SIR ERIC BAMFORD

DISTINGUISHED CIVIL

SERVANT

Sir Eric Bamford, K.C.B., K.B.E., C.M.G., who died at his home in Surrey on Saturday at the age of 65, was formerly director-general of the Ministry of Information and later chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue.

Eric St. John Bamford was born in 1891, the son of Frederick Linwood Bamford. As a boy at Stonyhurst he showed a brilliance which he carried through life. He won a history scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he read classical honour moderations and then went on to the final honour school of modern history, and in the year in which the 1914-18 War broke out he got a good first. He passed high in the Home Civil Service examination of 1914 and without waiting to get bedded out in the Civil Service took a commission in Kitchener's Army in the Rifle Brigade. Soon after getting out to France he received a wound in the knee, at the Battle of the Somme, which progressively crippled him througbout his life and seriously affected his health.

When he was eventually demobilized he was sent to the Treasury instead of to the General Post Office, to which he had been originally allotted. At first he did not take his duties in the Civil Service very seriously, being more interested in the affairs of the Kingston Rowing Club. His first promotion was to be private secretary to Stanley Baldwin when he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Neither the Minister nor the private secretary had any exaggerated reverence for official forms and though they were ideally suited to one another neither of them probably enhanced his reputation during the partnership. Nevertheless Bamford's outstanding talents cQuild not be concealed, though it was clear that they would find a better outlet in some place where he would be more in the nature of a free-lance. Ht was accordingly sent to the Trade Facilities Act Advisory Committee as secretary. The business of that committee was to find credits for industry to stimulate trade, particularly export trade.

Bamford's success with that comnmittee, and later with the Imperial Communications Advisory Committee, of which he was also secretary, marked him out for the Ministry of Information when war broke out. It was a new Government department which employed most unconventional methods and some most unconventional people, and was capable of doing untold harm if it did not work according to the rules laid down for it by the Government. He was second in command of the permanent staff and later director-general, and there for the first time he had an opportunity of showing that when he was personally responsible he could not only be original in his methods but could control the work of his department in accordance with the true Civil Service tradition.

He was acting director-general of the Central Office of Information when that department took the place of the Ministry when the war...