William Beveridge Life and career
What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career?
What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career?
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.  In 1908, now considered to be the United Kingdom's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.  In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists - in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report - that he could readily be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909) and a large historical study of prices and wages (1939). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots.  In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford. CANNOTANSWER
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer.
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge,  (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945. 
 
He built his career as an expert on unemployment insurance. He served 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 (1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence (1953) and A Defence of Free Learning (1959). He was elected in a 1944 by-election as a Liberal MP (for Berwick-upon-Tweed); 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.

Early life and education

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.

Life and career

After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.

In 1908, now considered to be Britain's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.

In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists – in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report – that he could be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909).  The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. From 1929 he led the International scientific committee on price history, contributing a large historical study, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1939).

In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937 Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.

Wartime work

Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.

His work on manpower culminated in his chairmanship of the Committee on Skilled Men in the Services which reported to the War Cabinet in August and October 1941. Two recommendations of the committee were implemented: Army recruits were enlisted for their first six weeks into the General Service Corps, so that their subsequent posting could take account of their skills and the Army's needs; and the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was created.

Report on social insurance and views on full employment
An opportunity for Bevin to ease Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations. Although Brown had made the announcement, the inquiry had largely been urged by Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood, and Bevin suggested to Greenwood making Beveridge chairman of the committee. Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only reluctantly.

The report to Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in November 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the "five giants on the road of reconstruction" of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.

Beveridge's arguments were widely accepted. He appealed to conservatives and other sceptics by arguing that welfare institutions would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account but also by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would also serve as a great source of demand for British goods.

Beveridge saw full employment (defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 report. Full Employment in a Free Society, written in 1944 expressed the view that it was "absurd" to "look to individual employers for maintenance of demand and full employment." These things must be "undertaken by the State under the supervision and pressure of democracy." Measures for achieving full-employment might include Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society.

Later career

Later in 1944, Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeed George Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July 1944. Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, during which time he was prominent in the Radical Action group, which called for the party to withdraw from the war-time electoral pact and adopt more radical policies. However, he lost his seat at the 1945 general election, when he was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Robert Thorp, by a majority of 1,962 votes.

Clement Attlee and the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill's Conservative Party in that election and the new Labour Government began the process of implementing Beveridge's proposals that provided the basis of the modern Welfare State.  Attlee announced he would introduce the Welfare State outlined in the 1942 Beveridge Report. This included the establishment of a National Health Service in 1948 with taxpayer funded medical treatment for all. A national system of benefits was also introduced to provide "social security" so that the population would be protected from the "cradle to the grave". The new system was partly built upon the National Insurance scheme set up by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1911.

In 1946, Beveridge was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland, and eventually became leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. He was the author of Power and Influence (1953). He was the President of the charity Attend (then the National Association of Leagues of Hospital Friends) from 1952 to 1962.

Eugenics
Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, which promoted the study of methods to 'improve' the human race by controlling reproduction. In 1909, he proposed that men who could not work should be supported by the state "but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood." Whilst director of the London School of Economics, Beveridge attempted to create a Department of Social Biology. Though never fully established, Lancelot Hogben, a fierce anti-eugenicist, was named its chair. Former LSE director John Ashworth speculated that discord between those in favour and those against the serious study of eugenics led to Beveridge's departure from the school in 1937.

In the 1940s, Beveridge credited the Eugenics Society with promoting the children's allowance, which was incorporated into his 1942 report. However, whilst he held views in support of eugenics, he did not believe the report had any overall "eugenic value". Professor Danny Dorling said that "there is not even the faintest hint" of eugenic thought in the report.

