THE CIVIL SERVICE AND THE COLOURS. (Hansard, 9 September 1914)

§ *LORD REDESDALE
My Lords, I rise to ask His Majesty's Government whether they will be prepared to grant facilities for young Civil Servants to join the Colours provided that they can find suitable substitutes among retired members of the Civil Service, or, I might almost add, other persons who could be accepted. The Secretary of State for War has declared that he requires 500,000 men. Mr. Asquith, in that glorious speech which has been ringing like a clarion call to arms throughout the British Isles and indeed over the seas wherever the English language is spoken, emphasised the same thing; but he went a step further. He told us that he wanted the best men. The day before that great speech was made I ventured to write a letter to The Times, in which I suggested something of the nature of what I have put in my Question on the Paper to-day. That letter has brought me an amount of correspondence which it is far beyond my powers to answer or even to acknowledge, but it shows that there are scores upon scores of young Civil Servants who are burning to join the Colours and who feel acutely the privation, if I may so call it, of being obliged to remain at home.
Unlike those "heroes" who prefer staying at home and playing with balls of various sizes to going where the bullets are flying and the shrapnel and shell are hissing in the air, these Civil Servants are burning to do something for their country in this hour of need. And you can hardly imagine a better class of men from whom to draw recruits such as were asked for by Mr. Asquith. They are many of them University men, some have gained high honours, and all of them have had the highest possible education; they are just the men who would be able to supply what we are told is in these days the greatest necessity in the case of every soldier—the brains behind the rifle. It is quite evident that those who could be drawn upon for active service must of necessity be the younger men. Nobody knows better than I do that you would throw a Department out of gear if you took away from it those men who have to perform the most responsible work. But there are hundreds of young men who have recently joined the Civil Service, whose work is really such as could be taught to an educated man in a very 583 short time. And if, in addition to being educated, the men who came forward had been accustomed to business and had been trained in offices, then the senior clerks in the various Departments would be able to make of these volunteers most useful men in a very short time. Those from whom I have had letters expressing a desire to give their services in this way comprise old Civil Servants, old bank managers, solicitors, men of letters, men of business—all of them men whom, I repeat, any senior clerk would be able to train in a week to do all the business that would be required of them.
The men who might join in this way as volunteers, if ever this proposal should come to anything, must, of course, be content to take the humblest duties. They must be content to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Department. They cannot undertake the more responsible work. But I feel that you have in them a reservoir of good material that could be turned to account at very short notice. And by adopting this proposal you would have enabled these young Civil Servants to avoid the stigma, under which they now are, of staying at home and doing nothing, and you would have conferred upon the older men who are willing to come forward and take their places the inestimable boon of feeling that they were doing something for their country when their country was in dire need. The spirit which animates all the men who have written to me is one of the highest patriotism. Indeed, it is something beyond patriotism—it is very reasoned patriotism. They do not believe that if they come forward to help in this matter they will be helping France alone, or Belgium alone, or even England alone; they feel that they will be helping to preserve the liberty, the freedom, and the independence of Europe and of the world at large, and doing their best to avoid the world falling under that militarism to which Prussia and Germany are at this moment slaves. If my proposal comes to anything, no doubt the details will have to be arranged. At present it is a very crude and undigested proposal. But I venture to lay it before His Majesty's Government in all humility, asking them to turn it over in their minds and see whether they cannot do something in this matter to meet the wishes of the younger Civil Servants of the Crown.

