Between 2013 and 2023 Michael researched and wrote a biography of the social reformers and socialist pioneers, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Unceasing war on poverty: Beatrice and Sidney Webb and their world is available to buy online here.
Beatrice and Sidney – the Webbs, or the firm of Webb, were a remarkable couple.
She was tall and slender; he was short and stout. Beatrice was born in 1858; Sidney Webb in 1859. Sidney’s mother ran a hairdressing salon near Leicester Square in central London; Beatrice’s father, Richard Potter, was a successful businessman, chairman not only of the Great Western Railway but of railway companies in North America as well.
Sidney went to a local school on St Martin’s Lane; he said later that he had taught himself to read by looking at the books and notices in London shop windows.
Beatrice had one year at boarding school when she was 17; otherwise, she and her eight sisters were educated at home (mostly at their country house in the Cotswolds) by governesses.
Sidney started work as a clerk in a broker’s office in the City of London when he was 16. He signed up for night school – not just one night school, but several; he became skilled at passing examinations, and winning prizes. His target was the civil service – not long opened up to competitive examination. He joined the service as a Man Clerk in 1878. He carried on studying for examinations; by 1881 he had reached the senior civil service – at about the same age as his contemporaries who had arrived via Oxford or Cambridge.
At the same time, Sidney became involved in socialist politics. In 1885, with his lifelong friend George Bernard Shaw, he joined the Fabian Society – a small, newly established socialist grouping.
Beatrice’s only year at school ended just before her eighteenth birthday. She described the next seven years as irresponsible girlhood – a frenetic social life: presentation at Court, grand balls, and an introduction to the marriage market. Beatrice later said that the business of getting married was
carried on by parents and other promoters, sometimes with gentle surreptitiousness, sometimes with cynical effrontery.
Most of her sisters made the conventional, ‘good’ marriages expected of them.
After her mother, Lawrencina, died in 1882, Beatrice ran the household, and acted as her father’s official hostess. She became disillusioned with her way of life. With the Charity Organisation Society, she began visiting the poor. She became a Lady Housing Visitor in East London. And she worked on Charles Booth’s survey of the life and labour of the people of London (Booth was her cousin). Her mother’s family had been weavers in Lancashire; Beatrice, incognito, went on extended visits to Bacup, their original home town, to find out more about her own background.
Sidney and Beatrice, the socialist and the social reformer, met in 1890. They were introduced by another of Beatrice’s cousins, the novelist Margaret Harkness. For Sidney it was love at first sight; Beatrice took longer to be convinced. But they married in 1892, and set up house on Grosvenor Road, by the river Thames – roughly where the Millbank Tower stands today.
They wrote books together – before the marriage, Beatrice had already published a book on the cooperative movement. Now they produced substantial works on trade unionism and on local government.
Together, with a legacy left to the Fabian Society, they set up the London School of Economics (LSE)
Sidney was elected to the London County Council. He became an expert on secondary and technical education, greatly extending the scope of post 14 education, first in London, then, working with a Conservative government, across the whole country.
Their political approach was one of permeation – working with politicians of any party to achieve their aims; in 1900, Beatrice wrote that:
A Conservative government is as good for us as a Liberal government…Our business is to be friendly to men of all parties.
And friendly they were. Encouraged by George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs’ home on Grosvenor Road became the location of a political salon. The novelist H G Wells said their house became the centre of an astonishing amount of political and social activity:
She mixed the obscurely efficient with the ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than had ever met easily before.
In 1905 Beatrice was appointed to a Royal Commission to investigate the Poor Law and policy on unemployment. She threw herself into the task, quickly falling out with the chairman and many of the other members. When the Commission reported in 1909, Beatrice produced a Minority Report, calling for the abolition of the Poor Law.
Beatrice and Sidney organised a national campaign – in favour of the Minority Report, calling for the prevention of destitution. After 1905, the Fabian Society had recruited new, young members, women as well as men. These recruits formed the backbone of the campaign; they included people like Clement Attlee, Hugh Dalton, and Arthur Greenwood, who would go on to actually abolish the Poor Law after 1945.
