Samuel Waxman , 86, is the son of Jewish emigres from Poland. He has been a member of the British Sociological Association for 50 years, though he has never been an academic.
Mr Waxman worked in engineering. He taught himself the ideologies of the Labour movement and became a shop steward. Mr Waxman joined the BSA for its publications, hoping they would be a sounding board for his developing ideas.
But he said: "I found the jargon most disconcerting. I had to keep stopping and making my mind up about what they were talking about."
He took a part-time BSc in sociology as a mature student at the former Hatfield Polytechnic. Mr Waxman so often interrupted lectures on 19th-century history that his lecturer said if he kept quiet for 50 minutes, he could have the last ten minutes of each lecture for a Marxist rebuttal.
Mr Waxman attempted a sociology PhD at the London School of Economics, but found academics unsympathetic to his view that sociology was an art, requiring innate talent, rather than a science to be taught.
Gabriel Newfield , former chairman of the BSA and latterly pro-director of Hatfield Polytechnic, first studied medicine. He completed a year at University College London before National Service in the Royal Army Medical Corps. But he was disenchanted by a lack of discussion of the social context in which medicine was practised, and he transferred in 1952 to the LSE.
"I wanted to understand the world. At that time, it was possibly more common for students to feel their sociology interests had political implications than is the case nowadays."
Mr Newfield joined the BSA because he liked its programme of lectures. He planned to be an industrial sociologist, and he got a job at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.
He took a post at the LSE, where he saw sociology's popularity boom and slump. "There were (then) promising young people who found themselves discouraged from reading sociology because of its image in the minds of those advising them."
Michael Banton , emeritus professor of sociology at Bristol University and first editor of the journal Sociology, served in the Royal Navy before beginning a BSc at the LSE in 1947.
He planned to specialise in economics but he was recruited to sociology by his tutor, Edward Shils. "He said that if I had been able to navigate a fleet minesweeper, I would not need his help to navigate my way around the LSE, but he gave me inestimable help in navigating a way through the social sciences."
Professor Banton disagreed with Kingsley Amis's "more will mean worse" opposition to planned expansion of higher education in the 1960s. But he said that events had proven Mr Amis right.
"At the LSE, I was taught by economists who won Nobel prizes and by anthropologists, sociologists and others (such as Karl Popper) who belonged, internationally, on the first rank," he says. "I was tutored by, established scholars, not graduate students on short-term contracts."
John Westergaard lived in occupied Denmark during the Second World War, after which he became a mail censor in British-occupied Germany. He joined the LSE as a student in 1948.
"The war had fired my interest in societal and political affairs. The world was awry, and I thought social sciences might help to throw some light on that."
But sound sociology, he said, depended on context. It was concerned not only with contemporary society but with trying to understand how past societies developed.
After graduating, he became an academic at the LSE, where he sympathised with students protesting against academic authoritarianism. "A sizeable number of teacher rebels came from other disciplines. Sociology came to be regarded as the vanguard of subversive radicalism, which was a caricature.
It had a much more diverse ideology."
Professor Westergaard is now emeritus professor of sociology at Sheffield University.
He was involved in defending teaching at the Polytechnic of North London's sociology department, which was allegedly Communist and Marxist inspired.
"I chaired a routine inspection that looked into that, and we said it was nonsense. Keith Joseph (Conservative Secretary of State for Education and Science) still tried to get it smashed using other arguments."
In 1940, Thomas Bishop, aged 15, was taken from England to Canada for safety during the war. He proved so educationally advanced that he was admitted directly to McGill University.
After studying a mix of subjects, he went into the army. He worked in military counter-intelligence and was responsible for interviewing Nazis.
This did not impress Morris Ginsberg, the UK's only professor of sociology and first chair of the BSA, when Dr Bishop subsequently studied sociology at the LSE as a postgraduate. "Somebody described different resistances to being interrogated by different nationalities. 'In my experienceI' I opened my contribution. Professor Ginsberg interrupted: 'Have you read Dicks on interrogation?' 'No, sir,' I replied. 'Well, if you haven't read Dicks, you can't have much to say on interrogation.'"