Peter Townsend

I was saddened last week to learn of the deaths of two men who, in different ways, played an important role in my life in England in the 1980s.

The first man was Ralf Dahrendorf, who died at the age of 80 on 17 June. Dahrendorf was a liberal sociologist who at different times belonged to both the German parliament and British House of Lords.

Dahrendorf was the director of the London School of Economics (LSE) from 1974 to 1984. The last three years covered my time as a postgraduate student of economics there, although I never met Dahrendorf personally.

After leaving the LSE, I joined a pressure group called the Disability Alliance, which campaigned for a fairer system of social security benefits for people with disabilities. My title was "Reseach and Information Worker", which also included being the group's press officer.

The Disability Alliance was the brainchild of the second man who played a key role in my life: Peter Townsend, who was 81 when he died on 7 June.

The name Peter Townsend can be confusing. This was not the guitarist with The Who. That's Pete Townsend. Nor was he the former lover of the queen's late sister, Princess Margaret. That was the RAF Officer Peter Townsend.

The Peter Townsend I'm talking about here was a professor of sociology and Britain's leading expert on poverty. I was lucky enough to work closely with him for five years before moving to Germany in June 1989.

Townsend popularized the concept of "relative poverty" — the idea that poverty should be measured not in terms of people's absolute incomes, but in terms of their incomes relative to the norm in society.

Townsend wrote: "Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities, and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or are at least widely encouraged and approved in the societies in which they belong."

Townsend also founded the Child Poverty Action Group, a pressure group campaigning against poverty in families. He was a dogged campaigner, a tough negotiator at work and a lovely man in private.

I owe Peter an enormous debt of gratitude. So do millions of Britain's poor, whose lives were improved, at least marginally, by Peter's work to publicize their plight and fight for improvements in their condition.