Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree was born in York in 1871. He was the third child of Joseph Rowntree, the man who was to become the famous chocolate maker. The name Seebohm was his mother’s maiden name. Quakers at the time were not allowed to attend the older universities or join the professions and so, after schooling in York, Seebohm studied part of the chemistry course at Manchester University. In 1897 be married Lydia Potter; the couple were to have five children.
He returned to York and joined the family company in 1889 and also began teaching on a Sunday at the York Adult School. Both these areas of work made him increasingly aware of the hardship and suffering of the poorest of York’s citizens. He became increasingly interested in social reform issues and was particularly influenced by Charles Booth’s survey of the East End of London of 1887 and by a visit to poorer areas of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1895. More...
Evidence from his school work shows that Seebohm Rowntree had keen observational skills and was interested in practical research. By 1895 he had also developed a keen interest in statistics and he resolved to discover if the poorer citizens of York were in a situation comparable to those in London.
During the years 1897 and 1898 he led a team of researchers in a lengthy survey of the poorer districts of the city and in 1901 the results, with commentary, were collated and published as Poverty: a Study of Town Life. This was the work that has made him most famous and regarded as one of the founders of empirical sociology. In it he defined his concepts of the ‘poverty line’ (a minimum standard based on basic food intake) and the ‘poverty cycle’ (showing how poverty affected individuals over their lifetime). He also made distinct ‘primary’ poverty (where income was inadequate to avoid desperate poverty) and ‘secondary’ poverty (where some choices were made with expenditure which resulted in desperate poverty). There is still debate about the harsh nature of his definition of ‘primary’ poverty.
Booth and Rowntree’s studies were a significant influence on the social policy thinking of their day. In the early years of the 20th century, the rising Liberal Party and concern over National Efficiency, meant that these detailed surveys commanded much attention. Poverty was now seen by more people of influence to be an issue demanding nationwide attention to alleviate it and not something which was mainly due to the weaker morals of the working classes. Seebohm Rowntree became a friend and adviser to Lloyd George from 1907 on a variety of areas of public policy, including the Old Age Pensions Act (1908) and the National Insurance Act (1911). More...
During the First World War, although a pacifist himself, he directed the welfare department of the Ministry of Munitions. During the war he developed further his interest in industrial psychology and was a keen student of developing business practice in the United States. Workers at Rowntree’s were sometimes suspicious of the new methods which were encouraged by the employment of the first full-time industrial psychologist in a British business, but Seebohm Rowntree was always clear in his own mind that welfare and industrial efficiency were equally important. Although, Rowntree’s chocolate factory did employ time and motion methods in the 1920s to improve the efficiency of chocolate packing and to train packers in a specific mode of working, the company continued to develop schemes for worker’s welfare, including an eight-hour day in 1904, a works council in 1919 and initiatives such as staff dining, a library, swimming pool and theatre. The full realisation of the potential of the individual was a passion for Seebohm Rowntree.He wrote his ideas down in The Human Needs of Labour (1918, revised 1937) and The Human Factor in Business (1921). They address the relationship between the needs of the employer and the employee and were still required reading for new graduate managers joining the company in the 1960s. The former focused upon good practice in the areas of wages, working hours, working conditions, and employees' welfare and status. Both of the books added to his influence over national level policy. A natural supporter of mediation, he acted to try to bring opposite sides together in major industrial disputes, for example, the railway strike of 1919.
As the Liberal Party declined, he nevertheless remained an adviser to Lloyd George on unemployment, housing, and agriculture until 1935. He was part of policy discussions between the Liberal and Labour parties in the 1920s and 30s which went on to shape later labour policy, although he always remained a supporter of free-trade principles and became a less committed Liberal as the party moved away from his definition of liberalism. More...
In 1936, Seebohm Rowntree undertook another survey of York and in 1941 he published Poverty and Progress. He recognised that while progress had been made, the combating of poverty still required legislation, but was optimistic that this could be achieved. He worked with Beveridge and helped to pioneer family allowances through a voluntary scheme at Rowntree's from 1940. Beveridge was very interested in the new survey and Seebohm Rowntree’s ideas shaped Beveridge’s social policy thinking at this time.
He seems to have had little direct involvement with the final survey of York in 1951, which claimed that old age had replaced unemployment as the primary cause of poverty. This was over optimistic, as time was to prove, and the survey techniques used were soon found to be flawed. At this time Rowntree himself was increasingly concerned with how society would spend the fruits of increasing affluence and leisure time and the effects this would have on spirituality and morals.
His biographer in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states:
“For several reasons Rowntree diverged from the mainstream in British life. … It was his political and intellectual position that limited his influence, for three relationships congenial to Rowntree were by international standards relatively weak in inter-war Britain: a reformism powered by an undivided party of the left (the British left was split between Liberal and Labour), an affinity between intellectual life and entrepreneurship, and a channelling of welfare to the citizen through the employer rather than through the state. Each of these was to be found elsewhere—in inter-war Scandinavia, in twentieth-century America, and in modern Japan, respectively—and it is no accident that Rowntree's intellectual concerns often drew him into overseas comparisons and collaborations. His welfare preoccupations had of course drawn him by the 1940s closer to the centre of public discussion. By other tendencies within British life, however, he was left increasingly on the margin, concerned and uncomprehending: by its growing secularization, hedonism, and materialism.”
Brian Harrison, ‘Rowntree, (Benjamin) Seebohm (1871–1954)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008