Gillian Wagner, who has died aged 98, spent more than 30 years raising the standard of residential care in Britain, the most neglected and maligned and the least appreciated area of social care.
It was her appointment in 1986 to chair what became known as the Wagner committee into residential care that projected her on to the national stage at a time when the service was undervalued and a poor relation to the NHS, with low-paid staff.
While residential care is in many ways still neglected and under-resourced, the Wagner recommendations did much to change how standards of care were judged.
While the report into community care carried out by Sir Roy Griffiths, also published in 1988, was quickly translated into legislation by the Thatcher government, keen to create the market-driven social services system that Griffiths recommended, Gillian’s report received no such official action.
The Wagner committee wanted residential care to be “a positive choice”, part of a spectrum and not a last resort. Its recommendations ranged from the idea of a unified national inspectorate and regulatory system to how staffing requirements should be calculated; from the rights of residents to workforce development.
Despite the lack of any legislative backing and the indifference, if not hostility, shown by many local authorities, three-quarters of the committee’s 45 recommendations were eventually implemented, due, in part, to an exhaustive tour of conferences and meetings throughout the UK that Gillian undertook to propagate the proposals and to the Wagner Development Group, which Gillian chaired, which monitored progress.
In 1994, after the development group was wound up, on Gillian’s initiative the Residential Forum came into being to continue to promote Wagner principles of high standards and improving quality and practice. Three years later Gillian followed Norman (now Lord) Warner as its chair.
Born in London, Gillian came from a family of peers, baronets, MPs and soldiers. Descended from a nephew of Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, she was the eldest of five children of Major Henry Graham of the Grenadier Guards and his wife, Margaret (nee Lopes), daughter of the first Baron Roborough.
Gillian’s was a happy, if unusual, childhood. She and her three sisters suffered “a series of incompetent governesses”, she said. When the second world war broke out the family were staying in Normandy and her mother decided that they would remain there because the Germans were sure to invade Britain.
They were foreigners in wartime France but when they returned to Britain a year later, they felt somewhat dislocated in their own country. Her mother wanted to send Gillian to Canada for the duration of the conflict but she refused to go. Instead, she went to Cheltenham Ladies’ college. She did not enjoy it but she was grateful “because we were so ill educated”.
Gillian attended the University of Geneva, where she studied political science, and then went to work for the Georgian Group, the charity that preserves Georgian architecture. There she met Anthony Wagner, a medieval historian; they married in 1953. When, in 1984, he was blinded as the result of a medical accident, Gillian became his great support, allowing him to continue his work, a task she somehow combined with her own occupations, until his death in 1995.
Joining the council of Barnardo’s in 1969, she became its first female chair from 1978 to 1984. She took a diploma in social administration from the London School of Economics and in 1977 was awarded a doctorate.
It was when she was writing the catalogue for the National Portrait Gallery exhibition The Camera and Dr Barnardo in 1974 that she became interested in the charity’s founder. Discovering the truth about Thomas Barnardo – his darker side, as well as his benevolence – led to her first book, Barnardo (1979).
“Well, Tom, you are not going to like this,” she said when sitting at her subject’s desk and looking at a bust of him. Among other things, she revealed that he used his medical title, although unqualified; that he had sent some children to Canada without their parents’ consent; that his personal finances became entangled with those of the charity; and that he could be arrogant and intransigent. It remains the definitive work.
This planted the seeds for her next book, another that has yet to be bettered, Children of the Empire (1982), the story of the migration of children in care to Canada, Australia and New Zealand by charities, a practice that did not cease with some agencies until the 1950s. Then came The Chocolate Conscience (1987), on the philanthropic Quaker families.
Serving from 1990 to 1995 as chair of governors of the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children inspired her to write a biography of that organisation’s founder, Thomas Coram, Gent (2004). Her final book, based on the writings of her great-grandmother, was Miss Palmer’s Diary: The Secret Journals of a Victorian Lady (2017).
She combined all this with chairing Carnegie UK and the National Centre for Volunteering, while being a member of the governing bodies of the National Institute for Social Work, the London School of Economics and the Princess Royal Trust for Carers. She was appointed OBE in 1977 and DBE in 1994.
Gillian had homes in Chelsea (and later Belgravia), and Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where she enjoyed swimming (in all seasons), sailing and gardening, and sought refuge to write in a beachfront tower owned by a neighbour, the fellow writer Laurens van der Post.
Her good manners and cut-glass accent sometimes took people by surprise in an area such as social care, which does not attract many from her background. But her toughness, commitment, sharp intellect, historical perspective and charm made her a forceful and popular advocate.
She is survived by her three children, Lucy, Roger and Mark, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
• Gillian Mary Millicent Wagner, writer and residential care advocate, born 25 October 1927; died 31 December 2025
