Direct-Entry Recruitment to the Administrative Class

Abstract

The role of the leading Civil Servant in the departments of the Regulatory State was a modest one compared with the complex tasks that face the modern administrator. The departments of the period were too small, and their duties were too simple, either to create difficult managerial problems, or to demand the employment of specialists other than small groups of lawyers and inspectors. The contemporary administrators did not need to have qualities of initiative, drive and organising ability: the work came to them, thrown up by the working of the various regulations, and in the form of the parliamentary needs of the Minister. The leading Civil Servants of the period were the socially acceptable personal aides of Ministers who, like themselves, led a leisurely existence until the pace of political activity speeded up after the turn of the century. Whether a graduate Higher or First Division was really needed by the Service before the 1890s has already been questioned.