The British Civil Service and the War Economy. Bureaucratic Conceptions of the ‘Lessons of History’ in 1918 and 1945
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11005107 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J M Lee (0000-0003-3490-7754, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1980 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Pages | 183-198 |
| Publication date | 1980-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0080-4401 • E-ISSN: 1474-0648 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3679008 |
| OpenAlex | W2082998272 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
Sir Edward Bridges, when he was trying in 1952 to guard against the dissolution of an official inquiry into economic organization which he hoped would establish a set of principles for civil servants to follow, sent a minute as Head of the Civil Service to the Cabinet Secretary which included a powerful rhetorical question: ‘If those of us who have lived all our working lives in Whitehall, and have studied the Whitehall organization, give up as hopeless all attempt to reform it from inside, then what hope is there of any reform in our time?’ In the context of Winston Churchill's return to power in October 1951, Bridges was implying that the new Prime Minister had unilaterally imposed his own conception of Cabinet organization on his official advisers, and ignored their claim that they could effectively design what was required. Churchill had in some sense broken a convention that senior civil servants were primarily responsible for the official side of what they called ‘the centre of the machine’
Bureaucracy · Cabinet (room · Civil servants · Civil service · Convention · Guard (computer science · Peacetime · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Prime minister · Public service · Rhetorical question · Spanish Civil War · History · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Public Administration
The Visible Hand
Sir Warren Fishe and the Public Service
The Civil Service
Advising the Cabinet—the Committee of Civil Research and the Economic Advisory Council
Haldane and the Machinery of Government
The Machinery of Government1
John Anderson. Viscount Waverley
Memoirs of a Public Servant
The Economic Effects of the Two World Wars on Britain
Arms and the Wizard
The Erosion of State Intervention in Britain, 1917-24
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |