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THE RISE OF
MANAGERIAL
BUREAUCRACY
REFORMING THE BRITISH CIVIL SERVICE
LORENZO CASTELLANI
The Rise of Managerial Bureaucracy
Lorenzo Castellani
The Rise
of Managerial
Bureaucracy
Reforming the British Civil Service
Lorenzo Castellani
LUISS Guido Carli
Rome, Italy
ISBN 978-3-319-90031-5 ISBN 978-3-319-90032-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90032-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939730
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
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Cover credit: decisiveimages/Getty Images
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
The Civil Service has been neglected by historians. We know a lot about
the machinations of politicians in most twentieth-century governments.
Yet the role of civil servants, and the Civil Service, is too often neglected.
Peter Riddell, Director of Institute for Government, 2011
Preface
In 1969, the historian Henry Parris published his seminal work

Constitutional Bureaucracy, where he gave account of the changes in
British Central Government from the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury to the middle of the twentieth century, identifying the transition
from a patronage bureaucracy to a constitutional one. Nearly fifty years
later, many other institutional transformations have occurred, marking
the transition from Parris’s constitutional bureaucracy to a new, mana-
gerial bureaucracy that originated from the political, economic, cultural
and social changes that had begun by the end of the seventies. This
work provides the history of that last transformation, which took place
between 1979 and 2007, the period of the Thatcher, Major and Blair
Governments, focusing on the Civil Service, the bureaucracy of the cen-
tral government of the UK.
The period examined is particularly important for this institution
because it represents nearly 30 years of waves of reforms inspired by neo-
liberalism, monetarism and managerialism with the rise of the New Public
Management paradigm (Hood 1991, 1995; Pollitt 1990) and by the
need to answer the fiscal crisis of the state in late 1970s and 1980s and to
manage the pressure on government imposed by the expansion of global
markets, rise of globalisation and 24/7 communication in the nineties
and in the new century (Raadschelders and Vigoda-Gadot 2015). These
reforms informed a cycle that was completed just in the middle of the first
decade of the twenty-first century, and this process crossed different gov-
ernments, prime ministers and parties without losing momentum.
vii
viii Preface
Sources of the Research

It would be helpful here to make a distinction among different types
of sources: legal and constitutional sources, archive sources and other
sources. Legal and constitutional sources are available for the entire
period considered on the sites of the UK Government (www.legislation.
gov.uk) and in the Hansard (Parliament) database (http://www.parlia-
ment.uk/business/publications/hansard/). Archive sources are of differ-
ent kinds: files in the National Archives, Kew and Thatcher Foundation
Archives cover the period 1979–1990. Parliamentary archives (http://
parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing/index.jsp), which consist of par-
liamentary debates, White Papers, Command Papers, parliamentary com-
mittees’ reports and oral evidence, court judgements and Civil Service
statistics (www.ons.gov.uk), cover the entire period considered (1979–
2007), and they are the pillars of this research. There are other sources
no less important, such as civil servants’ diaries, Prime Ministers’ and civil
servants’ biographies and autobiographies, political books of the period,
academic articles, journals, speeches, Who’s Who and Who Was Who,
Civil Service Yearbook, interviews quoted by other authors, Institute for
Government papers and the UCL Constitution Unit database.
Methodological Framework
In terms of methodology, the book has a very strong historical back-
ground (which makes it different from the existing literature), but I will
more thoroughly explain in the introduction some concepts of political
science that I have used as tools to develop my historical analysis, such
as path dependency (Pierson 2004). Furthermore, particular attention
is devoted to British administrative traditions (Painter and Peters 2010),
looking at them in relation to the reforms of the 1980s, 1990s and
2000s. Indeed, the aim of this research is to explain the dynamic of insti-
tutional development of the Civil Service from the Thatcher to the Blair
Governments, giving an account of continuity in administrative traditions
and managerial changes of central government bureaucracy through the
use of legal, public and archive sources. The book can be considered a
mixture of history and public administration, a historical research that
does not abdicate to trace “Weberian models” and to use a methodology
to set up the research and to outline its findings.
Preface ix
As some authors have argued, the British Civil Service can be consid-
ered to be “a case study in path dependency” (Richards 2003), and a
detailed historical analysis of archives and documents seemed to confirm
this theory. From a historical institutionalist perspective, the Civil Service,
and more broadly the British state, can be identified as possessing a path
dependency whose equilibrium has only rarely been disturbed. We can
argue that the British political elite has tended to regard both the con-
stitution and the Civil Service as institutions to be proud of, and thus,
any form of changes should only ever be limited and partial (see Thelen
et al. 1992; Rose and Karran 1994). The central argument of this
research, at methodological level, is that while there have been a num-
ber of periods in the last fifty years in which the British Civil Service has
undergone a process of reform (most notably the 1968 Fulton Report
and from the 1980s onward), the nature of change has been evolutionary
rather than revolutionary. Even when the parties have been elected on
a radical platform—as was the Thatcher Government in 1979 and Blair
in 1997—their period in office has been marked by an unwillingness to
provide a new constitutional settlement that would fundamentally trans-
form the foundations on which both the Civil Service and the state are
legitimised. It is therefore argued here that although in those 30 years
the British Civil Service has undergone structural, cultural and personnel
reforms similar to those experienced by other liberal–democratic states,
the reform process itself has always been constrained by the continued
maintenance of constitutional conventions and administrative traditions
that define Britain’s institutional arrangements. The Westminister model
of government continues to condition the way both ministers and civil
servants operate within the British political system (see Marsh et al.
2001). During the period examined, the different governments reformed
structure, careers and administrative techniques, but their reforms cannot
be regarded as a radical overhaul of the Civil Service they inherited, since
the traditional Westminster model remained intact. Moreover, even if the
governments had a different political colour, their reforms show continu-
ity on both sides: attempting to introduce a managerial culture and new
techniques imported from the private sector and preserving, and reaf-
firming, the institutional/constitutional traditions of the Civil Service.
In parallel, the civil servants reacted to reforms, absorbing and contrib-
uting to introduce new organisational frameworks and to develop new
administrative techniques and reaffirming through a codification process
x Preface
the traditional beliefs and values of their institution. In conclusion, it is

important to recognise the structural context that has constrained the
process of reforming the British Civil Service. The theory advanced in the
mid-1990s by public administration scholars of the “end of the Whitehall
paradigm” may have been overstated. Structurally, much has changed.
But other elements of the Whitehall–Westminster model persist. For
example, as Kevin Theakston (2000: 58) observes, “Senior civil servants
continue to play a vital role at the fulcrum between politics and adminis-
tration by virtue of their expertise in making the system work. Ministers
(Conservative and Labour) do seem to look for and to value the tradi-
tional mandarin skills—of managing the political interface, political nous,
and a thorough knowledge of the governmental and parliamentary pro-
cess.” The point here is that while some elements of the Westminster
model have clearly been eroded, others are still firmly in place, so it may
be premature to write about the death of the Whitehall paradigm.
Indeed, analysis of the historical facts shows that many changes
occurred in the organisation of the Civil Service, the process of manage-
rialisation was settled and implemented, organisation and structure were
reformed, the relationship between ministers and civil servants changed
progressively, but the traditional principles of the Civil Service, such as
access by open competition, meritocratic career, permanency, neutrality,
integrity, impartiality, centralisation and institutional self-government,
mostly persist.
As Peters (1999: 65) notes, “There will be change and evolution,
but the range of possibilities for that development will have been con-
strained by the formative period of the institution.” Thus, even when
reform of Whitehall has occurred, the impact of change has been evolu-
tionary rather than radical. This leads to the conclusion that the reform
of bureaucracy in Britain provides a convincing example of institutional
path dependency. As a leading constitutional historian, Geoffrey Elton
once wrote “True administrative revolutions are rare.” They took place,
he said, “only when the State itself is being refashioned fundamentally.”
Otherwise, public administration “usually develops by slow degrees”
(Elton 1953). Indeed, as I attempt to demonstrate in this work, the
soundness of administrative traditions has turned out to be more resilient
than political discourse.
Rome, Italy Lorenzo Castellani

Preface xi
References
Elton, G. (1953). The Tudor revolution in government: Administrative changes in
the reign of Henry VII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hood, C. (1991). A public management for all seasons? Public Administration,
69(1), 3–19.
Hood, C. (1995). The “New Public Management” in the 1980s: Variations on a
theme. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 20(2/3), 93–109.
Marsh, D., Richards, D., & Smith, M. J. (2001). Changing patterns of govern-
ance: Reinventing Whitehall? Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Painter, M., & Peters, B. G. (Eds.). (2010). Tradition and public administration.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pierson, P. (2004). Politics in time: History, institutions and social analysis.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pollitt, C. (1990). Managerialism and the public services: The Anglo-American
experience. Oxford: Blackwell.
Raadschelders, J. C. N., & Vigoda-Gadot, E. (2015). Global dimensions of public
administration and governance. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Richards, D. (2003). The civil service in Britain: A case study in path depend-
ency. In J. Halligan (Ed.), The civil service systems in Anglo-American coun-
tries. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Rose, R., & Karran, T. (1994). Governing by inertia. Abingdon: Routledge.
Thelen, K. A., Longstreth, F., & Steinmo, S. (Eds.). (1992). Structuring politics:
Historical institutionalism in comparative analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Contents
1 The Civil Service: Definition, Organisation and

Historical Background 1
2 The Rise of Managerialism in the Civil Service:

The Thatcher Years 31
3 Focus on Policy Implementation, Consumer Service

and Marketisation: Civil Service Reform in the Major
Government (1990–1997) 123
4 1997–2007: Coordination, Consolidation and Delivery

in Blair’s Government 161
5 Management and Tradition in the British Civil Service:

Assessing Institutional Development—Issues and
Conclusions 207
Bibliography 233
Index 253
xiii
CHAPTER 1
The Civil Service: Definition, Organisation

and Historical Background
In order to better understand the subject of the book, it would be useful

to give a definition of the British Civil Service. The most widely used defi-
nition of a civil servant is the one proposed by the Tomlin Commission in
1931: “Servants of the Crown, other than holders of political and judi-
cial offices, who are employed in a civil capacity and whose remuneration
is paid wholly and directly out of moneys voted by Parliament” (Cmnd
3909, 1931). The term was first used in the late eighteenth century to
distinguish the covenanted civilian employees of the East India Company
(through which India was governed until 1858) from military personnel.
This use of the adjective “civil” to connote “not military” carried over
into the context of the early nineteenth-century British Civil Service, but
was gradually adopted to convey the crucial distinction between holders
of permanent posts and those whose jobs changed hands when there was
a change of government (Parris 1969).
However, it was not until well into the nineteenth century that polit-
ical and permanent officials clearly emerged as two separate and distinct
species of public servant. Departments remained autonomous and differ-
entiated in their structures and practices. In such circumstances, the term
“civil servant” and any notion of a coherent entity called a “civil service”
had and could have had no useful meaning. Even after the major reforms
in central administration that took place in the middle of the nineteenth
century, the expression only gradually became common currency. Until
1870, as Chapman and Greenaway point out, “statesmen and leading
administrators were reluctant to talk of the ‘Civil Service’; they used
© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. Castellani, The Rise of Managerial Bureaucracy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90032-2_1
2 L. CASTELLANI
instead such terms as the ‘public offices’ or the ‘public establishments’”

