Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
that the Beveridge Report be implemented in full, and immediately.35 The key figure in Common Wealth was the eccentric former Liberal MP, Acland, encountered earlier as a supporter of a Popular Front. Titmuss was active in the various factions which were to become Common Wealth, an organisation which, Acland’s biographer suggests, appealed ‘essentially to the more modest, professional middle classes, notably in London and on Merseyside’.36 This no doubt applied to its predecessors, and accurately enough describes Titmuss. Acland and Titmuss had been in touch since at least late 1938 when they had entered into a correspondence over one of Titmuss’s obsessions of the time, population health. Titmuss had also been among those who, having been sent a copy by the author, had responded to Acland’s 1940 Penguin best-seller Unser Kampf (Our Struggle, an allusion to Hitler’s Mein Kampf). This was part of Acland’s strategy to form a broad, progressive political front looking forward to post-war social reconstruction. Titmuss told Acland that while ‘as a Liberal’ he might disagree on ‘a few side issues’, nonetheless he accepted ‘your major argument for Common Ownership with all that implies in national and international relations’. If a majority of the ‘Liberals and Labour accept your case’, then the ‘Lib-Lab front on Common Ownership must become a reality’.37 Acland’s response also contained an invitation to a Forward March meeting to be held at the Commons in early March 1940. Titmuss accepted, adding that in his view ‘the most important and urgent step’ would be to ‘break the political truce’. This meant, he argued, ‘continuous pressure’ on the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, and required the formation of an ‘ALL-PARTY COMMITTEE’.38
An ‘Unser Kampf’ group (presumably an alternative name for Forward March) was formed, and in spring 1940 issued a ‘Manifesto of the Common Men’. This sought to ‘build a new world based on a new morality. To put into practice in our public life the principles which we pay lip service to in our churches’, and it was to such ends that ‘we invite the co-operation of our fellow-men’. Titmuss, describing himself as a ‘Writer and Statistician’, agreed to be a signatory to this document.39 A few weeks later, he became chairman of the group’s Home Policy Committee, and, as such, party to a discussion which noted that the government now had complete power over both capital and labour, something which could be used for either progressive or reactionary ends. There was no effective parliamentary opposition, so wartime policies should focus on ‘new moral imperatives’ – again a very Titmuss notion – such as the ‘permanent conscription of capital’ and ‘workers representation’.40 During Acland’s brief spell in the army, Titmuss once more took a leadership role, telling a correspondent that he ‘personally felt that the work should go on and that some direction was needed in Acland’s absence.41 He also seems to have been a member of Forward March’s ‘Inner Executive’, a small body of five individuals which included Acland and Titmuss’s friend, François Lafitte.42
Further reinforcing this idea of Titmuss in a leadership role, by spring of 1941 he was, apparently, chair of the Unser Kampf group, and consequently dealing with various enquiries to the organisation. For instance, he responded to a correspondent who had approached Unser Kampf with what appears to have been proposals based on the idea of Social Credit. The latter argued for the establishment of a form of economic democracy, particularly by way of monetary reform. In reply, Titmuss suggested that while he agreed that much was wrong with the present monetary system, nonetheless it would be mistaken to think that ‘drastic change in the monetary system and its operation would create – by itself – a new kind of society’. The system was ‘part and parcel of an acutely acquisitive society’ and Unser Kampf had recently publicised what it saw as the consequences of such ‘acquisitiveness … as it impinges on our war effort’.43 The phrase ‘acquisitive society’ alludes to the work of the ethical socialist, R.H. Tawney, a recurring figure in this volume. Titmuss also gave talks on behalf of Forward March, for example to the latter’s Ealing Group in May 1942 on ‘Private Profit versus the Health Subsistence and Conservation of the People’.44
There can be little doubt that Titmuss played an important role in Forward March. In summer 1941, Acland told him that he felt something important was about to happen and, although he did not specify what, perhaps he, like Titmuss, saw the evacuation from Dunkirk the previous year, and the subsequent Blitz, as transformative moments in British history. In any event, something prompted him to reflect on Forward March’s own recent history. Reviewing the last 15 months, Acland gratefully acknowledged all the people who had helped the organisation. But, he continued, ‘I look back also on that meeting we had outside the dining room of the House of Commons when you and I tried to think up in a hurry one or two practical conclusions to which we hoped that first meeting might perhaps lead’. This was clearly the meeting to which Titmuss had been invited in March 1940. ‘Since then’, Acland flatteringly suggested, ‘you and only you have remained with us quite steadily in good times and bad’. Throughout, Titmuss had given ‘the wisest advice’, and whenever he had agreed to do something it had happened. As things presently stood, it was ‘quite clear to me that the next stages of our enterprise could not be accomplished without your steady guidance and advice almost from day to day’.45
In reply, Titmuss told Acland that he would continue to do what he could before going on to make an important statement of his own beliefs. Looking back to the era of the Popular Front, that is the mid-1930s, he could see that ‘what counted most with me at the very beginning was sincerity in public life’. And, as he began to ‘think more deeply’, there came the ‘importance of ideas; moral values’. Equally importantly, there must be ‘no compromise’. Although not a Christian himself, he was perhaps appealing to Acland’s Christian socialism when he suggested that while ‘Christ would not admit hairsplitting’, nonetheless ‘one outstanding feature of our time is the ability of the progressive to hairsplit’. Perhaps this was because progressives symbolised ‘the age of indecision from which I hope we are now emerging’. In his own work, meanwhile, he was hoping soon to complete ‘my study of Infant Mortality and Social Class’ – what was to be Birth, Poverty and Wealth. His text had been vetted by ‘other experts’, and showed conclusively that the working class, and the poor, were now worse off in relative terms than before the First World War. Clarifying his point, he continued that this was ‘in terms of health, which incidentally should be the criterion of any new order. The fact that no one has previously studied the subject indicates that in an acquisitive society even research concentrates on money tokens – not health’.46
Unfortunately, at least for Acland, Titmuss was unable to fulfil the role the former had envisaged for him, although the two kept in touch. Titmuss also compiled a file about Common Wealth, including a draft response to the Beveridge Report written by Lafitte. Years later, he was to send this to Abel-Smith, describing it as a ‘fragment of history’.47 The Beveridge Report, published in 1942, was not the revolutionary work sometimes claimed (including by its author). Essentially, it proposed rationalising and expanding existing social insurance schemes, while making, admittedly important, arguments for healthcare reform, family allowances,