Michael Young, the Institute of Community Studies, and the Politics of Kinship

1. Lise Butler* University College Oxford1
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Michael Young, the Institute
of Community Studies, and
the Politics of Kinship
Abstract
This article examines the East London-based Institute of Community Studies, and
its founder, Michael Young, to show that sociology and social research offered
avenues for left-wing political expression in the 1950s. Young, who had
previously been Head of the Labour Party Research Department during the
Attlee government, drew upon existing currents of psychological and sociological
research to emphasize the continuing relevance of the extended family in
industrial society and to offer a model of socialist citizenship, solidarity and
mutual support not tied to productive work. Young and his colleagues at the
Institute of Community Studies promoted the supportive kinship networks of the
urban working class, and an idealized conception of the relationships between
women, to suggest that family had been overlooked by the left and should be
reclaimed as a progressive force. The article shows that the Institute’s sociological
work was informed by a pre-existing concern with family as a model for
cooperative socialism, and suggests that sociology and social research should be
seen as important sources of political commentary for scholars of post-war
politics.
Introduction
After the general election of 1950 Michael Young felt drained and
disillusioned. Young, Head of the Labour Party Research Department,
had been tasked with reinvigorating the party’s policy programme for
the 1950 election. Though he had also been primarily responsible for the
*E-mail: lise.butler@univ.ox.ac.uk
1
I warmly thank my supervisor Ben Jackson, anonymous reviewers for Twentieth
Century British History, Jon Lawrence, James Vernon, John Davis, Christina de Bellaigue,
Stuart White, Paula Butler, Kit Kowol, and Christina Black for their invaluable comments,
suggestions and edits, and remember the help of the late A.H. Halsey. Thanks also to the
participants of the Oxford Modern British History Seminar, Oxford History of Political
Thought Seminar, and the Berkeley Graduate Conference in the History of British Political
Thought for helping me to shape this article.
Twentieth Century British History, 2015, page 1 of 22 doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwu063
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Twentieth Century British History Advance Access published February 5, 2015

2. party’s 1945 election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, which had
contributed to the resounding victory of the first Attlee government, he
found post-war policy development to be a much greater challenge.
Young was not terribly proud of Let Us Face the Future, which, he
recalled, had ‘sort of wrote itself’.2
He characterized the document as an
intellectual mix of ‘Beveridge plus Keynes plus Socialism’ and the
product of ‘centuries of socialist propaganda’, recalling ‘I didn’t think it
was particularly good. It wasn’t well written, but nor did it need to be’.
But the manifesto was of secondary importance as a policy document: a
‘champagne fizz’ was in the air, a mood of inexorable change had
swept politics, and ‘[a]lmost anything the Labour Party said was going
to carry them’.3
After the exhilarating election victory of the summer of 1945, Young
found the next phase of policy development to be an uphill battle.
Labour’s arguments for reconstruction, the health service, social
security and post-war housing policy had been developed over decades
in opposition, and had crystallized during the war. But after 5 years in
government, new policies were more difficult to come by. Young
presided over ‘umpteen committees’ seeking fresh ideas and policy
solutions to bring to the 1950 election, and eventually produced the
somewhat awkwardly titled election manifesto, Let Us Win Through
Together, which promised full employment, new homes, more power to
local government, a consumer advice service, the promotion of private
enterprise and industrial democracy.4
But Young, upon reflection, still
thought the 1950 programme ‘a pretty tawdry thing’ devoid of
intellectual spirit or substance. He recalled that despite his best efforts,
he and his colleagues had failed to find a satisfactory new policy
direction.5
Nonetheless, the Labour Party won the election of 1950 by a
slim majority of only five seats in stark contrast to its 146 seat majority
of 1945, and would go on to be defeated in a second general election
18 months later. Disillusioned, Young resigned from the Research
Department after the 1950 election, accepting the Labour Party’s
generous offer of a 6-month sabbatical to travel to New Zealand,
Australia, Israel, and India. But when he arrived back in Britain, Young
returned not to public policy, but sociology. And it was through
sociology that he would mount a critique of the post-war settlement.
2
Churchill Archive Center, Cambridge, Michael Young Papers, [hereafter YUNG] 10/
2, National Life Story Collection: Leading Citizens, Lord Young of Dartington interviewed
by Professor Paul Thompson, 12 May 1990, 70.
3
YUNG 10/2, National Life Story Collection, 69; Peter Hennessy, ‘The 1945 General
Election and the Post War Period Remembered’, Contemporary Record, 9:1 (Summer 1995),
81, 84; YUNG 10/3, Michael Young interview by Jane Gabriel, Roll 1, 22 March 1994, 16.
4
YUNG 6/39, Let Us Face the Future: A Declaration of Labour Party Policy for the
Consideration of the Nation, September 1945.
5
YUNG 10/2, National Life Story Collection, 69.
2 of 22 LISE BUTLER

3. Michael Young’s ideas have recently enjoyed a small renaissance in
Labour circles concerned with devolution and local government. A
number of publicly facing and more scholarly accounts have portrayed
Young as a proponent of decentralization against the centralizing
tendencies of the post-war left, and placed Young’s thought in the
context of a longer liberal pluralist or ethical socialist tradition that
favoured communitarian and cooperative forms of political association.6
But Young’s ideas should not just be set against dominant intellectual
trends within the Labour Party, past and present, but also seen as the
products of a sustained engagement with the social research and social
sciences of his day, including sociology, anthropology, and psychology.
As Stephen Brooke, Martin Francis and Jeremy Nuttall have all
shown, a strand of social scientific thought informed debates about the
ideological direction of the Labour Party in the 1940s.7
This social
science inflected socialism did not disappear with Evan Durbin’s
premature death in 1948, or the Labour Party’s election loss in 1951, but
blossomed in the realms of social research and sociology. As Ben
Jackson has described, sociologists like Richard Titmuss, Peter
Townsend, and Michael Young contributed to a mutualist and
organicist strand of left-wing political thought in the 1950s. Inspired
by the socially transformative experience of wartime, these groups
looked to working-class social practices, traditional ways of life, and the
extended family for inspiration.8
In 1953 Young founded the Institute of Community Studies (ICS) in
the East London district of Bethnal Green and would soon be joined by
Townsend and fellow social researchers Peter Willmott and Peter
6
Jon Cruddas, speech to the New Local Government Network, February 2014, http://
www.nlgn.org.uk/public/2014/power-and-one-nation/; Jon Cruddas and Jonathan
Rutherford, One Nation: Labour’s Political Renewal (London, 2014), 13; David Goodhart,
A Post-Liberal Future? (London, 2014); Anthony Painter, ‘A Late Triumph for Michael
Young’, in Progress, 12 February 2014. http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2014/02/12/a-
late-triumph-for-michael-young/; Stephen Meredith, ‘Michael Young: A Social Democratic
Alternative’ in Peter Ackers and Alastair Reid, eds, Other Worlds of Labour (Basingstoke,
2015).
7
Jeremy Nuttall, ‘‘‘Psychological Socialist’’; ‘‘militant moderate’’: Evan Durbin and the
Politics of the synthesis’, Labour History Review, 28:2 (2003), 235–52; Stephen Brooke, ‘Evan
Durbin: Reassessing a Labour ‘‘Revisionist’’’, Twentieth Century British History, 7:1 (1996),
27–52; Stephen Brooke, ‘Revisionists and Fundamentalists: the Labour Party and
Economic Policy during the Second World War’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989), 157–75;
Martin Francis, ‘Economics and Ethics: The Nature of Labour’s Socialism, 1945-51’,
Twentieth Century British History, 6:2 (1995), 220–43.
8
Ben Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study of Progressive Political Thought, 1900-
64 (Manchester, 2007), esp. 188–91. See also Lawrence Black, ‘Social Democracy as a Way
of Life: Fellowship and the Socialist Union, 1951-9’, Twentieth Century British History, 10:4
(1999).
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 3 of 22

