Driving up to Stoke D'Abernon, the 23-year-old Oxford graduate nervously fingered his blond, bristly mustache. With a good war record behind him (he had lost an eye in a Jap air raid on Burma), he had come to Stoke in search of a peacetime career. A "houseparty" exam at the government's 300-year-old manor house is now the way to get a topflight civil service job in England.
Since its beginning less than three years ago Stoke has examined 2,725 candidates, passed only 608. Though a Conservative M.P. recently complained in the House of Lords...
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