ALAN COHEN AND THE 26 INTERVIEWEES
ALAN COHEN (1932 –2012)
Alan Cohen was born in Hackney, East London, in January 1932. His parents
were the children of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. His family suffered
considerable hardship in the 1930’s, with periods of unemployment. He lived in
north London prior to the second world war and he was a child evacuee to
several different locations, including Cambridge. This experience affected him
greatly. He returned to London in 1946. He attended the London School of
Economics (LSE) and, following National Service based in Germany, he worked
as a houseparent in residential child care; and then for Family Service Units in
Islington from 1957 to 1962. Apparently he was sure from an early age that he
wanted a career in social work.
After gaining the Certificate in Psychiatric Social Work at LSE in 1963, he worked
for Nottinghamshire County Council’s Mental Health Services and from there
moved to Nottingham Regional College of Technology (now Nottingham Trent
University) as a tutor on the Social Work course. In 1974 he was appointed as a
lecturer on the newly established Social Work course at Lancaster University. In
1983 Alan moved to part-time hours at the University in order to return to
fieldwork. He served as a resettlement social worker at the Royal Albert Hospital
in Lancaster –a long-stay learning disability institution – and in 1985 he took early
retirement from the University.
Alan returned to full-time social work in the learning disabilities division of
Lancashire Social Services Department and set up an adult placement scheme
before retiring in 1996. Meanwhile he had researched and written his book, The
Revolution in Family Casework: the Story of Pacifist Service Units and Family
Service Units, 1940 to 1959, published in 1998.
He also researched the lives and work of many of the people involved in the early
development of social work in the UK, assisted by his sabbatical in 1979-80 from
Lancaster University, and conducted taped interviews with several in 1980 –81.
It is the edited and annotated transcripts of those tapes that are now published
under the title The Cohen Interviews: conversations with 26 social work pioneers.
The Editors can recall meeting Alan personally only very occasionally – once he
came to the Family Service Units national office in the mid-1980’s to discuss his
proposed research on the PSU and FSU pioneers. And so we knew he had a
penchant for pioneers and that face to face interviews were his preferred method.
He acknowledged the influence of Hentoff and Shapiro’s 1955 treatment of the
jazz pioneers in Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: the story of jazz by the men who made it.
If we substitute ‘Social Work’ for jazz and ‘Mostly Women’ for men, then we are
close to Alan Cohen’s grasp of the importance of social work history and the
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courageous characters who laid many of the foundations. Alan’s partner Maggie
once affectionately remarked that he was better at starting things than finishing.
We, as co-editors, are very pleased to have been invited to do a bit of finishing.
THE 26 INTERVIEWEES
In August 1979 the Nuffield Foundation under its small grants social science
research programme offered a grant of £1217 to the Department of Social
Administration at the University of Lancaster to enable Alan Cohen, a lecturer in
that department, to carry out a project on “personalised accounts of the
development of social work institutions and ideas”. A supplementary grant of
£200 was given in August 1981.
Alan had a long standing interest in the careers and reflections of important
social work figures. There was a shortage then, as there is now, of such
accounts – a view specifically put by Professor Harry Ferguson in his Foreword
to Olive Stevenson’s Reflections on a Life in Social Work (2013).
In 1980-81 Alan interviewed 26 retired social workers and academics, all
pioneers in their day, whose career paths in many ways replicated in Alan’s view
the fundamental changes in social work and in society at that time. The aim was
to use the material from the interviews to write a 240 page book on the theory
and development of casework examining the casework process and looking at its
operation in family casework, medical social work, psychiatric social work,
probation and the early days of moral welfare. As part of that he was keen to
discuss the reasons the 26 came into social work, the type of people who chose
that profession and the nature of the training available.
It is clear from the notes that Alan left that the book was intended to be a series
of “conversations” around certain themes such as, for example, the relevance to
social work of psychoanalytic concepts. These exchanges would have been
constructed through juxtaposing excerpts from the 26 interviewees to create in
effect the appearance of a “conversation”.
There is no record of how the 20 women and 6 men were chosen or indeed if
there were any others who refused to be interviewed. The predominance of
women reflects the times, apart from the male dominated probation service.
