He even financed a historical re-enactment of the Chevauche de Saint Michel (Cavalcade) by the Court of Seigneurs and wrote a newspaper article about it. In Guernsey, he was a very active member of the community and was even committed to the feudal heritage of the island. To avoid high taxation in Britain, he moved to the Channel Islands and settled at St Martin's, Guernsey, where he purchased Les Caches Hall. After serving as visiting professor at Harvard University in 1958, the University of Illinois and the University of California, Berkeley in 1959–60, he resigned his post in Singapore to become an independent writer. Typical of his satire and cynical humour, it included a discourse on Parkinson's Law of Triviality (debates about expenses for a nuclear plant, a bicycle shed, and refreshments), a note on why driving on the left side of the road (see road transport) is natural, and suggested that the Royal Navy would eventually have more admirals than ships. It explained the inevitability of bureaucratic expansion, arguing that 'work expands to fill the time available for its completion'. The 120-page book of short studies, published in the United States and then in Britain, was illustrated by Osbert Lancaster and became an instant best seller. In 1958, while still in Singapore, he published his most famous work, Parkinson's Law, which expanded upon a humorous article that he had published in the Economist magazine in November 1955, satirising government bureaucracies. Parkinson divorced in 1952 and he married the writer and journalist Ann Fry (1921–1983), with whom he had two sons and a daughter. The Singapore campus later became the University of Singapore. His efforts were unsuccessful and the two campuses were established in 1959. Parkinson attempted to persuade the authorities to avoid dividing the university by maintaining it in Johor Bahru to serve both Singapore and Malaya. A movement developed in the mid-1950s to establish two campuses, one in Kuala Lumpur and one in Singapore. While there, he initiated an important series of historical monographs on the history of Malaya, publishing the first in 1960. In 1950, he was appointed Raffles Professor of History at the new University of Malaya in Singapore. In 1943 he married Ethelwyn Edith Graves (born 1915), a nurse tutor at Middlesex Hospital, with whom he had two children.ĭemobilized as a major in 1945, he was a lecturer in history at the University of Liverpool from 1946 to 1949. In 1940, he joined the Queen's Royal Regiment as a captain and undertook a range of staff and military teaching positions in Britain. He became senior history master at Blundell's School in Tiverton, Devon in 1938 (and a captain in the school's OTC), then instructor at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth in 1939. While at Cambridge, he commanded an infantry unit of the Cambridge University Officers' Training Corps. In the same year, Emmanuel College, Cambridge elected him a research fellow. While a graduate student in 1934, Parkinson was commissioned into the Territorial Army in the 22nd London Regiment (The Queen's), was promoted to lieutenant the same year, and commanded an infantry company at the jubilee of King George V in 1935. In 1934, then a graduate student at King's College London, he wrote his PhD thesis on Trade and War in the Eastern Seas, 1803–1810, which was awarded the Julian Corbett Prize in Naval History for 1935. The papers formed the basis of his first book, Edward Pellew, Viscount Exmouth, Admiral of the Red. As an undergraduate, Parkinson developed an interest in naval history, which he pursued when the Pellew family gave him access to family papers at the recently established National Maritime Museum. Peter's School, York, where in 1929 he won an Exhibition to study history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The youngest son of William Edward Parkinson (1871–1927), an art master at North East County School and from 1913 principal of York School of Arts and Crafts, and his wife, Rose Emily Mary Curnow (born 1877), Parkinson attended St. ![]() Cyril Northcote Parkinson (30 July 1909 – 9 March 1993) was a British naval historian and author of some 60 books, the most famous of which was his best-seller Parkinson's Law (1957), in which Parkinson advanced Parkinson's law, stating that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", an insight which led him to be regarded as an important scholar in public administration and management.
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