Dennis Sewell states that "On the day the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report in 1943, its author slipped out of the gallery early in the evening to address a meeting of the Eugenics Society at the Mansion House.  ...  His report he was keen to reassure them, was eugenic in intent and would prove so in effect.  ...  The idea of child allowances had been developed within the society with the twin aims of encouraging the educated professional classes to have more children than they currently did and, at the same time, to limit the number of children born to poor households.  For both effects to be properly stimulated, the allowance needed to be graded: middle-class parents receiving more generous payments than working-class parents.  ...  The Home Secretary had that very day signalled that the government planned a flat rate of child allowance. But Beveridge, alluding to the problem of an overall declining birth rate, argued that even the flat rate would be eugenic. Nevertheless, he held out hope for the purists."  'Sir William made it clear that it was in his view not only possible but desirable that  graded family allowance schemes, applicable to families in the higher income brackets, be administered concurrently with his flat rate scheme,' reported the Eugenics Review.

Personal life

Beveridge married the mathematician Janet Philip, daughter of William Philip and widow of David Mair, in 1942. They had worked together in the civil service and at LSE, and she was instrumental in the drafting and publicising of the Beveridge Report.

He died at his home on 16 March 1963, aged 84, and was buried in Thockrington churchyard, on the Northumbrian moors. His barony became extinct upon his death. His last words were "I have a thousand things to do".

Commemoration
Beveridge Street in the Christchurch Central City was named for William Beveridge. It was one of 120 streets that were renamed in 1948 by Peter Fraser's Labour Government of New Zealand.

In November 2018, English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque commemorating Beveridge at 27 Bedford Gardens in Campden Hill, London W8 7EF where he lived from 1914 until 1921.

University College, Oxford's society for students studying and tutors involved in the study of Philosophy, Politics and Economics was recently renamed the Beveridge Society in his honour.

Works
 Unemployment: A problem of industry, 1909. online (Archive.org)
 'Wages in the Winchester Manors', Economic History Review, Vol. VII, 1936–37. 
 Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, 1939.
 Social Insurance and Allied Services, 1942. (The Beveridge Report)
 The Pillars of Security and Other War-Time Essays and Addresses, 1943, republished 2014.
 Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944.
 The Economics of Full Employment, 1944.
 Why I am a Liberal, 1945.
 The Price of Peace, 1945.
 Power and Influence, 1953.
 "India Called Them," George Allen & Unwin, 1947
 Plan for Britain: A Collection of Essays prepared for the Fabian Society by G. D. H. Cole, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths, L. F. Easterbrook, Sir William Beveridge, and Harold J. Laski (Not illustrated with 127 text pages).
 'Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era', Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. VIII, 1955.

See also
 Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee's Health Minister
 Beveridge curve – the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate
List of liberal theorists
 List of British university chancellors and vice-chancellors
 List of United Kingdom MPs with the shortest service
 List of Vice-Chancellors of the University of London

Resources
 Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1997. .
 Julien Demade, Produire un fait scientifique. Beveridge et le Comité international d'histoire des prix, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2018. .
 William Beveridge's archives are held at the London School of Economics.
 Photographs of William Beveridge held by LSE Archives
 Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.

References

Further reading
 Addison, Paul. The Road To 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1977) pp  211–28.
 Harris, Jose. William Beveridge: a biography (1997) online.
 Hills, John et al. eds. Beveridge and Social Security: an International Retrospective (1994)
 Robertson, David Brian. "Policy entrepreneurs and policy divergence: John R. Commons and William Beveridge." Social Service Review 62.3 (1988): 504–531.
 Sugita, Yoneyuki. "The Beveridge Report and Japan." Social work in public health 29.2 (2014): 148–161.
 Whiteside, Noel. "The Beveridge Report and its implementation: A revolutionary project?." Histoire@ Politique 3 (2014): 24–37. online

Primary sources
 Williams, Ioan, and Karel Williams, eds. A Beveridge Reader (2014); (Works of William H. Beveridge).

