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societies contained elsewhere within a measured amount of representation in some of the West Indian possessions, or with small, appointed legislatures.
A governor might be posted to any of a variety of such territories, or, more rarely, be selected by the colonial office for promotion from the senior ranks of the local hierarchy. Metropolitan selections from the younger sons of the nobility, parliamentarians, or well-connected civil servants of ability were essentially patronage appointments. 2 For a period in the 1830s and 1840s, two permanent under-secretaries, R. W. Hay and Sir James Stephen, had worked towards a less preferential and more bureaucratic system of regulating colonial establishments along the lines of the separation of senior administrators performing “intellectual labour” and the providers of “manual labour.” 3 While elementary regulation of responsibilities, as well as salary and pension levels, made some headway, the successors of Hay and Stephen and later secretaries of state did not fully accept or apply British metropolitan civil service moves towards recruitment by examination after 1853. In addition, the continuation of departmental patronage was reinforced by two other changes. One was continued absorption by the colonial office of the patronage functions of other departments servicing colonial posts (post office, board of trade, treasury), and the other was a decreasing reliance on war office provision of veteran officers of the Napoleonic wars in favour of suitably sponsored civilians. Both of these changes had a further consequence, important for Gordon's career. As the colonial office acquired much of the patronage functions of associated departments from the mid-1840s, “it made a substantial renunciation [of patronage] and thenceforth a growing number of vacancies in the lesser offices was filled on the advice of Governors and by colonists.” 4 This important observation suggesting a partial transfer of patronage to territorial governments has never been verified in detail for the crown colonies. But the evidence of Gordon's governorships shows that local patronage could, indeed, be used in this way.
Consequently, by the time the colonial office separated from the war office in 1854, the claim of its secretary of state, the duke of Newcastle, that “colonial government has become a profession” has to be treated