4. Marris. The new organization’s stated purpose was to examine the
interaction of the family, the community and the social services. It
promised to study the way in which ordinary people interacted with
the newly expanded social service sector, and asked whether the organs
of the state were in cooperation or conflict with established patterns of
family support and mutual aid. Bethnal Green had long suffered from
overcrowding and poor housing conditions, and was subject to mass
slum clearance and replanning in the decade after the war. By 1958, as
Young and Willmott would report in a radio broadcast, something like
one family left the area every day, often for the housing estates of rural
Essex.9
The Institute’s first and probably best-known book, Young and
Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London, contrasted Bethnal Green
with the newly constructed Essex suburb of Debden, called ‘Greenleigh’
in the study. Young and Willmott suggested that extended family ties
and kinship networks provided an essential web of support for the
residents of Bethnal Green, and that those who moved to the suburbs
suffered from a decline in quality of life as a result of their relative
isolation. Invoking a conception of working-class culture rooted in
family and neighbourhood, which historians have also associated with
contemporary Richard Hoggart’s classic The Uses of Literacy, Young and
Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London and Townsend’s The Family
Life of Old People challenged a view that the extended family was in
decline, and argued that kinship ties provided an important source of
community and practical support in Bethnal Green.10
The ICS has been referred to as probably the most widely known
social research institute in Britain.11
And the message of its early
publications influenced a generation of sociologists and social historians
and helped to create a nostalgic picture of urban life that survives
today, notwithstanding suggestions that the mutualist spirit observed
by Young and Willmott may have had less to do with an ethos of civic
virtue amongst the working class, and more to do with ‘the fact that
they lacked power’.12
The ICS’ emphasis on the working-class family
was in fact informed by a wealth of contemporary social scientific
influences. And, as this article seeks to show, Young’s work with the
Institute represented a deliberate intellectual and political project to
emphasize the continuing relevance of the extended family in industrial
society, and to offer a model of socialist citizenship, solidarity and
community tied to the family rather than the workplace.
9
Churchill Archive Center Cambridge, Sasha Moorsom [Young] Papers YONG/4/2,
transcript of radio program for ‘Families on the Move’, 14 May 1958, 8–9.
10
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New Brunswick, 2000).
11
Jennifer Platt, Social Research in Bethnal Green: An Evaluation of the Work of the Institute
of Community Studies (London, 1971), 1.
12
Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class (London, 2014), 176.
4 of 22 LISE BUTLER

5. The ICS, Socialism and Sociology
The first meeting of the Institute of Community Studies Advisory
Committee was held at the Westminster headquarters of the think tank
Political and Economic Planning (PEP) on 9 November 1953, and was
chaired by London School of Economics (LSE) Professor of Social
Administration Richard Titmuss. The Institute’s Advisory Committee
initially consisted of the child psychologist John Bowlby, the sociologist
Barbara Wootton, and Alan Jarvis, the Canadian Director of the Oxford
House social settlement, who would soon go on to become Head of the
National Gallery of Canada.13
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the
research staff of the ICS would include the historian Raphael Samuel,
the medical researcher Ann Cartwright, and the sociologists Brian
Jackson and Dennis Marsden. And the Institute’s Advisory Board
would later include Charles Madge, better known for his work with
Mass Observation, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, and Sir
Alexander Carr Saunders, Director of the LSE.14
The Institute was
supported by the Nuffield Foundation and the Elmgrant Trust, a fund
associated with Dartington Hall, the cooperative community in Devon
established by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst to which both Young and
Jarvis had ties. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization supplied ‘[o]ne or more typewriters’, and the American
sociologist Edward Shils channelled several hundred pounds of his
own research funding from the Ford Foundation into the new unit.15
The Institute survives today as the Young Foundation in its original
Bethnal Green location. As in 1953, it is non-partisan but retains a
strong informal association with the Labour Party: former Associate
Director Rushanara Ali is Labour MP for Bethnal and Bow, and its
former director Geoff Mulgan was Director of Policy at 10 Downing
Street under Tony Blair.
Young and Willmott described their focus on the extended family in
Bethnal Green as a natural outgrowth of empirical research. In Family
and Kinship in East London, they insisted that ‘[w]e were surprised to
discover that the wider family, far from having disappeared, was still
13
British Library of Political and Economic Science [hereafter BLPES], Richard Titmuss
Papers [hereafter Titmuss] 2/136, Minutes of first meeting of the Institute of Community
Studies, 9 November 1953; for more on Alan Jarvis, see Asa Briggs, Michael Young: Social
Entrepreneur (London, 2001), 132, and Andrew Horrall, Bringing Art to Life: a Biography of
Alan Jarvis (Montreal; Ithaca, 2009).
14
Young Foundation private papers, ‘Institute of Community Studies Advisory
Committee Minute Book, 1953–1963’.
15
Titmuss 2/136, Notes from talk with Michael Young, 9 February 1954; Letter to
Richard Titmuss from the National Corporation of Old People, 25 November 1953. Young
had also considered a funding application to the Eugenics Society, and would
unsuccessfully seek support from the National Corporation for the Care of Old People.
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 5 of 22

6. very much alive in the middle of London’.16
Their Bethnal Green
respondents, they claimed, inevitably described their experiences of the
social services ‘against the background of the extended families to
which they belonged’.17
Young and Willmott presented the Institute’s
emphasis upon extended family as a concern that derived from
objective, methodologically careful research—they wrote about the
extended family, they said, because they had discovered that it was
important to their subjects.
This was not entirely true. Young would later admit that he and his
colleagues had ‘generally lied in a small way when [they] said that
[they had] ‘‘stumbled on’’ a kinship system we didn’t know existed
when we started work in Bethnal Green’.18
And Jon Lawrence’s recent
re-examination of field notes from Young’s 1953 to 1955 interviews in
Bethnal Green supports this admission, suggesting that Young and
Willmott did not fully acknowledge their informants ‘much more
equivocal attitudes towards neighbours, neighbourhood and kin’ and
might have seen ‘what their politics wanted them to see’ in Bethnal
Green.19
Young and Willmott’s fierce emphasis upon family life in
Family and Kinship in East London was not fully the product, as they
claimed, of unbiased investigative research, but rather of a pre-existing
concern with the family.
Most scholars interested in the ICS have focused primarily on Family
and Kinship in East London. In his influential study of British sociology,
Mike Savage suggests that the Institute represented a distinctive and
novel approach to British social research that treated Bethnal Green as a
‘capsule’ where broader processes of social change could be discerned.
Contrasting Family and Kinship in East London, in particular, with
Norman Dennis’ 1957 study of a West Yorkshire coal mining
community, Savage argues that rather than emphasizing the difference,
particularity and otherness of working-class communities, the re-
searchers of the ICS treated the social changes affecting the lives of their
East London subjects as symptomatic of broader processes of
reconstruction and modernization.20
Nick Tiratsoo and Mark Clapson
have examined the ICS’ relationship with the Ford Foundation, which
granted the Institute $70,000 in 1957 to support studies of contemporary
16
Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Middlesex,
1968 [1957]), 12.
17
Michael Young and Peter Willmott, ‘Research Report No. 3: Institute of Community
Studies, Bethnal Green’, The Sociological Review, (July 1961), 203–6.
18
YUNG 10/3, Michael Young interviewed by Kate Gavron, 22 March 1994, Roll No. 3,
4.
19
Jon Lawrence, ‘Inventing the ‘‘Traditional Working Class’’: a Re-analysis of
Interviews from Young and Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London’, History After
Hobsbawm Conference, 29 April–1 May 2014, London.
20
Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method
(Oxford, 2010), 156–9.
6 of 22 LISE BUTLER

