The Beveridge Report became the main pillar of the post-war Welfare State, its prescriptions guiding the 1945 Attlee Government and its successors. When the report came out, Beveridge told Wilson: ‘This is the greatest advance in our history. There can be no turning back. From now on Beveridge is not the name of a man; it is the name of a way of life, and not only for Britain, but for the whole of the civilized world.’58 Such was Wilson’s professional intimacy with Beveridge, that he would almost certainly have played a major part in the construction of the report, if he had been involved. To have been closely associated with such a document would have been a magnificent springboard for a political career.
It did not happen: instead, eighteen months before the publication of the Beveridge Report, and after four years of the closest possible association, the two went their separate ways. Yet the imprint of Beveridge upon Wilson was deep, and Wilson would have been a very different person, and political animal, if their paths had not crossed. For all his bitterness towards his employer, Wilson had obtained much from a man of great intellect, energy and ingenuity as well as of personal selfishness, coldness and conceit. He had been tested, trained, exploited, and transformed from a clever fledgling graduate into a statistical analyst of unique experience and immense stamina. He had been brought into contact with leading academic and political figures, and had taken their measure. He had acquired habits of work, and habits of mind, even more formidably diligent and disciplined than those he had taught himself. (He was fond of claiming later that he had learnt from Beveridge ‘that a great man does his own work. His own essential work, at any rate. Beveridge had his research assistant, but only so that more could be done than he could do himself, not to save himself doing everything.’)59
Finally, and perhaps most important, Beveridge gave him a sense of possibility. To work at close quarters with a man of world renown, to see his weaknesses as well as his strengths, and to observe his techniques, is a good way to cultivate an ambition. The enormous success and popularity of the Beveridge Report, over a year after they had parted company, increased Wilson’s sense of what was within reach.
One reason why Wilson rejected Beveridge’s offer may have been that, almost simultaneously, he received another which he found more attractive. This was a post in the Mines Department, where there was an urgent need to modernize the method of calculating coal production figures. The appointment came about casually. ‘They wanted a statistician and asked me if I could think of somebody,’ says Sir Alec Cairncross. ‘I suggested Harold.’1 Wilson eagerly accepted, and embarked on a new Whitehall career that led – indirectly but just about foreseeably – to a parliamentary seat. The miners were the most powerful union in the Labour Movement, sponsoring more, than a fifth of all Labour MPs; coal was rapidly becoming the most sensitive issue of the war on the Home Front. Neither point, we may guess, escaped the attention of Wilson.
Few industries in wartime were as important, or as inefficiently organized, as coal, two years after the outbreak of hostilities. At the beginning of 1942, there were no fewer than 1,135 colliery companies producing coal from an estimated 1,900 coal mines.2 The fear was of a fuel crisis, which might damage vital war production. To avoid one, the Government had moved in, taking appropriate measures. One of these had been labour conscription: faced with a net loss of miners into the better paid munitions industry, the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, had introduced compulsory direction under wartime powers. Although this reduced the danger of a shortage, it added to a deep dissatisfaction among miners over wages and conditions.
Because of these difficulties, the Mines Department – responsible for the machinery of state regulation – acquired a special political significance, as did the regular statistics of production. The Department was a sub-division, or satellite ministry, of the Board of Trade, and it was the Board’s President, Sir Andrew Duncan, who provided effective direction. Wilson’s job – shared with John Fulton, another Oxford don temporarily in Whitehall – was to supply Duncan (and David Grenfell, the Welsh MP who was Secretary of the Department) with a monthly dose of figures. This was made harder by the notorious inaccuracy of the statistics provided by the colliery owners. Consequently, one of Wilson’s first tasks was to work out how to treat them. The owners made much of the alleged problem of miners’ absenteeism. Wilson wrote a paper on ‘Absenteeism and Productivity’ in which he disputed the statistical basis for the owners’ claim that poor levels of production were the fault of the face workers. Instead, he explained a decline in total output in terms of the fall in the total mining workforce, which had meant that the proportion involved in unproductive but essential ‘cost work’ – safety work, winding, pumping and so on – inevitably grew, bringing down the average per shift.3 He later claimed that this was the first use of the term ‘productivity’ in an official document.4
Sir Andrew Duncan was replaced as President of the Board of Trade in February 1942 by Hugh Dalton, a very different kind of politician. One of the most forceful of Labour’s leaders in the Coalition, Dalton had earned a reputation as ‘Dr Dynamo’ at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, from which department he had been moved following bitter clashes with other ministers. Dalton had another attribute, of some importance to any would-be Labour politician. He made a practice, a hobby even, of talent-spotting among the promising Labour-inclined young men he encountered. Among those who had already benefited from his patronage were Christopher Mayhew, Douglas Jay and Hugh Gaitskell. Wilson now came to his attention as well.
Dalton lunched with Duncan at the beginning of March. Afterwards, he noted his predecessor’s recommendation to ‘promote Harold Wilson to be Director of Programmes’.5 Duncan’s opinion was reinforced by that of a young economist and temporary civil servant, Hugh Gaitskell, whom Dalton had employed as his personal assistant at his previous ministry, and now brought with him to the Board. Dalton asked Gaitskell to carry out a review of the Mines Department and its personnel. Gaitskell submitted a highly charged report which urged a major shake-up and was severely critical of some senior officials. Wilson, however, he singled out for special praise. He wrote that the young statistician was ‘extraordinarily able. He is only twenty-six, or thereabouts, and is one of the most brilliant younger people about … he has revolutionized the coal statistics … The great thing about him is that he understands what statistics are administratively important and interesting. We must on no account surrender him either to the Army or to any other department.’6
That both Duncan and Gaitskell spoke well of Wilson, suggests that his reputation was high at the political end of the ministry. Gaitskell’s enthusiasm, however, was not universal. A. J. Ryan, then an assistant secretary in the department, believes that the civil service departmental head, Lord Hindley, treated the young statistician with caution. Whether or not this was so, Ryan’s own opinion of Wilson was distinctly cool.
One of Wilson’s jobs was to prepare statistics of coal stocks – where they were, where they needed to go, and how they were to be disposed of – for a weekly meeting which Hindley chaired. According to Ryan, Wilson exuded confidence and authority at these meetings, yet when he was challenged on his figures, he could not always justify them. Once (says Ryan) he made the cardinal error of confusing figures for output and for distribution, failing to take into account that at many pits there were insufficient trucks to carry the coal away. ‘All our troubles would be gone, if we could do that,’ said Hindley – meaning that there would be no shortage if output could be equated with distribution. Ryan sees the incident as symptomatic. ‘Wilson didn’t understand the coal business, and didn’t bother to find out what he might have,’ he maintains. Ryan’s distrust was based on the suspicion that, despite all Wilson’s years with Beveridge, establishing statistical truth was not his only objective: he was as much concerned to ingratiate himself. ‘His job was to be told by Viscount Hindley what was required, and say whether it could be done,’ recalls Ryan. ‘But he wasn’t straight. He arranged matters to suit his own convenience, rather than fact.’
Wilson