Harriett Wilson, Audrey Harvey and Margaret Wynn: poverty, research and social action in 1950–1970s Britain

ABSTRACT

The foundation of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in 1965 is seen as a pivotal moment in the history of British welfare policy heralding a new wave of pressure group activism. Many histories of the organisation focus on the expertise of two of their founder members, Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Towsend. But in foregrounding the role of these academic experts in the early history of CPAG the wider ecosystem of professionals, academics, politicians and activists involved has been overshadowed. This insight this article will argue that contributions to welfare policy and practice can be subsumed in organisational histories, particularly work that is local, smaller scale and practical. Often though not exclusively, women have undertaken such grassroots research and activism. Such work can, and does, contribute to the success of voluntary groups as well as feed into wider intellectual and policy currents. This paper will explore one such case study of this: the crucial but under-documented work of three women campaigners Harriett Wilson, Audrey Harvey and Margaret Wynn. It will illustrate how by combining both intellectually rigorous social research and practical social action they were important both in the formation of CPAG and sociological thinking and practice more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology
• poverty
• social action
• women and grassroots activism

Introduction

It was the annual conference of the British Sociological Association, in Brighton in 1962, that drew together diverse workers in the field of poverty … there was a mood of conspiratorial excitement amongst those of us who were producing empirical evidence of poverty, definitions of poverty, and the links of poverty with health, with performance and with social behaviour.¹

Before 1965 the public, media and politicians assumed poverty had been eradicated in Britain. There had been an assumption that the various social provisions that had been legislated after the Second World War, collectively known as the ‘Welfare State’ meant that poverty had been conquered in Britain. This comfortable assumption was blown apart in the mid-1960s by the ‘rediscovery of poverty’.² This rediscovery was, in part, due to the work of researchers at the LSE who used statistical analysis to demonstrate the large number of households living below the poverty line.³ In 1965 Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith published the results of this analysis, The Poor and the Poorest, which argued that 14% of the population was living in poverty, and these figures included 2.5 million children.⁴ As Keith Banting argues the ‘poor did not make themselves visible; they were discovered at the bottom of income tables by social scientists’.⁵ Action to address this inequality required it to become a political issue. This was the background to the launch of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in December 1965.

Rodney Lowe has argued that the launch of CPAG ‘blazed the trail for pressure groups in the 1960s’⁶ Townsend and Abel-Smith were key figures in CPAG’s launch and through CPAG, and other new pressure groups, poverty became a key political concern. Banting suggests that the primary initiative behind its formation came from Abel-Smith and Townsend.⁷ Indeed, many of the early histories of CPAG foreground the work of these academic experts. There was, however, a wider ecosystem of professionals, academics, politicians and activists working in this period on poverty, as the opening quotation from Harriett Wilson indicates. There remains much work to be done to inscribe different forms of expertise and experience into the history of poverty research and activism in the 1950s and 1960s. This article will explore one facet of poverty campaigning in this period: the crucial but under-documented work of three women campaigners involved in the formation and development of CPAG, Harriett Wilson, Audrey Harvey and Margaret Wynn.

Histories of campaigns against poverty

The 1950s saw an upsurge in concern about poverty in Britain but poverty research and activism has a long heritage. The nineteenth century saw a several significant pieces of survey-based work to establish poverty levels and map poverty such as those of Seebohm Rowntree, Charles Booth and A.L. Bowley.⁸ These early applied sociologists, as John Cooper outlines, were businesspeople who came from outside the academic elite but whose surveys were original in defining ideas such as the ‘poverty line’ and minimum standards, concepts that would be revisited many times.⁹ As Jane Lewis has traced, social action was prevalent amongst late-Victorian and Edwardian women of a certain class. These reformers saw it variously as a moral duty, an obligation of citizenship, a means of achieving social change and, in some cases, most notably Beatrice Webb, part of a vision of a more socialist collectivist society.¹⁰ Some of these women followed a more sociological and investigative agenda, others such as women Poor Law Guardians, saw social action as practice to alleviate the conditions of the poor.¹¹ Many, but by no means all, of these sociological forebears sought to both investigate and make moral judgements about the lives of those in poverty.¹² Not all these social reformers were middle-class, and many women from the Labour party and organisations such as the Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG) advocated reform on behalf of their communities.¹³ Others used the voices and experiences of the poor to evidence and campaign against the structural conditions causing poverty and argue for the need for material support rather than admonition. Important amongst these were publications such as Maud Pember Reeves Round about a Pound a Week (1913), Margaret Llewellyn Davies, General Secretary of the WCG 1889-1921, Maternity: Letters from Working-Class Women (1915) and Margery Spring Rice Working-Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions (1939).

There is a long literature on poverty research and activism. The launch of CPAG and the revelation of much more poverty in Britain than expected, despite welfare measures, are important facets of many of these studies.¹⁴ There are also important biographical works on some of the key individuals involved in poverty research and campaigning.¹⁵ Finally, there are various accounts of the specific work of CPAG, including an important series of Witness Seminars, much of which considers the key political interventions made by the group.¹⁶ But, other than some more recent scholarship, the focus of much work is on university academic knowledge, professionals and the interaction of organisations with the high politics of Westminster and Whitehall.¹⁷ This can elide those whose experience, methods and activism sit outside these networks.

Heidi Egginton and Zoe Thomas have recently reminded us that women have had a precarious purchase on being professionals in the twentieth century and they ask did ‘the gendered experience of precariousness ever provide a foundation for practical innovations, political action or forms of cultural authority which may have been sidelined in later histories?’¹⁸ This is an insight that speaks to Ann Oakley’s recent work, which seeks to explore the erasure of women in social welfare formation.¹⁹ As she argues at the end of Women, Peace and Welfare five strategies cause a general ‘amnesia about the lives and labours of women reformers’ one of which she describes as using the term ‘social worker’ to imply that women’s work is small scale, local and practical rather than the ‘culturally valued work of thinking, analysing and theorizing’.²⁰ She argues that the privileging of the intellectual over the practical and science over care has led to overlooking women’s role in social reform.²¹ For Oakley, righting this omission requires a return to the original accounts and evidence rather than reliance on histories of social policy and the welfare state.²² These insights are richly illustrated in the work of the women examined in this paper.

Wilson, Harvey and Wynn: poverty activism in the 1950s and 1960s

Wilson, Harvey and Wynn were all associated with CPAG’s formation and early years. They did not have close personal relationships, nor did they formally collaborate beyond the early years of CPAG. But in these few years their lives intersected as they developed their research, contributed to public and professional debates and cooperated in the founding of CPAG.²³ There are also some interesting similarities in their biographies. They each had expertise in the way welfare policy was translated in practice in daily welfare involvements, were well published, made interventions in researching and theorising issues of poverty and they all had long careers in social research and activism. Their work also speaks to longer traditions of women’s grassroots welfare advocacy and activism. They worked in long-established voluntary organisations and used the experiences of the poor as evidence to campaign for social reform. By using Wilson, Harvey and Wynn as a frame through which to view this period of poverty campaigning we can offer a broader account of research and activism in these decades. As well as noting the importance to their work in the 1950s and 1960s of a longer history of women’s social reform activism.

