‘Influence and legacy’


Rowntree's secularized religion of civic responsibility generated in him an earnestness and consistent hard work that ensured a profound long-term and cumulative impact on many areas of British life. He was unusually skilful at drawing together the practical and the ideal, powered as he was by the optimistic and positivist conviction that through steady application and careful thought all problems could be solved. Throughout his life he readily moved on to tackle new problems: housing reform and industrial conciliation in the 1920s, the distressed areas in the 1930s, old age in the 1940s, and mass leisure in the 1950s. In 1953 he even became president of the newly founded ‘War on Want’, which extended his preoccupation with poverty within Britain to poverty overseas.

From Brian Harrison, ‘Rowntree, (Benjamin) Seebohm (1871–1954)’

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008