This experiment in collaboration was not an episode for which Wilson ever felt much nostalgia. Though he appreciated Beveridge’s energy and discipline – and remained proud to have worked for a man whose name became synonymous with the setting up of the Welfare State6 – he never learnt to like him. Years later, the ambivalence in his attitude remained. In a Beveridge Memorial Lecture delivered in 1966, Wilson (by then Prime Minister) annoyed Beveridge’s stepson, Philip Mair, by the ‘disparaging manner’ in which he described his former master.7 He paid Beveridge the double-edged compliment of describing him as ‘a man who could inspire all who came under his dominating sway with a love of work for its own sake, of the discovery of truth for its own sake and the application of that truth for the betterment of his fellow citizens’.8 The reality was, however, that he found Beveridge impossible in personal relations and disastrous as a boss, because of what he described as his employer’s ‘arrogance and rudeness to those appointed to work with him and his total inability to delegate’.9
Summer months were spent at Beveridge’s cottage at Avebury in Wiltshire, with the great man and his formidable cousin Jessie Mair. Sir William’s habits made Harold’s seem like idleness. Every day started with two hours’ work before breakfast. That was just the beginning. ‘The regime wore him out,’ says Arthur Brown. ‘They worked all morning, played tennis all afternoon, and worked all night.’10 Wilson discovered, as he once told an interviewer, that the best way to deal with Beveridge’s intolerance was to keep working with him. Buried in his studies, he was easier to get on with.11 Much of the work, however, was grindingly dull, involving a meticulous examination of unemployment figures for the cyclical period 1927–37. Later, the project took Wilson on a tour of labour exchanges to get details of the filling of vacancies – which he enjoyed more.
Fresh from his chrysalis of introverted undergraduate study, Wilson could have benefited greatly from a genuinely inspiring teacher, who was prepared to give as well as take. Instead, though he learnt from Beveridge, it was somewhat in the manner of a pack animal learning from a muleteer. His apprenticeship frequently felt like a period of servitude. Yet he survived it, toughened and unbroken, having earned, if not Beveridge’s gratitude, at least his approval. Indeed, in a professional sense, they were in some ways well suited. Both had no need to be part of a team. Both were single-minded, self-flagellatory workers who – for all Wilson’s grumbles – enjoyed the puritanical sense of applying themselves harder than anybody else. ‘Really, they had a lot in common,’ says Brown. ‘They were hyperactive and had practical interests. They liked to get their teeth into a problem and worry away at it.’12
Early in their partnership, Beveridge wrote to the President of the American Rockefeller Foundation, boasting with typical self-centredness about his ‘first-rate research student doing just what I am going about saying all research students should do: that is, working under my supervision on a problem that I want solved and on which I am working myself, in place of writing a thesis to please himself’.13 Lord Longford, who worked with Beveridge in Whitehall later, reckons that Beveridge ‘probably saw Wilson as a useful machine, not as a person’.14 Over the next few years, Beveridge continued to rely on the ‘useful machine’, turning to Wilson whenever he needed efficient, streamlined assistance. Wilson, meanwhile, reaped the benefits of their cold alliance in Beveridge’s munificent patronage.
There were other elements as well. Though Wilson kicked a little against the pricks, he acquired, during these critically formative years, something of Beveridge’s outlook. It was one that differed in significant ways from that of the other great reformer of the age, who was attracting an enthusiastic following, Maynard Keynes. In his book, Paul Foot presents Wilson accusingly as a Liberal Keynesian, citing undergraduate influences. This was certainly how Wilson wished to present himself in the 1960s, when he was eager to appear as part of the Keynesian mainstream. In his memoirs he went out of his way to identify himself as a member of the pre-war Keynesian vanguard. The reality, however, was rather different, partly because of Beveridge.
Although both men were Liberal in their politics, and progressive in their goals, Beveridge did not approve of Keynes. Their minds worked in different ways. Where Keynes was an aristocrat and a cavalier among thinkers, Beveridge was a roundhead, suspicious of ideas. While Keynes’s intellect soared, Beveridge’s rigorously empirical approach made him insist on looking at the evidence first. Thus Beveridge had reacted to The General Theory in 1936 with a furious scepticism and – like the father of Edmund Gosse, when confronted with the disconcerting hypotheses of Charles Darwin – set himself against the tide of advanced opinion by embarking on the largely negative task of disproving it.
Beveridge took particular exception to Keynes’s reduction of concepts like ‘unemployment’ and ‘demand’ to what he regarded as a high level of abstraction. The unemployed, he insisted, were a heterogeneous group who could not be lumped together. He found the Keynesian multiplier incomprehensible. Recoiling from Keynes’s new thesis, he was drawn instead to the economic ideas and policies contained in a lengthy study by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, which had taken a close, admiring and gullible look at Stalinist planning.15 In 1938 – the year after Wilson joined him – Beveridge published a book called Constructive Democracy which showed how far its author had travelled in this direction. Anticipating a possible war, Beveridge argued that planning had become the prerequisite of national survival. Beveridge’s polemical approach aroused widespread interest, especially on the Left. ‘Here at last’, wrote Richard Crossman in the New Statesman and Nation, ‘you feel is someone talking and talking angrily out of his experience.’16
How much rubbed off on Wilson, brought into daily contact with great men, and great ideas, for the first time? Later, Wilson sought to distance himself from much of Beveridge’s work, claiming to have seen fallacies in it. He also claimed that he tried to educate Beveridge on the subject of unemployment. In their joint project, he wrote, Beveridge wanted to think in terms of ‘frictional’ unemployment – that is, unemployment caused by the immobility of labour. Wilson was impatient: Herbert had suffered from joblessness which, as the Wilson family bitterly knew, was anything but frictional. Beveridge did not seem to understand the point. ‘He didn’t realize – until much later – that there was a fundamental problem of under-demand in the economy,’ Wilson told an interviewer in the 1960s.17 He also maintained that he tried to persuade Beveridge of the basic tenets of Keynesianism. We need to treat both claims cautiously.
Wilson may not have shared Beveridge’s fierce prejudice, but he was happy enough to accept his supervisor’s intellectual framework. Wilson’s earliest published work, which took the form of academic articles, reveals no evidence of a desire to break Beveridge-imposed fetters. The first, which appeared in Economica in May 1940, analysed details of industrial production between 1717 and 1786, in order to establish the existence and chronology of a trade cycle.18 This faithfully employed a technique used by Beveridge, and started from his assumptions.
Wilson’s main undertaking, a book to be written jointly with Beveridge about the trade cycle – a subject on which Beveridge’s views differed sharply from those of Keynes – was intended for publication early in 1940. The outbreak of war killed the project, along with Wilson’s doctoral thesis.19 Nine chapters, however, were written, and Beveridge was able to plunder this research when writing a later study called Full Employment in a Free Society, published in 1944. In this book, Beveridge refers repeatedly to Wilson’s investigations and findings.20
The first of the discarded chapters had begun, significantly, with a conversation between Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes:
‘This is indeed a mystery,’ I remarked. ‘What do you imagine that it means?’
‘I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’21
This