The Treasury 1660-1870 by Henry Roseveare

Author:Henry Roseveare [Roseveare, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Victorian Era (1837-1901), Georgian Era (1714-1837), Stuart Era (1603-1714)
ISBN: 9781000409291
Google: Dh4vEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-07-25T03:42:44+00:00

It might be more reasonable to believe of this generation, what has been proposed for an earlier one,82 that its best elements had been positively attracted by the reformed character and opportunities of the Treasury. Certainly any cursory survey of a First Lord’s correspondence will reveal the considerable pressure for nominations to the Treasury’s Junior Clerkships83 but the pressure is invariably parental. As far as the aspirations of Treasury recruits are concerned, the litde evidence there is tends to be negative. For example, Welby, the embodiment of the late-Victorian ‘Treasury mind’, had had no clear ideas about a career when he took his ordinary pass degree at Cambridge. Prompted by a friend, the son of a Treasury minister, he accepted his nomination to the Treasury ‘on the impulse of the moment’.84 Likewise Edward Hamilton, faced with the choice of becoming tutor to the children of the Prince of Wales or remaining at the Treasury, which he had only just joined, found it difficult to decide. ‘Somewhat gloomy prospects of future in Treasury’ was a factor weighing against remaining; the dangers of ‘giving up profession’ argued against leaving.85 Other Treasury clerks of this era, who have left impressions of their early lives in the department, give no evidence of positive ambitions to serve there. They came because they had been secured nominations by their parents or friends, and they stayed in spite of the discovery that the work ‘did not then seem … of a very attractive or important nature. There was too much useless duplication in the shape of copying out, and making précis in books of decisions and matters which were merely formal.’86

82 Torrance, ‘Sir George Harrison’, p. 78.

83 For published examples, see Parris, Constitutional Bureaucracy, pp. 53–6 (cf. Some Records of the Life of Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, K.C.B., compiled by a friend (1896), p. 30); Sir J. A. Kempe, Reminiscences of an Old Civil Servant, 1846–1927 (London, 1920), p. 285 Sir Robert Peel from his Private Papers, ed. C. S. Parker (London, 1891), iii, ch. xv.

84 See his obituary, The Times, 1 November 1915, p. 12.

85 The Diary of Sir Edward Hamilton, ed. D. W. R. Bahlman (Oxford, 1972), i, pp. xv—xvi.

86 Kempe, Reminiscences, p. 34.

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