Sidney and Beatrice Webb

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were English socialist economists (husband and wife), early members of the Fabian Society, and cofounders of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Sidney Webb also helped reorganize the University of London into a federation of teaching institutions and served in the government as a Labour Party member. Pioneers in social and economic reforms as well as distinguished historians, the Webbs deeply affected social thought and institutions in England.

Early life of Beatrice Potter Webb

Beatrice Potter was born in Gloucester, into a class which, to use her own words, “habitually gave orders.” She was the eighth daughter of Richard Potter, a businessman, at whose death she inherited a private income of £1,000 a year, and Laurencina Heyworth, daughter of a Liverpool merchant. She grew up a rather lonely and sickly girl, educating herself by extensive reading and discussions with her father’s visitors, of whom the philosopher Herbert Spencer exerted the greatest intellectual influence on her. Her elder sisters made conventional marriages, and Potter herself might have become the third wife of the much older Liberal statesman Joseph Chamberlain had not incompatibility of temperament caused a break between them. Even before that, however, she had begun to question the assumptions of her father’s business world. While staying with distant relatives in a small Lancashire town, Potter became acquainted with the world of the working-class cooperative movement.

Following the disappointing outcome of her relationship with Chamberlain, Potter took up social work in London but soon became critical of the inadequate measures taken by charitable organizations to attack the root problems of poverty. She learned more of the realities of lower-class life while helping her cousin Charles Booth, the shipowner and social reformer, to research his monumental study of The Life and Labour of the People in London (1892–1902). In 1891 Potter published The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain, a book based on her experiences in Lancashire, which later became a classic. It was not long before she realized that, in order to find any solution to the problem of poverty, she would have to learn more about the organizations, such as labor unions, that the working class had created for itself. While collecting information about earlier economic conditions, she was advised to reach out to a “mine of information,” Sidney Webb, whose acquaintance she made in 1890.

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Early life of Sidney Webb

Sidney James Webb was born in London into a lower-middle-class family; his father was a freelance accountant, and his mother was a shopkeeper. He left school before he was 16, but after attending evening classes he secured admission to the civil service and three years later (1884) passed his bar examinations. For some time he had been the close friend of the young journalist George Bernard Shaw, who in 1885 induced him to join a very small, newly founded socialist body called the Fabian Society. Shaw believed that Webb’s extensive factual knowledge was exactly what the society needed as a foundation for its theoretical advocacy of socialism. In 1887 Webb justified Shaw’s choice by writing for the society the first edition of the Fabian Tract Facts for Socialists, revised editions of which were published until the end of World War II. The tract was the first concise expression of the Fabian conviction that public knowledge of the facts of industrial society was the essential first step toward the reform of that society.

As an executive member of the Fabian Society, Webb, in 1889, delivered one of the public lectures that made up Fabian Essays in Socialism and put the society on the map. The following year he met Beatrice Potter, who was making her own way to a belief in socialism and had been greatly impressed by Webb’s contribution to Fabian Essays. Webb at once fell in love with the handsome, intellectual young woman. Potter took longer to adjust her sights to scruffy Sidney Webb, though he had already made a name for himself as a lecturer and writer on economics. They were married in 1892 and by way of honeymoon set off to investigate trade union records in Glasgow, Scotland, and in Dublin.

The Webbs’ work after marriage

Shortly after returning to London they set up house there. Sidney Webb left the civil service, and they decided to live on Beatrice Webb’s inheritance and what they could make from books and journalism in order to devote more time to social research and political work. Sidney Webb retained only his position on the London County Council, to which he was first elected in 1892, and his association with the Fabian Society. The first fruits—and the first successes—of their collaborative effort were the great twin volumes The History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897). In these books the Webbs, in effect, introduced the economists and social historians of Britain to a part of British social life of which they had hitherto been unaware. The work that followed extended into areas of historical and social research, educational and political reform, and journalism.

Among their writings was the prodigious enterprise—which again broke new ground—of the history of English local government from the 17th to the 20th century. This work, published over a period of 25 years, firmly established the Webbs as historical researchers of the first rank. They produced also a great number of books, large and small, and pamphlets, some short-lived, others of permanent interest. Their literary output, however, important as it was, takes second place to their work in creating and developing institutions.

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Sidney Webb served from 1892 to 1910 on the London County Council; he is best remembered for his creation of the system of secondary state schools and the scholarship system for elementary school pupils. He was also instrumental in the establishment of technical and other post-school education in London. Concurrently, he and Beatrice Webb founded the London School of Economics with Richard Burdon (later Lord) Haldane, a Liberal statesman. Sidney Webb reorganized the University of London into a federation of teaching institutions, and with the educator Robert Morant he provided the blueprint for the Education Acts of 1902 and 1903, which set the pattern of English public education for generations to come. In this last effort, the Webbs employed the tactic that became known as “permeation”—that is, attempting to push through Fabian policies or parts of policies by converting persons of power and influence irrespective of their political affiliations. At that time, for instance, both Lord Balfour, the Conservative prime minister, and his Liberal rival Lord Rosebery were approached for political support. With the advent of the huge Liberal majority in 1906 this strategy became ineffective, and the Webbs were eventually forced to “permeate” the fledgling Labour Party. Before that, however, Beatrice Webb, as a member from 1905 to 1909 of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, had produced her remarkable Minority Report (1909). Published more than 30 years before the Beveridge Report (1942) advocating for universal social insurance, Beatrice Webb’s writing clearly spelled out the outlines of the welfare state. The nationwide agitation that the Webbs organized in favor of social security was only quelled in 1911 by Lloyd George’s hasty improvisation of a scheme of contributory insurance.