SIR WM. BEVERAGE

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3244, 26 March 1943, Page 8

SIR WM. BEVERAGE

finds favour again with a Government he shrugs his shoulders and pushes ahead with some other job, which may already have been commissioned by the self-same Government.

One cannot help comparing him with that other great contemporary figure in the sphere of economcis, theoreical and applied, Lord Keynes. Whereas Keynes is the deductive economist, starting always from first principles, Beveridge works inductively. For instance, he becomes the social investigator, probing poverty from Toynbee Hall in the slurne of East London; then writes a book —“Unemployment: A Problem of Industry”; then invents the labour exchanges and the administration of unemployment insurance.

His features fit his faculties. The erect, long-backed head tells you of his power of assimilation. The broad fine forehead explains his ability for impromptu “dictation” —an art somewhere between literature and oratory, in which it is difficult to believe that even Mr Ohurehill is his superior. The grey eyes and fighter's chin give you the born leader, to whom the opportunity of taking big decisions on his own initiative is the breath of life. If you had to name his weakness there is little doubt what an admirer would choose: he is and has always been constitutionally incapable of concealing his opinion of people he is working with. He lacks that particular form of cunning which is the stock-in-trade of the small-town politician.

“Outside the office” he is the soft-est-hearted, the gayest of men. But work has always been sacred, and those whose neglect or relative slowness hold up his dynamic progress pay a penalty which leaves on many weaker"vessels a permanent scar.

A MAN OF ACTION LOOKS TO THE FUTURE AUTHOR OF SECURITY SCHEME (From “Profiles” in the Observer) The overwhelming fact about Sir William Beveridge, the author of the report on “The Social Services,” is that he is a man of action. Life is to him a series of campaigns against inefficiency and injustice. If he strikes an unfamiliar note in Whitehall, it is far more because he is the great captain who has left his troops, the administrator without a department, rather than the scholar who has wandered from his study. He is a great scholar. But knowledge to him is a means, not an end. He lives in the future; he has always done so. Yesterday is only of interest to him as a guide to to-mor-row. He never talks about his own past achievements, not out of any false modesty, but • simply because it seems irrelevant to him.

When you see this white-haired, rosy-cheeked, vigorous bachelor of 63 dodging in and out of taxis, or bounding, rucksack on shoulder, up the steps of the Reform Club, it does not occur to you to -wonder what Sir William was like as a young man, nor to think

of him as a Scotsman born in India, the son of a judge. His activities compel too much attention for one to look back. When you see him in his real element —presiding at an inquiry with Service high-ups or fuel magnates or famous social reformers appearing to give evidence —even a lifelong friend does not find leisure to io call the days of 1909-11 when the present Prime Minister brought in “the boy Beveridge” at the request of the Sidney Webbs to start the labour exchanges and get unemployment insurance going. Fuel Rationing Plan Again, his recent plan for fuel ra tioniug aroused much controversy, b it neither Sir William nor anyone efi.j was particularly concerned to compare it with his successful plan for food rationing in the last war. In the academic field he was Director of the London School of Economics from 1919 to 1937, and he created “the School” as we know it to-day. But with his achievements there completed he fulfils his role as Master of University College, Oxford, without reference to them as precedents.

But from his buoyant freshness, do not infer volatility or lack of persistent personality. Nothing could be further from the truth. Always, inelucably and irreducibly, he has been and is his distinctive self. If he is asked to do a job he does it in his own way —and he gets it done. If its final consummation depends on the decision of a Government, as with fuel rationing, there may be delay, debate, negation. But is is early yet to pronounce fuel rationing as an exception to the rule, first established in 1909, that a .Beveridge plan always goes through. If it is some time before he (Continued in previous column)