Webb was born at 45, Cranbourn Street, near Leicester Square, London, the second of three children of Charles Webb (1828/9-1891) and Elizabeth Mary (1820/21-1895), née Stacey. His father was "variously described as an accountant, a perfumer, and a hairdresser"; his mother was a "hairdresser and dealer in toiletries". Webb's upbringing was "comfortable", the family employing a live-in servant; his father was "a man of local substance" as a rate collector, guardian, and sergeant in a volunteer regiment. Having attended a "first-class middle class day school" at St Martin's Lane, and his parents having sent him abroad to Switzerland and Germany to extend his education, [2] Webb later studied law at the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution for a degree of the University of London in his spare time, while holding an office job. He also studied at King's College London, before being called to the Bar at Gray's Inn in 1885.
Professional life
In 1895, Webb helped to found the London School of Economics with a bequest left to the Fabian Society. He was appointed its Professor of Public Administration in 1912 and held the post for 15 years. In 1892, he married Beatrice Potter, who shared his interests and beliefs.[3] The money she contributed to the marriage enabled him to give up his clerical job and concentrate on his other activities. Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded the New Statesman magazine in 1913.[4]
As Colonial Secretary he issued the Passfield White Paper that revised the government policy on Palestine, previously set by the Churchill White Paper of 1922. In 1930, failing health caused him to step down as Dominions Secretary, but he stayed on as Colonial Secretary until the fall of the Labour government in August 1931.[citation needed]
The Webbs ignored mounting evidence of atrocities being committed by Joseph Stalin and remained supporters of the Soviet Union until their deaths. Having reached their seventies and early eighties, their books, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935) and The Truth About Soviet Russia (1942), still gave a positive assessment of Stalin's regime. The Trotskyist historian Al Richardson later dubbed Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? "pure Soviet propaganda at its most mendacious".[7]
In H. G. Wells' The New Machiavelli (1911), the Webbs, as "the Baileys", are mercilessly lampooned as short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators. The Fabian Society, of which Wells was briefly a member (1903–1908), fares no better in his estimation.[citation needed]
Beatrice Webb in her diary records that they "read the caricatures of ourselves... with much interest and amusement. The portraits are very clever in a malicious way."[17][18] She reviews the book and Wells's character, summarising: "As an attempt at representing a political philosophy the book utterly fails..."[19]
When his wife, Beatrice, died in 1943, the casket of her ashes was buried in the garden of their house in Passfield Corner, as were those of Lord Passfield in 1947.
In 2006, the London School of Economics, alongside the Housing Association, renamed its Great Dover Street student residence Sidney Webb House in his honour.
Archives
Sidney Webb's papers form part of the Passfield archive at the London School of Economics.[21] Posts about Sidney Webb regularly appear in the LSE Archives blog.[22]
Soviet Communism: A new civilisation? (1st ed.). 1935 – via Internet Archive. Vol IVol II) (the 2nd and 3rd editions of 1941 and 1944 did not have "?" in the title)
^Al Richardson, "Introduction" to C. L. R. James, World Revolution 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International. Humanities Press (reprint), 1994; ISBN0-391-03790-0
^Webb, Sidney; Webb, Beatrice (1897), Industrial Democracy, vol. I (1 ed.), London, New York, Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co, retrieved 5 October 2014; Webb, Sidney; Webb, Beatrice (1897), Industrial Democracy, vol. II (1 ed.), London, New York, Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co, retrieved 5 October 2014
Bevir, Mark. "Sidney Webb: Utilitarianism, positivism, and social democracy." Journal of Modern History 74.2 (2002): 217–252 online
Cole, Margaret, et al. The Webbs and their work (1949)
Davanzati, Guglielmo Forges, and Andrea Pacella. "Sidney and Beatrice Webb: Towards an Ethical Foundation of the Operation of the Labour Market." History of Economic Ideas (2004): 25–49
Farnham, David. "Beatrice and Sidney Webb and the Intellectual Origins of British Industrial Relations." Employee Relations (2008). 30: 534–552
Hamilton, Mary Agnes. Sidney and Beatrice Webb: a study in contemporary biography (1933). online
Harrison, Royden. The Life and Times of Sydney and Beatrice Webb, 1858-1905 (2001) online
Kaufman, Bruce E. "Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Institutional Theory of Labor Markets and Wage Determination." Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society 52.3 (2013): 765–791. online
Kidd, Alan J. "Historians or polemicists? How the Webbs wrote their history of the English poor laws," Economic History Review (1987) .40#3 pp.400-417.
MacKenzie, Norman Ian, and Jeanne MacKenzie. The First Fabians (Quartet Books, 1979)
Stigler, George. "Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and the Theory of Fabian Socialism," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1959) 103#3: 469–475
Wrigley, Chris. "The Webbs Working on Trade Union History," History Today (May 1987), Vol. 37 Issue 5, pp.51-56; focuses mostly on Beatrice.
Primary sources
Mackenzie, Norman, ed. The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb (3 volumes. Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. xvii, 453; xi, 405; ix, 482)
.jpg)
.svg)
