The Secret State: Preparing For The Worst 1945 - 2010 by Peter Hennessy

Author:Peter Hennessy [Hennessy, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141979205
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Mrs Beryl Grimble, an executive officer in the Cabinet Office who joined the Civil Service as a typist in 1936, doesn’t feature in the standard accounts of the dramatis personae of post-war Whitehall. But she should – and will – now that a fair swathe of the paper trail covering the innermost of Britain’s Cold War secrets has reached the National Archives. She was known as ‘The Queen of the War Book’5. From 1958 to 1973, Mrs Grimble was the keeper of the ‘Government War Book’, which drew all the individual departmental war books together and laid out in sixteen chapters the 200 decisions required (eighty of them Cabinet ones) that paved the road from a peacetime UK to a country on the brink of Armageddon.6 Not until the first complete ‘Government War Book’, the 1970 version, was declassified by the Cabinet Office for use in the Pimlott Lecture I delivered on 23 June 20097 could the scope and reach of Mrs Grimble’s world be fully appreciated.

As she sat in her second-floor office in the Cabinet Office overlooking the garden of No. 10 Downing Street, bits of the current ‘War Book’ strewn across her desk (ready to be posted back incorporating the latest amendments) and old ones resting on her shelves, Beryl Grimble cannot have imagined the day they would be released to the public. ‘She knew the “War Book” inside out’, said Richard Ponman her clerical support.

She did make a good fist of it. She was attractive, colourful and had a fiery temper but she was kind to her juniors. They called her Aunty Beryl. You wouldn’t forget her.8

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