Jonathan Bradshaw - Getting the Measure of Poverty

The early legacy of Seebohm Rowntree

Edited by
Jonathan Bradshaw and Roy Sainsbury
Social Policy Research Unit
University of York

First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright Jonathan Bradshaw and Roy Sainsbury 2000

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Getting the measure of poverty : the early legacy of Seebohm Rowntree. - (Studies in cash and care)
1. Rowntree, Seebohm - Influence 2. Poverty - Great Britain - History - 19th century - Congresses 3. Poverty - Research - Great Britain - History - 19th century - Congresses
I. Bradshaw, Jonathan, 1944 - II. Sainsbury, Roy
362.5'0941'0903

Library of Congress Control Number: 00-131707

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-1289-6 (hbk)

Lord Asa Briggs

Roy E. Bailey

Graham Bowpitt
Nottingham Trent University

Jonathan Bradshaw
University of York

Mark Freeman
University of Glasgow

Patricia L. Garside
University of Salford

Alan Gillie
The Open University

Bernard Harris
University of Southampton

Timothy J. Hatton
University of Essex

Samus Cinnide
National University of Ireland Maynooth

Roy Sainsbury
University of York

Ifan D. H. Shepherd
Middlesex University Business School

John Veit-Wilson
University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Harriet Ward
University of Leicester

SIR PETER BARCLAY, CHAIRMAN
JOSEPH ROWNTREE FOUNDATION

As chairman of Joseph Rowntree Foundation, I welcome the publication of these volumes containing the proceedings of the conference sponsored by the Foundation.

The Foundation was delighted to support this event for a number of reasons:

His work and his ideas also had a great influence on his father Joseph and in 1904 were partly responsible for Joseph's decision to establish his three trusts.

If you read about the debates which followed the publication of the survey, in Asa Briggs' (1961) fascinating and comprehensive study of Seebohm's life, they have an uncomfortably modern ring. The Charity Organisation Society had, throughout the previous century, maintained that poverty was caused by the moral turpitude of the poor (shades of ' benefit dependency?') - in answer to which Seebohm was able to show that poverty was a real phenomenon with clear structural causes. He called for a minimum wage and warned his opponents, as Asa Briggs recounts, 'not to pit their uninformed feelings about poverty against his facts'. If they saw people who by his standards were in primary poverty appearing to live well (as we see sometimes in TV documentaries today), let them not, said Seebohm confuse 'things that are seen with consequences of poverty which are not seen' - (in our time, isolation, bad health, bad living and social exclusion in general).

Finally, the Foundation welcomes this publication because it provides a unique opportunity to review the theory method and policy relevance of poverty research. As a consequence, I hope that after 20 years in which such research has been largely ignored - in fact, in recent years only the brave even dared to mention the word 'poverty' at all - I hope we can bring high quality research in this area back into the centre of both social research effort and informed policy debate and that we shall look back on these conference proceedings as a significant turning point.

Briggs, A.S. (1961), Social Thought and Social Action: A Study of the Work of Seebohm Rowntree, 1871-1954, Longmans.

Cole, M. (ed.) (1956), Beatrice Webb's Diaries 1924-1932, Longmans, London.

Rowntree, B.S. (1901), Poverty: A Study of Town Life, Macmillan, London.

The editors would like to acknowledge the generous financial support provided by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to the conference to mark the centenary of Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty: A Study of Town Life held at the University of York in March 1998.

We would like to offer heartfelt thanks to all the contributors to this volume, not only for their excellent papers but also for their patience during the seemingly inevitable delays that accompany the preparation of an edited book.

The help and guidance of our colleagues at Ashgate Publishing has been invaluable. Our thanks to them.

And, finally, our support team at the University of York have carried out their contributions to the production of the book with their usual enthusiasm and efficiency without which we would be lost. Thank you Sally Pulleyn, Lucy Bradshaw and Nico Bradshaw.

Jonathan Bradshaw
Roy Sainsbury

University of York, March 2000

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.