There were after all 30 women on Robina Addis’ course at the LSE in 1931. The
selection was also rather too focused on London though the dominance of key
institutions like the LSE and the Maudsley Hospital may have partly determined
that. Indeed there was a debate in the 1920s as to whether the new Mental
Health Course should be based at the LSE or the Maudsley. Nonetheless one
does wonder what social work developments were occurring in, for example, the
north-east.
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The 26 covered a wide range of roles and professions. Almoners, probation,
poor law relieving officers, Charity Organisation Society workers, medical social
workers, psychiatric social workers, child care and local authorities were all
represented. Some went on to become academics, others played critical roles
on government committees, some wrote widely and reflected on their
experiences. Some said they had been too busy ‘doing’ to write, often to Alan’s
disappointment!
However Alan chose his 26, they are by no means a uniform group. There is
great variety within such a small number. Perhaps the only generalisation that
we can risk is to say that they all spent their whole working lives in the social
work field at one level or another with an immense commitment to its
development and all looked back on their careers with satisfaction but not in any
sense self-satisfaction. Alan asked them all when and how they came into social
work. They came from a variety of backgrounds and for many reasons. Some
had a Christian upbringing, some a family tradition of service, some were
searching for a profession open to them, some had an interest in children
through say the scouts and one came through a personal family tragedy
Their social backgrounds were equally varied: the women ranged from Oxford
graduates to refugees, though it is fair to say that Alan became perhaps
unexpectedly interested in the small group of women from an educated middle or
upper middle class. He saw them as “very powerful women”. How else, he
wondered, did Eileen Younghusband persuade the Carnegie trustees to fund the
course she initiated?! He sensed that this group was better able to hold their
own when as psychiatric social workers they were faced for example with
overbearing male doctors. He also saw them as more than holding their own on
major committees or in dealing with senior civil servants. Not all those in that
group necessarily agreed with Alan’s hypothesis and had never previously seen
their background in that light, which doesn’t mean to say he was wrong! After all
one PSW said that still in the 1940s you had to be “socially acceptable” to the
doctors. Another made it clear she was not just going to be an “errand girl” in the
hospital. Although social work overall was a female world one person recalled
the first ever man on a child care course. The women interviewed here brought
new professional attitudes and an increased intelligent understanding of the
clients, far removed from the old divisions into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving.
Many of the 26 were in fact important figures in the emerging profession of social
work before and during the second world war. Only one person started their
career after the war. Alan was clear that this survey of social work history would
end in 1959, the year that Barbara Wootton published her landmark social work
critique in Social Science and Social Pathology. There is some discussion of
social work issues post-1959, particularly of Seebohm, but the heart of the
material lies in the earlier period.
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Just as there is no means of knowing how the 26 were chosen, so the exact
methodology of the interviewing is equally unknown. Some interviewees refer to
‘our earlier conversation’ which suggests that there may have been a prior visit.
Some seem to have been given advance notice of the questions. There is
however no clearly defined standard approach though almost all were asked the
same opening and closing questions. One thing that was common was that they
were being asked to remember and reflect upon people and events that were
part of their lives for anything up to 50 years previously, Robina Addis for
example was born in 1900 and Lettice Harford in 1907. It is not so surprising
therefore that much to Alan’s amazement and amusement that in 1980/81 they
could not always recall articles they had written, significant though some of these
now were in terms of social work developments. On the other hand, like the
remarkable practitioners they were, they had little difficulty in providing Alan with
most informative and lively anecdotes about clients they could recall, often with
affection. However Alan decided upon these 26 people, there is no doubt that
reading these interviews now in 2013 he chose well, for they all provide,
individually and together, a fascinating and important insight into the early years
of social work in the UK.
The Editing Process
The interviews were completed but the tapes were not fully transcribed until
shortly after Alan’s death in 2012. In 2008 the tapes and the copyright had been
gifted to WISEArchive, a voluntary body in Norwich, whose volunteers spent
many hours transcribing with great accuracy what turned out to be some 700
pages of the written word. Then in 2012, through the suggestion of Professor
June Thoburn, Harry Marsh was asked if he would be interested in editing the
transcripts to produce publishable interviews. In discussion with Tim Cook it was
agreed the two of them would, pro bono, try to do justice as co-editors to the rich
historical material in the transcripts.
