Evil Surfer

In 1954 he was dragged out of this post to be Private Secretary to the Minister of Supply, first Duncan Sandys, then Aubrey Jones. I think he would have preferred to continue as Chief Statistician In 1958 a blip appeared in this promising career. Cass was chosen as one of the 10 leading civil servants of his time to join budding greats from the Services, the Commonwealth and the United States to attend the year-long course at the Imperial Defence College, now the Royal College of Defence Studies. The IDC had a reputation for light work and heavy drinking and Cass, then virtually a teetotaller, must have been beguiled by devilish Service colleagues to indulge too much one lunchtime. That afternoon he was picked up by the police for attempting to get into a stranger’s car in Belgravia.

The incident was cruelly leaked to the press, who had a mini field day. Whether this incident had any effect on his future career is a moot point. The Air Ministry, to which he was posted at the beginning of 1959, took an indulgent view. He rose steadily through the hierarchy of the Ministry of Defence, concentrating on finance and the budget. He occupied the key seat of Deputy Under-Secretary of State, doing the best he could for the Services with the Treasury. An impossible job, but Cass remained at all times equable (some would say too equable), unfazed, unflappable, clinically efficient, unemotionally involved, moving a mountain of paper each day but always ready to return at 6pm to his beloved family and garden in Golders Green.

In retirement, in 1976, he served for seven years on the Review Board for Government Contracts, much needed after the scandal of Ferranti and the bankruptcies of Rolls-Royce and Handley Page, and was an Alternate Governor for the Bank of Rhodesia and Chairman of the Verbatim Reporting Study Group. For the last 27 years of his life he battled with ill-health. He commented that in old age “some break down from the bottom upwards Some start at the top. Fortunately my top is OK.” Indeed it was, sharp, incisive to the end, and he attended his roses as long as he could and watched cricket on TV, and his favourite detective, Frost Patrick Shovelton.