The Permanent Under-Secretary of State: A Brief History of the Office and its Holders

Currie owed his elevation to his intimacy with Lord Salisbury. Sir Thomas Sanderson, his successor as PUS, owed his to his good sense, sharp intellect, and devotion to duty. The second son of the Conservative MP for Colchester, at sixteen years of age Sanderson had been forced by his father's bankruptcy to quit Eton in order to find some form of remuneration. Two years later, in 1859, he sat the recently instituted Foreign Office competitive examination and secured himself a junior clerkship. He remained in the Office for the next forty-seven years, his only service abroad being with Lord Wodehouse's mission to King Christian IX of Denmark in 1863-64, and at Geneva during the Alabama arbitration in 1871. His qualities were amply recognised in a despatch from Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, the British arbitrator, to Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary. 'His perfect mastery of the subject of the Alabama claims', Cockburn observed, 'extending even to the minute details; his general information, his great intelligence, his indefatigable industry, his readiness, only excelled by his ability, to afford assistance, have excited my warmest admiration and deserve my sincerest acknowledgements.' Granville, to whom he was Private Secretary, during 1880-85, was also impressed by his talents. Indeed, in 1882 he considered Sanderson a suitable successor to Tenterden as PUS, but dared not press his case for fear of the disruption that was likely to be caused by passing Sanderson over the heads of so many of his more senior colleagues.

'Lamps' or 'Giglamps', as Sanderson was known to friends and colleagues because of the heavy spectacles he usually wore, was a frequent guest at Granville's home in Carlton House Terrace.

There he joined younger members of the household in games of drawing room cricket. He also wrote short stories for children and played the flute. His playful gestures were not, however, invariably appreciated. Once, whilst staying at Walmer Castle, he was party to some charades in which he was required to impersonate an acrobat and much alarmed Lady Granville by appearing in his under-shirt and drawers. The poor woman could not be consoled with assurances that Sanderson's underclothes were the nearest approach to a professional acrobat's attire that could be attained. Others, by contrast, were irritated by Sanderson's bureaucratic strictures. His eye for detail and refusal to abide the least inaccuracy in terminology or drafting meant that many clerks lived in terror of him, and in later years he was regarded by juniors as a 'martinet of the old order'. It is, however, quite impossible to read the memorandum which he wrote as Assistant Under-Secretary in October 1891, 'Observations on the Use and Abuse of Red Tape for the Juniors in the Eastern, Western, and American Departments', without recognising Sanderson's capacity to bring wit and intelligence to the driest of subjects. And his paper's penultimate admonition would seem to belie the verdict of some of his contemporaries that he was out to stifle individual initiative.

'I should [he wrote] be glad to think that I could at any moment refer to any member of the Chinese Department for the respective whereabouts of Honan and Hunan, or ascertain from a Junior of the Western Department what are the sizes of the various islands in the Samoan Archipelago, and whether the inhabitants do, or do not, wear trousers. But I am afraid that to many of us Samoa only represents copying and sections of blue print. This I think is a misfortune; it turns our daily bread into dry bones, and after a time the steel pen enters into the soul, and the individual becomes a mere official (who is a very dismal creature), or loses all vigour, and sinks into hopeless mediocrity.'

Sanderson had, however, a rather more cautious view of the role of PUS than had some of his successors. His appointment as Permanent Under-Secretary in January 1894 was followed, eighteen months later, by Salisbury's return for his final term as Foreign Secretary. Salisbury liked and respected Sanderson, but kept the overall making of policy very much to himself and treated even his closest officials as though they were instruments rather than advisers. Indeed, Salisbury could sometimes be more open in expressing his views to foreign Ambassadors than to either colleagues or staff. Pressure of business during the late 1890s, a time of crisis and conflict in Africa and Asia, nevertheless, left senior officials with more opportunities for debating policy, and Salisbury was content to leave them to deal with matters of detail. When in April 1898 Salisbury fell ill and his nephew, Arthur James Balfour, acted as Foreign Secretary, it was Sanderson who was summoned every morning to assist him with the matters of the day. 'I am now a sort of standing dish at Arthur Balfour's breakfast', noted Sanderson. 'When his attention is divided, as it was this morning, between me and a fresh herring there are alternatively moments of distraction while he is concentrating on the herring, and moments of danger when he is concentrating on foreign affairs.'