Harriett Wilson (1916--2002) was a single-parent refugee from an affluent but impoverished German family. Her parents’ divorce and business losses during German inflationary crisis in 1923 forced her to leave school at 16. She married the son of Jewish family friend, Harro Veit Simon, at the age of 18 and they fled to Spain. The marriage was not a success and they divorced in 1938 and she then moved to the UK with her son John Veit Wilson.²⁴ She worked in a shop in Cambridge, continued her secondary education by correspondence course, and gained a place to study sociology at the L.S.E. and then a PhD from the University of Wales in Cardiff.²⁵ The only one of these three women to have formal sociological training, she retained a strong sense of the world of the poor. As her son recalled: ‘Her sociology degree and PhD followed, but it was not until her second marriage in 1946 that she escaped the poverty of the low paid … Her own experiences deeply affected the respect she always had for families struggling in adversity’.²⁶ She married in 1946 and had two further children.

Wilson’s research work at Cardiff University, and subsequently Birmingham University after 1966, focussed on family poverty. A number of published papers and her book, Delinquency and Child Neglect (1962) argued that child delinquency was a family problem not a child one and that for many families adverse economic circumstances were a key consideration and preventive measures such as nursery schools and a unified ‘family advisor’ were needed to be addressed first.²⁷ This research project also spurred her to set up a nursery school, the Ely Play Centre, in Cardiff. Appalled by the conditions in which many children of large low-income families lived she sought to undertake practical action to alleviate this. In 1960, with support from local Quakers, the nursery was founded. This project operated not just as a childcare facility but offered many services and was responsive to the needs of families offering a minibus pick-up service, spare clothes and shoes as well as health services and speech therapy. She argued that the

children need to be given an opportunity, before reaching school age, to acquire the social skills and, more important, to develop the positive aspects of their personalities, the warm, friendly, co-operative aspects of living which are so under-nourished in their home environment.²⁸

The success of this facility she noted, in the 1990s, was evident in the fact that the service continued, albeit now run by the council.²⁹

Audrey Harvey (1912–1997) was educated at a boarding school and then read English at Oxford. She volunteered for the Citizen’s Advice Bureau in London during the war, and her accounts of the impact of poverty are striking.³⁰ She subsequently became a paid worker in the Poplar CAB between 1955 and 1959, where she was described in the press as a ‘Hampstead housewife, [who] went to work part-time in an East End social service unit’.³¹ She was, frustrated at the inability of CAB workers to offer proper legal advice to the many clients who did not know their rights and were only able to direct them to seek legal advice elsewhere. This led to the twin threads of her career. Firstly, she used the experiences of her clients to highlight the poor housing conditions that many of them experienced, with one of her first articles appearing in the New Statesman in 1957.³² These articles were followed up with a number of Fabian publications, with Casualties of the Welfare State making a significant impact in revealing the dire state of housing and family poverty in the East End of London. But she also advocated a more rights-based activism. Her technical knowledge of the benefit system and legal remedies open to tenants led to Tenants in Danger (1964), a detailed guide to the abuses practiced by private landlords and the redress available to tenants.³³

Margaret Wynn (1913-2010) was the first girl from Barnsley High School to go to Oxford (St Hilda’s, 1931-1935) where she read English.³⁴ Even as a student, she was politically active, writing a letter in the Daily Herald in 1934 about a trip to Russia she had undertaken in 1934 visiting factories and schools.³⁵ She was the honorary secretary of the London Federation of Peace Councils and then assistant secretary of the National Peace Council, speaking on many platforms across the county promoting peace.³⁶ She married civil servant Arthur Wynn in 1938. Arthur’s work improving pit safety led them to live in mining communities where, as a member of the WCG, Margaret’s commitment to the health and welfare of working-class women continued. She recalled:

Childbearing was a woman’s occupational hazard … Women had a level of health which you just cannot believe. During the war I organized a trip with a bus-load of middle-aged women. I asked the driver to stop at the top of the avenue because it was a lovely day and I thought we would walk the quarter mile to the house. These women were not elderly, but they were so infirm that many of them could not have managed it. I had to call the driver back and have them taken to the door. I felt so upset.³⁷

Wynn was combining motherhood and working for the Catholic Housing Association in the early 1960s. What she recognised from this work was there was inadequate support for fatherless families. Moreover, there was insufficient information on both the numbers of these in the UK and comparative services for women bringing up children without a father across Europe. Through dogged research from official sources and case studies, she carefully outlined the difficulties faced by women bringing up children without a father.³⁸ She readily accepted Wilson’s offer to be involved in CPAG and participated in 1965 in meetings to discuss the group’s formation.

These biographical portraits highlight the importance of social action to all these women. Voluntary action, particularly through non-party women’s groups such as the WCG has been recognised as a central thread in women’s campaigns for health and welfare in the decades before the Second World War.³⁹ But as Wilson, Harvey and Wynn illustrate this remained important both for the welfare reformers and for those they sought to support after 1948. It is also, however, important to also see this activism not only as practical support but also as a source of social knowledge that was translated into expertise that could be mobilised in policy formation and political campaigns.

Different kinds of experts

Wilson, Harvey and Wynn were all-important figures in the world of poverty research and campaigning, and well regarded as such during the 1950s and 1960s. However, their relationship with academic and professional research and reform networks was not as straightforward as those who followed more usual paths of qualifications and expertise gained in formal employment.

They were of an earlier generation when there were few academic routes to sociological training within universities. Their routes into social reform, as outlined above, included the well-trodden path of voluntary action. Yet these different pathways allowed them, when it came to the ‘rediscovery of poverty’, to play an important role as experts.

In the 1995 Witness Seminar on the formation of CPAG Wilson reminisced:

I just want to remind people present that in the decade preceding the birth of CPAG, there were already a number of publications in the field of sociology and socio-medical research which contained information about poverty. This was in the 1950s a very new field. Peter Marris (1958) … investigated the circumstances of widows in East London. Virginia Wimperis (1960) in a study of unmarried mothers drew attention to inadequate financial resources. Peter Townsend and Dorothy Wedderburn (1962) … drew attention to the economic circumstances of old people. Margaret Wynn (1964) wrote on fatherless families; and Royston Lambert (1964) drew attention to malnutrition in Britain.⁴⁰

What Wilson reminds us here is that there was a loose, but connected network of social researchers, both within and outside academia working on poverty in this period. This group of researchers incorporated those working at the LSE, including Townsend, Dorthy Wedderburn and Tony Lynes. It also subsequently involved the University of Essex, when in 1963 Townsend moved to take up a new professorship he established a group of scholars which included John Viet Wilson (the son of Harriett), Adrian Sinfield and Dennis Marsden, author of the landmark Mothers Alone. Other research centres included Peter Marris at the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green where he worked with Townsend and completed Widows and their Families (1958). There was also a strong body of research published independently; including the work of Wynn and Harvey, and the social worker Virginia Wimperis’ study The Unmarried Mother and Her Child (1960). All these authors worked independently but were in different ways supported by a network of academics and practitioners with whom they collaborated. The sociological worlds did not operate as separate silos. Researchers benefited from one another’s research and were part of the same campaigning and academic networks. The work of Wilson, Wynn and Harvey, as with others outside the academy, was important to the politicisation of poverty. This paper will be focused on these three women, but as this article will conclude, there is much work still to be done on the different individuals, men and women, with different expertises and experiences, and their contributions to what was an important moment in British society and British sociology.