In editing all this material we have sought to respect Alan’s intentions and to be
fair to the distinguished interviewees themselves. As each interview will now
stand alone as opposed to being all edited into “conversations”, as if with each
other, we have wanted to be sure that they were readable and comprehensible.
Without doing damage to the essential content we have tried to remove
repetition, factual inaccuracies such as the date of a report, manifest
misunderstandings between Alan and the interviewee, comments that were
made with the request for strict confidentiality (of which there very few) and some
passages which even with first class transcribing simply were unclear. We have
sought to maintain the conversational style so that the editing has not aimed to
make each answer a highly polished statement.
What we have added to the material are notes relating to committees, reports
and legislation mentioned by the interviewees and perhaps even more important
brief explanations on the key people referred to, often by more than one
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interviewee. Some of the people mentioned are internationally known and have
their own biographers; others were influential at the time but are less well known
today; and some were very important work colleagues in the careers of an
individual interviewee but are untraceable today via the usual archives and
internet resources. Apart from the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University
we have not visited archives such as those, for example, relating to the Charity
Organisation Society. This would have been fun to do but we took the view that
tracing every person mentioned in passing by any of the 26 was not strictly
necessary and they would certainly not have been referenced in Alan’s proposed
book. A problem we did not anticipate was readily finding information on all the
26 in order to write a brief biography at the start of each interview. We have tried
to do that but however remarkable a person’s career we have discovered there
was not always a written legacy to match that career.
We decided to provide notes for each interview rather than refer readers to a vast
collection of notes at the end of the publication, in whatever form that took. This
means that, although the note on the LSE for example appears virtually at the
end of each interview the reader who only wants to study say the Aves interview
has all the relevant notes with that interview. It should be said that there is a
considerable degree of cross referencing by some of the 26 who knew each
other well so that reading all 26 interviews adds another dimension to the work
as a whole.
In gathering together this additional explanatory information we are deeply
indebted to Diana Wray at the Institute for Voluntary Action Research, Birkbeck
College, University of London. The Institute generously allowed her some pro
bono time to help track down all the important figures mentioned by many of the
26. On occasion some highly skilled detective work has been necessary, but
invariably has been rewarded. To supplement Diana’s work we have tried to
obtain information on other less frequently mentioned people and institutions
using for example the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University, the Oxford
DNB, Women’s Library, the National Archives and circulating requests for
information to members of the Social Work History Network whose helpful
responses are acknowledged below.
Overview of the interviews
It is of course the interviews themselves that are the goldmine for social work
students and historians. It would be inappropriate if not impossible to attempt
anything resembling an executive summary for though there are themes that
Alan sought to address in the interviews there are few generalisations that can
be made. This is hardly surprisingly given the strong personalities of the
interviewees, their career paths and their divergent views on social work issues.
However as the interviews focused on the period prior to 1959 there was a social
and political context in which they all were working. It is worth initially
highlighting some features of that context.
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The very term social work was not yet widely used and certainly not readily
understood as the first psychiatric social workers in hospitals quickly discovered.
Who counted as a social worker became important as associations of different
professions sought to come together in a federation of social workers. Courses
were described as “social science” not social work. Eileen Younghusband said in
her interview that “the whole concept of what constitutes a social worker …was
extremely vague, amorphous at that period compared with what it is now. For
instance, in many quarters personnel managers, women housing managers,
youth employment bureau secretaries were regarded as being social workers.”
That social work as a concept was not readily grasped is perhaps unsurprising
while the long shadow of the Poor Law and its institutions hung over the 1930s.
Tom Tinto and Cecil French for example vividly describe working within the Poor
Law framework and, with workloads of 250 cases, social work was scarcely an
applicable term. Highly regulated and often judgemental systems were too often
the norm. Equally the legacy of the old asylums, housing up to 2000 patients
and then renamed mental hospitals, was still present. In the 1940s Ilse
Westheimer gave in her notice after one day from her post in a mental hospital in
Maidstone recommending to the Institute of Almoners that it was added to its
informal blacklist. These were hospitals where “only a very experienced person
who didn’t mind something very tough should go”. Others had better
experiences but were surprised that the standards of the Maudsley Hospital
(“outstanding”) were not universal in the “outer darkness” as one called it.
