ABSTRACT
The Beveridge Report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, was the most important official social publication of the twentieth century. Beveridge had been invited by the government to chair an inter-departmental committee of civil servants charged with reviewing the social services. It had been originally conceived of as a low-key technical exercise, but Beveridge saw it as the opportunity to create something far more comprehensive and radical. Amidst the technical and statistical underpinning of Beveridge’s analysis, there was a powerful image which captured the public’s attention and became a trademark Beveridge metaphor. Having been given the bureaucratic cold shoulder during the war, Beveridge found himself excluded from post-war policy by politics.