(Chapman and Greenaway 1980).
Hence, the terminology is of quite recent origin. And, even in
the hundred years or so that “civil servant” has been part of the day-
to-day vocabulary of public affairs, the precise content of the term has
never been defined. This situation was created too by the fact that the
civil servant of late Victorian Britain was a very different animal from
his modern counterpart; he was the product of a very different social
and political order. The state that employed him has changed greatly
in size, shape and nature. Similar problems arise when we try to draw
international comparisons by using the traditional vocabulary of British
civil servants to refer to the central bureaucracies of France, the USA or
Germany.
The neutral ideal type of bureaucracy designed by Max Weber gives
some guidelines for undertaking basic comparison across time and space.
The problem in defining the British Civil Service was that other concepts
like “Crown” or “departments of government” were themselves slippery
concepts. This was underlined by Mackenzie and Grove in their author-
itative account of British Central Government, which pointed out that
“we are met at the outset by the fact that there are no precise criteria,
either legal or historical, by which to determine the scope of the Civil
Service. There is a central core which is unmistakable, but at the mar-
gin no sharp line divides those public servants who are within the Civil
Service from those who are not” (Mackenzie and Grove 1957). Some
20 years later the Expenditure Committee of the House of Commons
reached much the same conclusion.
Defining civil servants became of considerable importance once
patronage was reduced in 1870. It is no good preventing politicians
from nominating their own candidates if they can still insert their nom-
inees under a different traditional guise (Craig 1955). This problem has
re-emerged with the continuing debate about the appointment of tem-
porary special advisers into the twenty-first century. The absence of firm
definition is the expression of the reluctance of British administrative
reformers to place central bureaucracies within a coherent framework of
public law. The Superannuation Acts, dating from the early nineteenth
century, and providing a rare example of statutory intrusion into the
operation of the Civil Service, are often taken as a basis for an official defi-
nition of the scope of the Civil Service for statistical and other purposes,
though in fact the definition they provide is somewhat tautological.
1 THE CIVIL SERVICE: DEFINITION, ORGANISATION … 3
Despite these difficulties, the definition from the Tomlin Report is still
the most useful. In the absence of the sort of neat definition that can be
found in other countries with Civil Service Acts, the definition stood the
test of time, until comparatively recently. We have to consider that the
British Civil Service was a peculiar institution for a number of reasons.
Officials did not normally have written contracts, presumably because
they were servants of the Crown, though they had implied contracts.
Defining the Civil Service became a useful example of how the British
unwritten constitution worked in practice. Civil servants were known to
have modest privileges, or benefits, as a result of being servants of the
Crown; for example, they had a non-contributory pension scheme and
they held a job “for life.” As the texts on bureaucracy put it, following
Max Weber’s definition of the ideal type bureaucracy, employment in
such Civil Service was “based on technical qualification and … protected
against arbitrary dismissal” (Blau 1956: 30). The British Civil Service in
the early and middle years of the twentieth century built upon the advan-
tages that resulted from these characteristics. No one contributed more
to this process than Sir Warren Fisher, who regarded the Civil Service as
a fourth service of the Crown, after the armed services. Fisher did much
to encourage a sense of belonging to the service and emphasised the
need to maintain the highest possible standards. His approach was con-
tinued by Sir Edward Bridges, who, when he was the Head of the Home
Civil Service, also tried to develop a sense of belonging and loyalty to a
distinctive service.
Following the creation of the Civil Service Department (CSD) in
1968, the publication Civil Service Statistics also at first accepted the
Tomlin definition, though from 1972 the wording was modified. In
1972 it read, “A civil servant is a servant of the Crown (not being the
holder of political or judicial office) who is paid wholly and directly out
of money voted by Parliament and who works in a civil capacity in a
department of government” (Civil Service Department 1972: 12). This
was further modified in 1976 by adding the sentence: “However, some
civil servants work for Crown bodies which are not government depart-
ments, such as the Manpower Services Commission and its two agencies
or the Health and Safety Executive, and are paid out of grants-in-aid to
these bodies” (Civil Service Department 1976: 12). By 1994, the defi-
nition as it appeared in Civil Service Statistics had been changed again,
this time presumably to adjust to the creation of Next Steps agencies,
especially those with trading fund status. This, the 1994 definition, omits
4 L. CASTELLANI
all reference to what had previously been regarded as the key financial
clause; there is no longer any reference to pay being drawn wholly and
directly out of money voted by Parliament. It stated that “a Civil Servant
is a servant of the Crown working in a civil capacity who is not: the
holder of a political (or judicial) office; the holder of certain other offices
in respect of whose tenure of office special provision has been made; a
servant of the Crown in a personal capacity paid from the Civil List”
(HM Treasury 1994: 18).
This is, on the face of it, comprehensive, though much less specific
than earlier definitions. All officials working in the central administra-
tion come within its sphere, but recent explanations and changes have
tried to clarify what it means in practice. Since the creation of Next Steps
agencies, following the publication of the Ibbs Report (Efficiency Unit
1988), there has been discussion about whether a Civil Service as such
can still be said to exist as a recognisable and discrete service, distinct
from an aggregation of employees of particular government departments
and agencies. This process was stimulated by characteristics of work in
agencies, which operated on business-like lines, where staff increasingly
began to have contracts with pay and conditions of service that vary
from agency to agency, and where staff were given targets to achieve,
with incentives including pay related to the achievement of their targets.
Sir Robin Butler, Head of the Home Civil Service, said he was quite
clear that the Civil Service as a distinct entity still existed, though it is
a service that was “unified but not uniform” (Butler 1993). The 1994
White Paper, The Civil Service: Continuity and Change, was also confi-
dent on this point. It argued that “the importance of the Civil Service
as a coherent entity, rather than simply the sum of the staff of individ-
ual departments performing specific roles, has been recognised for more
than 150 years,” and it goes on to quote Butler’s key principles. These
are “integrity, impartiality, objectivity, selection and promotion on merit,
and accountability through ministers to Parliament” (Cabinet Office
1994, para. 2.7).
Other recent publications have also focused on this issue. Sir Peter
Kemp, known as “the architect of Next Steps,” wrote about “moving
away from the model of a single service monolith to one where a loose
federation of many smaller agencies, units, and cores predominates”
(Kemp 1993: 8). However, he believed there was “no such thing as a
single public service ethos” (Kemp 1993: 33) and that “there has never
been any real unity” (ibidem: 44). Instead, the “unity of the Civil Service
rests on its being a body of professionals, like doctors and lawyers,

rather than on any harder commonality” (ibidem). Similar sentiments
were expressed in the report by Sylvie Trosa, Next Steps: Moving On.
Recognising that agencies were semi-autonomous bodies, she stated that
“financial, management, and personnel rules will become more and more
different; the only element of unity which will be left, besides ethical
standards, will be the uniform tag of being a civil servant” (Trosa 1994,
para. 2.17). One of her conclusions on the agencies was that “typically,
the main protagonists either want to maintain a complete uniformity of
rules or alternatively argue that unity of the Civil Service is an obsolete
preoccupation, contradictory to the requirements of good management
practice … [however] it seems that the solution can neither be uniform-
ity nor complete diversity, but a mixture of both” (para. 4.5.4).
William Waldegrave, the then minister responsible for the Office of
Public Service and Science, explained how he saw the future of public
service in the context of reforming Britain’s bureaucracies. He did not
define the Civil Service, nor did he discuss the problems associated with
various definitions, but he explained recent changes as he perceived
them. Agencification, he said, “involves the separation of the Civil
Service into a number of smaller, increasingly specialised units known as
Next Steps agencies” (Waldegrave 1993: 18). This, the result of recent
reforms, “will leave us with a smaller … public service … consist[ing]
of a comparatively small core, and a series of devolved delivery organ-
isations” (ibidem: 23). Furthermore, he saw the new ethos of public
service as based on the principles to be found in the Citizen’s Charter
(1991), as being grafted onto “unshaken, unchanging, unchallenged
incorruptibility and political impartiality.” These principles were: explicit
standards of service that were set, published and prominently displayed
at the point of delivery; full, accurate and up-to-date information about
how public services are run, what they cost and how well they perform;
value for money; regular and systematic consultation with service users;
accountability; and well-published and readily available complaints proce-
dures (Waldegrave 1993: 19–24). These principles listed by the Citizen’s
Charter were very similar to Butler’s list of key principles, except for the
reference about accountability between Parliament and ministers made
by the latter, and both hardly differentiated the Civil Service from good
management practices. Even on that criterion, however, there must be
some doubts if we consider the second period of this research (1990–
2007), because ministers were differentiating between policy, for which
6 L. CASTELLANI
they saw themselves as responsible, and “operational matters,” which

were apparently the direct responsibility of officials from parliamentary
committees, the media and the public.
Therefore, to summarise and to have a clearer perspective about
a definition for “civil servant,” we need to find a way to better define
who is a civil servant. In the end, the best method is the use of exclusion
criteria. This means considering the categories of public servants who,
by general consensus, must not be regarded as civil servants: (a) minis-
ters and MPs are public servants who receive remuneration from pub-
lic funds, but they are political officers and therefore definitely not civil
servants; (b) members of the armed forces are Crown servants, but are
not serving in a civil capacity, using that adjective in the original sense
(Parris 1969). However, civilian support to the Army is provided by civil
servants who work in the numerous divisions of the Ministry of Defence,
which is by far the largest department in British Government; (c) judges
and chairmen of administrative tribunals are public servants whose inde-
pendence from government is safeguarded by special rules and conven-
tions. In the case of the higher judiciary, these special rules are of great
constitutional weight and historical importance. No one in this cate-
gory is a civil servant, even if the courts are administered by civil serv-
ants; (d) employees of Parliament are not servants of the Crown. They
may belong to Civil Service unions. The Clerks of the two Houses were
recruited through the Civil Service Commission until 1991, when this
was abolished, and they enjoy similar conditions in terms of contracts to
the Civil Service, but they are not civil servants; (e) local government
employees are certainly public servants but they are not civil servants.
A high proportion of local authority income comes from central gov-
ernment transfers approved by Parliament. But local authorities are con-
stitutionally autonomous bodies, and those who work in them are not
servants of the Crown. This approach excludes from the civil servant
definition many categories such as school teachers and policemen, who
in other EU countries are considered to be civil servants; (f) public cor-
porations, the bodies that run what remain of the nationalised industries
and other services such as broadcasting, though subject to ministerial
directives and in some contexts supported by central government funds,
are also constitutionally autonomous; those who work in them, or who
are appointed to their executive boards, are neither Crown servants
nor civil servants; and (g) quangos, meaning non-departmental pub-
lic bodies. There are many organisations that operate under the central
government, performing ancillary administrative tasks, sometimes in

association with government departments, but are staffed for the most
part by non-civil servants (Drewry and Butcher 1991).
Hence, to further narrow the broader definition of “civil servant,” the
best method is first to consider and compare all the definitions provided
during the history, and second, using the “exclusion criteria,” eliminate
all the roles that cannot be considered roles within the Civil Service.
The History of the British Civil Service: From Its