*THE MARQUESS OF CREWE
My Lords, I am sure that everybody will sympathise with the spirit which has animated my noble friend in laying this particular proposal before the House. At the same time I think I had better say at once that it does not appear to me possible to lay down any general regulation of the kind which I think the noble Lord desires to see carried into effect. It seems to us that in a matter of this sort each particular case has to be dealt with on its merits by those who are responsible for an particular Department. As a matter of fact the heads of the various Departments, as I am informed—and I can certainly speak with confidence about my own Department—have done what they could to give facilities for joining one branch or other of the military forces to which such men could be posted to those in their Offices who seem particularly fitted for the service. This is altogether apart from the considerable depletion which the noble Lord knows has taken place of the Public Departments, including those who have been attached to some part or other of the Military Service, either the Territorial Force or some other branch, and who have already had military training.
Those to whom the noble Lord refers, I suppose, are Civil Servants who have had no military training, and who at any rate if they were to become officers would have to undergo a very long course of training, in spite of their special capacity and general ability, before they could be fitted to go to the front. And I cannot help thinking that the noble Lord rather overstated the case when he spoke of these men who were left behind in Public Departments as doing nothing. Even at this time it has to be remembered that there are other absolutely necessary forms of public service besides those which involve service in the firing line. We all of us, of course, fix our main interest for the time upon those who are actually engaged in the combatant service, but there is a great deal of national work of a different kind to be done. And I should like to remind my noble friend of this, that a large part of the work which is being thrown upon these Civil Servants—very often extra work involving overtime, which is most cheerfully undertaken by them—is directly concerned with the supply services and with countless incidents arising out of the war, work which, with 585 all respect to my noble friend, cannot be done with anything like decent efficiency by people, hank managers or anybody else, however willing, called in from outside without the particular training which comes from experience in the Civil Service.
There are, of course, cases in which, as the noble Lord has pointed out, a young man has just joined the Civil Service, has hardly learned his job at all, and might just as well, perhaps, take to soldiering. In some of those cases I have no doubt that permission has been given to undertake it. I think that if the noble Lord gets the figures he will find that the number of those who have gone from different branches of the Public Service to join one branch or another of the fighting services has been considerable, and it is important to bear that in mind in considering the whole question. In addition to this, a great number of retired members of the Civil Service have voluntarily come to the help of their old Departments, affording the most cheerful service, which they would be quite prepared, if allowed, to give gratuitously, and have done a great deal to fill up the gaps which have been left by those who have gone. I can assure the noble Lord that we have not neglected this side of the question. I do not myself believe that anything like a general depletion of the Civil Service—I mean supposing all the men under thirty-five years of age were enlisted in some force or another, which I suppose is what the noble Lord has in his mind—and the casting of these men en masse into the ranks of the Army would be to the public benefit. And for two reasons. In the first place, those particular men, as I have ventured to point out, are doing more valuable national work in many cases as they are; and, in the second place, there is, happily, no lack of young men coming forward to bring the National Forces up to at any rate a million if that were thought necessary. That being so I confess I cannot hold out any hope to the noble Lord of any general or dramatic movement in the direction which he indicates, although 586 I sympathise with his general object and can assure him that so far as individual cases are concerned every possible consideration is given to them.

§ *THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE
My Lords, I think the reply of the noble Marquess has met my noble friend very fairly. The noble Marquess tells us that the Civil Service has already undergone a considerable amount of depletion owing to the calls made upon members of it who belong to the Territorial Force or to other branches of the Service. But, in addition to that, we gather from the noble Marquess that in special cases and where the Civil Servant can be spared without serious Departmental inconvenience leave has been given by the chief of the Department to the gentleman in question to join the Army. That seems to me as far as the Government can reasonably be expected to go. I must add this one observation, that I hope that those junior members of the Civil Service who cannot be spared, and who are, perhaps, as we have been told, working overtime, and naturally feel military aspirations at a moment like this, will remain unmoved by any one who attempts to taunt them with shirking their duty because they stick to their posts. The problem which every one has to consider at this moment is what is the best form of service that he can give to his country, and I will venture to say that gentlemen of this description can probably do better work for their country by adhering to their Departmental duties than by asking to be enrolled as raw recruits in the Army. The sudden transfer of half-a-dozen efficient clerks from a Public Office would probably do an amount of harm by the disorganisation of the Office which would far outweigh the advantage which could be gained by the addition of so small a number to the volume of recruits whom we are now taking in every day.