HOSTESS OF THE LEFT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 900, 2 November 1956, Page 13

HOSTESS OF THE LEFT

BEATRICE WEBB’S DIARIES, 1924-1932, edited and with an introduction by Margaret Cole; Longmans, English price 25/-. O far there have been four autobiographical works of Beatrice Webb. My Apprenticeship covered the period up to her marriage in 1892, Our Partnership took us to 1912, the third volume consisted of Diaries from 1912 to 1924--this volume begins when Beatrice was 65 and covers the eight years from 1924 to 1932. The period until her death in 1943 will not be published -for various good reasons-for some years yet. -- The Webbs had an incalculable and imponderable effect on several generations of public men and women-politi-cians, political scientists, economists, sociologists, historians and public ad-ministrators-in Great Britain and indeed in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and even India. Their painstaking research, their consistent and persistent advocacy of administrative methods of solving social problems had important results. The breaking down of the Poor Law, the establishment of minimum payments in social security, the national health service, nationalisation of railways and mines, secondary education by the State, economic planning, the

London School of Economics, the New Statesman, are all in some major way connected with the Webbs. That is one of the interesting aspects of this volume. It includes the first Labour Government, the General Strike of 1926, the subsequent depression and the Labour defeat of 1931. It. covers disillusionment with the Labour Party, gathering doubts about the "inevitability of gradualism,"’ a recognition that they were seriously wrong when they suggested "we know how to prevent unemployment," an acceptance of the fact that administration is not enough and the final conversion of two bourgeois social democrats to Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. But social theory is only a small part of the Diaries. Here is the intimate social and political history of Britain seen through the eyes of a trained ob‘server who was also a participant-the official hostess of the left. Her brief descriptions will be long remembered. "Ramsay MacDonald is a magnificent substitute for a leader." J. -M. Keynes is "brilliant, supercilious." Philip Snowden is "the upholder of the banker, the landed aristocrat and the Crown." Kingsley Martin has a "certain religious fervour for social reconstruction." What rich personalities were in the Britain of the twenties. There are Amefy, Beveridge, Bevin, Citrine, Clynes, Cole, Cripps, Dalton, Dutt, Haldane, Henderson, Lansbury, Laski, Maxton, Mosley, Parmoor, Pollitt, Pritt, Queen Mary, Russell, Sankey, Shaw, Smuts, Strachey, Tawney, Toynbee, Wallas, Wells, the Woolfs. And hostess to them all was Beatrice Webb, who refused to be called Lady Passfield when her husband was knighted and who did not become Joseph Chamberlain’s wife because he demanded the "intellectual subordina-

tion of women."

W. B.

Sutch