Origins to the Crisis of the Late Seventies
Origins and Development of the Westminster–Whitehall Model
The history that we are approaching is intertwined with the long path
of British constitutional and institutional development. The Continuity
and Change that mark the life of the Civil Service cannot be avoided,
and, even concentrating on a circumscribed period, the long perspective
is essential to make a credible historical analysis.
The Civil Service is both a component and a product of the UK con-
stitutional system. It has evolved as state systems and structures have
changed and grown over the years. Organic growth and gradual change
have been the characteristic modes of development, rather than sudden,
consistent change. In contrast to most other nations, there is no found-
ing constitutional statute or basic Civil Service law establishing the pur-
pose, function and responsibility of this vital body of the state. Instead,
coherently with the broader constitutional trend in the UK which,
again, unlike most other nations, is an uncodified collection of Acts of
Parliament, court decisions, conventions, customs and practices deemed
to be of constitutional significance, the work of the Civil Service is to be
understood with reference to a group of statutes, codes, memoranda and
time-honoured procedures (Burnham and Pyper 2008). The origins of
the British Civil Service lie in the sets of courtiers surrounding the early
monarchs of the nations of Britain that themselves had yet to crystallise.
The evolution of the institution was slow and gradual. It took six
centuries, from the ninth to the fifteenth, to refine the organisation of
the English Crown’s records and distinguish between the monarch’s
“household” finances and national finances and for staff to be appointed
by the monarch to administer government affairs. There was no formal
distinction between officials and ministers or between administrators and
8 L. CASTELLANI
parliamentarians, as illustrated by the case of Thomas Cromwell, vari-

ously MP, solicitor, Principal Secretary to the King and Lord Privy Seal.
All were servants of the Crown, all subject to the spoils system; indeed,
they remained in post for as long as the monarch decided. Into the nine-
teenth century, ministers had time for administrative issues; officials were
often their political supporter and would leave with their minister when
having resigned or having been dismissed. The history of the early devel-
opment of the Civil Service can be seen in terms of financial administra-
tion and thus of the supremacy of the Treasury.
In the nineteenth century too, the Treasury often took the lead in
improving the administration and building the Civil Service into a uni-
fied institution, and its strong role was to persist in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries (Hennessy 1990: 17–30; Drewry and Butcher
1991: 39–41). On the other hand, another and important element to
control the Civil Service issues derives from the “Privy Council,” com-
prising a monarch’s religious, official, judicial and political advisers. In
modern times, Privy Counsellors are appointed by the Queen, but are
chosen by the government from among ministers, opposition party lead-
ers, top officials, judges, archbishops and other senior figures, simply as
an honour or to enable them to be told in confidence sensitive intelli-
gence on Privy Council terms. From the Privy Council derives a number
of constitutional and organisational arrangements. First, the inner circle
of the Privy Council eventually became today’s Cabinet government. By
the early eighteenth century, it had become the Cabinet of government
of ministers, whose role was to advise the Crown. They found it safer to
reach a private consensus before giving that advice, thereby augmenting
the concept of collective, and confidential, Cabinet government. By the
end of the eighteenth century, the Cabinet of ministers, led by the Prime
Minister, exercised power, provided it had the support of Parliament, but
it acted in the name of the Crown.
There was little administrative help to support Cabinet government
until the First World War, not even to keep records on what ministers
had decided when they met in Cabinet. When Lloyd George became
Prime Minister in the middle of the war, the Cabinet Secretariat, which
became the Cabinet Office, was created to support his War Cabinet,
using the staff and the coordinating techniques of their interdepartmen-
tal secretariat already serving the Committee of Imperial Defence. The
continuation of the Cabinet Office after the war was opposed by the
Treasury and by Conservative politicians, who aimed to abolish what
they considered to be Lloyd George’s “power building.” However, the

incoming Conservative Prime Minister (Bonar Law) had seen first hand
the usefulness of the Cabinet Office, and the Cabinet Office and its
Secretary stayed (Burnham and Pyper 2008).
Traditionally, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury have remained
opponents to be the centre of government, and to be in control of the
Civil Service, as was particularly the case in the 1980s. Second, decisions
by the “Monarch in Council” have remained an appropriate method of
law making long after Parliament became the main source of legislation.
The Queen still authorises “Orders in Council” at a meeting of four or
more ministers who are “Privy Counsellors.” Most of the early mon-
archs’ former areas of competence have been transferred to Parliament,
but those powers that the Crown still retains, called Royal Prerogative
Powers, such as agreeing international treaties, dissolving Parliament
before having new elections and being head of the armed forces, are
exercised in practice by ministers and usually the Prime Minister.
An Order in Council is one way in which these powers are exercised.
Many examples in history have showed how this instrument has been
useful to introduce changes in the Civil Service without the need to rely
on a majority in Parliament first. Paradoxically, the short Civil Service
Management Functions Act of 1992, delegating personnel functions
from ministers to top officials, created considerable suspicion within
Parliament, if only for the reason that it was so unusual for MPs to be
asked to give their consent on Civil Service functions.
Third, managing the Civil Service is a prerogative power of the Crown,
exercised by the Prime Minister. The Civil Service Management Code,
which is the set of regulations that govern the recruitment, promo-
tion, conduct, transfer, retirement or dismissal of civil servants, reaf-
firms the historic principle: “Civil servants are servants of the Crown and
owe a duty of loyal service to the Crown as their employer” (Cabinet
Office 2006, para. 4.1.1). This declaration is followed by a statement
of the contemporary practice: “Since constitutionally the Crown acts
on the advice of Ministers who are answerable per their departments
and agencies in Parliament that duty is … owed to the duly constituted
Government” (para. 4.1.1).
The British Government has substantial interest in reorganising the
Civil Service because, in principle, the administrative structure of the
monarchy and the vestigial power of the monarch can be used to estab-
lish new rules on its reform. Two Orders in Council during the Blair
10 L. CASTELLANI
government showed the usefulness of this power. In 2007, the Civil

Service Management Code was “issued under the authority of the Civil
Service Order in Council 1995.” It gives power to the minister for the
Civil Service “to make regulations and instructions for the management
of the Home Civil Service, including the power to prescribe the condi-
tion of the civil service” (para. 1). In contrast to the widening control,
an Order in Council of 1997 gave a new power to the Prime Minister for
the appointment of three special advisers, which means temporary polit-
ical appointees to advise the Prime Minister, who could give orders to
permanent civil servants. For example, Blair’s chief of staff and his press
secretary were appointed under this innovative provision.
Fourth, government departments such as Trade and Education orig-
inated as committees of the Privy Council, trying to reform its Civil
Service. The Board of Trade, which was created in a permanent form
in 1786, is particularly significant for the history of the Civil Service
because it was organised on the basis of a clear distinction between its
government ministers on the one hand and its small staff of officials on
the other. It introduced a clearer differentiation between ministers and
civil servants on financial grounds (Pyper 1995: 6). These ministers were
also starting to act as a single government and resign together, so that
it became administratively the best option if those junior officials who
were not identified closely with their minister’s politics stayed to serve
the incoming government. It was the emergence of formal departmental
frameworks that led to the development of a permanent Civil Service in
the UK (Burnham and Pyper 2008: 12).
Moreover, the wide collection of departments and boards being set up
in the early nineteenth century hardly merited the name “civil service,”
although a form of commons pension scheme for officials was intro-
duced under pressure from the Treasury in 1810. The term civil serv-
ant was first used in the eighteenth century by the East India Company,
which was a Crown agency, to categorise those employees who were
not military personnel. It was not too much used in Britain, however,
until the late nineteenth century, when it came into use to denote per-
manent officials, that is to say, those who remained when the minister
changed. It took the first wave of modernisers to fight against nepotism,
patronage, inefficiency and corruption by imposing common recruit-
ment and promotion systems, working practices and a collective ethos
on the growing bureaucracy. Some individual reformers, such as the early
monarchs Alfred the Great and Henry VII, and the Principal Secretaries,
Thomas Cromwell and Lord Burghley, made significant contributions to

the initial development of the British Central Government. Cromwell’s
employer, Henry VIII, made an unwitting contribution to administrative
language when he took over the area of London between Parliament and
what is now Trafalgar Square, and turned it into a palace that he called
“Whitehall,” which is now the site of many government buildings. This
became the term to indicate bureaucracy, just as Parliament and its asso-
ciated political institutions around the Palace of Westminster are collec-
tively called Westminster (Burnham and Pyper 2008).
Although these individuals and many others played a part in trans-
forming the Civil Service into a unified entity, a special part was played
by two top Treasury officials, Charles Trevelyan in the mid-nineteenth
century and Warren Fisher between the two World Wars.
The periodical interest of Parliament in cutting back on expendi-
ture had provoked a special parliamentary inquiry in 1848. Trevelyan,
Secretary to the Treasury, advised it that one way to reduce the growth
of bureaucracy would be to recruit officials on the basis of competence,
eliminating patronage and clientelism, and to use more productively
the junior officials with the higher qualifications. Trevelyan already had
experience of bureaucracy and a great interest in reforming the British
Civil Service, which was less efficient than the East India Company, for
which he had previously worked. His project was supported by William
Gladstone, then Chancellor of Exchequer, who asked Trevelyan and
Stafford Northcote to produce a report advising on how to recruit and
then motivate qualified people. The Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854
recommended a division of the Civil Service into superior, “intellectual/
generalist” work and lower “mechanical/technical” tasks; recruitment
through an open, competitive examination, conducted by an independ-
ent board; promotion on the basis of merit and moving staff between
departments to make use of them where they were most needed and to
create a more unified service; pensions to be granted only after a report
on the work done by an official; annual pay increments to maximum
in class and further increases to depend on promotion. The reform-
ers clearly expected resistance to their proposals from those who bene-
fited from the old system or were aghast at the idea of “being displaced
by middle-class, meritocratic clerks” (Drewry and Butcher 1991: 44).
Gladstone could not assist because he wasn’t in office at the time of pub-
lication. Furthermore, educational reformers were pressing the premier-
ship from outlets for students coming from the public schools and the
12 L. CASTELLANI
universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which in the same period were

reformed and opened to the rising bourgeoisie.
In 1855, the Civil Service Commission was created to examine can-
didates to evaluate career advancement by departments. In 1870,
with Gladstone now Prime Minister and with Robert Lowe, a reform-
ing Chancellor of the Exchequer, open competition was established as
a rule, though the Home Office and Foreign Office were still slow to
join in. Some other elements of the Northcote–Trevelyan recommen-
dations, such as the functional separation in two divisions, also took
place, but other proposed reforms, notably actions to reduce departmen-
tal fragmentation, were still not in place by the end of the First World
War despite more reports endorsing them. However, implementation
was much more difficult than recommendation. It was not until Warren
Fisher was appointed Permanent Secretary to the Treasury in 1919 that
a genuine corporate identity developed and the unitary nature of the
institution became clearly established. Fisher, who wanted the Civil
Service to have the same status as the armed services, created the top role
of “Permanent Head of the Civil Service.” On the one hand, the move
could be seen as reinforcing Treasury interests in controlling expenditure
on personnel: an Establishments Branch was established in the Treasury
and soon organised common pay scales for all but the top tiers of offi-
cials. On the other hand, the appointment was thought to be a way into
bringing about “Treasury” or general classes of civil servants at the dif-
ferent hierarchical levels who could be deployed across departments,
and it gave the holder the authority to issue guidance to the Permanent
Secretaries of other departments, thus developing common conventions
(Lee et al. 1998: 141). The Cabinet decided in 1920 that the Prime
Minister would have the final say in the appointment and dismissal of
all senior civil servants. Warren Fisher then used his position as Head of
Civil Service and chief adviser to the Prime Minister in the latter’s guise
as First Lord of Treasury to put forward names in a way that encouraged
officials to seek interdepartmental transfers and work in more than one
department on their way towards the top.
Fisher implemented the 1854 Report during the interwar period, but
the Northcote–Trevelyan prescription for intellectuals to perform the
superior tasks was interpreted narrowly as a requirement for generalist
administrators recruited through the generalist examination in which
Oxford and Cambridge graduates excelled (Burnham and Pyper 2008:
16). During Fisher’s long period at the head of the Civil Service, the
number of senior officials with specialist experience fell dramatically. It

