As a young assistant solicitor at Rochdale council in the early 1960s, he recalls, he prosecuted for the police. He casts a misty eye back to the days, not so long ago, when councils delivered a vast range of services, from water and sewerage to buses and firefighting. I’m not saying that making soapflakes isn’t important for the economy, but it’s a good thing to know you are performing a public service.” But he feels keenly the decline in status of local government in particular and public service in general: “It always seems to me such a huge asset to have people thinking they are doing something for the benefit of the public. The passing of such overweening behaviour should be unlamented, Brooke agrees. A native of the patch, he saw himself a successor of grandee county clerks of the West Riding such as Sir Charles McGrath, who in the 1930s would have the London train held for him at Wakefield station and who, on reaching the capital, would put up at Claridge’s and send for Whitehall mandarins to attend him there. Walking out had been a risk, but within days he was invited to take the chair of the then Bradford health authority and the following year he became secretary of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, which he led into the new Local Government Association seven years later.īrooke undoubtedly takes greatest pride in his 11-year service (before Westminster) at the former West Yorkshire county council, the last three years as chief executive. Reports of a £1m payoff were nonsense, he insists. In that situation the only thing I could do was resign.” “I did my best to alert the council, but Shirley’s dominance was such that it was to no avail.
“I knew something fishy was happening because these meetings were taking place outside City Hall without records, of which I had no knowledge,” Brooke recalls. In 1989, he found the media camped outside his home when he finally quit as long-suffering chief executive to Westminster council leader Shirley Porter as the authority’s homes-for-votes scandal was unfolding.
Six decades later, his career has taken him around the world – he has been honoured in five other countries in addition to his UK knighthood – and occasionally landed him in the headlines. It was in 1955 that he forsook a tentative start in newspapers and went to work at his local town hall as office boy and would-be articled clerk. Aged 75, he has just ended six decades of unbroken service across local government, the NHS, education, utilities and beyond, that gives him a surely unique perspective. F ew, if any, public servants can match Sir Rodney Brooke’s 60-year record.
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