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CHAPTER 1

‘Thank you, Sir William’

In every country it is unfortunate not to be rich; in England it is a horrible misfortune to be poor.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Voyages en Angleterre et en Irlande en 1835

‘They used to tell me I was building a dream …’

E. Y. Harburg, ‘Brother can you spare a dime’, American song of the Great Depression, opening line

At this stage of the war, the main ideas of reconstruction were in their first bloom, but largely, also in a state of suspended animation. Like the sleeping beauty, they awaited the prince’s kiss. In almost every field of reconstruction, Beveridge’s report of December 1942 was to be the decisive breath of life.

Paul Addison, The Road to 1945, p. 171

IN JUNE 1941, Sir William Beveridge was called in by Arthur Greenwood to be offered a job. Greenwood was the Labour Minister for Reconstruction in Britain’s wartime coalition government. Beveridge was an egotistical sixty-two-year-old civil servant who believed his destiny was to organise key parts of Britain’s war effort. He was asked instead to chair an interdepartmental committee on the co-ordination of social insurance. The task hardly sounded inspiring. With tears, not of joy but of bitter disappointment, in his eyes, he accepted.¹ It was the strangest of starts to one of the greatest of adventures – the founding of Britain’s modern welfare state.

Beveridge’s reaction was perhaps not surprising, for he was no ordinary civil servant. He was already well known as a radio broadcaster, academic, public servant and newspaper columnist; a man with more careers behind him than most ever enjoy. He was also by any standard, despite his detractors (of whom there were plenty), a member of the Great and the Good, at a time when such a class was perhaps more easily defined than at the start of the twenty-first century.

Born the son of a British judge in India in 1879 into a house staffed by twenty-six servants, he was schooled at Charterhouse. At Oxford he read mathematics and classics before, in 1903 at the age of twenty-four, he became in effect an Edwardian social worker and researcher at Toynbee Hall, the university foundation for the poor in the East End. It was there that ‘he learned the meaning of poverty and saw the consequences of unemployment’.² The impoverishment of this part of London was to affect others in the tale of Britain’s welfare state, including Clement Attlee and Sir Keith Joseph, even if the conclusions each was to draw from the experience were to be rather different.

At Balliol, Beveridge recalled, the Master, Edward Caird, used to urge his charges ‘to go and discover why, with so much wealth in Britain, there continues to be so much poverty and how poverty can be cured’.³

Oxford and Toynbee Hall triggered in Beveridge a lifelong interest in unemployment and broader social questions, turning the young man into a social reformer, but one whose academic training convinced him that policy should be based on exhaustive research and detailed analysis. In his autobiography, Beveridge characterised his own progress at the time as being from ‘Oxford to Whitechapel, Whitechapel to Fleet Street, Fleet Street to Whitehall’.⁴ On the way, however, there had been a visit early in 1907 to Germany, where he had studied the systems of compulsory social insurance for pensions and sickness, though not yet for unemployment, which Bismarck had introduced in the 1890s. It was an important and fitting lesson, for Bismarck’s is the only name to rank above Beveridge’s as a welfare state designer, although of a rather different model.

Late in 1905 the twenty-six-year-old Beveridge, on a recommendation from Caird, was installed as a leader writer at the Tory Morning Post, a newspaper which eventually merged with the Daily Telegraph. There he was given licence to write on social policy and advocate labour exchanges and unemployment insurance, drawing on the forms of social insurance he saw in Germany. That work brought him to the attention of the thirty-three-year-old Winston Churchill, who four years earlier had crossed the floor of the Commons from the Conservative to the Liberal benches. In July 1908, Churchill brought Beveridge into the Board of Trade as a fulltime civil servant. Over the next three years, Beveridge played a crucial role in the creation of a national network of labour exchanges of which he became the first director; and then in the formation of the world’s first, if initially highly limited, statutory insurance scheme against unemployment. The measure was introduced in 1911 by David Lloyd George and by Churchill, who by 1906 had become so imbued with the cause of social reform that he declared Liberalism to be ‘the cause of the left-out millions’.⁵

In government service, Beveridge had seen Lloyd George as Chancellor introduce the first state pensions, dubbed by their grateful recipients ‘the Lord George’ (because only a Lord could afford to be so generous), and had seen the spectacular row over the 1909 ‘People’s Budget’ which raised the money to pay for them. The pensions, Lloyd George declared, lifted ‘the shadow of the workhouse from the homes of the poor’. Churchill, more temperately, declared of the first relatively meagre means-tested payments: ‘We have not pretended to carry the toiler on to dry land. What we have done is to strap a lifebelt about him.’

The first unemployment insurance in 1911 covered only about 2.75 million men, or roughly one in six of the workforce, in industries at high risk of cyclical unemployment such as iron and steel and shipbuilding. It ran out after fifteen weeks. But with it came the first state-backed insurance scheme for health. Lloyd George’s famous ‘Ninepence for Fourpence’ was more comprehensive, covering all male workers earning less than £160 a year. For the worker’s compulsory fourpence (just under 2p) a week, the employer had to add threepence and the state twopence. The scheme was administered by ‘approved societies’ and provided the services of a ‘panel’ family doctor, but no right to hospital care or medicine; with that came sick pay of ten shillings (50p) a week, but no cover for wives and children other than a maternity grant. What marked out the health and unemployment measures of the 1911 National Insurance Act from anything that went before was that both were contributory, compulsory and state organised, with employers, employees and the taxpayer each contributing: the so-called tripartite system. What they were not was comprehensive.

The same Liberal Government had also introduced the first tentative legislation on free school meals (for large families only), school medical inspections, and the first overtly redistributive budget – the ‘People’s Budget’ – to pay for it all. The House of Lords, then still the power-base of the landed aristocracy, was faced by a new supertax and what were, in effect, wealth taxes. They threw out what Lloyd George had declared to be ‘a war budget’ – one ‘for raising money to wage implacable warfare on poverty and squalidness’. He added the hope, which he almost lived to see realised, that ‘before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time when poverty and wretchedness and human degradation which always follow in its camp will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests’.⁶ The result, after a long battle, was the 1911 Parliament Act which removed for ever the right of the Lords to delay financial legislation.

Beveridge was thus not only a close Whitehall observer but a key player in the formation of what has been dubbed the ‘ambulance state’ – the lifebelt precursor to the modern welfare state which thirty years on he was to do so much to help create.

With the arrival of the First World War, Beveridge moved in to the Ministry of Munitions, where he was involved in deeply controversial moves to mobilise manpower and where he worked directly with Lloyd George. In 1916 he went to the Ministry of Food, becoming one of the chief architects of rationing and price control. He finished his first Whitehall career in 1919 at the age of thirty-nine as the ministry’s Permanent Secretary.

Peace saw him leave the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics, transforming it into a great base for the social sciences. During a spell as Vice Chancellor of London University he commissioned its massive and Teutonic Senate House (the building Hitler earmarked to be his London headquarters). In 1937 he went back to Oxford as Master of University College. His academic appointments did not, however, to use the title of his autobiography, remove him entirely from power and influence. In 1934 he was appointed chairman of the Unemployment Insurance Statutory Committee, whose job it was to keep the insurance fund solvent, and in 1936 he was brought back to Whitehall to help devise the rationing that operated from 1940. In 1941, when Greenwood called him in, Beveridge had a knowledge of the origins and scope of social services in Britain that was probably unequalled.

He was connected everywhere. R. H. Tawney, the great Christian socialist thinker, was his brother-in-law and friend. He knew well Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the Fabian Society, who in fact had introduced him to Churchill. (Churchill’s aside,’I refuse to be shut up in a soup kitchen with Mrs Beatrice Webb’,⁷ appears to have been no barrier to the appointment.) It was in fact Mrs Webb who had first proposed a free health service for all in her minority report of the Poor Law inquiry of 1909. Clement Attlee and Hugh Dalton, two men to whom would fall the job of finding the cash for Beveridge’s plan, had been lecturers on his staff at the LSE. Dalton was to be Attlee’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1945. As well as having worked with Churchill, Beveridge was a friend of John Maynard Keynes, whose new economics were to make the welfare state possible, and he knew Seebohm Rowntree, whose landmark studies of poverty in York in 1899 had first helped drive the 1906 Liberal Government into its reforming zeal and whose follow-up study in 1936 was to influence Beveridge’s own report. In a line to the future, his research assistant at Oxford was a bright young economist called Harold Wilson.