was the triumph of generalist. His personnel policy was to have impor-
tant consequences as government intervention in social and Economic
Affairs became a characteristic of political life in Britain, and the issue of
generalist versus specialist expertise was a fundamental theme of the next
big inquiry into the British Civil Service by the Fulton Committee. To
summarise, the full effect of the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854
was not felt for some decades after its publication, but it was the final
step in the building of a modern Civil Service (Greenwood et al. 2002;
Hennessy 1990, Chapter 1).
By the early twentieth century, a corporate, unitary Civil Service could
be recognised (Drewry and Butcher 1991; Parris 1969). It was charac-
terised by departmental recruitment to the lower-level posts in depart-
mental offices, but also by a standardised system of national recruitment
of university graduates for top posts. This central control over high-
er-level recruitment coupled with interdepartmental staff transfers
for officials moving into the senior rank, a centralised pay system, and
a unified approach to the administrative problems faced by all govern-
ment departments led to the emergence of a harmonious organisational
entity. The functions of the Civil Service expanded far beyond its nine-
teenth-century administrative role in central government, especially after
the Second World War with the building of the welfare state, as govern-
ment became involved in managing pensions, national insurance, health
and social care systems, employment offices, and, in time, industries and
transport systems. Whitehall’s structures and processes were exposed
to fresh ideas and new personnel during both the First and the Second
World Wars as temporary civil servants from a range of business, scientific
and academic backgrounds took up posts in government. However, even
as Whitehall reverted to its traditions in the 1950s, concerns were already
starting to emerge about the Civil Service’s efficiency for purpose, as the
UK’s economic performance declined and the central institutions of the
State came under scrutiny.
The twentieth-century equivalent of the Northcote–Trevelyan Report
was the Fulton Report of 1968. While the administrative reformers of
the mid-nineteenth century had been inspired by elements of Britain’s
imperial adventure, especially the experience of the Indian Administrative
Service, by educational elites of the Oxbridge system and by the munic-
ipal improvers, the Fulton Report and its promoters were influenced in
large measure by the corporate and strategic management changes that
14 L. CASTELLANI
derived from the private business world: the major US corporations

believed they would be more efficient and profitable with greater inte-
gration of the manufacturing process. “The report was based on col-
lectivist assumptions about big government, emphasising the need for
management expertise in an era of rising expenditure, the expansion of
government activities, and large departments” (Theakston 1995: 90).
The inquiry also fitted into a wider reform programme of the Labour
Government of 1964–1969, with other committees examining the case
for corporate management in local government, economic planning
regions and reforms to the National Health Service. The recommenda-
tions of the Fulton Report have, like those of the Northcote–Trevelyan
Report, continued to be debated, whether implemented or not. The
recommendations of the Report can be summarised as follows: fusion of
generalist and specialist classes into a single and unified grading structure,
with Civil Service jobs evaluated to determine the grade; recruitment
that takes into account relevance of university studies for future work;
specialist training of administrators from the beginning of their careers;
establishment of a Civil Service College (CSC) to provide training; more
flexible recruitment, temporary appointments and secondments; trans-
ferable pensions; managerial responsibility and accountability for per-
formance; adaptation of government accounting; hiving off of work to
non-departmental bodies; introduction of departmental policy planning
units to ensure that decisions are made in the light of possible future
developments; and governmental review of the progress made in imple-
menting changes recommended by the Report (Cmnd 3638, 1968).
Successive governments lost interest in the details of the Civil Service
reform in the face of serious economic crises, and the top officials suc-
cessively neutralised the measures they saw as most damaging to the
Civil Service they knew, even if younger officials, especially those with
technical qualifications, had rather looked forward to the new manage-
ment opportunities that were proposed. Nevertheless, some significant
changes were introduced in the early 70s, including a rationalisation of
the staff grading system to give more opportunities for specialist adminis-
trators at senior level, the beginnings of managerial training for officials,
a few experiments with executive agencies and advent of a new account-
able management, planning and budgeting system. The partial introduc-
tion of Fulton’s recommendations, which were already rather restricted
by the Committee’s official terms of reference together with a growing
concern about the quality and efficiency of the Whitehall machine, left
the Civil Service exposed as being “underdeveloped” when the Thatcher

Government came to power in 1979 armed with a precise conception
about the role of the “mandarins” as the symbol of a discredited sys-
tem of big government, bureaucratic oppression and state intervention.
The impact of the subsequent modernisation, which was developed by
Margaret Thatcher’s government and its successors, the governments of
John Major and Tony Blair, is the object of our analysis.
The Seeds of the Managerialisation Process: The Fulton

Committee and Its Report (1966–1970)
Following definitions and an overview of the institutional development
of the Civil Service, it’s time to focus on the history of the Civil Service
before 1979. The Fulton Committee and its report (1966–1968) was
undoubtedly a major chapter in the historical development of the British
Civil Service.
The Fulton Committee was appointed in 1966, and the report was
produced in 1968. We can consider three reasons that qualify the impor-
tance of the Fulton Report for historians. First, it was the first major
report on the Civil Service after the Second World War. As a result of the
well-known Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854, there had been major
inquiries on the service every 20–30 years. The most important were
the Playfair Commission (1875), the Ridley Royal Commission (1887–
1890), the McDonnell Royal Commission (1912–1915), the Tomlin
Royal Commission (1929–1931) and the Priestley Royal Commission
(1953–1955). In the decade immediately prior to the Fulton Report
the Estimates Committee produced the Treasury control of expenditure
(1957–1958) and recruitment (1964–1965). The Plowden Committee
(1961) had analysed the role of public expenditure in the Plowden
Report, highlighting much about the way Whitehall worked. Fulton
continued the periodical line of inquiries into the Civil Service. Partly
for these reasons, Fulton reported little that was truly innovative. This
was not a surprise because it was the product of a wider contemporary
milieu. It expressed a very critical position towards the Civil Service
because, during the relatively long economic decline in Britain, top
mandarins were very much criticised. They were at the centre of gov-
ernment: it was felt that they should accept their part of the blame for
the crisis of the state. A series of consistently hostile comments high-
lighted their failures (Balogh 1959; Abel-Smith 1964; Nicholson 1967).
16 L. CASTELLANI
Considering this climate, it would have been difficult for the Fulton
Committee to have said much in a reformist way that was worth saying
and had not already been said. There has long been discussion about the
influence exerted by the Fulton ideas, both in the years immediately after
the publication and in the longer term (Fry 1995). Such debate is still
going on. Without taking position, it would be wrong to claim that the
influence of the Fulton Report ended in a few months or, on the other
side, argue that everything that happened after 1968 had its roots in this
report. Its importance, and what produced such a debate, lay in the fact
that, among all the official reports on the Civil Service, it was the most
critical.
Then, it became particularly influential because it reflected a prevail-
ing trend among contemporary reformers towards the Civil Service. In
the end, Fulton provided a blueprint for those who sought to challenge
the bureaucratic status quo. Indeed, it became the point of reference
for many years to come for both supporters and dissenters. The Fulton
Report opened with this statement: “The Home Civil Service is still
fundamentally the product of the nineteenth-century philosophy of the
Northcote–Trevelyan Report. The tasks it faces are those of the second
half of the twentieth century” (para. 1). The report considered the Civil
Service ossified in the previous century: the very successful framework
of the Northcote–Trevelyan continued to resist, and, despite over one
hundred years of administrative changes, had left the service underdevel-
oped. It issued a list of complaints: specifically, it claimed that there was
too much of the “culture of the generalist,” and specialist knowledge was
not spread among senior civil servants where it was more necessary; the
grading system was too rigid and inconvenient to exploit skills of civil
servants; and these formed a too-elitist institution based exclusively on
an Oxbridge education.
Furthermore, there was too much mobility within departments and
too little career development, and this was partly because the Treasury
was not able satisfactorily to manage both the economy and the Civil
Service; there was a lack of systematic training, a further reflection of the
British philosophy of administration, and this feature was linked with an
excessive emphasis upon advising ministers, so that senior officials were
giving too little attention to the efficient management of their depart-
ments. Finally, there was a lack of clearly defined responsibility and
accountability among individual civil servants within the hierarchy.
In order to modernise the Civil Service, Fulton made 158 specific

recommendations. The bulk of these were focused on overcoming the
generalist culture, with correspondingly greater emphasis upon the role
of the specialists; building a classless service; unifying grading; giving
more equitable opportunities; recruiting graduates from a broader range,
and having regard for the nature and relevance of applicants’ qualifica-
tions; curbing excessive mobility between departments within Whitehall
by employing more coherent career planning, with careers resolving
around either the economic/finance or the social service functions, and
transfer between these broad areas being allowed only in exceptional cir-
cumstances; creating a CSD, taking away from the Treasury all responsi-
bilities for personnel management and staffing and setting up a CSC to
give a new emphasis to post-entry training at all levels, partly to direct
greater attention to the management of their departments by senior
civil servants whose near monopoly on policy advice to ministers would
be tempered by the enhanced role for specialists; creating within each
department policy units or think tanks; developing “accountable man-
agement,” with individual civil servants at various levels in the hierarchy
being given clearly defined responsibilities for areas of work for which
they would be held accountable if not outside Whitehall; and “hiving
off” certain functions within each ministry to semi-independent bodies
or agencies. The aim of the Fulton Report was to make the Civil Service
more efficient and more managerially minded. The Wilson government
swiftly endorsed the principles embodied in the report. In November
1968, the CSD was settled and its Permanent Secretary, Sir William
Armstrong, was also the Head of the Home Civil Service. The CSD was
a disempowerment of the Treasury and assumed most of its responsibil-
ities for staffing and personnel in the Civil Service. It was the Treasury’s
lower moment in the British Government. Furthermore, the CSC,
established in 1970, was the replacement for the Treasury Centre for
Administration Studies (CAS). The CAS provided training for the new
entries in the higher grades of the service, insufficient training, according
to Fulton. The CSC was established to cover a wide range of post-entry
training. With this new institutional arrangement, the Treasury retired
into a corner, weakened but not defeated. As we will see, it later returned
triumphantly to recover failures of the CSD.
The implementation continued in the seventies. In 1971, the
Administrative Class, the bureaucratic elite, was merged with the
18 L. CASTELLANI
Executive Class and the Clerical Class to form a new Administration

