Webb

On the evening of the fourth of August 1894, in the drawing-room of the Webb family flat at 41 Grosvenor Road, Pimlico, London, Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Sidney, thirty-five, the London civil servant turned Fabian-Society researcher; Beatrice, thirty-six, the Potter-of-Standish-Cotteridge heiress and social-investigator who had spent the previous decade documenting the East-End labour-conditions), read aloud to each other the codicil to the will of Henry Hunt Hutchinson, the Derbyshire Fabian solicitor who had committed suicide three weeks earlier and who had left ten thousand pounds (about £1.5 million in 2025 money) to the Webbs jointly for the propaganda and work of the Fabian Society and the advancement of socialism in Britain. The Webbs spent the next two months considering how to deploy the bequest. Their decision, communicated to Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas at the fifth-of-October 1894 Fabian-Executive meeting, was to use the Hutchinson Trust funds to found a new university-college at London dedicated to the research-and-teaching of the social sciences (economics, political science, sociology, public administration) on the explicit principle that the British political-administrative class needed empirical-social-scientific-training rather than the traditional classical-Oxford-and-Cambridge gentleman's-education. The London School of Economics and Political Science opened in October 1895 in rented rooms at 9 John Street, Adelphi. It is, by every careful judgment of British intellectual history, the foundational institution of twentieth-century British social-democratic thought.

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