BRITAIN’S SINECURES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21538, 9 January 1932, Page 14

BRITAIN’S SINECURES

THE BUDGET’S DISCLOSURES Few, perhaps, have ever heard of the King’s Cock Grower; or the Surveyor of the Green Wax; or the “ Husband of the Four-and-a-Half Per Cent Duties ” since these particular offices are no longer in being. But they, and a number of others almost as quaintly named, existed in England in the not very distant past, and were held by persons who drew the comfortable salaries attached to them and paid other people a mere fraction of what they themselves received (says the New York Times).

Some people were reminded of these oddly titled sinecures when Philip Snowden’s Budget revealed recently that the “ Lord of the Liberty of Furness in Lancashire” (of whom few if any taxpayers had ever previously heard) gets £9 a year from the Exchequer. The “ Lord of the Liberty of Furness ” is the Duke of Buccleuch, and the £9 a year is paid to him as compensation for an ancient privilege he surrendered in 1866.

But the sum mentioned is a pittance, anyway, and the people who are asking why it is paid at all and grumbling because, as the Budget also revealed, the community is still providing about £13,565 a year in pensions for the household servants of Queen Victoria, ought to thank their stars instead that the Hereditary Admiral of ’the Coasts of Cumberland and Westmoreland (Lord Lonsdale), the Hereditary Chief Butler (the Duke of Norfolk), the Grand Almoner and Grand Falconer and the holders of other high-sounding offices still in existence are no longer on the nation’s payroll. It was just before the Christmas of 1830 that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Althorp, announced: “The Government intends to abolish all salaries of persons who are not doing any work. No 08106* that is not useful will he continued.”

The profit of the Clerk of the Hanaper, after paying his deputy, was £I7OO a year. The Chaff Wax had £360 from the Hanaper Office, plus £240 In fees, did nothing, and paid his deputy £150; the Glerk of the Custody of the Debts of Lunatics drew £5lO a year and paid his deputy £l3O. The Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland received £2OO a year in salary and £IOOO in fees, and got the work done for £4OO.

There were also the Chief Proclamator of the Court of Common Pleas, the Hereditary Chief Usher of the Exchequer, the Surveyor of the Green Wax in the Exchequer, the Patentee of the Subpoena Office, the Clerk of Presentations, the Clerk of Dispensations, the ChirOgrapher of the Common Pleas, and the Four Filacers of the Common Pleas, all doing nothing, or practically nothing, and getting anything from £3OO to £2OOO a year. When a certain George Arbuthnot, fated to be the last Receiver of the First Fruits and Tenths, was asked by a Parliamentary investigating committee what his job was, he replied that he did not exactly khow, but it had something to do with the first year’s income from the livings of certain clergy in the King’s Books. He “imagined” these were paid yearly. And perhaps he was not a receiver of the tenths, not only of the arrears of the tenths. His deputy, who had an office in the Temple, would, he blandly asserted, know better. The one certain thing was that George Arbuthnot drew £220 a year. This idyllic state of things came to an end in March, 1831. The Government of the day abolished more than 200 offices.

The King’s Cock Grower had gone somewhat earlier. This ollicial’s duty in bygone centuries was to crow the hours in the recincts of the Royal Palace every night from Ash Wednesday till Easter. In the first Ash Wednesday spent in England by George 111, however, that monarch, imperfectly acquainted with English customs, took the performance of the crower as a personal insult. But the days of money for nothing from the British Exchequer have not gone completely. Air Snowden’s Budget revealed also that the Receiver General of the Duchy of Cornwall takes the equivalent of £16,210 a year for “ the loss of duty on the coinage of tin.” Earl Nelson and “ whoever hereafter shall bear the title of the victir of Trafalgar,” gets £SOOO a year from the nation, and Lord Seaton, whose grandfather fought ably in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, gets £2OOO.