29 Facts About William Beveridge

William Beveridge built his career as an expert on unemployment insurance.

William Beveridge served on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food.

William Beveridge was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.

William Beveridge was elected in a 1944 by-election as a Liberal MP ; following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he was elevated to the House of Lords where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.

William Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry William Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India, on 5 March 1879.

William Beveridge's mother had, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864.

William Beveridge met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls.

William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a first class degree in both.

William Beveridge became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper.

Churchill invited William Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty.

William Beveridge published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment.

In 1937 William Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.

Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited William Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry.

William Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime.

Bevin was reluctant to let William Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so William Beveridge became a temporary civil servant.

An opportunity for Bevin to ease William Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations.

William Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall".

William Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.

William Beveridge appealed to conservatives and other sceptics by arguing that welfare institutions would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account but by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would serve as a great source of demand for British goods.

William Beveridge saw full employment as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 report.

The impetus behind William Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war.

William Beveridge believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society.

Later in 1944, William Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeed George Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July 1944.

William Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, during which time he was prominent in the Radical Action group, which called for the party to withdraw from the war-time electoral pact and adopt more radical policies.

In 1946, William Beveridge was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron William Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland, and eventually became leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords.

William Beveridge was the author of Power and Influence.

William Beveridge was the President of the charity Attend from 1952 to 1962.

William Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, which promoted the study of methods to 'improve' the human race by controlling reproduction.

William Beveridge died at his home on 16 March 1963, aged 84, and was buried in Thockrington churchyard, on the Northumbrian moors.