Introduction

 

CCG was partly staffed by permanent civil servants on loan from their UK parent Departments, but many others were employed on temporary contracts, initially for three years until June 1948, with further annual extensions to June 1955.  In both cases, their conditions of service were based on those of the Home Civil Service, although working in Germany meant living under Military Government regulations, which imposed significant restrictions on employees’ official and private lives, including the requirement to wear a uniform.  Civilian employees also faced controls on their movements, and rank-based limitations on their access to services and social facilities.  In return, they were provided with accommodation and rations, free until June 1948, and thereafter at subsidised rates, as well as subsidised alcohol and cigarettes.  Section 4, Life in the British Zone describes what life was like in Germany under the Military Government.    

 

The general conditions of service for CCG employees were published in BAOR Order 103 of 7th September 1945, which also served as a recruiting pamphlet and was circulated throughout the armed forces, detailing salary scales and allowances, and equivalent military/civilian ranks.[1]  As discussed in the previous chapter, it also listed sixteen types of jobs available in the Control Commission, and the qualifications required.  By 1949, when the Control Commission was almost entirely civilianised, more comprehensive Staff Rules were published, which were essentially the then-current Civil Service personnel regulations, tailored to Control Commission conditions.[2]

 

Grade Structure

 

CCG, like the rest of the Civil Service at that time, was composed of a series of virtually autonomous functional groups, each with its own grade structure.  Recruits generally entered at the lowest grade level and progressed up the ladder through promotion.  The largest Groups within CCG were the Administration Group - university-educated policy generalists who occupied the most senior positions; the Executive Group, who performed a wide range of administrative and managerial functions; the Support Group, including clerks and typists, as well as other office support staff; and the Technical and Professional Group, composed of engineers, scientists, technologists and other specialists.  Many other smaller Groups were represented too, reflecting CCG’s widely varying functions.  Appendix A lists more than 50 different CCG staff Groups, sub-divided into almost 200 grades, including censors, export officers, intelligence officers, judges, police, teachers, prison warders and many more.  Some CCG-specific job titles were adopted: Control Officers were members of the Executive group; while the most senior Technical & Professional officers became Controllers, Deputy Controllers or Deputy Assistant Controllers.  

 

The grade of a job was of prime importance.  It determined not only rates of pay and allowances, but also, crucially, status.  Grade governed every aspect of working life: the size of one’s office, the size of one’s desk (and whether it should have one pedestal or two, or none); entitlement to curtains, a bookcase, a carpet (and, if so, what size); entitlement to a secretary or, more prestigious still, a personal assistant.  Grade also determined who was authorised to sign official correspondence. 

 

Grade was doubly important in the Control Commission, where civilian officials were also assigned equivalent military ranks.  At the outset, when CCG was mainly composed of military personnel, and civilians and military worked alongside each other, their duties were often indistinguishable; indeed, many positions were designated as ‘military or civilian’.  As jobs were progressively civilianised, a  notional military rank was thought necessary to establish civilian officials’ authority, especially in the eyes of the Germans, who sometimes referred to civilians by honorary military titles. Michael Balfour writes: “Everyone in Germany had his – or her –equivalent rank though civilians carried no outward sign of it; and, when wives began to appear, the ‘Frau Unterregierungsrat Schmidt’ of German tradition became matched by ‘Mrs Equivalent Lieutenant Colonel Robinson’.[3]  Appendix B gives the main CCG job titles alongside their equivalent military ranks.  

 

Equivalent military rank not only conveyed status, but also governed private life under the Military Government.  As described in Section 4, Life in the British Zone, rank determined a CCG employee’s entitlement to accommodation, furniture and household goods; class of travel; and the number of domestic servants permitted per household.  It also governed access to social amenities: junior civilian staff, who were deemed to be of ‘non-officer’ status, were denied access to the Officers Mess, which was central to CCG social life, and they deeply resented it.  The rank culture also led to abuses, as relatively junior administration officials came under pressure from friends and superiors to grant access to goods and services to which they were not entitled.[4]

 

Gender

 

A large number of CCG staff were female, most of whom were employed in lower level administrative, clerical and typing jobs or, less often, in the middle ranks.  With rare exceptions, women were virtually non-existent at senior level.  One of the exceptions was Dame Jane Trefusis Forbes, (Lady Jane Watson Watt) who was Director of Welfare Services from 1946-48.  Another was Lorna Rainbow, working on the high-level plans for the Occupation.  In June 1945 Miss Rainbow was posted to Berlin in advance of the main CCG deployment to set up the British component of the Allied Control Council Secretariat, where she slept with a pistol under her pillow and who, as an equivalent Lt Colonel, was addressed by bemused soldiers as “Miss Rainbow, Sir”.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

