FACTS WERE HER PASSION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 207, 11 June 1943, Page 8

FACTS WERE HER PASSION

(From a talk on BEATRICE WEBB, broadcast from 3YA

by

Nellie F. H.

MacLeod

of the first Baron Passfield, at the age of 85, Great Britain and the world have lost a woman who has been described as one of the two most skilled and best informed investigators upon the earth. The "other one" of these two investigators was her husband, Baron Passfield himself, better known as Sidney Webb. When one considers the gifts by which women have won fame in the past and present, the achievement of Beatrice Webb seems unique. Many have been remembered for beauty, like Cleopatra and Lady Hamilton, many for superlative courage, like Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale, and still more for artistic originality or skill. Madame Curie is one of the few women who have won eminence by scientific discovery. Insofar as Beatrice Webb's achievement can be attributed to one predominant characteristic, it is best described as a triumph of reason, and I emphasise this point because women in general have iz the death of Beatrice Webb, wife

not been noted for the exercise of cool and disinterested reasonableness, especially in personal and social matters, Her Father And Mother Beatrice Webb, who began life as Beatrice Potter, was the eighth of nine daughters in a capitalist family typical of the rich industrialist classes of the nineteenth century. Her father was a director of railway companies, and a capitalist-at-large, a man of great winsomeness, integrity and ability, with a simple religious faith but, Beatrice decided, without any clear vision of the public good. He adored his wife and daughters, and believed women to be superior to men. Yet, oddly enough, every one of his daughters began life as an anti-feminist! Mrs. Potter was an austere, aloof disciplinarian, whose own intellectual ambitions had been frustrated. She disliked women, and was embittered by the loss of her only son, who was born when Beatrice was four and died when she was seven. As a re-

sult, Beatrice suffered from a feeling of neglect, and spent most of her childhood hours among the servants, educating herself, in the main, by her own reading. Her mother sincerely believed and practised the Victorian code "that it is the duty of every citizen to better his social status, ignoring those beneath him and aiming at the top"-yet every one of her daughters refused to be educated, and defied class conventions. Shakespeare Bored Her The first 15 years of Beatrice’s life were spent irf seeking a creed by which to live. From her mother’s side she had inherited a strain of melancholy, and in times of ill-health (and in childhood these were frequent), of loneliness, or of stress, she was tortured with sleeplessness and depréssion, Reading was her chief occupation, and she learned to find an outlet in writing in her diary, that last resort of loneliness. The habit lasted, and the publication of these diaries will later on be a major literary event. She lacked any form of artistic ability, hated the then idolised Tennyson, and was bored by Shakespeare. For recompense she possessed a tireless intellectual curiosity, and a double dose of willpowet — but these, she felt, were not attractive qualities in a woman. Actually her friends and her photographs both testify to her real beauty and attractiveness. Of the society life of London she soon tired, finding it morally degrading and physically enervating, as may be seen in her autobiography, My Apprenticeship. But the stimulus of the great men she knew there, of Cardinal Manning, Sir Joseph Hooker, Huxley and George Henry Lewes, upon her knowledgecraving mind sent her from strength to strength of study. At 24 her mother’s death left her head of a large household, and now she was more than ever tossed and torn between her social duties and her intellectual ambitions. She managed by rising at 5 a.m. and studying till 8 am., and these, she said, were the happiest hours of the day. From Religion to Science Meanwhile, her spiritual outlook had been revolutionised, and her feeble hold of Christian orthodoxy replaced by what scientists then called "The Religion (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) of Science" or "The Religion of Humanity." By 1883, when Beatrice was 25, the sum total of influence acting upon her had led her to the conviction that she could best serve humanity by becoming a social investigator. Her sister Kate had for some time worked as a rent-collector in the dock area, and she herself had visited in the slums of Soho. But people made destitute by vice were not, she felt, typical members of the manual-working class. She determined to gain first-hand knowledge of how respectable workers lived, and so resorted to a ruse. Unknown, and posing as "Miss Jones" she went to stay among her mother’s mill-working relatives in the town of Bacup. The visit was a revelation, She was delighted with the simplicity, sincerity, and genuine religious piety of the men and women of this classless society. Moreover, with the chapel as centre, it provided a small working model of democratic government. Here, too, she first observed the successful working of a co-operative store. In London’s Slums She returned to a London seething with discussion about the burning question of the hour, the problem of the destitution in London’s slums. Some blamed the shortcomings of individuals, some blamed the careless almsgiving of the rich; others, influenced by William Morris, Henry George and such writers, blamed the social system, and advocated Socialism. As with her cousin-by-‘marriage, Charles Booth, her convinced Conservatism was at this time still unshaken, but also like his, her reason demanded accurate facts that would show the real cause and extent of this destitution. She therefore gladly agreed to be one of the army of investigators for Charles Booth’s monumental survey Life and Labour of the People in London. Using the census as basis, an area inhabitated by a million families was examined, with the aid of school attendance inspectors, district visitors, sanitary inspectors, street by street and house by house. The results when scientifically analysed, proved that 30 per cent of people in the world’s largest and tichest city lived at or beneath the level of bare subsistence. Of how. Beatrice worked as a rent-collector and later as an employee in sweaters’ dens in order to obtain the desired first-hand knowledge it would take too long to tell, but to me the story is more interesting than any novel. She Meets Sidney Webb About this time, her father’s illness tied her for long periods to his bedside at Bournemouth, where she missed her work, and was acutely depressed, "But how little do we mortals know what is good for us," she writes. A friend directed her to Sidney Webb for some historical data, and her diary relates her first impression of this tiny man with a huge head, who wore clothes that were shabby to shininess, and was completely innocent of vanity. Soon they had become partners, not only in an ideally happy marriage, but in a life-work of social investigation. She called it "a working comradeship founded in a common faith and made perfect by marriage; perhaps the most exquisite, certainly the most enduring of all the varieties of happiness." Death has destroyed the partnership, but its fruits will enrich mankind for ever.