SOCIAL WORK HISTORY NETWORK: 14 October 2010
Bill Pearce and Joan Cooper
Personal Reminiscences
An invitation to talk about Bill Pearce and Joan Cooper proved irresistible. I
knew them both personally, Bill at the beginning of my career and Joan at the
end of hers. Both were role models, Bill the ideal boss of an agency for
delivering publicly-funded human services, Joan as a chief professional officer
in a department of state. Near contemporaries, they shared many values yet
were utterly different personalities.
Inhabiting as they did sharply
differentiated social work worlds, I am not aware that they ever met.
Bill’s world was that of probation and the wide field beyond it of criminal
justice. It may seem strange in 2010 to speak of probation in the context of
social work, yet members of the generation that entered the probation service
from Home Office training in the 1950s were proud to describe themselves as
social workers of the courts. Steeped in the methods of social casework, we
were among the agents of change in a service adjusting to increases in crime
and major changes in functions.
Some of us were fortunate enough to
journey north to work in the Durham combined area probation service. There
we found in Pearce a leader who combined the traditional values of service to
the courts with an innovatory approach to the treatment of crime and
delinquency and their causes.
William Harvey Pearce was born in a working class family in Liverpool in
1920. I do not know that he possessed any formal educational qualifications;
he certainly valued, and possibly over-valued, them in others. He joined the
Merchant Navy: not the safest career choice since when war broke out in
1939 his ship was torpedoed and he spent five days in an open boat.
Another ship he served on was also torpedoed.
He was later briefly a
prisoner of the Japanese and escaped, contracting a tropical disease that
caused his discharge on medical grounds.
I do not doubt that these
experiences contributed to the ethos of public service that characterised so
many of the men and women of that generation.
Joining the probation service in 1944, he made an astonishing leap from basic
grade officer eight years later to head the newly combined service in County
Durham. This was now one of the largest services in England, extending
from Darlington in the south to Gateshead in the north, and from Sunderland
in the east to Consett in the west. The turbulence caused by reorganisation
and amalgamation is now a familiar experience. When I arrived in Durham in
1956, undercurrents of antagonism to the new dispensation still surfaced
among older staff, but Pearce had already established the reputation of the
service among judges, recorders and magistrates, local authorities,
universities, the police and the probation inspectorate.
He regarded
probation as a service for the whole community, working as closely as
possible with other social agencies.
Business boomed as a result, with
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progressive increases in the use of social enquiry reports and probation by
the courts.
Pearce welcomed the stimulus and challenge of newly qualified staff, and
demonstrated a commitment to training ahead of his time in a service that had
previously weighted ‘character’ and experience ahead of formal training.
Durham provided first postings for many products of Home Office training, and
when demand for staff exceeded supply Pearce was rigorously faithful to
training for direct entrants to the service. He established in-service training
for all staff, and the county was alive with groups of all kinds. Many future
leaders of the service emerged from Bill Pearce’s stable, including a future
Chief Inspector of Probation in Sir Graham Smith.
Pearce’s professional leadership was accompanied by a grasp of wider
criminal policy fuelled by national and international contacts.
He also
possessed the managerial ability that a growing service needed to direct its
resources in the most productive way. Few objective criteria were available
to evaluate success and promote consistency of standards. Pearce worked
with his middle managers to arrive at common standards of performance
without constraining the flair of individuals at field level.
He provided
continual encouragement to innovate – followed by pressure to standardise
and communicate so that innovation could be replicated. Outside the county,
he served on advisory bodies to the Home Office and as president of the
conference of principal probation officers. He was an inspiring, informal – but
always well prepared – speaker at conferences.
I never knew Pearce avoid a problem or equivocate. He took time if he
needed it, and sought knowledge where it might be found – even in junior
staff. But he was always decisive; he would admit error, but always stuck to
his guns when he believed he was right. He stood by his staff; one might be
criticised in private, but he always took the responsibility in public.
The
principal lesson I learned from him was about the ethical standards required in
running a service with a statutory basis and funded from the public purse. He
placed himself and his staff in a chain of accountability: to the public
generally, the public we served, our employing committees, the courts, the
Home Office and Parliament.
After 18 years in Durham, Pearce moved at the height of his powers to the
Inner London Probation Service, the largest in England. He continued to
innovate, and developed a thriving international exchange of schemes and
projects through activities in the USA, Asia and the Far East, and through the
United Nations. In 1980 he was appointed the first chief inspector of prisons,
but sadly died within two years.
Bill was not everyone’s cup of tea. Forcefully genial, larger than life, his
personality could blow you away at first meeting. He smoked a pipe, played
golf and his cars were always painted red. But he was a superb, visionary
leader, a practical manager and a splendid public servant.
Tough on
backsliders and those who believed that the job could be organised around
their personal interests, he was even more severe towards others who
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transgressed against his code of public service. Privately, however, he was
the kindest of men, with a consoling ear and more practical help when it was
needed. In my view, Pearce was the outstanding figure in the probation
service during the second half of the twentieth century. This at a time when it
counted a high proportion of giants among its leaders, and when it was
geared to social work goals, social work methods and to generally doing good
in the world.
The background and personality of Joan Davies Cooper were very different,
although she and Pearce at least haled from the same county. Born into a
middle class household in Manchester in 1914, Joan was a grammar school
girl who proceeded to a university education. Her parents were members of
the Moravian Church. Joan did not practise any religion in later life, but her
approach to social work was based on the firm moral foundations established
in her childhood and, later, by her experience in Lancashire during the
depression years. Both she and her younger brother lived lives of public
service, Frank becoming a notable permanent secretary in Northern Ireland
and the Ministry of Defence.
