On a Thursday afternoon in November 1955, the report of Britain’s Royal Commission on the Civil Service was published. The Economist had no time to comment on it that week. Instead it ran a piece by a correspondent, introduced as a “startling discovery” that was “certainly relevant to what should have been in it.”
The correspondent was the historian C. Northcote Parkinson. His discovery came with a table built from Admiralty statistics, comparing 1914 with 1928.
Capital ships in commission: 62, then 20. Officers and men in the Royal Navy: 146,000, then 100,000. Dockyard workers: 57,000, then 62,439. Dockyard officials and clerks: 3,249, then 4,558. Admiralty officials in London: 2,000, then 3,569.
The fleet had shrunk by a third in men and two-thirds in ships. From 1922 it wasn’t even expected to grow back, because the Washington Naval Agreement limited its ships. Its officials, as Parkinson pointed out, were under no such limit.
Critics at the time had already mocked “a magnificent Navy on land.” Parkinson set that complaint aside. What interested him was that the Admiralty’s growth, 78.45 percent in fourteen years, was unrelated to any increase in its work.
He tried the obvious defense. Naval technology was changing fast. “The use of the flying machine was no longer confined to the eccentric. Submarines were tolerated if not approved.” Maybe the new machines needed more people. But the dockyard officials, where the new draughtsmen, designers and technicians would show up, grew by only 40 percent. The men of Whitehall grew by nearly 80. “For every new foreman or electrical engineer at Portsmouth there had to be two more clerks at Charing Cross.”
Then he turned to the Colonial Office, during what he called “a period of Imperial decline.” Between 1935 and 1954 the territories it ran shrank during the war, grew again by 1947, then shrank year after year as colonies achieved self-government. On the chart The Economist published with the essay online in 2020, its staff climbs from under 500 to more than 1,500. In peacetime it grew 5.24 percent a year before the war and 6.55 percent a year after it.
The essay was satire, written in a mock-serious scientific voice. Parkinson offered a formula for staff growth and announced, in that same deadpan, that the yearly figure would always land between 5.17 and 6.56 percent, whatever the amount of work. Nobody has shown it to be a real limit. He declined to say whether departments ought to grow. The paper added a footnote to the new law’s name: “Why? Why not?”
The essay ends with a botanist. “It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow.”