William Beveridge Life and career What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career? After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. Where did he work as a lawyer? worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. What year did he work at Toynbee Hall? 1903
Do we know what he worked on while at Toynbee hall?
Do we know what William Beveridge worked on while at Toynbee hall?
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
becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.
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
Walter Birmingham (January 4, 1913 - August 16, 2004) was an educationist and economist who served as the warden of Toynbee Hall. He also worked on economic planning for West Africa in the post-colonial era.

Early life 
Birmingham was born in Firozpur, India, in 1913.

He took night classes at the London School of Economics, obtaining a degree in economics.

Career 
Birmingham taught at several British, African, and American universities and was involved in economic development planning for West Africa.

He was professor of economics at the University of Lesotho.

Toynbee Hall 
In 1964, Birmingham was appointed warden of the Victorian charity Toynbee Hall, which had fallen on hard times.

Soon after taking post, he took on the disgraced former government minister John Profumo as a volunteer. Profumo would continue to support Toynbee Hall for decades, eventually becoming chairman of the charity.

Personal life 
He married twice with a son and a daughter from his first marriage and two sons and one daughter from the second.

A sculpture of Birmingham by Betty Jukes is housed at Toynbee Hall.

References

1913 births
2004 deaths Toynbee Hall is a charitable institution that works to address the causes and impacts of poverty in the East End of London and elsewhere. Established in 1884, it is based in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, and was the first university-affiliated institution of the worldwide settlement movement—a reformist social agenda that strove to get the rich and poor to live more closely together in an interdependent community. It was founded by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett in the economically depressed East End, and was named in memory of their friend and fellow reformer, Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee, who had died the previous year.

Toynbee Hall continues to strive to bridge the gap between people of all social and financial backgrounds, with a focus on working towards a future without poverty.

History
Shortly after their marriage in 1873, Samuel Barnett and his wife, Henrietta, moved to the Whitechapel district of the East End of London. Barnett worked as a vicar at St Jude's church, where he saw poverty at first hand. Late-Victorian Whitechapel was known for its overcrowded living spaces and high criminal activity. In the area of Whitechapel alone, the mortality rate for children under the age of five was around 60% mostly due to the tight living conditions. Charles Booth, another social reformer, mapped London according to eight different social classes, finding that around 70% of people living in the East End were in the lowest three classes.

Whitechapel was also a place where many different immigrants settled. The Great Famine of Ireland in the 19th century led to many Irish settling in Whitechapel. Also, many Jewish immigrants settled in Whitechapel after fleeing from persecution in Western Europe at the time.

The Barnetts used their roles in the parish to improve the Whitechapel area. They built a church library, introduced art exhibits, brought university lecturers in, and took their parishioners on excursions to the homes of the wealthy and to universities. The Barnetts also tried to encourage officials to improve sanitation and housing and to build more playgrounds and washhouses. However, the attempts the Barnetts made with the parish had little effect on the East End community as a whole. The parish did not reach everyone that lived in the East End. Many of the people did not involve themselves with the established church. In an effort to improve the wellbeing of the community, Barnett had the idea of sharing knowledge and culture. His proposal was to have university students come as volunteers to share their knowledge: the students would be able to help the poor, and at the same time witness poverty at first hand, and potentially develop solutions for it.

In 1883, Barnett gave a lecture at St John's College, Oxford to gain support for his idea. Barnett was able to gather enough support and a committee called the "University Settlement of East London" was set up by Oxford. With these ideas and the support of universities, Barnett founded Toynbee Hall, the first settlement house in the world. Named after another social reformer, Arnold Toynbee, Toynbee Hall first opened its doors on Christmas Eve in 1884. Samuel Barnett was named as the first warden of the hall and Oxford and Cambridge university students came to work at the hall.

By 1910 more settlement houses were founded in England in the areas of Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Birmingham, Liverpool, and elsewhere in London; as well as in Holland, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria, and the United States. In 1911 the leaders of the social settlement movement founded the National Federation of Settlements. One of the best known settlement houses that was inspired after a visit to Toynbee Hall is Hull House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889.

Over time Toynbee Hall implemented many different educational community programmes. At its opening, Toynbee Hall introduced University Extension Society lectures. These lectures were taught by university professors. At the programme's peak, in the 1890s, classes were taught in over 134 topics including; literature, zoology, ethics, philosophy, etc. In order to further promote education, 36 societies or clubs were created in different areas, such as, music, art, history, and science. One of these societies was founded in 1889 and was called the "Toynbee Travellers". This group was created after a group of Toynbee Hall residents travelled to Belgium in 1887. Toynbee Hall also began hosting Smoking Room Debates in which community members and invited speakers would come to debate issues of the day. This tradition continued for over twenty years. In 1899, the Poor Man's Lawyer service was introduced. This programme gives free legal services to those who can not afford it, and continues to the present day.

The settlement movement

The international settlement movement began at Toynbee Hall, where a community centre was formed that attracted university students who wished to live or "settle" among the underprivileged in London's economically depressed East End. They came, according to Samuel Barnett, "to learn, as much as to teach, to receive as much as to give". As at most settlement houses, its social workers—students from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, among others—resided at Toynbee Hall and sought thereby to get to know their neighbors and their needs on a more intimate, personal level.

