Noel Timms: A brief appreciation

Abstract

I have in a dusty foolscap folder my handwritten lecture notes for courses I was given to teach in my first year as a social work academic at Cardiff University in the early 1970s – two-year-long courses on social work research and another on ‘Principles of Social Work’ – 105 hours of lectures. I lived from hand to mouth. Among the most rewarding reading were the ‘introductory’ books written by Noel Timms. Among these were his Language of Social Casework (Timms, 1968), a string of historical articles from archival sources regarding the London Charity Organisation Society (COS), his then recent collaboration with JohnMayer that yieldedThe Client Speaks (Mayer and Timms, 1970), and the unexpected ways he constantly set the terms of reference for what on the face of it were standard social work texts. My early research and writing was influenced in several ways by the angles of vision, the ‘gaze’, that he brought to thinking about and doing social work practice and research. He was to be an examiner for my doctoral thesis a few years later. The range of his interests – diverse yet interconnected – has been wider, perhaps, than any other contemporary social work scholar and includes the history of social work, relations between social work and other disciplines, faith issues in social work, social work and the work of philosophers and research with and about service users. There is a serendipity about Noel Timms’ appearance as the focus of this special issue of Qualitative Social Work. Various rediscoveries prompted the decision to invite him to be interviewed as part of the occasional series of career interviews in the journal. Library research for a history of the relation of sociology and social work in the UK, the stimulus provided by the network of people linked to the recent annual conferences on sociology and social work, the spontaneous enthusiasm of doctoral social work students at Michigan to engage with his Sociological Approach to Social Problems (Timms, 1967/2014), and the editors’ awareness of and contribution to current work on the history of social work came together in fortunate ways. Qualitative Social Work 2014, Vol. 13(6) 742–748 ! The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1473325014552886 qsw.sagepub.com