Harriett Wilson was a trained sociologist but her work, as with Wimperis, dealt with careful interactions over a period of time of those living in poverty. Her first published work, Delinquency and Child Neglect (1962) explored the family life of so called ‘problem families’. The idea of the ‘problem family’ has a long history, and contemporary resonance.⁴¹ Wilson’s work sought to unpick more rigorously what led to families being given this label. She used a sample of cases from children who came before the juvenile courts in ‘Seaport’ and were referred to the local Co-ordination Committee, the Chair of which was the Medical Officer of Health.⁴² As there was no clear definition as to what constituted child neglect Wilson’s selection of families was based on solvency, health and education.⁴³ The families were assessed in terms of their living conditions, use of welfare services, family planning, attitudes to education, and spending patterns, Wilson herself interviewed each family and they were monitored for a period of five years. This was a long study and her ideas developed over the research period. As John Welshman explains, she became increasingly critical of the emphasis placed by social workers on the inability of the parents to make a success of their lives.⁴⁴ Wilson concluded that there were no ‘inherent or ineradicable characteristics of so-called problem families’ and that their problems were ‘symptoms of living on a level below that generally acceptable to the community’.⁴⁵ Moreover, these problems were compounded by social isolation and the ‘inadequacies of social services which do not yet, as a rule, include skilled curative services’.⁴⁶ She concluded that as

knowledge increases about the extremely heterogenous group of people who are at present lumped together under the label of ‘problem families’, we will begin to see their many problems no longer as a threat to our living standards but as a challenge to us as social reformers.⁴⁷

Her observations that there was an insufficiency of social services to support these families led her to set up a pre-school playgroup, encompassing many supports for deprived children, as discussed above. In 1964 SEAC published Poverty in Britain Today on the inadequacy of national assistance benefits and the problems faced by poor families.⁴⁸ Wilson’s work was well regarded and promoted within the sociological community, one of her articles being promoted as about ‘one of the most pressing of all deficiencies in social provision—the plight of large families. Harriet Wilson analyses their relative poverty, their poorer physical attainment—and sets out what should be done’.⁴⁹

Audrey Harvey, as Tony Lynes observed, was ‘a different kind of expert, whose knowledge was based on daily observation of the ways in which social services tried and too often failed to meet the needs of working-class families’.⁵⁰ In this Lynes sought to emphasise that Harvey’s expertise was self-taught and derived from her many years working as a CAB advisor in the East End of London. The cases she had dealt with had given her expertise on social security rules and entitlements, and also on how the implementation of these could have significant consequences for those in need. Her casework also gave her a granular understanding of the lives of poor families and how a combination of poverty, precarious work, lack of understanding of supports available and inadequacy of support can lead to a cycle of decline. In Casualties of the Welfare State, she stated that she had spent the past five years dealing with social problems in the East End of London. She described her clients, many of whom do ‘the dirtiest work of the community’ including working ‘on the lavatories’ in laundries and slaughterhouses.⁵¹ They are people on whom ‘the whole community depends’ but were looked on as ‘second-class citizens’ which was reflected in the quality of services provided for them and the attitudes of those in authority towards them.⁵² She argued against the perception that the state was overly generous and contended that it is ‘harder for the man without private means to get something for nothing than is generally supposed’ and outlined the difficulties the poor can have in getting sanitary housing and adequate benefits.⁵³ She drew all these more abstract problems together in a detailed case study, the Stevens family. By demonstrating the unravelling of a ‘deserving’ family through ill-health, lack of housing and lack of awareness of social support, she concluded the pamphlet by arguing that problems they faced were ones of poverty and inadequate services and that this case was not regarded by the authorities as atypical.⁵⁴

The Guardian reported in detail on Casualties of the Welfare State under the title Welfare State ‘Only in Name’:

The facts she presents illuminate the inadequacy of the National Assistance benefits, the critical shortage of housing, the unfairness of the home-made rules of the local authorities in managing their housing lists, the tragedies of overcrowding and the senselessness of providing such a high proportion of one and two roomed dwellings when it is the large families whose needs are the most desperate … Eviction for non-payment of rent is often the start of a train of disasters, and Mrs Harvey states that what seems to be needed is not skilled case-work which cannot produce the cash … but a relaxing of National Assistance regulations.⁵⁵

Her particular expertise in this area was already well known and she was a regular contributor to The Observer newspaper and The New Statesman. Harvey also collaborated more widely with other poverty experts. Sally Sheard cites articles written in the New Statesmen in 1958 by Townsend and Audrey Harvey who ‘used their interviews with people living in poverty to write some of the most moving accounts of this seemingly invisible section of society’.⁵⁶ She contributed to a 1968 Fabian pamphlet coordinated by Peter Townsend, Social Services for All? and her work evidenced the failure to improve National Assistance scale rates, alongside the work of Peter Townsend and Dorothy Wedderburn.⁵⁷

As with Audrey Harvey, Margaret Wynn was not a trained sociologist. Her first book, Fatherless Families, was galvanised by the period when she was working for the Catholic Housing Association and trying to find housing for fatherless families.⁵⁸ In the acknowledgments to the book she notes this impetus as she states that it was ‘inspired by discussions with mothers, with fatherless children, and with social workers’.⁵⁹ She gathered evidence from a range of voluntary bodies including Barnado’s, National Children’s Homes and the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child, from academics in Britain and Europe and individual social researchers, including Wimperis and Harvey. The importance of this book is reflected in the fact that even today it is used as a source for enumerating the numbers of separated and divorced wives.⁶⁰ The book carefully sets out the numbers of families without fathers, the consequent poverty experienced by these families, their social and legal rights, available childcare supports and the need to keep these families together. Its underlying strong argument is that the needs of the fatherless family must be included in policy and that is practical support that is needed to prevent the potentially damaging consequences to children of being brought up without a father. As Thane and Evans note, there are contradictions in her approach, as she did not focus on unmarried mothers, believing there was already a lot of work in this area, despite her own finding that 35% of mothers claiming National Assistance were unmarried mothers.⁶¹ She proposed a range of new measures to alleviate the poverty of fatherless families including a Fatherless Child Allowance, employment training, nurseries and more flexible income limits for National Assistance benefits. She also suggested that the government should guarantee maintenance payments, which would then be collected and distributed by the Inland Revenue.⁶² Drawing on her years of pre-war campaigning with grassroots organisations she promoted this work at numerous meetings of the local church and women’s groups. From this, she received positive publicity from both national (Daily Herald, Sunday Mirror and The People) and local (Aberdeen Evening Express, Coventry Evening Telegraph, Sevenoaks Chronicle) press.

Changing policies to address poverty was, as Keith Banting observes, a formidable task, both because of the lack of recognition of the problem but also the entrenched view that poverty was a result of personal failure and fecklessness rather than material need.⁶³ The important work of Townsend and Abel-Smith was one dimension of demonstrating the extent of poverty, but so was the work of Wilson, Harvey and Wynn. What these women were seeing, through their practical social work and research, were gaps in the welfare state and the people and places where need was not being met. But more than this they were graphically illustrating this for a wider audience. Their work made an impact and established them as experts within the burgeoning, and increasingly influential, field of poverty research during these decades.

Experiences that influenced change in social work practice and public attitudes.