Later that year, at the height of the Fashoda Crisis, Sanderson also served as a convenient negotiating buffer between Salisbury and the French Ambassador in London. Sanderson had nonetheless to reckon with constant criticism from colleagues who were anxious to have more say in the direction of policy. Much of this was the result of personal and bureaucratic rivalries. Francis Bertie, who had joined the Office only four years after Sanderson and who doubtless envied him his position, was in the words of one new entrant to the Diplomatic Service 'always turning Sanderson into ridicule in front of us'. He also condemned Sanderson for his 'red tapeism', and reluctance to countenance change. 'Sanderson', noted Cecil Spring-Rice, one of Bertie's young friends, 'never listens to anyone: has no personal knowledge of Europe and no general ideas: is an ideal official for drafting despatches and emptying boxes … As long as he is there the officials at home & abroad are simply useful as machines and the Foreign Office is like Johnson's definition of fishing: a line with a fool at one end and a worm at the other.'

This was neither accurate nor fair. Sanderson, who was by his own admission an 'official and narrow-minded', was extremely circumspect in devolving work from Under-Secretaries and heads of department downwards. His first concern was with the proper transaction of business in an office in which a blunder could have more serious consequences than in any other Department of State, and he believed, not without good reason, that 'constant practice … [was] … necessary to ensure methodical attention to matters of detail'.

But he was prepared to consider and inculcate such changes as he considered necessary, especially when Lord Salisbury's replacement by Lord Lansdowne in November 1900 provided an impetus to reform. From the start the new and inexperienced Foreign Secretary sought advice in summary form from within the Office and encouraged more specialisation on the part of officials. But it was Sanderson who assumed responsibility for initiating reforms which would relieve able and talented young recruits to the Office of many of the more mundane and menial tasks with which they had previously been assigned, and which would leave it to heads of department to devolve policy work to subordinate members. He was instrumental in securing the appointment of the Cartwright Committee in 1903 to look into the reform of the administration of the Office, and with the aid of both Francis Villiers, Assistant Under-Secretary since 1896, and the indefatigable Eyre Crowe, who was then an Assistant Clerk, he eventually overcame Treasury quibbling over the Committee's proposals. As a result, the Office acquired a General Registry, a Registrar, an Assistant Registrar, two staff officers, nine second division clerks and four boy clerks. The additional appointments were sanctioned from 1 December 1905 and the new scheme was put into operation on 1 January 1906, a month before Sanderson's retirement.

Sanderson's last eighteen months in the Office were unfortunately marred by ill-health. Problems with his eyesight forced him to take extended leave in the summer and autumn of 1904, and Bertie, who in the previous year had replaced Currie in Rome, returned to London to assume temporary charge of the Office. Sanderson had hoped that 'in the Italian climate and with much less work some of [Bertie's] asperities from which we have suffered [would] disappear'. They did not. Nor did Bertie's penchant for intrigue. He had already succeeded in furthering the diplomatic careers of several younger men who shared his increasing Germanophobia—a reaction in part to the Germans' adoption of French and Russian methods in their dealings with the British—and in London Bertie began to work for the nomination of his second cousin Sir Charles Hardinge, who was then Ambassador in St Petersburg, as Sanderson's successor. Sanderson would have preferred Villiers to be his heir. But Bertie and Hardinge were both on excellent terms with Edward VII and with the King's support they were able to win the appointments they desired. There was indeed a certain sad irony in the fact that it was those who looked to Bertie as their mentor who were ultimately to benefit most from Sanderson's reforms. And in retirement Sanderson was left to ponder on the increased influence on policy of former colleagues whose views on relations with Germany he evidently perceived as dangerous and misplaced. His observations on Eyre Crowe's celebrated memorandum of January 1907 offered a balanced, but too often ignored, corrective to Crowe's historical analysis and the growing tendency within the Office and outside to portray every German action as a threat British interests. 'It has sometimes seemed to me', he observed, 'that to a foreigner reading our press the British Empire must appear in the light of some huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes stretching in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream.'