Sir Richard Clarke - 1910-1975 A Most Unusual Civil Servant
| Published date | 01 January 1988 |
| DOI | 10.1177/095207678800300104 |
| Date | 01 January 1988 |
| Author | David Hubback |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Sir Richard Clarke - 1910-1975
A
Most Unusual Civil Servant
by David Hubback, CB. Cabinet Office 1944-1950, Treasury 1950-68, Deputy
Secretary DTI 1971-76, Clerk to the House of Commons Select Committee on the
Treasury and the Civil Service up to 1981.
Abstract
Sir Richard Clarke, known always as Otto, was a highly unusual and controversial
Treasury civil servant responsible for a wide range of new initiatives in Whitehall
between 1945 and 1970. A Cambridge Wrangler, a pre-war chess champion and
originator of the Financial Times Index he entered Whitehall in war time more
literate and numerate than most of his contemporaries. He regarded Keynes with
whom he worked as his model. He was one of a new breed of post-war forceful
civil servants, and one of the few capable of original thought.
This biographical article tries to assess Otto’s contribution, especially in the
period 1945-52, compared with that of his contemporaries, in working out the
new economic and financial strategy needed for post-war recovery. It also glances
at his later career as the main architect of the P.E.S.C. system for controlling
public expenditure.
’Otto can do anything with figures’ Maynard Keynes is reported to have said after
a successful negotiation in July 1944 with the Canadians in which he and R.W.B.
Clarke, (nicknamed Otto), a thirty-three year old temporary Assistant Secretary
from the Ministry of Production persuaded the Canadians to take a larger share in
financing the war. It was Otto’s ingenuity which led to the Canadians contributing
an additional S650 million.
When Otto moved to the overseas finance side of the Treasury early in 1945
he saw more of Keynes for whom he had a great admiration and whose death in
1946 affected him deeply. He wrote in his diary at the time ’Appalling news of the
death of Keynes. Felt bereft as at death of Roosevelt and Alekhine (the chess
champion). He is the man whose career I would soonest match; I could never hope
to match his all round genius, but I might hope to match his type of skill in the
field of forensic political economy. The extraordinary thing about him was his
intellectual sex appeal and zing, always fresh and interesting and original and
provocative.... his death leaves the Treasury in a terrible hole.... it will be
interesting to see whether the Treasury relapses into habitual slovenliness and
complacency or whether some new man is found for providing stimulus’. A year
later, still an Assistant Secretary, he wrote in his diary ’I am developing a fantastic
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authority in the Treasury; since Keynes died I am the only person capable of
original thought or with a round view, and so I get terrific reclame. Assisted by
the political feeling of Dalton, the result is really quite frightening responsibility’.
Was Otto’s 1947 assessment of himself accurate and fair to his contemporaries?
What was Otto’s contribution to the formulation of financial and economic policy,
particularly in the period 1945-52? It is always difficult and often impossible to
assess after the event an individual civil servant’s contribution, as opposed to those
of his colleagues, in the hierarchy leading up to Ministers. But the Treasury was, in
the author’s experience, (and no doubt still is) not at all rank conscious and even
an Assistant Secretary could make a major contribution if his ideas survived the
continuous debate that goes on up to the moment the Chancellor takes his decision.
In this article I have tried to trace from talks with Otto’s surviving contem-
poraries, my own recollection and from the available papers, including Otto’s post-
humous half finished book on Anglo American Economic Collaboration 1942-49,
how far his voice tended to predominate on major issues in the period 1945-52.
Although a great deal has been published, both by Otto and others, on the
period 1955-66 when Otto was the main architect in devising and building a com-
pletely new system for controlling public expenditure it will not be possible to
assess in any detail Otto’s personal contribution until the relevant papers are
available under the 30 year rule. This article, therefore, while glancing at Otto’s
later career, concentrates on the influence he had on overseas economic and
financial policy during the period 1945-52.
