An Invitation to Talk About Bill Pearce and Joan Cooper Proved Irresistible

SOCIAL WORK HISTORY NETWORK: 14 October 2010

Bill Pearce and Joan Cooper

Personal Reminiscences

An invitation to talk about Bill Pearce and Joan Cooper proved irresistible. I knew them both personally, Bill at the beginning of my career and Joan at the end of hers. Both were role models, Bill the ideal boss of an agency for delivering publicly-funded human services, Joan as a chief professional officer in a department of state. Near contemporaries, they shared many values yet were utterly different personalities. Inhabiting as they did sharply differentiated social work worlds, I am not aware that they ever met.

Bill’s world was that of probation and the wide field beyond it of criminal justice. It may seem strange in 2010 to speak of probation in the context of social work, yet members of the generation that entered the probation service from Home Office training in the 1950s were proud to describe themselves as social workers of the courts. Steeped in the methods of social casework, we were among the agents of change in a service adjusting to increases in crime and major changes in functions. Some of us were fortunate enough to journey north to work in the Durham combined area probation service. There we found in Pearce a leader who combined the traditional values of service to the courts with an innovatory approach to the treatment of crime and delinquency and their causes.

William Harvey Pearce was born in a working class family in Liverpool in 1920. I do not know that he possessed any formal educational qualifications; he certainly valued, and possibly over-valued, them in others. He joined the Merchant Navy: not the safest career choice since when war broke out in 1939 his ship was torpedoed and he spent five days in an open boat. Another ship he served on was also torpedoed. He was later briefly a prisoner of the Japanese and escaped, contracting a tropical disease that caused his discharge on medical grounds. I do not doubt that these experiences contributed to the ethos of public service that characterised so many of the men and women of that generation.

Joining the probation service in 1944, he made an astonishing leap from basic grade officer eight years later to head the newly combined service in County Durham. This was now one of the largest services in England, extending from Darlington in the south to Gateshead in the north, and from Sunderland in the east to Consett in the west. The turbulence caused by reorganisation and amalgamation is now a familiar experience. When I arrived in Durham in 1956, undercurrents of antagonism to the new dispensation still surfaced among older staff, but Pearce had already established the reputation of the service among judges, recorders and magistrates, local authorities, universities, the police and the probation inspectorate. He regarded probation as a service for the whole community, working as closely as possible with other social agencies. Business boomed as a result, with

1 progressive increases in the use of social enquiry reports and probation by the courts.

Pearce welcomed the stimulus and challenge of newly qualified staff, and demonstrated a commitment to training ahead of his time in a service that had previously weighted ‘character’ and experience ahead of formal training. Durham provided first postings for many products of Home Office training, and when demand for staff exceeded supply Pearce was rigorously faithful to training for direct entrants to the service. He established in-service training for all staff, and the county was alive with groups of all kinds. Many future leaders of the service emerged from Bill Pearce’s stable, including a future Chief Inspector of Probation in Sir Graham Smith.

Pearce’s professional leadership was accompanied by a grasp of wider criminal policy fuelled by national and international contacts. He also possessed the managerial ability that a growing service needed to direct its resources in the most productive way. Few objective criteria were available to evaluate success and promote consistency of standards. Pearce worked with his middle managers to arrive at common standards of performance without constraining the flair of individuals at field level. He provided continual encouragement to innovate – followed by pressure to standardise and communicate so that innovation could be replicated. Outside the county, he served on advisory bodies to the Home Office and as president of the conference of principal probation officers. He was an inspiring, informal – but always well prepared – speaker at conferences.

I never knew Pearce avoid a problem or equivocate. He took time if he needed it, and sought knowledge where it might be found – even in junior staff. But he was always decisive; he would admit error, but always stuck to his guns when he believed he was right. He stood by his staff; one might be criticised in private, but he always took the responsibility in public. The principal lesson I learned from him was about the ethical standards required in running a service with a statutory basis and funded from the public purse. He placed himself and his staff in a chain of accountability: to the public generally, the public we served, our employing committees, the courts, the Home Office and Parliament.

After 18 years in Durham, Pearce moved at the height of his powers to the Inner London Probation Service, the largest in England. He continued to innovate, and developed a thriving international exchange of schemes and projects through activities in the USA, Asia and the Far East, and through the United Nations. In 1980 he was appointed the first chief inspector of prisons, but sadly died within two years.

Bill was not everyone’s cup of tea. Forcefully genial, larger than life, his personality could blow you away at first meeting. He smoked a pipe, played golf and his cars were always painted red. But he was a superb, visionary leader, a practical manager and a splendid public servant. Tough on backsliders and those who believed that the job could be organised around their personal interests, he was even more severe towards others who

2 transgressed against his code of public service. Privately, however, he was the kindest of men, with a consoling ear and more practical help when it was needed. In my view, Pearce was the outstanding figure in the probation service during the second half of the twentieth century. This at a time when it counted a high proportion of giants among its leaders, and when it was geared to social work goals, social work methods and to generally doing good in the world.

