Book Reviews : Statesmen in Disguise: The Changing Role of the Administrative Class of the British Home Civil Service 1853-1966. By GEOFFREY KINGDON FRY. (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1969. Pp. 479.)

• Date: 01 December 1970
• DOI: 10.1177/106591297002300413
• Published date: 01 December 1970
• Subject Matter: Articles

BOOK REVIEWS
Statesmen in Disguise: The Changing Role of the Administrative Class of the
British Home Civil Service 1853-1966. By GEOFFREY KINGDON FRY. (New
York: Macmillan and Company, 1969. Pp. 479.)
Mr. Fry’s book is the product of, and embellishment upon, a doctoral disser-
tation written between 1962 and 1967. Subsequently, at the request of his pub-
lishers, the author added a 65-page postscript about the Fulton Report on the
British Home Civil Service which was released in June 1968. Much of the docu-
ment is a history of the British administrative class, beginning a bit before the
Trevelyan-Northcote report of 1853 and carrying very nearly up to date. The
historical sections, which comprise about three-fifths of the book, seemed to this
reader the most interesting. They offer a good rationale of why the British adopted,
though gradually and piecemeal, the central recommendations of Lord Macauley.
They explain the many adjustments made during the current century to make
the public service more responsive to radically changing needs, yet without modify-
ing the thesis that the fundamental tone of public administration be determined
by the administrative class, most of the governing echelons of which were changed
hardly at all. They explain how the British civil service could become generally
viewed as one of the most important elements of the unwritten British constitution
(whereas the bulk of the American public service, starting from similar origins
in a vastly different society, would never become regarded as part of the American
constitution at all, written or unwritten, despite its obvious importance to Ameri-
can governance). &dquo;The preference for the amateur over the professional, both in
1930 and possibly even now, is a characteristic of ’the community generally’ in this
country, not just the Civil Service.&dquo;
The main theme of the book, however, which persists from the first page of
the preface to the closing paragraphs, is polemical, not...