David Donnison described the early CPAG, rather than CPAG in later years, as being essentially Fabian

highly metropolitan, very London centred, and professional both in the best sense of that term and in the elitist sense, developed by people who were marvellous at talking with politicians, to civil servants in the Reform Club … but much less likely to be mobilising the poor themselves … or working with grass-root groups.⁶⁴

Titmuss, Townsend and Abel-Smith had such Fabian ties. They all had close links to the Labour party, having sat on the party’s study group, drafted proposals for National Superannuation in the 1950s, and continued to advise on social policy.⁶⁵ But as Banting suggests this approach did not gain sufficient attention and what was required was a more dramatic effort. And thus the CPAG was launched.⁶⁶ It was those working with the grassroots, such as Wilson, Harvey and Wynn, who were able to add a new, and powerful experiential dimension to this more public-facing campaign.

Harriett Wilson was the driving force behind the formation of CPAG. She was involved with the Quakers at a national level, sitting on the Friends Social and Economic Affairs Committee (SEAC). It was this involvement alongside her drive for practical action that led her to seek to form an organisation that would campaign for policy change, this was to become CPAG. Reflecting in 1995 Wilson stated:

Our disappointment was great when we found no mention of legislative provisions in aid of family poverty in the Queen’s speech. … it was decided to hold a meeting at Toynbee Hall, East London, whose Warden at that time was Walter Birmingham, also a Quaker. We sent out invitations to a number of persons who were working in various occupations that brought them into contact with poverty.⁶⁷

Whilst she used the term ‘we’ in fact a lot of the effort was hers. As a senior Quaker figure, Richard Allen, recollected, ‘she was deeply concerned about child poverty and the SEAC supported the first meeting, but it was Harriett who had practically all the necessary contacts’.⁶⁸ Archival letters testify to the networking and persuasion she used to set up the first meetings. Wynn and Harvey were both early, and enthusiastic recruits.⁶⁹ Albeit, that there were differences in their research and policy priorities. Wilson remarked to Wynn in early 1965 that she would be interested in her views on family allowances and whether she (Wynn) still saw them of ‘minor importance as a reforming instrument’.⁷⁰ However, it wasn’t just the organising capacity of Wilson that was valuable to CPAG, as these women brought a different type of expertise that would help CPAG fulfil an important political goal, which was to try to change attitudes, both professional and public, towards the poor through the use of detailed, often graphic, and empathetic portraits of those living in poverty.

Debates within the social work profession

The personal social services, as Rodney Lowe discusses, did not fare well from the post-war settlement and their limited resources stifled progressive possibilities.⁷¹ By the late 1950s there were debates, sometimes heated, about the role and training of social workers as the role was professionalising. These were happening in a context, which, as John Welshman has argued, saw the poor blamed for being ‘immature,’ a perspective influenced ‘by the Eugenics Society, along with the psychiatric orientation of the social work profession.’⁷² Earlier forms of social action were inclined to suggest a moral cause for poverty. As Jane Lewis explores in her work on the Charity Organising Society (COS), their social workers emphasised the difference between the deserving and the undeserving poor.⁷³ But increasingly it was being argued, as Richard Titmuss did, that those ‘in receipt of social services should not be pathologised—that is, blamed for their own misfortunes. This happened when too much emphasis was placed on behavioural issues at the expense of the socioeconomic environment’.⁷⁴ Barbara Wootton’s book Social Science and Social Pathology was critical of what she saw as the psychiatric orientation of social work.⁷⁵ This book caused a storm and social workers were upset that she had aligned them with the American psychoanalytical approaches and believed they were more interested in the material needs of their clients.⁷⁶ One issue at the centre of these debates was the casework method. Terry Bamford notes the roots of social casework started with records of visits made by those working for COS which helped them to decide whether a case was one for help or not.⁷⁷ Bamford argues that this was not a psychotherapeutic approach and that there was a balance in recognising the social and economic environment. Wootton critiqued this seeing casework as having ‘a fuzziness of language and the lack of evidence for its efficacy’.⁷⁸

As social researchers working at the grassroots, Wilson, Harvey and Wynn interjected their own experiences of social work practice into these debates. Their work refused to place the blame on the poor for their ‘immaturity’, they wanted a greater emphasis on material issues and were critical of casework. As Wilson reflected in 1993:

I wrote a paper for Case Conference [a journal for social workers and social administrators which was launched in the mid-1950s] in 1959, in which I criticised the assumption that poor people are poor because they are immature. I suggested that we should alter the environment in the first place before trying to treat the condition of ‘immaturity’. It was heavily criticised by Elizabeth Irvine … in which she continued to refer to, and I quote, ‘Spend thrift drunkards’ and ‘men who fling off petulantly to the pub or to the racetrack’.⁷⁹

Concluding her study, Fatherless Families, Wynn remarked that social workers

who are empowered to do little more than attempt to reconcile families to their lot … are unlikely to be very successful. Casework therapy alone cannot make it possible for a family … to stand up to an exceptionally tough social environment.⁸⁰

Between 1980 and 1981 Alan Cohen, a social work academic and practitioner, interviewed some pioneers of social work. He especially probed their views on these debates from the late 1950s. The two figures these interviews reveal as being mostly strongly critical of the profession were Wootton and Harvey.⁸¹

In Casualties of the Welfare State Harvey argued that Joe Steven’s long and fruitless search for work and welfare support for his family was exacerbated by the fact that when ‘interviewed he could not put his true case clearly, and there was no trained worker to do this for him’.⁸² She continued that still more ‘questionable is the tendency of trained case-workers to actually to avoid giving practical help and advice, and to adopt a would-be psychiatric approach. This attitude often results in total remoteness from existing social conditions’.⁸³ As Townsend recalled she wrote in 1968 that ‘families in difficulty rarely require “solemn amateur psychiatry” and often require material help—for example, just plain cash as a loan’.⁸⁴ Even in the 1980s, these debates aroused strong feelings, with some especially critical of Harvey, as Cohen’s interviews illustrate. But, others were more nuanced, seeing something in the criticism of social work by Wootton and Harvey. Clare Winnicott responded that we

have to be advocates on behalf of our clients who haven’t got access to public voices or eminences who can put their case. They haven’t and we often have to be advocates. I can see her point, that’s the trouble. We could easily get bogged down in the detail of the family dynamics of the individual and lose sight of the structure. I feel so strongly that the two things have to go together.⁸⁵

These debates were complicated by politics and disciplinary divides at a time of changing understandings and expectations of the welfare state. There were those in the social work profession who recognised the structural issues, for instance in 1970 Case Con a radical social work magazine was launched which challenged the pseudo-science of casework and argued for the need to locate the client’s problems in the wider social and economic context.⁸⁶ From the perspective of the 1950s the importance of the work of Wilson, Harvey and Wynn was to interject a granular knowledge into these debates, a perspective that fed into the evolution of the social work profession.

