To be recorded among our pioneers implies in itself some kind of success story in research: primarily in terms of intellectual discovery and influence, sometimes later linked to taking a key position in the academic world and achieving, in Colin Bell's words, ‘a degree of celebrity’ (p 15). (If you want to know more about who they all were, see the Biographical summaries on pp 219–231.) The engine of their success had to be the research work, but many of our Pioneers spoke perceptively of their lives much beyond this, especially their earlier lives, hinting or reflecting on how these experiences may have shaped their research. Thus, the sociologist Peter Townsend, whose single mother was a struggling singer, frequently away from home, described his grandmother as the emotional and practical ‘rock’ of his childhood: ‘Nowadays, I reflect a lot on the question of being an only child and what that means. It led, in part, to my enormous interest in family relations and extended family life, and the structure of families’ (pp 5–6). So, among our Pioneers, how did life experience feed creative research?

The influence of childhood communities

First, how were they influenced by the communities where they grew up? Almost half of our Pioneers were Londoners, but it is striking that only two, Peter Townsend and the social geographer Peter Hall, focussed on London in their early work. Of the others, some did local fieldwork on non-local issues, but half researched elsewhere in Britain or abroad.

There was a second important group, probably particular to the early decades in which sociology became established in British universities, who came from working-class families in the north of England. Throughout their research lives they shared a key concern with the significance and subtleties of social class: John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood on class and social mobility in The Affluent Worker (1963–69), David Hargreaves on school cultures, and Dennis Marsden with Brian Jackson on schooling and leisure in Education and the Working Class (1962) and Working Class Community (1972). Marsden and Goldthorpe especially spoke of the complexities of class differences in their own families and communities. But not all the northerners were so keen on this local culture. Thus, Raymond Smith grew up as a policeman's son in Oldham.