Seebohm rowntree biography of christopher

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Though he remained largely aloof from local Quaker concerns, his Quaker convictions remained as a strong influence on his work. The first of these was particularly congenial to Seebohm, for he found the question of personal relationships in industry an absorbing one, as demonstrated in his The Human Needs of Labour (1919; revised and enlarged 1937), The Human Factor in Business (1921, 3rd ed.

His contention that a cooperative work-force could be achieved only if each worker had ‘a reasonable share with the employer in determining the conditions of work, and an interest in the prosperity of the industry in which he is engaged’ (Industrial Unrest, p. He was educated at the York Quaker Boarding School and Owen College, Manchester.

In 1897 Rowntree was appointed as a director of his father's successful business in York.

Primary poverty, he argued, was where the family lacked the earnings sufficient to obtain even the minimum necessities, whereas families suffering from secondary poverty, had earnings that were sufficient, but were spending some of that money on other things. In The Human Factor in Business (1921), Seebohm urged employers to abandon their preferred style of autocratic management in industry.

In 1907 he met David Lloyd George (1863-1945), then President of the Board of Trade, and had a considerable influence on Lloyd George`s legislation on Old Age Pensions and National Insurance.

During the First World War he was Welfare Director of the Ministry of Munitions.

His report, The Land, published in 1913, argued that an increase in small landholdings would make agriculture more efficient and productive. On marketing, the board inherited a Quaker belief that if the quality of a product was good, this should be sufficient to persuade people to buy it. Working closely with his father, Joseph Rowntree, Seebohm introduced a series of reforms at his own company.

He was born in York, the son of the Quaker chocolate manufacturer Joseph Rowntree (1835-1925), and was educated at Bootham School, York, a Quaker establishment, and at what became the University of Manchester, where he studied chemistry.

He was appointed a director of the family company in 1897, and applied his chemical knowledge to the development of chocolate-manufacturing processes, while taking some responsibility for the development of the model community at New Earswick, alongside the chocolate factory.

He also pointed out that in the 1930s the main cause of poverty was unemployment, whereas in the 1890s it had been low wages. In Poverty and the Welfare State, Rowntree argued that the measures introduced by the Labour Government between 1945 and 1951 were dealing successfully with the worst aspects of poverty that he had recorded in his earlier studies.

David Lloyd George, President of the Board of Trade, met Rowntree in 1907 and the two became close friends. While, for example, sales between 1918 and 1920 had risen by an encouraging 70 per cent, manufacturing wages had risen by 292 per cent.

The problems of management and marketing

Two perennial problems were management and marketing.

9.

The above biography is a slightly edited version of a biography drawn from The Biographical Dictionary of British Quakers in Commerce and Industry 1775-1920, by Edward H Milligan, published by the Sessions Book Trust, York, England in 2007  (ISBN 978-1-85072-367-7). Whereas some of these were "useful", others, like spending on alcohol, was "wasteful".

Rowntree's study provided a wealth of statistical data on wages, hours of work, nutritional needs, food consumed, health and housing.

According to an obituary in The Friend, he was privately cremated.

Writings

Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: a Study of Town Life (Macmillan, 1901); Betting and Gambling: a National Evil (Macmillan, 1905); Land and Labour: Lessons from Belgium (Macmillan, 1910); with Bruno Lasker, Unemployment: a Social Study (Macmillan, 1911); with May Kendall, How the Labourer Lives: a Study of the Rural Labour Problem (Thomas Nelson, 1913); The Human Needs of Labour (Thomas Nelson, 1919); The Human Factor in Business (Longmans, 1921); Society and Human Relations (Olaf Hodgkin, 1924); Poverty and Progress: a Second Social Survey of York (Longmans, 1941); Portrait of a City’s Housing: being the Results of a Detailed Survey in the City of York 1935-9 (Faber & Faber, 1945); with GR Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State: a Third Social Survey of York (Longmans, 1951); with GR Lavers, English Life and Leisure: a Social Study (Longmans, 1951).

Reference

1) Asa Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action: a Study of the Work of Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (Longmans, 1961), p.

In Progress and Poverty (1941), Rowntree argued that the city had experienced a fifty per cent reduction in poverty since his first study. Slowly, the board came to terms with the fact that (for example) packaging and easily-remembered brand names were essential as marketing techniques. The book illustrated the failings of the capitalist system and argued that new measures were needed to overcome the problems of unemployment, old-age and ill-health.

Rowntree, a strong supporter of the Liberal Party, hoped that the conclusions that he had drawn from his study would be adopted as party policy.