I recently discovered Yes Minister, and one thing I notice is that the career civil servant, Sir Humphrey, appears to be of a distinctly higher social background than his boss, the politician Hacker. (Though I don’t think his “Sir” is an inherited baronetcy; probably he was knighted as one of those honours that “come up with the rations” in the civil service.) I know in times past in Britain, all government jobs above a menial/clerical level would go to the gentry as a matter of course. (Like the Tite Barnacles family in Dickens’ Little Dorritt, who defend their positions in the Circumlocution Office like a baron defending his fief.) Is that still the case? What effect has it had on the institutional culture of the civil service in Britain? (In the U.S., I assure you, civil service has no upper-class cachet and never has, with the possible exception of the foreign service.)
The current head of the Civil Service is Gus O’Donnell. He doesn’t seem to have come from a particularly privileged background, more a “boy done good” one. The relationship between Sir Humphrey, Hacker and Bernard is worth following though, all the the way through Yes, Prime Minister.
I suppose part of the issue is that the managerial class would have had a university education. Typically that would be upper class or upper middle class, or some really smart cookie; that sort would understand they had to fit in and butt-schmooze the ones who made promotion decisions, so they were less likely to flout their crassness. In a way that’s no different than middle management in bureacratic corporations of North America, where a university degree, any degree, was a prerequisite for promotion beyond a certain level. Plus, the Ox-bridge types were probably a very self-serving clique-ey bunch.
The politician, of course, is a member of parliament and his need is to appeal to the people of his riding not some civil service bigwig. If it’s a strong working class riding, he would be the sort who can chat up the locals while playing darts and quaffing a brew rather than discussing polo while sipping cognac or a martini.
Of course, this is set in the mythical 70’s or early 80’s IIRC, where a lot of the civil servant higher-ups would be career types going back to the 50’s when class mattered. Today I’m sure things are a bit omre egalitarian. Oddly, I don’t think I’ve seen an episode of the show yet.
From what I know of my family, Senior Civil Servants were universally Public School and Oxbridge educated, but that doesn’t necessarily mean fantastically privileged. My own Grandfather (a senior Civil Servant who had among other things and OBE) came from a long line of Anglican Priests and attended a Minor Public School and Oxford University, but AFAIK (except by marriage to my Grandmohter) wasn’t relaed to anyone who had any sort of a title.
I think generally speaking a lot of Senior Civil Servants were what would’ve been called Upper-Middle Class.
I was thinking of Sir Humphrey’s background as, not necessarily titled, but gentry – the class of which the titled aristocracy is but a subset. (I understand it still exists in some form, though any clear distinction from the non-gentry upper-middle class has faded.)
The British Civil Service was (and still is) based mostly on merit. The entrance was through competitive exams. Now it is true that the Oxbridge and public school crowd dominated (and to an extent might still do), but being Oxbridge and Public school was not necessarily equivalent to being from an upper class background, there were many people from poorer backgrounds who managed to go to a Public School and then Oxbridge.
Also, class mobility (despite the popular depiction) is also there. Sir Humphrey could have been from a working class background for all we know, but by the time we see him, he is titled , employed in a gainful profession and is influential at the highest reaches of government, to the ordinary person, he is going to reek establishment.
As far as the accent and title are concerned, again, no certain indication of background, I believe that Knighthoods were a given when you reached a certain rank in the Civil Service (at one time Lt Gens and above were given knighthoods in the Army, not sure if that is still the case and to this day, High Court Judges are given a knighthood upon appointment.) and as far as the accent goes, until fairly recently, you were expected to adopt RP in certain professions.
Very true. class and money is no real bar to success in the civil service or politics in general. Looking back over the last 10 PM’s we only see two that have come from money and privilege.
BrainGlutton writes:
> In the U.S., I assure you, civil service has no upper-class cachet and never has,
> with the possible exception of the foreign service.
The C.I.A. was well known in its early years for having a substantial amount of people from old money/prep school/Ivy League backgrounds.
One of the major differences between the US and UK wrt to the Civil Service, was that in the former Service was based upon patronage, while this was not the case in the latter (especially from 1800’s onwards). Also, the Civil Service offered great opportunities in the UK especially in the days of the empire; you could get posted to far flung corners and essentially run a/big part of a colony. This obviously attracted interest and made it competitive.
One could however argue that O’Donnell is the exception, or, perhaps more fairly, an indication of change. All his predecessors as Cabinet Secretary since 1945, including Sir Humphrey;), had attended public schools and then Oxbridge, whereas O’Donnell did not go to a public school and only went to Oxford as a postgraduate. The old stereotype on which Yes, Minister was playing was largely true at the time.
The point however is that, while it is true that the aristocracy and the landed gentry were vastly overrepresented in the student populations at Oxford and Cambridge, they were always during the twentieth century outnumbered in absolute terms by the sons of the professional upper-middle classes. In fact, the group that was probably most overrepresented was the sons of Anglican clergymen, just like These are my own pants’s grandfather.
So, by favouring recruits from Oxbridge, the civil service naturally enough tended to favour not the aristocracy and the landed gentry, but the upper-middle classes. One postwar Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, was the son of a poet (albeit the Poet Laureate) and another, Sir Robert Armstrong, the son of a musician (albeit the Principal of the Royal Academy of Music). Moreover, students of whatever background who had got into Oxbridge less on the basis of grand connections and more on sheer intellectual ability tended to just the type who thrived in the civil service.