The second world war provided for the interviewees some remarkable challenges
and opportunities to develop their skills and show their strengths. On one or two
occasions in the interviews Alan expresses astonishment that the interviewee
was only in her mid-twenties when undertaking difficult war-work. The work
described included dealing with badly injured casualties from the blitz when trying
to find out family details, assisting war wounded soldiers, managing the
evacuation of children - and sometimes their families - and their reception out of
London, organising hostels for evacuated children, fire warden duties, visiting
Rest and Feeding Centres, escorting children across the Atlantic and post-war
resettlement of children in Europe.
Although the war provided some opportunities, the period as a whole (1929-59)
was one in which women were hugely disadvantaged: for example giving up your
job on marriage in the civil service and in teaching, but the 20 women
interviewed did not seem to complain much. They fought their corner as social
workers and talked of themselves as pioneers but more in their professional role
rather than as women. While some had had golden educational opportunities,
others had to struggle to get an education as Ilse Westheimer so movingly
demonstrates.
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All the 26 had the experience of working before the NHS was established in 1948
and the differences for some were marked. This was especially the case in the
hospitals where the almoners no longer had to be concerned with the patients’
ability to pay and the assessments previously required to determine that. In all
areas the remnants of the Poor Law were now gone. Future generations read
about the NHS in the history books but for the 26 here they lived and worked
through this momentous change.
Finally in terms of the overall context this period marks the beginning of the long
march towards a unified profession of social work. But at this stage it still has
many strands and the BASW deposit of its predecessor bodies’ archives at the
Modern Records Centre contains a real saga. It is not at all surprising that it was
such a long march when the interviewees reveal some very strongly expressed
views about each other’s professions.
It is fascinating, perhaps occasionally dispiriting, to have glimpses of the interprofessional perceptions and the status hierarchy of which some were all too
conscious. The PSWs were seen as being in ivory towers though not, needless
to say, by those in them. The probation officers were seen by some as the real
social workers “plodding the streets at night” when almoners were never out and
about. The PSWs in child guidance were at the top of the hierarchy, but Clare
Winnicott saw them as being “stuck away in clinics” and not, as she wished to be,
in “the thick of social work.” By 1959 the probation service was sticking to its role
while some thought the social workers were trying to make an empire for
themselves. In the 1950s the PSWs who went into community care were
assumed to be “less sophisticated in relationship work and tended to be the
men”. Feelings could be very strong. The mental welfare officers “are dust
beneath their (the PSWs) chariot wheels”.
The overall tone of the interviewees is one of modesty. They describe what they
did. They forget important articles they’ve written. They don’t lay claim to being
influential even when Alan presses them to say they were. They were all in one
way or another breaking new ground or being the first to wrestle with new social
work concepts coming over from America. They were pioneers but that idea is
there almost by implication. There are no overt statements such as ‘of course we
were pioneers in this area’. Rather they simply say ‘I went to start the first child
guidance clinic’ or ‘I was the first PSW at the hospital’. ‘The two departments
were amalgamated and I became the Principal Welfare Officer’. The pioneering
nature of so much of what they all did is however only one part of the picture. In
editing the transcripts and compiling the notes for each interview we became
aware of the wider professional world, and its history, in which the 26 were
working.
They had direct contact with talented and distinguished lecturers and professors,
especially at the LSE but by no means exclusively, brilliant psychiatrists, vastly
experienced COS secretaries and Relieving Officers and a live awareness of the
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contribution of the very first almoners even if they had not met them or worked
with them. Perhaps most striking of all to us as editors was the relative
frequency we were noting that so and so was say ‘the first woman magistrate’ or
‘the first woman minister’. These 26 people, particularly the women, were
building on the shoulders of other extraordinary people and coming into contact
with them. One example will have to suffice.
Letty Harford was interviewed in Chesterfield for a job in the settlement. The
chairman and owner of the settlement was Violet Markham, who interviewed her.
Violet Markham had used an inherited fortune to found the settlement in 1901
and went on to have a distinguished public service career. By 1937 she was the
deputy chairman of the Unemployment Assistance Board “probably the most
important administrative post up to that time that had been held by a woman”. In
the Cohen material she is but one note among many.