But Beveridge was not an easy man. José Harris, in her biography, is reduced to summing him up as ‘rather baffling’. To some, she says:

he seemed wise and loveable, to others overbearing and vain. To some he was a man of dazzling intellect, to others a tedious bore. To some he was endlessly generous and sympathetic, to others harsh and self-centred to the point of complete insensitivity. By some he was seen as a humane, radical and visionary reformer, by some as a dangerous bureaucrat, by some as a sentimental idealist with his ‘head in the clouds and his feet in the pond’. He has been described to me personally as ‘a man who wouldn’t give a penny to a blind beggar’ and as ‘one of the kindest men who ever walked the earth’.⁸

Others have been terser and harsher. Angus Calder in The People’s War describes him as ‘the outstanding combination of public servant and social scientist’, but adds: ‘He was also vain, humourless and tactless.’⁹

He tried to run the LSE as an autocracy, inducing a mutiny by the staff in favour of a constitution. Lionel Robbins, a young lecturer at the school who would later produce the Robbins report of 1963 which initiated the great post-war expansion of British universities, once said: ‘I doubt if it ever occurred to him to regard the great men of those days as his equals, let alone, what some of them certainly were from the academic point of view, his superiors.’¹⁰

Arrogance, brilliance and a belief in statistical evidence did not prevent him from espousing unlikely ideas. Harold Wilson, when Prime Minister, would recall having to talk him out of a firm belief that fluctuations in unemployment were linked to the price of wheat which was in turn affected by a sun-spot cycle.¹¹ The weather, it seemed for a time, was all that there was to blame. He drove himself and others hard. Wilson, staying with him in his pre-war days at Oxford, recalls him rising at six to take an icy bath, following it with a couple of hours’ work before breakfast. If he was far from easy either to know or to work with, he was also no more consistent than the rest of us. Over his lifetime his views varied from strong support for the free market to a dirigiste view of the advantages of central control and planning during the First and Second World Wars, via a distinct if intermittent sympathy with Fabian socialism. At times he favoured generous social welfare, at others he believed ‘the whip of starvation’ was a necessary precondition for economic advance.¹² After his report was published he was to become briefly a Liberal MP, and it is as a liberal and indeed Liberal document that his great work is best read: an attempt to bridge the desire for security and an end to poverty on one bank with encouragement for individuals to stand on their own two feet on the other.

A mere four years before his clarion call for full employment, social security from cradle to grave, a national health service, and a war against ignorance and squalor, he had been for two long walks with Beatrice Webb, then in her eighties, over the downs near her Hampshire home. Her diary records:

His conclusion is that the major if not the only remedy for unemployment is lower wages … if this does not happen the capitalist will take his money and his brains to other countries where labour is cheap … he admitted almost defiantly that he was not personally concerned with the condition of the common people.¹³

If his desire for reform appeared to have waned, the war was to change that. But its arrival in 1939 left him bitter and frustrated. His talent and past experience, he felt, demanded a role in government. He bombarded government departments with offers of assistance, stringent criticism and unsolicited advice. He complained bitterly that ‘the present crew have no conception at all of how to plan for war.’ Along with other veterans of First World War administration, he gravitated to Keynes’s Bloomsbury house during the autumn and winter of 1939. The ‘ancient warhorses’, to use José Harris’s phrase, denounced Chamberlain’s incompetence to each other and devised alternative strategies.¹⁴

When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, Beveridge wrote to remind the old bulldog of their ‘old association’ and to offer his talents. He followed up with letters to Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison, the key Labour ministers in the newly formed coalition government. None wanted the awkward and arrogant ex-Permanent Secretary around. Bevin, whom Beveridge was later to feel had betrayed him, did offer him charge of a new welfare department in the Ministry of Labour. ‘I didn’t feel that welfare was up my street,’ Beveridge said. ‘… organisation of manpower was my goal.’

One by one, Keynes and the others were absorbed into Whitehall as part of the flood of academics whose presence was to do so much to help win the war against Nazi Germany. But Beveridge, who hardly helped his case by the style in which he proffered advice and sought work, remained outside. Finally, in July 1940, Bevin asked him to carry out a brief survey – in a firmly non-executive capacity – of wartime manpower requirements. At last Beveridge was doing the work he wanted to do. The survey done, in December he again became a full-time civil servant as under-secretary for the military service department at the Ministry of Labour. There he drew up the list of reserved occupations exempt from call-up; but he continued to demand from Bevin an ever larger role in running manpower.

The two, however, did not get on. Beveridge, condemned by so many as autocratic, in turn applied the same adjective to Bevin’s mountainous personality. The bull-necked ‘tsar’ of the Transport and General Workers Union, in Kenneth Morgan’s memorable epithet,¹⁵ had been brought in from the general secretaryship of the union to provide the sound base for labour relations in wartime that the First World War had so notably lacked. Bevin saw his remit coming firmly from ‘my people’. And while he used a range of Beveridge’s ideas during the months they worked together, it seems plain he did not trust with any executive responsibility a man he almost certainly associated with the coercive and at times damaging manpower policies that Beveridge had helped draw up in 1914–18.¹⁶

At the beginning of June 1941 someone else got the job Beveridge wanted: Godfrey Ince, who went on to become the department’s permanent secretary, was made Director General of Manpower. Beveridge was taken off administrative work and put in charge of a study on the way skilled manpower was being deployed into the forces. Four months before, however, in February, the Trades Union Congress had been to government to lobby about the hopelessly untidy mess of sickness and disability schemes by which workers were then covered. An inter-departmental committee was proposed to Cabinet in April. Bevin, having initially opposed the idea, suddenly saw it as a way of getting rid of someone whom he had clearly come to see as a pain in the neck.¹⁷ It was Greenwood who formally made the job offer, but Beveridge recorded twenty years later that it was Bevin who ‘pushed me as chairman of the Social Insurance Committee by way of parting with me … my removal from the Ministry of Labour … was “a kicking upstairs’”¹⁸ away from the work he believed he was cut out to do. Hence the tears that started to his eyes.

Indeed, so disillusioned was Beveridge that he appears for some months to have done little or nothing about his new task. His appointment, announced on 10 June 1941, attracted much parliamentary and press comment. But Beveridge spent the next months touring military bases and finishing his study on how the army was wasting skilled engineers. His reaction is perhaps understandable. The terms of reference – ‘to undertake, with special reference to the inter-relation of the schemes, a survey of the existing national schemes of social insurance and allied services, including workmen’s compensation, and to make recommendations’ – scarcely sounded like the dawn of a revolution or the making of a place in history.

While Home Office and Ministry of Health officials had higher hopes, the Treasury saw the committee merely as ‘a tidying up operation’, one of its senior officials declaring that the terms of reference had been made ‘as harmless as they can be made’.¹⁹ Bevin’s parting shot, according to Beveridge, was that the inquiry ‘should essentially be official in character, dealing with administrative issues rather than with issues of policy’.²⁰ Arthur Greenwood, however, saw it as something a lot bigger and in an early example of spin-doctoring gave briefings to that effect, inspiring Fleet Street so to write it up.²¹ The day after the committee was formally announced several newspapers reported in remarkably similar terms that it would be ‘the widest and most comprehensive investigation into social conditions … with the object of establishing economic and social security for every one on an equitable basis’.²²

Certainly something, if only at a tidying-up level, needed to be done. If, forty years on in 1984, Norman Fowler concurred in his civil servants’ judgement that the social security ship needed to be hauled in ‘to have the barnacles scraped off it’,²³ in 1941 the social security system – if it could even be called that – was a vessel full of holes and rotten planks through which it was only too easy to fall. It was showing all the strains and anomalies that piecemeal growth of voluntary and state provision over the previous forty-five years had produced since the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1897.

