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The Creator of the Beveridge plan was last week the object of vast adulation. He had become the little man's hero in Britain. At a crowded press conference he flatly rebutted pre-publication charges that his plan would take Britain "halfway to Moscow." Said he: "It is entirely British. Even insurance schemes take on something of the national character—like types of houses and standards of female beauty."
Sir William Beveridge is slim, with longish white hair combed over a domed forehead. His eyes are china blue, his face pink, with deep humor incisions on either side of his wry mouth. Britons know him as an idealist who has never belonged to a political party in his life. He believes firmly in State planning, for which, says he, suitable political machinery should be provided.
His home is the largish, comfortable, book-filled Master's House at University College, Oxford, but he spends much time in his cell-like London Government office, living in a basement Reform Club where, since the blitz bombed him out, he sleeps comfortably in a passage.
Sir William comes from a long-lived family (his father died at 92, his mother at 87) and has his last years carefully planned out. After retiring at 70 (he is now 63) he looks forward to ten more active years to develop his firm belief that, given time for research, he can foretell the weather through statistical periodicity—a theory with which meteorologists disagree. His last years, between 80 and 100, he intends to spend facing a large wall on which he will have drawn a chart of his weather predictions. When his forecasts go wrong, he will commit suicide.
Said he last week: ". . . The object of Government in peace and war is not the glory of rulers or of races but the happiness of the common man."
*One of the most devastating sections in the Beveridge Report was Appendix D, "The Problem of Industrial Assurance," wherein Sir William exposed the costliness of industrial life insurance. In 1939 there were 103,000,000 industrial policies in force, or nearly three per head of the population. Premiums received were over £70,000,000 ($280,000,000), of which expenses and management took up £24,000,000 while shareholders' dividends amounted to £1,750,000 ($7,000,000). The handling of these vast businesses is done by 65,000 agents, many of them "penny-a-week men" touting and receiving small payments throughout the country. In 1938 men & women receiving unemployment relief were paying £1,750,000 ($7,000,000) yearly as premiums on life, death and endowment policies. In each of the last three years before the war about 10,000,000 policies were issued, of which about 6,750,000 ended prematurely each year. More than half were forfeited completely.