There was certainly no-one quite like Otto in Whitehall in his day. There were
a number of outstanding career civil servants, such as Edward Bridges, Norman
Brook, Frank Lee, William Armstrong and Douglas Allen, and others who like Otto
were recruited during the war, such as Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden and Eric Roll:
but none of them was so productive of new ideas as Otto. They were usually
trying to reconcile conflicting policies, while Otto, having thought out his position
fully, tried to override opposition by the sheer strength and volume of his argu-
ments. A
large man, physically and intellectually, he appeared not to mind what his
critics thought. He was usually certain he was right and frequently fought his
battles through ruthlessly, at least until Ministers decided one way or the other. In
spite of (or, perhaps, because of) Otto’s abrasive style - more marked in his early
years, his achievements were considerable.
He took a leading part in the Treasury during the immediate post-war years in
working out the knife-edge policy needed to maintain full employment in spite of
frequent sterling crises. His‘insistence that the main problem was the dollar short-
age which constrained both the UK, western Europe and much of the Third World,
led to a whole series of measures, including tight import controls, which he himself .
administered as a formidable chairman of the inter-departmental Programmes
Committee. He played a crucial part in working out UK policy towards the
Marshall Plan and the Organisation of European Economic Co-operation in its early
years and fittingly he wrote the report of the 1947 Marshall Plan Conference in
Paris which was sent to the US Congress to justify the provision of ~ 20 billion
20
needed for European economic recovery.
Otto’s conviction that by 1952 the time had come to ease the restraints imposed
on the UK by the weakness of sterling led to the ROBOT proposals, for making
sterling convertible at a floating rate, of which he and George Bolton of the Bank
of England were the originators.
In 1953, after eight years of sterling crisis management, Otto was switched to
the Supply Division in the Treasury dealing with social services. Here, his deter-
mination to get a grip on expenditure by presenting the facts needed for a rational
decision, led to his projecting expenditure on social services over a period of five
years, instead of concentrating on the Estimates for only one year ahead as was
then, except in the field of defence, Treasury practice. This seminal idea led
logically to the Plowden Report on Public Expenditure in 1961, which embodied
Otto’s ideas and to the all-embracing Public Expenditure Survey Committee scheme
(PESC). Both as a Third Secretary from 1955 and later as a Second Secretary in
charge of Public Expenditure from 1962 until he became Permanent Secretary of
the Ministry of Aviation and Technology in 1966, Otto was the main driving force
in working out the new ideas and putting them into effect. This outstanding gift
for evolving new policies and executing them explains Otto’s great interest in the
machinery of government. He was not only one of the two main architects of the
recasting of the Treasury in 1962 (William Armstrong was the other), but worked
out how enormous departments, as the Ministry of Technology became, should be
run.
He also gave much thought to the possible reconstruction of the central
departments of Whitehall. (See Clarke, 1971).
Born. in 1910, both his parents were schoolteachers, his father being the senior
mathematics and science teacher at Heanor in Derbyshire. He had been a private in
the RAMC in Greece in the First War and wrote letters to Otto which were headed
’Mathematics from Mesopotamia’.
In 1922 Otto won an exhibition at Christ’s Hospital and in 1928 went up to
Clare College Cambridge to read mathematics. It was there he acquired the nick-
name of Otto because of his round spectacles and fluent German. Cambridge was
clearly the right place for him. He became sixth wrangler in 1931 before switching
to Part II of the Economics Tripos in which he gained a 2(1). His passions were
first for chess (he played for the University), bridge and betting at Newmarket on a
scheme he had evolved, and later for socialism, which led to his working for the
Fabian Society and becoming a Labour Councillor on the Holborn & St Pancras
Borough Council. It was at Cambridge Otto became fascinated by statistics, an
interest which lasted throughout his life and, thanks to his reading Economics, he
got to know Keynes and Austin Robinson.
His first major job was on the Financial News, where between 1933 and 1939 he
was leader writer, the columnist Lex, and devised the 30 Equity Share Index, later
taken over by the Financial Times when it acquired the Financial News after the
war.
It was in this period he developed his twin skills of writing quickly and
lucidly, using statistics to the best advantage. It can be argued that a thorough
grounding as a financial journalist constitutes an excellent training for a Treasury
21
official who has to produce a lucid and short brief for the Chancellor by 6p.m.
He learned to write fast in short sentences which drove his point home with great
force. His main...
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