Warren Fisher (civil servant)

Sixteen years later he was Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and the first-ever Head of the Home Civil Service.

[2] Fisher gave the Civil Service a cohesion it previously lacked and did more to reform it than any man in the preceding fifty years.

[1] However, he was also a controversial figure: his colleague Maurice Hankey, with whom he sometimes co-operated and sometimes competed on issues of imperial defence policy, once described him as 'rather mad', and he was criticised for his attempts to control the appointments of senior civil servants across Whitehall.

His generally unsuccessful attempts to gain a say in Foreign Office appointments were much resented, and gave rise to unfounded accusations that he had been an appeaser (despite a robust defence of his reputation by the anti-appeaser Robert Vansittart).

He married Mary Ann Lucie (Maysie) Thomas on 24 April 1906 and had two sons, but the marriage ended in separation in 1921.