In defence of classics, cricket and meritocracy
The top echelons of the British civil service were charged this week with operating through a “secret code” reflective of class privilege. In a survey of more than 300,000 civil servants, the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) found that 72 per cent of senior civil servants could be said to come from privileged backgrounds. In 1967, the equivalent figure was 70 per cent. How does Sir Humphrey stay in charge? According to the report, via a workplace culture shaped by “certain cultural touchpoints”: “being able to make, or respond to, casual conversation about theatre, art galleries and foreign holidays… or understanding the use of Latin and cricketing metaphors in work meetings.”
One official commented: “You’ll be in a ministerial meeting and they’ll sort of talk in Latin but they’re sort of making what you’ll realise later is a joke about Brussels that everyone sort of understands.”
Ironically, the modern civil service was created to take on an elite which was popularly perceived as self-serving and corrupt. Victorian reformers wanted to do away with the “Old Corruption” that was prevalent in the higher echelons of the nascent British state of the 18th and early 19th century, when a culture of backroom deals, epic bribe-taking and aristocratic entitlement effectively meant that the privileges of public office were bartered like goods in the marketplace.
We owe our nickname for top officials, mandarins, to the way reform-minded politicians looked to the Chinese imperial civil service as a model of good governance and attributed its enduring success to the principle of open competition. For centuries, entry into the Chinese imperial civil service had depended on rigorous examinations known as the keju. Core subjects included philosophy and calligraphy. The Earl of Granville, speaking in the Lords in 1853, said that the system “enabled persons of the lowest origin to obtain the highest appointments”.
But this was far from the truth of it. According to Eleanor Olcott, writing for Engelsberg Ideas: “Only the sons of the wealthy, aristocratic, or literati classes could afford the classical training required to pass the test. Regional inequality was also a prohibitive factor: students in prosperous cities such as Beijing and Nanjing, where academic traditions were formed, had access to the latest study guides and trends in calligraphy that would score highly with the proctors.” Initially, the British civil service developed in a similar direction. It quickly became dominated by graduates of the public schools who had studied Classics at the elite universities.
But meritocracy wasn’t all myth. Rule by clever poshos has to be better than rule by idiotic poshos. In the 20th century, changing social realities gave new impetus to the idea of meritocracy. After the war, clever grammar school boys had a lot of success in rising to the top. What the SMC report tells us is that the culture of the civil service reflects not so much that old class debate, but the factor which drives some of our most intense antagonisms: regional disparity, especially the broad gap between London and the rest of England.
First off, how could a Yorkshireman be confused by a cricket reference? The spirit of English cricket is as infused with Yorkshire mist and Lancastrian skies as it is with the Home Counties village green or the burbling of the MCC at Lord’s. Sir Len Hutton, the first professional captain of England, said: “In an England cricket eleven, the flesh may be of the South, but the bone is of the North. And the backbone is Yorkshire.” There are more regional accents in the English cricket team than in the Cabinet – the team’s changing room must be filled with the variety of our dialects. You can find the Lancashire burr, dulcet Yorkshiremen, a couple of Geordies, posh Surrey, even a shade of West Country in the corner.
The idea that posh people use Latin as a code can be quickly disposed of. Many of our legal terms are carried over from Latin: mutatis mutandis, etc. Hence, perhaps, the joke about Brussels. Britain has an extraordinary tradition of working-class didacticism in the classics. Our great industrial cities bear the mark to this day of ordinary people’s fascination with the history and literature of the ancient world – Thessaly Street in Battersea, Juvenal and Great Homer Street in North Liverpool.
I remember my late grandmother, brought up on a small tenant farm in the north-east of Scotland, absolutely loving classical quotations. She would enjoy recalling them. But the point wasn’t to demonstrate superior knowledge. They seemed to function for her like Bible sayings, a common phrase book including pearls of wisdom treasured and handed down from the generations before and instantly recognisable to all and sundry. It is counter-intuitive, but within living memory, fairly typical members of the working class might well have been just as likely to use classical references or quotations in off-hand jokes as their public school peers.
But back to Sir Humphrey: this really is a story of the new professional classes, overwhelmingly metropolitan in mindset and tastes, “calling out” an older style of officialdom which was once quite accessible to individuals of all classes who were inspired by the massive variety of our national culture to believe that they all had a place serving the administration of their country. Until fairly recently, it was taken as read that the Civil Service would continue to embody the spirit of the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan report, recruiting and promoting based on merit rather than “preferment, patronage or purchase”.
To genuinely break down the “secret code” of officialdom, we need a new wave of energy and inspiration to sweep into our institutions from outside the capital. Only then will we have the chance to prevent meritocracy from once more becoming myth.