Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
certain aspects of the decline in Germany’s birth-rate during the war – the last one’. The ‘most significant fact’ was that over 40 per cent of German women who had married in 1933/34 had not given birth.45 As his own article had suggested, this was a knock-on effect of the First World War, and one reason why Germany had an even poorer record in population replacement than Britain. Grant-Duff would certainly have been interested in Titmuss’s observations not only from a eugenic point of view but also because she was, as Oakley notes, keenly interested in German affairs, and a fluent speaker of the language.46
Titmuss and Kuczynski, meanwhile, had a growing friendship, one outcome of which was that in 1946 the former wrote to the Home Office in support of Kuczynski’s application for British citizenship. Titmuss noted that he had ‘been personally acquainted’ with Kuczynski for around seven years, and had known of him as an authority on population for some time previously. The two had been meeting at fortnightly intervals as friends, and because of ‘our joint interest in population developments’, in which capacity Kuczynksi was ‘one of the greatest living authorities in this field’. Titmuss had a ‘very high opinion of his character as a scholar and as a citizen’. With his usual generosity in such matters, he concluded that Britain was indebted to Dr Kuczynski for his soon to be published population history of the empire. So ‘we should welcome Dr Kuczynski as a British Citizen. I am delighted that he has applied for naturalisation in this country and not in the United States’.47
Titmuss also helped other refugees from Nazi oppression. In early 1941 he was contacted by a member of the Czechoslovakian government in exile, its Minister of Social Welfare, M.V. Ambros. Ambros sought Titmuss’s advice about basic information on wartime conditions, and was trying to put together a picture of what Central Europe might look like after the war. He was especially concerned with health and food in relation to women and children. Titmuss responded almost immediately, declaring that he had ‘admired the work of the Czech Republic before the entry of Hitler’, and so would be ‘glad to help you in any way possible’. Always generous with his time, he suggested a meeting. This appears to have taken place, and in a further letter Titmuss suggested that Ambros might find it useful to approach bodies working on similar projects, for example that led by the highly experienced civil servant and politician Sir John Anderson under the auspices of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Titmuss also offered to introduce Ambros to contacts at the Ministry of Health, as well as giving him advice on how to organise any data he gathered, urging him to identify whether particular food components, for example vitamins, were likely to be in short supply post-war.48
But Titmuss’s first concern was Britain’s population health. Having identified serious problems among the population as a whole, as war became increasingly inevitable he turned his attention to their implications for the armed forces. The immediate context was the Military Training Act of spring 1939 under the terms of which 20 and 21 year old males were to be called up for six months of military training – they were to be referred to, in this capacity, as ‘militiamen’ – before being transferred to the Army Reserve. This was a form of conscription, the first in peacetime in Britain, and further evidence of the sense that the country was heading towards war.49
In a piece published in The Spectator around the time of the act’s passage, Titmuss noted that in the previous year some 42,000 potential recruits had been rejected on medical grounds by the regular army. The majority had been between 18 and 20 years old, and so some would be conscripted under the terms of the 1939 Act. Since such conscripts would be medically inspected, this afforded the state an opportunity to gather information on this particular cohort, while raising concerns about the potential physical state of the militia. Titmuss then brought forward data which showed that over 50 per cent of those volunteering between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s had been rejected on medical or physical grounds. The total number involved was 650,000 – over double the number to be conscripted. This could not be solely attributed to the effects of unemployment as most of the potential recruits were in work, and hence it was a ‘grave indictment of the nation’s health’, suggesting that malnutrition among children and young people was ‘vastly more widespread than has so far been recognised’. The lesson was clear ‘to everyone who realises that we do not fight by guns alone’. If the nation’s manpower was to ‘marshalled in common defence then there should be not only the equalisation of wealth by conscription’, but also ‘the equalisation of health’. Poverty in Britain was a reminder that ‘freedom is best defended by attacking want’. If the people had to ‘rise in defence of their homes then let them demand that their homes should not be hovels and that their children should not be malnourished’.50
Titmuss pursued this theme for the rest of 1939. In November, the Eugenics Society Emergency Committee agreed that he should speak at the next meeting on ‘your findings with regard to the physical condition of the men of the new Army’.51 Titmuss also had letters on military health published in The Times, The New Statesman and Nation, and The Spectator. He commended The Times for highlighting the discrepancy between rejection rates on medical grounds for potential recruits to the regular army, and those conscripted to the militia. But the situation was even worse than reported, and he produced evidence to show why. Titmuss conceded, though, that as far as the militiamen were concerned only a small sample was as yet available. So he called on officialdom, in the interests of ‘the many sociologists, medical men, and others who are concerned with the state of public health’, to bring forward ‘an authoritative explanation’ of the apparent discrepancy.52
His contribution to The New Statesman and Nation made similar points, as well as explicitly citing a speech by Prime Minister Chamberlain, delivered since the publication of Titmuss’s letter to The Times. Chamberlain had made claims which, if true, refuted the work of those such as John Boyd Orr who had provided estimates of ‘the number of people existing in this country on a diet deficient in every essential respect’. It takes little imagination to work out what position Titmuss took. He concluded that it had been brought to his attention that young men rejected as unfit by the regular army had been passed as ‘fit for service’ by the militia, notwithstanding that an ‘insignificant’ period of time had elapsed between the two examinations. Therefore, in the ‘likely event of a considerable number of Militiamen electing to adopt one of the Defence Forces as a career’, was ‘the Government … prepared to transfer them without further medical examination’?53 Correspondence in The Spectator, meanwhile, derived from Titmuss’s article and involved, among other things, rebutting an army officer’s claim that his own observations revealed an immense improvement in the condition of recruits, thanks partly to the expansion of the social services.54 Essentially, Titmuss was arguing that the armed forces’ physical capacity could be undermined by bringing in recruits from the militia, and that this in turn reflected the poor condition of large swathes of the British population. This was clearly an injustice in itself, but also raised issues about potential military efficiency and performance. As he pithily put it in a book review at the beginning of 1940, ‘the functional capacity of nation whether at peace or war depends on the nutritional state of its people’.55
During the latter part of the 1930s, and into the early part of the Second World War, Titmuss was not