Able Men must “wait their Turn”
Shortly before the Royal Commission had made this recommendation, in words which seemed to place the responsibility for past failure to promote by merit, on the permanent officers of the Departments, as distinguished from the political heads of the Departments, the Ministers, Mr. Raikes, the Postmaster General, and the representative in the House of Commons of the University of Cambridge, had refused to accept the advice of the Permanent Secretary of the Post Office, Mr. S. A. Blackwood, in filling a post of some importance in the Secretary’s office. On March 1, 1887, the Postmaster General, Mr. Raikes, in reply to questions put to him in the House of Commons, said: “…It is also the fact that I have recently declined to adopt the Secretary’s recommendation to promote to the first class [in the Secretary’s office] one of the junior officers in the second class over the heads of several clerks of much longer standing. The gentleman whom I have promoted was, in my judgment, fully qualified for promotion, and was senior clerk in the class, with the exception of one officer who, on the Secretary’s recommendation, has been passed over on sixteen occasions…. What was I asked to do? I was asked to promote a gentleman who was much lower down in the class, a gentleman who was third or fourth in the class, and to place him over the heads of his colleagues. This I declined to do. I made inquiries in the office, and I found that the gentleman who was promoted was a meritorious officer who had discharged his duties with adequate ability, and therefore I thought there was no reason for promoting over his head and over the heads of one or two other competent officers, a junior officer who could well afford to wait his turn. I acted in the interests of the Public Service, and especially in the interests of the Department itself.”[285]
No Post Office official in the United Kingdom has power to make a promotion. No one has power to do more than recommend for promotion. Each recommendation for promotion is examined by the surveyor, and is then sent to headquarters, where “a most vigilant check is always exercised, not from the suspicion that there has been favoritism, but in order to secure that favoritism shall not be practised.”[286] Ultimately the Postmaster General passes upon every recommendation. Sometimes the action of the Postmaster General is merely formal, and is limited to the mere affixing of the Postmaster General’s signature to the recommendation made by the permanent officers of the Department; at other times it is independent, and is preceded by careful consideration of the case by the Postmaster General himself. Whether or not the Postmaster General shall give his personal attention to a recommendation for promotion, is determined largely by the presence or absence of the political element, that is, the temper of the House of Commons. The Postmaster General is not a mere executive officer with a single aim: the efficient administration of his Department. He is first of all an important Minister, that is, one of the aids of the Prime Minister in keeping intact the party following. He must know to a nicety how any given administrative act in the Post Office will affect his party’s standing, first in Parliament, and then among the constituents of the Members of Parliament. It is true that no British Postmaster General would convert the Post Office into a political engine for promoting the interests of his party; but it is equally true that no British Postmaster General would for a moment lose sight of the fact that Governments have not their being in either a vacuum or a Utopia, but that they live in a medium constituted of Members of Parliament and the constituents of Members of Parliament.
In the course of a protest against the Postmaster General being a Member of the House of Lords, Sir H. H. Fowler[287] recently said: “No man who has sat in the House of Commons for 10 years can be ignorant of the fact that there is a tone in the House; that there are occasions in the House when, in dealing with votes [of Supply] and administrative questions, a Minister is required, who, with his finger on the pulse of the House, can sweep away the red tape limits and deal with the questions at once on broad general public grounds.” To make the statement complete, Sir H. H. Fowler should have added the words: “and grounds of political expediency.” In the course of his reply to Sir H. H. Fowler, Mr. R. W. Hanbury, Financial Secretary to the Treasury and representative in the House of Commons of the Postmaster General, said: “When I undertook the representation of the Post Office in the House of Commons, the first rule I laid down was that [in replying to questions put by Members as to the administrative acts of the Post Office] I would take no answer from a permanent official, and that all answers [framed in the first instance by permanent officials] should be seen and approved by the Postmaster General [288]
The Anxieties of Postmasters General
In 1896, before the Tweedmouth Committee, Mr. H. Joyce, Third Secretary to General Post Office, London, said: “I well remember Mr. Fawcett’s[289] address to the head of a large Department [of the Post Office] who, … having a large number of promotions to recommend, had told the officers concerned whom he had recommended, and whom he had not, and what made the matters worse, he had in his recommendations taken little account of seniority, whereas Mr. Fawcett, like Mr. Arnold Morley,[290] had a perfect horror of passing anyone over. I only saw Mr. Fawcett angry on two occasions, and that was one of them.”[291] A moment before giving this testimony, Mr. Joyce had said: “It is always a matter of deep regret to the Postmaster General—every Postmaster General under whom I have served—when he is constrained to pass anyone over. I have seen Mr. Arnold Morley in the greatest distress on such occasions.”[292] Again, in defending the action of the Post Office in promoting one Bocking, a second class sorting clerk at Norwich, over the heads of 15 men in his own class, and 8 men in the first class, to a full clerkship, Mr. Joyce said: “It is a matter of the greatest regret to the Postmaster General to feel constrained to pass over so many officers, all of whom were thoroughly respectable and zealous, and performed the duties on which they were employed very well, but the lamentable fact remains that they were not fit for a higher position; every endeavor was made at headquarters to what I might call squeeze them through, but it was no use.” Mr. Badcock, Controller London Postal Service, corroborated this testimony with the words: “The statement is absolutely correct. The reports on which it was based can be produced.”[293] In passing it may be added that in February, 1895, Mr. R. J. Price, M. P., for Norfolk, East, sought to intervene from the floor of the House of Commons in this case of promotion. In 1892 and 1895, Mr. Price had been returned to Parliament from Norfolk, East, with majorities of respectively 440 votes and 198 votes.