Beatrice and Sidney Webb

• Born: January 22, 1858
• Birthplace: Gloucester, Gloucestershire, England
• Died: April 30, 1943
• Place of death: Liphook, Hampshire, England

British labor and social activists

The Webbs were leading figures in the Fabian Society and in the development of Labour Party policies. Founders of the London School of Economics and the journal New Statesman, they also authored several important texts on trade unions, local government, and the Poor Laws.

Early Lives

Beatrice Webb was born the eighth of nine daughters in an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Richard Potter, was a wealthy industrialist; her mother, Laurencina Heyworth Potter, was a highly intelligent but increasingly reclusive woman, disappointed by a life of constant pregnancy rather than scholarly achievement. Beatrice’s childhood was an unhappy one, marred by ill health, loneliness, and resentment. Her formal education was limited by chronic illness and psychosomatic complaints; it ended by the time she was thirteen. By then she had begun securing her own education through extensive reading. She had also begun her lifelong habit of keeping a diary in which she examined her own frailties and those of whomever came under her scrutiny.

At the age of sixteen, Beatrice lost her religious faith and was sorely troubled by that loss ever after. She remained an agnostic, dedicated to the religion of humanity, but she was much given to prayer. By the age of twenty-five, Beatrice had decided to become a social investigator, in spite of her belief that a woman’s intellectual capacity was strictly limited. She hoped to apply the scientific method to the study of society, to understand and improve it.

Beatrice became a rent collector and tenant organizer at a housing project for the poor in London’s East End. Later, she joined her cousin Charles Booth in his massive study of poverty in London; her first published article was “Dock Life in East London.” To study sweated labor in the manufacturing trades, she worked briefly as a seamstress in several sweatshops. In 1888, five of her articles on sweated labor were published, and she began to enjoy a reputation as a knowledgeable social scientist.

It was in connection with her next project, a book on cooperative societies, that Beatrice first met Sidney Webb. Friends had recommended him as a useful resource for her work. Beatrice was thirty-two at the time, a tall, slim, dramatically attractive woman, with piercing brown eyes and long dark hair fashioned in a no-nonsense bun. She and Sidney were an unlikely match.

Sidney Webb was the second of three children in a lower-middle-class family. His mother, Elizabeth Mary Stacy Webb, the more industrious and energetic partner, ran a millinery and hairdressing business. His father, a somewhat ineffectual but public-spirited man, reserved most of his energy for political debates and local politics. Educated to be a commercial clerk, Sidney continued taking courses, winning prizes, and passing examinations well after he had begun his career. He became a clerk in the colonial office in 1881 and was called to the bar in 1886.

Extremely bright and ambitious, Sidney also took advantage of the numerous debating clubs, study groups, and political societies that flourished in London in the 1880’s. There he learned techniques for bringing people around to his point of view, mainly by mastering a subject and knowing far more about it than anyone else present. Thus, despite his rapid speech, slight lisp, and dropped aitches, Sidney was extremely persuasive, especially in a committee situation.

In 1885, Sidney joined the executive committee of the fledgling Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist organization. The goals that Sidney helped to establish as he, along with George Bernard Shaw and a few others, began to dominate the society were those of gradual change through the promotion of education and the permeation of other organizations and committees with collectivist ideas.

Sidney resigned from his position as a civil servant in 1892 and was elected as a Progressive member to the London County Council. By this time, he had wooed and won the illustrious Beatrice Potter, despite their class differences and despite the fact that he was far from attractive, with his bespectacled head atop a rotund little body and his unkempt appearance. Sidney had assured Beatrice that their marriage would be a working partnership, dedicated to the betterment of society, a relationship that would expand her own efforts along these lines rather than hinder them. That was certainly the case. Freed from the onus of earning a living by Beatrice’s limited but adequate inheritance, the couple immersed themselves in researching and writing books and studying and formulating public policies.

Lives’ Work

For the first fifteen years of their married lives, the pattern established was one that kept Sidney in the public eye and Beatrice as the more private, research-oriented member of their team. Sidney continued to play a leading role in the Fabian Society as policymaker, speaker, and tract writer. In addition, he served on the London County Council for eighteen years, wielding his greatest influence as chair of its Technical Education Committee. In this capacity he extended the number of scholarships to technical schools and universities, increased the number of such schools, and reformed the level of education practiced in these schools. Because of his expertise on education, Sidney was particularly influential in the drafting and passage of the Education Acts of 1902-1903, which expanded and consolidated public education. Sidney also served on various commissions and wrote a series of minority reports, such as one for the Royal Commission on Labour Disputes in 1894.

While Beatrice gave an occasional speech to the Fabians or served on a committee, her chief responsibility as a reformer and agitator was to hold select dinner parties for whichever political, intellectual, or philanthropic set of people they were most interested in knowing or influencing at the time. The meals, like the furnishings, were sparse at 41 Grosvenor Road the home the Webbs rented for almost forty years but the conversation was thick with ideas and plans for social reconstruction.

