NO ONE can read without the deepest regret the Report of the Board of Enquiry appointed to investigate “certain discussions engaged in by the Permanent Secretary to the Air Ministry.”
What matters least, perhaps, is that it brings to an end a career in the Public Service of exceptional brilliance. Sir Christopher Bullock became the head of a great Government Department before he had reached the age of 40. He had already been a prominent figure both at Rugby and Cambridge, had taken first place in the Civil Service examination, and had chosen the great adventure of India rather than any of the easier places which were open to him at home.
Then the War turned his life to a still more adventurous course and took him first to the Rifle Brigade and then to the Royal Flying Corps. He had won conspicuous distinction as a pilot before a wound brought him to the Air Ministry and his promotion in it ever since has been meteoric in its rapidity. These facts should be set out at once because they do illustrate the better side of those qualities — the restlessness, the ambition the blind pertinacity — which eventually brought him to grief.
The real tragedy is not that the Public Service loses a remarkable man, but that so fine a record should have ended under a cloud — and incidentally that the Service itself should be involved in a certain loss of credit.
There can be no reasonable doubt, in the mind of anyone who studies the Report of the Board of Enquiry, that the Government were morally bound to take action once the facts in question were brought to their notice, and that these facts have been most fairly set out and adjudged in the findings of the Board.
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They are concerned with four conversations between Sir Christopher Bullock, Head of the Air Ministry, and Sir Eric Geddes, Chairman of Imperial Airways, or his Managing Director, Mr. Wood-Humphrey, on dates extending from May 1934 to June of the present year. Throughout this period, it will be remembered, negotiations for a contract of great importance were in progress between the Ministry and the Company. Sir Christopher and Sir Eric were compelled in the end to take a personal hand in them; there is no doubt that at least one of the discussions under review was mainly concerned with the conclusion of a business agreement.
But on each occasion Sir Christopher — to the growing embarrassment of his companion, whose attitude throughout was beyond reproach — raised the question of his own cherished ambition to join the Board of Imperial Airways, and in particular to succeed Sir Eric as Chairman of the Company.
On the first occasion he further made a suggestion, which he had previously broached to his Parliamentary Chief, that some high honour should be conferred on Sir Eric in recognition of his services to the state. On the last occasion, having already been persuaded by Sir Eric that matters of personal advancement should not be raised at such a time, he recapitulated to Sir Eric’s colleague his ideas about the future of the Board and his own ambition to become its Chairman, and went so far as to endeavour to obtain a pledge of secrecy between these two representatives of the Company.
In all this there is no offence against the Law. If there had been it would have been a case for the Director of Public Prosecutions, not for a Board of three distinguished civil servants. But it is frankly impossible to resist the conclusion, unanimously drawn by the whole Board, that Sir Christopher’s conduct was “intrinsically improper”, “more improper at the time he chose,” and “completely at variance with the tenor and spirit of a code which clearly precludes a Civil Servant from interlacing public negotiations with the advancement of his personal and private interests.”