OBITUARY : Sir Thomas Padmore

Thomas Padmore's contemporaries prefer to remember him as the brilliant and resourceful civil servant he was rather than the disillusioned mandarin whom Barbara Castle couldn't stand, as he appears in the latter's autobiography.

"From 1931 Thomas Padmore was considered a high- flier," states Sir Edward Playfair. "Unlike many high-fliers he was an easy man to deal with, and didn't raise hackles. He was always indispensable. . . That is why the Treasury kept him so long, without yielding him up to another department."

The notion that he was anti-Labour does not chime easily with Clement Attlee's publicly announced wish in 1951 that, at the age of 42, Padmore should succeed his patron and friend Sir Edward Bridges as Secretary to the Cabinet. He was deprived of this coveted post by Winston Churchill's cavalier insistence: "Bring back Norman Brook." The old man wanted cronies whom he knew from the Second World War.

Padmore was born in 1909 into a family of Sheffield traders. His grandfather left school at the age of 10 and worked his way up Thomas Ward Ltd, steel merchants. His father, also Thomas, wanted his son to go into the firm after school, and it was young Thomas's headmaster who insisted, against the family's wishes, that he go to university.

From Central School, Sheffield, Padmore won the Foundation Scholarship to Queens' College, Cambridge. He took a First Class degree in French and German, and on graduation joined the Board of Inland Revenue. His three years here, immersed in the nitty- gritty of taxation, were an invaluable preparation for three decades in the Treasury.

In 1934, the same year he moved to Great George Street, he married Alice Alcock, by whom he had two daughters and a son and with whom he celebrated the first of his silver weddings. Her death in 1963 and that of his son from lingering cancer left him shattered at the point when he was to reach the height of his career.

His breakthrough had come in the middle of the war when Sir Kingsley Wood, Churchill's first Chancellor of the Exchequer, plucked Padmore out to be his Principal Private Secretary. Then, from 1943, he found himself working for Wood's successor, Sir John Anderson. After the general election and a Labour government, he stayed long enough to see the incoming Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, settle down in his task.

At the Treasury, he was given charge of personnel and management matters and subsequently finance. Successive Chancellors of the Exchequer - Stafford Cripps, Hugh Gaitskell, Rab Butler, Harold Macmillan, Peter Thorneycroft and Derick Heathcoat-Amory - all gave the impression that he would get the top job in the Treasury. Instead, it was given first to Sir Norman Brook (1956-60), then to Sir Frank Lee (1960-62) and to (Sir) William Armstrong (1962-68). Padmore's private letters reveal that he was in fact relieved not to be offered the rather difficult job of Secretary to the Cabinet.

He was, however, only too pleased to accept Harold Macmillan's suggestion in 1962 that he should have his own department - that of Transport under the dynamic Ernest Marples. Together they worked on the construction of a motorway system, and part of the reason that he was to run into such difficulty with Barbara Castle was that she rightly perceived he was wedded to the concept of motorways, whereas she favoured increased public transport and railways.

In February 1964, as a member of a Public Accounts Committee, I asked Padmore, the accounting officer, what were the changes during the years 1961-63 which should have enabled him to get earlier information about land costs in these big motorway schemes? His answer encapsulates the way in which his mind worked, introducing all sorts of qualifications.

There are quite a number of them. Some of them are changes which we have already brought into effect. Others are changes which we are still discussing with the Local Authority Associations.

The biggest of them is that, in the future - and this has been agreed - all applications for land grants under the system, which is now coming into use increasingly, where we make grants in advance, that is to say where local authorities acquire land for highway purposes in advance of actually launching the schemes of reconstruction - all applications will have to be accompanied by a District Valuer's Certificate of the purchase price; and we also propose - and this is not yet agreed, that there is no reason to suppose that it will run into any difficulties - we propose to do the same thing where applications for land grants are made at the time that the scheme is being launched. That is the biggest change.

That is a vintage, careful civil servant's reply, encapsulating Padmore's extreme accuracy and concern for language.

In 1964, the year after his first wife's death, Padmore married Rosalind Culhane, whom he had first met in the Treasury and who had become Assistant Private Secretary to Neville Chamberlain and Sir John Simon as Chancellors of the Exchequer. With Rosalind he was to celebrate a second silver wedding before she died last year.

Relations with the incoming Labour minister, the kindly Scot Tom Fraser, went smoothly. However when Barbara Castle was appointed and walked into her office on the first morning she records that the atmosphere was almost glacial. She found that her private office was manned by Scots resentful that a Sassenach woman had ousted their beloved Scottish minister. Further, she writes in her memoirs, "the Permanent Secretary, Sir Thomas Padmore, had gained a reputation for indifference to his job and knew that one of the conditions I had laid down to Harold Wilson in accepting my new post was that he should be replaced."

A Guardian article leaking this was hardly an auspicious start to the relationship between minister and permanent secretary. Things went from bad to worse. Sir Christopher Foster, who was present at the dreadful meeting in December 1965 when Castle summoned all the deputy secretaries and assistant secretaries for a policy meeting, recalled Padmore acidly replying: "Your predecessor did not have that way of working. A co-ordination took place round my table." However, Foster found Padmore "unfailingly courteous; unfailingly charming; unfailingly approachable. If you went to him you got the best of his advice."

He also recalled that Padmore used to play the violin during his lunch hour in the department and its strains came through the wall. That was not perhaps what was expected of an enthusiastic permanent secretary. To add insult to injury, a concert at which he was playing in Liverpool took precedence over his presence at one of Barbara Castle's critical pay negotiations. She was furious.

In her entry for 20 July 1968, Castle noted that her successor Dick Marsh "has got rid of Tom Padmore a year ahead of time". She claims that Padmore admitted he had been thoroughly unhappy for the past three years because he hated the department and was utterly bored with transport.

Padmore did extremely valuable work from 1963 to 1986 as chairman of the Handel Opera Society, made up mainly of civil servants who resurrected and performed works by Handel. Indeed, Charles Farncombe, the society's Musical Director from 1955 to 1985, states that thanks to Padmore the society's life was prolonged by five years after its grant was cut.

Tam Dalyell

Thomas Padmore, civil servant: born Sheffield 23 April 1909; PPS to the Chancellor of the Exchequer 1943-45, Second Secretary 1952-62; CB 1947, KCB 1953, GCB 1965; Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Transport 1962- 68; married 1934 Alice Alcock (died 1963; two daughters, and one son deceased), 1964 Rosalind Culhane (died 1995); died London 9 February 1996.