Media and public attitudes to poverty

One central problem for poverty campaigners in these years were the entrenched attitudes of the public towards to poor. The work of activist reformers such as Wilson, Harvey and Wynn went some way to building awareness and empathy, as each of them made concerted efforts to publicise their findings. Margaret Wynn engaged in a tour of speaking engagements across the country at women’s groups, gaining much exposure in the local press. Thus Fatherless Families made an especial splash. It was praised for its rigour ‘strictly factual, unsentimental, authoritative; it is documented, statistics-filled, convincing; deeply disturbing as a result’.⁸⁷ But the reviews also emphasised its revelatory aspect: ‘Its pages reveal a shadowed area we may have hardly suspected. It is hard to believe that any thoughtful reader will turn its final pages without a resolve to translate kindled emotion into some form of practicality’.⁸⁸ As Lena Jeger [Labour MP] argued ‘all those who think that in this welfare, post-Beveridge age, all is different and that poor children are anachronistic accidents should read [Margaret Wynn’s Fatherless Families]’⁸⁹ Its emotional power also lay in the descriptions of poverty as she reported on one case: ‘Mum is half fed, half clothed and half herself, and the whole house is threadbare from top to bottom’.⁹⁰

Harriett Wilson’s work was reviewed extensively, and The Birmingham Daily Post saw her work as a ‘comprehensive and searching study’ which makes the strong point that it is those who are least able to cope with difficulties and ‘by virtue of their poor earning power [are faced] with having to run their homes and raise their family at bare subsistence level’.⁹¹ Harvey’s work also made a stir. A Guardian review of Casualties of the Welfare State indicated the impact her work had in revealing the extent of poverty:

In our affluent and prospering society there is still a considerable, yet comfortably hidden, minority who live in conditions of extreme poverty and acute distress and who, for all the organisation of the social and welfare services, cannot receive the help they need, the welfare state is a reality only in name.⁹²

In a political challenge to Labour, the Guardian noted that Social Services for all? contained a passionate outburst by Mrs. Audrey Harvey, social worker and journalist ‘on the present fashion for selectivity … No Labour Government … unless positively bent on suicide, can afford to forget that means-tested benefits can never reach more than a small proportion of the poor’.⁹³ Harvey was described by Lynes as being ‘unorthodox at the time’ for the way she used her clients’ experiences in a series of influential articles. ‘One of her earliest journalistic efforts was an article in the New Statesman in 1957, on the treatment of homeless families’.⁹⁴ Another case reported in the Guardian in 1962 described two thugs dragging women from their basement onto the pavement whose landlords wanted to evict them without recourse to bailiffs. Harvey described tenants having their gas cut off, house locked and of ‘terrifying things unknown to the public’.⁹⁵ It was such graphic descriptions of the inexorable results of poor wages and poor social supports that brought the reality of poverty home to a wider public. The importance of such testimony to CPAG’s campaigning is illustrated in the fact that in December 1966 the first issue of the Group’s magazine, Poverty, focussed on one of Harvey’s cases, a family struggling to make ends meet at Christmas.⁹⁶

Importantly, their work provided evidence of these issues for the public through the broadcast media. Wilson’s study was rich in detailed case studies, often drawn from her own observations and interviews, which formed not only her policy solutions but also used to expose the realities of poverty to the wider public. At the launch of CPAG the BBC interviewed Brian Abel-Smith and Harriett Wilson, and it was Wilson who provided the granular account of the problems of poverty, quoting a ‘pick-and -shovel labourer’ with six children. Giving a detailed account of his wages and outgoings she outlined how:

Struggling to make do on this ‘totally inadequate’ amount could not but affect the health of parents and children … They would come to school always tired because the family had to sleep several to a bed and there were not enough blankets in winter.⁹⁷

However, she was quick to point out that it was the inadequacies in the system rather than the parents who were to blame.⁹⁸ Wynn’s policy idea of a Fatherless Family Allowance was picked up by the BBC’s Woman’s Hour programme, and the Guardian suggested that if it should pass into law it should rank the BBC as one of its earliest sponsors.⁹⁹ The most impactful was Cathy Come Home. This BBC documentary-drama, directed by Ken Loach, first broadcast in 1966 was a television play about homelessness. Audrey Harvey collaborated with the playwright Jeremy Sandford and her granular knowledge of these issues gave an authenticity to the script. It continues to be cited as a pivotal moment when a piece of cultural work acted as a catalyst for changes in public attitudes and calls for public action.¹⁰⁰

This period saw challenges to these stereotypes of the poor as ‘feckless’, revealed the real material difficulties of living in poverty and garnered sympathy rather than condemnation of the poor. The work of Wilson, Harvey and Wynn was part of this effort to challenge both professional and public audiences in terms of attitudes and new policy.

Wilson, Harvey and Wynn: social research and action in the 1970s

CPAG, whilst still a relatively small organisation in the 1970s retained its ability to make a political impact, with some major successes such as the establishment of child benefit, and some political controversy such as the publication ‘the poor get poorer under Labour’.¹⁰¹ Much of CPAG’s daily work revolved around the improvement of the material circumstances of the poor through the campaign for improved family allowances (later Child Benefit), increased take-up of benefits amongst those entitled, and attacking policies that would increase poverty such as the ‘wage stop’ and the 1972 Housing Finance Act.¹⁰² This was important work but did not entirely align with the priorities of Wilson, Harvey and Wynn.

As discussed above, Wilson was the driving force behind the setting up of CPAG. And she remained deeply involved in the management of the group.¹⁰³ She was secretary and then vice-Chair of CPAG between 1965 and 1981 and whilst her contribution to the group might not be publicly acknowledged she was an important figure. Frank Field reflected that she ‘brought idealism and practicality to the group’s deliberations’.¹⁰⁴ And Alan Walker stated that she:

was not anonymous but she was low-key … When she spoke, she spoke with authority. Harriett will have been one of those people who was interested in a broader, family-based perspective … [she] was tremendously supportive behind the scenes. If there was a criticism in the room, she would act to suppress it. I think she was a really important member of the Executive, even though she does not appear in the written version.¹⁰⁵

She remained an important sociological figure. Whilst at Birmingham University she co-authored with Geoffrey Herbert Parents and Children in the Inner City which Frank Field argued ‘provided one of the most sensitive explorations we have of the impact of poverty on child-rearing practices, illuminating, with deep understanding, the ways in which parenting can be undermined by the stress caused by poverty.’¹⁰⁶ Bob Holman remarked that in the 1970s she.

challenged Sir Keith Joseph’s cycle of deprivation thesis, which held that the inadequate habits of deprived parents led to the next generation of problem families. Drawing on her own research, she demonstrated that any public interventions to improve parenting should be accompanied by simultaneous action to take them out of the poverty that undermined their efforts to be capable parents. Her message is still needed today.¹⁰⁷

Whilst being involved in the founding of the group, Margaret Wynn chose not to work formally with CPAG. She was present at the meetings organising the launch of CPAG and she certainly saw herself as a significant figure in CPAG. As she wrote to Fran Bennett in the 21st anniversary year ‘I certainly think a letter from the golden oldies of the poverty rediscovery in 1965 would be of interest.¹⁰⁸ But, as David Donnison recalled, her priorities did move away from those of CPAG

I think the departure of Margaret Wynn many be worth further explanation. She told me at the time that one of her main reasons for her parting company with her colleagues was that she wanted a movement concerned with the family, not with poverty.¹⁰⁹

