We noted in Chapter Three earlier the expressed anger of the Kepples’ neighbours and their concern to find out what had happened to Maria Colwell. However, just as the mere facts of a case may not be sufficient to fuel a scandal, neither are demands for an explanation, no matter how forcefully made, necessarily sufficient to secure an inquiry. As we have argued already, for this to happen, there has to be also a clear resonance with wider social and political constituencies of interest. Those interests were to meet face to face on 18 May 1973, when the Member of Parliament for Brighton Kemptown, Andrew Bowden, was ushered into the office of the Secretary of State at the DHSS, Sir Keith Joseph. This chapter describes both how that meeting came to take place and how the subsequent public inquiry came to be established. We describe also something of how the Inquiry went about its business.

This chapter is concerned also to reflect the fact that this was a public inquiry. It became important not just for those involved to know what had happened to Maria but also that the account of what had happened should be rendered in public and to the public. In this way, it satisfied what Frederic Seebohm recognised as ‘an ever growing demand to participate at all levels and an evident “passion to know” or at least to obtain an assurance that there is “nothing to know”’ (Seebohm, 1977; see Chapter Three, this volume) that seemed to be part of the general mood of the times.

As well as being present in the public gallery and in the queues outside on certain days, the ‘public’ were to be ‘represented’ at the Inquiry through the evidence provided to it by family members and by the Kepples’ neighbours on the Whitehawk Estate. The neighbours, in particular, contributed to the construction of one of the most important commentaries on the events surrounding Maria Colwell's death. They can be understood to represent the voice of the proverbial ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’, the voice of Everyman (although, in this case, they were almost all women), the voice of ‘common sense’ against which the practice of social work would, in part, be judged and found wanting.