External links 

 
 Sir William Beveridge Foundation
 Spartacus Educational on William Beveridge and The Beveridge Report
 Full text of the report
 BBC information
 BBC Radio 4, Great Lives – Downloadable 30 minute discussion of William Beveridge
 Catalogue of William Beveridge's papers at the London School of Economics (LSE Archives)
 Cataloguing the Beveridge papers at LSE Archives

 

1879 births
1963 deaths
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Alumni of University College, Oxford
Barons in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
British agnostics
British humanists
British economists
British reformers
British social liberals
Civil servants in the Board of Trade
English people of Scottish descent
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
Liberal Party (UK) hereditary peers
Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Masters of University College, Oxford
People educated at Charterhouse School
People associated with the London School of Economics
Permanent Secretaries of the Ministry of Food
Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society
British social reformers
UK MPs 1935–1945
UK MPs who were granted peerages
Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Peers created by George VI
A Beveridge curve, or UV curve, is a graphical representation of the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate, the number of unfilled jobs expressed as a proportion of the labour force. It typically has vacancies on the vertical axis and unemployment on the horizontal. The curve, named after William Beveridge, is hyperbolic-shaped and slopes downward, as a higher rate of unemployment normally occurs with a lower rate of vacancies. If it moves outward over time, a given level of vacancies would be associated with higher and higher levels of unemployment, which would imply decreasing efficiency in the labour market. Inefficient labour markets are caused by mismatches between available jobs and the unemployed and an immobile labour force.

The position on the curve can indicate the current state of the economy in the business cycle. For example, recessionary periods are indicated by high unemployment and low vacancies, corresponding to a position on the lower side of the 45° line, and high vacancies and low unemployment indicate the expansionary periods on the upper side of the 45° line.

In the United States, following the Great Recession, there was a marked shift in the Beveridge curve. A 2012 International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the shift can be explained in part by "extended unemployment insurance benefits" and "skill mismatch" between unemployment and vacancies.

History
The Beveridge curve, or UV curve, was developed in 1958 by Christopher Dow and Leslie Arthur Dicks-Mireaux. They were interested in measuring excess demand in the goods market for the guidance of Keynesian fiscal policies and took British data on vacancies and unemployment in the labour market as a proxy, since excess demand is unobservable. By 1958, they had 12 years of data available since the British government had started collecting data on unfilled vacancies from notification at labour exchanges in 1946. Dow and Dicks-Mireaux presented the unemployment and vacancy data in an unemployment-vacancy (UV) space and derived an idealised UV-curve as a rectangular hyperbola after they had connected successive observations. The UV curve, or Beveridge curve, enabled economists to use an analytical method, later known as UV-analysis, to decompose unemployment into different types of unemployment: deficient-demand (or cyclical) unemployment and structural unemployment. In the first half of the 1970s, that method was refined by economists of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), in London, so that a classification arose that corresponded to the 'traditional' classification: a division of unemployment into frictional, structural and deficient demand unemployment, according to a 1976 analysis. Both the Beveridge curve and the Phillips curve bear implicit macroeconomic notions of equilibrium in markets, but the notions are inconsistent and conflicting. Most likely, because the curve enabled economists to analyze many of the problems that Beveridge had addressed, like mismatch between unemployment and vacancies, at aggregate level and industry levels and trend v. cyclical changes and measurement problems of vacancies, the curve was named in the 1980s after William Beveridge, who never drew the curve, and the exact origin of the name remains obscure.

Movements
The Beveridge Curve can move for the following reasons:

