Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
4 June 1941, Acland to RMT.
46TITMUSS/8/7, letter, 21t June 1941, RMT to Acland (emphasis in the original).
47TITMUSS/2/83, typescript ‘Statement to Branches on the Beveridge Report’ with attached note, 28 November 1955, RMT to Abel-Smith.
48R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Right to Social Security’, in R.M. Titmuss and M. Zander, Unequal Rights, London, CPAG, 1968, p 3.
49TITMUSS/8/6, letter, 5 June 1942, RMT to Acland.
50Cited in A.H. Halsey, No Discouragement: An Autobiography, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996, p 217.
51Freeden, Liberalism Divided, pp 223ff., 313ff.
52M. Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth Century Progressive Thought, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp 175–7, 182–4.
53J. Stewart, ‘“Man against Disease”: The Medical Left and the Lessons of Science’, in D. Leggett and C. Sleigh (eds), Scientific Governance in Britain, 1914–79, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016, pp 199–216.
The Eugenics Society, Poverty and Population, and ‘Manpower and Health’
The last chapter examined Titmuss’s political activities in the 1930s and early 1940s. Demanding as these undoubtedly were, Titmuss also found time for other forms of social and political engagement. Among his early research interests were population, and population health. He was convinced, as were many others at this time, that Britain’s population was in decline, and that this promised problems for the future. Nonetheless, as Pat Thane puts it, Titmuss was ‘the most persistent, prolific, and one of the most immoderate demographic pessimists’ of the 1930s and beyond.1 We shall encounter this pessimism in this, and later, chapters. Titmuss was, further, concerned about population health, arguing that proper analysis of the rates of morbidity and mortality revealed significant class and regional disparities in health experience and outcomes. Such concerns led to membership of the Eugenics Society, his first major publication, and conclusions with serious implications, at least in his view, for Britain’s preparedness for what was, by the late 1930s, inevitable war.
The Eugenics Society (originally the Eugenics Education Society) was founded in 1907. It was a small but influential body campaigning for greater attention to be paid to issues of heredity and population quality. Among its members in the 1930s and 1940s were William Beveridge, and his successor as LSE director from 1937, the social scientist Alexander Carr-Saunders. Titmuss was introduced to the society in 1937 by the LSE demographer and refugee from Nazi Germany Robert René Kuczynski, remaining a member until shortly before his death. Kuczynski, who had published alarming predictions about population decline in Western Europe, had favourably noted Titmuss’s statistical skills. Titmuss gained further kudos with the Society when, a year later, he published Poverty and Population, which impressed, in particular, reform-minded eugenicists such as Carr-Saunders, Society General Secretary C.P. Blacker, and Lord Horder, the King’s physician. The Society, it has been argued, appealed primarily to certain elements of the middle class.2 This can be construed to include both members of the professional middle class – doctors such as Blacker – and those, like Titmuss, from the ‘new’ middle class. Titmuss became an active Society member, and, in addition to its usefulness as a platform for his ideas, it gave him the opportunity, which he was not slow to take up, to gain important and influential contacts.
While Titmuss had a genuine, almost obsessive, interest in population issues, there can be little doubt that he used the Society to advance his career. As we shall see, it was one of its leading members, the social reformer and feminist Eva Hubback, who suggested Titmuss to the historian Keith Hancock as a potential contributor to the wartime histories. Hubback was, indeed, to play a considerable part in his life. A woman of extraordinary energy and commitment, she played a key role not only in the Eugenics Society, but also in, among other organisations, the Association for Education in Citizenship (which she co-founded in 1934) and for which Titmuss was to write a pamphlet during the war, and the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. She was deeply interested in population issues, including birth control and, as her daughter records, was familiar ‘with the writings of Carr-Saunders and later of D.V. Glass, Alva Myrdal and Richard Titmuss, and indeed became friends with all these experts whom she met on common intellectual ground’.3
In the 1930s, like many progressive intellectuals, Hubback ‘hovered’, as Brian Harrison puts it, between Liberal and Labour. Harrison suggests that ‘Titmuss resembled her in this’, with socialism for him becoming the way to ‘keep up the birth-rate’. This is overstating the case, and Harrison is on firmer ground when he remarks that it was one of Hubback’s ‘most fruitful suggestions’ that Titmuss contribute a volume of the war histories.4 Another important Society contact was Carr-Saunders, first chair of the Population Investigation Committee set up by the Society in 1936 (Hubback was also a member), and discussed in Chapter 7 as Titmuss came to play a prominent role on it. Carr-Saunders was to be a key player in Titmuss’s LSE appointment. Oakley records that the two had, by that point, been in correspondence for at least a decade, and that this involved meetings at Carr-Saunders’s club, The Athenaeum. Carr-Saunders, too, was close to Hancock.5
So what was eugenics? For Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall, eugenics is ‘too often discussed as if it were a clearly understood ideology, stable over time, and predictive of particular attitudes and sympathies in its adherents’. It is more plausible, then, to ‘argue that there was no one monolithic eugenics, either in beliefs or policy implications’. It could thus be embraced by, for instance, a wide range of political opinion.6 Certainly for its conservative, hard-line, adherents, eugenics involved the belief that an individual’s social circumstances were shaped by inherited genes, rather than by socioeconomic environment – nature rather than nurture. But as Michael Freeden suggests, there could also be an ‘ideological affinity’ between eugenics and ‘progressive thought’.7 In Titmuss’s case, this involved emphasis more on social environment, and less on biological inheritance. For Titmuss and those of like mind, the ‘genetic question’ could not be dealt with until there was greater equality in socioeconomic circumstances, brought about by ameliorative social intervention – nurture rather than nature. This brought him into disfavour with more ‘traditional’ Society members who thought that any form of intervention was dangerously counterproductive, and that nature should be allowed to weed out ‘undesirables’. Richard Soloway