Where new ground was certainly being broken was in the possibility of going to
work and study in America through the Commonwealth scholarships in the
1920’s and 30’s. A surprising (to us) number obtained these scholarships to go
to the USA bringing back a wealth of material about the casework process.
Intriguingly this experience and knowledge was not always welcomed back in
England, certainly not always understood and with some strong feeling that
jargon was appearing for the first time. But as Geraldine Aves says “there is a
fatal fascination about jargon merchants”. Casework was not yet a term in
common usage. Even when explained, one view was that the word might be
new but the concept certainly was not. There was resistance in some quarters to
psychological knowledge. Though there might have been some over-enthusiasm
on the part of the returning scholars, it is a useful reminder of how incremental
the development of professional knowledge can be.
One feature of the early years of many of the 26 that Alan draws out - but doesn’t
highlight - but which struck us, as co- editors with lifelong careers in the voluntary
sector, was the importance of voluntary organisations in providing required
experience or initial work opportunities. Some are of course very well known
such as the COS, National Council of Social Service, Barnardos and the National
Association for Mental Health. Others such as the Settlements in London,
Birmingham and Liverpool are key experiences in some people’s career
development, some of which still flourish today.
Fascinating and remarkable though the life-time careers of all the 26 were, the
Cohen interviews are a valuable reminder that everyone has to start somewhere
and all the beginnings, to which Alan pays close attention, are illuminating.
There was training and certificates obtained - including the rote learning required
for the Relieving Officer’s certificate - as well as for instance the LSE Mental
Health course. What was missing was teaching about technique. The art of
interviewing was ignored as a subject. That was often learnt on the job by either
being observed doing it or watching someone else, then discussing the do’s and
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don’ts of what took place. For Eileen Younghusband who taught at the LSE from
1929 to 1939 “there was no practical work.” There was very little that linked the
teaching to “the kind of level at which social workers would be working”. In 1944
she became the LSE’s first practical work organise, the irony being “I’ve never
been a kosher social worker”.
What is also striking is the absence of what we would now call induction. Being
thrown in at the deep end was common especially when you went in your
twenties as the first ever social worker to a large mental hospital where no one
else had any idea as to why you were there! Establishing a child guidance clinic
was not always any easier as for example where you had to argue for an actual
office but then discovered the phone you needed was in an adjacent locked room
so by the time you got to it the caller had rung off. One very brave and
outspoken PSW left her job after one day because of the totally oppressive
atmosphere and conditions in the hospital – something no-one had ever dared do
before, but an understanding ‘supervisor’ placed her in another hospital where
she stayed for seven years. On the other hand one of the first qualified social
workers in a local authority said to herself “if the situation isn’t any different in
three years I’m off”.
The initial impact of the job is a strong feature of the interviews, as well as the
ways in which jobs were obtained. You had to learn a lot as you went along. In
some fields “supervision didn’t really exist”. For some there was a “so-called
placement supervisor”. You could be single-handed for a year in a very large
hospital. Such was the state of some hospitals that, as we have noted above, the
Institute of Almoners kept an informal blacklist. In Manchester in the 1930s
protestant probation officers could not supervise catholic juveniles or vice versa!
The workloads as mentioned were heavy. A new relieving officer had a caseload
of over 100. You had to be available 24 hours a day seven days a week. Being
called out of the cinema to handle an emergency was not easily forgotten.
Medical social workers might have to see 50 patients in a morning to assess their
financial position and all carried out in a public office. For others “the hours were
ridiculous”. Despite this as professional associations began to develop there was
sensitivity and even embarrassment about discussing salaries and conditions of
service which now reads as amusing and truly historical. Long hours and heavy
caseloads were just accepted and not raised as issues.
Amongst such strong personalities, who in their different ways were working out
what constituted a professional social worker, there always likely to be divisions
of opinion. It is the teasing out of different perspectives in the interviews that is at
times quite riveting and important. This is best illustrated by one area that Alan’s
notes suggest he too found striking namely the clash between the “old fashioned
social work” and “the psychoanalytic fringe-lands”. While some wrestled with
transference and counter transference others saw “care and concern” as the
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essential ingredients in a relationship. In wanting to be at the forefront in the
development of this new field were boundaries overstepped? What was the
distinction between casework and psychotherapy? Views on this issue were
strongly held. “Common sense and sensitivity were far more important than
some psychoanalytical whatever.” We hope these brief sentences read like a
trailer for the collection of interviews because it is simply not possible to set out
fully the intellectual excitement that this and other issues generated all those
years ago but which are by no means without resonance today. The impetus for
the psychoanalytical approach came in part from those who had been given
American Commonwealth scholarships in the 1920s onwards. The interviewees
who went came back with a realisation that social work in England was lagging
behind and needed to include some different approaches
However there was in practice perhaps never simply one approach or the other.
