Samuel Joseph had provided his only child with a head-start in life, but he had no thought of sitting back and exulting in the glorious prospects of the next generation. Samuel was occupied with his own course, and had been driving hard on at least six cylinders ever since he left school. As a politician Sir Keith Joseph liked to refer to those who worked too hard as “the ulcer people”. This label would do less than justice to Samuel, who by the 1930s could already be identified as a “heart-attack person”. Sir Keith remembered that his father was struck down several times by such life-threatening illnesses, but Samuel was not the kind of man to be deterred by bodily weakness.

Samuel Joseph's temperament was not ideally suited to every aspect of public service; for example, the full details of contracts won by Bovis in the 1920s were never recorded in the minutes of board meetings because he found that kind of bureaucratic practice “excessively tedious”. But his other qualities overrode any petty drawbacks. In standing as a candidate for office in London Samuel was arguably furthering his firm's interests to some extent, but the overall impression is that of a man with a high estimation of his abilities and an equal determination to place them at the disposal of his fellow citizens, whether or not he received any material reward. It was a dominant family trait.