Reform

Abstract

In 1956 the Foreign Office resolved that MECAS must be livened up. The question was who would do the livening. In me they had for the first time a professional Arabist as Principal Instructor, with by then eight years’ experience of teaching Arabic, still young and fresh. They tinkered with the idea of making me Director. But I knew little or nothing of administration and nothing at all of the Foreign Office, its work, its system or its spirit. The decision was therefore taken by John Henniker-Major, still the Head of Personnel Department (the term Human Resources had not yet been invented; it was a time of widespread literacy), that the Director must come from within the Service and must be of a completely different type from his predecessors.