In this chapter we explore two of Peter Townsend's pioneering studies: first, The family life of old people (1957), an ethnography of Bethnal Green, and second, The last refuge (1962), a nationwide study of old people living in residential homes. We suggest that these key texts laid the foundations of his entire opus.

The financial Dunkirk

Before describing these studies in more detail, and discussing their relevance for contemporary research and policy agendas, it is important to place them in context, opening with the immense challenge Britain faced in 1945. John Maynard Keynes had laid a paper before the Cabinet titled The financial Dunkirk, the title all too clearly setting out the scale of the problem (Toye, 2004). The national coffers were empty and an ill-fed, ill-clothed and ill-housed people believed that the hard-won victory would now bring prosperity or at least a job and a roof over their heads. Recovery, despite huge loans from the US, was desperately slow. David Kynaston calls the period from 1945 to 1951 Austerity Britain (2007). But while everyday life was indeed austere, his title underplays the achievement of the Attlee government in laying, however unevenly, the foundations of the welfare state. Its policy of redistribution of wealth and income was for Old Labour the beginning of the long march to a more just society.

Nonetheless the Labour government fell in 1951, punished for their failure to build enough council housing. When the Conservative manifesto pledged to build 300,000 homes a year, and achieved its target, Prime Minister Macmillan was able to declare triumphantly, ‘You’ve never had it so good’. However, Labour's redistributive policies were sufficiently well entrenched and popular that the Conservative government could only begin to reverse this in the mid-1950s. Despite the struggle, with Peter among the leaders in the defence of the poor from the 1950s to his death in 2009, it has taken a combination of Conservative and New Labour governments to turn Britain into a massively unequal society in which the difference in expectation of life between the poor and the rich is now a full 10 years.