 The matching process will determine how efficiently workers find new jobs. Improvements in the matching system would shift the curve towards the origin, because an efficient matching process will find jobs faster, filling vacancies and employing the unemployed. Improvements can be made by increasing the mobility of labour, the introduction of agencies, such as job centres, and lower rates of unionisation, according to a 2001 article on OECD that compared unemployment and wages in the OECD from the 1960s to the 1990s. 
Skills mismatches occur when changes in the skills employers want differ from the available skills in the labour pool. Greater mismatches would shift the Beveridge curve outward. If that were the driving factor behind the shift, one would expect to also see employers bid up wages for the few candidates who were desirable. Although the US Beveridge curve shifted outward in the 2010–2012 period, wages did not increase.
 Labour force participation rate: as the number looking for jobs increases relative to the total population, the unemployment rate increases, shifting the curve outwards from the origin. Labour force participation can increase due to changes in education, gender roles, population age and immigration.
 Long-term unemployment will push the curve outward from the origin, which could be caused by deterioration of human capital or a negative perception of the unemployed by the potential employers.
Frictional unemployment: a decrease in frictions would reduce the number of firms searching for employees and the number of unemployed searching for jobs. That would shift the curve towards the origin. Frictional unemployment is caused by job losses, resignations and job creation.
Economic and policy uncertainty may cause employers to hold vacancies open longer in the search for the "perfect candidate", particularly when there is high unemployment with a large number of candidates from which to choose. More uncertainty would tend to shift the curve outward.
Skill shortages should not be confused with "labour shortages", which identify an objective lack of workers in the market, independently of their skills, and it may arise because of limited geographical mobility, ageing populations or a labour market approaching full employment during an economic boom. Along with labour surpluses, labour shortages are one of the most traditional examples of labour market imbalances. What distinguishes an objective shortage of labour from a skill-related shortage (i.e. a special case of skill mismatch) is just the presence of a pool of unemployed individuals (non-discouraged job seekers) willing to take up jobs in the labour market considered at the ongoing rate. Nevertheless, even in presence of unemployment and assuming that there is adequate demand for labour in the market, it could still be difficult to point to a skill shortage for at least two reasons: if whether the unemployment we observe is frictional (just a short-term consequence of costly "search"), cyclical (caused by the business cycle) or structural cannot be established or if whether the position offered is accessible and/or attractive (such as whether or not the wage posted is competitive or at least rising with respect to other segments of the market that are not reporting unmet labour demands) cannot be established. 
In addition, skill shortages may be caused by both "horizontal" skill mismatch, when workers have qualifications/skills which are different than the one required by the firms, or by "vertical" skill mismatch, when workers' skills and qualifications are lower levels than what firms require. In the literature, scholars have also referred to skill mismatch and sometimes even to skill shortages to define a situation of the skills of the employed workers and those required by being jobs were different. To avoid any possible confusion, that form of mismatch affecting only employed individuals will be referred as "on-the-job" mismatch, in the more general case of workers being both over and under-skilled for their jobs (vertical on-the-job mismatch) or have different skills/qualifications (horizontal on-the-job mismatch) and as skill gap to refer to employed workers whose skills are lower than those required by their jobs. It follows that skill mismatch, as it is defined here, can result in the occurrence of both skill shortages and on-the-job mismatches (both vertical and horizontal).

Economists generally believe that labour markets adjust to such imbalances, especially over time, but it is also possible for such mismatches to persist for many years or decades. In such instances, adverse equilibria, characterized by more structural unemployment, long-term unfilled vacancies and/or lower labour force participation may arise, and employers may eventually be forced to hire workers who possess lower or just different skills, giving place to the mismatch "on the job". Public policy interventions to change or improve the match of workers to employers might be appropriate in such cases.

In the United States, following the Great Recession, there was a marked shift in the Beveridge curve. A 2012 International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the shift can be explained in part by "extended unemployment insurance benefits" and "skill mismatch" between unemployment and vacancies.

See also
 Labour economics
 Search theory
 Matching theory
 Types of unemployment
 Phillips curve
 Involuntary unemployment

References

Sources

External links
 
 
 
 
 
 

Economics curves Dùn an Achaidh, sometimes Anglicised as Dun Acha, is a dun located near the village of Acha on the Inner Hebridean island of Coll. It is considered the best preserved dun on the island. The site of Dùn an Achaidh is located at . According to local tradition, the dun was the stronghold of, and named after, the son of a Norse king. The early 20th century antiquary Erskine Beveridge considered it as one of the four most interesting fortifications on Coll (along with Dùn Anlaimh, Dùn Dubh, and Dùn Morbhaidh).

Etymology

Dun an Achaidh takes its name from the Scottish Gaelic An t-Achadh, which translates into English as "the field".

