Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Morant, Robert Laurie
MORANT, Sir ROBERT LAURIE (1863–1920), civil servant, the only son of Robert Morant, decorative artist, of Bond Street and Hampstead, by his wife, Helen, daughter of the Rev. Henry Lea Berry, head master of Mill Hill School, was born at Manaton Lodge, Hampstead, 7 April 1863. He was educated at Winchester and at New College, Oxford, where, in straitened circumstances, he lived an exceptionally studious and abstemious life, his sole athletic diversion being boxing, in which he excelled. He took a first class in the final honour school of theology in 1885. He then taught for a short time at Temple Grove preparatory school. In November 1886 he went to Siam as tutor to King Chulalongkorn's nephews, and subsequently became tutor to the Crown Prince and laid the foundations of a system of public education in Siam which is still associated with his name. He exercised great and independent influence and became the object of much jealousy, which led to his retirement from the Siamese service in 1894. On his return to England he went to live at Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, and took part in its social and educational work.
In 1895 Morant entered the Education Department as assistant director of special inquiries and reports, contributing to the series of volumes edited by (Sir) Michael Sadler valuable reports, among which may be mentioned those on the French system of higher primary schools (1896–1897) and on the national organization of education in Switzerland (1898). In November 1899 he became private secretary to Sir John Eldon Gorst [q.v.], the elder, who was vice-president of the Committee of Council on Education; and in 1902 he was appointed assistant private secretary to the eighth Duke of Devonshire [q.v.], lord president of the Council. This gave Morant his opportunity. His achievement, as a relatively junior officer, in mobilizing and marshalling the political, municipal, and educational forces of the country for the not unhazardous enterprise of constructing an orderly and comprehensive system of public education out of incoherent and antagonistic elements, is one of the romances of the civil service. The passing of the Education Act of 1902 was largely due to his vision, courage, and ingenuity. His promotion, in November 1902, to be acting secretary of the Board of Education, and in April 1903 to the substantive post of permanent secretary, was not only appropriate but inevitable.
Although its operation was for some years embarrassed by denominational controversy and by attempts to modify the settlement effected by it in respect of voluntary schools, the Act of 1902 afforded a broad foundation for subsequent administrative and legislative development; and the organization of English education, in the spheres both of the central and local authorities, was transformed by Morant's administrative genius and indomitable energy. He showed himself a great constructive organizer, insistent on intelligible classification and clear definition of aims, but not doctrinaire in adherence to any preconceived plan or formula. He had a great sense of realities, and though revolutionary when he was convinced that pulling down was a necessary preliminary to rebuilding, he often displayed a tolerant and tentative opportunism. The impulse of his administration and the ideals which inspired it spread very widely in the country, and during his term of office the planning and provision of public education, and particularly of secondary and higher education, made large advances, and access to it was greatly facilitated. The period was by no means free from polemics, and a lively controversy over a matter of no intrinsic importance, coupled with the need for a man of outstanding ability to take charge of a new enterprise, occasioned Morant's departure from the Board of Education in 1911 and his transference to the post of chairman of the National Health Insurance Commission.
For the next eight years Morant's work had two aspects. The outstanding practical achievements were the initiation of the payment of insurance contributions, the provision of sanatorium benefit (July 1912), and the general practitioner service (January 1913). Morant had more at heart the wide potentialities, realized in the European War, of the system of national aid for medical research, founded in 1913 on principles which he elaborated, and of a closer interrelation between the whole medical profession and the public service. Above all, he was increasingly absorbed in the plan, which was in his mind at least from 1907, when the school medical service came into being, of a redefinition, long overdue, of the functions both of central and of local authorities concerned with public health. He saw its first stage accomplished in the passing of the Ministry of Health Act in June 1919, and in July he became first secretary of the new department. The means and the man had been secured for the more important task of formulating proper relationships between the separate authorities locally responsible. His knowledge and appreciation of the difficulties were unequalled; it was a disaster to the cause of good government that time was not left him to overcome them.
Thus in seventeen out of the twenty-five years of his official life Morant conducted three large government departments. The Board of Education he entirely remodelled, adjusting it to the new division of responsibility between the central and local authorities, and making it capable of giving and receiving stimulus for a great expansion of the service of public education. The National Health Insurance Commission he organized from the beginning; and he then passed on to the business of consolidating health functions and local government functions and constructing a new instrument of government.
The work actually done by Morant for the public services of education and health cannot be related particularly or in concrete form so as to be intelligible to those who are not intimately acquainted with the machinery of the departments in which he was engaged. The stages of design and action between the big ideas and the practical details are numerous—and for Morant no idea was too big and no detail too small. It was not without good reason that in 1917 he was asked to serve on the committee on the machinery of government. To Morant administration was a great adventure. He had a passion for making the instruments of public service more effective, and was consumed and destroyed by it. There was no intermittence in his volcanic energy. He knew no rest and enjoyed no leisure. If opportunities presented themselves he took them; if they did not, he made them. His methods were quite unorthodox and they challenged criticism from which he never shrank. He was ambitious not of his own advancement but of establishing the dominance of the ideas which dominated him. He was impatient of opposition to them, and prone to suspect that criticism and advocacy of different methods concealed hostility to his principles. But once he was sure that his colleagues and subordinates were loyally working for the ends which he set before himself and them, no one was more generous in welcoming their criticism, in leaving them a free hand if they came up to his standard of ability and industry, and in giving them full credit for their achievement. Underlying all superficial characteristics, and reinforcing an amazing dialectical quickness, ingenuity, and grasp of detail, there was a solid core of large and simple devotion to ideals of public service, which compelled respect and commanded devoted friendship and service. The force, variety, and complexity of his character were to his contemporaries a constant source of interest, admiration, or wonder. His premature death, in London, 13 March 1920, left the civil service with the feeling that their order had lost one of the greatest figures it had ever produced—great by both character and achievement.
Morant received the C.B. in 1902 and the K.C.B. in 1907. He married in 1896 Helen Mary, daughter of Edwin Cracknell, of Wetheringsett Grange, Suffolk, by whom he had a son and a daughter.
[Private information; personal knowledge.]