Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
33Interviews with Professor Pat Thane, a PhD student in the LSE Social Administration Department in the1960s, 9 March 2016; and with Professor Jose Harris, one of Titmuss’s doctoral students, also 1960s, 18 July 2016.
34M. Powell, ‘Social Policy and Administration: Journal and Discipline’, Social Policy and Administration, 40, 3, 2006, p 239.
35TITMUSS/7/72, letter, 15 May 1964, Shore to RMT.
36LSE/Staff File/Titmuss, letter, ? October 1965, Crosland to RMT.
37LSE/Staff File/Titmuss, memorandum, undated but October 1965, Sydney Caine to School Standing Committee.
38LSE/Staff File/Titmuss, letter, 21 November 1966, RMT to Caine.
39TITMUSS/7/71, letters, 29 June 1963, Concord Films Council to RMT; and 3 July 1963, RMT to Council.
40TITMUSS/7/71, letters, ? July 1963, Craske to RMT; and 1 August 1963, RMT to Craske.
41For this type of approach see ‘What We Do’ on the website of the organisation History and Policy, www.historyandpolicy.org; also M. Powell and J. Stewart, ‘Themed Section on History and Policy: Introduction’, Social Policy and Society, 4, 3, 2005, pp 293–4.
42‘The New Year Honours’, The Times, 1 January 1966, p 5.
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER TO THE END OF 1941
‘As the son of a farmer…’: origins, early employment, and personal life
Titmuss’s early life, unremarkable in many respects, has nonetheless been the subject of dispute. Shortly after his death Margaret Gowing, a friend with whom he had worked during the Second World War, produced an account of his life which has proved influential for how Titmuss has since been viewed.1 Gowing’s narrative remains important, and will be drawn upon in what follows. In certain respects, however, Gowing’s was a partial account which consolidated the by then standard view of Titmuss’s origins and career. Put simply, this stressed the deprivations of his childhood and youth, so throwing into sharp contrast his eventual place as Britain’s leading authority on social policy, an expert advising governments at home and abroad, and public intellectual. For instance, a sympathetic profile in The Observer in 1959 noted the challenges Titmuss’s family had faced, and how Titmuss himself claimed to have learned little at school, save an enduring love for cricket and football.2 A few years later, another newspaper article suggested that the origins of ‘The Poverty Lobby’ of the 1960s lay in the early hardships of one of its members, Titmuss. While colleagues such as Abel-Smith were middle class, and had come to socialism ‘by conviction’, Titmuss had reached this position ‘by experience’.3 The last point begs more questions than it answers, not least the nature of Titmuss’s political beliefs.
In his application for the LSE chair in 1950 Titmuss said little of his formal education save that, ‘As the son of a farmer’, he had been sent to ‘a preparatory school in Bedfordshire which drew most of its pupils from farmers in the district’. At 14 he was then sent to Clark’s Commercial College for six month to learn bookkeeping.4 The downbeat account of Titmuss’s early years was most vigorously promoted by his wife, Kay. Shortly after his memorial service in June 1973, she told an American friend who had spoken at the event that Titmuss’s ‘only schooling was at a private school of poor quality from which he was frequently absent due to ill health in childhood’. ‘And’, she continued, ‘he knew what it was to be on the poverty line when he struggled to keep the family going after his father’s death on a mere pittance of an insurance clerk’s salary’.5 Kay’s comment about Titmuss’s health reminds us that this was certainly a feature of his childhood, but also of his whole life. And the idea that Titmuss was, as a consequence of his early hardships, especially sympathetic to the poor is a variant on the notion that he came to ‘socialism’ through ‘experience’, and is likewise questionable.
And here lies the problem. Ann Oakley has disputed aspects of Gowing’s account of her father’s origins and subsequent career, substantiating her case with archival and other evidence. What Gowing wrote, she argues, was ‘weakened by its reliance on the singular perspective’ of Kay. Kay’s concern had been to highlight ‘how important she had been to (Titmuss’s) success and how unimportant, indeed damaging, had been the contribution of his own family’. Such a narrative was attractive as it appeared to show ‘this champion of equality and the welfare state transcending his own impoverished background through sheer hard work, a truly self-made man’.6 And it was not only Kay who promoted this somewhat self-regarding version of Titmuss’s life, so did many of those around him, and influenced by him. The entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for instance, written by his friend A.H. Halsey, suggests that the Titmuss family ‘lived an isolated and impecunious life in Bedfordshire’, that Titmuss never took a formal examination in his life (a fact he allegedly did not regret), and that he instead preferred to ‘applaud the public library as the most precious of British social services’. Halsey suggests, too, that Titmuss’s ‘first step out of obscurity was made in 1934’ when he met his future wife, Kay.7 Parts of this are, to say the least, debatable.
Oakley certainly has the advantage over Gowing in her access to her parents’ papers, some of which are not in the public domain.8 To be fair, Gowing acknowledged that she had spoken extensively with Kay, noting her especial gratitude for access to ‘Richard’s voluminous records’. But she also, as her memorial noted, spoke to others.9 For instance, in a letter to Walter Adams, LSE director, she thanked him for ‘spending so long in talking to me about Richard Titmuss and for sending me the information’. This would be extremely useful in the preparation of her article, of which she would send him a draft. Gowing agreed not to refer directly to correspondence which Adams had shown her. This concerned Titmuss’s appointment at the LSE, and in particular T.H. Marshall’s recommendation.10 Nonetheless, as Howard Glennerster remarks, Oakley’s research