Baroness Evelyn Sharp was the first woman to receive equal pay, and did more than any other official to bring central and local government together
In 1926, just one woman passed the civil service administrative exam. Evelyn Sharp had planned on becoming a teacher, but was persuaded to try out for the civil service by her friend Alix Kilroy – a fellow student at Somerville College in Oxford and one of three women to pass the exam when it had first opened to her sex in 1925.
Kilroy wrote later that the women who joined at that time were treated with scrupulous even-handedness by their male colleagues in the administrative class. In Sharp’s case, this included being taken out by her boss on her first day for a lunch of snails and brandy, accompanied by a range of foul language she had never heard before.
While Sharp had to look up some of the words he used in a dictionary after the lunch, she eventually became a connoisseur of such language herself – many years later, it is said, Harold MacMillan’s special adviser had to tell her in a meeting: “Dame Evelyn, do remember there are gentlemen present.”
Sharp – who eventually became a Baroness – would later say that she did face some prejudice despite the attempts at equal treatment. On one occasion, when she arrived to represent the Ministry of Health at a local council, the town clerk refused to believe she was the ministry’s inspector and wouldn’t introduce her to the council for fear that he was being made the butt of a practical joke.
Back in Whitehall she was soon being spoken of as a talented young official and was building connections and expertise in local government, housing and planning – the policy areas which would dominate her career.
In 1946 Sharp joined the Ministry of Towns and Country Planning as deputy secretary – the equivalent of a director general today. No other woman had held such a senior post before, so there was no pay scale for women at that grade. To solve this, the department put her on the men’s pay scale and she received the same salary as her male peers a decade before equal pay began to be introduced in other parts of government.
When the Ministry of Housing and Local Government was formed in 1951, Sharp became the deputy secretary. She worked closely with Macmillan on the ambitious and successful post-war housebuilding programme and was also instrumental in the creation of New Towns, though not everyone has praised her influence on post-war British architecture.
In 2002, historian (and later Labour politician) Tristram Hunt nominated Sharp as one of the worst Britons, saying: “Because of her enthusiasm for modernist architecture and urban rebuilding… she truly did come close to doing as much damage to Britain as the Luftwaffe.”
To her ministers, however, Sharp was always seen as an asset. Macmillan would later described her as "without exception the ablest woman I have ever known", and she was already regarded as the most dominant and dynamic official in the department even before she took the top job.
Her permanent secretary in the early 1950s, Sir Thomas Sheepshanks, was a traditional, cautious civil servant. Hugh Dalton – minister for town and country planning from 1950 – described the pair in cricketing terms which also reveal the male and upper-class culture of the time: “He has a very safe pair of hands,” Dalton said, “but she’ll hit the sixes.”
It was therefore unsurprising that she took over from Sheepshanks on his retirement in 1955. Cabinet secretary Edward Bridges wrote to the prime minister Anthony Eden that she was “a very able administrator… well-known and liked by the local authorities” and that while her promotion would “no doubt” be acclaimed because she would be the first woman in such a role, “it is recommended to you for the reason that she is by far the best qualified person, man or woman, for the job”. She held the post until she retired in 1966, cementing her position as a towering figure in both central and local government.
A decade after retirement, Sharp gained wider recognition with the publication of Richard Crossman’s Diaries of a Cabinet Minister. Their relationship was not a smooth one – she felt he did not know how to use the civil service and was enraged by the publication of his diaries, describing his breach of the confidentiality between officials and ministers as “appallingly ill-mannered”.
Yet Sharp’s reputation seems only to have been enhanced by the diaries. As Peter Hennessey noted in his 1989 book Whitehall, “the more the arrogant and bullying Crossman rallied against the Dame, the more the reader sided with her”.
Crossman’s portrait of Sharp includes unflattering descriptions and expressions of frustration – he describes her as expensively but uglily dressed, “granite-like”, obstructive to outsiders, and complains that by running the department as her personal domain she rendered it “badly run and badly organised”.
Yet alongside this there is admiration (sometimes grudging) and genuine recognition of her consummate skills in navigating Whitehall to achieve his objectives.
These skills were evident immediately on Crossman’s appointment, when she fought to retain planning functions within what was by then called the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. Crossman had agreed to jettison this responsibility, but Sharp believed it was impossible to have responsibility for housing without oversight of planning.
“The Dame explained to me that what I had unconsciously done was to demolish the whole basis of her department,” Crossman wrote, and she immediately “got down to a Whitehall battle to save her department from my stupidity and ignorance.”
Sharp won the battle, telling Crossman the next week that “I always win. But it was exhausting”.
The question of how departmental functions should be allocated was one which had interested Sharp for decades. She had advocated successfully for planning, local government and housing to be combined in one department after the Second World War, having seen the challenges caused when they did not sit side by side. But she did not convince the then-cabinet secretary of the need for a commission which would oversee how machinery of government was designed, to avoid departmental functions being assigned according to guesswork and personalities.
She would revisit some of these concerns after her retirement, when she joined work organised by Ted Heath as leader of the opposition to consider how government could be better organised. She chaired a committee which would eventually recommend the creation of a Prime Minister’s Department, a more rational demarcation of departments and a central planning staff to maintain government-wide priorities.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a woman who dedicated her entire career to one policy area, she was also supportive of the Fulton Report’s call for greater specialisation in the service, saying in her 1968 maiden speech to the House of Lords that she recognised what Fulton called the “cult of the generalist” and thought it got worse at the most senior grades.
“Far too often, to my way of thinking, permanent secretaries have been appointed to take charge of departments who have come from some quite different area of government and with, inevitably, no real knowledge of the work of the department, of the clients of the department or of the concepts that rule the department,” she said.
“This has been done on the theory that administration is an art that can be applied to any subject. Sometimes indeed it has been done more to solve a personnel problem elsewhere than in the interests of the department concerned.”
Sharp never married, and although the civil service had lifted the marriage ban in 1946, she explicitly linked this to her working life, saying in a retirement interview: “I should prefer to have been a man: then I could have had a career and marriage too.”
Not everyone warmed to Sharp – indeed Crossman reports that the Queen said of her: “Oh that woman – I never liked her.” But she was an energetic, resourceful and inventive civil servant, giving her own views to ministers frankly, yet providing wholehearted and loyal support once their decision was made. In the early 1960s another of her ministers – Charles Hill – described her with a summary that many civil service leaders would value today. She tolerated no inefficiency above or below her, he said, and was a woman who “cherished the traditions of the [civil] service, yet remained a rebel”.
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