Maurice Hankey

The Right Honourable The Lord Hankey GCB, GCMG, GCVO, PC, FRS
Maurice Hankey as British Cabinet Secretary (1921)
Cabinet Secretary
In office 1916 – August 1938
Prime Minister	David Lloyd George Andrew Bonar Law Stanley Baldwin Ramsay MacDonald Neville Chamberlain
Preceded by	Inaugural holder
Succeeded by	Sir Edward Bridges
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
In office 14 May 1940 – 20 July 1941
Prime Minister	Winston Churchill
Preceded by	The Lord Tryon
Succeeded by	Duff Cooper
Personal details
Born	(1877-04-01)1 April 1877
Died	26 January 1963(1963-01-26) (aged 85)

Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey, 1st Baron Hankey, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, PC, FRS (1 April 1877 – 26 January 1963) was a British civil servant who gained prominence as the first Cabinet Secretary and who later made the rare transition from the civil service to ministerial office. He is best known as the highly efficient top aide to Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the War Cabinet that directed Britain in the First World War.

In the estimation of biographer John F. Naylor, Hankey held to the "certainties of a late Victorian imperialist, whose policies sought to maintain British domination abroad and to avoid as far as possible British entanglement within Europe. His patriotism stands inviolable, but his sensitivity to processes of historical change proved limited." Naylor finds that "Hankey did not altogether grasp the virulence of fascism ... except as a military threat to Britain; nor did he ever quite comprehend the changing face of domestic politics which Labour's emergence as a party of government entailed ... In these shortcomings Hankey was typical of his generation and background; that his responsibility was greater lay in the fact that he was better informed than nearly any of his contemporaries."

The third son of R. A. Hankey, Maurice Hankey was born at Biarritz in 1877 and educated at Rugby School. He joined the Royal Marine Artillery, was promoted captain and served in successive roles including as coastal defence analyst in the War Division of the Naval Intelligence Department (1902–1906). In 1908 he was appointed Naval Assistant Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence and became Secretary to the Committee in 1912, a position he would hold for the next twenty-six years. In November 1914 he took on the additional duty of Secretary of the War Council. In this function he took notice of the ideas of Major Ernest Swinton to build a tracked armoured vehicle and brought them to the attention of Winston Churchill on 25 December 1914, leading to the eventual creation of the Landship Committee.