26 Somerville Magazine
She’s Making History: Reflections of a Whitehall Historian Gill Bennett OBE MA FRHistS (1969, History) looks back on a long and eventful career in which she has compiled official histories and provided historical advice to twelve foreign secretaries under six prime ministers – yet her love of the work has never diminished.
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n March 2020, I had the honour of giving the keynote address at the annual conference of the Naval Servicewomen’s Network in Yeovilton, Somerset. The topic of my talk was ‘An Intelligence Historian in Whitehall’. However, as I stood there in front of 200 servicewomen and several men, mostly of senior rank, drawn from across the Navy, Army, RAF and MoD, two questions lingered at the back of my mind. First, would this predominantly military audience find any interest in a talk about my work as a historian? And, second, should I perhaps have amended my title to ‘A Female Intelligence Historian in Whitehall’ in order to consider the role, if any, that gender has played in my career?
The serendipity of this role always attracted me: researching whatever comes next.
Happily, the first question was promptly answered by the very generous reception I was given. As to the second question, my instinctive response was that being a woman certainly hasn’t disadvantaged me professionally. In the Civil Service, after all, one is appointed to the job on merit, not gender, and with equal pay. Furthermore, there have been enormous changes across all Whitehall departments since I first joined the FCO in 1972 that have benefitted women and other minorities – not least the requirement to resign upon marrying, which had only just been dropped when I started. But perhaps to answer this second question fully, I should go back to the beginning and lay the evidence out before my fellow Somervillians
with proper historical care, and let you judge for yourselves. I joined the FCO Historians as a very junior Research Assistant and worked my way up, but by 1990 was struggling to cope with the demands of both the job and two small children, one of whom was severely disabled. This led to my moving out of Historians to do three quite different jobs: in the Strategic Planning Unit, helping to draw up the FCO’s first Information Systems Strategy; in Research Analysts; and finally in Personnel, in the Performance Assessment Unit. All these experiences contributed to my success at the Assessment Development Centre (ADC), whereafter I joined the FCO’s Senior Management Structure, ultimately rising to the role of Chief Historian in 1995. I have spent my career working on history of all kinds. For those not familiar with the FCO Historians, they have two principal tasks: to produce the official documentary history of British foreign policy in the series Documents on British Policy Overseas, and to provide ‘historical advice to ministers and senior officials’ on any given period, nation or topic. This might involve anything from recommending a book to undertaking major research. The serendipity of the job always attracted me: researching whatever comes next. Our role is not to defend government policy, but to explain it. Sometimes that can be uncomfortable, but history is an indispensable backdrop to good policy-making.