Social work was never just a practical service though it had that element. The
medical social worker had to work hard to “assert the social work activity” amidst
all the other activities such as the “welter of dentures”. Consideration did have to
be given to the emotional impact of poverty and illness not just work to relieve the
poverty. Helping an amputee for example was always going to be more than
organising the physical aids. Why do some people not take up the service on
offer? High powered PSWs did collect patients clothing. Not all psychiatrists
were psychoanalysts. Clare Winnicott drew on her early experiences of
children’s homes to highlight the critical nature of practical provision when social
workers complained they were prevented from doing casework in their jobs. “The
deepest casework you’ll do is making good provision for somebody. That’s
caring. Basic fundamental caring without which life isn’t possible. I feel very
strongly about this”.
Returning from America was not only a more sophisticated view of social work
relationships but also the literature describing them. Some here were also
writing articles. Not everyone found the new social work texts helpful. Indeed
one comment about Barbara Wootton’s 1959 critique (see below) was that it
relied too heavily on American social work literature which was by no means part
and parcel of English practice. As a group the 26 do not seem overwhelmed by
the social work literature (”I got very little from the literature”), and two suggested
novels were more informative and helpful in understanding human behaviour. As
always there was no uniformity (“I always tended to read articles in the journals”)
Alan expressed some frustration that his chosen 26 had not themselves written
more as there was manifestly a contrast between what was written and what
people actually did. Word of mouth was more prevalent than the written word
because we “were far too busy and pressed”. Writing things down was “just
another task on top of what you’ve already done”.
One gap that was filled (and might not have been unearthed other than via these
interviews) was how some found it extremely valuable to meet informally in
someone’s flat to share experiences and new ideas. Once in a job, support in
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the workplace was not so forthcoming. Peer supervision was unheard of and as
we have noted many were thrown in at the deep end. So, in what was still a very
small world, some mutually educative and supportive groups developed. Even in
the 1960s Clare Winnicott was of the view that for Children’s Officers “there was
no good supervision, no supervision at all really, except on administrative
procedure”.
Alan had come into social work in the 1960s and there were two other areas
where he appears to be frustrated at not having the answers he was perhaps
expecting. This concerns the social worker’s use of authority and their political
engagement, both live issues in the 1960s.
To risk a generalisation, the social workers prior to 1959 were not unduly
bothered by the exercise of authority. Good child care officers know that
boundaries have to be set for children. Some probation officers shelter behind
the court’s authority when taking the offender back to court. Others simply said ‘I
will take you back to court’. With compulsory patients in mental hospitals you
had to use authority and tell them they could not walk out, it was “facing reality”.
Using authority meant being truthful. The PSW should say ‘you have to go into
the mental hospital’ not pretend you are taking them out to tea. No one was as
worried by all this pre-1959 as were the social worker cohorts of the 1960s. Reg
Wright thought there was confusion about this as it was not a debate about
“authority” and “not authority” but “it was a debate about different kinds of
authority”.
Most of the 26 had trained in and were working during the 1930s, a period of
depression, unemployment, poverty, poor housing and the rise of fascism. Alan
pushed hard to sound out whether these issues so exercised the interviewees
that political activity resulted. In summary, he was sorely disappointed. One was
definitely aware of the spirit of idealism and rebuilding in the 1930s but could only
say that “I suppose I caught it”. Some knew social workers who were communists
but were not themselves communists. For one the LSE in 1922 was “as red as
red could be” but “politics never got hold of me really. There was some good in
the red labour side but there was also a lot of bad”. Yet by the 1950s the LSE
was for another “politically a dead duck”. One with a refugee background was
“never really radical. I was not a political animal”. The mission was not to reform
society but to alleviate things for the individual. Unemployment and the
depression were not taken up as issues, what mattered was how people handled
them. Even if you had all the services that were needed there would still be the
emotional impact of an amputation for which help would be required. Even with
the ‘welfare state’ in the offing the professional associations were not thought by
the interviewees to have been heavily drawn into these fundamental
developments.