Seven different government departments were directly or indirectly involved in providing cash benefits of one kind or another. To modern eyes, some of these seem mighty strange: Customs and Excise, for example, administered ‘the Lord George’, the first state pension. But by 1941 there were three different types of pension, and three different types of unemployment benefit, all operating under different rules. War victims and their dependants were helped by the Ministry of Pensions, but the civilian disabled, widows and orphans were the responsibility of the Ministry of Health. The Home Office had its finger in the pie through running workmen’s compensation in some industries. For many, however, cover for industrial injuries was provided by for-profit insurers who scandalously tried to buy off claimants with inadequate lump sums when disaster struck. ‘Indoor servants’ in private houses were excluded from the state unemployment insurance scheme; those in ‘establishments and institutions’ were included. Health insurance now provided panel doctors for those in work who earned less than £420 a year, but that still covered less than half the population. Wives and children remained excluded. Sickness benefit was provided through non-profit-making ‘approved societies’ whose benefits varied as widely as their performance. A good one might provide a nursing home, dental treatment and spectacles, a poor one only the minimum sickness benefit guaranteed by the state. And beneath and alongside all this, local authority committees, the inheritors of the Elizabethan Poor Law, paid means-tested benefits to those in need.

The result was ‘different rates of benefit involving different contribution conditions and with meaningless distinctions between persons of different ages’ as Beveridge was to say in his report.²⁴ There he picked out just one example of the many he said could be found. A married man with two children, he recorded, received 38s. od. (£1.90) a week if unemployed. If he then became sick and unavailable for work, his benefit more than halved to 18s. od. An unemployed youth of seventeen, by contrast, received 9s. od.; but 12s. od. if he was sick. It was this considerable mess that Beveridge was set to sort out. He did so in the grandest of styles, and on a scale that no one who appointed him could possibly have envisaged.

The first hint of what he was planning, and that he had no intention of just tidying a few things up, came in July when he produced a paper for the committee headed ‘Social Insurance – General Considerations’. ‘The time has now come,’ he declared, ‘to consider social insurance as a whole, as a contribution to a better new world after the war. How would one plan social insurance now if one had a clear field … without being hampered by vested interests of any kind? The first step is to outline the ideal scheme, the next step is to consider the practical possibilities of realising the ideal, and then the changes of existing machinery that would be required.’

Beveridge aside, the committee was staffed entirely by officials. There was a civil servant apiece from each of the seven departments involved in social insurance. In addition, there was the inevitable official from the Treasury, one from the Ministry of Reconstruction, the Government Actuary, and a representative each from the Assistance Board and the Friendly Societies. They spent the summer drawing up background papers and inviting evidence, while Beveridge’s attention was elsewhere.

In all, 127 pieces of written evidence were to be received, and more than 50 private evidence sessions held with witnesses. But only one piece of written evidence had arrived by December 1941 when Beveridge circulated a paper entitled ‘Heads of a Scheme’ which contained the essence of the final report a year later. The paper proposed unifying the existing schemes, paying flat rate benefits at a rate high enough to provide ‘subsistence’ – that is, sufficient to live on, free of poverty – while the whole should be financed by contributions divided between the insured, employers and the state. As Point One, the paper opened with the key statement which was to stretch his terms of reference up to and beyond their limit and which was to underpin the whole report.

1 No satisfactory scheme for social security can be devised [without the] following assumptions.

A A national health service for prevention and comprehensive treatment available to all members of the community.

B Universal children’s allowances for all children up to 14 or if in full-time education up to 16.

C Full use of powers of the state to maintain employment and to reduce unemployment to seasonal, cyclical and interval unemployment, that is to say to unemployment suitable for treatment by cash allowances.²⁵

So there it was. The nation needed a national health service; tax-funded allowances for children; and full employment to make social security work.

The reliance on insurance – though insurance backed by the state, so-called ‘social’, as opposed to private, insurance – reflected what already existed even if less than half the population was covered in 1941. It also reflected what Beveridge had helped design for the unemployed in the years after 1908 and his own long-held beliefs. In 1924 he had written a tract for the Liberals advocating ‘insurance for all and for everything’. Always opposed to means-tests, he had like many of his compatriots become affronted by both their enormous expansion and the harshness of the particular tests used during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He wanted to see benefits paid as of right. One consequence of the insurance principle, the paper states, is that ‘no means test of any kind can be applied to the benefits of the Scheme’.

But while Beveridge believed that everything that could be insured for should be, he had also come to see that benefits for children could not be run that way. To combat poverty and at the same time provide work incentives, it was essential that children’s benefits be paid at the same rate whether the parent was in or out of work. For if only means-tested help was given for children, then the low-paid with large families would be better off out of work than working – unless benefit rates were to be set dangerously low. Equally, family allowances would also help to prevent poverty among the low-paid. Rowntree’s work had shown that low wages in large families were the primary cause of poverty in 1899 and even his 1936 study showed they still played a significant role. Thus, Beveridge concluded, children’s allowances had to be tax funded, not insurance based. He had additional motives for backing family allowances. The war had seen the cancellation of the 1941 census, and on the information available Beveridge believed erroneously that the birth-rate was still declining, as it had been in the 1930s. It was a trend he believed required to be reversed in the national interest.

‘Once this memorandum had been circulated,’ Beveridge declared blithely in his autobiography, ‘the committee had their objectives settled for them and discussion was reduced to consideration of the means of attaining that objective.’²⁶

They had indeed, and there was to be no little annoyance among the committee members at Beveridge’s general unwillingness thereafter to listen to their views, other than on technical matters. But point one of the memo had another instant effect: it alerted the government to the scale of what he had in mind. Alarm bells started to ring. Beveridge was asked to withdraw his three assumptions, and refused. On 17 January 1942, Greenwood wrote to him after talking to the Chancellor, Sir Kingsley Wood, declaring that ‘in view of the issues of high policy which will arise’ the departmental representatives should in future be regarded merely as ‘advisers and assessors’. The report would be signed by Beveridge alone and ‘be your own report’. The civil servants ‘will not be associated in any way with the views and recommendations on questions of policy which it contains’.²⁷ In other words, the government was damned if it was going to let itself be committed.

Work on the committee speeded up through 1942 as witnesses were called and evidence taken. But the credit (or reproach: some see the report and its aftermath as a key cause of Britain’s post-war decline) for the report’s popular impact may need to go as much to Janet Mair as to Beveridge himself.

Jessy, as Janet Mair was known, was the wife of David Mair, a somewhat austere mathematician and civil servant who was Beveridge’s cousin. She and Sir William had become close before the First World War, Mrs Mair sharing, in Jose Harris’s words, Beveridge’s ‘dreams and ambitions’. A powerful personality in her own right, she and Beveridge were to marry a fortnight after the report was published. They had, however, already scandalised the ‘lady censors of the University world’ when Mrs Mair moved into the Master’s lodgings at University College at the outbreak of war.²⁸ Jessy also had, in Peter Baldwin’s words, ‘a knack of putting in the baldest terms the ideas that lay more implicitly in her husband’s writings’.²⁹

During the crucial stages of the report’s compilation in the spring and summer of 1942, Jessy was staying with relatives in Scotland. But it was she, according to Jose Harris, who ‘greatly encouraged’ Beveridge not just to rationalise the existing insurance system but to lay down long-term goals in many areas of social policy.

There is no evidence to suggest that Mrs Mair was responsible for any of Beveridge’s substantive proposals. But much of his report was drafted after weekends with her in Edinburgh, and it was she who urged him to imbue his proposals with a ‘Cromwellian spirit’ and messianic tone. ‘How I hope you are going to be able to preach against all gangsters,’ she wrote, ‘who for their mutual gain support one another in upholding all the rest. For that is really what is happening in England … the whole object of their spider web of interlocked big banks and big businessmen [is] a frantic effort to maintain their own caste’. And she urged Beveridge to concentrate on three main policy objectives – ‘prevention rather than cure’, ‘education of those not yet accustomed to clean careful ways of life’, and ‘plotting the future as a gradual millennium taking step after step, but not flinching on ultimate goals.’³⁰

Beveridge of course had a track record as journalist and broadcaster, not just as an academic and administrator, and could express ideas clearly. He was fond of lists: ‘ten lions on the path’, ‘six principles’, ‘three assumptions’, as well as his ‘five giants’. But nothing else he wrote – certainly not his Full Employment in a Free Society whose preparation two years later was to worry both Churchill and his Chancellor – has the same rich blend of Cromwellian and Bunyanesque prose to be found in the drably titled Social Insurance and Allied Services.

