Simon Szreter                      

Most people know that this memorable phrase is associated with the modern welfare state created by the first majority Labour government under Prime Minister Clement Attlee, elected in 1945 after victory in World War II. But was it in fact the first time that a universal social security and welfare system had been legislated in British history? 

The Beveridge Report 

The overall design of Britain’s welfare state is credited to W.H. Beveridge, a Liberal who had been Director of the LSE before entering wartime government service.

William Beveridge.

Beveridge authored the boringly titled government report Social Insurance and Allied Services (Cmd. 6404), which was published by the Cabinet in the middle of the war, in November 1942. But its contents were anything but boring as far the public was concerned. Within two weeks of its publication, the wartime Ministry of Information reported that 95 percent of the public had heard of it and there was almost universal approval. In fact the phrase “from cradle to grave” first appeared as a front-page headline in the Daily Mirror on 2 December 1942, and it was first used (and approvingly so) in a radio broadcast in March 1943 titled ‘After the War’, delivered by the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, a Conservative. So it is significant that support for the new welfare state spanned across the political spectrum. 

Demand the Beveridge Plan (1944).

This is because it was widely appreciated that the Beveridge Report was a serious proposal to deal with the working class’s perennial problem of poverty. Since Seebohm Rowntree’s pioneering research published in 1901, it had become appreciated in government circles that most working-class persons faced life-cycle poverty. Three times in their lives they were likely to be living in households below the poverty line: firstly when young and growing up; secondly after marriage, when they had most dependent mouths to feed; and finally in old age, when they could no longer work. This was inevitable because working-class wages did not increase much with age, and few had adequate pensions (unlike the salaried professional and managerial middle class).  

Added to this, the working class in the north and the midlands had just endured two interwar decades of mass unemployment, poverty, and deprivation, with unemployment averaging 2.3 million across the period 1925-37, equal to 10.3 percent of the workforce. 

The Beveridge Plan presented itself as a road to reconstruction. The war was demonstrating to everybody what could be achieved through the full use of the collective resources of the nation, organised by the state, with a system of steeply progressive taxation to ensure that the most wealthy were contributing as much as 90 percent of their highest marginal incomes and inherited fortunes to the war effort. 

The aim was to use this national resource flow to follow winning the war against fascism with winning a battle against the ‘Five Giants’ that still afflicted so many poorer families and communities: poverty; inadequate educational provision; insufficient preventive and curative health care; poor housing and slums; and insecurity of employment. 

The Five Giants Cartoon. Image © London School of Economics.

The NHS is of course the most iconic centrepiece of the modern welfare state, offering care for free at point of need to the entire population. Additionally, free universal education was extended to include secondary and not only primary schooling. Whole new towns with superior housing amenities (electricity and running hot and cold water) were built, and family allowances paid to mothers. Furthermore, backed by the new Keynesian economic theory, the government offered a guarantee to ensure full employment. This was perceived as revolutionary stuff. Britain had moved from a laissez-faire liberal economy to a social democracy.   

One of the most influential national figures during the war against fascism was the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple (1881-1944). He was a former Bishop of Manchester during the 1920s and then Archbishop of York, and so very familiar with the interwar problems of the north. He is credited with first using and popularising the term ‘welfare state’ in 1941. He asserted that the Beveridge Report represented “the first time anyone had set out to embody the whole spirit of the Christian ethic in an Act of Parliament”. 

But was Archbishop Temple historically correct in this?   

No.

A Tudor welfare state? 

During the reign of Elizabeth I, parliament passed two Acts in 1598 and again, both slightly modified, in 1601, which together certainly ‘embodied the whole spirit of the Christian ethic’, in the sense that Temple meant in embracing Beveridge’s plan as his wished-for ‘welfare state’. These two Acts established a new compulsory and universal system of public charity, the Poor Law, alongside a revitalized realm of complementary private Christian charity under the new Charitable Uses Act.   