​

​

​

​

​

Male and female grades are listed separately in BAOR Order 103.[5]  No male clerical or typing grades are shown, and absent from the female list are Chief Executive and Senior Executive Officers and Technical & Professional Grades.  Although there was no official gender bar, the lists reflect the reality of the mid-C20th workplace, exemplified by Miss Rainbow, which was that males generally occupied the most senior positions – and were expected to do so.  Bill Yeadell, a wartime Naval Lieutenant, now a CCG Control Officer Grade III, had no hesitation, on his first day of work in November 1946, in complaining about being expected to share an office with two women, both of whom were senior to him.  His complaint was treated sympathetically, and he was moved to the Wing Commander’s office.

​

​

​

​

​

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

Pay and Allowances

 

Each CCG functional Group had its own pay scale but, with little or no lateral entry, and no grade-skipping, the only route to the top was step-by-step promotion through the grades.  Progression was therefore very slow, so annual increments were paid to motivate staff and encourage retention.  In common with the rest of the Civil Service and almost all other employers, women in CCG were paid less than men for the same work, so there were separate scales for men and women.[6]   Pay scales were designed to maintain a broad alignment between functional Groups, as well as between civilian and military remuneration, which resulted in an immensely complex collection of hundreds of different pay rates, requiring  a significant amount of personnel time and effort to calculate.  Lower level staff were paid weekly in cash at the twenty-nine cash offices spread throughout the British Zone.[7]  Appendix C gives examples of the minimum and maximum male and female pay rates for in selected grades in 1945 and 1949.

 

CCG personnel were financially better off than their UK Civil Service counterparts, especially in the early days, by virtue of the additional allowances and free or subsidised food, accommodation and other amenities they received.  On top of their basic pay (paid at London rates, which were higher than those outside the capital), CCG personnel received three allowances:

 

• A flat rate, taxable Civil Service War Bonus, paid to all except the very small minority of Division Chiefs and above those earning £1,500 p.a. or more.  In 1945 the War Bonus was £60pa for men and £48 p.a. for women so, for junior staff, the War Bonus was significant.  For example, it represented around 30% of the basic pay of a Temporary Officer Grade III, but only 4% of basic pay for an Assistant Secretary;

 

• A taxable Control Commission Allowance.  In 1945 the allowance was paid to senior grades at the rate of around 25% of salary for married males, and 12.5% for unmarried males and women.  The rates for lower grade levels were a little higher: 28% and 14% respectively.  By 1951, there was only a single rate of 25% for married males, capped at £78 p.a. for men on salaries of up to £450 p.a. and a minimum of £112/10/- for those on salaries above £450 p.a.  The rate for unmarried men and for women had been reduced to 7½% of salary subject to a maximum of £42 p.a;[8]

 

• A flat rate, tax-free Foreign Service Allowance.  In 1945 this was paid at £90pa for married males and £25 for unmarried males and women, and remained unchanged for the next six years.[9]

 

These allowances, together with free (until June 1948) or, later, subsidised accommodation, food rations, cigarettes, alcohol and amenities, were an important incentive for people applying for service with the Control Commission, especially for those at the lower grade levels, and temporary staff, who had no pension entitlement and received no gratuity at the end of their service. These ‘perks’ invariably came in for adverse comment whenever there was a critical story about CCG in the press.  

 

One group of CCG civilians was outside the standard remuneration arrangements.  These were the ‘ad hocs’: hand-picked, high calibre external appointees who filled the topmost positions as heads of CCG Divisions and Branches.  As discussed in the previous section, they were needed in place from the outset to establish the Control Commission, and an early priority in 1944 was to devise conditions which would attract them.  Civil Service pay rates, it was said, would not suffice: the appeal would have to lie in the prestige of the job and their sense of public service “which everything should be done to emphasise”.[10]   Ivone Kirkpatrick, then CCG Deputy Commissioner (later UK High Commissioner),  thought that it would not be possible to recruit men of the requisite calibre without financial inducement.  He suggested that such individuals must be given either appointments to high military rank which would carry tax-free emoluments superior to those which civilians of equivalent grade could expect; or they must be offered tax-free allowances.  The Treasury would not hear of it: the Civil Service annual limit of £90 Foreign Service Allowance and £500 expenses could not be exceeded; increased emoluments could only be achieved by increasing the salary.   But the Foreign Office was concerned that devising a fixed rate of pay for external appointees would reveal a sharp and unhelpful contrast with civil servants’ rates.[11] Individual, ad hoc terms were therefore agreed with each appointee – Appendix D gives some examples.  These were not published, but in the rank-conscious world of CCG, the exalted status of the ‘ad hocs’ was widely understood.[12]