When the report was published on 1 December 1942 its reception was ecstatic. On the night before there were queues to buy it outside HMSO’s London headquarters in Kingsway. The first 60,000 copies of the full report at 2S. od. (lop) a time were rapidly sold out. Sales topped 100,000 within a month and more than 200,000 by the end of 1944.³¹ It is hard to believe that most of those who bought it made it through to the end. Much of this 200,000-word excursion through technical exposition and complex appendices is heavy going. Even Beveridge’s own section is hard work, and the report may well rank alongside Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time as one of the most bought but least read books ever published in Britain. What made its reputation and provided its impact was the twenty-page introduction and the concluding twenty-page summary, separately published in a cut-down version at 3d. Combined with the full report this took sales above 600,000:³² in HMSO folklore, nothing is said to have outsold it until the Denning report on the Profumo scandal twenty years later.

And that introduction and summary were couched in terms unlike those of any government report before or since. Beveridge declared that he had used three guiding principles. First that ‘a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not patching’. When the war was ‘abolishing landmarks of every kind’, he declared, now was the time to use ‘experience in a clear field’.³³ Second, his plan for security of income – social security – was principally an attack upon Want. ‘But,’ he went on, hammering the point home with mighty capital letters, ‘Want is only one of five giants on the road of reconstruction, and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.’ Third, he stressed that social security must be achieved by co-operation between the state and the individual. ‘The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than the minimum for himself and his family.’ But that minimum should be given ‘as of right and without means test, so that individuals may build freely upon it’.

Taking social insurance as the base, he wrote in boldly the three assumptions needed to make it work: family allowances, a national health service, and ‘maintenance of employment’. In the conclusion of the main report, he expanded the themes in Bunyanesque terms. The plan, he said, ‘is not one for giving to everybody something for nothing and without trouble’. It involved ‘contributions in return for benefits’. War offered the chance of real change, for ‘the purpose of victory is to live in a better world than the old world’. And, most importantly, he stated that in itself social security was ‘a wholly inadequate aim’; it could only be part of a general programme.

It is one part only of an attack upon five giant evils: upon the physical Want with which it is directly concerned, upon Disease which often causes that Want and brings many other troubles in its train, upon Ignorance which no democracy can afford among its citizens, upon Squalor … and upon the Idleness which destroys wealth and corrupts men.³⁴

In that one ringing paragraph Beveridge encapsulated much of post-war aspiration. By seeking not only freedom from want, but a national health service, improved education, full employment and an attack upon Squalor (which Beveridge saw as being as much about town and industrial planning as about housing), he gave the vital kick to the five giant programmes that formed the core of the post-war welfare state: social security, health, education, housing, and a policy of full employment, the giants constructed to combat Beveridge’s five giant evils.

The report in practice does not mention education apart from its trumpet call for the attack on Ignorance. Nor does it deal in any detail with housing save for his struggle over how to handle rents within social security. Even a Beveridge could not stretch his terms of reference that far. The sections on how the health service would work are undisguisedly tentative. Beveridge himself stressed the need for further study. But the necessity of comprehensive health care ‘without a charge on treatment at any point’³⁵ is repeatedly driven home – not just to prevent poverty, but on economic grounds, to help keep people working, and quite simply on moral ones: ‘restoration of a sick person to health,’ he states, ‘is a duty of the State and the sick person, prior to any other consideration’.

If the report’s impact at home was spectacular, it was also pushed heavily overseas by an initially enthusiastic Ministry of Information. Details of ‘The Beveridge Plan’ were broadcast by the BBC from dawn on 1 December in twenty-two languages. Copies were circulated to the troops, and sent to the United States where the Treasury made a $5000 profit on sales.³⁶ More copies were dropped into France and other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe where they caused concern at the highest level. After the war, two papers marked ‘secret’ and providing detailed commentary on Beveridge’s plan were found in Hitler’s bunker. One ordered that publicity should be avoided, but if mentioned the report should be used as ‘obvious proof that our enemies are taking over national-socialistic ideas’. The other provided an official assessment of the plans as ‘no “botch-up” … a consistent system … of remarkable simplicity … superior to the current German social insurance in almost all points’.³⁷

Overnight Beveridge became a national hero – in Paul Addison’s phrase, ‘The People’s William’.³⁸ It was ‘like riding an elephant through a cheering mob’, Beveridge said.³⁹ Halls were packed to hear him expound his proposals in the rather prissy Edwardian tones that marked his speech. He broadcast and wrote about it endlessly, batting down critics who said his proposals would lead to feather-bedding and moral ruin. When an American declared that if Beveridge had had his way in the days of Good Queen Bess there would have been no Drake, Hawkins or Raleigh, he replied with a touch of the wit that his critics would deny him: ‘Adventure came not from the half starved, but from those who were well fed enough to feel ambition.’⁴⁰

A little seventeenth-century evangelical language, however, in a boringly titled and dense government document, even when propounded by a well-known Oxford don, is not enough to explain the report’s impact. To understand that we must go back, through the influence of the Second World War, to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the outcome of the Great War, and even beyond.

The Boer War (1899–1902) had provided one part of the stimulus for the great reforming programme of the Liberal Government of 1906 when it was discovered that almost half those volunteering to fight in South Africa were medically unfit. The First World War exposed the same problems even more brutally and on a much larger scale. One survey showed that one conscript in three was not fit enough to join the forces.⁴¹ Only a third were judged Grade One. By the time of the Second World War, seven out of ten were put in the top grade.⁴²

The mud and carnage of Flanders and the Somme, the days of ‘lions led by donkeys’, also changed British society for good. The Victorian era and the gilded summers of its Edwardian afterglow, in which hideous poverty had come to exist alongside abundant wealth, were to be swept away for ever. Lloyd George, in language Beveridge would have recognised, declared in 1917:

The present war … presents an opportunity for reconstruction of industrial and economic conditions of this country such as has never been presented in the life of, probably, the world. The whole state of society is more or less molten and you can stamp upon that molten mass almost anything so long as you do it with firmness and determination … the country will be prepared for bigger things immediately after the war … and unless the opportunity is seized immediately after the war I believe it will pass away.⁴³

The Welsh wizard found poverty abhorrent and the agenda from which he was working bore striking similarities to Beveridge’s almost thirty years later: unemployment insurance, health, housing and education, and a desire to end the 1834 Poor Law which had established the workhouses and the principle of ‘less eligibility’. In order to provide a vigorous incentive for self-help, the 1834 Act required that Poor Relief be set at a standard below the earnings that an industrious labourer ‘of the lowest class’ could achieve, regardless of the impact that policy had. The view then was strong, and its echoes can still be heard today, that poverty was the fault of the individual and should be punished. As the Royal Commission whose report produced the Act put it: ‘Every penny bestowed, that tends to render the condition of the pauper more eligible than that of the independent labourer, is a bounty on indolence and vice … nothing is necessary to arrest the progress of pauperism, except that all who receive relief from the parish should work for the parish exclusively, as hard and for less wages than independent labourers work for individual employers.’⁴⁴ Individuals would thus be forced, as far as possible, to stand on their own two feet. There was no intent here to prevent poverty, only to avert starvation.

Despite Lloyd George’s words, in 1917 too little was done too late. But before the grand vision collapsed, there was a brief illusion that all was well. The rapid removal of wartime controls brought a short but spectacular boom, producing the certain assumption, in the phrase of the day, that it was ‘business as usual’. Significant strides were made in education and the expansion of council housing. Unemployment insurance, limited to a few high-risk industries in 1911, was further extended in 1920 to cover around twelve million workers, roughly three-quarters of the workforce.