Administrative and social duties notwithstanding, the Webbs’ joint research was carried on vigorously. For the most part, Beatrice planned their projects, formulated the questions to be asked, and did much of the interviewing, while Sidney concentrated his efforts on the analysis of their data. Their first joint venture, The History of Trade Unionism (1894), became the standard text on the subject. In their next effort, Industrial Democracy (1897), they argued that trade unions were necessary for the economic and moral benefit of workers and were needed to right the imbalance between powerful employers and their far weaker employees. Trade unions, they predicted presciently, would play a far more important role in the future.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Webbs had established themselves as respected and original investigators in the fields of economics and sociology. Their third major project, begun in this period, was a study of local government on which they worked sporadically. The motivation behind the work was their firmly held conviction that only government would or could be entrusted with the care and welfare of its citizens. The Webbs addressed their studies to the structure, function, and reform of parish and county governments in their first volume (1906), the manor and borough for their second and third volumes (1908), and completed the series in 1922 with the Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes . Along these lines, the Webbs produced occasional studies on specific local authorities such as “The History of Liquor Licensing” and “English Prisons Under Local Authorities,” as well as three volumes on boards of guardians.

The Webbs’ marriage remained childless, a fact that occasionally caused Beatrice some distress, the more so since she believed that motherhood was a woman’s chief responsibility and greatest glory. Still, neither partner believed that the commitments to research and reform allowed sufficient time to rear a family. Instead, their progeny included their ideas, their books, and even more important, two influential British institutions. The Webbs founded the London School of Economics in 1895, a school devoted to research and teaching in the social sciences. In time, Sidney was able to secure the financial stability and independence of the London School of Economics by overseeing its incorporation into the University of London system. Both Webbs lectured at the school, and Sidney was chair for several years. The second major offspring of the Webb partnership was New Statesman , a magazine that they founded in 1913 and that was to become a leading British weekly.

While the publication was Beatrice’s idea, she had little time for it. Since her appointment to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in 1905, Beatrice had begun to play an active role in public life, both as commissioner and in the subsequent two-year campaign on behalf of her The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission (1909). The report advocated not only the abolition of the Poor Laws but also of poverty itself, by such methods as public works, job-training programs, and labor exchanges. Beatrice and her thousands of supporters in the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution were not successful in bringing about the specific changes advocated; they were effective, however, in awakening public opinion to the problems of poverty.

Remaining in the public eye, Beatrice next turned her energies to the Fabian Society, being elected to its executive in 1912 and founding the Fabian Research Department in 1913, drawing on many of the young talents from the National Committee and on her own expertise as a social investigator. Before returning to private life, Beatrice was appointed to the War Cabinet Committee on Woman in Industry in 1918. Again, she conducted research independent of the committee on which she served and produced her own minority report. This one championed equal wages for women, a reversal of policies she and Sidney had advocated earlier. Thereafter, Beatrice began to attend to private matters, in particular, turning her diaries into two volumes of autobiography. The first, My Apprenticeship (1923), was the story of her youth; the second, Our Partnership (1948), that of her marriage.

In the last two years of World War I, Sidney began to play a major role in the Labour Party, one that both he and Beatrice had eschewed in previous years. He, along with Arthur Henderson, not only drafted the new constitution for the party but also drew up its official policy, a policy of public ownership and welfare that strongly resembled the essence of Fabianism. He became the party’s leading intellectual and key adviser on matters of economic and social reform, assuming the party’s chairmanship in 1923. At long last, at age sixty-three, Sidney was elected to the House of Commons, and he held cabinet positions in Labour’s first two ministries. Sidney was appointed president of the Board of Trade in 1924 and, elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Passfield, he served as secretary of state for the colonies in 1929. Unfortunately, as a member of Parliament, and especially as cabinet minister, Sidney was less adroit, less effective, than he was as county councillor or resident intellectual.

Like Sidney’s late-blooming political career, the Webbs’ last major work was also of questionable quality. Distressed over worsening conditions in the 1930’s, the Webbs looked to the Soviet Union for a solution. Given a royal welcome during their three-month stay in the Soviet Union, they produced a massive and adulatory volume, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? , in 1935. The Webbs were in their seventies by then and past the point of substantiating their theories with meticulous investigatory research.

In retirement at Passfield Corner, their country home on the Hampshire-Surrey border, the Webbs continued to view the Soviet Union as the embodiment of their own plans for a socialist state, despite ominous reports to the contrary. Greatly distressed by World War II and troubled by ill health, Beatrice died on April 30, 1943; Sidney, although weakened by an earlier stroke, lived for another four years. Their ashes were mixed at Westminster Abbey in 1947, an enormous honor and a fitting end to their extraordinary partnership.

