Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_18d09825-904a-5d90-a233-e6dc8413497e">34E.F. Rathbone, The Case for Family Allowances, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1940, pp 51–2 and prefatory ‘Note’.
35Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 126–7.
36TITMUSS/4/534, undated, unsigned, seven-page typescript, p 7.
37A. Oakley, Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880–1920, Bristol, Policy Press, 2018, pp 7–8.
38Ibid, p 146.
39TITMUSS/7/48, letter, 10 September 1940, RMT to Martin.
40EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 16 November 1941, RMT to Blacker.
41TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 22 March 1939, RMT to Editors, Population Index, School of Public Affairs, Princeton University.
42R.M. Titmuss, ‘Hitler’s Man-Power Problem’, The Spectator, 20 October 1939, pp 539–40.
43R.J. Evans, The Third Reich at War, London, Allen Lane, 2008, p 543.
44R.M. Titmuss, ‘Rassenhygiene’, Eugenics Review, 32, 2, July 1940, pp 62–4, reviewing M. Gumpert, Heil Hunger!
45EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333 letter, 18 September 1939, RMT to Grant-Duff; the book alluded to was R.R. Kuczynski, Living Space and Population Problems, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1939.
46Oakley, Man and Wife, p 113.
47TITMUSS/7/54, letter, 15 March 1946, RMT to Under Secretary of State, the Home Office.
48TITMUSS/7/49, letters, 28 February 1941 Ambros to RMT, 2 March 1941, RMT to Ambros, 17 March 1941, RMT to Ambros.
49Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, p 158ff.
50R.M. Titmuss, ‘Man-Power and Health’, The Spectator, 26 May 1939, pp 896–7.
51EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 10 November 1939, Business Secretary, Eugenics Society, to RMT.
52R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘Physique of the Recruit: Militiamen and Regulars’, The Times, 22 June 1939, p 12.
53R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘The Health of the Militia’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 July 1939, p 15.
54R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘The Health of the Militia’, The Spectator, 21st July 1939, p 96.
55R.M. Titmuss, ‘National Health’, Eugenics Review, 31, 4, January 1940, p 219.
The Titmuss gospel and progressive opinion
Previous chapters outlined a broad political, and social, historical sketch of British society as the 1930s moved towards war. But the points Stefan Collini makes about the era’s cultural atmosphere should also be acknowledged. As he puts it, the inter-war period was notable for increasing concerns centred around the notion of cultural decline, alongside anxieties about the morally destructive effects of ‘modernity’. One component of such critiques was ‘a challenge to the category of “the economic”’. On one level, this was part of a longstanding rejection, on the part of English radicalism, of traditional political economy, and of related ideas such as the ‘cash nexus’. But what was new was a ‘more sustained questioning of the place of economic activity in human life’, alongside ‘a more wide-ranging exploration of the alleged cultural significance of its accepted centrality in “modern” society’. For this Chapter, what is especially important is that Collini sees R.H. Tawney, an intellectual mentor to Titmuss, as one of the principal exponents of such an analysis.1 Tom Rogan, in a study which deals in detail with Tawney, likewise suggests that, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critics of capitalism focused especially on its ‘moral or spiritual desolation’.2 This was, therefore, an important constituent of the contemporary intellectual environment.
Titmuss was determined to get his views across to as wide an audience as possible, and so sought to broadcast these in both scholarly and popular outlets. His co-authored ‘Penguin Special’, discussed in the last chapter, was an example of a publication aimed at both markets, as well as targeting those of like mind, namely ‘progressive opinion’. This chapter builds on the preceding two as we further examine Titmuss’s engagement with progressive opinion in particular. As part of this, we also examine his critique of what he saw as contemporary society’s moral shortcomings, not least the obsession with economic matters at the expense of what was, or could be, truly valuable in human affairs. For Titmuss, this complemented his concerns over population, as well as informing his more overtly political activities.
One sign of Titmuss’s commitment to spreading his message, along with his growing self-confidence as a writer, was, as we saw in Chapter 3, his engagement of J.M. Henderson as his literary agent. Henderson’s task was to try and place Titmuss’s writings with various print media outlets. For instance, he told Titmuss in spring 1939 that The Spectator had accepted the piece, discussed in the previous chapter, on health and manpower.3 A few months later, Titmuss sent Henderson the talk which he was about to deliver to the Liberal Summer School, discussed in Chapter 3, and ‘which might appeal to one of the better class monthlies’, for example Sociological Review. And if Henderson wished to ‘add to my qualifications you may be interested to know that I have just been awarded a Leverhulme Research Grant for work on Vital Statistics’.4 Titmuss’s article did not appear in Sociological Review, but his letter is revealing in showing that, given the award of the Leverhulme grant, he was being taken seriously as a researcher. Throughout his career