First published in 1984, this book examines the style of leadership amongst senior civil servants and its impact on administrative reform by investigating the work of Sir Percival Waterfield who was First Civil Service Commissioner from 1939 to 1951. He was responsible for setting up the Civil Service Selection Board which was the key institution in the pioneering new approach to personnel selection initiated in Britain after the Second World War. It has been regarded as the model for personnel recruitment in other contexts and for civil service recruitment in other countries. The book raises fundamental questions about the criteria for recruitment and promotion of leading officials in British central government and offers a rare glimpse of the day to day work of top civil servants and the administrative culture in which they operate.

This book is a history and analysis of the government department most important in the development of the unified Civil Service in the United Kingdom.

The Civil Service and the London County Council employed tens of thousands of women in Britain in the early twentieth century. As public employers these institutions influenced both each other and private organisations, thereby serving as a barometer or benchmark for the conditions of women’s white-collar employment. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources – including policy documents, trade union records, women’s movement campaign literature and employees’ personal testimony – this is the first book-length study of women’s public service employment in this period. It examines three aspects of their working lives – inequality of pay, the marriage bar and inequality of opportunity – and demonstrates how far wider cultural assumptions about womanhood shaped policies towards women’s employment and experiences. Scholars and students with interests in gender, British social and cultural history and labour history will find this an invaluable text.