But Britain’s share of world trade proved to have contracted sharply during the war. The economy swung rapidly into recession. In 1922 the ‘Geddes axe’, named after Sir Eric Geddes who chaired the economic committee, introduced swingeing public spending cuts. These curtailed plans for educational expansion and left Lloyd George’s euphoric promise of ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ with a desperately hollow ring. As the new unemployment insurance came in, the total number of unemployed increased in the summer of 1920 to more than a million. Between then and the summer of 1940 it never fell below that mark and at times rose above three million.⁴⁵ The new experience of mass unemployment dominated social policy for the next twenty years, for it rapidly destroyed the insurance basis of the 1911 and 1920 Acts. Large numbers either exhausted their right to benefit, or were thrown out of work without having earned it in the first place. Fearing large-scale unrest and the Bolshevism which had just produced the Russian revolution, the government responded with a series of ad hoc measures starting in 1919 with Christopher Addison’s ‘out-of-work-donation’ for the unemployed: the words ‘the dole’ entered the vocabulary. The payment was not means-tested, and semi-inadvertently it established the principle that the state had a commitment to maintain all the unemployed, not just those whose insurance payments were up to date. But at the same time it undermined the insurance principle.

Worse was to come. In 1929 the American stock market collapsed, bringing in its wake the deepest recession the modern world has known. Its length was not matched in Britain until the early 1990s when the very welfare state created in reaction to the 1930s helped mitigate the effects. In the early 1930s, Keynes had yet to ride to the rescue on the white charger of his new economics. He was still developing his theories: indeed, the jibe at the time (which with the name changed can still be used today) was that ‘where five economists are gathered together there will be six opinions and two of them will be held by Keynes’. Cutting the soaring expenditure on the unemployed to defend the gold standard became the sole touchstone of British economic policy. It smashed the Labour Government in 1931. Ramsay MacDonald was left as Prime Minister of a new National Government, but effectively a prisoner of the Tories, to carry out the blood-letting of ‘severe surgical operations’ on Britain’s economy.⁴⁶ Insurance benefits were cut, and those who had exhausted their benefit or lacked sufficient contributions to qualify were transferred to the Public Assistance Committees of local authorities, who in 1929 had replaced the Poor Law guardians. The committees were empowered to enforce a stringent household means-test. As Derek Fraser put it:

The means test, like the workhouse before it, was destined to leave an indelible mark on popular culture. The means test of the early 1930s was a family one which involved a household assessment of need, taking into account the income of all its members, be it the few shillings pension of the aged parent, or the coppers earned on the son’s paper round. Its inquisitorial tone produced resentment and frustration among applicants and heightened family tension, already aggravated by the loss of patriarchal dignity and discipline consequent upon unemployment itself.

In effect it put the unemployed ‘right back on the Poor Law (though not in name) which, locally administered, exhibited wide regional variations in scale and conditions of benefit. Injustice only added to the demoralisation.’⁴⁷ A father whose son or daughter found work could see his benefit ended. George Orwell recorded it as ‘an encouragement to tittle-tattle and the informer’. A word from a jealous neighbour spotting a new coat or pair of shoes could bring the means-test men round demanding to know where the money had come from. Its effects became seared into the national soul.

In 1934 responsibility for the means-test and its attendant benefits was removed from local authorities and placed in the hands of a national Unemployment Assistance Board which at least applied rather more consistent rules. Freed of their direct financial responsibility for the unemployed, local authorities found in the late 1930s that their Poor Law responsibilities for children, the sick, the elderly, widows and deserted wives began, in Fraser’s words, ‘to mellow’. A 1937 report from Political and Economic Planning, an early independent research organisation and think-tank, records them slowly evolving into something faintly recognisable as the social services departments to come: ‘Instead of the grim Poor Law of the nineteenth century with its rigorous insistence on the principle of “less eligibility” and the workhouse test we have a liberal and constructive service supplementing the other social services, filling in gaps and dealing with human need in the round in a way which no specialist service could ever be expected to do.’⁴⁸ Such a picture, according to Sir George Godber, then a medical officer with the Ministry of Health, remained very much that of the best. ‘Some of the services, particularly the accommodation for “wayfarers”, could be grim indeed when I was inspecting them in 1939.’⁴⁹

Unemployment, as Fraser says, had become ‘the central issue of the inter-war years. Its malignant canker had poisoned millions of homes; it had blighted whole industrial regions; it had disinherited a generation; and it had laid low an elected Government.’ The Pathé News images of the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 are the most potent symbol of the times. Two hundred men, selected from hundreds of volunteers among the 8000 made redundant after the Tyne shipyard and its linked industries closed, marched to London and on Parliament led by their MP ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson (whom we will meet again). Their cheerful discipline washed through with despair still comes through the flickering black and white film. In the short term they received and achieved nothing – indeed, on their return they learned their dole had been cut; as the Unemployment Assistance Board explained, while on the march they would not have been available for work had any turned up.⁵⁰

Yet unemployment was far from touching everybody equally. While it reached 67 per cent in Jarrow, it was a mere 3 per cent in High Wycombe, and 7 per cent in London’s Deptford.⁵¹ Britain’s first great twentieth-century experience of mass unemployment was as regional as its return was to be in the recession of the early to mid-1980s. As in the eighties – though not the nineties – it was heavy engineering, coal, steel, and shipbuilding that were razed by foreign competition. The twenties and thirties added to that the dramatic decline of King Cotton in Lancashire and the slower decline of Yorkshire wool: the world was discovering that it wanted fewer of the ‘millions of yards of calico and thousands of steam engines’⁵² that Britain had previously provided. So it was chiefly the north of England, Scotland and Wales that suffered.

None the less, other parts of the country and the middle classes were not entirely immune. In 1934 it was estimated that 300,000 clerks, office managers, engineers, chemists and the like were out of work, white-collar workers whose earnings were too high to qualify for the state insurance schemes and who thus did not appear in the general statistics.⁵³ In 1936, when the worst was over, Fowey in Cornwall, Ross on Wye, and Keswick in the Lake District featured alongside Wigan, Hartlepool and Glasgow as priority places for official contracts because their adult unemployment had run at above 25 per cent in the previous year. But it remains true that even at the absolute nadir of the slump, more than three-quarters of the workforce was still working. And overall – again a pre-echo of the eighties – those in work enjoyed real, rising standards of living over the two decades before World War II. In fact the thirties was to be the last decade for half a century when it could fairly be said that the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.

The 1930s not only saw George Orwell chronicle the plight of lower England in The Road to Wigan Pier, it also saw J. B. Priestley’s English Journey. The novelist and critic travelled from Southampton to Newcastle by way of most points in between and back to London. He found three Englands. There was ‘Old England’ of the cathedrals, the colleges and the Cotswolds, ‘a luxury country’ that ‘has long since ceased to earn its own living’. Then there was the nineteenth-century England: ‘the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways’ with ‘thousands of rows of little houses all alike’, ‘detached villas with monkey trees’, ‘mill chimneys, slums, fried-fish shops’ and ‘good-class draper’s and confectioner’s’ – all existing in ‘a cynically devastated countryside’ itself dotted with ‘sooty dismal little towns and still sootier grim fortress-like cities’. It was an area he described as ‘the larger part of the Midlands and the North’ but ‘existing everywhere’. This England, Priestley judged, ‘is not being added to and has no new life poured into it. To the more fortunate people it was not a bad England at all, very solid and comfortable.’⁵⁴ But this England also contained the England of the dole, one that looked as if it had ‘devoted a hundred years of its life to keeping gigantic sooty pigs. And the people who were choked by the reek of sties did not get the bacon.’

It was this England that also contained Hebburn and Jarrow, its ironworks derelict and its shipyards nearly so when Priestley visited in 1933, three years before the march. He pronounced the town quite simply ‘dead’.

Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual, penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a distant civilization … would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was now being punished. He would never believe us if we told him that in theory this town was as good as any other and that its inhabitants were not criminals but citizens with votes.⁵⁵

Writing nine years before Beveridge, in an unconscious premonition of things to come and using the same capital letters, Priestley railed: ‘If Germans had been threatening these towns instead of Want, Diseases, Hopelessness, Misery, something would have been done, and done quickly.’⁵⁶

Priestley also found a third England – and not one which appealed much to his fastidious taste. That was ‘the new post [First World] war England … the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motorcoaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarettes and coupons.’⁵⁷

It was also, he might have added, the England of the middle-class estates of twenties semis that were just starting to explode into the thirties suburban private house building boom, the England of Beckenham and Bromley and of Metroland, the rise of the clerk and the demise of the servant, the heyday of ribbon development, of the Great West Road, the Art Deco of the Firestone and Hoover factories, the days of ‘glass and white tiles and chromium plate’.⁵⁸ This England was a country of which a large section had prospered despite the celestial emperor’s view of Jarrow.

