One of Peter Townsend's earliest memories is of playing cricket with the comedian Arthur Askey. They met while Peter's mother was performing in a seaside revue. Peter was to become Britain's leading poverty researcher and campaigner against child poverty.

Childhood

Peter's parents were living in Middlesbrough when he was born in April 1928. The marriage soon broke up and Peter saw little of his father for years. By the age of three, Peter was living in London where his mother was pursuing her career as a singer and stage performer. As Peter recorded in an interview with Professor Paul Thompson (now lodged in the Essex University Archives), “We had a very chequered existence because some weeks she was very much in work, and other weeks she wasn’t” (Thompson, 1999, p 2). His mother's intermittent earnings meant that Peter sometimes experienced the hard side of life. From an upstairs flat in Pimlico with the cooker on the landing, they moved to an attic flat in Belsize Park and then to a basement flat in the same district.

Sometimes Peter's mother took him on her tours. On one occasion, during the war, she was performing in Blackpool and lodging in a boarding house. Years later Peter wrote about this experience, that he noticed how people were shocked “by the poverty of the evacuees. In the early part of the war the upheavals of evacuation caused many people to understand for the first time how the other half lived, and what the years of unemployment had wrought. Here were two nations confronted” (Townsend, 1973, p 1). Back home, as a teenager, he also took his turn as a fire-watcher, enjoyed the sense of fellowship with others and observed the readiness of ordinary people to make sacrifices for others.

Although his mother took him on some tours, during most of them he stayed at home with his grandmother. In an interview with me, Peter spoke movingly about his mother. He said: