Getting the Measure of Poverty

The Early Legacy of Seebohm Rowntree

Jonathan Bradshaw, Roy Sainsbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351933735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Poverty in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A collection of papers with an historical theme, representing a fundamental review of 'A Study of Town Life' and its impact on the study of poverty and on wider empirical research.

1 Editors' Introduction

JONATHAN BRADSHAW and ROY SAINSBURY

The conference to mark the centenary of Seebohm Rowntree's first study of poverty in York has resulted in three volumes of proceedings. This first volume Getting the measure of poverty is devoted to papers which explore the early legacy of Rowntree's work before the Second World War and, in some papers, into the post-war period. The second and third volumes Researching Poverty (Bradshaw and Sainsbury, 2000a) and Experiencing Poverty (Bradshaw and Sainsbury, 2000b) represent a picture of the state of poverty research in the late 1990s, after a period of 20 years when Britain had a government not particularly concerned with poverty and not much interested in funding research into it. That a conference commemorating one man and one book has been held nearly 100 years after the book's publication is testament to Rowntree's enduring influence and, less welcome, to the enduring problem of poverty.

This volume opens with an exhilarating account by Lord Asa Briggs of the genesis of Rowntree's seminal work Poverty: A Study of Town Life in the context of Rowntree's life as employer, pioneering social researcher, practising Quaker, and family man. Lord Briggs draws on his own analysis of Rowntree's major works in Social Thought and Social Action (Briggs, 1961), itself not intended to be a biographical account of Rowntree's life, to build a picture of a shy, hard working, garden-loving, unobtrusively religious man, who prompted contrasting responses from people with whom he came into contact: loved by some, disliked by others. His story draws in a diverse cast, from his close collaborators who worked with him on his series of poverty studies to prominent figures such as Lloyd George and the international spy, Trebitsch Lincoln. Briggs emphasises the contribution of Rowntree in pioneering scientific methods of investigation, for example, in survey sampling and in the comprehensive measurement of poverty.

In Chapter 3, GrahamBowpitt examines the contemporary debates at the end of the nineteenth century about the causes and appropriate remedies for poverty between the leaders of the charity organisation movement and social reformers such as Rowntree. The former argued that there was no such thing as 'poverty', only social inefficiency caused by the moral choices and behaviour of individuals. Rowntree's success in countering this argument through his conceptualisation of poverty as a scientifically measurable phenomenon is evaluated.

In Chapters 4 to 6, the contribution of Rowntree to the study of poverty is debated. John Veit-Wilson emphasises the importance of Rowntree. He argues that Rowntree did not intend his measures to define the boundaries of poverty, rather that his 1899 primary poverty measure was a criterion of the inadequacy of incomes, and his later Human Needs of Labour measures were standards for minimally adequate wage rates. Hence, his projects were essentially setting 'minimum income standards' and that despite government reviews of the basis of income maintenance benefit levels, both before and since the Second world War, Rowntree's project is still unfinished. Bernard Harris takes a different position and argues that Rowntree's original conception of poverty may have been less 'relative' than Veit-Wilson suggests. Harris goes on to discuss the evolution of Rowntree' s conception of poverty between 1902 and 1951 and concludes that there are good grounds for believing that it was in the later surveys, rather than his 1899 survey, that Rowntree came closest to anticipating the more modern notion of 'relative poverty'. The aim of Alan Gillie's chapter is to reassess Rowntree's work in its historical context. He suggests that the focus on Booth's presumed influence on Rowntree has been unhelpful and challenges the claim that Rowntree's was 'the first attempt to fix a poverty line on scientific grounds'. Gillie presents the argument that the concept of a poverty line was familiar to school boards since the Elementary Education Act of 1870 and the neither Booth nor Rowntree invented it. Hence, he argues that the recent 'rehabilitation' of Rowntree (Veit-Wilson, 1986) is based upon a fundamental misinterpretation of Rowntree's Poverty, and that an assessment of Rowntree's work requires an understanding of the relationship between his and earlier concepts and measurements of poverty.

Tim Hatton and Roy Bailey focus on Rowntree's finding from his 1899 study of poverty in York that there were three phases of poverty in the life cycle of the unskilled labourer: in childhood, in the middle years and in old age. They then use the newly computerised records from the New Survey of London Life and Labour (1929-31) to explore the pattern of poverty incidence by age in the interwar period. They conclude that the distinctive pattern of poverty incidence across the life cycle first noted by Rowntree can be clearly identified in interwar London.

In Chapter 8, Ifan Shepherd adds to our understanding of poverty in late Victorian London by critically evaluating the role of mapping in Charles Booth's study of poverty which influenced Rowntree's first study in York. By geographically coding the detailed information recorded in Booth's manuscript notebooks, a set of maps is for the first time created at the family scale. These permit a re-evaluation of Booth's famous street colour maps of poverty, and a micro-geographical analysis of social and economic life in Victorian London. Shepherd draws conclusions about the contributions that family-level mapping can make to the historical study of urban poverty, and on the fundamental issue of which scales are best for the geographical exploration of urban poverty.

In her contribution to this volume, Patricia Garside offers an insight into the contrasting approaches to philanthropy of Seebohm Rowntree and the late-Victorian businessman William Sutton (whose business interests in brewing and distilling could not have been further removed from the Rowntrees' temperance background). Sutton's Trust was set up to provide immediate and practical help to the poor in the form of affordable housing, but, as Garside shows, his wider influence on housing for the poor was negligible. In contrast, Rowntree, by emphasising the need to assess, to quantify, and to explain social phenomena, gained a central position in debates about both poverty and housing policy.

Harriet Ward draws on the contribution of Rowntree to explore how poverty inhibits the capacity of parents to provide adequately for their children, and in particular how one of the major consequences of poverty was the separation of children from their parents. The chapter draws on information from a sample of children who were taken into the care of one of the voluntary societies between 1894-1894. Ward compares family incomes data from Rowntree's almost contemporaneous study in an analysis that demonstrates the part played by poverty in parents' decisions to agree to separation. Evidence from modern studies demonstrates how poverty still remains a major precipitating factor in entry to care or accommodation.

While mainland Britain was struggling with the problems of poverty identified by Booth, Rowntree and others, Ireland (still a part of the United Kingdom) was experiencing even higher incidences of poverty. In his wide ranging historical review of poverty and social policy in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century, Séamus Ó Cinnéide shows that, in the midst of political turmoil around the issue of independence, poverty was not high on the political agenda. Ó Cinnéide goes on to identify changes in the understanding of, and policies towards, poverty in Ireland, and how these were influenced by the historical context, by empirical work and by philosophical and political debates.

The final chapter in this volume by Mark Freeman concentrates on an area of Rowntree's work often overshadowed by his seminal studies of urban poverty. In several works over his lifetime Rowntree also investigated the impact of poverty on agricultural workers and their families. Freeman reviews the methods used to look at rural poverty, by Rowntree and other investigators, and argues that studies of the social relations of the countryside complemented the more narrowly focused studies of poverty in providing a fuller understanding of the conditions of agricultural labourers.

References

Bradshaw, J. and Sainsbury, R. (2000a), Researching Poverty, Ashgate, Aldershot.

Bradshaw, J. and Sainsbury, R. (2000b), Experiencing Poverty, Ashgate, Aldershot.

Briggs, A. (1961), Social Thought and Social Action: A Study of the Work of Seebohm Rowntree, Longmans, London.

Veit-Wilson, J. (1986), 'Paradigms of Poverty: a Rehabilitation of B.S.Rowntree', Journal of Social Policy, vol.l5, no.1, pp.69-99.

2 Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty: A Study of Town Life in Historical Perspective

LORD ASA BRIGGS

The papers being delivered at this Centenary Conference cover a wide variety of themes, historical and contemporary. Some, the most ambitious, point to the future. Most have policy implications - as Seebohm Rowntree himself would have wished. Some have technical aspects which he did not anticipate and which he would not necessarily have understood or liked. All deal with issues and problems in more detail than I have time to do in this opening plenary session, when my task is to place one book by Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, in historical perspective.

To pursue that task I have to begin by placing Rowntree in historical context and perspective as a person. One man, more than one book: the last of his books was written more than a half a century later than Poverty. Three of the books deal with poverty, and constitute an unusual time sequence, published as they were in 1901, 1941 and 1951. There was a striking gap between 1936, when the material for the second book was collected, and the middle of the Second World War.

