Beveridge in the Antipodes: the 1948 tour

Abstract

During the first half of 1948, while the report on voluntary action was in press, William Beveridge and his wife Janet toured New Zealand and Australia. Beveridge was invited to New Zealand by its oldest university, the University of Otago in Dunedin, to deliver the first De Carle lectures. This invitation was quite the antidote to a freezing and generally depressing British winter, one of the coldest on record, through which Beveridge and his team of inquiry assessors and research assistants (including his wife, Janet) worked to complete his third report, 'Voluntary action'. With the manuscript and the supplementary volume, 'The evidence for voluntary action' completed, the thought of leaving behind food rationing, queues, strikes and a mood of quiet despair for an all-expenses-paid round-the-world trip for himself and his wife was too good to pass up. A keen traveller, Beveridge had not before been to New Zealand, and to include a visit to Australia, which he had last visited at the age of three in 1882, and where he had many cousins, was an opportunity not to be missed.' Beveridge was also interested in these two 'British nations', and he was keen to assess their development since the war and to 'see people, to ask them questions, to get to know them'.