The Webbs and the LSE

Institutions of consequence are rarely built by men in power. More often they are built by a pair of researchers at a drawing-room table, with a solicitor's bequest between them and thirty years of patience in their heads, choosing in one quiet evening what an empire's administrative class will read a generation later.

THE TABLE AT GROSVENOR ROAD

Sidney James Webb was born on the thirteenth of July 1859 in two rented rooms above a shop at 45 Cranbourn Street, Leicester Square, son of a small London accountant and a hairdresser, schooled at the City of London School and in the evening classes at Birkbeck, and into the Colonial Office by the open competition of 1881. He left the Civil Service in 1891 for the work of the Fabian Society, which he had joined in 1885 and reshaped, with Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas, into a research organism rather than a debating club. Beatrice Potter was born on the twenty-second of January 1858 at Standish House in Gloucestershire, daughter of the railway director Richard Potter, niece by marriage of Charles Booth, and trained, through the rent-collecting at Katharine Buildings and the long inquiry into the East End that became part of Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, in the slow patience of the social survey. They married on the twenty-third of July 1892, settled in a first-floor flat at 41 Grosvenor Road in Pimlico above the Thames, and on a joint income of about a thousand pounds a year set themselves to a programme of work they expected to occupy the rest of their lives: a history of the trade unions, a study of industrial democracy, a study of local government, the long Fabian campaign for what they called the inevitability of gradualness.

THE CODICIL

On the twelfth of July 1894, in his house at Derby, Henry Hunt Hutchinson, solicitor and founder of the Derby branch of the Fabian Society, put a revolver to his head and shot himself. He was an elderly man, irritable, estranged from his family, persuaded that the cause he had served in his small way was about to be betrayed by its London committee unless he tied its hands. His will, drawn on the second of July, left ten thousand pounds, about a million and a half by the reckoning of a hundred and thirty years on, to five trustees of whom Sidney Webb was named first, the money to be applied, in the words of the codicil, to the propaganda and other purposes of the said Society and its Socialism, and towards advancing its objects in any way they deem advisable. The formal notice reached Grosvenor Road on the twenty-eighth of July. On the evening of Saturday the fourth of August, in the long summer light off the river, Sidney and Beatrice read the codicil aloud to each other and began, with the methodical patience that was already their joint signature, to set down what could be done with such a sum.

THE SECOND AT GROSVENOR ROAD

It is the easiest thing in the world, in such a moment, to do the obvious thing: to spend a great bequest on the propaganda its donor named. Tracts, lectures, a paid organiser in every northern town, a Fabian newspaper, candidates at by-elections. Hutchinson had written propaganda into the codicil in his own hand. Every executive man they knew, Pease and Bland and Olivier, would expect the money to flow into the machinery already built. To do anything else was, in the plain reading, to bend the letter of a dead man's will toward an end he had not specifically named, and a suicide's will at that.

Beatrice writes that evening in her diary; the entry survives. She sets down the figures, then the question: not how to spend the money, but what, in the next thirty years, the British state will actually need that the British state does not yet possess. The answer, between them, comes by a route they have walked separately for a decade and together for two years. The classical education of Balliol and Trinity, Greek and Latin and a little mathematics, has produced administrators who govern an industrial empire by the instincts of country gentlemen. The Continent has begun to do otherwise: the sciences politiques in Paris, the cameral schools of Berlin and Vienna, the seminars at Heidelberg. Britain has nothing of the kind. Sidney has been arguing for years that the inevitability of gradualness requires not orators but trained minds, men and women who can read a Board of Trade return, cost a municipal tramway, draft a Factory Bill, sit on a Royal Commission and know what the figures mean. Beatrice has spent ten years collecting such figures herself, in tenement staircases and union offices, and knows how few in Whitehall can read them.

A bequest of ten thousand pounds will not float a newspaper for five years. It will not pay for a parliamentary campaign. It will not buy an inch of Fleet Street. But it will, if husbanded, found a college. A small college, in rented rooms, with a single director and a handful of evening lecturers and a clientele of civil servants and trade-union secretaries. A college that, over thirty years, will train the people who write the regulations. The propaganda of an afternoon, against the slow permeation of an administrative class: it is, in the Fabian grammar they have been writing together since the Essays of 1889, no contest at all. The codicil's word propaganda is stretched to the snapping point, and held there.

