His family were transferred to various posts on promotion but settled in Essex where he went to Westcliffe High School. At 16 he joined the Post Office technical department, serving at Dollis Hill, where research vital to the war effort was being undertaken. He also studied for an engineering degree at London University.In 1948 he transferred to the Ministry of Transport and in 1959, the break that led to his distinguished career, he was chosen by the Minister, Ernest Marples, to be his Principal Private Secretary. “Though you gave me a torrid time and many late nights, it is an experience that I would not have missed!”John Garlick was born in Edinburgh, the son of a tax inspector. In the autumn of 1979 I ran into Garlick in the street and asked him, “How’s life?” His reply, with his wry smile, was, “It is a great relief to come home to the Department of the Environment and bury myself in the problems of urban planning and transport.” He paused. His impression was that Smith was doing the job because it was asked of him rather than because he believed in it.Sir Michael Quinlan, who was brought in to help in the constitutional unit, told me that Garlick had come to see the huge difficulties for the Westminster parliament of Scottish and Welsh assemblies, and the chickens that are coming home to roost now the Government has less of a majority. When I wrote in John Smith’s obituary for The Independent in 1994 that, unlike Donald Dewar, Smith did not wholly believe in Scottish devolution and certainly never gave his mind to the mechanics of the problem from the day that it was defeated in the House of Commons in 1979 until the tragic morning he died, Garlick commented to me he thought that I was probably right.

He said that at first he had been exasperated by the pedantic nature, as he saw it, of the devolution critics. However, he had been reading Morley’s great Life of Gladstone and the problems of the “ins” and the “outs” in Ireland, and had come to the conclusion that there was no answer to what Enoch Powell had dubbed “the West Lothian question”.Garlick earned the gratitude and huge respect from the ministers who inherited responsibility from Short, Fowler and Crowther-Hunt, namely Michael Foot and John Smith, who was winning his political spurs as Callaghan’s attorney putting forward the devolution case. Hardworking and loyal, he did his best for Short and Fowler, but was reduced to asking the next minister in charge, Harold Wilson’s chum the Oxford don Lord Crowther-Hunt, “Are you sure that you really want to do this?” – this being the formation of a subordinate parliament in part, though only part, of a kingdom which above all they wished to keep united. On being given the Government’s assurance that they did indeed wish to pursue this policy as a political imperative, Garlick went about the task as best he could.Vividly I remember him sitting in a civil-service box behind the Speaker’s chair night after night enduring immensely long speeches from myself, George Cunningham, the MP for Islington (and the author of the Cunningham amendment requiring 40 per cent endorsement for the Government’s constitutional plans), and Enoch Powell, with occasional help from a young red-headed Welsh MP by the name of Neil Kinnock.Towards the end of the 47 days when we kept the House of Commons chuntering on while Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey tried to put the economy right I ran into Garlick in the cafeteria late at night.

Ted Short, Leader of the Commons (now Lord Glenamara), was put in nominal charge, the real ministerial work being left to the mercurial classical scholar Gerry Fowler, Minister of State in the Cabinet Office and MP for the Wrekin A constitutional unit had to be formed. Looking around for a bright, upcoming civil servant due for promotion, Wilson and Short alighted on John Garlick, an expert on transport who had made a distinguished contribution at the National Economic Development Office in 1962-64.
Like the ministers in matters of constitutional affairs relating to Scotland, Garlick had to start from scratch. Motivated perhaps by political panic, between the elections of February and October 1974 Harold Wilson’s government turned turtle and decided to endorse the notion of the creation of a Scottish Assembly, which until then the Labour Party had vehemently opposed. No one had thought the concept through, least of all the Prime Minister. John Garlick, civil servant: born Edinburgh 17 May 1921; staff, Post Office Engineering Department 1937-48; staff, Ministry of Transport 1948-62, 1966-70, Assistant Secretary 1960-62, Under-Secretary 1966-70; Private Secretary to the Minister of Transport 1959-60; staff, National Economic Development Office 1962-64; Under-Secretary, Department of the Environment 1966-72, Deputy Secretary 1972-73, Director-General, Highways 1973-74, Permanent Secretary 1978-81; CB 1973; Second Permanent Secretary, Cabinet Office 1974-77; KCB 1976; married 1945 Frances Munday (died 1992; three daughters); died Northwood, Middlesex 17 August 2005. Her stories about being peremptorily evacuated from the island during the Second World War were amusing. She always travelled with her Jersey passport – “frightfully useful”, she said She recorded her wish to be buried in Jersey.Negley Harte.

The other happy marriage was to Sir Robert Hobart Bt, which lasted from 1975 until his death.Caroline Vatcher was proud to have been born in Jersey, daughter of Colonel Henry Vatcher MC. “Do please stop putting anchovies into the tomatoes.” When she found me one evening happily making soup for the next day, she announced firmly, “One does not eat soup for lunch.” At 7.30 the next morning she was banging on my bedroom door: “I’ve had to throw that soup away, it was heaving .”She married twice more. “I’ve had two happy marriages, and one unhappy one,” she confided around the time of her 70th birthday, adding coyly, “I wouldn’t mind another happy one.” The unhappy marriage was to Peter Hoos. Undressed salad, blocks of ham, hard-boiled eggs; guests were shocked by the invariable Nescaf?t breakfast. After I got to know her well, she accepted me fully as chauffeur, but my efforts to be cook were assiduously undermined “Not too much garlic,” she would shout into the kitchen. She painted in Italy, in Czechoslovakia, in all parts of Europe that took her fancy – her paintings boldly signed “Leeds”.

Her last exhibition in London was only weeks before her death, at Campbell’s of London Gallery. She also produced admirable portraits, such as a series of Falkland war heroes now hung at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, including a memorable impression of the Duke of York.Despite her love for France, Caroline Leeds’s taste in food remained resolutely English and dating from the Attlee era. She showed in many group exhibitions in London, including the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Society of British Artists, over half a century, as well as commercial galleries in Lectoure, London, Paris, New York and Monte Carlo. She studied under Philip Lame and Bernard Adams, honing her skills in oils, watercolour and chalk. Her landscapes of her beloved Gers, and of other departments of France, were wonderful in both oil and watercolour. Very much in love with him, she was deeply disappointed to find that she could not have children She nursed her husband devotedly in his decline.