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PUBLIC SERVICE IN U.K. DEPENDENT TERRITORIES
519
THE PUBLIC SERVICE IN UNITED KINGDOM DependeNT TERRITORIES
General review
The Central Organisation
The term "Her Majesty's Colonial Service" was in use for well over a century to describe the members of the public services of the Colonies, Protectorates and other territories dependent upon Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. Originally, the Colonial Service consisted of officers appointed from Britain or recruited locally from amongst British colonists. As time went on, staffs were increasingly built up from the indigenous or resident populations of the territories, but it was always necessary to recruit large numbers of men and women from Britain and other Common- wealth countries to supply needs which could not be met from local resources, especially in the professional, technical and higher administrative branches.49
51
Until some time after the last war there was one elaborate organisation, managed by the Colonial Office, embracing appointment, terms of service, promotion, discipline and welfare of the public service in nearly all of the forty-odd 50 United Kingdom dependent territories. The organisation still exists, though most of its functions have been taken over by the Ministry of Overseas Development." One may therefore use the present tense. But since it has become modified in form and operation and it has been reduced in size to a mere fraction of what it was even in 1957, in describing a vast organisation working (whatever critics may say) like a carefully constructed and well-oiled machine (but with a human conscience) it is nearer the truth to speak of the past-with no reflection upon the Ministry of Overseas Development.
The organisation is, in essence, one of dual control-by the Colonial Office and local governments. The notion has been current in some less well-informed circles that expatriate officers serving in dependent territories are somehow employed by the Colonial Office- and therefore by the United Kingdom Government; but, as a matter of law, that is true of none of them, except a few on secondment. The Secretary of State exercised, and still exercises over a much reduced field, extensive authority, but the officers are in the service of the countries to which they are appointed. Nevertheless, the official view is that they are rightly regarded as belonging to a general service under the Crown as well as to the local civil services.52
* Colonial No. 306, para. 1.
10 Constitutional grouping and changes, e.g., in the Windward Islands and the
Malayan peninsula, make it impossible to be more definite. 11 See p. 524, infra.
52 Colonial No. 306, para. 2.
Law
(1966))