Group. To provide a more broadly based entry training, the
Administrative Trainee Scheme was launched. This framework was com-
pleted by the creation of an “Open Structure” in January 1972. This
meant that posts at and above under-secretary level were a unified cat-
egory and they would no longer formally belong to any discrete admin-
istrative group. The last change was in the departments where there was
a slow introduction of new forms of organisation. Pilot schemes cre-
ated new units of accountable management, but resistance to significant
changes soon became evident and there was little political will or bureau-
cratic commitment to tackle it. William Armstrong told the Expenditure
Committee that running a government department was not like running
a bank (Expenditure Committee, The Civil Service, HC 535, q. 1510,
1977). Government was different from business management because
of its political dimension. The resistance to this change was an example
of the “mistake-avoiding culture” described by Sir Derek Rayner, a for-
mer top-level manager of the private sector who became the architect of
Thatcher’s Civil Service reform in the 1980s: “In business one is judged
by overall success … the civil servant tends to be judged by failure.” The
scope for delegation was limited by “the conventions of public accounta-
bility, the highly centralised arrangements for the control of the spending
by the Treasury and of manpower and pay by the CSD, and the need for
equity and consistency in the treatment of cases” (Garrett 1980: 132).
In most areas of governmental departments, it was not possible to
measure in quantitative or financial terms performance and objectives.
Without a proper accountable management regime, the information and
budgeting systems could not operate. Initially, there was some progress
in the application of the technique called Management by Objectives
(MBO), which was developed by the private sector in the sixties. The
CSD had launched 45 projects covering 12,000 managers by 1974, but
the process then was stopped. Fulton had considered MBO as a tool for
areas of administrative work, but CSD had used it in executive operations,
quasi-commercial works and support services. As Theakston wrote: “Some
of the schemes had apparently been over-elaborate and costly to install,
but it is also clear that top administrators had not been enthusiastic and
that the unions were concerned about the pressure put on low-ranking
officials by target-setting and performance-monitoring arrangements”
(1995: 106). A number of governmental functions were hived off during
the seventies following the recommendations of the Fulton Report, but,
again, this approach was applied only in a few parts of Whitehall. Another
prescription was to adopt planning units in the departments in order to
plan costs and activities performed by the department. The dominant view
in Whitehall was that planning was a political responsibility and it should
involve only the policy division and not the Civil Service as a whole.
Dismissive comments by the Permanent Secretary to the Department of
Education in 1976 about “the flabby type of futurological day-dreaming”
suggested that there were senior officials who did not take planning seri-
ously (Barberis 1996).
In the late seventies, the Fulton Report was considered a failure
for the central government. Fultonites complained about “the lost
reforms.” The position of John Garrett, a former member of the Fulton
Committee, was that “in general the Civil Service of 1980 is not much
different from the Civil Service of 1968 … The top management of our
large and technically complex departments of state is still dominated by
generalist arts graduates from public schools and Oxbridge.” Whitehall
had not been immobile, but “there has not been any sense of pushing
through the great strategy for development that Fulton envisaged. After
1969 no politician with sufficient weight cared sufficiently to understand
the strategy or to see the importance of reform.” A civil servant told the
historian Peter Hennessy in 1975 that “Fulton was a joke” because “they
accepted everything he said and then did what they wanted to.” Some
academic observers argued about the administrative system’s “remark-
able capacity to absorb and transform reform proposals, adapting them
subtly to its perception of what is tolerable” (Garrett 1980: 3; Hennessy
1990: 205). The Fulton programme was detuned for the whole of the
seventies, but a decade later the impact of the report was revalued.
After 1979, Mrs. Thatcher abolished the CSD but provided the politi-
cal commitment necessary to implement the Fulton-shaped management
reforms (the Financial Management Initiative—FMI—and the Next
Steps) as well as extending unified grading.
However, even if the Thatcher Government developed many Fulton
recommendations, the ideological perspective of the two initiatives was
very different: Fulton focused on the promotion of more efficiency for
a big Civil Service and Thatcher’s reform aim was to roll back the state.
The Whitehall view in the 1980s and the 1990s was that Fulton had
been a “milestone” on the way to the “lasting reforms” of the Thatcher
years and that it had “laid a trail for many of the key changes in the Civil
Service over the next two decades.” Also some members of the Fulton
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keep out of danger in the future. If you do not, I’ll have to call this
tour off and take you all home.”
“We’ll be as good as mice watched by a cat,” put in Frank, and this
caused another laugh; and then the subject was changed and soon
the group separated, each person bent on making himself
comfortable in his own way.
But the Chester was not a comfortable ship, as Mark and Frank soon
learned by a tour from stem to stern. And they also learned another
thing,—that the captain, Jason Sudlip, was anything but an
agreeable man.
“Hi, you, I don’t allow passengers in there,” they heard the captain
cry, while they were peering into the chart room. “You boys must stay
where you belong while you are on this ship.”
“We weren’t going to touch anything, Captain,” replied Mark,
pleasantly, although he did not like the way in which he was being
addressed.
“Oh, I know boys—into everything they have no business in,”
retorted Captain Sudlip. “I’ve had them on board before. You’ll have
to stay where you belong.” And he slammed and locked the door of
the chart room in their faces.
“He’s real sweet, isn’t he?” said Frank, as they walked to the saloon
deck. “I’m glad I don’t work under him. I wouldn’t be a hand on this
steamer for ten dollars a day. I’ll be glad when our trip on her is
ended.”
Professor Strong had noticed the captain’s harsh manner to those
under him, but he said nothing, for in his travels he had met many a
captain just as harsh and some of them had been positively brutal.
Dinner was served at five o’clock, and when the boys came to the
table with their hearty appetites—nobody had as yet had a chance to
get seasick,—they looked at what was set before them by January
Jones with dismay.
“This is awful!” whispered Darry to Sam. “This soup is regular dish-
water.”
“I can’t eat such soup,” returned Sam. “I hope the meat and
vegetables are better.”
“Sorry, sah, but it’s de best de ship affords, sah,” said January
Jones, who saw that they were not suited. “De cap’n am a werry
close buyer, sah,” he added, in a lower voice. “Can’t git nuffin cheap
enough.”
The meat was tough and there was hardly sufficient to go around,
while the vegetables, brought on board the day before, were far from
fresh. The bread was also poor, and the coffee of the lowest grade.
For dessert there was a rice pudding which, according to Darry, “was
just like a chunk of dirty rubber.”
Professor Strong saw that the boys were on the point of open
rebellion, but he shook his head at them.
“Make the best of it,” he said. “I will see the captain about it later and
find out if the service cannot be improved.”
January Jones heard the words, and they made the solemn-looking
colored man grin. “Dat’s right, sah,” he whispered. “I hopes yo’ do
kick, sah. But yo’ wants to be careful, sah. De man wot kicked on de
las’ trip got it hot an’ heaby from de cap’n, sah.”
“So there has been trouble before?”
“Yes, sah, lots ob trouble. But please don’t say I tole yo’, sah. De
cap’n would mos’ kill me if he found it out,” went on January Jones.
“De cap’n am a hard one, an——”
The colored man did not finish, for he had turned to leave the table,
and now he found Captain Sudlip close behind him. He gave one
startled look and dove for the door leading to the cook’s galley. The
captain followed, and one disappeared directly after the other.
CHAPTER IV
A TALK ABOUT A MEAL
“There’ll be music now,” whispered Frank to Darry. “That captain is

a tartar if ever there was one.”
The dessert had already been brought on, so January Jones was not
called on to do additional waiting and he did not re-appear. The boys
were soon finished and went again to the deck, leaving Professor
Strong to interview the master of the steamer.
It was a disagreeable duty he had to perform, but Amos Strong was
too old a traveler, and had seen too much of life, to hesitate
concerning his course of action. Being unable to find the captain, he
hailed the first mate.
“I wish to see the captain at once,” he said. “Where is he?”
The mate did not know, and sent a deck hand to hunt him up. It was
a good quarter of an hour before the master of the Chester put in an
appearance.
“What is it you want?” demanded Jason Sudlip, harshly and there
was a gleam in his eyes which was far from pleasant.
“I wish to complain to you, Captain Sudlip, of the food furnished to
our party.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Everything is the matter with it. In the first place it is very poor in
itself and in the second place it is miserably cooked. To-day’s dinner
is the poorest which has been served to our party since we left the
United States, and that is several months ago.”
“Humph! I heard you trying to raise a row at the table. According to
my way of thinking the food is all right, and so is the cooking. Is that
all you want to see me about?”
“That is all, and it is quite enough. I do not propose to stand it. I paid
for first-class accommodations for myself and for those with me, and
I shall expect such accommodations in the future. If they are not
forthcoming as soon as we get to Kingston I shall lodge a complaint
against you and sue to recover, even if I have to hold myself and
your ship there to do it.”
At this announcement Captain Sudlip’s eyes almost bulged out of his
head with rage.
“Ha! do you threaten me?” he roared. “That’s the way of all Yankees
—think they can ride right over everybody that comes along. You
can’t ride over me!”
“I won’t argue the point,” returned Professor Strong, calmly. “You
heard what I said, and I am a man who always keeps his word. I
once met a fellow of your stripe at Nassau—Captain Renfaw, of the
Queen Mary—perhaps you know him. He tried the same game of
poor food and it cost the owners of the ship about sixty pounds in
court—and the money came out of Captain Renfaw’s salary. Unless
there is a better service I shall treat you exactly as I did Renfaw.”
With this remark Amos Strong swung around on his heel and
sauntered off. Captain Sudlip stood for a second glaring at him, and
seemed on the point of talking back. Then he drew his lips tightly
together and walked to his private cabin.
The professor said nothing to the boys about what had taken place,
but they all knew that he had “laid down the law” by the way the
captain acted whenever he came near them. They saw nothing of
January Jones until the day following.
By nightfall Hockley was taken seasick, and a little later Sam and
Mark were also suffering. None of the attacks, however, was severe,
and Frank and Darry escaped entirely.
“We got cleaned out when we came down here,” said Darry, with a
grin. “My! but I’ll never forget that dose. I thought sure I was going to
turn inside out!”
“Poor Hockley didn’t get a chance to boast this trip,” replied Frank.
“He was the first one taken.”
By morning all felt fairly well, and everybody appeared at the table
but Hockley, who was suffering from a headache.
“Now we’ll see what’s what!” whispered Frank. “This certainly looks
encouraging,” and he pointed to the clean tablecloth and the neat
piles of bread and pats of butter.
Breakfast seemed a long time in coming, but when at last it did arrive
it was quite a fair meal. The quantity was not extravagant, but what
there was of it was fairly well cooked, and the coffee proved of a
much better grade, greatly to the professor’s satisfaction, for like
many old-time travelers, he was a great coffee drinker. Nothing was
said about the improvement in the food, but many a sly wink was
given and returned across the board.
While the boys were eating they saw that January Jones was
unusually silent. The negro had a bit of court-plaster on his forehead
and one side of his jaw seemed slightly swollen.
“It looks to me as if January had been in a fight,” remarked Sam,
when the crowd found itself on deck. “Do you imagine that brute of a
captain attacked him?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” returned Mark. “He is a very easy-going,
mild-mannered darkey, and a fellow like Captain Sudlip would just
take pleasure in brow-beating him.”
“But isn’t it against the marine rules to strike a man like that?”
questioned Frank.
“I guess captains often take the law into their own hands,” said
Darry. “They can put in a complaint of mutiny, or something like that,
and a sailor, or other ship’s hand, has no show.”
The day had started in bright and clear, but by ten o’clock it began to
grow misty, and soon a drizzling rain was falling and they were
compelled to seek the shelter of the cabin.
“I think we may as well improve our time by having a talk about
Jamaica,” said Professor Strong. “We shall only stop for one day at
Kingston—unless something unforeseen happens—but it won’t hurt
to know something of this English possession.”
He had his map handy, and placing it on the wall he sat down in front
of it, and the boys ranged close alongside.
“As you can readily see,” began the professor, “Jamaica is an island
located in the Caribbean Sea directly north of Colombia in South
America and south of the island of Cuba. It is oval in shape and is
about one hundred and fifty miles long by fifty miles wide. Can any of
you name a State at home of about that size?”
There was a few seconds of silence.
“If I am not mistaken New Jersey is just a little larger than that,”
answered Mark.
“You are right Robertson, the general length and the general width
are about the same, although New Jersey contains more square
miles than Jamaica. The island has a ridge of high hills running east
and west, called the Blue Mountains, and from these hills spring over
half a dozen small streams which flow into the sea.”
“Can you sail on the rivers?” came from Darry.
“On only a few, Crane, the others contain too many rapids and
waterfalls. The deepest stream is the Black River, which is used by
small boats for perhaps twenty-five or thirty miles. I once had an
adventure on that river, so I am not likely to forget it.”
“Oh, tell us the story!” cried Frank, eagerly. He always thought a
“geography lesson” awfully dry.
“It is soon told,” answered Professor Strong, with a good natured
smile. “I had been out hunting and had slipped on a steep rock and
twisted my ankle. I went down to the river and there discovered a
rowboat. No one was at hand from whom I could hire the boat and I
could not walk around looking up the owner. So I determined to risk
taking the boat, and jumping in I shoved off and began to row down
to the town, two miles away. I had hardly gotten quarter of a mile
when I heard a shouting and two old Englishmen came running
down the river bank, yelling wildly. They, too, had been out gunning,
and before I could come back and explain one of them aimed his
gun at me and fired.”
“And were you hit?” asked several of the boys together.
“No, fortunately his aim was poor and the charge passed over my
head. Then I rowed to shore in a hurry, and after a good deal of
trouble explained matters. They told me that they had had their boat
stolen by negroes three days before and in the darkness took me for
one of the negroes. I felt like giving them a piece of my mind for
shooting at me, but as it was their boat I let the matter drop. But I
never borrowed another boat without permission.”
“I’d had ’em locked up,” came from Hockley, who had just joined the
group.
“Well, I did not. Now to get back to Jamaica. The mouths of the
numerous rivers afford good harbors, but the best of the shelters for
ships is the bay toward the south-east, upon which is situated
Kingston, the capital. The total population of the island is about six
hundred and fifty thousand, only a very small part of that being white
people.”
“It’s the best of the West Indies belonging to England, isn’t it?”
questioned Sam.
“Yes. It used to belong to Spain. It was discovered by Columbus, on
his second voyage, in 1494, and it was taken under Spanish rule
fifteen years later. In 1655 Oliver Cromwell sent out an expedition
which captured the island, and it was ceded to England later on.
Since that time there has been more or less trouble with the
negroes, but at present the island is at rest.”
“And what do the people do for a living?” asked Darry.
“They raise sugar and coffee principally, and also some fruit. The
country is also becoming something of a health resort, the climate,
especially among the hills, being fine.”
“I’ve often heard of Jamaica rum,” said Hockley.
“Yes, the island produces more of that than is good for the people at
large,” answered the professor. “It also exports large quantities of
log-wood, and the price received is, at present, very good.”
“Tell us about your hunting trips in Jamaica,” said Frank, after a
pause, during which Amos Strong pointed out several of the
important towns on the map; and a long talk on hunting followed
which did not come to an end until the gong rang for dinner. Nothing
had been brought down in the forests of Jamaica but birds—for there
are no wild animals worth mentioning—but the professor had a
manner of telling his “yarns” which was exceedingly captivating.
The midday meal served was about on a par with the breakfast.
There was no more than was absolutely necessary, but the quality
was far above that of the day previous and the cook had taken pains
with the preparation of the food. The captain did not show himself,
and even January Jones hardly spoke a word.
“I hope you didn’t get into trouble on our account, January,” observed
Sam, when he got the chance.
“De cap’n am a werry hard man, sah,” replied the negro, and that
was all he would say.
“Angry, is he?”
The negro nodded solemnly and walked away.
“I think we’ll hear more of this,” said Darry, and he was right.
It grew dark early in the afternoon and the rain kept them in the
cabin, where the boys started in to amuse themselves in various
ways.
“It’s small fun on board of a ship in a storm,” said Sam. “Makes me
feel like a chicken boxed up in a hen-house.”
“Really?” returned Darry, dryly. “Now I never was a chicken in a hen-
house, so I don’t know how——” and then he broke off short and
dodged, as Sam moved as if to throw a book at his head.
“It certainly is dead slow——” remarked Frank, when a sudden
hissing stopped him. The hissing was followed by a roar as of an
explosion and before they could realize it the cabin began to fill with
steam.
“Gracious, the boiler must have burst!” ejaculated Mark.
“Boiler burst!” came from the others.
“We had better get out on deck, boys!” called Professor Strong.
“Something is certainly very much wrong.”
He had scarcely spoken when there came another roar and worse
hissing. A yell went up from some other passengers and immediately
there was wild confusion on all sides.
“Oh, Professor, are we going down?” cried Hockley in terror, as he
clutched Professor Strong’s arm.
“I hope not, Jacob,” was the reply. “Come, we will get to the deck
and provide ourselves with life preservers.”
But to reach the deck through that cloud of steam was by no means
easy. Hockley was frantic and began to yell for help. In the meantime
Professor Strong and Frank reached a number of life preservers and
passed some to the others. At last they found themselves outside on
the wet and dark deck, wondering what was going to happen next.
CHAPTER V
THE DEFENSE OF JANUARY JONES
“We’ll all be drowned, I know we will!”

