When he died in 1973, in a small hospital room, aged 65, of lung cancer, Richard Titmuss had his wife and daughter beside him. Eileen Younghusband died later, older and differently. It was 1981, she was 79, and she was in a car driven by a close woman friend. They were en route to an airport in North Carolina where Younghusband was to board a plane to Chicago; the car plunged off the road and hit two trees. The driver was severely injured, and Younghusband and the third woman in the car were killed. ‘Noblewoman Dies in Wreck,’ cried the headline in the local paper.

Over a quarter of a century before this, at the very time the Carnegie Experiment was being set up and Richard Titmuss was discovering his difficulties with the women social workers at LSE, Younghusband and the driver in the fatal car crash were exchanging love letters. The car-driver was Martha Branscombe, another internationally renowned social worker, an expert in the field of child welfare; she was Chief of the Social Services Division at the United Nations Secretariat in New York, and in 1943 had helped to found the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, an extensive social welfare programme providing aid to war-ravaged nations. Branscombe and Younghusband had first met during the War when Branscombe was dispatched to Britain with a group of other women social workers to help with welfare work. Their contact became closer in 1953 when Younghusband visited the USA to prepare for the Carnegie Course. The tone of Branscombe’s letters in the Younghusband Archives is abundantly warm and intimate; the other side of the correspondence presumably was, too, although it isn’t there to be read. ‘Eileen, My Dear – My so Cherished One’, ‘My Very Dearest’, ‘Eileen My Honey’: the capitalised Americanisms preface pages of emotions and thoughts, discussions of mutual friends, worries about money and work, the conflict between materialism and spiritualism, and, above all, the progress of social work education in which both women invested so much. There were repeated plans to meet. After one meeting, in 1954, Branscombe writes to Younghusband of, ‘the inexpressible meaning of having you so near in all these days and feeling the beautiful and revitalizing force of your love’.