The second ‘giant’ that Beveridge identified was disease. In the early 1830s the first great Cholera epidemic wiped out approximately 32,000 people. At that time there was little understanding of the causes of disease and almost no effective legislation through which it could be tackled. In the following decades some steps to provide the most basic medical help for the very poor were taken, such as the introduction of free smallpox vaccinations in 1841, but little apparent national concern continued to be shown for the victims of disease until 1848 when the death of a further 62,000 people in a second epidemic finally overcame the influences of vested interest and galvanised the government into action. In the subsequent period an increasing national interest in public health began to develop which was stimulated by scientific discoveries such as those of John Snow in 1854 and Louis Pasteur in 1867 who established the causes of cholera and made the critical connection between disease and germs respectively. Although the Public Health Acts of 1848, 1858, and 1866 clearly demonstrate an ever-increasing concern by the government of the day for the welfare of its citizens it was not until 1875 that promoting public health became obligatory. It was at this moment that the idea became firmly established that the health of the public was a state responsibility. Following the election of the Liberal government in 1906 pro-active measures began to be taken to improve the nation’s health through a focus upon children. Free school meals, medical inspections and clinics were all established between 1906 and 1912. However, there remained huge gaps in the health provision being provided by the state for the nation as a whole. The Beveridge Report of 1942 proposed a comprehensive national health service ‘covering every branch of medical and allied activity’. Though the ideas which precipitated this section of the report had been developing throughout the previous century the scale of the proposition from Beveridge was quite unprecedented.
Ignorance was the next issue Beveridge proposed to tackle and he sought to do this by improving education. Until the 1830s learning was considered an unnecessary luxury for the working man and laissez faire governments showed no desire to intervene in education or provide it with any state funding. When schooling finally received its first grant in 1833 this was seen only as a contribution towards improving the moral standards of the working class. Over the following decades the need for at least a basic education became increasingly appreciated. The grant was extended in 1839 and the government began gradually to involve itself in this aspect of everyday life. The genuine need for a more educated working class became relevant to politicians following the 1867 Reform Bill and as Britain’s industrial supremacy became threatened by apparently better educated foreign workers. Such issues stimulated the introduction of the 1870 Forster’s Education Act which effectively provided access to primary education throughout the country. In 1902 the possibility for free secondary education was introduced, and by 1918 the official national school leaving age had been raised to fourteen. The recommendations of Beverage’s report were implemented in1944 through Butler’s Education Act. All education was for the first time to be available free of charge and the school leaving age was raised to fifteen with a planned extension to sixteen a few years later. It was proposed that compulsory part time education should also be introduced up to the age of eighteen as soon as practical. This aspect of the Beveridge report seemed little more than the next step of a natural progression in the development of British education. Indeed the raising of the school leaving age to fifteen had been proposed as early as 1926 in the Haddow Report and many children were already being provided with free education.
Beveridge was also determined to confront what he termed ‘squalor’. This effectively meant substandard living conditions. In the 1830s rapid urbanisation created a ‘squalor’ crisis in most major cities. Urban houses became insufficient in number and any new ones were often built rapidly, of poor quality. Almost no infrastructure of water and sewage systems was constructed. Though the inadequacy of urban living conditions was recognised by those in power relatively little was effectively done to alleviate them until a connection was finally made between these and the devastating Cholera epidemics of the period. In1875 the Public Health Act finally signalled a fundamental change in approach by placing a direct responsibility upon local authorities to deal effectively with refuse and sewage and to ensure clean water. This meant that creating an infrastructure necessary to overcome ‘squalor’ was finally being tackled. In the same year the Artisan’s Dwelling Act gave local councils the powers to clear whole districts of substandard housing and though these powers were not frequently used from this moment an assault upon unsatisfactory housing began to gain momentum. The period between the two wars saw a determined effort being made to finally tackle the housing problems created in Victorian times. The 1919 Addison Act introduced the idea of municipal housing and the 1924 Wheatley Housing Act resulted in the creation of half a million council houses. By 1939 much of the ‘squalor’ created a century earlier had finally been eliminated. In the context of the 1942 Beveridge Report ‘squalor’ was a giant that he foresaw returning after the devastation caused by the Blitz. He was anticipating having to take radical measures to deal with a new housing crisis of quite an unprecedented scale.
The final of Beveridge’s giants was ‘idleness’ by which he meant unemployment. In the early nineteenth century little sympathy was shown for those in need of work as it was generally considered that unemployment was the result of personal weakness. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act introduced a system where the blatant objective was to force people to work by only providing relief that was at a minimal level and in a way that involved personal disgrace. The same view was still apparent as late as 1871 when a Local Government Board circular re-stated the principles of the 1934 act. It was not until 1886, as a result of a severe trade depression, that government accepted the need to provide additional work schemes beyond the walls of the workhouse. By this time it was dawning upon those who wielded power that unemployment in an industrialised economy was partly cyclic and often the result of forces beyond an individual’s control. The work of social investigators, such as Booth and Rowntree, around the turn of the century helped to confirm this view. By the time that the Liberal government came to power in 1906, under considerable pressure from the emerging Labour Party to improve the lot of the working man, it was generally accepted that alleviating the effects of unemployment was a state responsibility. In the years 1909 and 1911 the Liberals introduced reforms that led to the introduction of labour exchanges and, for the first time, state aided unemployment insurance. Beverage himself was a prime mover behind the introduction of labour exchanges in this period and the seeds on which he built his later report were sown. This idea of national insurance was to be a key strategy around which Beverage constructed his 1942 report. He proposed that every single working man should pay a national insurance contribution which would then provide the support necessary for his family to continue to live satisfactorily and for him to find new work if he became unemployed. The idea itself was no longer revolutionary; the only new aspect was that it was to be applied to everybody.
The Beverage Report provided the direct inspiration for the establishment of the Welfare
State and can is generally looked upon as the source of the greatest initiative by any British government to meet the needs of the working people and the poor. Nevertheless a previous attempt to tackle similar issues had occurred under a Liberal government between 1906 and 1914 and there are many similarities between the ideas expressed on both occasions. This is not surprising since Beverage was also a key figure in the implementation of the earlier reforms. The provision of state subsidised insurance against sickness, old age and unemployment was not a new concept in 1942, some provision of free child welfare and medical support was already available and state subsidised quality housing was relatively common. The idea of financing reform through higher taxation of the rich had even been introduced in the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. To this extent Beverage was reworking existing ideas in his report. What appeared quite revolutionary in 1942 was the concept that all people, rich or poor were equally entitled to state support and that this support should be universally available. He proposed a ‘Welfare State’ that would protect all citizens from the ‘cradle to the grave’. What also appeared completely new was the actual underlying philosophy behind the report which The Times, in July 1948 commented treated the individual ‘as a citizen, not as ‘pauper’, an object of charity’.
