Archived news
11 August 2009: Tributes to Peter Townsend
Tributes from University of Essex staff
Ken Plummer,
University of Essex, July 2009.
I first encountered Peter’s work through three early books as an undergraduate in the mid 1960’s – The Last Refuge, The Family Life of Old People, and a pamphlet on poverty. His work stood out from most of what I read and meant a great deal to me. Little did I know then that ten years later, I would find myself in an office at Essex right next door to this inspirational man. He was a striking presence – much younger than I thought (to have produced so much I reckoned he had to be quite old!), tall and be suited, with a shock of hair and an enthusiastic energy that invaded everything he touched. He was always kind, unassuming, and with a massive generosity of spirit. He was no run of the mill university administrator and no ivory tower academic, and I was very privileged to get to know him a little.
He had, of course come, to Essex from the LSE in 1964 appointed as one of the two foundation Professors at the new university. Peter was to establish, develop and lead the Department of Sociology. He chaired it for the first seven, and stayed for nearly two of his six working decades to shape a lively, eclectic, idiosyncratic and hugely successful department – as well as playing a formative role in the making of a modern new university, serving as Pro Vice-chancellor (Social) – a role he created and which was subsequently (sadly) dismantled, and becoming a central negotiator in the student conflicts of 1968 and later. Peter had a wide ranging vision of sociology – and helped establish department based on a wider vision than that often given by a narrowly defined sociology. His passion about inequality helped shape major preoccupations of the department for a long while. With Dennis Marsden, Stan Cohen and Adrian Sinfield, he later pioneered a major course in M.A. Social Service Planning – a formidable team, serving a generation of students well.
All the time Peter was actively involved in setting up a new university and new department, he never ceased researching, writing, campaigning, and establishing pressure groups. At the heart of his work was a humanist socialism, a hatred of inequality and a passion and plea to see the need for redistribution, recognition of stigmatized groups and the maintenance of human dignity. He was a prolific writer -many hundreds of pieces over the years. The complete list of his publications 1948-2008 runs into some 67 pages! Towering over them all was the magisterial Poverty in the UK (1979) which really was his Essex book. This alone must bequeath his name to history – now as part of the history of Britain’s great poverty studies. Future generations will have to study Booth, Rowntree and Townsend to see how measurements and levels of poverty changed over a century. And nowadays who seriously challenges the notion of relative poverty?
Peter was never one for fashionable theories per se – but always had his eyes on the issue of change and equality. In the early days of Essex, he encouraged for example ethomethodology – in the work of Dorothy Smith. But nowadays he is seen more as a major man of Policy and Rights – and perhaps less as a major sociologist. His work spanned the life cycle – from child poverty and chide rights through the vagaries of adult life to the pains and deprivations of the elderly. Peter always brought a first rate critical sociological mind to everything he did – but he also always wanted to take it further into the practical affairs of the world. He saw social structures – not people- as lying at the heart of universal inequalities of all kinds. But his passion indeed was for the real living and struggling people who suffered the difficulties of unequal lives – specially the poor, the disabled, the children and the aged. And hence his work was always accompanied by action: a long list of actions from establishing CPAG and the Disability Alliance, to involvement in both government and NGO’s. In his later years he turned vehemently towards a model which firmly located these sufferings within a human rights framework. His life and work was a testament to pragmatism, equality and the decent treatment of all people.
I last spoke to Peter when he came to Essex to present a paper at the 40th anniversary of the department. We strolled the campus together and he reflected generously on what Essex had given him and his fondness for those years. He spoke too of illness , which he was clearly transcending. Indeed, when I last saw him – at his 80th birthday party at the London School of Economics in 2008 – he looked as if he was clearly flourishing and as active as ever. He continued to inspire me as a kind of a model of almost how not to retire! Peter’s massive legacy has been inspirational to thousands - students, researchers, fellow professors, and activists. Above all he helped to make the world a better place for millions. Above all, he oozed egalitarianism through the pores of his skin. He was a wonderful, inspirational and indeed Great Man.
