eastlondonhistory.com

It was back in the years before and after the Second World War that two men living and working in the East End laid the plans for the system that would deliver a newer, fairer world for the homecoming servicemen and women.

Economist William Beveridge – born in India in 1879 and educated at Charterhouse public school and then Oxford – was a child of privilege. In 1903 he came to live at Toynbee Hall, in Commercial Street, becoming sub-warden with responsibility for educational activities, and staying in the East End until 1906.
Beveridge’s expertise in the employment – or more accurately unemployment – market was formed when he became director of Labour Exchanges at the age of just 30.

A long career as director of the London School of Economics and as master of University College, Oxford followed. But his years in academia never dimmed the memory of his early years in the East End and his first-hand experience of the horrors that faced the unemployed – and the failure of a system with no “safety net”.

There had to be a better way. And when, during World War Two, the Government approached Beveridge for his ideas on a new system to sweep away the deprivation and want of the pre-war years, the economist set to work on a report on Social Insurance and Allied Services.

The Beveridge Report appeared in 1942 and caused a stir of excitement throughout Britain, with its outline of a comprehensive scheme of social insurance. Beveridge proposed that everyone would be covered – henceforth no-one would want for food, health care or a roof over their head simply because they were poor or had lost their job. The people at home and the homecoming troops were enthralled – at last this was the fairer world the British had hoped for.

Not fair for all though. Having steered the British people through the darkest days of the Blitz, privation, shortages and six long years of war, prime minister Winston Churchill was confidently expecting a mandate for five years of Conservative government in the election of 1945. There was a hunger for change in the country, though, and to the old guard’s horror a new Labour government was swept to power, under leader Clement Attlee.

“Clem” was just four years younger than Beveridge and, like the great economist, was educated at Oxford. Like him, too, his eyes were opened when he came to live in the East End. He lived first at Haileybury House, off Ben Jonson Road in Stepney, then in 1908 became secretary of Toynbee Hall, joining the Independent Labour Party in the same year. The parallels with Beveridge didn’t end there. In 1913, Attlee started lecturing at the London School of Economics, a career swiftly interrupted by service in the First World War, when he rose to the rank of major.

On his return from war, Attlee became mayor of Stepney and quickly rose through the political ranks – serving as MP for Limehouse from 1922 to 1950 and serving in the first two Labour governments, in 1924 and 1929. In 1935 he succeeded another political giant of the East End when he replaced George Lansbury as leader of the opposition Labour Party. And, in 1942, the very year Beveridge published his report, Attlee became deputy PM to Churchill in the government of national unity.

In 1945, the new government started the most radical programme of social reform the country had ever seen, Beveridge’s ideas flowing through the creation of the NHS and the Welfare State. The last shadows of the workhouse had finally been swept away by two men who had seen the scourge of poverty at first hand – their visions forged in the East End of the early 1900s.