Measuring poverty in late 1960s Britain: Peter Townsend, relative deprivation and the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust

1960s Britain saw the start of a transformation in poverty research that, 30 years later, would lead to the resurgence of interest in inequality that we are still experiencing.The sociologist Peter Townsend (1928-2009) played a leading role in those events, pioneering a variety of approaches to poverty, including the concept of relative deprivation.An attempt to express poverty in relation to individuals' access to a range of resources that enable social participation, relative deprivation was described by Townsend fully for the first time in Poverty in the United Kingdom (1979).Yet, as this paper shows, he first worked out a version of the concept 15 years earlier, during the troubled national survey of poverty that provided data for that book, which was initially co-directed by Brian Abel-Smith and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust.Drawing on archival sources that reveal the difficult early history of relative deprivation, this paper contributes to our understanding of the origins of an idea that has become central to discussions of poverty and inequality and, in so doing, explores the challenges associated with pioneering new approaches to poverty knowledge in postwar Britain.