7. British Society.21
Christian Topalov has situated Family and Kinship in an
international sociological literature on urban slums and working-class
neighbourhoods addressing transatlantic trends towards slum clear-
ance, urban redevelopment and suburbanization in the post-war
decades. He situates Family and Kinship in East London within an
international collection of publications including Herbert Gans’ 1962
study of the Boston West End, and Henri Coing’s 1963 study of the 13th
arrondissement of Paris.22
Angela Davis suggests that Young and
Willmott’s concern with family should be set in the context of a general
post-war optimism ‘about the stability of marriage and family life.’23
And in his biography of Young, Asa Briggs compares the communi-
tarian thrust of the ICS to that of Dartington Hall, the alternative
community and school run by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst where
Young had studied as a teenager, suggesting that though very different,
both places offered models of community and belonging that informed
Young’s work.24
In 1971 the sociologist Jennifer Platt published the first and only
comprehensive study of the Institute. Platt’s assessment was highly
critical—as a professional sociologist, she condemned the ICS for its
perhaps naı¨vely optimistic view of working-class communities which,
she pointed out, could prove stultifying as well as supportive. Most
damningly, perhaps, she referred to the Institute as a ‘special sort of
pressure group’ more concerned to promote a particular vision of the
good society than to conduct empirically rigorous sociological
research.25
In a sense, Platt was right: the ICS was a pressure group.
But perhaps Platt did not go far enough. The Institute did not aim at
empiricism but fall back on dogma: it had been conceived from the start
as a public policy think tank. The ICS was explicitly modelled after
Political and Economic Planning, where Young had served as Secretary
before joining the Labour Party Research Department in 1945, and
sought to promote the integration of social science in policymaking.26
21
Nick Tiratoo and Mark Clapson, ‘The Ford Foundation and Social Planning in
Britain: The Case of the Institute of Community Studies and Family and Kinship in East
London’, in Gemelli, Giuliana, ed., American Foundations and Large-Scale Research:
Construction and Transfer of Knowledge (Bologna, 2001), 206.
22
Christian Topolov, ‘‘‘Traditional Working-Class Neighborhoods’’: An Inquiry into the
Emergence of a Sociological Model in the 1950s and 1960s’, Osiris, 18 (2003), 212–33.
23
Angela Davis, ‘A Critical Perspective on British Social Surveys and Community
Studies and their Accounts of Married Life c, 1945-70’, Cultural and Social History, 6:1
(2009), 47–64, 47.
24
Briggs, Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur, 110–154.
25
Jennifer Platt, Social Research in Bethnal Green, 31.
26
On Political and Economic Planning’s engagement with the social sciences and its
Active Democracy project see Raymond Goodman, ‘The First Post-War Decade’, in John
Pinder, ed., Fifty Years of Political and Economic Planning (London, 1981); Abigail Beach,
‘Forging a ‘‘nation of participants’’: Political and Economic Planning in Labour’s Britain’,
in Richard Weight and Abigail Beach, eds, The Right to Belong, Citizenship and National
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 7 of 22

8. Though the ICS was a sociological research institute, it also provided an
explicit outlet for Young’s frustrations with the Labour Party. It was not
so much that politics informed sociology—though it did—but rather
that sociology provided a vehicle for political expression.
Young’s interest in sociology and the scientific study of human
behaviour dated from at least the early 1940s. Young studied Economics
at the LSE and was called to the bar in the summer of 1939, but was
prevented from going into chambers by the advent of war.27
Instead, he
took a position at PEP, which had published his first pamphlet on
manpower policy while he was still a student. There he developed an
interest in the work of the army psychologists who selected officers and
promoted morale in the armed forces, and also in the application of
motivational psychology to industrial relations. Young left PEP in 1945
to become Head of the Labour Party’s Research Department, though he
continued to play a major role in PEP through its Active Democracy
project, producing and contributing to broadsheets on local elections,
the role of clubs and non-state associations in participatory democracy,
as well as studies of the London suburb of Watling, and human
relations in industry.28
During this period he was influenced by the
ideas of Evan Durbin, an economist and MP interested in the
psychological motivations of political behaviour. Young attended
Durbin’s 1945 Conference on the Psychological and Sociological
Problems of Modern Socialism in Oxford, which was co-organized by
G.D.H. and Margaret Cole and the child psychologist John Bowlby.
Though Young complained that he ‘had not obtained much direct
guidance from the psychologists’ at the conference, he was very
concerned with how planners and policymakers could cultivate active
and participatory democracy, and became increasingly interested in
psychology and sociology.29
Young described his influences during this intellectually fruitful
period of his life as ‘[a] lot of American ideas; social science,
psychology. Sort of very Utopian stuff. And I had a lot of confidence in
that’.30
While still working for the Labour Party, Young had begun a
PhD on the organization of local political parties supervised by Harold
Laski, but soon abandoned that project to undertake a study of the
Identity in Britain, 1930-1960 (London, 1998). For more on Political and Economic Planning
in the 1930s see Daniel Ritschel, ‘Political and Economic Planning: The PEP group’, in The
Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the 1930s (Oxford, 2007).
27
See Briggs, Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur, 46.
28
PEP ‘Active Democracy—A Local Election’; ‘Clubs, Societies and Democracy’;
‘Watling Revisited’; ‘The Human Factor in Industry’.
29
London School of Economics Library Evan Durbin Papers 4/8, ‘Weekend Conference
on the Psychological and Sociological Problems of Modern Socialism’, 15–16 September
1945.
30
YUNG 10/2 ‘National Life Story Collection’, 70.
8 of 22 LISE BUTLER