Three were clear about their political position. Margaret Simey was very political
but could be said to be best known for her local political work rather than for her
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social work activity. Kay McDougall, who was from a working class background,
had been in a “state of indignation” about the conditions in the 1930s but was not
directly involved in any obvious political action. Edgar Myers who came into
social work in 1949 described himself as “very left wing” and said to Alan that
some of the “old and wonderful PSWs were communists. They weren’t just
radical”.
We have referred above to the inter-professional perceptions and the resistance
to some of the emerging concepts as social work developed but it was in 1959
that there was an outsider’s sustained critique of the social work profession as a
whole. This was the chapter in Barbara Wootton’s Social Science and Social
Pathology.
Wootton argued that social workers had ceased to see themselves as primarily
concerned with the relief of poverty and needed a new interpretation of their
function which aided by psychiatry and psychoanalysis they had found in social
casework. But the latter involved claims to powers verging on “omniscience and
omnipotence”. The relationship with the client was now key rather than practical
assistance. The social worker’s duty is to penetrate the “presenting problem”
and get to the “something deeper” underneath. There is a “lamentable
arrogance” in the language of social workers which Wootton said masks the fact
that most social workers are “sensible practical people”, which makes it even
odder that they make such fantastic claims for what they do. The emphasis on
the casework relationship deflects attention away from the “problems created by
evil environments”. In her final barbed comment Wootton concluded that social
workers should do “for the run of ordinary people what confidential secretaries
and assistants do for the favoured few”. At one point Wootton wrote that social
workers had been deserted by their sense of humour. The same might be said in
return.
There was a minority of the 26 interviewees with some sympathy for the Barbara
Wootton critique (“a realist”) when others were extraordinarily dismissive of it
(“rubbish”). “I don’t think I ever read Barbara Wootton, except the thing she said
about me”. The two main responses were that she had never done a day’s
social work in her life and that she relied far too heavily upon the claims made
American literature about social work. Sometimes there was a grudging sense
that she was making some important points though rather overstating her case.
The claim made on her book cover says that Wootton cuts through “flabby
generalisations” with “surgical precision”. But reading the 26 interviews it is hard
not to conclude that some time spent with all or any of the 26 might have given
her a different perspective.
Apart from the Wootton saga, Alan was keen to raise two other final matters with
some of the 26. These were the issues of the social worker and the agency
function; and the generic versus specialist debate. Like much else these are
books in themselves. It is fair to say that the interviewees reflected on the two
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matters but were not generally animated about them. Time may have put things
in perspective. It is a contrast with the more vivid language they used in referring
to the old mental hospitals, doctors’ attitudes or the American casework
literature.
The local authority was a different kind of agency from that of the hospital or
Medical Officer of Health. “The first students who went into local authorities were
told firmly “this is not a social work service. This is an administrative service.”
The children’s department had been quite autonomous. But negotiating ways
through a local authority was more complex and indeed the functions of a local
authority were more diffuse than a hospital. The relationship with the local
authority administrator had to be different from that with the hospital doctor. But
the agency was set up for a purpose and “that unless you worked through the
function of the agency you could get off-beam very easily”. Tom Tinto clearly
had a firm grasp in Glasgow. Some things did have parallels: just as the medical
social worker had to fight to hold on to the social work activity in the hospital so
social workers in the new social service departments had to do the same.
Perhaps there will always be the challenge of the “welter of dentures”.
The struggle between the generic and specialist ways of working was for some a
bitter struggle. Kay McDougall said it made her ill. Reg Wright remembers the
“tensions and discomforts” at the LSE between the generic and the specialist
courses. Resisting the generic approach made the PSWs for example seem
elitist. To the question ‘what could a skilled child care worker not do for the old?’
one answer was certainly that given time the skills were transferable. Did
generic courses make people think social workers were omnipotent? The
Seebohm development was not welcomed by all the 26. Specialisms did not of
course totally disappear and, rather like in medicine, there seem to be more
emerging and as more is learnt about issues such as child abuse or abuse of the
elderly, that may be wise and inevitable.