But the pre-1914 Liberal government was not convinced, opting instead for the system of National Insurance. In summer 1911 the Webbs concluded that they had lost and set off for a round-the-world trip, visiting North America, Japan, China and India.
Returning to London a year later, they committed themselves to the emerging Labour Party. Beatrice called Labour
…a poor thing, but our own…
Permeation was over.
From 1912 to 1931, Sidney and Beatrice worked to build up Labour, to become, first the official opposition, and then, between the wars, twice to hold power in minority governments.
The war affected them differently: Sidney worked with trades unions and others to look after the needs of the civilian working population. Beatrice, for the first part of the war, became depressed and ill, shocked by the deaths of so many of the young campaigners with whom she had worked, and on whom she was depending for future political campaigning.
Their network of supporters was deeply divided: some volunteered for military service or were conscripted; others became Conscientious Objectors, or argued for a negotiated peace.
Sidney began to take a leading role in Labour: he drafted a new constitution for the party, and wrote its first comprehensive national programme. In 1923 he chaired the party organisation, coining the phrase inevitable gradualness to describe Labour’s approach.
He became, first an MP, and then a Cabinet minister in the Labour governments of 1924, and 1929 to 1931.
In the second Labour government Sidney was Colonial Secretary. He worked diligently and effectively on intractable long-term problems – including the future of Britain’s East African colonies, and the contradictions inherent in the Palestine League of Nations mandate.
But the main challenge faced by the government was high unemployment following the Wall Street crash of 1929. The policies Labour (including the Webbs) had evolved since the 1890s were no help. The Chancellor, Philip Snowden, followed a narrow Treasury orthodoxy. Although the Webbs knew Maynard Keynes, his advice was not heeded by the government. Beatrice saw that that no new thinking was happening; she and Sidney began to have doubts about inevitable gradualness.
In August 1931, faced with the prospect of massive spending cuts – including cuts to the benefits of the unemployed – and an ultimatum from Wall Street bankers, the Labour government collapsed. It was replaced by a coalition, or National government – led by Ramsay MacDonald, who had been the Labour Prime Minister.
After the fall of the Labour Government, the Webbs turned their attention to the Soviet Union. While they had not at first supported the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution, they convinced themselves that a new civilisation was emerging in Russia.
In 1932 they spent eight weeks travelling in Russia and Ukraine. They were guests of the government; they were treated, said Beatrice, like a new kind of royalty. But they went where they were supposed to go; they saw what they were supposed to see.
The resultant book – Soviet Communism, a new civilisation? – was unashamedly pro- Soviet. Ivan Maisky, Russian Ambassador to London, checked the draft chapters as they were written. Faced with the evidence of famine in Ukraine, the Webbs suggested that the peasants had sabotaged their own harvest. The historian AJP Taylor wrote that Soviet Communism was
…despite serious competition, the most preposterous book ever written about
Soviet Russia.
Their conversion had its limits: they never supported the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Beatrice thought
…a ludicrous caricature of a revolutionary movement.
In the years before the Second World War, they opposed appeasement. They were horrified by the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, and they were relieved when, from 1941, Britain and Russia ended up as allies.
Sidney had a stroke in 1938, after which he did no further work. He continued to read prodigiously. Beatrice followed world affairs assiduously up to her death in April 1943.
After Sidney had died, in October 1947, 91-year-old George Bernard Shaw successfully campaigned for their ashes to be buried in Westminster Abbey. At the ceremony, in December 1947, the address was given by the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee (one of the young activists who in 1909 and 1910 had spoken at street corners in the campaign against the Poor Law). Attlee said that Beatrice and Sidney had
changed for the better the condition of the masses of the people. In field after field of social endeavour we are today reaping the fruits of the seed which they sowed in the minds and hearts of men and women. They declared an unceasing war on poverty.
To accompany the publication Michael has written an article for the Fabian News, which you can read here.