 

Working hours and Leave

 

Most CCG staff worked the then-standard civil service 5½ day week of 44 hours,  and were expected to work additional hours without pay when necessary.[13]  At a time when many workers in Britain received only 2 or 3 weeks annual holiday, CCG employees enjoyed a generous 6 weeks annual leave, plus up to 8 days travel time, in addition to the nine statutory public holidays and three Civil Service ‘privilege’ days.[14]  After 18 months of service in Germany, they and their families were also entitled to a free passage to their former home towns in the UK every 3 years, and could obtain a refund for travel in Europe within 50 miles from the German border, enabling many to glimpse parts of Europe for the first time in their lives.[15]

 

Dress Code

 

At the outset, CCG civilian staff were issued with military-style uniforms, consisting of khaki battledress, greatcoat, cap, shirts and tie, plus shoulder flashes: green with gold lettering ‘Control Commission Civilian Officer’; or, for those of non-officer status, blue with gold lettering. Additional winter clothing was issued in the freezing winter of 1945, including boots, windproof trousers and gloves.[16]  Later recruits were issued with ex-ARP (Air Raid Precaution) blue battledress uniforms, presumably because after 1945 thesewere surplus to requirements, whereas khaki uniforms were still required for the Army.  Apart from those who worked in DP camps, and others in direct contact with the German population, such as railway officials, CCG civilians were not compelled to wear the uniform routinely, and it seems that many office-based staff did not do so after the first few months in Germany.  But, when wearing a uniform, civilians were subject to military-style dress codes, which were punctiliously enforced.  For example, Routine Orders in 1946 instructed that in the summer, jackets and ties could be removed, and shirts opened to the first button; women could wear ankle socks instead of stockings; but men were not permitted to wear braces.[17] 

 

In September 1949, civilians were  told that, after establishment of the High Commission, civilian dress should become the norm.  CCG personnel were nevertheless required to possess a complete suit of uniform “the wearing of which would become obligatory in case of an emergency”[18]  Bill Yeadell, who had rarely worn the uniform, which his wife compared unfavourably with his former more glamorous Naval officer’s uniform, nevertheless handed it back in August 1950, remarking nostalgically: “returned blue battledress uniform issued in Bletchley in 1946.  Long time ago”.[19]

 

Conduct

 

Like all civil servants, CCG personnel, both permanent and temporary, were bound by the Official Secrets Acts; and both they and their families were subject to a specially adapted CCG version of the Civil Service Code of Conduct which, among other things, prohibited them from engaging in political activities; forbade acceptance or solicitation of gifts and rewards; and banned the lending or borrowing money from fellow civil servants.[20]  CCG employees were also barred from engaging any outside activity or occupation “which might conflict with their official duties”; in particular, neither they nor their family members were permitted to accept employment with a German employer.   Under the Official Secrets Act, members of CCG must not: discuss official matters in public or with any unauthorised person; give or show an unpublished official document to anyone unconnected with CCG without authority; make any unauthorised communication to any newspaper or person of information to which they obtain access in the course of their duties; or discuss official matters in the presence of Germans and other non-members of CCG.   The need to protect official information was especially important for CCG, because of fears of espionage and criminality in the febrile political and economic situation in Germany at the time. 

 

CCG employees and their families were also bound by additional regulations governing propriety of conduct in relation to the Germans, in particular relating to black market and barter. [21]  They were banned from buying goods from Germans except for a strictly limited range of goods which could only be paid for in Reichsmarks; and no goods of any kind could be sold to Germans, or disposed of to them for services rendered.  Small gifts were permitted, provided they were not a substitute for payment, but barter was prohibited; and Germans were not permitted to be given BAFSV (British Armed Forces Service Vouchers).  See Chapter 4, Life in the British Zone.[22]  It was also forbidden to tip Germans who worked in CCG clubs, hostels, canteens, rest camps and leave centres; and Germans who accepted tips were liable to be dismissed.[23] 

 

