Beatrice and Sidney

I picked up A Victorian Courtship by Jeanne MacKenzie (Oxford: OUP 1979) in the early 1980s, in Oxford after OUP published the first edition of the Dictionary of Epidemiology or in London. I forget which.  It vanished in my bookshelves which have an uncanny ability to conceal as well as to reveal books. Happily it survived the ruthless pruning that accompanied our move from a house to an apartment. Its spine caught my eye last week. I opened and began to read it. It's a slim little book, about the courtship of Beatrice Potter, youngest of 9 daughters of a prosperous North Country industrialist, and Sidney Webb, the little Cockney who wooed and won her. They were a power couple I'd love to have known, left of centre intellectual movers and shakers. They founded the London School of Economics and the weekly New Statesman, and were prominent Fabian socialists. Beatrice and Sidney Webb were married for more than 50 years and accomplished an enormous amount of good in Britain and the world. They and their work deserve to be better known by all of us. This book helps to make them better known.

Beatrice Potter (1892) shortly before her
marriage to Sidney Webb

Sidney and Beatrice Webb en route
to the Soviet Union, 1932

I've often wished for time travel so I could converse with many people I'd love to have known but couldn't because they lived before my time. Mary Wollstonecroft, for instance, and Jane Austen, and Samuel Johnson. Sidney and Beatrice Webb's lives overlapped with mine, so it would have been possible in theory for me to have met them, if I'd gone to London a few years sooner, and moved in the same circles.   (Beatrice lived 1858-1943 and Sidney 1859-1947). But I didn't go to London for the first time until 1951, and didn't enter that magical circle of left-wing intellectuals until 1961. Perhaps it bends truth a little to say I 'entered' that magical circle: I was always on the fringe, and the circle had fragmented by the early 1960s. But I knew well, and networked with some of the surviving members throughout the 1960s, first in London then in the second half of the 1960s from my base at the Usher Institute of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. My mentor Jerry Morris was a disciple of the Webbs, and his friend Richard Titmuss at the London School of Economics was their principal apostle. I sat at Titmuss's feet too, and learnt much from him, notably how to reinforce and apply in my own professional life, his (and my) values of equity, altruism and social justice. These were the Webb's values too, of course. I did my best to pass on these values in all my contacts with students, in many of my published papers and in Public Health and Human Ecology, and even managed to smuggle hints into some entries in the Dictionary of Public Health.

Like most young women of her time, Beatrice Potter had no formal education, but was self-taught. Long before the concept was 'invented' as an exciting innovation in medical education, she was applying problem based learning in her work as a rent collector in tenements owned by her family in the slums of East End London. She taught herself sociology, applying the concepts and theories of Herbert Spencer. She worked with Charles and Mary Booth on their monumental study of work and poverty, teaching herself more social science as well as economics and statistics. Sidney Webb too was largely self-taught. When these two scholars met - two student researchers attempting to figure out how society and communities worked, how and why some were 'healthy' and functioned smoothly and successfully while others did not - it was a true marriage of two first class minds in search of solutions to oppressive problems that hampered progress towards a more ideal civilization in late Victorian and Edwardian England. 

Beatrice was able to deploy some of her family wealth pursuing research aimed at diagnosing the ills of that society, and poured more of that wealth into the research and educational institution that became the London School of Economics. This occupies a huddle of buildings near the junction of Kingsway, Aldwych and the Fleet Street end of the Strand. (Whenever I was in London in the 1960s, 70s and 80s I used to beat a path to the LSE, specifically to the Economist Book Shop whence I usually staggered away, my briefcase bulging and weighed down with exciting treasure obtainable nowhere else). 

Sidney Webb's wooing and winning of Beatrice Potter depended on his letters to her. In those times before telephones became ubiquitous, generations before email, the internet, Facebook and the other fast-track features of life in the early 21st century, communication between two young people who were attracted to each other relied heavily on letters.  They weren't all that young, moreover: Beatrice was well into her 30s and Sidney a few months younger.  It took a while for them to overcome the constraints of their times, and their letters seem stiff and formal, compared for instance to those between Wendy and me. Nevertheless few exchanges are as captivating as the letters back and forth between Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter, judging by the samples in this small book. 

Beatrice had at least one really kooky idea (two, if you count the infatuation she shared with Sidney for Soviet Russian communism as practised by Stalin). She believed that women should adopt cigarette smoking as a sign of their equality with men: "Let men beware of the smoking woman. I would urge earnestly on the defenders of Man's supremacy to fight the female use of tobacco with more sternness and vigour than they have deployed in the female use of the vote. It is a far more fatal power. It is the wand with which the possible women of the future will open the hidden stores of knowledge of men and things and learn to govern them. Then will women become the leading doctors, barristers and scientists. And a female Gladstone may lurk in the dim vistas of the future."  It's happening and gaining momentum - although she would have deplored Maggie Thatcher and her policies even more than I do!  

There's much more I could say about this fascinating couple, especially about Beatrice. I haven't even mentioned her emotional relationship with the powerful statesman Joseph Chamberlain. The Webbs richly  merit a biopic.  I hope someone at the BBC or elsewhere sees this post and seizes the suggestion.