Jose Harris, who has died aged 82, was the writer of a powerful biography of William Beveridge that established her because the pre-eminent historian of the British welfare state. In that ebook, printed in 1977, simply 14 years after its topic’s demise, she blew aside cherished narratives concerning the architect of the welfare state.
She confirmed that Beveridge’s imaginative and prescient of a common insurance-based system was poles aside from the form of welfare state that Britain really had within the Seventies, which retained a robust means-tested factor. A second version 20 years later gave an enthralling account of Beveridge’s uncommon non-public life, one thing that Jose had been prevented by his stepchildren from exploring totally within the first version.
The strain between non-public life and public service additionally formed the ebook that confirmed her distinction. In Personal Lives, Public Spirit: A Social Historical past of Britain 1870-1914 (1993) she traced a profoundly authentic image of British society in a interval of basic transformation. As with all her work, it revelled within the paradoxes and complexities of the previous. Grounded in an unequalled command of the sources, it was additionally the product of a directing intelligence that makes it one thing of a traditional. It secured her quick election as a fellow of the British Academy.
Born in Bedford, Jose was the one baby of Freda (nee Brown) and Leonard Chambers, an insurance coverage officer. She was educated on the Dame Alice Harpur college within the city, and at Newnham School, Cambridge, the place she graduated in historical past in 1962. She then undertook a PhD on unemployment as an issue in social coverage in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, supervised by Richard Titmuss of the London Faculty of Economics.
After instructing at College School London (1964-66), Jose moved to a analysis fellowship at Nuffield School, Oxford (1966-69). Her curiosity in Beveridge, already central to her PhD, was nurtured by the then warden of Nuffield, Norman Chester, whose early profession had included service as secretary to the Beveridge committee. She then taught for nearly a decade in Titmuss’s division of social administration at LSE. Whereas there she printed her first ebook, Unemployment and Politics (1972), and the biography of Beveridge.
In 1968 she married the authorized thinker James Harris, whose significance in Jose’s mental in addition to private life was incalculable. That they had met as undergraduates at a Christian retreat. Jose admired the inside power by means of which Jim, who had been blind since early childhood, constructed a distinguished educational profession. Jose too had a single-minded dedication that belied a bodily frailty. “All my life folks have tried to cease me doing what I need to do,” she was wont to say; however few succeeded. They had been completely matched in values, mental pursuits and a shared Christian religion, with Jim’s bonhomie a foil to Jose’s depth. That they had one son, Hugh.
Jim was elected to an Oxford fellowship in 1973 and the couple moved to the leafy north of the town. Jose exchanged gardening suggestions with an aged neighbour, Girl O’Malley (the novelist Ann Bridge). Solely a while after her neighbour’s demise did Jose uncover that she was the Mary Sanders who had turned down a proposal of marriage from Beveridge 60 years earlier than. The correspondence between Beveridge and Sanders was one of many new archival finds that enabled Jose to provide the enriched second version of the biography.
In 1978 Jose left LSE to take up a tutorial fellowship at St Catherine’s School, Oxford; solely the second girl fellow. There she was a part of a distinguished crew of historians, however Jose was by no means outshone. Her work more and more explored the interfaces between social and mental historical past. She wrote powerfully for New Society within the Seventies and for the London Assessment of Books within the 80s and 90s. She sounded a sceptical notice about politically impressed manipulations of the previous, akin to “Victorian values” within the Eighties. Correlli Barnett’s The Audit of Warfare, a lot in vogue amongst Thatcherite journalists in that decade, was torn to shreds.
Jose was a frightening however inspirational tutor who made a lifelong impression on her college students. Her technique was to conduct a viva on the weekly essay, on the premise (not often if ever true) that the undergraduate was her mental peer. She deployed to nice benefit the power to stay silent for so long as it took till her query elicited a solution, and unworthy contributions could be overwhelmed again by the blankest of clean appears. She thought punctuality an overrated advantage, and visiting audio system simply stepping into their stride a couple of minutes into an Oxford seminar could be disconcerted to glimpse a slight, darkish determine sliding right into a seat on the again. She may very well be relied on to ask, not the primary, however all the time essentially the most looking query. Her actual exocets had been reserved for senior students.
She was promoted to reader in trendy historical past at Oxford in 1990 and professor in 1996, then to a Leverhulme analysis professorship the next yr. This might need seen the climax of her educational life, however the later years of her profession had been clouded by Jim’s demise from most cancers in 2004. It took Jose a very long time to get well personally from that blow, and he or she by no means produced the foremost final work that many hoped for. She remained, nevertheless, an influential mentor to a number of youthful students.
In retirement she relished the corporate of her two grandchildren, Isabel and James. She took pleasure in her former college students’ careers, however her compliments had been not often easy: “I actually loved your ebook. It was so significantly better than the one I believed you’ll write.”
Hugh and her grandchildren survive her.