Toynbee Hall rejected the concept of a community centre as a location for Christian proselytisingas seen in the efforts of the Salvation Army. This principle is reflected in the decision to name it after the social reformer, Arnold Toynbee, who had died in 1883, aged 30. As Henrietta Barnett explained, the name would be "free from every possible savor of a mission."

From the beginning, it was non-sectarian and welcomed people of all faiths, despite having been founded by a Church of England cleric. It saw its purpose as more educational than charitable, in a missionary sense. Gertrude Himmelfarb lists some of the activities offered by Toynbee Hall in a typical month: "evening classes on arithmetic, writing, drawing, citizenship, chemistry, nursing, and music (...); afternoon classes for girls on dressmaking, writing and composition, geography, bookkeeping, needlework, hygiene, reading and recitation, French, singing, cooking, and swimming; and evening sessions devoted to the discussion of legal principles and current social issues".

By 1900 there were over 100 settlements in the United States and across the UK, and in 1911 the leaders of the social settlement movement founded the National Federation of Settlements.

Current activity
Today, Toynbee Hall provides a range of programmes and activities, broadly broken down into: youth, the elderly, financial inclusion, debt, advice, free legal advice and community engagement.

Each year over 400 volunteers help to deliver the charity's services.

In 2006 Toynbee Hall launched Capitalise, a pan-London free debt advice service to support 20,000 people a year with their money worries. In April 2019 this service was rebranded as Debt Free London.

In 2007 the Toynbee Studios opened in part of the building offering dance and media studios and a theatre.

Buildings
Toynbee Hall, the original building that houses the organisation of the same name, is located in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It was designed by Elijah Hoole in a Tudor-Gothic style, and was formally opened in January 1885. It was built on the site of a disused industrial school, and adjacent to the church of St Jude (built in 1845–46, but demolished in 1927). It was designated a Grade II listed building in 1973. The front of the building bears a Greater London Council blue plaque, erected in 1984, commemorating Jimmy Mallon, warden 1919–54.

Since its foundation, the charity has expanded from the original building into a number of extensions and other neighbouring buildings.

People

Wardens
1884–1906 Samuel Barnett
1906–11 Thomas Edmund Harvey
1914-17 John St George Currie Heath
1919–54 James Joseph Mallon
1954–63 Arthur Eustace Morgan
1963–64 Jack Catchpool
1964–72 Walter Birmingham
1977–87 Donald Piers Chesworth
1987–92 Alan Lee Williams OBE
1992–98 Alan Prescott
1998–2008 Revd Professor Luke Geoghegan
2008–17 Graham Fisher
2017– James Minton

Chair of trustees
 1884–96 Philip Lyttelton Gell, first chairman
 Charles Alfred Elliott
 1911–25 Alfred Milner
 1933–45 Cosmo Lang
 1966 Lord Blakenham
 1982–5 John Profumo
 1985–90 Sir Harold Atcherley
 1990–2002 Roger Harrison
 2002–2009 Christopher Coombe
 2009–2015 Ben Rowland
 2015–2022 Julian Corner
 2022– Steven Burns

Notable associated people
Toynbee residents included R. H. Tawney and Clement Attlee.
William Beveridge began his career by working as Sub-Warden at Toynbee Hall from 1903 to 1905.
Visitors to Toynbee Hall included Lenin and Guglielmo Marconi. The latter made the first public presentation of his wireless invention in Toynbee Hall on December 12, 1896.
Lionel Ellis (1885–1970), the military historian, was an Associate Warden of Toynbee Hall after the Second World War. Between the two World Wars, he had been General Secretary of the National Council of Social Service and then Secretary of the National Fitness Council.
John Profumo dedicated much of his time to the Hall from the 1960s onwards after the Profumo affair forced him out of politics.
Social reformers from the United States, such as Jane Addams and Gaylord Starin White, visited Toynbee Hall, which inspired their work to establish Hull House in Chicago and Union Settlement in New York City, respectively.
Sir Nicolas Bratza, was a volunteer at Toynbee Hall's Free Legal Advice Centre in the 1970s. He went on to become the President of the European Court of Human Rights from November 2011 to October 2012. In 2014, Sir Nicolas became an Ambassador for Toynbee Hall.
 Marie-Jeanne Bassot visited Hull House, which inspired her establishment of la Résidence sociale in Levallois-Perret (France).

Associated organisations
Charles Robert Ashbee created his Guild of Handicraft whilst a resident at Toynbee Hall in the late 1880s.
The Whitechapel Art Gallery (founded 1901) grew out of annual free art exhibitions organised by Henrietta Barnett.
The Workers Educational Association (WEA) was founded here in 1903.
Child Poverty Action Group was founded at a meeting held at Toynbee Hall in 1965.
Stepney Children's Fund

References

Further reading
 (on the opening of the new Toynbee Studios)

External links

 Toynbee Art Club Website for the club that was established in 1886 by C. R. Ashbee during his residence at Toynbee Hall.
 LinkAge Plus Toynbee Hall page on LinkAge Plus site.

1884 establishments in England
Cultural and educational buildings in London
Education in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets
Grade II listed buildings in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets
History of education in the United Kingdom
History of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets
Organisations based in London
Settlement houses
Spitalfields
Commercial Street, London