constituents to write to their MP to complain about perceived mistakes or faults or failures in the system. The MP would then normally write to the Minister and ask for an explanation. An investigation would then follow. Enoch Powell received a letter from a constituent about failures at our Wolverhampton office. (I don’t think the word “alleged” is necessary in this case.) Instead of following the normal cumbersome procedure, the MP sent the letter on to Reg. Pike, with a short polite note, saying that he was sure there must have been a mistake and asking him to look into it. I did not like Enoch Powell’s political views, but I respected the way he handled this matter.
The first Deputy Manager was transferred out of the office, after I had been there for a few months, and I was made deputy until they found someone more experienced to replace him. My only direct responsibilities in this new job were for the secretaries, the switchboard and premises matters, but I also had responsibility for allocating staff to the various sections and the other two offices at Cannock and Bilston in the Wolverhampton area. I did not find it as satisfying as my line management job.
Unlike my first office at Wolverhampton, this office had an outside window with a view. In the foreground was the coal yard for the two railway stations. Then there was the railway line and Wolverhampton Low Level station, followed by another railway line and Wolverhampton High Level Station. In the background were a number of power station cooling towers. This was not a pretty sight and a marked contrast with the view from my next office in Swaziland!
Continued in Part 2: Swaziland