Wynn continued to publish widely on the family and family policy. Ruth Lister, the Director of CPAG, writing in the Guardian in 1983 described family policy as the redistribution of national wealth in favour of children and that Wynn’s book Family Policy was the seminal work on this.¹¹⁰ In Family Policy (1970) she argued that children were a good investment for the nation but that the cost of raising children mean that most were raised in families that did not achieve a modest standard of living. Yet, she contended, this was unfair as parents contributed more tax and NI than they got out of social benefits and income tax allowances were raised for couples over 65 not families with dependent children. Her other major contribution, as Frank Field outlined, was ‘to question whether the living standards of families were adequate for their needs’ and to argue that Rowntree’s poverty line did not take full account of the needs of women and children.¹¹¹ This, Field contends, was a watershed as it changed CPAGs emphasis from poverty to a family lobby up until 1980.¹¹² Fatherless Families and Family Policy gave her the status of an expert and she was invited to give evidence to the Committee on One-Parent Families, 1969-74, chaired by the Hon. Morris Finer was set up by Richard Crossman, then Secretary of State for Social Services to consider the problems of one parent families. Wynn also retained an activist bent. In the 1970s she joined the executive committee of the National Birthday Trust working with policy makers, scientists and mothers of all classes an organisation that she had long-standing associations with.¹¹³ In 1980 she was the inspiration behind the foundation of the Maternity Alliance, an organisation set up with the support of CPAG.¹¹⁴ In 1997, she co-edited with the Maternity Alliance, Mother Courage, a campaigning volume that used the experiences of mothers living in poverty to argue for increases in child benefits and better childcare provision. A book modelled on the earlier Women’s Co-operative Guild publication, Maternity, and asked the question of why 80 years later women still faced issues of poverty.

Both Wilson and Wynn moved away from CPAG’s day-to-day activities because their priorities lay beyond the scope of the Group, but they remained supportive and influential. Harvey’s trajectory was somewhat different. She was involved in the Group in its early years, sitting on its executive committee. As Frank Field recalls it was Harvey who was the final person consulted on his appointment.¹¹⁵ And CPAG’s development aligned well with Harvey’s priorities. Tony Lynes had steered the group towards undertaking tribunal work and this led CPAG to develop a Citizens Rights Office and a Legal department. Audrey Harvey was appointed the first director of CPAG’s Citizens Rights Office in 1969. The CRO met a clear demand and was quickly very busy. As Harvey reported:

On average we are getting between 40 and 50 enquiries a week …  … It may be of interest that in more difficult cases most of our clients have already consulted a CAB and some have been referred on to lawyers whom they did not find satisfactory … We have only been operating fully since mid-October and yet we are already hard put to deal properly with the queries put to us.¹¹⁶

There was clearly a demand for this service, but for a small group such as CPAG it was unsustainable. In the end CPAG focussed on welfare rights advice and training for the professionals providing this service for social workers and welfare rights advisors, alongside examples for legal test cases which came to them through enquiries and from branches. Harvey left to join Shelter, which allowed her to ‘set up a private agency for extreme or exceptional homelessness cases on which she could use her recognized talent for swift troubleshooting’.¹¹⁷ She qualified as a lay advocate and spent the last decades of her life campaigning on issues of housing legal rights. Both as an advocate for local authority tenants in county court eviction forums, offering advice on the rights of old people in nursing homes, on tied cottages, rent arrears and in the 1990s on problems arising from the implementation of Child Support Act (1991). She remained committed to the importance of lived experience as a qualification for advocates for the poor, ‘the most valuable qualification for a lay advocate is one which no lawyer is likely to possess: personal experience of unemployment and social insecurity, plus what it is like to live in a substandard council flat’.¹¹⁸

Conclusion

The years between 1948 and 1965 were ones of transition as gaps in the new welfare structures, and the continuities of old prejudices and practices left a segment of the poor behind. During the 1950s and 1960s, those who sought to provide evidence of the need for better treatment of the poor were finally beginning to make progress and the foundation of CPAG at the end of this period continues to be celebrated for its role in politicising poverty. It was a wide-ranging and evolving group and, as this article argues, Wilson, Harvey and Wynn were important in these early years. Recentring them within the history of CPAG and poverty activism is a reminder that pressure groups such as CPAG are more complex than their elite Fabian reputations.

In an era of poverty research which was lauded for top-down large-scale statistical surveys, Wilson, Wynn and Harvey had careers spent in practical social action, sociologically focussed research and campaigning grounded in the real lives of the poor. Their work not only illustrated the depth and intractable nature of poverty but offered a challenge to those who sought to blame the poor for their own circumstances. Their mix of practical expertise and experiences derived from the grassroots, alongside their energy and committed activism, demonstrably helped get CPAG started and give a sharp focus to the public message of the intractable nature of poverty from the perspective of the poor. This made a difference in the early years of CPAG.

There is still much research to be done on this social moment and we need a more comprehensive appreciation of the mix of methodologies and approaches being adopted, particularly those being undertaken outside the ‘elite’ university structures. Given the precarious place on the record of the work of these women I would argue that a focus on practical experience and welfare expertise grounded in the grassroots is an important starting place for revising and expanding our understanding of this key historical moment.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Davidson

Dr Ruth Davidson is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Mile End Institute, School of History, Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on women’s social activism, welfare policy and politics in twentieth century Britain. She is currently a core member of the Project Steering Committee for an AHRC funded project Agency and Advocacy: Locating Women’s Grassroots Activism in England and Ireland, 1918 to the present. She is co-editor Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: experiences, expertise and activism (Palgrave Macmillan, in press, 2024).

Notes

1 Rodney Lowe and Paul Nicholson, ‘The Formation of the Child Poverty Action Group’, Contemporary Record 9, no. 3 (1995): 613.

2 Nicholas Timmins notes that this assumption was based, in part, on the results of a 1950s poverty survey in York undertaken by Seebohm Rowntree. Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State New Edition (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 254–5.

3 For overview of methodology used by Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith see: Howard Glennerster, British Social Policy Since 1945. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000), 105–9.

4 Timmins, The Five Giants, 255.

5 Keith G. Banting, Poverty, Politics and Policy (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1979), 68.

6 Rodney Lowe, ‘The Rediscovery of Poverty and the Creation of the Child Poverty Action Group, 1962–68’, Contemporary Record 9, no. 3 (1995): 609.

7 Banting, Poverty, Politics and Policy, 72.

8 For an overview of poverty research in Britain before 1965 see: Ian Gazeley, Poverty in Britain, 1900–65 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); for the specific work of Rowntree, Booth and Bowley see: Gazeley, Poverty in Britain, 22–31.

9 John Cooper, The British Welfare Revolution, 1906–14 (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 10–11.

10 Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Stanford: SUP, 1991), 12–13.

11 Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 (Oxford: OUP, 1987), 247–99.

12 Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), Eileen Janes Yeo, ‘The Creation of “Motherhood” and Women’s Responses in Britain and France, 1750–1914’, Women’s History Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 201–8; Seth Koven Slumming: Social and Sexual Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

13 Pat Thane, ‘Visions of Gender in the Making of the British Welfare State: The Case of Women in the British Labour Party and Social Policy, 1906–1950’, in Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s, ed. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (London: Routledge, 1991), 93–118; Ruth Davidson, ‘Working-Class Women Activists: Citizenship at the Local Level’, in Alternatives to State Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Ackers and Alastair Reid (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 93–120.

14 Banting, Poverty, politics and policy; Susanne MacGregor, The Politics of Poverty (Harlow: Longman, 1981); David Donnison, The Politics of Poverty (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982); Gazeley, Poverty in Britain; Lucinda Platt, Discovering Child Poverty: The Creation of a Policy Agenda from 1800 to the Present (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2005); John Welshman, From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion: Policy, Poverty and Parenting (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012).