Joan became a teacher, one of the few careers easily available to educated
women in the pre-war world. Moving into administration with Derbyshire in
1941, she worked with children who had been evacuated from their homes.
At the age of 30 she was already an assistant education officer. Her big
opportunity came in 1948. Appointed children’s officer for East Sussex she
joined that pioneering band, largely composed of women, who set up the first
children’s departments. Like Pearce, she achieved chief officer status before
she was 35 – almost absurdly young for local government in that era. Also
like him, she remained in that first chief officer post for almost two decades in
establishing and maintaining her service as one of the best in the country.
Joan dealt with the early problems of chauvinism and envy that she and her
peers encountered by simply demonstrating how good she was at her job.
Strongly committed to the needs of the children she served and to the ethics
of public service, she modernised the obsolete systems she inherited. She
developed foster care and small residential homes in place of the large Poor
Law institutions, and introduced training for staff. Like many of that first
generation of children’s officers, Joan took a personal interest in the individual
children in the care of East Sussex. Her relationship with some of them
continued until her final illness. She attracted talented and committed staff
whom she inspired with similar dedication. She could be a challenging and
demanding leader, but provided staff with personal as well as professional
support. Like Pearce, she ranged to the continent and North America for the
latest thinking, served as the chair of her professional association and acted
as an advisor to the Home Office.
Her next post was at the Home Office, where she succeeded the retiring chief
of the children’s inspectorate in 1965.
This was a time of rapid policy
development in response to onrushing social change, and the appointment of
an outsider as chief inspector acknowledged the need for fresh approaches.
Much of the new stimulus in the children’s field was provided by a talented
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under-secretary, Derek Morell, and Joan worked closely with him on the white
papers leading to the Children and Young Persons Act of 1969 and on the Act
itself. While she also contributed to broader social policies on community
development and urban development, her principal focus remained on
children’s services and her own inspectorate. Unrest in approved schools
suggested that institutional treatment needed reform; the whole field of social
care, including children’s services, was being scrutinised by the Seebohm
Committee; and the inspectorate itself needed to adjust to changing patterns
in the field. Joan embarked, with the help of other incomers like Barbara
Kahan and Clare Winnicott, on shifting the role of the inspectorate towards a
supportive, creative, innovative and inspirational advisory group, formulating
and encouraging good practice.
The grand Seebohm reorganisation of services in the field was mirrored in
central government by the transfer of the Home Office’s responsibilities for
children to the Department for Health and Social Security. The relevant staff,
including the inspectorate, moved with their jobs. The existing professional
culture of the DHSS was rigorously non-interventionist. Merely to mention
inspection brought on a fit of the vapours, and even the formidable Richard
Crossman had been unable to impose more than a Health Advisory Service
on the NHS in the wake of Geoffrey Howe’s report on the Ely Hospital
scandal.
Even Joan’s new look inspectorate was rather strong meat for the DHSS. Its
functions were taken on but the title of the existing Social Work Service of the
DHSS was retained as the name of the amalgamated service. Administrative
colleagues regarded her unifying two such dissimilar services as a major
achievement, in which her calm and wise personality was crucial. She also
played a key role in channelling her Secretary of State’s interest in what he
called ‘the cycle of deprivation’ into a constructive programme of research.
To the field, Joan and the SWS presented interpretation and advice about the
mass of new legislation that assaulted departments contending with
amalgamations and then, in 1974, with a reorganisation of local government
everywhere except in London.
Joan had come to the civil service at the height of her powers. She brought
priceless experience to discussions of policy with civil servants who relied on
her practical knowledge and experience.
She possessed a commanding
intellectual ability that won her respect at every level.
Her Lancastrian
directness reduced complex issues to accurate summaries in briefing timepressed ministers. She was also a doughty campaigner for the needs of the
people and the services she represented.
She could also be patient,
knowing when – in civil service terminology – ‘the time was not yet ripe’, and
that opportunities to revive her schemes would surely return.
It was typical of Joan that the first thing she did after retiring from the civil
service was to undertake a period of refreshing study at the National Institute
for Social Work.
She was now able to give more time to the National
Children’s Bureau, one of her favourite projects. Sussex University enjoyed
her services as a visiting research fellow. She answered the call of duty to
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take on the chairing of CCETSW following an unexpected resignation,
handling with great dignity the ultimately unsuccessful negotiations about a
third year of social work training. She wrote a magisterial book about the
formation of the personal social services. And at the end was chairing the
group set up to plan the celebrations for the jubilee of the Children Act 1948.
In personality she was quite the opposite of Pearce. In public her habit of
applying the full force of her intellect to what was under discussion could
make her seem overly detached. She spoke only when she had something
to say; and one always knew that her mind was on what was being said. In
private there were few warmer and more humorous companions. She was
also fiercely independent; one of my fondest memories of her later years is of
this tiny woman, coping with the effects of ME and a recent fall, fiercely
resisting all efforts to help her carry a suitcase.
For both Cooper and Pearce, social work was a moral activity. I hope this
brief reminiscence imparts, to those who did not know them, something of
their contribution to social work and something of the flavour of their
personalities.
Bill Utting
October 2010
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