Beatrice Webb

The youngest of nine daughters of Laurencina Heyworth, a Liverpool merchant’s daughter, and the businessman Richard Potter, she was born at Standish House in Gloucestershire; her grandfather was a Liberal MP who helped bring about the Reform Act of 1832. Self-taught from an early age, she named the co-operative movement and the philosopher Herbert Spencer as her chief influences. After her mother’s death in 1882 she acted as her father’s hostess, and the same year began a relationship with the cabinet minister Joseph Chamberlain, which failed after four years because he would not accept her independence as a woman. Taking over her sister Catherine’s work as a voluntary rent-collector in model dwellings in Wapping, and assisting her cousin by marriage Charles Booth in his survey of London’s slums, she grew critical of the philanthropy of her day. In The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (1891), drawn from her experience in Lancashire, she argued for “co-operative federalism”. She met Sidney Webb in 1890 when she sought his help with her research, married him in 1892 and shared his political and professional work for 51 years, living on an income of £1,000 a year left by her father. The couple wrote The History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897), in which she coined the term “collective bargaining”, and in 1895 the Fabian Society used an unexpected £10,000 legacy to found the London School of Economics. As a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1905–1909) she led the Minority Report, which sketched a welfare state securing “a national minimum of civilised life … open to all alike”; William Beveridge, later author of the Beveridge Report, was its researcher. In 1908 she was a founding member of the Fabian Women’s Group, pressing for equal pay and for women’s role in local government. H. G. Wells, who attacked the Webbs’ hold on the society, lampooned them in a novel of 1911. The couple founded the New Statesman in 1913 and joined the Labour Party in late 1914, and she ran her husband’s election campaign in 1922. In the late 1920s she called Russian communism and Italian fascism “two sides of the worship of force and the practice of cruel intolerance”, but the Depression of 1929 and the split of the Labour Party over MacDonald’s National Government in 1931 led her and Sidney to look at the Soviet Union and Stalin with different eyes. In 1932 she became the first woman elected a Fellow of the British Academy and spent two months travelling in the Soviet Union with her husband. Their Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935) was condemned for its uncritical view of the agrarian centralisation of the first five-year plan, the creation of the Gulag and the purges of the 1930s; A. J. P. Taylor called it “the most preposterous book ever written about Russia”. When her nephew-in-law Malcolm Muggeridge wrote to her in 1933 denouncing the Soviet famine, she noted his “curiously hysterical denunciation” in her diary. Her diaries record her disquiet at the opening of the Moscow Trials in 1936 and after Bukharin’s conviction in 1938, yet her last book, The Truth About Soviet Russia (1942), celebrated central planning. She died in 1943 and was cremated at Woking.