Sir David Serpell

Scrupulously impartial senior civil servant who became the first Permanent Secretary at the DoE

Sir David Serpell was an outstanding civil servant. He was the founding first Permanent Secretary of the Department of the Environment in 1970 and went on after retirement to join the main board of British Rail and to produce the Serpell report on the railways in 1982. A man of wit and erudition who regarded the Civil Service as a vocation, Serpell was alert to the potential for conflicting pressures and divided loyalties in his role as he saw Labour and Conservative government ministers come and go. He readily admitted the accuracy of some moments in the acclaimed 1980s television series Yes Minister — later Yes Prime Minister — in which the civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby attempted to get the better of his often short-lived political masters. David Radford Serpell was born in Plymouth in 1911. He was brought up in the city and attended Plymouth College. His father, Charles, who inculcated his family with a strong Nonconformist ethic of duty, had a law practice. In 1930 Serpell went up to Exeter College, Oxford, where — distracted by a hectic social life and the river — he gained a poor third in history. To make amends to himself and his father, he went to France, where he earned a doctorate in history at Toulouse University with a thesis on the Cathars. In 1934 he became an English assistant in a Gymnasium in Templin, north of Berlin. He also had first-hand experience of the growing antiSemitism when he had a bout of appendicitis and a Nazi orderly delayed his operation because his name was David and he was circumcised. From Germany he moved to academic research as a Fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy attached to Harvard. While in the US he met Ann Dooley, a student at Syracuse University, whom he persuaded to move to England in 1937 and to marry him. Once back in the UK he joined the Civil Service as a member ofthe Imperial Economic Committee until the outbreak of war in 1939. From 1939 to 1942 he was with the Ministry of Food and from 1942 to 1945 he was with the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Immediately after the war he was involved in planning for the Berlin airlift. He continued his ascent of the Civil Service ladder through the 1950s. One of his notable achievements was the negotiation, early in the decade, of favourable terms for the supply of oil from Iran. He was under-secretary at the Treasury, 1954-60; deputy secretary at the Ministry of Transport, 1960-63; and served in Ted Heath's Board of Trade, 1963-68. In 1968 he returned to the Treasury before being appointed KCB, and then appointed Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Transport. In...