Dame Mildred Riddelsdell

Civil servant praised by Richard Crossman and promoted to Permanent Secretary by Keith Joseph

Mildred Riddelsdell, civil servant: born Llandaff, Glamorgan 1 December 1913; Assistant Secretary, Ministry of National Insurance 1945-50, Under-Secretary 1950-65, on loan to UN 1953-56; CBE 1958; Secretary, National Incomes Commission 1962-65; Under-Secretary, Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance 1965; Under-Secretary, Ministry of Social Security 1966; Deputy Secretary, Department of Health and Social Security 1966-71, Second Permanent Secretary 1971-73; DCB 1972; Chairman, Civil Service Retirement Fellowship 1974-77; died Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire 25 July 2006.

'A terribly noble and nice woman" was how the diarist and Secretary of State for Health and Social Security Richard Crossman described one of his key civil servants, Mildred Riddelsdell. Crossman maintained, correctly, that she was often noble on the part and for the benefit of her department.

As Crossman's Parliamentary Private Secretary who between 1968 and 1970 attended many meetings across a table with Riddelsdell I can confirm that she was a terribly nice woman. But of course she was a great deal more than that. Alongside Dame Evelyn Sharp at Housing and Dame Mary Smieton at Education, she was one of the first women to reach the pinnacle of the Civil Service, and on sheer merit, coupled with detailed, grinding hard work to get on top of her brief - and no brief was more complex than that of the pensioner.

Robin Wendt, then Crossman's civil service Principal Private Secretary, recalls Riddesdell as "highly intelligent, level-headed, modest, socially aware and concerned - a forerunner of a highly talented generation of women civil servants".

Mildred Riddelsdell was born in 1913, the second child of the Rev H.J Riddelsdell - at that time studying at Llandaff College but later to become the Vicar of Wiggington in Oxfordshire and Bloxham. She had excellent grounding, for which she was ever grateful, at St Mary's Hall in Brighton, where favourable terms were given to talented children of the clergy and this gave her entrance to Bedford College, then the women's college of London University.

In 1936 she passed the civil service exam and opted for the Ministry of Labour. Her niece Mary Miller says that she kept to the end of her life pictures of Ernest Bevin, whose character and politics she greatly admired, though she was discretion itself when it came to revealing what party politics might be her choice. She would admit to being a child of the Beveridge Report and certainly played her part in the detailed work which led to the setting-up of the National Health Service.

She was to spend three formative years in New York at the United Nations between 1953 and 1956 on loan and using her pensions expertise for the benefit of international staff at the UN. Having returned to the department, she was again seconded in 1962 to be Secretary of the National Incomes Commission for three years.

I first came into contact with her at the end of September 1968 when Richard Crossman was made Secretary of State of the new combined Ministry of Health and Social Security. My first recollection is of how grateful he was for Riddelsdell's briefing when he went with her and his Minister for Social Security, David Ennals, to confront the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, in his lair in the Treasury. If ever a civil servant knew how to handle treasury ministers and officials to the advantage of her department, it was Mildred Riddelsdell, combining tact with mastery of her case.

She bore the heavy end of the stick in the transfer from her old headquarters in John Adams Street, a quarter of an hour's walk from Downing Street, to Elephant and Castle, which might have been Outer Mongolia, involving as it did both distance and traffic jams.

Riddelsdell had her moments with Crossman. Crossman's diary for Thursday 4 September 1969 records:

"While we were in the Lakes a red box arrived on the Saturday, but this wasn't much good because I had frantic difficulty in getting a key posted up, which only arrived on our last day, the Tuesday. When I opened the box I found that Miss Riddelsdell had done exactly what I had told her not to do and had written a paper firmly committing me to a 1.3 [per cent] contribution rather than a 1.25 contribution. I telephoned her and she said, "Oh, I am so sorry. It is a real misunderstanding, I must apologise." A few years ago I would have been furiously saying that these bloody civil servants deliberately deceive the minister but I don't say that any more.

"I simply know Miss Riddelsdell assumed that I, being intelligent, would want what she wanted, and therefore she heard me say what she wanted me to say and misunderstood me."

Mildred Riddelsdell was loyal to ministers, but perhaps even more loyal to departmental wisdom. On Monday 8 September 1969, the complex contributions row had not subsided. Crossman again:

"I went out of the room and Miss Riddelsdell said, "Well, Secretary of State," in a rather breathless way, "it certainly worked, didn't it? I couldn't believe it when you asked me to write the paper that way. We couldn't write in 1.4 with any conviction but it worked." She had a naughty glint in her eye as if to say, "To think that the Chancellor of the Exchequer could fall for such a simple device as that." It only indicates what the political negotiation is and that the papers put up between ministers are political in a sense that civil servants, particularly, I think, civil servants in Social Security, find it hard to understand. I don't think it would be true to say that all civil servants are like this, that nobody ever battles in a calculated way, but she was excited by this naughtiness and pleased that her Secretary of State had been so successful."

It was part of Riddelsdell's charm that she could be naughty for the most upright and worthwhile of causes. On train journeys or in the ministerial car she could be very amusing and perceptive in her judgements. She was the antithesis of the stuffy civil servant, other than when the occasion demanded it.

I laughed like a drain on 3 November 1969 when she quite improperly told me about the meeting that Crossman had had flanked by herself, Douglas Overend, David Ennals and John Atkinson with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the senior Treasury mandarins. She said to me in a po-faced way with a twinkle in her eye. "You know, Tam, it was like visiting Mussolini and his advisers."

Towards the end of the 1966-70 Labour government Crossman described Mildred Riddelsdell as a really outstanding and able civil servant of deep personal integrity. He wanted her in 1969 to succeed Sir Clifford Jarrett as Permanent Secretary of the department. This was stymied by Sir William Armstrong, who told Crossman, "I shall have to consult some of my friends." In early December Armstrong, then head of the Civil Service, came back to Crossman and said:

"We have consulted. Miss Riddelsdell is good at policy but she couldn't manage the ministry. You will have to have somebody from outside."

In fact Mildred Riddelsdell was to become Second Permanent Secretary in 1971 at the request of the incoming Conservative Secretary of State, Keith Joseph (who had consulted Crossman). She retired in 1973 on her 60th birthday.

The following year she became Chairman of the Civil Service Retirement Fellowship, an indication of the high regard in which she was held by the cognoscenti.

Tam Dalyell