I recently caught up with
Judith Niechcial who has written a fascinating biography about Lucy Faithfull, the social worker who the biographer describes as having “caught the eye of Margaret Thatcher.”
A lifelong and passionate campaigner for children, Baroness Lucy Faithfull (1910 - 1996), pictured right, was one of the most renowned social workers of the twentieth century.
Niechcial explains how she came to choose her subject: “I did the MA in creative writing at University of East Anglia. For my thesis I cast around for someone who nobody had written about before, a woman, and somebody I felt an affinity with. I came up with Lucy Faithfull. I read her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and took that as a starting point.”
In her research, Niechcial discovered Faithfull’s work through the Second World War to support evacuees and their foster carers. Although she never had any children of her own, as Children’s Officer for Oxford City she made a difference to hundreds of children and families.
A number of Faithfull’s qualities impressed Niechcial (pictured below). “Lucy was the first qualified social worker in the House of Lords. She had an ability to charm anybody she had met, from the most inarticulate, deprived child right through to duchesses and lords. She was born too late to be a suffragette, but too early to be involved with the feminism of the 1970s. She used her charm and femininity to achieve the outcomes she wanted.”
Fellow social workers were taken aback when Faithfull became the first social worker to be given a life peerage, particularly as she had accepted an invitation to sit on the Tory benches. “Several people in the social work world were surprised that she, rather than some of the other eminent social workers at that time, was made a life peer. But she caught the eye of Margaret Thatcher and so she was the one who was appointed. There was also surprise that a social worker would take the Tory whip.
“During her time as a Children’s Officer, and as Director of Social Services for Oxford, nobody knew her what her politics were. But she was very much from a Tory background, with Anglican clergy and army officers in her family tree. Also, under Mrs Thatcher she knew that if she was a Tory she would have the ear of power and access to influence.”
However, during the Thatcher era Faithfull opposed many of the measures the party supported in relation to children’s welfare, earning her the nickname ‘Lady Faithless’ among Conservative whips. Most notable was her influence on the Children Act 1989.
“She did oppose many of the measures that the Tory party was putting forward at that time. She did fantastic, creative work getting groups of care leavers, with mohican hairstyles and studs in their noses, into parliament to meet with peers to explain to them just what it was like leaving care. That made a huge impact on them as most of them had never met people like that before.”
In 1993, Faithfull left a lasting legacy when she founded the child protection charity the
Lucy Faithfull Foundation. "Its therapeutic work with sex offenders was groundbreaking," says Niechcial.
"It was started at a time when people did not accept that there was such a thing as sexual abuse in the family, let alone that perpetrators could be treated. Raising money for such an unpopular cause was a huge challenge for her. She was in her eighties when she set up the charity, which I just thought was just an amazing thing.”
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It might sound like an unlikely topic for an arts event, but a festival at the Southbank Centre is currently taking a lighter look at life and death. 
A dramatic new play about social work opens next week at the Soho Theatre in central London. 
Is disability a laughing matter? The comedians at Abnormally Funny People seem to think so. 
In the run up to Christmas, Age Concern Southwark have been working with Create, a creative arts charity, to help transform the lives of older people. 