9. extended family in Bethnal Green under the supervision of Richard
Titmuss.31
While at the Labour Party Research Department, he
published several policy papers calling for greater government
promotion and coordination of the social sciences, as well as the 1948
pamphlet Small Man: Big World, which called for neighbourhood
democracy and support for the social sciences, and presented the family
as a model for cooperative community.32
After departing from the
Labour Party Research Department and returning from his Party-
funded world tour, he found himself ‘more or less unemployed’ as a
casual research associate at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations,
an organization devoted to the study of group behaviour, during which
time he produced ‘a long unreadable kind of manuscript’ called ‘For
Richer, for Poorer’ which he described as ‘sort of really half way
between a socialist tract and a sociological hypothesis building’.33
Subtitled ‘Essays on Family, Community and Socialism’, the manuscript
pleaded that the Labour Party should ‘give some prominence to the
needs of the family’ and championed the family allowance distributed
directly to mothers.34
Young presented this document to the Labour
Party Policy Committee in 1952, but recalled that with the exception of
the MP Edith Summerskill, few of his Labour colleagues took the work
seriously. The document would provide the basis, however, for Young’s
first published work of academic sociology, ‘Distribution of Income
within the Family’ which used Rowntree’s concept of the ‘secondary
poverty’ of women and children to call for more research into the
economics of dependency.35
Inspired by the academic success of his
friend and fellow PEP alumnus Charles Madge, Young would apply
unsuccessfully for an assistant lectureship in sociology at the University
of Birmingham, and for a fellowship at Nuffield College Oxford.36
Failing to secure either position and disillusioned with both politics and
the formal pathways of the academy, he formed the ICS in 1953.
Young’s LSE PhD thesis, A Study of the Extended Family in East London,
was completed in 1955.
31
YUNG 10/6, ‘Interview 6 by Phyllis Willmott with Michael Young (Lord Young of
Dartington) on 11th July 2001’, 5; Michael Young, ‘A Study of the Extended Family in East
London’, PhD thesis, London School of Economics, 1955.
32
Bodleian Library Labour Party Research Department Archives, Research Department
Memoranda, 118 (June 1948); 172 (October 1948); Michael Young, ‘What might have
been?’ reprint of ‘Social Science and the Labour Party Programme’ [1949], New Society, 2
November 1972.
33
YUNG 10/3, ‘Michael Young interview by Jane Gabriel, Roll No. 2’, 22 March 1994, 2.
34
London School of Economics Library, Peter Shore Papers 4/48, ‘For Richer for
Poorer: Essays on Family, Community and Socialism’, November 1952.
35
Michael Young, ‘Distribution of Income within the Family’, The British Journal of
Sociology, 3:4 (December 1952), 305–21.
36
YUNG 10/2, ‘National Life Story Collection’, 75.
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 9 of 22

10. Young’s embrace of sociology, and his founding of the ICS, should be
set against both the novelty and the shallow institutional roots of this
new discipline. Savage paints a picture of social science, and sociology
in particular, gradually gaining intellectual traction within the British
academy in the post-war period. In 1939, he reports, only 5 per cent of
university professors in Britain taught in social science subjects, and the
LSE was the only university to offer courses in sociology in 1949. But in
the 1950s and 1960s, social science departments spread rapidly,
particularly in what Savage calls the new ‘plate glass’ universities
such as Essex and Sussex, and sociology emerged as a major intellectual
force.37
Contemporaries observed that sociology had achieved a broad
cultural credence: as Anthony Crosland would remark in his 1956 The
Future of Socialism, ‘[t]he new style executive prides himself on being a
good committee-man; and subconsciously he longs for the approval of
the sociologist’.38
Looking back on the founding of the Institute, Young admitted that
his ambition had been to ‘reform the Labour Party through sociology’.39
His disillusionment with the Labour Party and simultaneous embrace
of sociology and psychology serve as an almost farcically perfect
illustration of the French sociologist Raymond Aron’s famous remark,
reported by A.H. Halsey, that ‘British sociology [was] essentially an
attempt to make intellectual sense of the political problems of the
Labour Party’.40
He later admitted that his ambition was a touch hazy,
naı¨ve, or ‘fuzzy headed’.41
‘[I]t was as if’, Young recalled in 1994, ‘I was
taken in by the ease with which you can mix up the two words,
socialism and sociology!’42
The Institute bridged the worlds of academic sociology and politics.
None of its members were seasoned sociologists—and Willmott and
Young later admitted that they had ‘to learn on the job’.43
Townsend
had studied anthropology as an undergraduate at Cambridge, Marris
had studied psychology, and Peter Willmott had no post-secondary
qualifications. Like Young, Willmott had previously worked for the
37
Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain, 124–33.
38
Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1985), 19.
39
YUNG 10/2, ‘National Life Story Collection’, 81.
40
A.H. Halsey, ‘Provincials and Professionals: the British Post-War Sociologists’ in
Martin Bulmer, ed., Essays on the History of British Sociological Research (Cambridge, 1985),
151; Halsey, No Discouragement: An Autobiography (Basingstoke, 1996), 44; Halsey,
‘Provincials and Professionals: the British post-war sociologists’ European Journal of
Sociology, 23:1 (May 1982), 1.
41
YUNG 10/2, ‘National Life Story Collection’, 81.
42
YUNG 10/3, ‘Michael Young interview by Jane Gabriel, Roll No. 2’, 22 March
1994, 2.
43
Young and Willmott, ‘Institute of Community Studies, Bethnal Green’, The
Sociological Review: New Series (July 1961), 204; Michael Young, ‘A Study of the
Extended Family in East London’, PhD thesis, University of London, 1955.
10 of 22 LISE BUTLER

11. Labour Party Research Department at Transport House, and Townsend
came to the ICS directly from PEP.44
They were, as Willmott admitted,
‘untrained and unproven’, and ‘more concerned with political action
than with the academy’.45
Their publications were deliberately
accessible, and, like the better-known social research organization
Mass Observation, sought to marry an anthropological and sociological
approach by embedding researchers in the communities that they
studied.
Cynically, the Institute could be understood as a collection of
amateurs with cavalier attitudes towards academic sociology: they were
committed to ‘reforming politicians and public servants rather than
educating a new generation of sociologists’ and were only sometimes
interested in sociological theory.46
Less cynically, the Institute’s work
can be understood as a genuine attempt to apply social research to the
vastly expanded post-war social service sector: Young’s Proposal for
Establishing a London Institute for Community Studies argued that the
state was too focused on treating the symptoms rather than the causes
of social deprivation in social service provision. Rather than focusing on
the consequences of poverty and social breakdown, the Institute of
Community Studies’ approach was to suggest that the social services
ought to adopt a more holistic approach to social welfare which
administered prevention alongside cure.47
And the best prevention for
social disease, Young argued, was in a better understanding of the
‘relationship between the social services and working-class family
life’.48
Why the Family?
In his biography of Young, Asa Briggs suggests that the family was ‘at
the core of all Michael’s thinking, feeling, and writing’.49
There were
significant biographical motivations for Young’s intellectual concern
with the family. Young’s upbringing had been bohemian and unhappy:
his mother Edith, an ‘advanced thinker’ of her time, had rejected
traditional family life (as he put it, she ‘was very interested in men and
44
Peter Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, in Martin Bulmer, ed., Essays
on the History of British Sociological Research (Cambridge, 1985), 138.
45
Peter Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, 144.
46
Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, 145.
47
Titmuss 2/136, Michael Young, ‘Proposal for Establishing a London Institute of
Community Studies’, July 1953.
48
Young and Willmott, ‘Institute of Community Studies, Bethnal Green’, 203.
49
Briggs, Michael Young, Social Entrepreneur, 10.
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 11 of 22