According to the early 20th century antiquary Erskine Beveridge, the dun was known in local tradition by the Scottish Gaelic name, Dun Bhorlum mhic Anlaimh righ Lochlinn (see Lochlann). He gave two translations for this: "the fort of ridge of the son of Olaf, King of Norway"; or "the fort of Borlum, son of Olaf, King of Norway". Beveridge noted that borlum is an old Gaelic word meaning "ridge"; and that this thoroughly described the site of Dùn an Achaidh. According to Rev. Dugald MacEchern, borlum means "board-land", which is "the home farm of a residence or mansion". MacEchern also noted that the locals considered Borlum to be a personal name.

Location and description
Dùn an Achaidh is located about  south-west of Acha Mill on Coll. Of all the duns on Coll, it is the second furthest from the shore (the dun atop Druim an Airidh Fhada being furthest). Dùn an Achaidh sits atop a rocky ridge which is  high above the surrounding land which is drained by Allt a' Mhuilinn (translates into English as "the stream of the mill"). Dùn an Achaidh is situated about  south of the crannog, Dùn Anlaimh.

Ruins and archaeological finds

The wall of the dun is considered to have originally been about  thick. It runs along a ridge on the ridge and encloses an area of , from north-east to south-west, by a maximum of . An entrance is located on the north-east end of the dun. The approach to this entrance is protected by a wall which lies about  below the summit area. This wall measures, in area, ; and is made of large boulders.

There have been several archaeological finds at the site; including decorated pottery, a slate whorl, and a stone pounder. These finds are now located in the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland.

History

Beveridge suggested that it was very likely that several of the duns of Coll, and the nearby island of Tiree, were occupied by the Norse during the Viking Age. He noted that the names that some of them bear; and in the cases of Dùn an Achaidh and nearby Dùn Anlaimh, the local traditions would also seem to confirm this.

In 1587, atrocities committed between warring west highland clans had escalated to such an extent that the Scottish parliament devised what is known as the General Band, in an effort to quell hostilities. The band, or bond, was signed by landowners throughout the Scottish highlands, borders and the islands. The signing chiefs and landowners were required to come up with sureties equal to their wealth and lands for the peaceful conduct of their followers and those who lived upon their lands. One of the lists drawn up was titled "The roll of the names of the landislordis and baillies of landis in the hielandis an isles, quhair brokin men hes duelt and presentlie duellis". The laird of Coll (Hector Maclean of Coll) was one of the chiefs listed on this roll. 'Broken men' were generally men who had no chief and who were often outlaws. Beveridge wrote that these men adopted "the Viking principle of living at the expense of those who were weaker than themselves". Beveridge proposed that the 'broken men' on Coll, mentioned in 1587, would have likely dwelt in the more remote areas on the island; and that the old duns would have offered such men a certain amount of defensive security. He concluded that there was no doubt that some of the duns on Coll were inhabited well within historic times.

Beveridge wrote that it was said, locally on Coll, that Samuel Johnson visited Dùn an Achaidh during his tour of the Hebrides. However, Beveridge noted neither Johnson, nor James Boswell, made mention of visiting any of the duns on the island.

Traditions associated with Dùn an Achaidh

Beveridge stated that according to local tradition the dun was the stronghold of a Norseman, named as the son of a king named Anlaimh (Olaf). The story was that the local islanders revolted under his tyranny and attacked the dun at night; setting fire to it and routed the Norse occupiers. Beveridge noted that the tradition of setting fire to the dun seemed to have been validated by the evidence of fire still visible on the dun's foundations (evidence which Beveridge came across before knowing the local legend).

In the early 20th century, Rev. Dugald MacEchern detailed a tradition concerning Dùn an Achaidh.

See also
Dùn Anlaimh, another dun on Coll traditionally linked to an Amlamh, or Olaf

References

Archaeological sites in the Northern Inner Hebrides
Coll
Former populated places in Scotland
Fortifications in Scotland
Scheduled monuments in Scotland