An afternoon spent snooping around Oxford’s second-hand bookshops uncovered ‘a magnificent compendium of wit and humour’ entitled ‘Life and Laughter.’ As you can perhaps guess from the title this was published in the 1960s, and proved to be a good escape from these angst-ridden times.
Anyway, amongst articles by such as John Betjeman, PG Wodehouse and long-time Punch editor Bernard Hollowood was an exposition of Parkinson’s Law by its author, C. Northcote Parkinson.
In it he poses the following. In 1914 this country had 62 warships in commission. By 1928 it only had 20. This 68% decrease in the size of the fleet was not matched by a similar decrease in the number of Royal Navy personnel. All the same this number did fall from 146,000 to 100,000 in this period. The number of dockyard workers, though, rose from 57,000 to 62,400. Strange! But nothing like as strange as the 40% rise, to 4,550, in the number of dockyard officials and clerks, or the extraordinary 78% rise to 3,570 in the number of offices of the Admiralty.
By 1954 the number of Admiralty staff had swelled to 33,788, but at least that had the excuse of World War II. So perhaps a better example of the tendency of administrative offices to expand regardless of their sphere of responsibility is provided by the Colonial Office.
In 1935 the Colonial Office employed 372 staff. As Parkinson explains ‘The colonial territories were not much altered in area or population between 1935 and 1939. They were considerably diminished by 1943, certain areas being in enemy hands. They were increased again in 1947, but then shrunk steadily from year to year as successive colonies achieved self-government.’
Multiplying subordinates, not rivals
As the British Empire wound down one might assume that it needed less administration. Far from it. By 1954 the number of Colonial Office staff had gone from 372 to 1,661. And in fact by the time the Colonial Office was folded into the Foreign Office in 1968 because of a lack of colonies to administer, it employed more people than ever before!
Parkinson sums up the forces that swell the ranks of the civil service as follows. ‘An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals’ and ‘Officials want to make work for each other’. He gives an example of a civil servant, called A, who believes himself to be overworked. Under the circumstances he could resign – but won’t. He could ask to split his work load with one other, B. But B would be on his own level and would become a rival for promotion when his boss, W, retires. So, instead, he demands the assistance of subordinates, C and D, each being kept in order by fear of the other’s promotion. Thus set in competition C and D create work with great intensity until C complains to A of overwork. Happily A permits C to appoint two assistants, E and F, doing the same for D, who gets G and H, in order to avert internal friction.
Thus, A finds himself sitting at the top of a department of seven. What does he do? Well, to start with he has to manage the other six. That means deciding whether G should go on leave even if he is not strictly entitled to it. It means listening to E’s application for a transfer to the Ministry of Pensions, and dealing with a ticklish situation that has arisen on account of D falling in love with a married typist. He has to read through the letters written by F, and delete the fussy paragraphs added by C and H. ‘He corrects the English – none of these young men can write grammatically – and finally produces the same letter that would have been sent out some time previously had C and H never been born.’
As Parkinson carries on to explain: ‘Far more people have taken far longer to produce the same result. No one has been idle. All have done their best. And it is late in the evening before A finally quits his office and begins the return journey to Ealing. The last of the lights are turned off in the gathering dusk that marks the end of another day’s administrative toil. Among the last to leave, A reflects with bowed shoulders and a wry smile that late hours, like grey hairs, are among the penalties of success.’
Sounds all too familiar, don’t you think? Fifty years after Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson expounded his law, has anything changed..?
This article is taken from Tom Bulford’s free daily email ‘Penny Sleuth’.