THE EXECUTIVE

On the evening of the fifth of October 1894, at the Fabian Society offices in Clement's Inn, Sidney laid the proposal before the Executive: Shaw, Wallas, Pease, Olivier, Bland, and Beatrice. The minute is short. The scheme was approved. There was grumbling, then and later, that the Hutchinson bequest had been diverted from the propaganda its donor specified into an institution the donor had never imagined; Hubert Bland thought so, and said so in print; the suspicion has clung to the founding ever since. The trustees took the legal opinion, which held that a college teaching political economy and public administration fell within the ambit of advancing the objects of the Society. Hewins, William Albert Samuel Hewins, twenty-nine, an Oxford economist with a taste for tariff reform that would later carry him out of the Webbs' circle altogether, was found and engaged as the first director at four hundred pounds a year.

JOHN STREET, ADELPHI

On the tenth of October 1895, in three rented rooms on the second floor of 9 John Street, Adelphi, off the Strand, the London School of Economics and Political Science opened its doors. The prospectus offered courses in economics, political science, statistics, commercial law, and public administration, taught in the evenings and on Saturdays, the fee a guinea a term. The first cohort numbered something on the order of three hundred, the majority of them civil servants, trade-union officials, journalists, clerks: men and a few women already at work in the world, come after office hours to learn what Whitehall did not teach them. Hewins lectured. Edwin Cannan came up from Oxford to teach economics. Halford Mackinder came in for geography. Within four years the School had moved to Adelphi Terrace; within five it was incorporated into the University of London; within ten its graduates were sitting examinations for the Indian Civil Service and the Home Office. None of it was loud. The Webbs were elsewhere, at the next book.

THE INTERLUDE

Hutchinson is buried at Derby. His daughter Constance Hutchinson, on the bequest's diversion, broke with the Fabians and brought her own action, which failed. She is the small unwritten figure in the story: the donor's child who watched her father's ten thousand pounds become a teaching institution for a class of administrators he would not have recognised. The college that opened in John Street did not bear his name and does not bear it now. There is no Hutchinson Hall, no Hutchinson Chair, no plaque. The bequest is recorded in the founding minutes and in a footnote in every history of the School. He is the man whose despair, in a Derby drawing-room in July 1894, became the slow capital of a different kind of England.

THE RETURN

Sidney Webb sat on the London County Council for Deptford from 1892 to 1910, drafted the 1918 Labour Party constitution with its Clause Four on common ownership, entered Parliament for Seaham in 1922, served as President of the Board of Trade in the first MacDonald government and as Colonial Secretary in the second, and was raised to the peerage as Baron Passfield in 1929. Beatrice sat on the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws from 1905 to 1909 and wrote, with Sidney, the Minority Report that became the long blueprint of the welfare state. Together they wrote eleven volumes on English local government, the histories of the Co-operative movement and trade unionism, and, late and badly, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), which credited Stalin with a thoroughness the evidence did not bear and which has never been forgiven them. Beatrice died at Passfield Corner in Hampshire on the thirtieth of April 1943, aged eighty-five. Sidney died at the same house on the thirteenth of October 1947, aged eighty-eight. They are buried together in the nave of Westminster Abbey, the only married couple so buried in the twentieth century, by order of Clement Attlee, whose government was at that moment writing into law the National Health Service, the National Insurance Act, and the nationalisation of the coal mines, the railways, and the Bank of England. The drafting was done, in large part, by people the School in John Street had trained.

Institutions of consequence are rarely built by men in power. They are built by the patient who can see thirty years ahead and spend a bequest accordingly. The houses in Pimlico and Hampshire have been pulled down or passed to other tenants; the diaries are in the British Library of Political and Economic Science, which is the School's library, in the building on Houghton Street where the School moved in 1902 and where it stands today: thirteen thousand students, a hundred and thirty countries, the largest social-science library in the world, founded on ten thousand pounds left by a Derbyshire solicitor who shot himself in July 1894 and never knew what his money would do.