`Not quite a gentleman': the Desk Diaries of the Assistant Private Secretary (Appointments) to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1899-1915. (Notes And Documents).

THE process of recruitment to Britain's former overseas civil services has been at the centre of a number of critical studies in the post-colonial period, to a degree rarely attained during the age of empire. (1) In the case of the Colonial Service, the focus of this article, the turning-point in recruitment came in 1930 with the publication of the report of the Warren Fisher committee. (2) This effectively terminated the patronage system in colonial appointments, (3) a practice pilloried as long ago as 1848 (a bare decade after the Colonial Service was established) by William M. Thackeray in the satirical account in his novel Vanity Fair of how Colonel Rawdon Crawley was appointed (and neatly exiled) to the governorship of the well-named Coventry Island by the intrigues of Lord Steyne, and echoed twenty years later in Anthony Trollope's novel about Colonial Office patronage, Phineas Finn. (4)

Scholars working on the patronage system within the Colonial Office have to date directed their attention to the Patronage Original Correspondence files (P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice] CO 429) and the Patronage Register of Correspondence (CO 430). (5) These cover the period 1867 to 1919, with the break of 1870-1881 partially filled in CO 378. (6) This article supplements these standard public sources with a fresh, private archival resource for the study of the praxis of Colonial Service recruitment in the opening decade of the twentieth century. This is the Desk Diaries of the Assistant Private Secretary (Appointments) to the Secretary of State for the Colonies between 1899 and 1915. (7) His main business was, in the comprehensive definition of one of them, `the recruitment of the Colonial Service'. (8)

These diaries record, in frank and--in the event--decisive language, the immediate judgemental impression made by enquirers (not yet always advanced to the status of applicants) who called at the Private Office of the Colonial Secretary in Downing Street to ask about the possibility of a job in the Colonial Service; others got no further than the preliminary visit to the Private Secretary's office. By nature an item of personal rather than public record, the Desk Diaries as a class did not find their way for deposit in the Public Record Office, though, expectedly and as Kubicek's citations indicate, some of the writers' opinions ended up on the subsequent Patronage files as an integral part of the ultimate `Submission' of candidates to the Secretary of State. (9) Yet they notably supplement, and at times enliven, the documentation in CO 429 and 430 as primary evidence of the Colonial Office patronage system in action at the grass roots, in first-time appointments. This is patronage at the everyday level, well below the less palpable but equally efficacious atmosphere of patronage at work in the upper reaches of the Colonial Office through, say, a direct acquaintanceship with or a ministerial approach to the Secretary of State (10) or by the quiet dropping of a name to a senior CO official or an approving nod at one mentioned at luncheon in a Pall Mall club. For despite a commonplace assumption, not all patronage over appointments was--or could possibly be-conducted by the direct involvement of the Secretary of State. At the basic entry level of junior Colonial Service appointments it was taken care of, officially, by his patronage staff. As Kubicek has pointed out, while the Colonial Secretary could himself handle the appointment of some thirty governors, `he was unable to concern himself, except very cursorily, with some 250 to 300 lesser officials where selection and promotion depended on his patronage'. (11) In accordance with Colonial Office convention, that responsibility for first appointments was delegated to his private secretaries, leaving the highest offices like governor, chief justice and colonial secretary as what the insider Sir Charles Jeffries called `proper objects for the exercise of patronage by the Secretary of State'. (12)

Yet the practice of `patronage' sought to distance itself from the concept of `influence'. Even after World War I the CO's public guidance on how to apply for a Colonial Service appointment warned, in unambiguous tones, that `attempts to influence the Secretary of State's selection through Members of Parliament or other persons who are not personally well acquainted with the applicant are useless, and will be regarded as indicating that the applicant himself does not consider his qualifications sufficiently good to justify his appointment on his own merits'. (13)

The desk diaries archive now accessible consists of fourteen volumes of government-issue engagement diaries (a half page every day) for the years 1899, 1902-1912, 1914 and 1915. Apart from the first, the diary supplied in the early years was the T. J. and J. Smith's Post Diary No.4B, costing three shillings and duly stamped `supplied for the Public Service'. (14) Each contained numerous pages of advertisement, postal and other `official' information. In many cases the pages are interleaved with pink blotting paper. The Secretary of State's Private Office at the turn of the century consisted of a Private Secretary along with several Assistant Private Secretaries, all (or, gradually, all but one) of them being patronage appointments themselves. (15) One of them has related how, at the age of 23, he came into the post through a telegram from the Assistant Private Secretary to Lord Crewe at the Colonial Office, Charles Clay, telling his Balliol friend that `If you …