The remark came from Hockley. His teeth chattered so that he could
scarcely speak.
“If there is any real danger I should think the captain would have the
boats lowered,” said Mark, who, now that the first scare was over,
was more calm than any of the other boys.
“Perhaps it is not as bad as we anticipated,” said the professor.
“Tie this life preserver on me, will you?” asked Hockley of Sam. He
already had one preserver around his waist and now wanted this on
his breast.
“All right,” replied Sam, and did as requested.
In the meantime all listened for the sound of another explosion.
Would it come, and if it did, would it send them skyhigh? Certainly it
was a moment of terrible suspense.
“I—I know we’ll go up,” chattered Hockley. “And we’re ever so far
from land too!”
But they did not go up, nor did anything more in the nature of an
explosion occur. The hissing of steam continued for fully five minutes
and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
“I imagine the worst is over,” said Professor Strong, after a painful
silence. “Unless I am mistaken that accident was nothing worse than
the ripping open of some steam pipes. But it may have cost the life
of a fireman, coal heaver, or engineer. If you will all remain here I will
investigate.”
They promised to stay where they were and he left them, to be gone
the best part of quarter of an hour. In the meantime quietness was
restored on board, and some of the passengers went back to the
cabin, which was now free of steam.
“It was as I surmised,” said the professor. “Two pipes burst and let
out an immense amount of steam. One of the firemen had his leg
scalded and an engineer had his left hand badly lacerated. They are
now repairing the damage done, and they say that by morning we
will be able to steam along the same as usual.”
“I’m glad to know it’s no worse,” observed Frank, while Hockley
wiped the cold perspiration from his forehead. “But it’s queer the
pipes should burst. They must be old.”
“The engineer says he told Captain Sudlip about the pipes needing
repairs before we left La Guayra. But the captain put him off and told
him that he would have the repairs made at Havana.”
“If that’s the case then that fireman and that engineer will have it in
for him,” was Mark’s comment.
“And they ought to have it in for him,” came from Frank. “Those men
might have been steamed to death, and we might have been blown
up in the bargain.”
“Just what I say,” added Sam.
The rain soon cleared off and that evening the countless stars came
out to brighten up the view of the sea. The boys made themselves
easy on the deck, taking in the scene, the single exception being
Hockley, who sat close to a cabin light, reading a novel he had
picked up at a bookstall in La Guayra.
“Did you see that novel Glummy is reading?” said Sam to Frank, as
he drew up his chair.
“I didn’t notice particularly. What is it, something deep?” And Frank
smiled.
“Very deep,” went on Sam, disgustedly. “The title is ‘Pete Prankley,
the Sassiest Boy in Sawtown; Or, Out for a Hundred Laughs a Day.’
Did you ever hear of such rot? I don’t see how Jake can read it.”
“That’s on a level with another book he was reading—at the hotel in
Caracas. That was called ‘Gold Nose Hank, the Mine Discoverer; Or,
The Whoop-Up at Stampede Hollow.’ Just for fun I looked through
the book and made a note of the things that happened. Gold Nose
Hank shot down three Indians, two road robbers and one
government detective. His enemies fired forty-six shots at him but
never touched him. He located nine gold mines, said to be worth
fifteen million dollars, and saved the life of the girl five times, once
from a stampede of cattle, once from the Indians, once from a road
robber, and twice from drowning in a river which he afterward forded
without getting his cartridge belt wet. And all that for ten cents.”
At this Sam burst into a merry laugh. “That author believed in giving
his reader his money’s worth, didn’t he?”
“Glummy seems to have got a mania for that sort of a story lately.
The professor once took a book away from him and burnt it up. But
now Glummy puts the books out of sight as soon as he sees the
professor coming.”
“If he keeps on he’ll be wanting to follow in the footsteps of Gold
Nose Hank or Pete Prankley,” said Mark, who had listened to the
talk. “If he does it will get him into trouble. He will find—listen!”
Mark stopped short, and all of the boys listened. From the forward
deck of the steamer came a cry, as of sudden alarm. Silence
followed.
“That was queer,” said Sam. “It sounded to me like January Jones’
voice.”
“It was January,” returned Frank. “He’s in some sort of trouble. Come
on and see what it is.”
The three boys rushed forward, followed by Darry, the professor
having gone to his stateroom to change his coat. At first they could
not find the colored man, but presently located him near the
forecastle. Beside him stood Captain Sudlip, a bit of an iron chain in
his hand.
“That will teach you a lesson,” the captain of the Chester was saying.
“You’ve needed it ever since you came on board.”
To this January Jones made no answer. He was wiping the blood
from his nose and from a cut on his left hand.
“The captain has been striking that negro,” whispered Sam. “It is an
outrage and I mean to tell him so.”
“Don’t do it, Beans,” cried Mark, catching him by the arm. “You’ll only
get yourself into trouble.”
But Sam would not listen. He was ordinarily a quiet, studious boy,
but now his stern New England sense of justice was aroused, and
tearing himself loose he hurried up and confronted the master of the
steamer.
“I think it’s a shame for you to strike this man,” he said, in a loud,
clear voice. “I know you are the captain but I don’t think you have a
right to abuse any of your crew.”
At this frank speech Jason Sudlip stared in open-mouthed
astonishment. For the moment he fancied he had not heard aright.
“Why—er—what——” he began, and then his eyes blazed with
sudden fury. “Get out of here!” he roared. “Get out, I say! If you don’t
I’ll knock you down!”
His advance was so threatening that Sam put up his hands to defend
himself. But he did not back away, and Captain Sudlip stopped when
directly in front of the lad.
“Did you hear me?” he stormed. “I want you to get where you belong.
I’ll treat this nigger as I please. By Jove, I think you need a good
licking too!” And he raised the chain as if to strike.
But now Darry ranged up alongside of Sam. “If you fight, you’ll have
to fight me too,” he declared. “He said it was a shame for you to
abuse January Jones and it is. No decent captain would act as you
are acting on this trip.”
If possible this declaration made Jason Sudlip more furious than
ever. He was naturally of a vindictive nature and he glared at the
boys as if he would like to “chew ’em” up.
Mark and Frank were not long in advancing as Darry had done, and
the sight of the four boys, with their determined faces, caused
Captain Sudlip to pause again. He glanced around, but in the semi-
darkness of that portion of the deck no one was visible but the boys,
January Jones and himself.
“Don’t you know you are carrying matters with a high hand, dictating
to me on my own ship?” he demanded, in a slightly milder tone.
“I am not dictating to you,” replied Sam. “But if this man needs
protection and I can aid him I will, that’s as sure as you stand there. I
don’t know much about the sea, but I think the time has gone by
when a captain can treat his crew like a lot of slaves.”
“Dat’s right, I ain’t no slabe no moah,” came from January Jones,
who was beginning to pick up a little courage, now he saw he had so
many to side with him.
“You keep quiet!” stormed the captain, shaking his fist at the colored
man. “I’ll settle this with you at another time,” and then January
Jones slunk back, fearful that he had “put his foot into it” worse than
ever.
“Captain, I can’t see why we can’t settle this little affair in a friendly
way,” said Mark, after an awkward pause. “We don’t want any
trouble. If you’ll only treat that colored fellow as he should be treated,
and continue to serve us with decent meals, there won’t be any
cause for——”
“I don’t want any preaching from a boy!” interrupted the captain. “I
know my business and I want you to mind yours.”
“All right, we will,” came from Darry. “But just the same, we are going
to keep an eye on you so long as we remain on board. And if you do
anything more that the law doesn’t allow you’ll hear from us; isn’t that
so, fellows?”
A chorus of assent followed.
“I won’t talk to you further,” growled Captain Sudlip, and turning on
his heel he started off. His direction was toward January Jones, and
that individual lost no time in getting out ahead and disappearing to
parts unknown.
“He is a brute and no mistake,” was Sam’s comment, when they
were once more left to themselves. “I believe he would have half
killed that darkey if we hadn’t come up.”
“Don’t worry but that the captain has it in for you,” came from Frank.
“And in for Darry, too.”
“I guess he’d have it in for all of us—if he got the chance,” said Mark.
“But we mustn’t give him the chance. In the future, while on
shipboard, we had better keep together.” And on this the boys
agreed.
When they returned to where the professor was sitting he asked
them where they had gone so suddenly.
“Oh, we took a walk forward,” said Sam, carelessly, and then to stop
further questioning asked Professor Strong how far he thought they
were on their journey and when they would arrive at Kingston.
Hockley had finished his so-styled humorous book, and now came
out to listen to what the crowd might have to say. But he was not
interested and soon began to yawn.
“I’d rather sleep than sit out here gazing at nothing but stars and
water,” he said, and shuffled off to his stateroom.
It was about an hour later when the professor and the boys also
retired. Mark and Frank who, as told before, roomed together, had
just undressed when there came a slight knock on the door.
“Who is it?” asked Mark.
“It’s me, sah,” came in the low voice of January Jones. “I dun stole
down heah widout de cap’n knowing it.”
“Oh!” Mark opened the door several inches. “What can we do for you
now, January?”
“Nuffin, sah, thank yo’, sah. I jess come down heah to thank yo’ fo’
what yo’ done fo’ me, sah. It was werry kind, dat was, sah. An’ I
thought I’d tell you dat I ain’t a-gwine to stay on dis ship no longer
dan I can help, sah. It ain’t good fo’ my constitution, sah, no, sah!”
“That’s right, it isn’t,” laughed Frank. “But you’ll have to stay on board
until you strike land. Is that all?”
“Yes, sah. Thought I couldn’t go to sleep widout thankin’ yo’ sah,
nohow. Please tell dem other gents, will yo’, sah?”
“We will.”
“Thank yo’, sah, much obliged, sah!”
And with these words January Jones sneaked off as noiselessly as
he had come.
CHAPTER VI
AN INTERRUPTION TO SIGHT-SEEING
Two days later the Chester slipped into the fine harbor at Kingston
and dropped anchor. It was cloudy, but by noon the sun broke forth
and the boys had a chance to look at the shipping, which is fairly
extensive. As usual in West Indian ports, the flags of many
nationalities were flying, and the scene was full of interest.
Since the boys had stood up so bravely in defense of January Jones
they had seen but little of Captain Sudlip, he evidently making it a
point to avoid them. And they also saw but little of January Jones, for
the negro was assigned to other work and a strange hand placed to
wait on the table and care for their rooms. The service all around
was fairly good, but, as Darry expressed it, “nothing to brag about.”
“Are we going to get a chance to stretch our legs on shore?”
questioned Sam, as he gazed over the rail at the narrow and
crowded streets of the town.
“The professor has got to find that out,” said Frank, who had just
been speaking to Amos Strong. “He says he paid our passage right
through to Havana, so we can’t bid good-bye to Captain Sudlip just
yet.”
A little later Professor Strong joined them with the information that
the Chester would remain in Kingston harbor until the following day
until three o’clock.
“Then we can take quite a look around,” said Mark. “Are there any
points of interest to visit?”
“A few only. You see, England has tried hard to make something of
the island, but as yet there are too many negroes here to suit
Americans. But we will take it in for what it is worth.”
It was decided that they should put up at the Queen’s Hotel over
night and they so notified Captain Sudlip.
“All right, do as you please,” he growled. “But it won’t take anything
off your passage money.”
“I did not expect it would,” replied Professor Strong, coldly.
They were soon ashore and walking up the narrow and dirty street
leading from the quay. On either side were big warehouses with here
and there a low drinking resort, around which hung sailors of many
nationalities and crowds of negroes.
“This is not very inviting,” was Sam’s comment. “It smells almost as
bad as at La Guayra.”
“It is not so bad further away from the docks.”
They soon reached the hotel, a comfortable resort with large shade
trees in the courtyard and a fountain, and here Professor Strong
secured accommodations for all.
“Kingston contains about fifty thousand inhabitants,” said the
professor, after they had secured a large carriage in which to drive
around. “It was established about two hundred years ago, after the
neighboring town of Port Royal had been destroyed by earthquake.
Now Port Royal has been rebuilt. It lies on the other side of the
harbor, but Kingston is the main city, and nearly all the foreign
commerce passes through this port.”
“Have they any railroads?”
“When I was here last they had a railroad about ten miles long,
running from here to Spanish Town, in the interior. The lay of the
land is not favorable to railroads.”
“I knew some sick folks who came to Jamaica for their health,” said
Hockley. “A man and his son. Both had consumption.”
“Yes, invalids come here in plenty, and there are several hotels up in
the hills built especially for their benefit.”
They were soon at the principal square of the city, called the Parade.
Here were numerous shops, as well as a barracks for the soldiers, a
church, theater, and other public buildings. The Parade was well
kept, quite in contrast to the streets through which they had been
passing.
It was a relief, when they returned to the hotel, to find a first-class
meal awaiting them, something that “topped clean over old Sudlip’s
lobscouse,” as Darry put it, borrowing a favorite sailor’s expression.
It was decided to take a run up to Spanish Town the next morning.
They could get a train about ten o’clock, and that would give them
ample time to look around and get back before three, the time when
the Chester would set sail.
All of the boys were up bright and early on the following morning with
the exception of Hockley, who snored away until Professor Strong
called him.
“I don’t want to get up,” he grumbled. “Nothing to see in this dead
hole.” Yet when dressed he joined the others in a trip to several
public buildings, where an English official kindly showed them
around.
Ten o’clock found them at the depot, waiting for the train which was
to take them to Spanish Town, and here they discovered that the
time table had been changed and the train would not leave until half
an hour later.
“But we can get back before three even so,” announced Amos
Strong, after studying the schedule. “I fancy none of you want to
return to the Chester until it’s necessary.”
They waited around and at last the little locomotive, with its three
coaches rolled in. As it came to a stop they heard a yell, and looking
around, saw January Jones coming toward them on a dead run.
“Hello! what does he want?” exclaimed Mark. “Something is up,
that’s certain.”
“Stop! stop!” called out the negro, as soon as he was within speaking
distance. “Doan yo’ go fo’ to take dat train, less yo’ want to lose de
ship!”
“Lose the ship?” queried Professor Strong. “What do you mean? We
expect to be back before three o’clock.”
“De ship am gwine to sail at one o’clock, sah.”
“One o’clock!” came from all of the others. And then the boys looked
at the professor inquiringly.
“Captain Sudlip told me he would sail at three o’clock,” said
Professor Strong. “I asked him twice to make sure.”
“I ’spect he did, sah, but I heard him tell de mate dat dey must sail
promptly at one o’clock, sah—dat he wouldn’t wait fo’ nobody, sah.”
“It’s a trick to leave us behind!” burst out Mark. “He has our money
and that is all he cares.”
“But he told me three o’clock,” persisted the professor. “Although I
have no witness to that fact!” he added, suddenly, a light breaking in
on him.
“Then that is where he has us foul!” came from Frank. “It’s a good
thing January told us this,” he continued, and gave the negro a
grateful look.
“Tole yo’ I would do sumt’ing if I got de chance,” said the negro, with
