The History of Parliament has been deeply saddened to hear of the death of Sir John Sainty, a great friend of the History and a very good friend over the years of very many of its staff. Here, we look back at his career and service to the field of parliamentary history.
For most of his career John’s day job was as a clerk in the House of Lords: he joined the service in 1959, and rose to the most senior position in the Lords – the Clerk of the Parliaments – in 1983. He held the position until 1990. But his other career was as one of the most tenacious and productive scholars of British government and administration, whose contribution might best be compared to some of the great nineteenth century historians who created the basic infrastructure and framework for others to follow.
In the Lords John’s historical interest was particularly piqued when, early in his career, he became private secretary to the Government Chief Whip, only the second career clerk to do the job. It had previously been held by a Treasury official: Charles Hendriks, born in 1883 and appointed in 1883, died in office in 1960. The position was (and is) a lynchpin in the operation of the House, the central clearing house through which business was arranged (John said that it helped Hendriks to perform the function that his office was the only room in the Lords to possess a television). John held the post through long all-night sittings on the London Government bill in the 1962-63 session, and while the number of cross-benchers appointed following the creation of Life Peerages in 1958 started to grow. The management of the House of Lords would become one of the abiding themes of John’s subsequent research: in a number of articles and collaborations later in life, he tracked down the elusive evidence for whips in the Commons. After his two year stint as private secretary, John spent five years as clerk of the Journals, a post that allowed him the run of a set of the key document for the history of the House, of which he took full advantage: the consequence has been a series of immensely careful publications which now form some of the key foundations for subsequent accounts of the development and operation of the Lords.
For most historians, though, he will be best remembered for a remarkable series of research publications that have laid the essential groundwork for the study of government and administration in late seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain: authoritative listings of government officials, holders of judicial office, peerage creations. These were largely the work of a period between 1970 and 1974 when he took a break from the Lords and went to work on the project in the Institute of Historical Research. Frances, whom he married in 1965, was in all of this an essential collaborator: if John had a remarkable ability to sort out the often unsystematic process of appointments to office, it was Frances whose typing and checking (John’s technological capacity was limited) converted the result into something that looked orderly.
Back in the Lords thereafter after his stint at the IHR, John would eventually preside, for seven years, over a changing, and rapidly growing institution, with more ambitious and politically savvy members, more business and longer hours – far removed from the genteel routine of the early 1960s – new select committees, and ever more administration. Even then, as one of his successors, Michael Pownall, wrote in a tribute to him written in 2013, ‘at the end of a busy day he was sometimes able to lay aside tiresome papers, such as staff appraisals or draft estimates … Instead, John could be seen poring over one of the older (and very large) volumes of the clerk’s personal set of Lords Journals’.
Michael Pownall’s tribute appears in a rare, these days, festschrift, published as a special issue of Parliamentary History. To that journal John was ‘godfather’, as its then editor, Clyve Jones, wrote, as well as being a member of its editorial board and trustee. He was also, it might be said, godfather to our own first House of Lords project: when we began the project, designed to cover 1660 to 1832, John cheerfully volunteered not only his unpublished research, but also his time and advice. We came to rely heavily on his knowledge and his wisdom. John’s quiet charm and kindness and his lively and wide-ranging conversation endeared him to many in the rarefied worlds of the Lords and historical research. But he also possessed firmly held and acute views, and a strong sense of what was right. When he retired in 1990 the then Leader of the House, Lord Waddington, said, justly, that ‘Sir John’s mild manner concealed a strong sense of the House’s traditional values. In defence of tolerance, courtesy and fair play he could display more than a hint of steel.’