15 Ann Oakley, A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Sally Sheard The Passionate Economist. How Brian Abel-Smith Shaped Global Health and Social Welfare (Policy Press 2014); John Stewart, Richard Titmuss: A Commitment to Welfare (Bristol: Policy Press, 2020); Lise Butler, Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Chris Renwick, ‘The Family Life of Peter and Ruth Townsend: Social Science and Methods in 1950s and Early 1960s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History 34, no. 4 (2023): 634–56.

16 Frank Field, Poverty and Politics: The Inside Story of the Child Poverty Action Group’s Campaigns in the 1970s (London: Heinemann Educational books, 1982); Michael McCarthy, Campaigning for the Poor: CPAG and the Politics of Welfare (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986); Paul F. Whitely and Stephen J. Winyard, Pressure for the Poor: The Poverty Lobby and Policy Making (London: Methuen, 1987). Witness Seminars: Lowe & Nicholson, ‘The Formation of the Child Poverty Action Group’; Maria Meyer-Kelly and Michael D. Kandiah, The Poor Get Poorer Under Labour’: The Validity & Effects of CPAG’s Campaign in 1970 (London: ICBH, 2003), cpag-1970s.pdf (kcl.ac.uk); Pat Thane and Ruth Davidson The Child Poverty Action Group in the 1970s and 1980s: Witness Seminar (London: ICBH, 2016), cpag1970s80s.pdf (kcl.ac.uk); Pat Thane and Ruth Davidson, eds. The Child Poverty Action Group in the 1990s and 2000s: Witness Seminar (London: ICBH, 2016), cpag-1990s-2000s.pdf (kcl.ac.uk). Accessed 24 January 2024.

17 David Bull, ‘What an Amazing Time to be Involved in This Sort of Politics: Child Poverty Action Group’, in The Unsung Sixties: Memoirs of Social Innovation, ed. Helene Curtis and Mimi Sanderson, (London: Whiting and Birch, 2004); Tanya Evans, ‘Stopping the Poor Getting Poorer: The Establishment and Professionalisation of Poverty NGOs, 1945–1995’, in NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-state actors in Society and Politics Since 1945, ed. Nick Crowson, Matthew Hilton and James McKay (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 147–63; Pat Thane and Ruth Davidson, The Child Poverty Action Group, 1965–2015 (London: CPAG, 2016).

18 Heidi Egginton and Zoë Thomas, Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain (London: Royal Historical Society, Institute of Historical Research, 2021), 3.

19 Ann Oakley, Father and Daughter: Patriarchy, Gender and Social Science (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014); Ann Oakley, Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform 1880–1920 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018); Ann Oakley, Forgotten Wives: How Women Get Written Out of History (Bristol: Policy Press, 2021).

20 Oakley, Women, Peace and Welfare, 348–9.

21 Ibid., 353.

22 Ibid., 354–5.

23 There are records of the correspondence in the months before the founding of CPAG between the three women in the John Veit Wilson papers in the CPAG archive: Harriett Wilson papers: box 1, CPAG/K/14 file 2, Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) Archive. Women’s Library. London School of Economics (LSE). Correspondence on the formation of CPAG undertaken in 1986 between many of the founding members of CPAG on the 21st anniversary of the group can be found at: CPAG/6. CPAG Archive, LSE.

24 Harriett Wilson key publications: Harriett Wilson, Delinquency and Child Neglect: The first Comprehensive Study of a Group of Families Often Referred to as ‘Problem Families’ (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1962); Harriett Wilson, ‘A Nursery School for Culturally Deprived Children’, in Exploration and Innovation in Childcare: Papers read at the 2nd Annual Meeting, 1965, The National Bureau for Co-operation in Childcare (Hove: NBCCC, 1965), 14–21; Harriett Wilson and G.W. Herbert, Parents and Children in the Inner City (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1978). See Frank Field, ‘Harriett Wilson Obituary’, The Guardian, July 26, 2002, Harriett Wilson | Children | The Guardian. Accessed 24 January 2024.

25 Ibid.

26 John Veit-Wilson, ‘Harriett Wilson Obituary’, Child Poverty Action Group website, obituary posted 2002, https://cpag.org.uk/welfare-rights/resources/article/obituary-harriett-c-wilson (accessed January 24, 2024).

27 Wilson, Delinquency and Child Neglect, 154–5; 160–3.

28 Wilson, ‘A Nursery School for Culturally Deprived Children’, 16–17.

29 Lowe and Nicholson, The Formation of The Child Poverty Action Group, 614.

30 Tony Lynes, ‘Audrey Harvey Obituary’, The Guardian, April 14, 1997, 19.

31 Betty Williams ‘This is the Family That Everybody Passed by’, Daily News, 3 February 1960, 5. British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk). accessed January 24, 2024.

32 Lynes, ‘Audrey Harvey Obituary’, 19.

33 Audrey Harvey key publications: Casualties of the Welfare State (London: Fabian Society, 1960); Tenants in Danger (London: Penguin, 1968); What help for Poor Tenants? (London: Fabian Society, 1968), 61–74.

34 I would like to thank the St Hilda’s College, Oxford archivist for confirming that Margaret Wynn was a student at St Hilda’s between 1931–1935. Margaret Wynn key publications: Fatherless Families (London: Michael Joseph, 1964); Family Policy (London: Michael Joseph, 1970); Christine Gowdridge, Susan Williams and Margaret Wynn, Mother Courage: Letters from Mothers in Poverty at the End of the Century (London: Penguin, 1997). Angela Phillips, ‘Margaret Wynn Obituary’, The Guardian, 17 February 2010. Margaret Wynn obituary | Communities | The Guardian. Accessed 24 January 2024.

35 Margaret Moxon, ‘Russia Today’, Daily Herald, 17 October 1934, 14. I – this Morning’S –. 1 – postbac – i | Daily Herald | Wednesday 17 October 1934 | British Newspaper Archive. Accessed 24 January 2024.

36 ‘Four New Points for Peace to be Discussed in Islington’, The Islington and Holloway Press, Saturday November 21, 1936, 4, They Will Speak | Holloway Press | Saturday 21 November 1936 | British Newspaper Archive: ‘Peace Councils’ Conference’, Western Daily Press and Bristol Mirror, 15 November 1937, 5. Peace Councils’ Conference | Western Daily Press | Monday 15 November 1937 | British Newspaper Archive. Accessed 24 January 2024.

37 Angela Phillips, ‘The Right to Choose: Women on the March’, The Guardian, June 25, 1998, 42. 25 Jun 1998, 42 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

38 See below for further detail.

39 Ruth Davidson, ‘Working-Class Women Activists’; Maggie Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement (London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, 2015); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (London: Routledge, 2016); Caitríona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

40 Lowe and Nicholson, The Formation of The Child Poverty Action Group, 613.

41 See John Welshman, ‘The Social History of Social Work: The Issue of the “Problem Family”, 1940–70’, The British Journal of Social Work 29, no. 3 (1999): 457–76.

42 Seaport was a name used to anonymise the data; it is likely that this was Cardiff.

43 Wilson, Delinquency and Child Neglect, 34–35.

44 Welshman, From Transmitted Deprivation, 180.

45 Wilson, Delinquency and Child Neglect, 109–10.

46 Ibid., 155.

47 Ibid., 156.

48 Harriett Wilson, Poverty in Britain Today (London: The Church Assembly Children’s Council, 1964). See also: Pat Thane, ‘Poverty’, Child Poverty Action Group website, CPAG-at-fifty-winter-2015.pdf. Accessed 24 January 2024.