Significance

The Webb partnership was remarkable for its continuous productivity, its long-term influence on British affairs, and the harmony with which the seemingly disparate partners worked. In the early years of their collaboration, the Webbs provided a program and a platform for the reformist middle class, whether as leaders of the early Fabian Society, as authors of the standard texts on trade unions, on local government and the Poor Laws, or as founders of the world-famous London School of Economics and New Statesman. After 1916, the Webbs became influential in the working-class movement and in Labour Party politics. Sidney Webb’s role as the leading adviser to the Labour Party, as it reformulated itself into a party capable of winning elections and holding office, was crucial. The British Welfare State that emerged after World War II strongly resembled the collectivist state and the social welfare provisions outlined by the Webbs. Clearly, they cast an indelible stamp on British socialism in its formative years.

The Webbs’ numerous honors included Beatrice Webb’s election, as the first woman member, to the British Academy, and Sidney’s being awarded the Order of Merit in 1944. Paradoxically, one important aspect of the Webbs’ fame rests on work that they themselves underestimated. Beatrice’s memoirs, My Apprenticeship and Our Partnership, and the full texts of her diaries, published posthumously, present a perceptive and beautifully written chronicle of the social, intellectual, and political climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, Beatrice’s description of her own search for a moral creed to replace her lost religious certainty, as well as for an economic agenda to ameliorate the plight of the poverty stricken, re-creates admirably two of the major issues of her time.

Bibliography

Bevir, Mark. “Sidney Webb: Utilitarianism, Positivism, and Social Democracy.” Journal of Modern History 74, no. 2 (June, 2002): 217. Examination of some of Sidney Webb’s ideas.

Cole, Margaret, ed. The Webbs and Their Work. London: Frederick Muller, 1949. Diverse essays on the major activities of the Webbs, covering a fifty-year span and dealing with their personalities, their thought, the institutions they founded, and their work as administrators. By a variety of contributors all but two of whom knew the Webbs at first hand the essays attempt to assess the Webbs’ influence on the modern world and to appraise, and at times criticize, their contributions to British society and social thought.

MacKenzie, Jeanne. A Victorian Courtship. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979. A brief narrative of the two-year courtship that preceded the Webbs’ marriage in 1892. The author makes good use of Beatrice’s diaries and the Webbs’ letters to each other and to others to reconstruct the uneven relationships between the two and the working compact they formulated. A warm and sympathetic picture, short on psychological analysis.

MacKenzie, Norman, and Jeanne MacKenzie. The Fabians. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977. The most recent of the several books on the Fabian Society, covering the early years from 1884 to 1914, when the society was at its peak of influence. As leaders of the society, the Webbs’ contributions to the Fabian, as well as their other activities, are discussed. The author offers a perceptive analysis of the ideas of the Webbs, their social and political milieu, and, especially, of the forces and conflicts that motivated them.

Michalos, Alex C., and Deborah C. Poff, eds. Bernard Shaw and the Webbs. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Compilation of 140 annotated letters written by the Webbs and their friend, George Bernard Shaw. In the letters, written between 1883 and 1946, the correspondents discuss the founding of the Fabian Society, the British Labour Party, World Wars I and II, and other subjects.

Nord, Deborah Epstein. The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985. This biography of Beatrice Webb, is more concerned with Beatrice as diarist than as a social scientist. Still, there is much useful material here on Beatrice’s other works and an insightful psychological analysis of her personal relationships as well. Placing Beatrice’s diaries in a literary context, Nord underscores their value as literature and evaluates their place in the autobiographical literature, and in women’s writings, of her period.

Radice, Lisanne. Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Useful as an introduction to the Webbs lives and work.

Thomas, Mark, and Guy Lodge, eds. Radicals and Reformers: A Century of Fabian Thought. London: Fabian Society, 2000. Extracts from twentieth century Fabian tracts, including writing by both Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb.

Webb, Beatrice. The Diary of Beatrice Webb. Edited by Norman MacKenzie and Jeanne MacKenzie. 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982-1985. Based on Beatrice’s first transcript of her fifty-seven manuscript books between 1873 and 1943. A fascinating chronicle of the Webbs’ lives, their work, and their times. Few have known more important or interesting people than did Beatrice Webb: far fewer could write of them as perceptively as she did. Unlike the books she wrote with Sidney, The Diary of Beatrice Webb shows to advantage Beatrice’s elegant prose style. Superbly edited and thoroughly annotated by the MacKenzies.

Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Edited by Norman MacKenzie. 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Volume 1 covers the period from 1873 to 1892; volume 2 covers from 1892 to 1912; volume 3 covers from 1912 to 1947. The letters of Beatrice and Sidney to each other and to others. Fascinating not only for what they impart of the Webbs themselves but also for the insight into the issues of their era and the personalities and concerns of the many, often famous, people with whom they corresponded. Edited with skill and meticulous attention to detail by MacKenzie.