In 1950 the first hydrogen bomb was developed and the first credit card was issued; in Britain, the wartime rationing of soap and petrol came to an end, and the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, secured a second term of government after its post-war triumph, but with only a tiny majority. In 1950 Richard Titmuss, a man whose only formal educational qualification was in commercial book-keeping, took over the headship of a university department that had once housed the newly victorious Prime Minister. Richard Titmuss became Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in charge of a department devoted mainly to social work training and staffed mainly by women. Over the course of the next decade or so, he transformed it into a centre of social policy expertise populated mainly by men – ‘the leading centre of its kind in the world’. He achieved this despite knowing little about social work (aside from the untrained social work activities of his own wife), having no experience of management or administration and having never worked in a university before.

This is a story about social mobility and about personal effort, about networking and the opportunities that unfold when useful friends are made. It’s a story about a decade that was bad for women and good for social policy. But it’s a great deal more than that. The social world came later than the natural world to the attention of the probing human mind, perhaps because it’s harder to feel we really know what we’re part of. In this appreciation of the social – the way our relationships and communities and structures and rituals and traditions work – knowing and doing have had an especially intimate connection. The connection is reflected in the terminology – social science, sociology, social work, social policy, social reform, social action.

Most of the people, both before and after Marx, who have wanted to understand society, have also wanted to change it. Sociology and social work are both children of the impulse to social reform. ‘Social work’ and ‘social worker’ were terms that only began to be used in the late 19th century in Britain. They described the practical activities of people, chiefly women, who had a sense of community and enough time and money to provide aid for those who weren’t in such advantaged positions.