The background and personality of Joan Davies Cooper were very different, although she and Pearce at least haled from the same county. Born into a middle class household in Manchester in 1914, Joan was a grammar school girl who proceeded to a university education. Her parents were members of the Moravian Church. Joan did not practise any religion in later life, but her approach to social work was based on the firm moral foundations established in her childhood and, later, by her experience in Lancashire during the depression years. Both she and her younger brother lived lives of public service, Frank becoming a notable permanent secretary in Northern Ireland and the Ministry of Defence.

Joan became a teacher, one of the few careers easily available to educated women in the pre-war world. Moving into administration with Derbyshire in 1941, she worked with children who had been evacuated from their homes. At the age of 30 she was already an assistant education officer. Her big opportunity came in 1948. Appointed children’s officer for East Sussex she joined that pioneering band, largely composed of women, who set up the first children’s departments. Like Pearce, she achieved chief officer status before she was 35 – almost absurdly young for local government in that era. Also like him, she remained in that first chief officer post for almost two decades in establishing and maintaining her service as one of the best in the country.

Joan dealt with the early problems of chauvinism and envy that she and her peers encountered by simply demonstrating how good she was at her job. Strongly committed to the needs of the children she served and to the ethics of public service, she modernised the obsolete systems she inherited. She developed foster care and small residential homes in place of the large Poor Law institutions, and introduced training for staff. Like many of that first generation of children’s officers, Joan took a personal interest in the individual children in the care of East Sussex. Her relationship with some of them continued until her final illness. She attracted talented and committed staff whom she inspired with similar dedication. She could be a challenging and demanding leader, but provided staff with personal as well as professional support. Like Pearce, she ranged to the continent and North America for the latest thinking, served as the chair of her professional association and acted as an advisor to the Home Office.

Her next post was at the Home Office, where she succeeded the retiring chief of the children’s inspectorate in 1965. This was a time of rapid policy development in response to onrushing social change, and the appointment of an outsider as chief inspector acknowledged the need for fresh approaches. Much of the new stimulus in the children’s field was provided by a talented

3 under-secretary, Derek Morell, and Joan worked closely with him on the white papers leading to the Children and Young Persons Act of 1969 and on the Act itself. While she also contributed to broader social policies on community development and urban development, her principal focus remained on children’s services and her own inspectorate. Unrest in approved schools suggested that institutional treatment needed reform; the whole field of social care, including children’s services, was being scrutinised by the Seebohm Committee; and the inspectorate itself needed to adjust to changing patterns in the field. Joan embarked, with the help of other incomers like Barbara Kahan and Clare Winnicott, on shifting the role of the inspectorate towards a supportive, creative, innovative and inspirational advisory group, formulating and encouraging good practice.

The grand Seebohm reorganisation of services in the field was mirrored in central government by the transfer of the Home Office’s responsibilities for children to the Department for Health and Social Security. The relevant staff, including the inspectorate, moved with their jobs. The existing professional culture of the DHSS was rigorously non-interventionist. Merely to mention inspection brought on a fit of the vapours, and even the formidable Richard Crossman had been unable to impose more than a Health Advisory Service on the NHS in the wake of Geoffrey Howe’s report on the Ely Hospital scandal.

Even Joan’s new look inspectorate was rather strong meat for the DHSS. Its functions were taken on but the title of the existing Social Work Service of the DHSS was retained as the name of the amalgamated service. Administrative colleagues regarded her unifying two such dissimilar services as a major achievement, in which her calm and wise personality was crucial. She also played a key role in channelling her Secretary of State’s interest in what he called ‘the cycle of deprivation’ into a constructive programme of research. To the field, Joan and the SWS presented interpretation and advice about the mass of new legislation that assaulted departments contending with amalgamations and then, in 1974, with a reorganisation of local government everywhere except in London.

Joan had come to the civil service at the height of her powers. She brought priceless experience to discussions of policy with civil servants who relied on her practical knowledge and experience. She possessed a commanding intellectual ability that won her respect at every level. Her Lancastrian directness reduced complex issues to accurate summaries in briefing time- pressed ministers. She was also a doughty campaigner for the needs of the people and the services she represented. She could also be patient, knowing when – in civil service terminology – ‘the time was not yet ripe’, and that opportunities to revive her schemes would surely return.

It was typical of Joan that the first thing she did after retiring from the civil service was to undertake a period of refreshing study at the National Institute for Social Work. She was now able to give more time to the National Children’s Bureau, one of her favourite projects. Sussex University enjoyed her services as a visiting research fellow. She answered the call of duty to

4 take on the chairing of CCETSW following an unexpected resignation, handling with great dignity the ultimately unsuccessful negotiations about a third year of social work training. She wrote a magisterial book about the formation of the personal social services. And at the end was chairing the group set up to plan the celebrations for the jubilee of the Children Act 1948.

In personality she was quite the opposite of Pearce. In public her habit of applying the full force of her intellect to what was under discussion could make her seem overly detached. She spoke only when she had something to say; and one always knew that her mind was on what was being said. In private there were few warmer and more humorous companions. She was also fiercely independent; one of my fondest memories of her later years is of this tiny woman, coping with the effects of ME and a recent fall, fiercely resisting all efforts to help her carry a suitcase.

For both Cooper and Pearce, social work was a moral activity. I hope this brief reminiscence imparts, to those who did not know them, something of their contribution to social work and something of the flavour of their personalities.

Bill Utting October 2010