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‘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