Obituary: Sir Lancelot Errington, senior civil servant who played a key role in the biggest state projects of the 20th century

AS COMMANDER of a Royal Navy minesweeper in the Firth of Forth during the Second World War, Sir Lancelot Errington helped defend Scotland and the UK against what appeared to be an imminent Nazi naval attack. It never happened – not least because of the pre-emptive defences of the Rosyth Command of the Home Fleet, including Royal Navy volunteers such as Errington.

Although part of the old Scots gentry, Errington was always known simply as Lance. He went on to become one of Britain’s most senior civil servants, a key player in the biggest government projects of the 20th century – construction of the welfare state and the national health service. As a civil servant rather than a party politician, his role went largely unrecognised outside Whitehall, yet cannot be underestimated. He was one of the UK’s finest public servants of the post-war years.

He ended his career in 1976 as a permanent secretary in the Department of Health and Social Security, when Barbara Castle was the department’s secretary of state. To most of us, perhaps, the title “permanent secretary” brings to mind Sir Humphrey Appleby of the television series Yes Minister, but Errington was not one to bamboozle his political boss with verbose speeches. Along with the department’s other permanent secretary, Sir Patrick Nairne, he ran the department on a day-to-basis and effectively acted as its chief executive. In that, according to the late Mrs Castle herself, in her diaries, he not only succeeded but was “brilliant”.

For the last 35 years of his life, Sir Lance lived in Scotland – at Fasnacloich, near Port Appin, Argyll – becoming a much-loved stalwart of his local church and community. “I think he had grown tired, generally, of the company of high heidyins [in London] and wanted to live again among normal people,” said one of his sons, Humphrey.

Knighted by the Queen in 1976, Sir Lance left Whitehall that year, somewhat disillusioned by what he considered the “mischievous” interference by party politicians into the work of the Civil Service. He foresaw the era of the “spin doctors” whose job was to put their bosses’ survival ahead of the aspirations and needs of those who elected them.

Lancelot Errington was born in the family seat, Beeslack House near Penicuik, into a privileged background. One ancestor, also called Sir Lancelot (or sometimes Launcelot) Errington briefly captured Lindisfarne Castle, Northumberland, in the first Jacobite rebellion of 1715.

Lance’s father was Major Lancelot Errington, who had fought with the Royal Scots during the Great War and later farmed at Quinish on the Isle of Mull. His mother was Elizabeth Hall Sanford. (Beeslack House is now the site of the Aaron House care home and the estate also houses Beeslack Community High School).

The family seat may not have been quite as grandiose as Downton Abbey, but Lance remembered having at least 17 servants. He took boxing lessons when he was seven to toughen himself up. That stood him in good stead at Belhaven High School in Dunbar, where he encountered a spartan regime, which included mandatory cold baths.

He then went south to attend the famous Wellington College in Berkshire before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a double first in 1939. During that time, he rowed for Trinity and was president of the Magpie & Stump, an old Trinity society devoted more to humour than debate.

It was at a history lecture at Cambridge that he met the love of his life, Reine (née Macauley) and, with war having broken out, they married in October 1939. It was a marriage that would last for 70 years until her death.

With war looming, Lance had signed up with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. When the conflict started, he was given basic training in Portsmouth and put in command of the minesweeping trawler HMS Wallena, mostly patrolling the Firth of Forth. The Wallena’s base was Granton harbour, its “base ship” officially HMS Claverhouse, which was not a ship but the historic building which now houses the territorial army’s Reserve Forces and Cadets Centre and the 205 Scottish Field Hospital.

“I remember being at anchor in the Firth of Tay when a signal came through that the German invasion fleet was on its way,” he recalled many years later. “Our instructions were to set out to sea to meet the German armada and, if necessary, to ram German ships.” Fortunately, that turned out to be false alarm.

Towards the end of the war, Errington worked for the Admiralty in London and Bath, where he once shared an office with the future poet laureate John (later Sir John) Betjeman, whom, he said, he often found sleeping under his desk after a particularly wet lunch.

Moving to the Home Office at the end of the war, and working with a dozen people and a single telephone in a bomb-damaged building, Errington was among a group of civil servants tasked with properly implementing the so-called Beveridge Report. Their work played a central part in constructing the welfare state we take for granted today, including the NHS.

Errington helped set up the Ministry of National Insurance and, as departments changed names or merged, also worked in the Ministry of Social Security. He had a spell in the Cabinet Office as right-hand-man to Prime Minister Harold Wilson at a time when Wilson was pushing for reform of the House of Lords. Errington spent the last three years of his career in Mrs Castle’s Department of Health and Social Security.

Knighted as Sir Lancelot, he and Reine moved to the Highlands. They bought the former St Mary’s church near Port Appin, where Reine, a keen potter, set up a studio in the vestry. The couple quickly became stalwarts of the community and of the Church of the Holy Cross at nearby Portnacroish.

As members of the Royal Highland Yacht Club, they indulged their passion for sailing aboard their yacht Neil Gow.

After Reine’s death in 2009, Sir Lance had difficulty living in the relative isolation of his Highland home. He moved this year to live with his sisters in Elie, Fife. He suffered a massive stroke on 16 October and died in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy two days later.

Sir Lancelot Errington is survived by his children Lindsay, Tom, Humphrey and Elizabeth, three grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and by a brother, John, and sisters Elizabeth and Jane.

Phil Davison