Abstract
Warren Fisher was a dominant and controversial figure in inter-war Whitehall, serving as permanent secretary to the Treasury and Head of the Civil Service for twenty years (in which period he worked for five different Prime Ministers and seven different Chancellors of the Exchequer). He did more than anyone else to modernize and unify the civil service in the years after the First World War. Key threads in the development of the Whitehall system in the twentieth century — including the system of civil service classes, the generalist tradition, the standards of conduct expected of civil servants, and the power of the Treasury as a central department of government — lead back to him and his great personal achievements after 1919.
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Notes
Eunan O’Halpin, Head of the Civil Service: A Study of Sir Warren Fisher (Routledge, London, 1989), pp. 1–7, 282; Sir H.P. Hamilton, ‘Sir Warren Fisher and the Public Service’, Public Administration, vol. 29 (1951), p. 4.
Lord Bridges, The Treasury (Allen & Unwin, London, 1964). p. 171; Henry Roseveare, The Treasury (Columbia University Press, New York, 1969), p. 252; Sir Harold Kent, In on the Act: Memoirs of a Lawmaker (Macmillan, London, 1979), p. 53.
Harold Laski, ‘The Chief Civil Servant’, Daily Herald, 26 Nov. 1932; O’Halpin, Head of the Civil Service, pp. 18–23; Geoffrey Fry, Reforming the Civil Service (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1993), p. 75; Bridges, The Treasury, p. 175.
Ann Bridge, Permission To Resign (Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1971), pp. 127, 132–3; Hamilton, ‘Sir Warren Fisher and the Public Service’, p. 38; Dictionary of National Biography 1941–1950, entry on Fisher, p. 255; The Times, 27 Sept. 1948.
D.C. Watt, Personalities and Policies (Longmans, London, 1965), p. 104; Bridge, Permission To Resign, pp. 125, 130, 133; O’Halpin, Head of the Civil Service, p. 214; Hamilton, ‘Sir Warren Fisher and the Public Service’, p. 34; Public Accounts Committee, PP 1935–6, vol. V, q. 4517.
G.C. Peden, ‘Sir Warren Fisher and British rearmament against Germany’, English Historical Review, vol. 94 (1979), pp. 30, 41; R.S. Sayers, The Bank of England 1891–1944, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976), p. 438, fn. 1; O’Halpin, Head of the Civil Service, pp. 126, 142, 168, 188.
Kevin Theakston, The Labour Party and Whitehall (Routledge, London, 1992), pp. 84–5.
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© 1999 Kevin Theakston
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Theakston, K. (1999). Warren Fisher. In: Leadership in Whitehall. Transforming Government. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27226-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27226-6_3
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