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Seebohm Rowntree

Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree was born in York on 7 July 1871, the third child of Quaker chocolate manufacturer Joseph Rowntree and Emma Seebohm. He was educated at the York Quaker Boarding School and Owens College, Manchester, where he studied for five terms focusing on chemistry. When he returned to York he started working in his father's chocolate factory where he used his knowledge of chemistry to carry out research and laboratory testing for the firm.

On Sundays he started teaching at the York Adult School which he continued doing for twenty years. His interaction with members of the working class at the Adult school combined with a visit to Newcastle in 1895, in which he was shown the living conditions of the poor first hand, made him determined to look into the problem of poverty.

In 1897 he married Lydia Potter of Middlesbrough and together they were to have five children. In the same year he was appointed as a director of his father's successful business which allowed him time to embark on his first investigation of poverty in York.

During the First World War he was the director of the welfare department of the Ministry of Munitions and in 1917 became a member of the reconstruction committee which later became the Ministry of Reconstruction.

He became chairman of Rowntrees in 1923 a post he held until 1941.

(With thanks to Wikipedia - full entry here.  A much fuller biography of Seebohm Rowntree is available here)

Seebohm Rowntree showed early signs of the observational skills he used in his later work on poverty.

Most of us probably feel none too proud in adulthood when confronted with our feeble school essays.  But, in Seebohm's case, an exception can be made.  At the tender age of sixteen he wrote a prize-winning essay on the subject of “The migration of salmon”, which opens:

 

“Whilst staying in Braemar in the summer holidays, I went two or three times to see the salmon leap at the river Dee, and wishing to know rather more about these fishes I read the report that Frank Buckland [who is nowadays referred to as the David Bellamy of his time] wrote for the Government on the subject. It is chiefly from his book that I have got the material for the present essay. Speaking of this book, I may as well mention here a few things that Buckland has done for the salmon fisheries of Great Britain.

 

Seebohm Rowntree's title page illustration for his salmon article.

 

Before 1860 our salmon fisheries had but little attention paid to them, the manufacturers polluting the rivers and the millers building weirs across them. The supply of fish in our rivers became so small, that a Royal Commission was appointed to look into the subject.

 

In Scotland the salmon laws had preserved the fisheries, to the extent of £ 300,000 annually; several salmon laws had also been made in Ireland. … Besides the weirs the POLLUTION of the rivers much diminishes the supply of salmon; salmon are as dependent on pure water, as human beings are on pure air. The refuse from mines is particularly injurious, for not only does it make the water uninhabitable by fish, but it also covers up the gravel beds in which the salmon would make their nests and lay their eggs.

 

Another essay by him in the following year is on the lifecycle of the rook.

 

In the month of March often in the company of gulls and other birds, the rook may be seen. Seemingly heedless of the ploughman, he will come within a very short distance of him to secure the grub turned up by the share.

 

At this time of the year, the rook is of inestimable value to the agriculturalist, from whom, however, he receives but little thanks. The grudge the farmers have against him is founded on the fact that he is too fond of grain and potatoes; this is true but still a rook has his good points as well as his bad ones and these overrule the latter.

 

I will try to prove this by some facts I have gathered from different books.

 

A rook requires about 1lb of food a week, and as 9/10 of his food consists of insects, one hundred rooks, would in the course of a year consume 4,680 lbs of insects. What damage might not these vast numbers of insects have done to many a crop of corn.

 

Seebohm Rowntree's title page illustration for his article about the rook.

 

Of particular interest in these essays—in the year of Darwin’s anniversary—is the way in which Seebohm combines his scientific observation, accuracy for detail, and a sense of God’s presence in the natural order, with poetry and even art – as his illustrations show.  These extracts demonstrate the beginnings of the statistical analyses for which he later became famous, and the rigorous method he applied to the study of poverty and unemployment in York. This is less a Darwinian exploration than an economic and environmental one; and his comments —over 120 years ago—on the damage that humans do to their world foreshadows a debate that rages today.

 

With thanks to Bootham School Archive

 

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