49 ‘Advert for New Society’, The Guardian, April 6, 1966, 11. Apr 06, 1966, page 11 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

50 Tony Lynes, ‘Audrey Harvey Obituary’, 19.

51 Harvey, Casualties, 1.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., 5.

54 Harvey, Casualties, 24.

55 By our own Reporter, ‘Welfare State “Only in Name”’, The Guardian, June 3, 1960, 4. 03 Feb 1960, 4 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

56 Sheard, The Passionate Economist, 116.

57 Robyn Rowe, ‘Gender and the Politics of Welfare: A Study of Social Assistance Policies towards Lone Mothers in Britain, 1948–1966’ (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2017), 259.

58 ‘Old Heads with a New Fix for Infant Health’, The Guardian, 26 February 2000, 16. 26 Feb 2000, 16 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

59 Wynn, Fatherless Families, 9.

60 Helen MacCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 254. fn. 83.

61 Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 122–3.

62 Thane and Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?, 123.

63 Banting, Poverty, Politics and Policy, 68.

64 Lowe, Witness Seminar, 630.

65 Banting, 71.

66 Ibid., 71–2.

67 Lowe, Witness Seminar, 614.

68 Letter to Fran Bennett from Richard Allen, 8 October 1986. CPAG/Box 6, File 21st CPAG History, CPAG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE. Richard Allen was co-convenor of the SEAC in 1965.

69 Harriett Wilson papers: box 1, CPAG/K/14 file 2, Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) Archive. Women’s Library. London School of Economics (LSE).

70 Letter from Harriett Wilson to Margaret Wynn, 24 February 1965. Harriett Wilson papers: box 1, CPAG/K/14 file 2, Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) Archive. Women’s Library. London School of Economics (LSE).

71 Rodney Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945. 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 272–83.

72 Welshman, From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion, 181.

73 Jane Lewis, The Voluntary Sector, The State and Social Work in Britain: The Charity Organising Society / Family Welfare Association since 1869 (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995), 10–11.

74 Stewart, Richard Titmuss, 229–30.

75 Oakley, A Critical Woman, 388–9.

76 Ibid.

77 Terry Bamford, A Contemporary History of Social Work: Learning from the Past (Bristol: Policy Press, 2015), 8.

78 Ibid., 23.

79 Lowe, Witness Seminar, 614. From 1952–1966 Elizabeth Irvine was a tutor in the Department for Children and Parents, Tavistock Clinic. See: 929.publ_no_13_irvine.pdf (warwick.ac.uk). Accessed 24 January 2024.

80 Wynn, Fatherless Families, 152–3.

81 Harry Marsh and Tim Cook, ‘Alan Cohen’, Warwick Modern Records Centre, Speaking Archives, Alan Cohen (warwick.ac.uk). Accessed 24 January 2024.

82 Harvey, Casualties, 22.

83 Harvey, Casualties, 30.

84 Peter Townsend, ‘Audrey Harvey Appreciation’, The Guardian, 15 April 1997, 20. 15 Apr 1997, 20 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

85 Alan Cohen, ‘Social Workers Speak Out, The Cohen Interviews: conversations with 26 social work pioneers, Interview with Clare Winnicott, 19’, Warwick Modern Records Centre, Speaking Archives, 929.publ_no_24_winnicott.pdf (warwick.ac.uk). Accessed 24 January 2024.

86 Bamford, A Contemporary History of Social Work, 93.

87 Gary Hogg, ‘Books for All Tastes’, Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald, Saturday 15 February 1964, 15. Carry Hogo Play- Ark Far – … e Popular Aristoci Bound Will !dds | Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald | Saturday 15 February 1964 | British Newspaper Archive. Accessed 24 January 2024.

88 Ibid.

89 Lena Jeger, ‘Women Talking’, The Guardian, 10 February 1964, 6. 10 Feb 1964, 6 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

90 Wynn, Fatherless Families, 32.

91 Margaret Cooke, ‘Delinquency and Child Neglect’, Birmingham Daily Post, 21 November 1962, 29. Brightening The Maternity Ward | Birmingham Daily Post | Wednesday 21 November 1962 | British Newspaper Archive. Accessed 24 January 2024.

92 ‘Welfare State “Only in Name”’, The Guardian, 4.

93 By our own Reporter, ‘Housing Allowances as an Alternative to Subsidies’, The Guardian, 1 July 1968, 5 01 Jul 1968, 5 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

94 Lynes, The Guardian, 19.

95 ‘Thugs Hired to Evict Families’, The Guardian, 23 November 1962, 14. 23 Nov 1962, 14 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

96 Beatrice Clarke, ‘A Letter to the Editor “Dear Sir”’, Poverty, Quarterly Newsletter of the Child Poverty Action Group, December 1966, 1–4.

97 By our own reporter, ‘Back to Beveridge’ Call in Helping Poorer Families’, The Guardian, 24 December 1965, 16. 24 Dec 1965, 16 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

98 Ibid.

99 ‘The Week on Radio’, The Guardian, 22 February 1964, 6. 22 Feb 1964, 6 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com) Accessed 24 January 2024.

100 See: Cathy Come Home: The TV drama that put homelessness on the map – BBC News. Accessed 24 January 2024.

101 See Thane and Davidson, The Child Poverty Action Group, 16–17.

102 See Thane and Davidson, The Child Poverty Action Group, 11–13 and 18–20.

103 See Harriett Wilson papers: CPAG/K/14 -16, CPAG Archive. Women’s Library. (LSE).

104 Frank Field, ‘Harriett Wilson Obituary’.

105 Interview with Alan Walker, Transcripts of oral history interviews for the project: The history of CPAG 1965–2015, 2016, CPAG/F/20. Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) Archive. Women’s Library. London School of Economics (LSE).

106 Frank Field, ‘Harriett Wilson Obituary’.

107 Letter, Bob Holman, The Guardian, 3 August 2002, 19. 3 Aug 2002, 19 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

108 Margaret Wynn letter to Fran Bennett, 19 December 1986. LSE.CPAG/6. CPAG Archive. Women’s Library. (LSE).

109 Lowe and Nicholson, The Formation of The Child Poverty Action Group, 630.

110 Ruth Lister, ‘Policy for the Family’, The Guardian, 21 February 1983, 12. 21 Feb 1983, 12 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

111 Frank Field, Politics and Poverty (London: Heinemann, 1982), 76.

112 Ibid.

113 A. Susan Williams, Women and Childbirth in the Twentieth Century: A History of the National Birthday Trust Fund 1928–93 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), The National Birthday Trust Fund was a voluntary organisation set up to examine women’s reproductive rights and health outcomes, with a focus on socio-economic inequalities.

114 Phillips, ‘The Right to Choose’, The Guardian, 42.

115 Field, Politics and Poverty, 29.

116 Audrey Harvey, ‘Report to EC’, Executive Committee Minutes and papers, 1970–71. CPAG/A/3. CPAG Archive. Women’s Library. LSE.

117 ‘Troubleshooter for Shelter’, The Guardian, 8 July 1972, 11. 8 Jul 1972, 11 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.

118 Audrey Harvey, ‘In Defence of the Poor’, The Guardian, 13 August 1986, 11. 13 Aug 1986, 11 – The Guardian at The Guardian (newspapers.com). Accessed 24 January 2024.