Beveridge, William Henry

WORKS BY BEVERIDGE

William Henry Beveridge, Baron Beveridge (1879–1963), creator of Britain’s post-World War II social security system, was born in Bengal. He was the son of Henry Beveridge of the Indian Civil Service, from whom, presumably, he learned to be a good administrator; one of the most human of Beveridge’s books is the biography of his parents, published in 1947 under the title India Called Them. He came to England at an early age and was educated at the Charterhouse School and at Balliol College, Oxford. At Oxford his early studies in mathematics and classics were equally distinguished, and in 1902 he secured a first-class degree in the latter. He was elected to the Stowell civil law fellowship at University College, Oxford, which he held from 1902 to 1909, taking a Bachelor of Civil Law degree in 1904. From 1903 to 1905 he was also subwarden of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, an industrial section of London, where he acquired his first insight into the problems of modern society.

At this time he also met Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Although at first they did not get on very well, later, when the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws was appointed in 1905, Mrs. Webb enrolled Beveridge in the ranks of the assistant inquirers who helped her to produce, in 1909, the famous Minority Report, with its detailed scheme for what subsequently came to be called social security. Just prior to the issue of the Report, Beveridge published his first major work, Unemployment:A Problem of Industry (1909), which established him as an economist of parts. The Webbs having introduced him to Winston Churchill, then president of the Board of Trade, Beveridge entered this department in 1908, and the following year he was made director of the newly formed system of labor exchanges.

For the next ten years Beveridge was a civil servant; he went to the new Ministry of Munitions in 1915 and to the Ministry of Food the following year, becoming permanent secretary in 1919. In both these posts he was assisted by his cousin Janet (Jessy) Mair as personal secretary; she continued to serve him in that capacity long after he left the civil service, and in 1942, after the death of her first husband, they were married.

When World War i ended and the wartime ministries were dissolved, the Webbs, seeking a vigorous director to succeed William Pember Reeves at the London School of Economics, invited Beveridge to take on the job. He accepted, and during the 18 years of his administration, from 1919 to 1937, he succeeded in greatly expanding the scope of work and increasing the physical facilities at the school. He was not, however, always so successful in his personal relations. The student body, which had a distinctly radical tendency, sometimes resented his disciplinary methods, and he had several brushes with one of the most distinguished members of his staff, Harold Laski. In 1937 he left the school in order to become master of University College, Oxford.

Until World War n Beveridge was known mainly as a competent economist and statistician; the first volume of a large study called Prices and Wages in England, edited by him, appeared in 1939. With World War n his opportunity came. In 1941 he was appointed chairman of the Inter-departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services. This was in fact a one-man operation; the civil servants on the committee were no more than investigators who took instructions from the chairman. The following year brought the result of the committee’s work, the Beveridge Report, which was an instant popular success and carried the name of Beveridge to millions, in and out of the armed services. The refusal of the government to declare unequivocally in its favor produced the only sizable antigovernment vote between 1940 and 1945. The report contributed in no small degree to the Labour party’s victory in 1945, after which it was implemented by the Labour government’s social legislation.

The Beveridge Report sought, as had Beatrice Webb 33 years earlier, to protect the individual against the poverty and destitution caused by the principal hazards of modern life. Its main differences from the earlier scheme were that it accepted the contributory principle, which had become part of the state insurance system, and that it did not deal with the prevention of unemployment. (Beveridge tackled the problem of unemployment in a subsequent book, Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944.) The report was an extremely competent piece of work, but its success was due as much to its timeliness as to its competence. The two other reports in which Beveridge had a part, one on fuel rationing (1942a) and one on the future of broad-casting, were not so impressive, and they were not put into effect.

In 1944 a by-election at Berwick-on-Tweed returned Beveridge triumphantly to Parliament as a Liberal, but when he stood as an independent in the following year he was heavily defeated. The local electorate preferred to vote for the candidate of the Labour party, which was pledged to introduce social security. Greatly disappointed, he accepted a peerage; he had resigned the mastership of his college on his election to Parliament. Later he took on the chairmanship of Aycliffe and Peterlee, two of the “new towns” set up under Labour government legislation; these were in the northeast, where he actually lived for a while. Beveridge wrote many articles in various journals, took a vigorous part in debate in the House of Lords, and in 1953 published a volume of autobiography, Power and Influence.

Margaret Cole

[See alsoWelfare state.]

WORKS BY BEVERIDGE

(1909) 1930 Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909 and 1930). New ed. London and New York: Longmans.

1939 Prices and Wages in England From the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century. New York and London: Long-mans. ? Beveridge was the senior author.

1942a Fuel Rationing: Report by Sir William Beveridge, K.C.B., to the President of the Board of Trade. Papers by Command, Cmd. 6352. London: H.M. Stationery Office.

1942b Great Britain, inter-departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied ServicesSocial Insurance and Allied Services. Report by Sir William Beveridge. London: H.M. Stationery Office; New York: Macmillan. ? Known as the Beveridge Report.

(1944) 1945 Full Employment in a Free Society. New York: Norton.

1947 India Called Them. London: Allen & Unwin.

1948 Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance. London: Allen; New York: Macmillan.

(1953) 1955 Power and Influence. New York: Beech-hurst.