BEATRICE WEBB

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 28008, 30 June 1956, Page 5

BEATRICE WEBB

FOURTH VOLUME OF HER AUTOBIOGRAPHY Beatrice Webb’s Diaries 1924-1932. Edited and with an Introduction bv Margaret Cole. Longmans. 327 pp.

This is the fourth autobiographical record of the life of Beatrice Webb to appear. First came “My Apprenticeship,” published in 1926 and composed by Mrs Webb herself, which covered her life up to the time of her marriage to Sidney Webb in 1892. The second volume, “Our Partnership,” also edited by the author, took the story up to 1912; and the next, compiled from diaries she left at her death, covered the years 1912-1924. This latest—and last—volume continues the chronicle until 1932. when the Webbs left England to visit the U.S.S.R. Although the diaries, continuously kept since the 1870’s, end only ten days before her death in 1943, it is not proposed to publish more of them, since the last part of the Webb’s joint life was spent in retirement, occupied mainly with the writing of their monumental book “Soviet Communism” and in controversy connected wi.h it. . It has been recognised since their first appearance that Beatrice Webbs diaries are as valuable as social and political history as for what they reveal of the personal life of one of the most shrewd and intelligent women (or perhaps one should say Bluestockings?) of her time This latest volume begins with the formation of the first Labour Government, and contains several penetrating portraits of its leading figures and many enlightening comments on the difficulties and problems—great and small;— of the Labour Party’s first experience of office: “I must do all that an old woman can do,” confides Beatrice to her diary, “to keep its manners simpie and unassuming and free front that ridiculous malady of social climbing. So Beatrice worked hard at the social side of the first Labour Government while Sidney was occupied m office at the Board of Trade. In 1926. she is to be found commenting on the General Strike—with too little sympathy for the strikers’ emotions, according to Margaret Cole. (Mrs Webb remained always the calmly rational aristocratic socialist theoretician, with £ 10 M ® year of private income and three doctorates far removed from the actdS irrational feelings of the proletariat.) From 1929-1931 her diaries are again a commentary on the political scene and Labour’s second term of But after the defection of Ramsay Macdonald and the partial collapse of the party, her interest turns more and more to the Soviet Union, and by early 1932 she is describing the forthcoming visit to Russia as a pilgrimage to Mecca.” The mistakes the Webbs made about ‘heir Communis I Mecca are of great mte r ® s ‘- they were mistakes made by so many o? their period. Mrs Webb’s personal favourable bias came partly from the fact that the Soviet constitution apneared to bear out the Webbs’ own “Constitution of a Socialist Common wealth”; it “supplies a soul to that conception of government—which our paper constitution lacked ; P?, rtl y also from her puritan nature — Communists are expected . . . not to waste energy, time or health on sex food .or drink. The exact opposite of the U. H Lawrence cult of sex which I hapoen to detest.” Several interesting passages occur in the diaries on her feeling that religion is necessary, in spite of the fact that she finds it impossible to believe m the Christian religion. It therefore comes as no surprise when at the end of the book she thinks she finds the required religion in Communism. At any rate the study of Communism brought much happi- ! ness to the indefatigable partnership, i The diary ends: “In spite of our old ! age, Sidney and I have had a delightful time together since he left office, j and studies and thoughts about Russian Communism have added to the i zest of our honeymoon compamonI ship.” -