Introduction

Disability was a topic of interest to Peter Townsend from the earliest days in his academic and policy-oriented career. From the 1960s onwards he recognised that disability was always present somewhere in the mix that sculpted poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage in communities – especially among old people and in families with disabled children. His long-standing interest in social conditions, social relationships and the unequal distribution of resources meant that social groups who faced particular disadvantages in achieving decent standards of living won his lasting attention and unwavering political commitment (Walker et al, 2010). Thus, in Townsend's conceptual and methodological approach to studying the social world, disability was always part of what he called the ‘big picture’: ‘the specialised cannot be disentangled from the generalised; the general and the special go together whether you approach it from one end or the other’ (extract from transcribed interview between Peter Townsend and John Welshman, London, 3 July 2006, p 5).

In the broad sweep of his analysis of poverty in British society in the 1970s, Townsend carefully and meticulously drilled down into information on those structural and distributional features of state practices and economic arrangements that created the conditions for relative poverty among disabled people:

Townsend's commitment to relieving poverty among ‘the disabled’ was most clearly expressed in his work for a campaigning organisation that he co-founded in 1974: the Disability Alliance. By this time in his academic career he was involved in building a new Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, on one of the new 1960s campuses (Busfield, 2010, p 28; see also Welshman, 2007).