1/5 Starting with your example of Sir Humphrey from Yes Minister…

Just how typical was Sir Humphrey?

Sir Humphrey appears to have been written as two or three years older than Nigel Hawthorne (b.1929), the actor who played him. The character bio suggests he went straight from Winchester (traditionally regarded as the most academic of the old public schools), to Oxford (a 3 year undergraduate degree), to National Service (18 months pre-1950, two years afterwards). The Wikipedia entry (apparently based on Politico’s Book of the Dead, the first of a number of publications I ran into while researching this which was only, i.e. barely, available in Google Books snippet view) seems to list his first Civil Service job as starting in 1950.

By this time, Classics was beginning to wane as the dominant subject for higher grade British civil servants.

In 1937, Herman Finer (p.92) reported that “For the years 1925-35, Classics supplied 35 out of every hundred entrants, History 25, Modern Languages 8, Economics and Politics 7, Mathematics 6, and mixed History, Languages and Literature 7.”

By the period 1948-56, History and Classics had more or less swapped places: History 32%, Classics 21%, Economics and Politics 10%, PPE 9%, Modern Languages 9%, English 6%, Law 4%, Maths 2%, Science and Technology 1%, Other Subjects 2%.

[I calculated these percentages based on the two columns of successful candidates on p.436, Fry (1969) a slightly frustrating table - taken from a 1964-65 government report I can’t access via more than snippet view on Google Books - which doesn’t fully add up, as it does not account for the degree subjects of 18 out of 319 successful candidates in one column, who do nevertheless appear in a subsequent table on p.437, as having a degree classification.]

Incidentally, the gradings for the entrance exams of Fry’s stats were almost comically British: “Very good indeed”, “Distinctly above average”, “Well up to standard”, “Rather below standard” and “Unsatisfactory” (Fry, p.433).

Sir Humphrey was marginally old-school in subject terms even among his own cohort, when long-term patterns are taken into account. But he was utterly typical in being an Oxford graduate.

Relative to the pre-war period, civil service entrants from Oxbridge in 1949-52 fell from 89-74%, but Oxford’s dominance rose, its graduates securing 47% of vacancies versus an expected 24% (Kelsall, 1955, p.142, 144). Cambridge and London graduates took the proportionally expected percentages, and it seemed that Oxford specifically was taking some of the share which would have been expected to come from redbrick universities (those founded in provincial English and Welsh cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth century). Kelsall considered that the fall in proportion from Cambridge was due to the increasing numbers of science graduates produced by that university. He found that a smaller than expected number of candidates from redbricks were applying – but also that only 1 in 33 of those applicants was accepted, as opposed to 2 out of 7 from Oxford (p.145).

Finer (p.90) mentions the way in which the British university small-group or individual tutorial system, at its most intense in Oxbridge, acted as training for the senior civil servant’s discussions with a minister. At least twice a week, the student would have to debate, usually one to one, with a tutor who was often a national or international expert in their field, developing confidence, and an ability to analyse, think critically and argue about new topics quickly (and, some critics would say, the art of bluffing and blagging).

Devanny and Ford (2015, p.46) interviewed a real-life ‘Sir Humphrey’, who served as Cabinet Secretary – the most senior British civil servant - to Thatcher, Major and, briefly, Blair:

Robin Butler told us that as a new-entrant Assistant Principal (or Fast Streamer) at the Treasury in September 1961, his Oxbridge classicist background was not unusual and he went on to form a cross-Whitehall cricket team – called the Mandarins – with other Fast Streamers who had studied on the second course at the Centre for Administrative Studies in 1964. Butler also recalled being part of a group of Treasury Principals who were interviewed for television on the day that the Fulton Report was released in 1968. The broadcast was edited to underline Fulton’s criticism of Whitehall’s Oxbridge elitism, with Butler and his peers answering questions about their educational backgrounds by naming their public schools and Oxbridge degree courses (‘Classics, History’).

Butler attended Harrow and Oxford. (Previous Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong (1979-87) – in post when Yes Minister started, also read Classics at Oxford.)

This is what the Fulton Report had to say:

To give preference for relevance is to adapt to the needs of today the old principle that the Service should seek to recruit those it believes best equipped for 'work in government. When the aim was to recruit men and women to be intelligent all-rounders, the Service naturally drew heavily on courses like classics and history at Oxford and Cambridge, which by their prestige have always attracted young people of the highest abilities. These courses give an insight into the conditions of historical change and because for the most part the material they use is remote from the here and now they provide a "disinterested" intellectual training. Today, when the tasks or government have changed, the Service should seek to recruit those equipped for the new tasks. First-degree courses based on the study of modern subjects especially attract many young people with a positive and practical interest in contemporary problems, political, social, economic, scientific and technological. These problems will yield their solutions only to the most concentrated assaults of minds equipped through rigorous and sustained intellectual discipline with the necessary apparatus of relevant ideas, knowledge, methods and techniques, We therefore wish the Civil Service to attract its full share of young people motivated in this way, with minds disciplined by undergraduate(and post-graduate) work in the social studies, the mathematical and physical sciences, the biological sciences or in the applied and engineering sciences.

Though the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge have played their part in this growth in the academic study of the problems of contemporary society, it has been most characteristic of the universities founded ill this century. The date and circumstances of their foundation have ensured that their courses have been mainly designed to prepare their undergraduates for work in a modern industrial society. To draw more fully on this source of manpower, trained in these subjects, would have many advantages for the Civil Service.

(The opening chapter of the report also observed that “The Home Civil Service today is still fundamentally the product of the nineteenth-century philosophy of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report”.)

It sounds as if collection of degree subject data on civil service candidates and entrants has been discontinued, as in their report covering the years 1979-2010, Devanny and Ford (p.45) state “It is less easy to establish the total numbers who studied classics or Greats, let alone how many used Latin phrases in the workplace.” [‘Greats’ being the traditional name for the Oxford Classics and Classical Civilisaion degree; PPE, the degree more recently considered to dominate British/English public life, was also known as ‘Modern Greats’.] Of the old reports available in snippet view on Google books and mentioning findable degree subject information, the most recent I managed to find was this from the Civil Service Commission (1981[sic]):

The degree subject studied by candidates has continued to be a fairly neutral factor at all stages of the scheme. The variation between the performance of the three main subject groupings is small at the QT [qualifying test] stage and virtually non-existent at the CSSB [civil service selection board] and FSB [final selection board] stages. The most popular degree subjects represented amongst successful candidates in 1982 were History, Economics (including PPE) and English. No Classics graduate was successful. Science and technology graduates formed only 11% of the field of external AT candidates who sat the QT. They did slightly better than average...
(my italics)