The Right Honourable The Lord Beveridge |
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Lord Beveridge in 1943
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Member of Parliament for Berwick-upon-Tweed |
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In office 17 October 1944 – 5 July 1945 |
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Preceded by | George Charles Grey |
Succeeded by | Robert Thorp |
Majority | 7,523 (74.8%) |
Personal details | |
Born |
Rangpur City, British India (now Bangladesh) |
5 March 1879
Died | 16 March 1963 Oxford, England. |
(aged 84)
Nationality | British |
Political party | Liberal Party |
Spouse(s) | Jessy Janet Philip OBE (d. 1959) |
Education | Charterhouse School and Balliol College, Oxford. |
Occupation | Economist |
Known for | Work towards founding the welfare state in the United Kingdom. |
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge KCB (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist who was a noted progressive and social reformer.
He is best known for his 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) which served as the basis for the post-World War II welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945. He was considered an authority on unemployment insurance from early in his career, served under Winston Churchill on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford. Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence (1953), and A Defence of Free Learning (1959).
Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879. His mother was a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community who, with Elizabeth Malleson, had founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864. She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls. Her known works are the translations of the Baburnama from the Turki (Turkish) language, and the Humayun-nama from Persian.