12. had lots and lots of them’), and he once caught his father, too, in a
compromising position with a female friend. Young recalled that his
parents had briefly considered giving him up for adoption, but the
family moved to Australia during Young’s infancy and early childhood,
where his grandparents had cared for him. This early experience may
have given Young an appreciation of the supportive potential of the
extended family.50
While working at PEP and the Labour Party Research Department,
Young had read biographies of George Lansbury and Ben Tillett, which
had highlighted the centrality of the extended family to working-class
life.51
And Young’s 1949 Small Man: Big World, and 1952 For Richer for
Poorer and ‘Distribution of Income within the Family’, had already
presented the family as the ultimate cooperative unit and the basis of a
successful socialism.52
But Young credited his PhD supervisor Richard
Titmuss with ‘the central idea’ of the ICS ‘that individuals should be
seen as members of family groups’.53
Titmuss had written extensively
on family and population during the interwar period in response to the
decline in birth rates in France, Germany and the UK. The 1942 Parents
Revolt, which Titmuss co-wrote with his wife Kay Titmuss, argued that
the birth rate had fallen because of the competitiveness, individualism
and social disconnection associated with acquisitive capitalism, a social
model which he saw as incapable of delivering incentives for
stewardship.54
The Titmusses argued that the solution to the birth
rate crisis lay in the promotion of community spirit and more altruistic
economics.
Though Titmuss’ interest in family policy derived from concerns
about population decline, it would survive the reversal of this trend.
After the demographic anxieties of the 1920s and 1930s, the 1950s
represented a high water mark for marriage rates.55
In his 1958 Essays
on The Welfare State, Titmuss would point out that though family and
marriage had become more culturally important, they were occurring
alongside an overall decline in the size and demands of the family. A
working-class mother of the 1890s might have spent 15 years of her life
pregnant or nursing, and her counterpart in the 1950s would spend
only 4 in the same state. Despite this apparent decline in the real
50
YUNG 10/6, ‘Interview 1 with Michael Young (Lord Young of Dartington)’, 10
November 2000, 10–13.
51
YUNG 10/2, ‘National Life Story Collection’, 72.
52
Michael Young, ‘Small Man: Big World: A Discussion of Socialist Democracy’,
Towards Tomorrow, No. 4 (London, 1949) 3.
53
Titmuss 2/136, Letter from Young to Titmuss, 11 November 1953.
54
David Reisman, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Society (Basingstoke, 2001).
55
Pat Thane, ‘Family Life and ‘‘Normality’’ in Postwar British Culture’, in Richard
Bessell and Dirk Schumann, eds, Life After Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History
of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003), 196–8.
12 of 22 LISE BUTLER

13. importance of the family, Titmuss observed, ‘we have gradually come to
expect more and more of our marriages’.56
In spite of diminishing social
and legal restraints on women, marriage had become more popular
since the 1930s, and was also occurring at a younger age.57
This
pervasive and increasingly important aspect of people’s lives, however,
had yet to be reflected fully in social research. Titmuss’ inspiration for
studying the family also owed much to industrial psychology. Though
he embraced the work of Elton Mayo, who argued that the factory
should be understood as a social environment, Titmuss also sought to
broaden this sphere of investigation away from workplace dynamics to
the families, communities and friendship networks in which individ-
uals formed their identities and lived their non-working lives.58
Industrial psychology, from Titmuss’ perspective, had been intellec-
tually critical to the humanization of labour, but Titmuss called for it to
operate in tandem with a social psychology of community that treated
family as one of the central institutions of industrial society.59
A second, less acknowledged force behind the Institute’s focus on the
family was the child psychologist John Bowlby. Bowlby is best known
for his work on ‘attachment theory’ and the thesis that loving
attachment relationships with a primary parent are essential to infant
and child brain development and an individual’s subsequent capacity
to create and maintain close personal relationships later in life. Though
Bowlby was trained in psychoanalysis by Melanie Klein, who
interpreted children’s emotional problems as a product of internal
psychic conflicts between aggressive and libidinal drives, he came to
object vociferously to the Kleinian approach to child psychology,
arguing that children’s families and primary relationships should be
factored into their treatment.60
When Bowlby became the Head of the
children’s department at the London Tavistock Clinic in 1948 he
renamed it the Department for Children and Parents and sought to
offer therapy that involved both the individual patient and his or her
kin.61
After contributing to both the 1946 Curtis Report on the Care of
Children and the 1948 Children Act, which made childcare the
responsibility of local authorities and consolidated existing childcare
services, Bowlby was commissioned by the World Health Organization
(WHO) to write a report on the care of displaced and delinquent
children. This report was published in 1951 with the title Maternal Care
56
‘The position of women’ in Welfare and Wellbeing: Richard Titmuss’s Contribution to
Social Policy (Bristol, 2001), 32; Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State (London, 1958), 98.
57
Richard Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State, 99–101.
58
Elton Mayo, The Social Problems of an Industrialized Civilization (London, 1949), 5–7.
59
Richard Titmuss, ‘Industrialization and the Family’, in Essays on The Welfare State,
111.
60
Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (London, 1986), 402.
61
Suzanne Van Dijken, John Bowlby: His Early Life (London, 1998), 132.
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 13 of 22

14. and Mental Health, and suggested that for healthy mental development,
it was essential that ‘the infant and young child should experience a
warm, intimate and continuous relation with his mother’.62
In this
report and his other publications, Bowlby argued that if children did
not have the advantage of a strong childhood bond with a primary
parent, they would not develop the capacity to form and retain
persistent, stable attachment relationships, and would fail to develop
into self-reliant adults.63
Bowlby’s emphasis upon maternal love as a
biological requirement for healthy childhood development has been
criticized for its highly gendered emphasis upon mothering itself, and it
has been suggested that his WHO report, which sold 400,000 copies,
may have contributed to a post-war cult of domesticity in the USA and
elsewhere.64
But Bowlby’s ideas remain pervasive and widely accepted
in mainstream social psychology.65
Bowlby is not mentioned once in Briggs’ account of Young’s life. But
his influence on the Institute is clear from both its papers and its
publications. Bowlby attended the first meeting of the Institute’s
advisory board in 1953 to supervise Peter Willmott’s report on ‘Social
Policy and the Broken Home’, a field study that examined how social
service providers, such as Children’s Officers, ‘Home Helps’ and
Probation Officers, interacted with Hackney families that had been
‘broken’ by divorce or the death or imprisonment of one of their
members.66
Willmott’s study opened by citing Bowlby’s WHO report
Maternal Care and Mental Health, and took as its basic premises that
‘children can be greatly damaged as a result of maternal deprivation’,
that ‘even a ‘‘bad’’ home can be better than no home at all’ and that ‘the
purpose of social policy [should be] to assist families in difficulty
within their own homes, rather than to remove the children’. The report
concluded that the best resources for broken families were often found
in their wider kinship network.67
In a 1955 talk to the Family Welfare Association, Young made his
intellectual debt to Bowlby explicit. Arguing that it was ‘not for the
State to try and take the place of the extended family, but for the State
and voluntary bodies to give it all the help and support they can’, he
cited Bowlby’s view that ‘even a pretty bad family . . . is better than a
62
John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health (Geneva, 1951).
63
John Bowlby, The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds (Abingdon, 1949).
64
Marga Vicedo, ‘The Social Nature of the Mother’s Tie to Her Child: John Bowlby’s
Theory of Attachment in Post-War America’, The British Journal for the History of Science
(September 2011), 402.
65
See, for example, Jonathan Haidt, ‘Love and Attachments’, in The Happiness
Hypothesis (London, 2006), 112–17.
66
Titmuss 2/136, ‘Institute of Community Studies Advisory Committee’, 9 November
1953.
67
Titmuss 2/136, Peter Willmott, ‘Social Policy and the Broken Home’, date unknown,
1, 11.
14 of 22 LISE BUTLER

