Jack Tizard

Jack Tizard CBE (25 February 1919 – 2 August 1979) was a research psychologist, professor of child development, research unit director, international adviser on learning disability and child care, and a president of the British Psychological Society. Tizard was born in New Zealand but spent most of his professional life in England where, as a psychologist, he worked at the boundaries of psychology, medicine, education and the social sciences. His work on alternatives to institutional care in the 1950s and 1960s underpinned the subsequent development of 'ordinary life' models for children and adults with learning disabilities. His later work focused on developing services for young children and their families. Tizard's approach was characterised by a commitment to using high research standards to address important social problems, ensuring through his extensive advisory activities that the results of research were available to practitioners and policy-makers.

Tizard was born on 25 February 1919 in the town of Stratford in the North Island of New Zealand, where his father was a police constable.

Tizard's father, John Marsh Tizard, was born in 1885 in the small mining township of Cromwell on the South Island of New Zealand. In 1910, John married Lionelle Washington Ward and commenced training with the police. His father had died in 1908 and in 1913 his mother Emma, Jack's grandmother, moved with most of her ten children, of whom John was the oldest surviving son, to Timaru, where worked as a policeman in Timaru until being transferred to Stratford in 1916.

Tizard's parents both contracted tuberculosis. In 1920 the family moved to Tokaanu, a village near Lake Taupō where there were hot springs beneficial to health. Lionelle died there in 1922, aged 33, when Tizard was three years old. After her death, John Tizard and his three children moved back to Timaru to live with the family of Jack's grandmother, Emma. John Tizard died in 1924 aged 39. Jack Tizard and his two sisters were brought up by their grandmother and six aunts. Also in the household were three other orphaned grandchildren of Emma.

Tizard's later childhood was lived through the global depression and the family suffered a degree of poverty. Tizard attended Timaru Boys' High School. His grandmother Emma died in 1935, at age 79, when Tizard was 16. He obtained a scholarship to Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand in Christchurch, where he chose the subjects of psychology and philosophy. He was fortunate to have as a philosophy lecturer the renowned philosopher of logic and scientific method, Karl Popper, who had moved to New Zealand in 1937 after the Nazis came to power in his native Austria. Tizard was very strongly influenced in his later commitment to scientific methodology by Karl Popper. Popper described Tizard as 'the best student I had in New Zealand'.

Tizard obtained a first class degree in 1940 and was given the award of the University of New Zealand's Senior Scholar in Philosophy.

World War II broke out before Tizard completed his studies. As a pacifist, he volunteered as a member of the Medical Corps for the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force. He spent five years in the field ambulance service in Greece, North Africa and Italy, as a medical orderly and stretcher bearer. He was involved in the major battles of El Alamein and Monte Cassino.

At the end of the war, Tizard took up an award he had been granted to study for a PhD at Oxford University. He travelled to the United Kingdom in December 1945. The subject he chose was social history. Tizard did not like life in Oxford, including the elitism and snobbishness associated with the university. He did, though, fall in love with an undergraduate, Barbara Parker (1926-2015) and they married in December 1947. To escape Oxford and earn some money, Tizard spent a short time as a part-time teacher of logic with his former teacher, Karl Popper, who had been appointed Reader (and later Professor) of Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. He then took a post as psychology lecturer at St Andrews University. Preferring research to teaching, through contacts in the British Psychological Society Tizard was recommended to the psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis who was setting up a new research unit at the Maudsley Hospital in London, funded by the Medical Research Council. This was called the Occupational Adaptation Unit, later changed to the Social Psychiatry Unit. Tizard began work there in April 1948. He had continued his studies at Oxford University, but downgraded his degree there from PhD to BLitt, which he was awarded in 1948. He registered for a PhD at London University which he was awarded in 1951.