Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
that when, in 1940, he applied to become a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, that body expressed surprise that he was not one already.5 The correspondence with Henderson illustrates, too, Titmuss’s strategy of reaching out to general audiences, such as the readership of The Spectator, as well as a more specialised group, his fellow social scientists (of whom, it has to be acknowledged, there were not that many in inter-war Britain).
Titmuss also began to approach organisations directly with potential articles, another sign of his self-belief. In late summer 1941 he sent a piece on ‘Planning and the Birth Rate’ to the Town and Country Planning Association, a progressive professional body which sought to encourage the humanistic planning of the built environment.6 The Association was clearly impressed, for the article appeared soon afterwards in its journal. Titmuss started by claiming that recent discussions of post-war reconstruction, at this point very much in their early stages, had tended to focus on material issues, understandably given the impact of physical destruction. But such a focus forgot that ‘national life cannot continue unless the population replaces itself, that is, unless parents desire children’. Social reconstruction, thus conceptually enlarged, thereby entered ‘the realm of moral values; of social attitudes to parenthood; of belief in the future of man’. Titmuss then raised his usual concerns about declining fertility and imminent population decline. He also, appropriately given his audience, discussed building data and the need to embrace house planning’s social aspects, for example the particular needs of large families. But what is perhaps most striking is his underlying philosophy. If an environment could be created wherein parents consciously desired children, then ‘the physical environment, the multiple and interlocked social agencies for communal existence must be attuned to social values rooted in a co-operative and not a competitive way of life’.7
We should pause here to say something about planning, an important strand in progressive thinking from the 1930s. At that time, unbridled capitalism appeared to have failed. It had brought about the Great Depression, the associated socioeconomic and political instability, and a questioning of some of the central tenets of classical political economy. Planning was likewise inherent in reform-inclined eugenics, given its mission to rectify shortcomings in the quality of the racial stock. Progressive opinion was, as we have seen, often happy to go along with this, and Titmuss certainly shared such ideas. And there were models of planning which seemed to show the way forward. While most progressives would have rejected the Soviet Union’s political system, nonetheless its Five Year Plans appeared to be transforming its economy, as well as providing a barrier to the Great Depression’s ravages. In the United States, meanwhile, President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ was more politically acceptable, an example of a liberal democracy intervening to promote economic revival and stave off social instability. Lloyd George, for instance, promoted the idea of a ‘British New Deal’. Social research was also looking into issues such as perceived problems in the social services and the healthcare system.8 Planning was seen as the solution to such ills, based as it was, or claimed to be, on empiricism and rationalism. To put it another way, it was ‘scientific’. Planning thus appealed to what Arthur Marwick famously described as ‘middle opinion’, that is those critical of both free-market capitalism and Soviet communism, found in groups such as PEP, the Popular Front, the Next Five Years Group, and Lloyd George’s Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction.9 Titmuss was linked to a number of these bodies, and was close to some of their leading figures. For instance, the Next Five Years Group included Laurence Cadbury and Eleanor Rathbone.10
But to return to Titmuss’s underlying philosophy, also in 1941 The New Statesman and Nation, a leading journal of progressive opinion whose readership was expanding rapidly under Kingsley Martin’s editorship, published Titmuss’s punchy, provocatively titled, article, ‘The End of Economic Parenthood’. This was a relatively short piece, but worth considering closely as it articulates further some of the ideas hinted at in the Town and Country Planning piece, most notably social attitudes towards families and family size, and, underlying this, what Titmuss saw as modern capitalism’s warping of morality. The broader context of both these pieces is crucial. The bombing of British towns and cities was a recent memory, bringing, as it had, huge physical damage, a large number of civilian casualties, and, as in autumn 1939, the movement of significant numbers of people out of the country’s urban areas – events described by Titmuss in Problems of Social Policy. And while Britain itself remained unconquered, in summer 1941 Hitler further escalated the conflict by invading the Soviet Union, initially with considerable military success. The United States had yet to enter the war, so while Britain had been reprieved, this conceivably might have been only temporary.
Titmuss started his New Statesman piece with a series of propositions with which, he suspected, most people would disagree. These were that there was a relationship between the declining birth rate and the present ‘battle for existence’, these two phenomena being ‘twin expressions of one and the same thing’, and that the growth of monopoly capitalism and the production and sale of contraceptive devices were correlated. As a rhetorical technique, this was a clever way of drawing the reader’s attention to purportedly irreconcilable positions while, simultaneously, suggesting that there might be more to them than met the eye. In any event, Titmuss continued, there were only two ways under human control which could lead to humanity’s extinction: mass suicide and the failure to reproduce. Again this is rhetorically clever, implying that the war itself was a form of mass suicide, and that the failure to reproduce might, too, be seen in this light. Given that Britain, with the rest of Europe, was failing to reproduce its population, two consequences of the conflict were possible, namely a ‘tremendous speed up … in the process of the dying out of the human race’, or a ‘complete reversal in our way of life so that an environment will emerge in which parents desire children’. Titmuss stressed that he was talking about the advanced capitalist societies, as the population of countries such as China was bound to rise ‘by hundreds of millions’ over the next 50 years. Although he did not have space to discuss this, the consequences of ‘an enormously increasing Asiatic population’ for the future of mankind raised ‘the most fundamental questions’.11
But why, in Western societies, should parents have to be encouraged to ‘desire’ children (a point also made in the Town and Country Planning piece)? Among the characteristics of such societies over recent decades were improvements in public health and the greater availability of contraception. So capitalist societies had gained more and more control over both the death rate and the birth rate. Focusing on the latter, why had the ability to control it been increasingly exercised? Here we can begin to discern what was to be a consistent theme in Titmuss’s thought, for he argued that the most ‘fundamental factor’ was the ‘psychological atmosphere of a society which places acquisitiveness before children’. Humanity’s impulse to serve the community – the ‘altruism’ which became increasingly central to Titmuss’s philosophy – had been denied by a society which told people that they must seek their own interests. Individuals were encouraged to regard wealth as ‘an index of biological success’, use that wealth to seek power, and ‘relegate morals to a two-hour session of platitudes on the seventh day’. In such an environment, one which was an ‘unpleasant, unhealthy, and immoral blend of acquisitiveness and fear’, children were viewed as ‘economic handicaps’.12
Nor, in reality, did competitive individualism achieve much in terms of upward mobility because of the ‘chains of a static society’. Consequently, the struggle for success became ‘more and more demoniac’. Given the identification of children as economic burdens, so individuals increasingly controlled reproduction, and thus expressed in