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This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer, Sarah Blackaby, from CSV Action Desk on behalf of Mary Finch and has been added to the site with her permission. Mary Finch fully understands the site's terms and conditions

I was 16, and in 1940 was about to leave my school in Oxford, soon after war was declared. I started work that year for the Oxford Institute of Statistics, which was housed, at that time, at the New Bodleian Library.

The Chairman of the Institute of Statistics was Sir William Beveridge, who later achieved international recognition for his massive report, published in 1944, on Full Employment in a Free Society. This report was a bold visionary plan commissioned by the War-time government, with the aim of abolishing the great social evils of the 1930s in the United Kingdom. It was destined to provide the springboard for the great reforming post war government under Clement Attlee’s premiership. The Beveridge Report named 5 giants on the road to the nation’s reconstruction (Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness). So much of what became known as ‘the Welfare State’, the government’s legislation on health, education, full employment and other matters, had their origins in the Beveridge Report.

My first tasks in joining the Institute was to scan daily newspapers, to cut out items for David Worswick and his fellow economists, who were launching a series of projects on War economics. I was also involved in calculations for making tables for various economists in reports. This work was done on electric calculators (later known as computers!).

It was in a later year that I was asked by William Beveridge to supply some calculations for his 1944 Report.

My work at the Institute of Statistics exempted me from call up for nursing, forces, or land army conscription.

My younger brother, Dick, was trained as a RAF pilot, and he was attached in 1944 to the army, for glider flying with one of the squadrons of the Glider Pilot Regiment. One of his colleagues in the squadron was Jack Finch. It was to Jack that I was married as the war ended. We are both 82 this year, and due to complete 60 years of married life together next year.

In the early months of our friendship, Jack was a familiar figure from his nearby airfield in his Flight Lieutenant’s uniform, peering into the narrow windows of my office in Balliol College, where the Institute was then housed, to see if I was ready for off duty. The wartime diet being then somewhat restricted, our favourite dish at our favourite little tea room, the Racket, was always beans on toast. One of my best friends at the Institute was Kathleen Bathgate, sadly one of the many war widows.

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