Joan Busfield
Professor of Sociology
University of Essex
9.6.09
Although it is right that the obituary (9.6.09) for Professor Peter Townsend focused on his research on poverty and inequality and his strong and active commitment to reducing them, his very significant contribution to the development of the discipline of sociology in Britain also needs to be highlighted. In 1963 at the age of 35, Peter was appointed the founding professor of the Department of Sociology at the newly established University of Essex, admitting the first students on a single honours degree in sociology the following year. Perhaps because relatively few academics in Britain had trained in sociology at that time, he created a department that was open to a broad range of disciplines – not only social policy, but also anthropology, social history, social psychology, geography, philosophy, classics, and the natural sciences. Early appointments included a strong core group of researchers and lecturers in social policy, poverty and inequality such as Dennis Marsden, John Veit-Wilson, Hilary Land and Adrian Sinfield, but also Paul Thompson, a social historian, Alison MacEwan, an anthropologist, Alasdair MacIntyre, the second chair in the Department, a philosopher, Geoffrey Hawthorn, a geographer, and Peter Abel, with a degree in chemistry, along with a range of academics with a sociological background, such as Dorothy Smith, Herminio Martins, Roland Robertson, and David Lockwood, the third professor. Almost all, if not appointed as professors, subsequently obtained professorships either in the United States or Britain. At a time in the late 1960s and1970s when sociology was being disparaged in the media, Peter was involved in the appointment to Essex of excellent sociologists such as Colin Bell, Howard Newby, Gordon Marshall and Michael Harloe who all made valuable contributions to the discipline, and then went on to become Vice-Chancellors. Peter’s creation of a sociology department that defined the discipline as a broad church stimulated intellectual exchange and research endeavour and provided the foundation for a high quality department, whose academic standing was eventually recognised in various research evaluation exercises. Both the breadth and the high quality have been retained in the Department’s teaching and research to the present day, and this contribution to the development of sociology in Britain is one of his important legacies.
Paul Thompson
Professor of Sociology, University of Essex
July 2009
Peter Townsend was unique and irreplaceable, a giant in so many people’s world’s, including my own. I first met him in 1963, when he had just become founding Professor of Sociology at Essex, and came to work with him in October 1964. He has been a crucial part of my life ever since.
Even in those early years, partly because he was involved in public as well as academic life, Peter seemed socially open and relaxed, and a skilled communicator. When the student `troubles’ erupted he was one of the very few staff able to mediate between students and management. He gave his staff a lot of freedom to work independently, but he was also interested in them personally and concerned for their families. He used to come to us quite often for supper, partly because his first wife Ruth and their children stayed in London. Peter was strikingly unconcerned with social status. At his London parties you might encounter their elderly working class neighbour, alongside his fellow researcher and close friend Brian Abel-Smith, or a leading Labour politician and intellectual like Dick Crossman – who would try to stir up a debate about some political issue. These lively parties gave us a sense of the breadth and vitality of Peter’s world. I also have strong memories from Peter’s later years at Essex, when we were both in trouble with our marriages, and we used to sit in the Hexagon Restaurant for long lunches exchanging experiences. Peter had to take refuge in a cottage at Higham in Suffolk, and I followed him in the same cottage!
Of all the people who have influenced me through my professional life, Peter has been the most profound. I had wanted not just to be an academic researcher and teacher, but also to make a genuine contribution to society. Peter was an inspiring example of how this was possible. His research was always innovative and brilliantly thorough, academically of the highest quality, but at the same time he gave so much of his life to social campaigning. In this way he has been a model for me and for many others over the last forty years.
Peter opened the path for my own life in oral history. It was because of his unusually broad vision of sociology that from the start he also recruited to Essex anthropologists, social philosophers, and me as a social historian. It was a wonderful experience working with so many brilliant and congenial people under his leadership, and it transformed my way of thinking into a fusion between social history and sociology,
As soon as I joined him Peter was keen for me to try interviewing, and he would show me extracts from his own interviews with old people in Bethnal Green, pointing out how their memories of the past could be interesting for social history. So he was a key influence in leading me towards oral history, and in this direct way helped me to find through oral history and life stories my own combination of academic and social contribution.
Working with life stories led of course long afterwards to my recording Peter’s own life story. I felt it was a great privilege to be able to do that, and some of it, such as when he talks about his mother, or the families in Bethnal Green, or washing elderly men himself in a home, I felt was deeply moving. The recording is 17 hours long, the longest interview I have every recorded, but scarcely a word wasted: it is long just because Peter was so incredibly active for so many years.
Peter was of course a powerful professional influence on innumerable people. But he was always so much more than this, a man who combined in a rare way great determination with gentleness, a truly lovable hero. I feel we have all been exceptionally lucky to know him.