With black marketeering endemic throughout the British Zone, as will be discussed more fully in Section 5, British-German Relations, there were frequent breaches of the regulations.  Many of these were minor infringements, but there were more serious cases too, which were prosecuted in CCG’s civilian courts (i.e. not in military tribunals).  For example, Appendix E lists over 80 civilian convictions announced in Routine Orders between September 1947 and October 1948.  Of these, a quarter were for black market-related offences, as well as for theft or misuse of government property, especially motor vehicles, and pay irregularities.  In addition, there were eight convictions for theft or misuse of firearms, eleven for assault, and four for gross indecency (a term often used at that time to mean homosexual practices, which were then illegal).  Family members were also subject to Military Government laws and, in one case, civilian wives were prosecuted and sentenced to be returned to the UK for bartering with Germans for goods in return for coffee and cigarettes.  Around a quarter of convictions resulted in imprisonment, ranging from 21 days to four years; the rest were awarded fines or led to dismissal.  What is not known is the how complete a picture these cases reveal.  Given the many rumours of corrupt behaviour by CCG officials, were some, perhaps more egregious cases quietly dropped; and how many failed through lack evidence? 

 

At no. 47 in the list of 55 regulations governing conduct appeared a single sentence stating that members of CCG were required to maintain an adequate standard of efficiency in the performance of their duties; but no provisions were laid down for how performance would be assessed, or what action might result if it were judged to be unsatisfactory.  At that time, civil servants’ performance was reported on annually by their immediate superior, in terms of attendance, dedication to duty, quality of work, conduct, and readiness for promotion, which could be assessed as ‘highly satisfactory’, ‘satisfactory’, or unsatisfactory.  In those pre-performance-management days, the main purpose of the system was to identify those who merited promotion, as well as those whose poor performance required them to be moved to another job.  While breaches of conduct could lead to dismissal, being sacked for poor performance was almost unknown in a Civil composed of permanent employees with lifetime jobs, not least because inefficiency was so difficult to prove, and the procedures for doing so were so long and cumbersome.  It was generally easier to shift temporary staff who were unsatisfactory to other jobs until the end of their contracts.

​

​

Footnotes

[1] Control Service for Germany, Appendix A. BAOR Orders No. 103 dated 7 September 1945.  IWM

[2] CCG Staff Rules.  IWM

[3] Michael Balfour & John Mair: Four-power Control in Germany 1945-46.  Royal Institute of International Affairs Survey of International Affairs 1939-46.  Hereafter ‘Balfour’.

[4] Balfour p108

[5] Control Service for Germany.   BAOR Orders No. 103 dated 7th September 1945.  IWM

[6] Equal pay was fully introduced in the Civil Service in 1961, having been implemented in seven annual instalments, beginning in 1955.  www.civilservant.org 

[7] 21.5.49 RO 22/262.  National Archives File No. FO1005/1878

[8] August 1951 FO Memorandum CCB/200/5.  National Archives File FO936/427

[9] August 1951 FO Memorandum CCB/200/5.  National Archives File FO936/427

[10] 5.9.44 FO Meeting.  National Archives File FO936/362

[11] 7.10.44 Minutes of 6.10.44 FO meeting with WO, Treasury & COGA. National Archives File FO936/362  

[12] Balfour P108

[13] Certain staff worked 48 hours gross: photographers, photoprinters, office keepers, messengers, British civil police, warders, Local Administration Unit supervisors, road transport supervisors, printing supervisors, cipher supervisors, clerks of works, builders’ foremen, drivers, frontier border guards.  CCG Staff Rules 1949. IWM

[14] CCG Staff Rules 1949, Arts 92-110.  IWM

[15] CCG Staff Rules 1949, Art 97.  IWM

[16] 11.5.46 Routine Order 62/362.  National Archives File FO1005/1875

[17] 23.5.46.  Routine Order 58/411.  National Archives File FO1005/1875 

[18] 10.9.49 CCG Routine Order 44/462.  National Archives File FO1005/1878

[19] WRDY diary entry 28.8.50

[20] Originally drawn up in 1928, the Civil Service Code of Conduct was amended frequently amended in subsequent years to reflect changing circumstance. 

[21] 19.6.48. CCG Routine Order 26/369.  National Archives File FO1005/1877

[22] 6.5.48 CCG Routine Order on Relations with the Germans.  National Archives File FO1032/1368

[23] 15.11.45 Routine Order 41/273.  National Archives File FO1005/1874