page_title: William Beveridge
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: William Beveridge / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped version of File:William_Beveridge_at_Balliol,_1898.jpg
context_page_description: William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, KCB was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services served as the basis for the post-World War II welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945. He was considered an authority on unemployment insurance from early in his career, served under Winston Churchill on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.
  Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry, Planning Under Socialism, Full Employment in a Free Society, Pillars of Security, Power and Influence and A Defence of Free Learning. He was elected in a 1944 by-election as a Liberal MP; following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he was elevated to the House of Lords where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.
context_section_description: Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879.
  Beveridge's mother had, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864. She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls. William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a first class degree in both. He later studied law.
  While Beveridge's mother had been a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community, his father was an early humanist and positivist activist and "an ardent disciple" of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte's ideas of a secular religion of humanity were a prominent influence in the household and would exert a lasting influence on Beveridge's thinking. Beveridge himself became a "materialist agnostic", in his words.
caption: Beveridge at Balliol College in 1898
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