Webb · 1895
The Webbs and the LSE
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.
It is twenty past nine on the evening of Saturday the fourth of August 1894, in the drawing-room of the first-floor flat at 41 Grosvenor Road in Pimlico, London, in summer light through the Thames-facing south windows. He is thirty-five years old. She is thirty-six. He is Sidney James Webb, born at 45 Cranbourn Street, Leicester Square, London, on the thirteenth of July 1859, son of a London accountant and a hairdresser, schooled at the City of London School and at the evening classes of Birkbeck College, in the Civil Service from 1881 to 1891 (Colonial Office), Fabian-Society Executive Committee member since 1885. She is Martha Beatrice Webb, born Beatrice Potter at Standish House in Gloucestershire on the twenty-second of January 1858, daughter of the Gloucestershire businessman Richard Potter and Lawrencina Heyworth, schooled at home, in the 1880s a rent-collector and social-investigator on the East End housing-question with her cousin Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London survey.
They have been married since the twenty-third of July 1892. They live at 41 Grosvenor Road on a joint income of about a thousand pounds a year (Sidney's Fabian and Beatrice's Potter inheritance). They have spent the past two years on the research-and-writing of the eventual Industrial Democracy (1897) and the eventual History of Trade Unionism (1894).
On the table in front of them is the codicil to the will of Henry Hunt Hutchinson, the Derbyshire Fabian-Society solicitor (a Derby-Fabian-branch founder of 1889) who had committed suicide on the twelfth of July 1894 at his Derby home with a revolver to the head. The codicil leaves ten thousand pounds (about £1.5 million in 2025 money) to Sidney and Beatrice Webb jointly and severally, to be used for the propaganda and work of the Fabian Society and the advancement of socialism in Britain. The codicil is dated the second of July 1894, ten days before the suicide; the Webbs had received the formal legal-notice of the bequest on the twenty-eighth of July.
Beatrice thinks, by her diary entry of the fifth of August: the Hutchinson money is, in plain reading, the largest single bequest the Fabian Society has received. The political-philosophical question is how to deploy the bequest for the maximum political-effect over the next thirty years.
Sidney thinks: the Fabian-political-strategy of the permeation-and-gradualism (the Fabian-Society political-theory I and Beatrice have been developing since 1889) requires the British political-administrative class to be trained in empirical social-scientific-methods. The Oxford-and-Cambridge classical gentleman's-education is, on the modern industrial-political-administrative requirements, inadequate.
He thinks: the Hutchinson Trust money is enough to found a university-college at London dedicated to the social sciences. The college would be the British equivalent of the Continental social-science research-universities (the Sorbonne sciences-politiques, the Berlin Verwaltungsakademie). The college would, over the next thirty years, train the British political-administrative class.
He thinks: the college would be the most-consequential institutional-deployment of the Hutchinson bequest. The bequest, on the college foundation, becomes the foundational endowment of the British social-democratic-administrative tradition.
The Webbs presented the LSE proposal to the Fabian Executive Committee at the fifth-of-October 1894 meeting at the Wellington Street office. The Committee (Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, Edward Pease, Sydney Olivier, Hubert Bland) approved the LSE foundation by unanimous vote. The London School of Economics and Political Science opened on the tenth of October 1895 in rented rooms at 9 John Street, Adelphi. The first director was W. A. S. Hewins, a twenty-nine-year-old Oxford economist. The first cohort was about three hundred evening-and-weekend students, mostly civil servants and trade-union officials, taking courses in economics, political science, statistics, and public administration.
Sidney Webb was elected to Parliament for Seaham (County Durham) in 1922 as a Labour MP, served in the 1924 MacDonald government as President of the Board of Trade and in the 1929–31 MacDonald government as Secretary of State for the Colonies, was raised to the peerage as Baron Passfield in 1929, and was the co-author with Beatrice of the Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935, an apologetic study of the Stalin-Soviet that did not, on the 1990s historical-judgement, age well). He died at Passfield Corner in Hampshire on the thirteenth of October 1947, eighty-eight years old. Beatrice Webb died at the same house on the thirtieth of April 1943, eighty-five years old. They are jointly buried in the Westminster Abbey nave, the only married couple buried together in the Abbey in the twentieth century. The LSE, in 2025, has about thirteen thousand students and is the leading social-science research-university in Europe by the international rankings.