But all three of these Englands, along with the rest of the United Kingdom, went again to war in 1939. And it was war which merged them closer into one.

As if to underline that not all social progress halted in the 1930s, the school leaving age had been due to rise to from fourteen to fifteen on 1 September 1939. But in the early hours of that morning German tanks rolled into Poland and the mass evacuation of schoolchildren and mothers from Britain’s cities, planned since the time of Munich, began.

In three days – war was finally declared on Sunday the third – an incredible one and a half million people were decanted into the countryside, including 827,000 schoolchildren, 524,000 mothers and their children under school age, and 103,000 teachers and helpers.⁵⁹ It was the start of the massive movements of population that were to stretch and bend the old class system as never before, one of the effects of a war which impinged on the civilian population in a way that 1914–18, for all its carnage on foreign fields, never did. While it slew the flower of a generation, from whole families of yeomen recorded on village war memorials to the gilded contemporaries of Robert Graves, the First World War did not throw people together as the Second did. It did not force one half of England to see how the other half lived. The Second World War, Paul Addison says, in The Road to 1945:

hurled together people of different social backgrounds in a series of massive upheavals caused by bombing, conscription, and the migration of workers to new centres of war industry. Over the war as a whole there were 60 million changes of address in a civilian population of about 38 million, while more than five million men and women were drawn into the three armed services. There were one and a half millions in the Home Guard, and about the same number in the various Civil Defence services, by the end of 1940. More than one and a quarter million evacuees, over half of them children, were billeted on families in the reception areas in February 1941. The number of women working in industry increased by 1,800,000 between 1939 and 1943. In air-raid shelters, air raid warden’s posts, Home Guard units, and overcrowded trains where soldiers barged into first class compartments, class barriers could no longer be sustained. ‘It is quite common now,’ Lord Marley was reported as saying in 1941, ‘to see Englishmen speaking to each other in public, although they have never been formally introduced.’⁶⁰

Many of the first evacuees soon returned home. But the impact of incomers who were mostly (though not entirely) from poorer inner city areas on the more comfortable countryside was remarkable. Ben Wicks in No Time to Wave Goodbye, his remarkable compilation of evacuees’ experiences (he was one himself), records children brought up in the days before mass television who, having watched cows being milked, were convinced they were being offered urine to drink; some who had never slept in a bed and preferred the floor; while Richard Titmuss told of the child who said to his visiting mother: ‘They call this spring, Mum, and they have one down here every year.’⁶¹

Mabel Louvain Manning took in two boys.

The first morning I was awoken about 6 am by such a noise, it was the boys fighting in bed! One had a bloody nose which had splattered all over the wall. I cleaned them up and got them ready for breakfast. They had no idea how to use a knife and fork and picked up a fried egg by their fingers. They didn’t like stew or pies, only beans in tomato, which they wanted to eat out of a tin, and chips.

When they came to me, one was wearing wellingtons, the other plimsolls, and no coats or extra shirts or underclothes. I cadged what I could from friends, and then decided to write to the parents for more. The mother wrote back saying she would have to get their suits and shoes out of pawn, which she did, and sent them down.⁶²

There were horrified tales of nits, lice and scabies, taken up by a press amazed by stories of children sewn into their only clothes. In Dorset a couple took in a mother and three children.

It was very hot weather when war broke out, but those older children went all round my house urinating against the walls.

Although we had two toilets, one being outside with very easy access for them, they never used them. Although my husband and I told the children and the mother off about this filthy habit they took absolutely no notice and our house stank to high heaven.⁶³

A more revealing tale of life in the under-toileted Glasgow slums came from the Scottish mother who told her six-year-old: ‘You dirty thing, messing up the lady’s carpet. Go and do it in the corner.’ The evacuation produced happier humour, too. Jean Chartrand recorded two boys billeted on a cousin’s farm asking to help with the milking. ‘One boy had put the pail under the cow’s udders and was holding it there while the other boy was the using the cow’s tail like a pump-handle. They were both very disgusted when there was no milk forthcoming.’⁶⁴

Some made lifelong friends from the experience, other children found themselves abused and exploited, emotionally, physically and even sexually, and never recovered. The lesser shocks were not all one way. Eileen Stoddart recalled coming from a ‘very respectable home. Some of the girls ended up in tiny cottages, three to a single bed, with bedbugs which they had never seen before in their lives. I wasn’t allowed to wash my hair for four months since we had to bring the water up the hill from the village pump.’⁶⁵ The overall impact of the whole experience, however, is summed up by one child’s memory of her family taking in three sisters. ‘We had never seen the like before and seriously learned how the other half lived.’⁶⁶ Or as Rab Butler, the creator of the 1944 Education Act, was to put it: ‘It was realized with deepening awareness that the “two nations” still existed in England a century after Disraeli had used the phrase.’⁶⁷

By the time Beveridge was appointed, the war had progressed through Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain to the Battle of the Atlantic as the convoys from America worked to save Britain from potential starvation and defeat. Food was rationed, with the Board of Trade, not the Labour Government of 1945, coining the phrase ‘fair shares for all’ as clothes rationing came in. And there had been the Blitz. By June 1941, the month Beveridge took on his task, more than two million homes had been damaged or destroyed by bombing, 60 per cent of them in London.⁶⁸ Bombs respected neither class nor income. The Luftwaffe may have effected a slum clearance programme around Britain’s docks that it would take years of post-war housing programmes to equal, but they also took out homes in Mayfair and Belgravia and the comfortable suburbs of towns when targets were missed or bombs jettisoned on the way home. Not just cities and big towns up and down the land were hit, but eastern and southern coastal areas in ‘tip and run’ raids. Some 100,000 people had been killed or seriously injured and the Emergency Medical Service was already running an embryo national health service by providing free treatment to ‘casualties’ – a definition which included evacuees.

Civil defence brought social classes together as much as the armed forces. My mother, a slip of an eighteen-year-old who worked as an ambulance attendant when the bombs began to fall on Bristol, recalls giggling with her middle-class friends at the shy approaches of dustmen too old and too young for call-up when they first sat at opposite ends of the canteen waiting for the siren’s call. ‘We just didn’t know people like them, or they people like us,’ she recalls. ‘We had never heard such language. But when you saw the risks they’d take to pull people out of bombed buildings, there couldn’t any longer be any sense of them and us.’

Claims of social cohesion can be overdone. The prison population almost doubled to more than 21,000, much of the increase owing to sentences for looting. Anélitestill lived better than the rest and black markets flourished. Nicholas Davenport, the highly successful and socialist City journalist wrote in the spring of 1941: ‘Not a week passes without the Ministry of Food prosecuting hundreds of food offenders and the Board of Trade dozens of offenders against clothes rationing and quota laws.’⁶⁹ But that same rationing was to change dramatically the nutritional status of the British people during the course of the war. Richard Titmuss, who told the official tale of the war’s social effects, recorded that ‘the families in that third of the population of Britain who in 1938 were chronically undernourished had their first adequate diet in 1940 and 1941 … [after which] the incidence of deficiency diseases, and notably infant mortality, dropped dramatically.’⁷⁰ It became known early on that the Royal Family too had ration books and ate Spam, while the King posed for a publicity photograph as he joined a ‘Pig Club’ – just about anything that was left over could be used for pig swill and converted into pork and bacon.⁷¹ Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, found windows blown out in Buckingham Palace and a black line painted round the inside of the bath, above which it was not to be filled. The Queen’s remark after Buckingham Palace was hit: ‘It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face’,⁷² may sound sentimental, even patronising. It contained, however, a truth.

