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Sir Thomas Padmore GCB was a British Civil Servant born in Sheffield on the 23 April 1909. He was, most notably, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and Second Secretary 1952-62; appointed CB 1947, KCB 1953, GCB 1965; Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Transport 1962-68; Chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; and Chairman of the Handel Opera Society. He died in London on 9 February 1996. ==Biography== Sir Thomas Padmore was born in 1909 into a family of Sheffield traders. His grandfather left school at the age of 10 and worked his way up Thomas Ward Ltd, steel merchants. His father, also Thomas, wanted his son to go into the firm after school, and it was young Thomas's headmaster who insisted, against the family's wishes, that he go to university. Padmore studied at Queens' College, Cambridge as a College Scholar and took Firsts in French and German. His Civil Service career started in 1931 in the Inland Revenue from which he moved, after two years, to the Treasury. He stayed there for twenty-eight years and rose rapidly to reach full Permanent Secretary rank at the unusually early age of 42. In 1952 he became Second Secretary of the Treasury, in charge of personnel and staff management and then of finance and supply, and, from 1962 until his retirement in 1968, he was Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Transport. Padmore tackled the occasional difficulties of his career - notably the frustration when a proposed appointment to the post of Cabinet Secretary did not materialise and, later, a well-publicised disagreement with an in-coming Minister of Transport - with humour and stoicism. Characteristically, he refused to waste time on the past and moved on with vigour and enthusiasm to the next task. Described as one of the great Civil Servants of the post-war years, he was an outstanding administrator and manager, an understanding and tolerant man of absolute honesty and integrity with a brilliant mind. His account of his particular professional aptitude was characteristically straightforward and informal: "Generally speaking, I am not an ideas merchant. What I can claim to have done many times in my life is to have spotted quicker than most that someone else had produced an idea that was a fizzer, and to have seized it for my own and shoved it through". Throughout his life he delighted in the skilful and precise use of languages, including his own of which he was a considerable master. He was noted throughout the Service for his ability to express lucidly in half a page an argument for which others might require several sheets. In retirement he applied this talent to writing numerous delightful, witty, incisively-argued and persuasive letters on subjects ranging from the relationship between Civil Service and Government and the dangers of a single European currency to the proper design of a squirrel baffle for a bird table. He was appointed G.C.B. in 1965 and, on taking up the offer of a personal stall in the Chapel of the Order of the Bath, he chose for the motto of his coat-of-arms "Suprema est lingua", reflecting his life long sense of the profound importance of language. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Thomas Padmore」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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