a grin.
“All aboard!” called the train porter.
“We are not going,” answered Professor Strong; and a minute later
the train was off.
“Yo’ see it was dis way,” continued January Jones, as they walked
away from the station. “I heard one ob yo’ young gen’men tell de
udder ’bout gitting back befo’ three o’clock. Den when I heard what
Cap’n Sudlip said to de mate I knowed sumt’ing was wrong. So I
made up my mind to dun tole yo’. I went to de hotel fust an’ dey tole
me to come heah.”
“We’ll not forget your kindness,” said Professor Strong. “It was
certainly a mean trick on Captain Sudlip’s part and I shall tell him so.
Of course if we had been left I could not have brought suit against
him for damages, since I have no witness to prove that he said he
would sail at three o’clock.”
“Tell yo’, sah, I’se mighty sick ob workin’ fo’ dat man, sah,” observed
January, with a shake of his woolly head. “I’d leave de ship heah,
only dis ain’t much ob a place.”
“No, I would advise you to remain until you reach Havana,”
answered Professor Strong. “I have a number of friends in that city
and perhaps I can get you something to do there.”
This pleased January Jones greatly, and he promised to do what he
could for them so long as they were together.
As there was nothing much to do at present, they walked back to the
hotel, where they procured dinner. In the meantime the negro, who
had been sent ashore on an errand, hurried back to the steamer with
all speed.
At quarter to one o’clock Captain Sudlip came on deck and looked
around him anxiously. He was all ready to sail and so far had seen
nothing of his five passengers. He gazed ashore but not one of them
was in sight.
“I’ve won the game this time,” he muttered to himself. “And they can’t
prove anything either. It was as slick as any Yankee move. They’ll be
mad enough when they realize how I have outwitted them. And I’ve
got the passage money safe in the cabin. Let me see, by dropping
them behind I clear just about twenty pounds. I can tell the owners
that they paid their way only as far as Kingston and they will never
know differently.”
As the minutes went by he looked at his watch nervously. Ten
minutes to one and no one in sight—five minutes. He called to the
first mate.
“All ready to sail?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” was the answer. “But I haven’t seen anything of those
Americans.”
“Well, it’s their own fault if they don’t come aboard in time. I shall not
wait for them.”
“Didn’t think you would, sir,” answered the mate, but in such a low
voice that Captain Sudlip did not hear him.
At one minute to one the lines were cast off and as a distant bell
tolled the hour the Chester began to move from the harbor. Standing
near the pilot house Captain Sudlip continued to gaze ashore. But
those he was fearful of seeing did not show themselves and
presently he heaved a sigh of relief and satisfaction. Half an hour
later Kingston Harbor and Jamaica itself were left behind and the
Chester stood boldly out into the Caribbean Sea.
“Dumped ’em!” said the captain to himself, with a smile of intense
satisfaction. “That will teach ’em a lesson. They can’t ride over me!”
And then he added, after a pause, “Now I’ve got that nigger to
myself, won’t I just teach him a lesson? He won’t be able to stand
when I get through with him!”
CHAPTER VII
THE JOKE ON CAPTAIN SUDLIP
But were our friends left behind, as Captain Sudlip so fondly hoped?
Let us go back and see.
It was light-hearted Darry, always ready for a joke, who offered the
suggestion, while they were eating dinner at the Queen’s Hotel.
“Say!” he exclaimed, suddenly, thumping the table in his excitement.
“I’ve got a scheme for paying Captain Sudlip off for his meanness.”
“Have you?” came from Professor Strong. “Even so, please don’t
pound the dishes from the table, Darry.”
“Oh, excuse me, I forgot, sir. But really, the scheme is just the thing,”
went on Darry, earnestly.
“Then let us have it by all means,” put in Frank. “I’m ready to do
anything to get square with that man.”
“My scheme is this: Let us try to get on board of the Chester on the
sly. Then, when he is congratulating himself on leaving us behind we
can suddenly appear. I’ll wager that will knock him silly.”
“Hurrah; that’s a go!” shouted Frank.
“A splendid plan,” came from Sam.
“We’ll have a tough job of it, getting on board without being seen,”
remarked Hockley, who was envious because he had not made the
suggestion. “There is always somebody on deck, and that somebody
will let the captain know of our coming.”
“We must watch our chance,” said Darry. “Anyway, it’s worth trying,
isn’t it?”
All the boys agreed that it was, and Professor Strong could not help
but smile at their enthusiasm. At once they made him promise to
come into the plan, and he finally consented.
“But I am not going to sneak on board like a criminal,” he said.
Soon they were down at the docks and here they met January
Jones, who had just completed his errand. They took the negro into
their confidence and he promised to come on deck and wave his big
red bandanna handkerchief when the coast was clear.
Fortunately the plan worked with ease. Captain Sudlip was not
dreaming of their return by half-past twelve and they came on board
seen only by January and one of the deck hands. This deck hand
loved the captain no more than did the negro and he readily
consented to remain silent concerning the American passengers.
Once on the steamer the party did not go to their staterooms but to a
storeroom which January pointed out to them. It was a fairly
comfortable spot, and here they remained until the steamer was
under way. While sitting here the boys completed their plan, which
made even Professor Strong smile broadly.
It was Darry who ventured forth first, showing himself when the
harbor had been left many miles behind. He strolled on deck as
coolly as possible, passing the captain without appearing to notice
the latter.
Captain Sudlip was nearly dumfounded and stared as if he was
looking at a ghost.
“Why—er—er,” he stammered. “When—er—when did you come on
board?”
“Not very long ago,” answered Darry, coolly.
“Hum! Did you—er know—I mean, did you have a nice time?”
“First-class, although I should have liked to have seen more.” And
then Darry added, before the captain could speak again: “Seen
anything of the rest of our crowd?”
“No.”
“Queer. They must be somewhere,” and then Darry walked away,
leaving Captain Sudlip staring after him.
“He must have left the others of his party,” mused the master of the
Chester. “Humph! Well, I won’t treat him any too good. He’ll find out
that he can’t boss me as the whole crowd did. If he gives me any lip
I’ll lock him in the brig.”
Darry lost no time in retreating to the storeroom, where he told his
story. Then Mark sauntered forth and passed the captain as the
latter was entering the cabin.
This time Captain Sudlip’s jaw dropped in chagrin as well as
amazement. He was about to back away without a word, but Mark
did not allow this.
“Well, Captain, I see you got away on time,” he said, pleasantly.
“Nothing like being prompt, eh?”
“Hum! Why—er—yes, I always sail on time,” came back, in snappy
tones. “I—er—when did you come aboard?”
“Not very long ago,” and then Mark added, as Darry had done: “Seen
anything of the rest of our crowd?”
“Saw one,” was the short answer, and then Captain Sudlip passed
on, his face full of perplexity and chagrin.
It was Frank he met next. The boy had a book in his hand and
pretended to be reading. But on catching sight of the captain he
sang out cheerily: “Hi, Captain Sudlip, have you seen anything of the
rest of our crowd?”
“Some of ’em,” growled the master of the steamer, and walked in
another direction, to encounter Sam, who came up to him with a
handkerchief to his eyes.
“Oh, Captain, Captain Sudlip!” he exclaimed tearfully. “I—I’m in
trouble.”
“Trouble?” demanded the captain, wrathfully. “What’s wrong?”
“Have you—have you seen anything—of—the—rest—of—our
crowd?”
“Find out for yourself!” roared Captain Sudlip. “If this is a joke let me
say I don’t stand for it!” And he rushed off for his private cabin.
Here he met Hockley, who had been waiting several minutes to
interview him. But he was no longer surprised and was on the point
of passing when the youth held him up.
“I say, Captain,” he began, “have you seen anything of the rest——”
“So you think you’re going to make a monkey of me?” exploded
Captain Sudlip, in a fury. “Think you are going to make laughing
stock of me, do you? I won’t stand it. How do you like that, you
impudent rascal!”
“That” was a slap from his broad palm, which took poor Hockley
fairly and squarely in the mouth and sent him on his back. The
captain would have followed it up with more violence, but just then
Professor Strong appeared.
“Stop that!” he commanded, sternly. “What right have you to touch
this young man, sir?”
“He insulted me,” answered the captain, but turned somewhat pale.
“I won’t be insulted on my own ship!” he added, doggedly.
“How did he insult you?”
“Didn’t insult him,” spluttered Hockley, rising. “I just asked him the
question we agreed on,—if he had seen any of the rest of our crowd,
—when he up and knocked me down.”
“I—I won’t argue the matter,” interrupted Captain Sudlip. “I know your
game. After this you can mind your own business and leave me
alone.”
“We will leave you alone,” answered Professor Strong, as calmly as
ever. “But first I am going to have my say. I know of your trick to
leave us behind. You told me you would sail at three o’clock and
then you changed the time to one o’clock.”
“I did not, I——”
“We won’t argue that matter. Fortunately we got back before one
o’clock, so your little plan was nipped in the bud. We are going to sail
with you as far as Havana, and you must treat us fairly while we are
on board, otherwise I shall enter a complaint with the owners of this
ship. And as for hitting this young man, you must apologize or I will
back him up in having you arrested as soon as we reach port.”
At these final words from Amos Strong the captain’s face became a
study. There was a look of rage and hate there, mingled with that of
baffled cunning. He had gotten himself in a tight corner and he knew
it. Two other passengers had seen the assault on Hockley, so there
were witnesses enough to his misdeed. The talk had collected quite
a crowd, including all the boys.
“So you think I ought to apologize?” he said, slowly.
“Yes, and you’ve got to do it, too!” put in Hockley, growing bolder,
now he saw that Professor Strong was, for once, backing him up.
“You had no right to play a joke on me.”
“I was only asking you a simple question.”
“Hum! I know you! But I may have—er—been hasty in hitting you,”
went on Captain Sudlip, lamely. “And if I was I—er—apologize.”
And with this he walked off, and did not show himself again until the
next day.
“I reckon we got square,” said Darry, later on, when they talked the
matter over. “He’ll be mad over this affair every time he thinks about
it.”
“It was all right enough for you fellows,” grumbled Hockley, who was
nursing a swollen lip. “You didn’t catch what I got.”
“Why didn’t you strike back, Glummy?” asked Mark.
“I didn’t get the chance, the professor came up so quickly. Otherwise
I would have wiped up the deck with him,” blustered the would-be
bully.
All of the others had their opinion about Hockley’s ability to “wipe up
the deck” with anybody, but they said nothing on that point, for
certainly he had caught the bitter end of the joke.
“And now we’ve got to wait and see how Captain Sudlip treats us for
the rest of the trip,” said Mark, when the meeting broke up.
“And how he treats January Jones,” said Darry. “Don’t forget that
poor fellow. My! what would Captain Sudlip do to him if he knew he
was the one who had brought us the news?”
As might be expected, Jason Sudlip was in anything but a sweet
temper during the days spent in making the run around the western
end of Cuba to Havana. But he managed to steer clear of Professor
Strong and his party, and the meals furnished, while not particularly
good, were still such as to be above complaint.
It was on his crew that Captain Sudlip emptied his vials of wrath, and
everybody caught it from the first mate down to January Jones and
the cabin boy. This led to more than one quarrel, and before the
Chester reached Havana half the help on board were on the verge of
mutiny.
“I won’t stand this,” said the second mate. “If the first mate won’t
make a complaint to the owners I will!”
“I do not blame you,” answered Professor Strong, to whom he was
speaking. “I think you have a clear case. If you wish it, I will write out
a letter stating such facts as I know, and I will sign it, and so can the
young men with me.”
This offer was readily accepted, and when the Chester reached the
harbor at Havana the second mate had the paper safe in his
possession. He had talked the matter over with the others on the
steamer and five men joined in making a complaint, not alone to the
owners but also to the authorities. As a result Captain Sudlip was
discharged by the owners of the steamer and the first mate became
the commander, and the second mate became first. The mate was
willing to keep January Jones, but the colored man remembered
what Professor Strong had promised and went ashore to stay there.
CHAPTER VIII
SIGHT-SEEING IN HAVANA
The boys watched the entrance into the harbor of Havana with
interest, and as they approached the shore Professor Strong pointed
out the various objects to which he wished to draw their attention.
“As you doubtless remember,” he said, “during the War with Spain, in
1898, the city of Havana and several other cities in this
neighborhood were blockaded for many months, so that it was next
to impossible for the Spaniards to get any supplies from outside or to
send any goods away from these ports. A number of vessels tried to
run the blockade but nearly every one was captured, so that when
the war was over our sailors had quite a lot of prize money coming to
them.”
“Is that Morro Castle?” asked Mark, pointing to a high fortification to
the left of the harbor entrance.
“Yes, that is old Morro, and over on the right is Punta Castle, and
beyond that is the Queen’s battery, a long fortification, which, as you
can see, shelters the city itself from the sea. It was these
fortifications, Morro, Punta, and the batteries to the west, that kept
our ships at a distance during the blockade.”
“I should like to visit Morro Castle,” came from Sam.
“I think there will be no difficulty, although, you must remember, the
American troops have now been withdrawn from the city and all of
Cuba is now in the sole possession of the Cubans.”
“Well, I guess they have a friendly feeling towards Yankees,” came
from Frank. “At least, they ought to have—we did so much to help
them establish their freedom.”
“The entrance to the harbor is about a mile from the harbor itself,”
went on Professor Strong, “and the city lies entirely on the west
shore. Roughly speaking it is about a mile and a quarter square and
contains about two hundred and forty thousand inhabitants. It is
divided into the old city and the new, the former being within the old
walls and being very much cluttered-up, and the latter being on the
outskirts, where there are many fine buildings and summer
residences. The harbor of Havana is a place that no real American is
likely to forget. Can you tell me why?”
“Because the battleship Maine was blown up here,” came from one
and another.
“Exactly, lads, and the blowing up of the Maine hastened on the war
which resulted in Cuban liberty. I think we shall be able to see the
spot where she sank, although the wreckage has been cleared
away.”
“I will show you the place,” said one of the other passengers, and he
pointed it out, not many rods from the shore. “I was here at the time,”
he went on. “The explosion was a very terrifying one, and broke a
good deal of the glassware in the hotel at which I was stopping.”
It was not until several hours later that they were allowed to land,
after a Cuban Custom House official had passed their baggage.
Professor Strong knew exactly where he wished to go, so there was
no hesitation on that score.
“What narrow streets!” exclaimed Frank, as they passed along, the
boys having elected to walk, in order to see the sights more fully.
“Why they are no better than alleyways. This sidewalk is barely two
feet wide.”
“That is the way they used to build the streets,” answered the
professor with a laugh. “They know better now, and the new part of
the city has some very broad and well-shaded highways, and also a
great number of beautiful fountains.”
“I don’t see how wagons can pass each other—especially those long
things they call volantes,” came from Hockley.
“There used to be a regulation that carriages and carts could only
pass through a street in one direction. I presume that is still in force
in the old part of the town.”

