Introduction

In February 1943, the guest speaker at the Eugenics Society’s annual Gal- ton Lecture took up the question of what he called ‘the main dysgenic fac- tor in our society today’, which was that the middle- and upper-classes were being outbred by the genetically inferior working-classes. ¹ There is nothing surprising in this—the topic of differential breeding was a staple for eugenicists—except that the speaker was William Beveridge, the author of the Beveridge Report, which laid the foundations for post-war recon- struction and the Welfare State. Beveridge had arrived hotfoot from the first House of Commons debate on his Report to address a large audience of the Eugenics Society (of which he was a life-long supporter) and to argue that the proposals contained in it could, in the long term, have positive eugenic effects. We are not used to making connections between eugenics and the project of post-war reconstruction, and it is generally assumed that eugenic thought petered out in Britain after the Second World War; this view has been endorsed by some historians of eugenics, including Pauline Mazumdar, who has argued that the eugenic project disintegrated under the pressure of ‘changed social attitudes’. ² As I shall show, this was far from the case. Eugenic thought was a key point of reference for politicians and policy makers in the 1930s, and it remained an important resource both during and long after the war, as policy makers grappled with ways of tackling the ‘five giants’ Beveridge identified as obstacles to social progress: ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’. The input from eugenics was facilitated by the fact that several of the chief architects of post-war reconstruction, including Beveridge, Richard Titmuss and C. P. Blacker, were closely involved with the eugenics movement.