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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’.