The switch to a war economy had also virtually eliminated unemployment. By the summer of 1941 it was down to 200,000 and falling. In 1943, soon after Beveridge reported, it had fallen to a mere 62,000, most of whom were in transit from one job to another.⁷³ Not only that, wages were rising. And Keynes, the uncertain prophet in the wilderness of the early 1930s, had now become the fount of Keynesianism. He had published his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 and had been in the United States where he had seen in Roosevelt’s New Deal the effects of ideas similar to those he advanced. Since June 1940 he had been inside the British Treasury, his influence plain on the 1941 Budget. While there were battles still to be fought before Keynesian economics ruled, the results of the government’s ever-growing economic intervention appeared to be demonstrating that his theories worked on this side of the Atlantic, too.

Things plainly were changing. The Times had gone pink, or so it seemed to right-wing Tories. In October 1941, Geoffrey Dawson, who had done so much to scar the paper’s reputation by his support for appeasement, was replaced by Robin Barrington-Ward, a Balliol contemporary of Beveridge. The paper’s official chronicler records Barrington-Ward as a radical Tory who was ‘inclined by temperament to welcome social change in advance, prepare for it, and so control it.’⁷⁴ He took the paper to the left. Earlier that year E. H. Carr, the leftish historian, had been appointed assistant editor, from which position he argued consistently for the need to espouse social justice as the aim after the war. In a sense, the then small group of Tory reformers, whose views had first been clearly articulated in 1938 when a rather obscure back-bench rebel called Harold Macmillan had defined the politics he was to follow in a book called The Middle Way, had found a voice in the leader columns of The Times. Even before Dawson left, however, a new tone had begun to emerge. An editorial on 1 July 1940 declared:

Over the greater part of Western Europe the common values for which we stand are known and prized. We must indeed beware of defining these values in purely 19th Century terms. If we speak of democracy we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organisation and economic planning. If we speak of equality we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction we think less of maximum (though this job too will be required) than of equitable distribution.

Labour’s right-wing egalitarians, Tony Crosland in the 1950s or Roy Hattersley in the 1990s, could have said amen to that. One Tory MP was later to growl (though not in the context of the welfare state) that The Times had become merely ‘the threepenny edition of the Daily Worker’, the Communist Party paper which was suppressed for a time during the war.⁷⁵ If the voices on The Times were a-changing, they were not alone. The Economist, long the guardian of financial orthodoxy, could pronounce that the ‘old controversy’ over ‘the question of whether the state should make itself responsible for the economic environment’ was ‘as dead as a doorknocker – that is, useful for making a noise but nothing else’.

Newspapers may shape the world around them, but they also reflect it. The churches had found a new vigour in siding with the underdogs, running meetings demanding social justice after the war. In this William Temple, appointed on Churchill’s recommendation as Archbishop of Canterbury in early 1942, played a key role. He was to bless Beveridge’s marriage later that year and still later was to be contemptuously described as Beveridge’s ‘warm-up man’ by Correlli Barnett, the Cambridge historian whose influential reinterpretation of the Second World War puts Beveridge high on the list of Great Satans responsible for Britain’s post-war decline.⁷⁶ In 1941, while still Archbishop of York, Temple had written Citizen and Churchman in which he defined the ‘Welfare-State’ in contrast to the Power-State of the continental tyrannies.⁷⁷ A meeting of the Industrial Christian Fellowship in the Albert Hall in October 1942, at which Temple spoke, drew ten thousand participants. ‘The general demands included … a central planning for employment, housing and social security,’ Picture Post reported.⁷⁸ It was thus fertile ground into which Beveridge was to plant his dragon’s teeth, seeking to raise up giants to respond to the ‘five giant evils’ he had identified.

Moreover, during 1942 the Conservatives found themselves losing by-elections to some of the oddest characters ever to sit in Parliament. Labour, the Liberals and the Tories did not stand against each other because of the coalition – indeed, Labour actively backed some of the Conservative coalition nominees. The awkward independents, standing on the vaguest and most confused of platforms, still won. Screaming Lord Sutch should have been born earlier. Soon Labour was to find its own candidates losing by-elections in similar circumstances.

Mass Observation, the pioneering opinion poll organisation, found in December 1941 that one person in six said the war had changed their political views. ‘Eight months later, in August 1942 [four months before the Beveridge report], the proportion was one in three,’ Angus Calder records. ‘At this time it was also found that only one-third of the voters expected any of the existing parties to get things done as they personally wanted them after the war. This minority was mostly Labour or Communist.’⁷⁹ The old Conservative front was collapsing. What might be dubbed the new progressive centre of Tory politics which was to receive Labour’s inheritance in 1951 was yet to have its day.

The sense that something more than victory over Nazi Germany had to be planned was also present in government itself, even if the terms were not yet very clearly defined. Churchill had, after all, appointed Arthur Greenwood Minister for Reconstruction – the same Greenwood who as Labour deputy leader, standing in for an ill Attlee in the Commons debate on the eve of war, had been urged by Leo Amery from the government benches to ‘Speak for England, Arthur.’

Churchill, back on the Conservative benches, had his days as a Liberal social reformer the better part of thirty years behind him, but he still retained Liberal or even Whiggish sentiments. His interest in home affairs had dissipated in the 1930s in the face of his concern for Empire and the threat of Fascism. But addressing the boys of his old school, Harrow, in 1940, he said: ‘When this war is won, as it surely will be, it must be one of our aims to establish a state of society where the advantages and privileges which have hitherto been enjoyed only by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many, and by the youth of the nation as a whole.’⁸⁰ He had sent R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler to the Board of Education and appointed him chairman of a new Conservative Post-War Problems Committee. In August 1941 he met Roosevelt for the first time off Newfoundland where they agreed on the Atlantic Charter – a joint statement of war aims, even though the United States was not yet formally in the war. The pair called on all nations to collaborate ‘with the object of securing for all improved labour standards, economic advancement, and social security’. Peace should bring ‘freedom from fear and want’.⁸¹ Beveridge was to exploit that statement in his report, citing it as backing for his plan.

And against this background, as Sir William prepared his report, the war raged outside Britain itself. On 22 June 1941, less than a fortnight after Beveridge’s appointment, Hitler had attacked the Soviet Union. Britain at last was not alone. For those with an abiding loathing of Communism, and who had seen the perfidious Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 allow the Soviet Union to swallow Finland and the German tanks to roll into Poland barely a week later, this was as hard a moment as any in the war. Not least for Churchill. In a broadcast that showed both courage and statesmanship, he declared that Nazism was indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. ‘No-one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have been for the last 25 years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.’ But he went on to declare that with the tanks rolling, ‘the [Soviet] past with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies flashes away … I see the ten thousand villages of Russia … where maidens laugh and children play …’ and ‘… the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.’⁸² Most people believed initially that the Soviet Union would be smashed. But in July, Stalin announced his horrific but awe-inspiring ‘scorched earth’ policy. By September British ships were on the nightmarish Arctic convoys to Archangel carrying aircraft and other supplies. At the end of that month ‘Tanks for Russia’ week was launched in British factories: they came out with the legends ‘Stalin’, ‘Marx’, ‘Lenin’ and ‘Another for Joe’ chalked on the sides. And as Hitler became bogged down in the Russian winter snows and Moscow held, admiration for Soviet sacrifices grew. A conviction became widespread well outside the ranks of the Communists and Labour’s left that the Soviet system could not be all bad. There can be few more symbolic exemplars of this particular time than the Christian and Conservative T. S. Eliot, then based at Faber & Faber, turning down the manuscript of Animal Farm, the savage and prophetic satire of the Russian revolution and Soviet system written by the atheist and socialist George Orwell. Eliot did so on the grounds that it did not offer ‘the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time’.⁸³

The success of Beveridge’s report with its universalist and collectivist themes has to be seen against this complex backdrop. There were three more factors which were to give it the greatest impact of any British social document of the twentieth century.

