Two debates at one social gathering caught my ear this week. One was about how taking aspirin — the manufacture and mass marketing of which at the end of the 19th century marked the beginning of the modern pharmaceutical industry — can reduce the risk of dying from cancer by 25 per cent; the other was about the birth of the welfare state and whether we have now become too dependent on it.

Both discussions have strong Oxford and Oxfordshire connections. In 1760, the Rev Edward Stone, the Vicar of Chipping Norton, was the first person to write that the bark of the white willow (from which aspirin is synthesised) eased fever and headache; and William Beveridge (1879-1963), was Master of University College, Oxford, during the 1940s when he produced his Beveridge Report (more properly called the Social Insurance and Allied Service Report, 1942) which led to the foundation of the post-war welfare state, including the National Health Service.

He left Oxford in 1944 to become Liberal MP for Berwick-upon- Tweed. Later he became leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords as the first (and last) Baron Beveridge of Tuggall. His portrait, by Allan Gwynne-Jones, still hangs in the hall of the college.

He was born in India, the second son of a district sessions judge in the Indian Civil Service, and was educated at Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a first in Classics. After an unhappy spell as a barrister — during which, however, he obtained a prize fellowship from University College — he became, much against his parents’ will, sub-warden of Toynbee Hall, that powerhouse of social reform in the east end of London which had opened in 1884 with the aim of bringing some of the most privileged — the future elite — into direct contact with some of the poorest people in the land.

Balliol is still listed as one of its funders, and it was here, incidentally, that the Workers Education Association (WEA), now the largest provider of adult education in UK, was born in 1903.

At Toynbee Hall, Beveridge worked closely with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and attacking unemployment by campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.

For 18 years he was director of the London School of Economics, but he left there in 1937 to come to University College, Oxford. When war broke out, the Churchill government gave him the apparently unglamorous brief of inquiring into the co-ordination of social services. Yet it was from this that he earned his reputation as the harbinger of a new social policy that voters hoped would result in a happier, richer Britain when the war was won.

His report identified five social evils —idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor, and want — and it proposed new benefits financed by the state, the worker, and the employer. It also advocated a health service for all, family allowances and a Government commitment to fight unemployment.

Despite Churchill’s famous reference to a “National insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave”, his government gave the report a cool reception, though it was largely adopted by Attlee’s post-war Labour administration.

Beveridge retired from public life in 1954 and bought a flat in Woodstock Road, Oxford, where he died in 1963. His last words were: “I have a thousand things to do.”

At the age of 63 he had married Jessie Janet Mair who was three years older than him and died in 1959. Perhaps details of his life are relatively obscure because he was one of those people of whom it is often said “he did not suffer fools gladly”. Then there is the undeniable fact that he was a prominent member of the horrible Eugenics Society, which labelled whole groups of people as by nature (not nurture) degenerate and unemployable, and worried about them breeding faster than others.

‘Nature or Nurture”, “Prevention or cure”. Such phrases rang round the table at that social gathering last week. Which brings me back to aspirin. A study of 25,570 patients, overseen by Oxford University’s Prof Peter Rothwell and published in The Lancet, found that almost all us so-called Lucky Generation post-war baby-boomers might benefit from taking a daily dose of 75mg. So there — younger workers will just have to go on paying our pensions for longer!