Looking through edits on my Wikipedia watchlist this morning, I checked the article for Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield, and noticed a reference to Sir Warren Fisher, quondam Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and Head of the Home Civil Service. I had a look at his article because I couldn’t remember if he was a brother of Admiral Sir William W. Fisher (he was not), and I was struck by the following claim:
After failing to get into the Indian Civil Service and the medical examination for the Royal Navy, he came a lowly 15th in the Inland Revenue entrance exams in 1903.
My ‘Bullshit’ sense started tingling immediately. Luckily, it is very easy to establish the veracity of this statement by consulting the annual reports of the Civil Service Commissioners, who were responsible for administering many examinations for public service. If we look at that for 1903, the 48th annual report (published in 1904 as a Command Paper, Cd. 2211), we find (pp. iv-xi) that there were 214 candidates at the August 1903 examination for Class I clerkships in the Home Civil Service, the Indian Civil Service and Eastern Cadetships. Fisher actually placed 16th, with 2,878 marks. The top marks were 3,991, obtained by A. C. McWatters, who went to the Indian Civil Service, and later became Secretary to the Government of India in the departments of Finance and Labour and Industry. The bottom marks, 1,674, were obtained by an E. Walker, who placed 126th, and curiously also went to the Inland Revenue. Clearly, therefore, Fisher did not sit ‘Inland Revenue entrance exams’ and he did not place a ‘lowly 15th’, but rather 16th out of 214 overall, and 7th in the Home Civil Service!
Where did this claim come from? It turns out it has been there since Fisher’s article was created way back on 18 March 2005 by someone with an IP address in Sterling or Dulles, Virginia. Nearly 20 years! The original text read, ‘After failing to get into the Indian Civil Service and the medical examination for the Royal Navy he came a lowly 15th in the Inland Revenue entrance exams in 1903.’ In all that time all that had altered was the addition of a comma.
Next step, out of pure devilry, I decided to see if someone had fallen for this nonsense. Google Books, ahoy! After a cursory search, there appears to be one. Professor Helen McCarthy, in her 2014 Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, wrote (page 109):
The very antithesis of the bowler-hatted bureaucrat, Fisher’s career had begun inauspiciously at the Board of Inland Revenue in 1903 (he scraped through the exam, coming a mediocre fifteenth).
No source is given, but it is clear from whence it came. The ‘lowly’ 15th has now become ‘mediocre’, and because of that he is deemed to have ‘scraped through the exam’ and started ‘inauspiciously’ at the Revenue, when he was in fact the top-placed Class I entrant there for 1903!
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