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Founding the Welfare State

This essay examines the close personal relationships between three of the founding figures of the British welfare state. The political theorist and historian R. H. Tawney was at Rugby School with William Temple, the churchman who became Archbishop of Canterbury and who first coined the term ‘welfare state’. Both went to Oxford where they met William Beveridge, civil servant and educationist, and the architect of the modern welfare system. Tawney married Beveridge’s sister, Jeanette. Temple attended that wedding and later officiated at Beveridge’s marriage. Tawney became a professor at the London School of Economics where his brother-in-law was the director. Yet these close relations cannot disguise differences of personality and temperament among the trio. This essay argues that the different qualities each embodied, and which sometimes divided them, were necessary attributes of the welfare state.