War, it has been asserted, stimulates the development of public welfare. Increased physical and social mobility, fostered by wartime conditions, exposes social inequalities and injustices, gives rise to demands for redress and thereby encourages government to introduce social reforms. This argument implies that, in order to maintain national solidarity in the face of a common enemy, central government becomes more sensitive to external political demands and thereby more – rather than less – responsive to democratic pressure. Certainly, during the First World War, it is possible to see increased state involvement in a number of initiatives designed to effect social improvement. This article examines one of them. It aims to analyse the role of central government in stimulating the development of private industrial welfare in Britain during this period. However, as will be shown below, the growth of industrial welfare – especially in the latter part of the war – was not designed to further industrial democracy. Rather,the form it took implicitly placed new constraints on the right of organised labour to demand improvements in working conditions. Although outwardly the industrial welfare movement sponsored by government seemed to win benefits for the working man, the use of scientific method to legitimate these improvements did not imply an increase in the power of organised labour to determine working conditions.

On 26 June 1740 the “very beautiful and sumptuous” Town Court or Guildhall of Newcastle upon Tyne was systematically wrecked by a crowd of angry townspeople, keelmen and local ironworkers, who smashed the woodwork and windows, tore the paintings, and ransacked the archives and treasury. Contemporary observers were stunned by this unprecedented orgy of destruction, because the campaign of intermittent and fairly orderly protests against the high price of grain which had preceded the 26th had not prepared them for the scale and ferocity of the assault on the corporation's most ostentatious monument to its wealth and authority. The outbreak of popular violence confirmed some people's suspicions that “respectable” grievances served only as a pretext for the mob's brutish desire to loot and plunder: to others it vindicated the traditional argument that it was not only unjust but also unwise “to provoke the necessitous, in times of scarcity, into extremities, that must involve themselves, and all the neighbourhood in ruin”.