15. good institution’.68
Bowlby’s foreword to Peter Marris’ 1958 Widows and
their Families lamented that because the National Insurance Act of 1946
only provided widows with a basic allowance not equivalent to a man’s
wage, widowhood placed women under ‘relentless economic pressure’
to neglect their children by undertaking additional employment.69
And
Peter Marris’ study of urban redevelopment in Nigeria would make
explicit reference to Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love by
suggesting that economic insecurity could force Nigerians to adopt
itinerant lifestyles, which in turn could produce unstable family
relationships and mother–child separations which stunted the emo-
tional development of children.70
Attachment theory, in short, provided
an intellectual argument for the ICS to promote and defend social
policies that kept children with their mothers, and mothers with their
children.
But the influence that most shaped the Institute’s work on family
may have been anthropology. Young’s 1955 PhD thesis, submitted 2
years after the founding of the ICS, critiqued the work of mainly
middle-class urban planners and social service providers, who, he
charged, had falsely assumed that working-class families looked like
the middle-class ‘nuclear’ family consisting of parents and young
children, and had therefore overlooked the importance of the extended
family in working-class life.71
And importantly Young’s thesis, and the
Institute’s first two major publications, Family and Kinship in East London
and Peter Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People, responded not only
to planners, but to the claims of American sociologists such as George
Homans and Talcott Parsons, who regarded extended family structures
as having lost their function in economic, spiritual and social life and
saw the nuclear family as the dominant kinship unit in industrial
society.72
Though ‘sociologists and psychologists ha[d] often spoken as
though the immediate family was the only kind of family in modern
society’, Young believed this view to be mistaken.73
Drawing on
anthropology, Family and Kinship in East London and The Family Life of
68
YUNG 3/1/1 ‘Family and Kinship: Talk Given by Michael Young at the Annual
Conference of the Family Welfare Association’, 4 November 1955.
69
John Bowlby, foreword to Peter Marris, Widows and their Families (London, 1958), x.
70
Marris, Family and Social Change in an African City (London, 1961), 64; John Bowlby,
Child Care and the Growth of Love (Baltimore, 1953).
71
Michael Young, ‘A Study of the Extended Family in East London’, PhD thesis,
University of London, 1955, 7.
72
Michael Young, ‘A Study of the Extended Family in East London’, PhD thesis,
University of London, 1955, 16; Peter Townsend, Postscript 1963 to The Family Life of Old
People, 251, citing George Homans, The Human Group, (London, 1951), 263; Talcott Parsons,
‘The American Family: Its Relations to Personality and to the Social Structure’, in Talcott
Parsons and Robert F. Bales, eds, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (Glencoe,
1955), 16.
73
Michael Young, ‘A Study of the Extended Family in East London,’ 15.
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 15 of 22

16. Old People both sought to show that the ‘wider’ family or extended
family remained a socially vital institution in Bethnal Green.
Young, Willmott and Townsend were by no means the first social
scientists to emphasize the continuing importance of the extended
family in a working-class community. Their work was in fact a
relatively novice incursion into what was already a well-established
field of intellectual inquiry. In 1947 the LSE anthropologist Raymond
Firth and his colleagues had formed a research group and seminar
focused on kinship, which started from the central proposition that ‘the
elementary family of parents and young children is not, even in
Western urban conditions, an isolated social unit’.74
Firth’s research was
eventually published in the 1956 Two Studies of Kinship in London, which
included a study of the kinship networks of South London and of the
city’s more geographically dispersed Italian community. Firth and his
collaborator Judith Djamour argued that extended family ties were vital
aspects of the communities they studied, providing an instrument of
communication and a frame of reference for social action.75
Firth’s
study would be followed by Elizabeth Bott’s 1957 Family and the Social
Network, a product of a programme of research into the ‘normal family’
jointly sponsored by the Tavistock Institute, the Family Welfare
Association, the Nuffield Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Drawing on a relatively limited sample of only twenty families, Bott’s
study was concerned with the division of labour and differentiation of
tasks between husband and wife, suggesting that the more closely knit
the extended family network in which a family was embedded, the
greater the separation of roles between husband and wife.76
Young’s early research on East London, published in a short 1954
article in the anthropology journal Man, aligned itself with Firth’s claim
that the extended family remained a vital institution.77
But Young and
Townsend made more ambitious claims than Firth about the social
importance of relationships between women. Firth’s South London
study had identified a matri-centred or matral kinship system oriented
around the relationships between mothers and their adult children, but
though Firth noted that familial relationships tended to develop and be
perpetuated through women, he saw this as a strictly informal tie.78
In
November of 1954 Young and Townsend both gave papers to Firth’s
74
Raymond Firth, Two Studies of Kinship in London (London, 1956), 23.
75
Raymond Firth, Two Studies of Kinship in London, 29.
76
Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network (London, 1957), preface, xvi; Bott’s study
was unfavourably reviewed by Peter Townsend, ‘Sociology and the Relationship between
Man and Wife’ in Case Conference, 4:10, April 1958.
77
Michael Young, ‘Kinship and Family in East London’, Man (September 1954).
78
Firth, Two Studies of Kinship in London, 41–2.
16 of 22 LISE BUTLER