The first is that Beveridge argued along the grain of current thinking. He may have drafted his report before he saw the evidence, but he already knew what much of its substance would be. Jose Harris writes:

One of the most striking features of the evidence submitted to the Beveridge Committee was the very widespread expectation among witnesses that the inquiry was going to lead to radical, even ‘Utopian’ social change. Quite where this expectation came from is not entirely clear, but it may well have derived from Beveridge himself and from his frequent references in articles and broadcasts to the abolition of poverty and to post-war social reform. A second striking feature was the very wide degree of support among witnesses for the kind of reform that Beveridge already had in mind – a measure of the extent to which Beveridge himself was interpreting rather than creating the spirit of the times. Again and again witnesses pressed spontaneously and independently for measures which afterwards became the main policy proposals of the Beveridge Report – namely, family allowances, full employment, a universal health service, a uniform system of contributory insurance, subsistence-level benefits and the reduction or abolition of public assistance.⁸⁴

Not everyone believed in planning for a New Jerusalem, let alone a Utopia. Sir John Forbes Watson, Director of the Confederation of British Employers, virtually urged Beveridge to abandon the report:

I want to say here – it will go on the shorthand note, but I do not know that I want to say it publicly – we did not start this war with Germany in order to improve our social services; the war was forced upon us by Germany and we entered it to preserve our freedom and to keep the Gestapo outside our houses, and that is what this war means.⁸⁵

Others shared that view and believed improvements could not be afforded. J. S. Boyd, vice-president of the Shipbuilding Employers’ Federation told the committee:

I am saying something I would not like printed – there may have been excellent reasons in the last war for talking about homes fit for heroes and there may be excellent reasons today for talking about improving the social services, but at the same time any of us who are trying to think at all do realize and do appreciate that the problems after the war are not problems that the man in the street concerns himself about, and you may be causing a much greater degree of danger by telling him something which in fact even the most optimistic of us may fear will be impossible after the war.⁸⁶

The industrialists’ desire not to go on the record may be significant; and the employers were not united. In November 1942, when Beveridge’s report was complete but not yet published, 120 senior industrialists including the head of ICI produced ‘A National Policy for Industry’ which called for companies to be responsible for proper housing for their employees, for supplementing the state pension and for subsidies to prevent unemployment. They also sought family allowances and the raising of the school leaving age to sixteen. The report had as much of corporate paternalism as state action about it. But in suggesting that big companies should almost become miniature welfare states the industrialists, if not in the same regiment as Beveridge, were marching to a similar beat.

The route Beveridge took, however, was not preordained. Evidence to the committee threw up alternatives of which he was already aware and which were to be recurring themes in the post-war years. Several witnesses argued for the abolition of contributions. Benefit should be funded either from taxation or from an identifiable surcharge on income tax. That Beveridge opposed, first because of its implied extension of means-testing, and second because of the Treasury’s longstanding opposition to earmarked taxes. Equally, there were arguments for flat-rate benefits paid for by graduated contributions: those who earned more would pay more. Both Political and Economic Planning and the Association of Approved Societies, who ran health insurance, pressed for that measure, which Beveridge dismissed, Jose Harris records, as the epitome of the ‘Santa Claus state’. ‘I believe there is a psychological desire to get something for which you have paid … the tradition of the fixed price is very strong in this country. You do not like having to pay more than your neighbours.’ Others including the International Labour Office praised the kind of ‘earnings-related system commonly found on the Continent’, where benefits were not flat but graduated according to previous earnings.⁸⁷

All these Beveridge rejected, objecting that earnings-related benefits would damage savings. In so doing he took the British social security system down a road that was both recognisable – the insurance basis already used for both employment and health – and very different from the earnings-related systems adopted over most of the rest of Europe after the war. For all the rhetoric in the early part of the report that ‘a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions’, Beveridge in many ways was far from revolutionary. He produced something people would recognise. And he recognised himself what he had done. In paragraph 31 he stated that his proposals ‘spring out of what has been accomplished in building up security piece by piece’. In important ways, he added, the plan was ‘a natural development from the past. It is a British revolution.’ Both in its incrementalism – the way in which in large measure it stuck to the old system of flat-rate benefits paid for by flat-rate contributions split three ways between employee, employer and state – and in its choice of a path other countries did not follow, Beveridge’s report was indeed a very British revolution.

The second additional factor in the report’s reception was that Beveridge through broadcasts, articles and half-leaks – he was an occasional member of the massively popular radio ‘Brains Trust’ – had made very certain that the world knew it was coming. He had repeatedly referred publicly to ‘equality of sacrifice’ and the possibility of abolishing poverty. In March 1942, more than six months before the report, Picture Post could write: ‘Everybody has heard of Sir William Beveridge.’⁸⁸ As early as April 1942, a Home Intelligence report noted: ‘Sir William Beveridge’s proposals for an “all-in” social security scheme are said to be popular’, and by the autumn Home Intelligence was recording that: ‘Three years ago, the term social security was almost unknown to the public as a whole. It now appears to be generally accepted as an urgent post-war need. It is commonly defined as “a decent minimum standard of living for all”.’⁸⁹

Harold Wilson had turned down the secretaryship of the committee. But Frank Pakenham (the future Lord Longford) was a friend and assistant of Beveridge, sympathetic to his work, and well connected in Fleet Street. He acted as an unofficial public relations officer.⁹⁰ Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, wrote to Churchill in October: ‘I have good reason to believe that some of Beveridge’s friends are playing politics and that when the report appears there will be an immense amount of ballyhoo about the importance of implementing the recommendations without delay.’⁹¹ There was indeed. In mid-November the ever-tactful Beveridge unwisely told a Daily Telegraph reporter that his proposals would take the country ‘half-way to Moscow’, a statement he promptly disowned but which only lowered by a few more degrees the icy reception the report was to receive from right-wing Tories and parts of government.⁹²

A frantic debate in fact was already under way over what facilities Beveridge should be given to publicise his recommendations. It was finally resolved on 25 November by Churchill minuting Bracken: ‘Once it is out he can bark to his heart’s content.’⁹³ Bracken changed tack. He apparently saw the report as a great morale-booster at home and for the troops, and a useful propaganda weapon overseas. His ministry recognised the force of Beveridge’s own declaration in the report that ‘the purpose of victory is to live in a better world than the old world’. Beveridge added that ‘each individual citizen is more likely to concentrate upon his war effort if he feels that his Government will be ready in time with plans for that better world.’ Where ministers were to part company with Beveridge was over the third clause of that sentence: ‘that, if these plans are to be ready in time, they must be made ready now’.⁹⁴

The final piece of luck and timing which ensured the report’s ecstatic reception lay with Montgomery and the British Eighth Army. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a year earlier had seen the United States finally enter the war, but apart from survival, and the heroism of the Soviet Union, there had been little else to celebrate since 1939. Monty had gone into action at El Alamein at the end of October. The battle started badly. But on 4 November a BBC announcer, his voice shaking with excitement, delivered General Alexander’s Cairo communique stating that Rommel was in full retreat in Egypt. The news from North Africa only got better. Churchill in one of the war’s best remembered aphorisms pronounced on the 10th: ‘Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’⁹⁵

Suddenly, after three years, there was a future to look forward to – and one that the times demanded should be very different from the past. On 15 November, for the first time since war was declared, Churchill ordered that the church bells ring out, not to announce invasion but to celebrate Monty’s victory.⁹⁶ A fortnight later the Beveridge report was published, its own words ringing out like a great bell. In his final paragraph Beveridge became more Churchillian than Bunyanesque:

Freedom from want cannot be forced on a democracy or given to a democracy. It must be won by them. Winning it needs courage and faith and a sense of national unity: courage to face facts and difficulties and overcome them; faith in our culture and in the ideals of fair-play and freedom for which century after century our forefathers were prepared to die; a sense of national unity overriding the interests of any class or section. The Plan for Social Security in this report is submitted by one who believes that in this supreme crisis the British people will not be found wanting.⁹⁷

There were – and still are – many battles to be fought against Beveridge’s five giants. His report’s popular impact was a matter, in Jose Harris’s judgement, ‘partly of luck and partly of careful calculation’ but partly also simply of the times in which it was made.⁹⁸

Beatrice Webb commented rather acidly how odd it was that Beveridge of all people had become a national hero. But if one sentence had to sum up popular reaction, it is the breathless enthusiasm of the Pathé News interviewer on the night the report was published. The white-haired, waist-coated, oh-so-Edwardian figure of Beveridge intoned to the massed cinema audiences of the great British public: ‘I hope that when you’ve been able to study the report in detail, you’ll like it. That it will get adopted, and, if it’s so, we shall have taken the first step to security with freedom and responsibility. That is what we all desire.’

The interviewer replies, all italics and capital letters and deference: ‘Thank You – Sir William’.