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The Rise of Managerial Bureaucracy 1st

ed. Edition Lorenzo Castellani

The Rise of Empires: The Political Economy of

The Rise of Neo-liberalism and the Decline of Freedom

The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans 1st

Representative Bureaucracy and Performance: Public

The Concept of an International Organization in

Street Level Bureaucracy, 30th Anniversary Edition:

The Rise of Autonomous Smart Cities: Technology,

Eurasia’s Maritime Rise and Global Security 1st ed.

ISBN 978-3-319-90031-5 ISBN 978-3-319-90032-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939730

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: decisiveimages/Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

In 1969, the historian Henry Parris published his seminal work

Sources of the Research

the traditional beliefs and values of their institution. In conclusion, it is

Rome, Italy Lorenzo Castellani

1 The Civil Service: Definition, Organisation and

2 The Rise of Managerialism in the Civil Service:

3 Focus on Policy Implementation, Consumer Service

4 1997–2007: Coordination, Consolidation and Delivery

5 Management and Tradition in the British Civil Service:

The Civil Service: Definition, Organisation

In order to better understand the subject of the book, it would be useful

© The Author(s) 2018 1

instead such terms as the ‘public offices’ or the ‘public establishments’”

rests on its being a body of professionals, like doctors and lawyers,

they saw themselves as responsible, and “operational matters,” which

government, performing ancillary administrative tasks, sometimes in

The History of the British Civil Service: From Its

parliamentarians, as illustrated by the case of Thomas Cromwell, vari-

they considered to be Lloyd George’s “power building.” However, the

government showed the usefulness of this power. In 2007, the Civil

Thomas Cromwell and Lord Burghley, made significant contributions to

universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which in the same period were

number of senior officials with specialist experience fell dramatically. It

derived from the private business world: the major US corporations

the Civil Service exposed as being “underdeveloped” when the Thatcher

The Seeds of the Managerialisation Process: The Fulton

In order to modernise the Civil Service, Fulton made 158 specific

Executive Class and the Clerical Class to form a new Administration

“There’ll be music now,” whispered Frank to Darry. “That captain is

“We’ll all be drowned, I know we will!”

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