The interviews were completed by 1981 and a brief report would have been sent
to the Nuffield Foundation. Sadly no copy of such a report now exists. There is
no doubt that Alan did obtain rich personalised accounts of the development of
social work institutions and ideas even though it may not always have been
exactly what he expected. To hear, as it were, his surprise at some of the
responses is good. However both of us have been at different times on both
sides of the funding relationship. We can easily hear funders saying ‘well Alan
you have given us informative and entertaining personal accounts, but what
impact do you think these people had?’ Alan might have reflected that whereas
he had thought that people like Clare Winnicott received, in his words. “endless
feedback” from their endeavours, in fact she said “unfortunately one never
knows”.
However we are sure Alan’s answer to the funders would have highlighted the
following: the development of intelligent theories to underpin the practical side of
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social work; the emergence of professional associations and their amalgamation
into the British Federation of Social Workers (the forerunner of BASW); the
establishment and recognition of social work in unfamiliar settings such as old
mental hospitals; the breaking down of the old Poor Law attitudes to the worthy
and unworthy; the realisation of the importance of training; the battling for things
that are now commonplace such as supervision; the courage to refuse to operate
services that were for one PSW a “parody of child guidance” and many other
impacts no doubt. What certainly would not have been expected was how in the
1950s and 1960s government reports and committees “time and time again” had
recommendations that “there needed to be more social workers”. They were
rather blandly seen as a solution to problems that no one else could deal with, an
omnipotence which came to be thrust upon them rather than claimed in the way
Barbara Wootton had argued. This was, whatever else, a far cry from doctors
not knowing what social workers were for.
There was one area of impact that Alan clearly found exceptionally interesting
was that which might be described as political influence on social policy and
legislation. One of the interviewees was Eileen Younghusband who gave her
name to the influential Younghusband Working Party and others in the 26 were
closely involved with it, for example Robina Addis and Tom Tinto were members.
Several of the 26 were members of the famous Curtis Committee looking into the
care of children “deprived of normal home life”. Alan sensed there was a core of
his 26 who were powerful ‘movers and shakers’ (in modern terminology) and he
was incredibly keen to find out how this inner world worked. He does get some
glimpses into it but in fact it is never quite as intriguing as we suspect he had
hoped.
The professional associations gave evidence to the various official committees
and enquiries but the interviewees are not always crystal clear as to who was key
in pulling that evidence together. There was certainly less suggestion of powerful
informality and networks than Alan had perhaps anticipated. On the other hand
individuals operated in a way that would be less likely today in 2013 when they
would almost certainly need to work through professional bodies. For example
after Lady Allen had written to the Times in 1944 about small children not getting
proper care, Letty Harford said in her interview “I went to see someone in the
Home Office and we talked about it. He said ‘of course we must have an
enquiry’”. The Curtis Committee was soon established. Then after the
Committee reported and legislation was planned, Clare Winnicott said that she
went to see Miss Geraldine Aves at the Ministry of Health to argue that the Act
should cover all children, only to be told that she was 20 years ahead of her time.
As she said about herself, “I’ve always been one of these people who would
lobby”. Access was clearly not a problem. Finally it is worth reading Alan’s
discussion with Geraldine Aves around her involvement in the setting up of the
Curtis Committee and her evidence to it. What actually happened is we feel not
as Alan would have liked to hear: far less “coffee gossip” and much more day to
day departmental workings.
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At the end of each interview Alan asked everyone to reflect on their greatest
achievement or work that had given them the greatest satisfaction. It is revealing
to note how many of the 26 reflected in some detail on individuals and families
with whom they had worked and from whom they had often learned important
lessons.
On June 9th 1954 candidates sat the Social Administration paper in the
Examination for the Certificate in Social Science and Administration at the LSE.
The last two of the 12 questions were:
“Casework is concerned not to provide a service but to help individuals to use
existing services”. Discuss this statement.
What do you understand by the phrase “professional social workers”? What part
do they play in the administration of the social services?
The LSE course, the paper and those questions owe much to the activities of
Alan Cohen’s interviewees.
Tim Cook and Harry Marsh.
London, July 2013
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