Maggs Bros.

‘The LSE had been founded by the Webbs in the 1890s as a college of London University, and had been closely involved in the Edwardian national efficiency movement. In 1919 it was still a small college, catering mainly for part-time students, but Sidney Webb was convinced that the time was ripe for expansion in all areas of the social sciences. He looked to Beveridge as an ambitious and imaginative administrator to be the dynamo for that expansion. Over the next eighteen years Beveridge devoted himself to raising massive funds from such bodies as the Rockefeller Foundation, to a large-scale building programme, and to attracting a range of distinguished scholars in all branches of the social sciences—Tawney, H. J. Laski, L. T. Hobhouse, L. C. Robbins, F. A. Hayek, and Bronislaw Malinowski, to name but a few. By the early 1930s the LSE was recognized as one of the world’s leading centres of the social sciences, and Beveridge himself was seen as mainly responsible for its prodigious growth’ (ODNB).