Introduction

Charitable activity grew rapidly in Britain from the late eighteenth century and disabled people were caught up in this expansion. Blindness and deafness were popular causes because these sensory impairments denied access to the word of God and hence appealed to Christian sympathies. Support for physical disabilities was slower to arrive, gathering pace after the 1870 Education Act revealed how many ‘crippled’ children did not receive schooling. Therefore, the House of Charity for Distressed Persons, founded in Soho in 1846, was unusual in caring for physically disabled children. This was not part of its original plan. The House was largely the achievement of a group of Anglo-Catholic laymen, known as the Engagement, whose members agreed to perform regular acts of charity. Their aim was twofold; to provide temporary shelter for suitably selected or recommended persons in London, and to give an opportunity for association with charitable activity to those too busy to get directly involved themselves. Its involvement in the provision of temporary accommodation for children with disabilities came about almost by accident. Although contrary to the founders' original intentions, it was probably a necessary response to the urgent need to keep its beds full, both to ensure a regular income from those benefactors who pledged to pay for the care of individual inmates, and to satisfy the spiritual needs of those of its supporters for whom the financial support of the House of Charity was a religious exercise, as well as a response to pressure from its supporters for a place of refuge for children receiving treatment in the capital.

The problems posed for local authorities by numbers of poor families were brought to public attention by the account of their wartime activities published by members of Pacifist Service Units (PSU) based in Liverpool, Manchester and Stepney during the Second World War. The efforts of PSU were rewarded by support from public figures and its establishment as a permanent peacetime voluntary social work agency, renamed Family Service Units (FSU). Its work attracted the attention of mental health agencies and Medical Officers of Health, partly as a consequence of the creation of a tripartite structure for the new National Health Service that vested responsibility for environmental health with local departments of public health, so that dirty homes and children were classified as medical problems. This chapter will suggest that the close association between PSU/FSU and public health doctors meant that poor and poorly functioning families were pathologised, frequently in terms of the intellectual inadequacy or mental illness of the parents. Children were evidence of parental failure and, in the case of those families who came to be labelled ‘problem families’, of a syndrome which was generally assumed to have a defined aetiology and prognosis. Little attempt was made to develop a critique of the economic and social conditions which contributed to the families’ situation.

The professionalisation of social work, the large increase in the numbers of those who called themselves social workers, and new methods of dealing with family difficulties weakened the influence of public health doctors after the mid-1950s. To some extent, therefore, changes in methods of helping those who came to be designated problem families may be understood as an aspect of the rise and fall – the working out of struggles and ambitions – of two professions, medicine and social work. It was a function of the increased professionalisation of social work, which was in part the result of a wider acknowledgement of its role in post-war Britain and a consequent increase in the number of courses designed to equip social workers for their task. Newly confident of their task and status, social workers wrested from public health doctors the care of families deemed to be at risk because of parental incompetence or neglect.

The essays published in this volume have been selected from over fifty papers presented at an international conference on Child Welfare and Social Action held at the University of Liverpool in July 1998. Organised by members of the departments of History, Special Collections and Archives, and Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Studies, the conference marked the deposit of the records of NCH Action for Children (formerly the National Children's Homes) in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the University. There they joined an important voluntary social work collection, including the records of Barnardo's, the Fairbridge Trust, Family Service Units and the Simon Community. Liverpool is an appropriate home for them. The Social Science Department, founded in 1904 and perhaps inevitably associated with the name of Eleanor Rathbone, was one of the first in the country, and training for social workers has always been an important aspect of the work of its successor departments.

There is currently great academic and general interest in the question of child welfare. Recent historical work has done much to focus attention on changing conceptions of childhood and of children's rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This has gone hand-in-hand with a rediscovery of the ‘hidden histories’ of childhood – shocking accounts of the physical and sexual abuse of children and of forced child migration, but also histories which seek to re-emphasise the importance of childhood as lived experience as well as discursive construction. The present volume brings together a wide range of essays that engage with the major themes of this recent literature. The essays are organised into four thematic sections, each representing a key field of research into the history of childhood and child welfare. The first section brings together two essays that explore ways in which notions of ‘delinquency’ have been, and remain, heavily gendered. Tamara Myers’ chapter on ‘delinquent’ teenage girls in inter-war Montreal neatly intertwines accounts of changing representations and changing policy frameworks with the lived experience of young women cut adrift in an exhilarating, but also frightening, city environment. Myers argues that, whereas in the late nineteenth century runaway girls (her ‘deserting daughters’) tended to be portrayed as defenceless victims of predatory adults, by the inter-war period they were widely viewed, and treated, as ‘sex delinquents’.

The approbation and endorsement which the agency had attracted during the 1940s and 1950s continued into the following decade and beyond. In spite of debates about the relative merits of different forms of intervention within both the social work profession generally and the organisation itself, FSU remained associated with intensive family casework. By stressing the importance of the whole family group, and of the child within the family, FSU even influenced the work of the voluntary agencies which had traditionally been associated with child rescue and the institutional care of children from families in which their well-being was thought to be threatened. For instance, it formed the basis of small-scale experiments like First Aid for Families, practised by National Children's Homes and explicitly based on FSU's example.

FSU was also singled out for praise by a Home Office Committee on Children and Young Persons which had been set up in 1956 under the chairmanship of Viscount Ingleby, and which reported in 1961. One commentator claimed that the report contained a ‘plea for a rationalised and huge extension of the pioneer work done by Family Service Units’. He was in a position to know; as a magistrate and a former chairman of the London County Council Children's Committee, Donald Ford had been a member of the Ingleby committee. However, his exultant comment appears to have been based on slim evidence and a partial reading of the report. The committee's terms of reference had been to inquire into the working of the law in England and Wales, specifically the juvenile court system and its jurisdiction and procedures, together with the remand home and approved school systems. The greater part of the report, therefore, is concerned with the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency, which was reported to have increased by 47 per cent since 1954. While the sort of family rehabilitation in which FSUs were involved had some bearing on the incidence of delinquency, it requires a good deal of imagination to see in the 125 Ingleby recommendations an encouragement to extend its work considerably. The committee was also required to inquire into, and make recommendations on, local authorities’ powers and duties in order to prevent or forestall the suffering of children through neglect in their own homes, but it was secondary to the main purpose of the report.