Christopher Bullock (civil servant)

[8][9][10][11] Following his Cambridge studies, Bullock took first place in the open competition for the Home and Indian Civil Services and in 1914, he chose India.

From then on until 1930, he served successive Secretaries of State including Sir Samuel Hoare and The Lord Thomson, fighting with Lord Trenchard, as Trenchard's right-hand man on the civilian side, against resistance and powerful forces within Whitehall and the hostility of the Navy and the Army to the establishment of a permanent independent Royal Air Force.

During the 1930s, he worked with great determination under considerable pressure on the expansion of the RAF during the period in which the menace of Nazism rose in Germany.

Bullock was personally committed to the policy of expansion and strove, against the pacific temper of the time, to awaken public and Parliament to the need to strengthen the RAF to meet the dangers that lay ahead.

[21] The survival of Britain in the Second World War was largely due to the foundations that Bullock laid for the vast expansion of the RAF.

[22] Of all the civil servants known by Lord Hankey, Secretary of the Cabinet, Bullock made by far the greatest creative contribution to the Defence effort.

[20] He also made a great impact on the extension of British Civil Aviation through his support for Imperial Airways and by his part in creating the Empire Air Mail Scheme, in which he went as a passenger in one of the early proving flights to India in December 1926.

The board found that he had abused his position as head of the ministry to seek a place on the board of Imperial Airways, at a time when his ministry was negotiating with the company to establish an air mail service – he had "interlaced public negotiations entrusted to him with the advancement of his personal or private interests" but also that "he at no time appreciated the gravity or fully realised the true nature or possible consequences of what he was doing and we consider that his failure to do so goes far to explain, though it cannot excuse, what has occurred".

[2] His case was taken up in the United States by Time magazine, which wrote: "Thus Sir Christopher Bullock had his career broken last week without anything specific being brought out against him.

[30][31] On leaving the Civil Service, Bullock went on to pursue a successful career in business, being appointed to the board of a number of public companies.

[33] In December 1938, the Marquess of Londonderry – the Secretary of State for Air at the time of the dismissal – wrote privately to Baldwin "[Bullock] was most unjustly treated and was the victim of the inveterate hatred of a civil servant Sir Warren Fisher who should never have been allowed to encompass his downfall, as he undoubtedly did.

"[34] In the spring of 1940, the injustice he had suffered was privately recognised when he was offered the Headship of the Petroleum Warfare Department which would have been de facto reinstatement and full restitution.

[37] Viscount Templewood wrote, in 1957, "Whatever may have been the merits of the dispute in which he (Bullock) was then involved – and I may say that I took his side, and that none of the charges in any way affected his honour – the fact remains that by his departure the Air Force lost one of its ablest defenders".

Public acknowledgement that his dismissal had been mistaken was belatedly made after his death[1] when his memorial service at the Central Church of the Royal Air Force, St Clement Danes was attended by representatives of the prime minister, (Victor Goodhew M.P.

Close to her Leeds family, she had reportedly attended the First and Third Trinity Boat Club May Ball in 1914 with both her future husband and her second cousin Olive Middleton (née Lupton).

She and another second cousin, Baroness Airedale, were guests at the 1935 London wedding of their relative Edith Cliff to Sir T. Willans Nussey.