AK84 writes:
> One of the major differences between the US and UK wrt to the Civil Service,
> was that in the former Service was based upon patronage, while this was not
> the case in the latter (especially from 1800’s onwards). Also, the Civil Service
> offered great opportunities in the UK especially in the days of the empire; you
> could get posted to far flung corners and essentially run a/big part of a colony.
> This obviously attracted interest and made it competitive.
That’s interesting. In what sense is it a reply to my post?
I’ll respond. The CIA evolved from the wartime OSS. The OSS, as a military intelligence service, was not civil service in any form. A couple of name changes later, the CIA emerged as part of the National Security Act of 1947 that overhauled the military, created the Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and lots of other stuff that included intelligence, which was thought of as military in all but legality.
The CIA was technically civilian, but calling it civil service is a misapplication of the term. Especially in the early years when the separation from it and the military was literally paper thin. Might as well call the SEALs civil service.
Sorry, meant to reply to BrainGlutton’s post.
Many of the key points have already been covered, but to recap:
[ul]
[li]Entry to the British Civil Service has been based on ‘Fair and Open Competition’ since 1855. Historically, this competition was largely conducted in the same manner as Oxbridge exams, so those who did well at Oxbridge exams also did well in the competition to join the Civil Service. I’ve seen at least one historian argue (sorry, no cite) that the Oxbridge teaching and exam system was actually based around the requirement for civil servants to rapidly master a specialist area and concisely summarize it for Ministers in limited time.[/li][li]Education is linked to, but not synonymous with, class. Sir Humphrey himself is probably from a better social background than Hacker (as we know that his parents sent him to Winchester, a very distinguished public school) but you would not necessarily be able to tell an upper-middle class person with a public school and Oxbridge education from a working-class person who attended a good grammar school or won a scholarship to a good public school, followed by Oxbridge. As a number of people above have pointed up, properly upper-class people often attended Oxbridge, but often got very poor exam results so would have been unlikely to get into the Civil Service. [/li][li]At the time of the show, the Civil Service was very large indeed - almost a million, if not several million. Most of these civil servants were thus ordinary working people from ordinary working class backgrounds. Sir Humphrey would probably have entered through the Fast Stream, a recruitment exercise intended to select future leaders for the Civil Service. [/li][/ul]
As a GQ answer to the question, you can see at the link below the statistics from the 2010 round of the Fast Stream competition. That will give you some indication of how diverse the Civil Service may be now. As mentioned above, the Fast Stream is a recruitment scheme for university graduates intended to find, select and train those with the potential to reach the top of the Civil Service.
Fast Stream Recruitment Reports on the UK Cabinet Office’s website
Another thing to bear in mind is that characters in British TV shows up to about that time tended to be either very posh, or very “common”. They had this thing called the RADA accent, a refined RP accent that actors were generally expected to be able to reproduce, and if you look back at films and TV from that era it’s amazing how upper-crust even supposedly ordinary characters sounded. It was either RADA, or “cor blimey guv’nor”, with little in between. In the case of Yes, Minister, they all have posh RP accents by today’s standards.
I believe to this day RADA insists upon it’s graduates being able to accomplish a variety of accents, at least British accents.
Sir Humphrey, from a few episodes implied that his was not exactly a posh background, in one episode, when they are talking about the cuts in education aid, he mentioned that he had gone to Oxford on a scholarship.
Certainly, it’s possible that he was from working or lower middle class background. He is very bright, and at the time of his youth, many Public Schools offered scholarships to and were on the lookout for, exceptionally bright students. I knew/know one man, who is a Barrister, a Queens Counsel, has a knighthood, earns tens of millions at the Bar every year, wife is an Earls daughter, he is Tory, speaks RP, is a member of the East India Club. Everything about him says establishment, upper class. Yet, he is from Sheffield (quite proud of it) and mother was a barmaid. He went to Harrow, Oxford and Lincolns Inn, all on scholarships.
He went to Winchester on scholarship.
Interestingly, there were two Offices back in the days of the British Empire responsible for looking after Overseas- the Foreign Office (which handled diplomatic relations with other countries) and the Colonial Office (which handled the Colonies).
Getting into the Foreign Office was fiercely competitive with rigorous exams, interviews, and Standards To Be Met. The Colonial Office was a lot more laid back, taking the view that they needed the right person for the job, and that was more about people skills and communication and being resourceful and so on, so they tended to recruit people more informally from different backgrounds, and did a lot of “word-of-mouth” and “refferal” recruiting.
The thing was, people in the Colonial Office were quite likely to be in the backblocks of some far-flung outpost of the Empire, doing a lot of practical, hands on stuff (often functioning as the local magistrate or something similar), which required a different skillset to someone attending a Diplomatic Function in Vienna.
I was also thinking of the BBC drama A Very British Coup, wherein a real-thing working-class democratic socialist becomes PM, and his chief enemy is a civil servant of obviously aristocratic background.
Don’t know how realistic any part of that is.
What about actual daily speech in the UK? Does anybody speak anything “in between”? Is John Oliver (on The Daily Show) “in between” or is that RP he’s talking?