17. seminar on ‘Kinship in Western Society’.79
Like Firth, Young also
identified a female-centred pattern of kinship structure in Bethnal
Green similar to that which Firth had found in Bermondsey. But he
accorded far more weight to the informal dominance of women in
working-class social, cultural and economic life than Firth had done.
Bethnal Green, he argued, was a matrilineage, in which the relation-
ships between mothers and their daughters played ‘economic,
recreational, ceremonial and mutual service functions of great
importance’.80
Young and Townsend were at odds with Firth about the degree to
which South and East London should be characterized as female-
centric, and disagreed over the specific terminology that should be
applied to these communities: Firth suggested ‘defacto matrilineage’,
‘matricapital’, or ‘short-term matrilineal’, while Young preferred
‘truncated matrilineage’ or ‘matricapital group’.81
And Young would
recall his interaction with Firth and the anthropological networks of the
LSE unfavourably (the anthropologists at Firth’s seminar, he recalled,
‘were in a rather nose-in-the-air fashion, a sniffy fashion’), and recalled
being castigated by Firth for failing to acknowledge his intellectual
debts to anthropology and his own work.82
But Firth’s work on kinship
was an essential forerunner and source of intellectual inspiration that
informed the Institute’s willingness to characterize the inhabitants of
Bethnal Green and Bermondsey as inhabiting a world that was not just
family-centric, but female-centric. Though Firth and his colleagues at
the LSE first identified the importance of the mother–daughter tie in
London communities, Young would politicize it. Venturing into a world
of research on urban kinship patterns already mapped by professional
anthropologists, Young, Townsend and Willmott applied an anthropo-
logical notion of matrilineal, matri-central or matriarchal family
structure to working-class communities. Perhaps most tellingly, Young
79
Peter Townsend Papers (hereafter Townsend) 56/1, Peter Townsend ‘Method and
Study of the Family’ and Young ‘Kinship in Bethnal Green’, November 1954.
80
Townsend 56/1, Michael Young, ‘Kinship in Bethnal Green’ (26 November 1954), 2;
Though Young and Willmott did not make use of the bolder formulation ‘matriarchal’ in
Family and Kinship in East London, their argument did cite Madeline Kerr’s finding that the
working class community of Ship Street in Liverpool was a ‘flourishing matriarch[y]’. See
Family and Kinship in East London, 195, citing Madeleine Kerr, ‘Comparative Study of
Deprivation in Jamaica and Liverpool’, delivered to the British Association in 1953.
81
Raymond Firth Papers (hereafter Firth) 3/1/16 ‘Mr. Young’s Kinship Study of
Bethnal Green’, 26 November 1954; Townsend Papers 56/1, Bott to Townsend, 28
September 1955.
82
YUNG 10/3, ‘Michael Young Interview by Jane Gabriel, 22 March 1994, Roll No. 1’,
4; BLPES Raymond Firth Papers 3/8/1, Letter from Raymond Firth to Michael Young, 6
May 1953.
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 17 of 22

18. and Willmott’s draft outline of Family and Kinship in East London was
provisionally titled ‘Mothers and Daughters’.83
The Politics of Kinship
Family and Kinship in East London should be understood as part of
Young’s larger and more intellectually ambitious project, dating back to
his work with PEP, to grapple with the status of women and other non-
working dependents in industrial society.84
Young, like other historians,
sociologists and anthropologists of his era, ascribed to a developmental
model of history according to which pre-industrial Britain had been a
more socially integrated and family-centred society in which men and
women participated simultaneously in economic activity often centred
around the home. According to this account, the Industrial Revolution,
legislation against child labour, and the growth of cities had divorced
home and workplace, and the family, as a result, had been reduced to
the nuclear family of parents and children.85
Young believed that
industrialization had made women more dependent on men, the state,
and each other for the well-being of themselves and their children.86
But Young also believed that women in working-class communities,
like those in the ‘primitive societies’ of other cultures, had adapted
strong female-dominated extended family networks as a result of their
shared identity as childrearers, their position outside of formal
employment, and their common vulnerability to their husbands’
unemployment, deaths and desertions. And Young felt that women’s
dependency on men and the state, and the female-centric form of
social solidarity or ‘matrilineage’ that he and his colleagues saw in
Bethnal Green, had been overlooked by left-wing policymakers. Young
believed that the Labour Party had emphasized work over the other
aspects of people lives, and workers over women, the unemployed, or
the elderly. In its quest to promote jobs and maximize industrial
efficiency, the Labour Party, he argued, had become constrained by a
politics of production that understood individuals in primarily
83
Titmuss 2/155, outline of ‘Mothers and Daughters: A Study of Family and Kinship
in East London’, 1 June 1956.
84
See PEP ‘Watling Revisited’, 82.
85
‘For Richer for Poorer’, Chapters 2, 7; Young’s conception of the social consequences
of the industrial revolution owed much to Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of
Capitalism (London, 1946), 262–7 cited in Family and Kinship in East London, 188. Titmuss
shared this developmental conception of industrial society, saying that ‘[i]ndustrialization
[had] demanded the breakdown of mutual relationships of the extended family’ Titmuss,
‘Industrialization and the Family’, 110.
86
YUNG 3/2/2/11 lecture, ‘The Rise of Women’s Status’, 1–2.
18 of 22 LISE BUTLER

19. economic terms. The weakness of the ‘Beveridge system’, Young
reflected, was:
that it is related to work, so much of it, and it doesn’t work well for
women who don’t work at any time; they’re not entitled to pensions
then except through their husbands, if they have them, and certainly
not through their cohabiting partners if they have them. And it
doesn’t work well at all for the growing numbers of the
unemployed.87
Young was not simply a critic of the welfare state: his 1952 ‘For
Richer for Poorer’ and ‘Distribution of Income Within the Family’ had
both been concerned with family policy and championed family
allowances distributed directly to mothers. But his sociological work
with the ICS was more concerned with uncovering the informal female-
centric support networks already in place within the urban working
class. Using politically potent language, Young and Willmott suggested
that working-class women, who suffered from insecurity due to their
partners’ unemployment, deaths, and desertions, as well as the risks of
child-bearing, belonged to their own ‘trade union’. The solidarity of the
extended family, ‘organized in the main by women and for women’,
offered them ‘protection against being alone’.88
Mothers and mothers-
in-law, Young and Willmott suggested, offered an alternative form of
health and childcare provision, which policymakers should treat as a
‘mutual aid agency’.89
Because the extended family was so central to working-class life, Young
called for urban planners to treat the family as a dynamic and ever-
evolving entity and build homes that reflected that reality rather than that
of the ‘formula’ or nuclear family consisting of a married couple with
young children.90
Other ICS publications by Townsend, Willmott and
Phillip Barbour called for older people to be treated as an inseparable part
of the family group, and challenged city planners to plan accordingly.91
And Peter Marris applied this argument to his work on Nigeria, where
new European-style housing developments had isolated individual
couples from work and relatives, failed to account for the common
practice of polygamous marriage, and led to high rates of divorce and a
87
Interview with Jane Gabriel, 12.
88
Young, ‘Kinship and Family in East London’, 137–9; Family and Kinship in East
London, 189.
89
Peter Willmott, ‘Social Administration and Social Class’, Case Conference, 4:7 (January
1958), 194–8, 196.
90
Young, ‘The Planners and the Planned’, 134.
91
Peter Willmott and Philip Barbour, ‘Housing of Old People in a Rural Parish’, Social
Service Quarterly, 31:4 (Spring 1958), 158–61; Peter Townsend, The Family Life of Old People
(London, 1957); Peter Townsend, ‘The Family Life of Old People’, Sociological Review, 3:2
(December 1955).
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 19 of 22

