Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
in the fields of population and population health. In both areas he saw himself as a contributing to arguments for what he would have seen as social progress, and in so doing he was prepared to take on leadership responsibilities. He was also beginning to establish himself as an influential figure in the Eugenics Society, and had made a number of contacts who were to prove important to his subsequent career. With the coming of war, his analyses of population and related issues led to his employment by various government departments. As if all this were not enough, and once again we have to remind ourselves that he had a full-time job, Titmuss was also keen further to make his mark on a wider audience as an exponent of ‘progressive opinion’, and it is to this we next turn.
Notes
1P. Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p 338.
2R.A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, pp 234, 316. For an approach to Titmuss’s association with the Eugenics Society which does not always take the same line as this volume, A. Oakley, ‘Making Medicine Social: The Cases of the Two Dogs with Bent Legs’, in D. Porter (ed), Social Medicine and Medical Sociology in the Twentieth Century, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1997; and A. Oakley, ‘Eugenics, Social Medicine and the Career of Richard Titmuss in Britain, 1935–50’, British Journal of Sociology, 42, 2, 1991, pp 165–94.
3D. Hopkinson, Family Inheritance: A Life of Eva Hubback, London, Staple Press, 1954, pp 128, 134, 160.
4B. Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, p 296 and Chapter 10 passim.
5Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 119, 148; and Father and Daughter, p 114.
6L. Bland and L. Hall, ‘Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole’, in A. Bashford and P. Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p 216.
7M. Freeden, ‘Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity’, Historical Journal, 22, 3, 1979, p 671.
8Soloway, Demography, p 316.
9Titmuss, Poverty and Population, pp 1, x–xi, xiii, xxvi.
10Ibid, pp 308–9, 3–4.
11B.S. Rowntree, ‘The Waste of Life’, The Listener, 8 December 1938, Supplement p xix.
12TITMUSS/3/399, letter, 24 October 1962, RMT to Tom Simey, University of Liverpool. Simey had written the entry on Rowntree for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
13For a survey of material of this sort, and a critique of official attitudes, C. Webster, ‘Healthy or Hungry Thirties?’, History Workshop, 13, Spring 1982, pp 110–29.
14Titmuss, Poverty and Population, p xxiv.
15EUGENICS, SA/EUG/A/1/32, Eugenics Society, Annual Report, 1939–40.
16EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 16 November 1941, RMT to Blacker.
17EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 19 November 1941, Blacker to RMT.
18R.C. Whiting, ‘Political and Economic Planning’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
19‘The Coming Fall in Population’, Planning, 73, 21 April 1936, pp 3–15; and ‘Population Facts and Trends’, Planning, 165, 9 April 1940, pp 3–15.
20For a favourable reference to Graunt, see R.M. Titmuss, Birth, Poverty and Wealth: A Study of Infant Mortality, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1943, p 94.
21RMT, review of Major Greenwood, Medical Statistics from Graunt to Farr, in The Economic History Review, 3, 1, 1950, p 146. I am grateful to Dr Margaret Pelling for this reference.
22TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 31 January 1939, RMT to Singer; and letter, 2 February 1939, Singer to RMT.
23TITMUSS/7/48, letter, 29 July 1940, RMT to Ministry of Information.
24D. Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, Ch 15.
25R.M. Titmuss, ‘Aliens and Refugees’, Eugenics Review, 32, 4, January 1941, pp 136–7.
26R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Cost of Living and Dying’, The New Statesman and Nation, 5 April 1941, p 357.
27R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘Medical Statistics in Wartime’, British Medical Journal, II, 1941, p 562.
28TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 9 March 1939, John Humphrey, UCH Medical Society, to RMT.
29Oakley, Man and Wife, p 81.
30N. Joicey, ‘A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books 1935–c.1951’, Twentieth Century British History, 4, 1, 1993, p 31.
31Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, p 107ff where the author talks of a ‘reading “Popular Front”’.
32F. Le Gros Clark and R.M. Titmuss, Our Food Problem: A Study of National Security, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1939, pp 91–2, 176–7, 178, 182.
33TITMUSS/7/47,