Sir Horace Wilson, 1900–1935: the Making of a Mandarin

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Abstract
In 1975, Max Beloff wrote an article entitled ‘The Whitehall factor: the role of the higher civil service, 1919–39’, which historians have been singularly slow to exploit. Influenced, no doubt, by the publication in the same year of the Crossman Diaries, Beloff argued that no modern political history could be complete which ignores the influence of the civil service on policy-making. ‘The anonymity of the civil service’, he argued, ‘may or may not be a valuable convention of the constitution: it is one which the historian of modern Britain accepts at his peril.’ The peril was greatest, he suggested, for the inter-war period because it was then that higher civil servants in Britain ‘probably reached the height of [their] corporate influence’. In contrast to their predecessors, they controlled a far more centralized machine whose influence had been greatly extended by increasingly interventionist policies. In contrast to their successors, they were a highly compact group – being a mere 500 in number.