Almost as well-known, however, among Rowntree's books were The Human Needs of Labour (1918) and The Human Factor in Business (1921). The whole collection is now best considered together. Whether they deal with poverty or with industry, they follow similar approaches - and that is how I considered them in 1961 in my book Social Thought and Social Action, A Study of the Work of Seebohm Rowntree (Briggs, 1961). This was not in an ordinary sense a biography, although it was chronological rather than thematic in its organisation, and since it was written more than a generation ago, within a few years of Rowntree's death in 1954, I now have to put my own book into historical perspective also. A great deal has changed in those thirty years in attitudes and in politics, particularly the politics of the welfare state. The book, which went quickly out of print, needs a new edition.

In 1955, when I started work on it, Peter Townsend, the speaker at our third plenary session, had not yet finished his first book, The Family Life of Old People (Townsend, 1957) which dealt with Bethnal Green, an early product of the Institute of Community Studies, founded by Michael Young, about whom I am now writing, focusing as in my Rowntree book on the relationship between social thought and social action. That is not the only linked theme. There is a direct link with The Family Life of Old People. More than a decade before Townsend started to work with Young, Rowntree in 1944 had been chosen as Chairman of a Committee set up on the initiative of the Nuffleld Foundation, indeed on the initiative of Lord Nuffleld himself, to look at issues concerning old people. It published its report, Old People in 1946 (Committee on the Problems on Ageing, 1946). Rowntree did not like the first draft, and with the help of G.R. Lavers rewrote it. In 1901, when Poverty: A Study of Town Life appeared, there were only 2½ million people over 65: in 1946 there were 6½ million, and Rowntree was one of them.

Poverty was published in the year when Queen Victoria died. In pre-Suez 1955 the Victorians were only just coming back into fashion: their virtues were still suspect. The term 'Victorian values' had not yet been invented - or disinterred. Margaret Thatcher had not yet entered Parliament. There was no University of York, although it was rather more than a twinkle in the eye of J.B. Morrell, for long a Quaker member of the Board of the Rowntree Company, and a newspaper director, and another non-Quaker member of the Board, Oliver Sheldon. When Sheldon died in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain, the Archbishop of York, who delivered the memorial address on him in the Minster, noted that it had been 'his great hope that York should found a College which would presently become a university which, situated in a city possessing so many treasures of the past combined with modern business activities would be able to make a special contribution to the culture of the North.'

In 1955 Rowntree's as a company was still very much Rowntree's. It had a distinctive, confident and proud culture of its own, independent of the Minster. The main context was a family context, and the University of Leeds, where I had just been appointed a Professor, had no associations with it, intellectual or social. A Rowntree, Peter, Seebohm's son, was still living at the Homestead in York, where Seebohm had lived until 1936 when he moved south - first to North Dean near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire and later, with more than a touch of irony, to Disraeli's old house in the same county at Hughenden. It was in Seebohm's study at the Homestead- he had first moved there in 1904 after work on Poverty was finished - where I carried out most of my research with the surviving, but sadly depleted, Rowntree papers, only a remnant and largely unsorted, at my immediate disposal. I was aware of their strengths and their limitations - many of them had already been destroyed before he moved south - and inevitably I was drawn to what came to be called 'oral history'. Fortunately some people of key importance were still alive, including Bruno Lasker, his private secretary before Frank Stuart, and a few of his other helpers. I have been re-reading the transcripts of some of the interviews which I carried out myself or were carried out by my own invaluable helper, Ian Smart. They bring Rowntree back to life as a person. Sadly I had never met him myself except when I received an essay prize of £1 from him while a boy of ten.

I do not wish an autobiographical element to intrude too much into this lecture. That is almost enough of it. Nor do I want to repeat all over again, even if in different form, what I wrote in my book. I do intend, however, to turn back to the transcripts of the interviews which are the main sources now, primary sources, if you like, of this lecture. What do they tell us about Rowntree as a person? Some of the people I interviewed - two, in particular did not like him. Even they, however, stressed how hard he worked - even in his last years he observed a six-day working week - and how willing he was to listen to people without pontificating. He was patient and forbearing. His religious views were not obtrusive. He rarely mentioned God. All the people I interviewed stressed too how practical he was, hard-headed and down-to-earth. Any scheme he proposed, Sir Robert Hyde, founder of the Industrial Welfare Society, stated had to justify itself 'by more than moral virtue: it had...