PETER Townsend was an inspiring and innovative sociologist who made an exceptional contribution as an academic, public intellectual and campaigner for social justice. He is probably best known for his pioneering work on poverty, especially Poverty in
the United Kingdom (1979), and for the two decades he spent as chair of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). In both he relentlessly pressured governments to respond and challenged fellow academics, and us all, to recognise that poverty can only be understood and tackled in the context of the wider society and its structural patterns of distribution and redistribution.
The massive and rigorously empirical 1979 study built on many years' work: in particular, The Poor and the Poorest with Brian Abel-Smith in 1965 provided the crucial momentum for the newly formed CPAG. Later work involved comparative and international analyses linking human rights and poverty.
Unicef has acknowledged that he transformed the way child poverty was understood and measured. Today, no attempt to study or tackle poverty can ignore his contribution.
This would be more than enough for one career, but Townsend also transformed understanding of the meaning of ageing and later life, disability and inequalities in health, stimulating and changing policies and research in many areas and countries.
Path-breaking studies including The Family Life of Old People (1957), with his interviews in Bethnal Green, and The Last Refuge (1962), revealing the best and the worst of institutional care, were enriched by his own photographs and established the experience of ageing as a subject for closer research and informed policy-making.
Townsend did not shirk controversy. He was key author of the 1980 Black report, Inequalities in Health, commissioned by the Labour government, that demonstrated that improving the nation's health required changes to the broader structure of society and the economy as well as the health service.
The succeeding Conservative government released just a few hundred xeroxed copies with a dismissive ministerial foreword before the August bank holiday. That spurred Townsend into action. He persuaded Penguin to produce an abridged paperback. In 1988 a press conference for a new edition was banned at the Health Education Council at the last minute: the evening TV news began with Townsend and Sir Douglas Black emerging from its offices to hold an impromptu conference above a music shop in Oxford Street, gaining much more attention. The topic is now the target of policy-making in many countries, including Scotland, and an established part of teaching and research in many subjects.
Townsend was brought up by his mother, a singer, and his grandmother, who was a key figure in his early life. After studying philosophy and social anthropology at Cambridge and spending a brief, but influential, period in Berlin, Townsend worked at Political and Economic Planning, the Institute of Community Studies and, then in 1957, the London School of Economics (LSE).
Appointed founding professor of sociology to the "new" University of Essex in 1963, he played a major role in improving access and creating less hierarchical forms of work. Innovations included much that is now taken for granted – for example, active recruitment of mature students and admission of candidates without first degrees into postgraduate work.
Townsend said 1968 was "the most absorbing and exciting year of my university career". His Sociology in University Practice (2004) should be read by every university teacher. While head of department, he took a full teaching load and a regular shift giving advice on the Colchester CPAG welfare rights stall.
In 1982 he moved to the University of Bristol, which has recognised his contribution with the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research, and then back to LSE in 1998, where he taught MSc courses on children's rights, child poverty and development and helped establish the Centre for the Study of Human Rights. Although he stopped his MSc teaching last year, he gave an e-lecture on poverty to South African students three days before his death.
He never ceased writing and campaigning: he finished correcting the proofs of work on human rights, "the best thing I've ever written", the day he died.
Much more could be written of Townsend's many contributions as a public intellectual and a campaigner, at CPAG, where he continued as president, but (after the Thalidomide scandal) his setting up and chairing the Disability Alliance for 25 years; as chair and vice-president of the Fabian Society; and of the many recognitions of his scholarship – founding member of the Academy of Social Sciences, fellow of the British Academy and many honorary degrees including from the universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde. But such a list could unbalance the picture of a man who practised what he wrote: "You cannot live like a lord and preach as a socialist."
His short, passionate essay, A Society for People, has just been reprinted as an 80th birthday tribute in April's Social Policy and Society. Written when he was 30, it provides a remarkably up-to-date account of how he worked and the issues that concerned him. He ended by calling for "a society where differences in reward are much narrower than they are today (1958] and where people of different background and accomplishment can mix easily and without guilt; and a society where a respect for people is valued most of all. For that brings a real equality".
Townsend shared 25 years of great happiness with Jean Corston, his third wife, who survives him, along with five children, two stepchildren and many grandchildren. His sudden death from a heart attack leaves us all bereft.