Nicholas Hilliard, the Pelican Portrait of Elizabeth, c.1574. The Walker Art Galley, Liverpool. The pelican symbolised self-sacrifice and charity as a Christian virtue.

The 1598 and 1601 Poor Law Acts established the fundamental principle of any meaningful welfare state. It became unlawful that any subject of the Crown in England and Wales could be permitted to perish for want of sustenance or support (termed ‘relief’). The Act specified that each parish was responsible in law for all its parishioners. Each parish must establish a continually replenished fund from a progressive local tax (the poor rates), proportionate to the value of land occupied (i.e. farmed) by each resident.   

At that time there were 10,000 parishes, each averaging 400 inhabitants. The Act explicitly stated that orphans, widows, the old, disabled, ill, and involuntarily unemployed were all entitled on demand to ‘relief’ and care in cash or in kind. The new parish Poor Law Overseers supervised collection and disbursement of funds, under the watch of the Crown-appointed, locally-resident Justices of the Peace, whose duty it was to be available to hear any appeals.  

A forgotten history

However, by the 1940s when Temple, Beveridge, and Britain’s leading politicians were contemplating the innovation of a universal welfare state, nobody in Britain made this comparison. It went largely unremarked that something similar had not only been put on the statute books, but had actually developed into a fully-fledged nationwide system of social security for all families and individuals over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. 

Since the 1970s, decades of painstaking research on local parish and judicial records, including by many members and ex-members of Campop including Richard Smith, Keith Snell, Samantha Williams, Thomas Sokoll, Jeremy Boulton, and John Broad, has brought this rich history to life. Recent research by Brodie Wadell has shown that spending on the Poor Law increased faster than either population or economic growth across these two centuries, and it has been shown that expenditure on both pensions for the elderly and health care became significant components of this rising provision. 

The Poor Law was radically reformed in 1834 into the widely–hated workhouse system. According to the new secular science of political economy, it was a misguided waste of money. Funding for it was cut dramatically. It has most recently been shown that this caused immediate damage to the health of children, just as the most recent austerity drive and cuts to welfare have done since 2010. 

Thus, when the New Poor Law of 1834 was finally abandoned, with the creation after 1945 of Beveridge’s welfare state, the Archbishop of Canterbury did not realise that this was in fact a recreation of a universal welfare system inspired by the Christian ethic that had once existed for over two centuries, and served the people and the economy well during this period. 

Further reading

• Charlesworth, L., Welfare’s Forgotten Past. A Socio-Legal History of the Poor Law (Routledge, 2010). 
• Cooper, H., and Szreter, S., After the Virus. Lessons from the Past for a Better Future (Cambridge, 2021), ch.11. 
• Green, D., Mesevage, G., Mooney, G., and Szreter, S., ‘The New Poor Law and the Health of the Population of England and Wales’. Forthcoming article in Economic History Review (2025). 
• Healey, J., The First Century of Welfare. Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire 1620-1730 (Boydell & Brewer, 2014). 
• King, S., Sickness, medical welfare and the English poor 1750-1834 (Manchester, 2018). 
• Slack, P., The English Poor Law 1531-1782 (Cambridge, 1990). 
• Smith, R. M., ‘Charity, self-interest and welfare’, in M. Daunton (ed.), Charity, self-interest and welfare (London, 1996). 
• Snell, K., Annals of the Labouring Poor. Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1985). 
• Sokoll, T., Essex Pauper Letters, 1731-1837 (Oxford, 2001). 
• Timmins, N., The Five Giants. A Biography of the Welfare State (3rd edition, London, 2017). 
• Waddell, B., ‘The Rise of the Parish Welfare State in England, c.1600–1800’, Past & Present 253 (2021), 151-94. 
• Williams, S., Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle under the English Poor Law 1760-1834 (Boydell & Brewer, 2011). 

Tags: charity, Elizabeth I, poor laws, poverty, welfare state

| This entry was posted on Thursday, February 13th, 2025 at 12:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.