SIR PERCIVAL WATERFIIELD

Sir Percival Waterfield, K.B.E., C.B., who was First Civil Service Commissioner from 1939 until his retirement in 1951, died at his home on Wednesday. He was 77.

Born on May 16, 1888, he was educated at Westminster and Christ Church. Oxford. where he was Hertford Scholar in 1909. He entered the Treasury in 1911, and trom 1920 to 1922 he was Treasury Remembrancer in Ireland.

He continued his career in the Civil Seryice from 1934 to 1939 a- Princloal

t%ssistant becretarv at the Treasury. and then for one Year was Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Information. In 1938 he was a member of the Palestine Partition Commission.

The Civil Service Commission was established in 1855 to ensure that its personnel were suited to the iobs which had to be done. and to run the

selection boards. During his time with it. from 1939, Waterfield concealed a kindly. sympathetic and imaginative nature beneath a somewhat formal and precise manner. Those who met him as chairman of a selection panel, on whose decision their fate depended, were not reassured by his bearing in the initial stages, but before long his willingness to listen to what they had to say, and his quick grasp of what they were trying to convey, created confidence.

No detail of any business in which he was concerned was too unimportant for his attention, yet that he could take the large view was shown by the changes which he introduced into the method of selection of candidates for the Administrative class of the Civil Service. Having become convinced that the existing examination placed too much emphasis on academic attainments to the exclusion of other highly important qualities. he studied all the latest ideas about methods of selection in other fields, and especially the Procedure adopted by the War Office for the selection of officers during the Second World War, and on this basis he evolved his scheme.

About the merits of this there has been much controversy but, whatever its merits. no one without a creative imagination and a power of initiative which would not have been suspected from a casual encounter with Waterfield. could have produced it.

In 1958 he returned from retirement when he was appointed Commissioner by the British and Maltese Governments to study the relativity and wage structure of Malta government and Defence Department employees.

Waterfield was made C.B. in 1923, knighted in 1944 and made K.B.E. in 1951.

He married in 1920 Doris Mary. daughter of Otto Siepmann, and they had two sons and two daughters.