20. resultant devaluation of the institution of marriage itself.92
The Institute
also promoted kinship as an alternate form of social organization. Under
the Poor Law, even adult children and grandchildren had been able to
claim for support from their kin, and children could be held similarly
liable to maintain their parents. Willmott argued that by universalizing
access to social support, the Beveridge model of National Insurance had
undermined kinship responsibilities by making social insurance the
responsibility of the national community as a whole. Many individuals
still took on kinship obligations voluntarily, creating a system of dual
moral and legal obligation in which the institutions of state and family
cooperated to provide alternate models of social support—a dual support
system that Willmott argued should be formally recognized in the existing
administration of state support.93
Young and Townsend saw their embrace of the family as a counter-
cultural reaction to an older view among ‘advanced thinkers in the
Labour Party’ that the family was a ‘fetter’ on women’s potential.94
In a
1954 talk to the Town Planning Institute, Young suggested that the
family should be treated as a progressive rather than conservative force
and supported rather than undermined by urban planners. He asked,
Now that there is no Wells and no Shaw to denounce the family, now
that Bertrand Russell and D.H. Lawrence have attained respectabil-
ity—one in the House of Lords and the other in the Penguin Series—
can we not all agree that a primary purpose of planning is to
maintain, support, and strengthen the family[?]95
Townsend would echo Young’s sentiment several years later in the
1958 Conviction. ‘Traditionally’, he argued, ‘Socialists have ignored the
family or they have openly tried to weaken it’ but ‘[t]he chief means of
fulfillment in life is to be a member of, and reproduce a family’.96
Young and Townsend’s embrace of family would not go unchallenged.
Jennifer Platt would note critically that in the Institute’s studies, ‘[f]amily
relationships seem at some points to be regarded as having an absolute
and inherent value’.97
And in 1966 the socialist feminist and psychoanalyst
Juliet Mitchell would attack Townsend, specifically, for his enthusiasm for
the family, asking how it was that the social position of women had come
to be treated uncritically by post-war socialists.98
For Young, Townsend
92
Peter Marris, ‘Social Change and Social Class’, International Journal of Comparative
Sociology (March 1960), 122–4.
93
Peter Willmott, ‘Kinship and Social Legislation’, British Journal of Sociology, 4:2 (June
1958), 126–42.
94
YUNG 10/3, ‘Michael Young Interview by Kate Gavron, Roll No. 3’, 22 March 1994, 11.
95
Michael Young, ‘The Planners and the Planned’, 134.
96
‘A Society for People’, in Norman Mackenzie, ed., Conviction, (London, 1958), 119–20.
97
Platt, Social Research in Bethnal Green, 15.
98
Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: the Longest Revolution’, New Left Review, 40 (December 1966), 12.
20 of 22 LISE BUTLER

21. and Willmott, the matrilineal kinship networks of Bethnal Green were
important because they provided a defense against economic and social
insecurity and represented a model of social solidarity that symbolically
challenged work. Engaging with maternalist feminism, social policy,
sociology, and anthropology, Young brought together public policy and
the social sciences to address the social position of women, and put
dependency at the centre of a sociological critique of the welfare state.
Conclusion
Family and Kinship in East London was republished by Penguin fourteen
times between 1961 and 1980, influencing a generation of planners,
sociologists and social historians and contributing to what the historian
Mark Clapson has called ‘an extraordinarily pervasive anti-suburban
myth in English culture’.99
The theme of family remained embedded in
the Institute’s research on urban planning throughout the 1950s and
continued to figure in its work thereafter, but its urban planning-
focused publications from 1960 onwards largely abandoned its earlier
close focus on the family to adopt a more general, community-oriented
concern with sociability. In the 1960s the Institute’s publications became
more concerned with suburban living in places like Woodford
and Dagenham, and more critical of the urban slum, especially in
the USA.100
Young remained Director of the ICS, but his life and research interests
became impressively polymathic. In 1956 he set up the Consumers
Association from the garage of the Bethnal Green headquarters of the
Institute, and founded its flagship magazine Which?, which tested and
assessed consumer durables to equip shoppers, faced with an unprece-
dented level of consumer choice, to make informed shopping decisions.101
Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958, was appointed lecturer
in Sociology at Churchill College Cambridge in 1961, and first Chairman of
99
Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Social
Dispersal in Post-War England (Manchester, 1998), 1, 66–67.
100
See for example Peter Willmott, The Evolution of a Community (London, 1963); Peter
Willmott and Michael Young, ‘The Social Implications of Urban Redevelopment’, Journal of
the American Institute of Planners, xxviii (August 1962); Peter Marris, ‘A Report on Urban
Renewal in the United States’ in Leonard J. Duhl, ed., The Urban Condition (New York, 1963).
101
On the Consumers Association, see Lawrence Black, ‘Which?Craft in Post-War Britain:
The Consumers’ Association and the Politics of Affluence’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal
Concerned with British Studies, 36:1 (Spring 2004), 52–82; Lawrence Black, Redefining British
Politics: Culture, Consumerism and Participation, 1954–70 (Basingstoke, 2010); Matthew Hilton,
‘The Fable of the Sheep, or, Private Virtues, Public Vices: The Consumer Revolution of the
Twentieth Century’, Past & Present, 176 (August 2002). Hilton, ‘Michael Young and the
Consumer Movement’, Contemporary British History, 19:3 (September 2005), 312.
MICHAEL YOUNG AND THE ICS 21 of 22

22. the Social Science Research Council in 1965, and would continue his career
as an eclectic thinker, social researcher, and innovator.
But the concern with family that had underpinned Family and Kinship
in East London would also inform Young’s concern with the consumer.
In 1960 Young published The Chipped White Cups of Dover. This
pamphlet, which was initially rejected for publication by the Fabian
Society but subsequently distributed by The Observer, suggested that
politics was becoming ‘less and less the politics of production and more
and more the politics of consumption’ and called for the establishment
of a new political party in the interest of consumers.102
The Consumers’
Association and Consumer Movement have been interpreted by one
commentator as primarily concerned with the promotion of ‘order,
objectivity, and the strength of individual character’.103
But The Chipped
White Cups of Dover presented consumer-focused politics as an
expression not only of rational individualism, but of ‘the establishment
of the family . . . as the unit of society’.104
In sociology lectures delivered
between 1961 and 1963 Young suggested that the family, which had
been displaced as the unit of production by the Industrial Revolution,
had been restored ‘to another kind of eminence, as the unit of
consumption’.105
Rather than representing a departure from the family-
centric sociology that had underpinned the development of the ICS, the
ideas underpinning Young’s involvement with the Consumers
Association and Consumer Movement were a continuation of those
which had informed his studies of Bethnal Green.
The ICS emerged out of Young’s frustrations with the Labour Party and
his embrace of social science, and responded to a wealth of intellectual
currents in psychology, sociology, anthropology and social administration
that emphasized the social function of the family. Family and Kinship in East
London was both a community study of Bethnal Green, and a deliberate
intellectual and political project to show the continuing importance of the
extended family in industrial society. Young’s politics were shaped by
sociological conception of family, and especially the relationships between
women, as a source of mutual support and social solidarity. His work at
the ICS speaks to a broader interrelation between post-war social science
and politics, and offers a useful reminder that present-day strands of
nostalgic, relational, and communitarian thinking within the British left
derive from a rich intellectual lineage.
102
Young, ‘The Chipped White Cups of Dover’, 11, 18–19.
103
Hilton, ‘The Fable of the Sheep’, 237.
104
Young, ‘The Chipped White Cups of Dover’, 9.
105
Young, ‘The Chipped White Cups of Dover’, 11.
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