Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
camp, and again shows his willingness to argue his case to a general readership in a publication, The Spectator, of a much more conservative disposition than its left-wing equivalent, The New Statesman and Nation.
As to Titmuss and Jones, theirs was, on one level, a relatively trivial spat, albeit on the important subject of the relationship between poverty and ill health. But it also reveals something of Titmuss’s views and character. It shows, for example, what he was up against in terms of what he clearly saw as reactionary and entrenched attitudes towards the poorest stratum of the working class, and especially its mothers. To put this in context, the recent evacuation of children from areas under threat from Luftwaffe bombing had not been unproblematic, involving negative perceptions of working class children and mothers among those upon whom they were billeted or who dealt with them by way of, for instance, voluntary social work. These perceptions did not go away, feeding into post-war debates about ‘problem families’ in which Titmuss would have a part to play.28 There is a further twist here in that, as we shall see in the next chapter, Titmuss, the first person to comprehensively document the evacuation process, was to put a more positive spin on wartime social attitudes in Problems of Social Policy. This is pre-figured, in his argument with Jones, by his defence of working class mothers, a commonly demonised group. And for those inclined to over-read Titmuss’s membership of the Eugenics Society, his rejection of the idea that the poor should be constantly weeded out by ‘Nature’ is notable. Perhaps less appealing is his rather condescending dismissal of Jones’s remarks (silly though some of them were), not least as Jones was dealing with mothers and children on a daily basis, and of the ‘nightly comic opera performance from Hamburg’, a legitimate cause for concern. But there is also a potentially more serious problem, one which would come back to haunt Titmuss. His admirable resistance to the misrepresentation of working class mothers was part of a general unwillingness to blame the poor for their plight. Poverty thus becomes a purely structural problem which has, on this account, little to do with individual behaviour. This was to lay Titmuss open to the criticism that he had an unrealistic view of human nature and, perhaps equally damagingly, that he denied agency to the poor themselves.
Such potential problems, and Jones’s critique, notwithstanding, Titmuss continued to use his undoubtedly up-to-date knowledge of nutritional science to effect, in the following case for the benefit of the wartime civilian and military population as a whole. In the summer of 1941 Gwilym Lloyd-George, recently appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, wrote to Eleanor Rathbone about a letter she had passed on from Titmuss. The original does not seem to have survived, but Lloyd-George reminded Rathbone that it had concerned ‘the waste of food values in cooking by restaurants’. He agreed that it was, undoubtedly, the case that ‘vegetables are wrongly cooked in many catering establishments, in the cook-houses of the fighting forces, and in private homes’. Attempts to educate the public were being undertaken.29 If this had only been about the famous British tendency to boil vegetables to death, along with Titmuss’s somewhat obsessive, if commendable, concern with population health and diet, this would have been a fairly low-level exchange of views. But, as noted, many foodstuffs in wartime Britain were rationed. Others were in short supply, not least because of the difficulty of importing them from abroad as German U-boats attacked incoming convoys. So eating nutritionally valuable foods such as vegetables, cooked properly, was important if individual, and population, health were to be maintained. Equally, and again this was to be an important feature of Titmuss’s thought throughout his career, while his approach was fundamentally underpinned by his moralism, he was also a firm believer in scientific investigation, and the use of science and scientific data to inform his arguments. These were, in many instances, key components of progressive thought, including the version of eugenics which Titmuss espoused, and its approach to social problems.
This part of this volume has shown, first, something of Titmuss’s background, his employment with the County Fire Office, and his marriage to Kay. His origins and early life were certainly modest, throwing into relief his subsequent career. From the perspective of Titmuss as a public figure, we have encountered his commitment, in the 1930s, to the Liberal Party, various organisations associated with ‘progressive opinion’, and then, in the early part of the war, Forward March. He was also, by the 1930s, committed to carrying out his own research, especially around concerns over the British population’s future size and health. Here, as at all points in his career, Titmuss was adept at networking, and this was an important component of his involvement with the Eugenics Society. By the same token he was not, it would appear, lacking in self-confidence when it came to promoting his ideas, whether through public speaking or in print. These ideas at this point can be characterised as broadly ‘progressive’, or left liberal, and we have seen here and in preceding chapters how this informed, for instance, his moral critique of the ‘acquisitive society’. Such a society was, by such an account, not only wasteful in terms of its own human resources, it was also cruel and inhumane. Both Titmuss and his ideas were, by the time war came, already catching the attention of important and influential people. In the next part, we examine how all this played out throughout the rest of the Second World War and into the immediate post-war era, by the end of which Titmuss had been installed as first Professor of Social Administration at the LSE.
Notes
1S. Collini, ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong? Cultural Critics and “Modernity” in Inter-War Britain’, in E.H.H. Green and D.M. Tanner (eds), The Strange Survival of Liberal England: Political Leaders, Moral Values and the Reception of Economic Decline, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp 247–8.
2T. Rogan, The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2017, p 1.
3TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 23 May 1939, Henderson of Stephen Aske, to RMT.
4TITMUSS/7/47, letter, undated but summer 1939, RMT to Henderson.
5Oakley, Man and Wife, p 89.
6TITMUSS/7/49, letter, 23 August 1941, RMT to Town and Country Planning Association.
7R.M. Titmuss, ‘Planning and the Birth-rate’, Town and Country Planning, XI, 33, 1941, pp. 83–5 (emphasis in the original).
8P. Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp 129–30.
9A. Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning, Progress and Political “Agreement”’, English Historical Review, LXXIX, CCCXI, 1964, pp 285–98.
10D. Ritschel, ‘Next Five Years Group’, and R.C. Whiting, ‘Political and Economic Planning’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
11R.M. Titmuss, ‘The End of Economic Parenthood’, The New Statesman and Nation, 9 August 1941, p 130 (emphasis in the original).
12Ibid,