Читать книгу Richard Titmuss - Stewart John - Страница 10
Оглавление‘As the son of a farmer…’: origins, early employment, and personal life
Titmuss’s early life, unremarkable in many respects, has nonetheless been the subject of dispute. Shortly after his death Margaret Gowing, a friend with whom he had worked during the Second World War, produced an account of his life which has proved influential for how Titmuss has since been viewed.1 Gowing’s narrative remains important, and will be drawn upon in what follows. In certain respects, however, Gowing’s was a partial account which consolidated the by then standard view of Titmuss’s origins and career. Put simply, this stressed the deprivations of his childhood and youth, so throwing into sharp contrast his eventual place as Britain’s leading authority on social policy, an expert advising governments at home and abroad, and public intellectual. For instance, a sympathetic profile in The Observer in 1959 noted the challenges Titmuss’s family had faced, and how Titmuss himself claimed to have learned little at school, save an enduring love for cricket and football.2 A few years later, another newspaper article suggested that the origins of ‘The Poverty Lobby’ of the 1960s lay in the early hardships of one of its members, Titmuss. While colleagues such as Abel-Smith were middle class, and had come to socialism ‘by conviction’, Titmuss had reached this position ‘by experience’.3 The last point begs more questions than it answers, not least the nature of Titmuss’s political beliefs.
In his application for the LSE chair in 1950 Titmuss said little of his formal education save that, ‘As the son of a farmer’, he had been sent to ‘a preparatory school in Bedfordshire which drew most of its pupils from farmers in the district’. At 14 he was then sent to Clark’s Commercial College for six month to learn bookkeeping.4 The downbeat account of Titmuss’s early years was most vigorously promoted by his wife, Kay. Shortly after his memorial service in June 1973, she told an American friend who had spoken at the event that Titmuss’s ‘only schooling was at a private school of poor quality from which he was frequently absent due to ill health in childhood’. ‘And’, she continued, ‘he knew what it was to be on the poverty line when he struggled to keep the family going after his father’s death on a mere pittance of an insurance clerk’s salary’.5 Kay’s comment about Titmuss’s health reminds us that this was certainly a feature of his childhood, but also of his whole life. And the idea that Titmuss was, as a consequence of his early hardships, especially sympathetic to the poor is a variant on the notion that he came to ‘socialism’ through ‘experience’, and is likewise questionable.
And here lies the problem. Ann Oakley has disputed aspects of Gowing’s account of her father’s origins and subsequent career, substantiating her case with archival and other evidence. What Gowing wrote, she argues, was ‘weakened by its reliance on the singular perspective’ of Kay. Kay’s concern had been to highlight ‘how important she had been to (Titmuss’s) success and how unimportant, indeed damaging, had been the contribution of his own family’. Such a narrative was attractive as it appeared to show ‘this champion of equality and the welfare state transcending his own impoverished background through sheer hard work, a truly self-made man’.6 And it was not only Kay who promoted this somewhat self-regarding version of Titmuss’s life, so did many of those around him, and influenced by him. The entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for instance, written by his friend A.H. Halsey, suggests that the Titmuss family ‘lived an isolated and impecunious life in Bedfordshire’, that Titmuss never took a formal examination in his life (a fact he allegedly did not regret), and that he instead preferred to ‘applaud the public library as the most precious of British social services’. Halsey suggests, too, that Titmuss’s ‘first step out of obscurity was made in 1934’ when he met his future wife, Kay.7 Parts of this are, to say the least, debatable.
Oakley certainly has the advantage over Gowing in her access to her parents’ papers, some of which are not in the public domain.8 To be fair, Gowing acknowledged that she had spoken extensively with Kay, noting her especial gratitude for access to ‘Richard’s voluminous records’. But she also, as her memorial noted, spoke to others.9 For instance, in a letter to Walter Adams, LSE director, she thanked him for ‘spending so long in talking to me about Richard Titmuss and for sending me the information’. This would be extremely useful in the preparation of her article, of which she would send him a draft. Gowing agreed not to refer directly to correspondence which Adams had shown her. This concerned Titmuss’s appointment at the LSE, and in particular T.H. Marshall’s recommendation.10 Nonetheless, as Howard Glennerster remarks, Oakley’s research has dispelled some of the ‘myths’ about Titmuss’s early life. It, too, provides a crucial source for what follows.11
This chapter attempts to steer a path through the rather scant evidence about that early life. First, Titmuss’s origins and childhood are examined. Then his entry into employment is described, and specifically his work for the County Fire Office. Next comes a discussion of Titmuss’s life outside employment. While Titmuss’s political and research activities in the 1930s are alluded to, they are dealt with more fully in subsequent chapters. Perhaps the central point, though, is that the degree to which Titmuss’s early years were, or were not, deprived should not unduly colour an indisputable fact – that he went, in the course of half a century, from being an insurance clerk to being an internationally recognised authority on social welfare.
Titmuss was born on 16 October 1907, son of Morris, at this point a farmer, and Maud, née Farr.12 Titmuss had an older sister (who pre-deceased him), and, later, a younger brother (another sister died in infancy). The family home was Lane Farm in Stopsley, a hamlet north of Luton in Bedfordshire. Here wheat, barley, oats, and beans were grown in clay soil. In addition to its Anglican church, Methodists and Baptists also had a local presence.13 Bedfordshire had a strong Nonconformist tradition, being a parliamentary stronghold in the English Civil War as well as home to another famous son, the writer and polemicist John Bunyan. There is no evidence that Titmuss was in any way religious (although he was married in an Anglican church and his memorial service was held in one too, probably at Kay’s behest). Nonetheless, he cannot have been unaware of the cultural surroundings in which he grew up. And, while unprovable, his commitment to the Liberal Party may have owed something to this dissenting cultural context. More broadly, we can also find a fit here with the notion of Titmuss as a radical of a peculiarly English sort. It is intriguing, too, that, according to Oakley, Titmuss retained an affection for rural Bedfordshire.14
Gowing suggests that the Titmuss children led an isolated life, but were free to roam the surrounding countryside. Titmuss’s education came at St Gregory’s, the preparatory school disparaged by Kay.15 But as Oakley sensibly points out, although the school did seem to prioritise sport, its ambitions to send pupils on to public schools – it was, after all, a preparatory school – suggests rather more academic rigour than is allowed in the usual accounts of the Titmuss ‘myth’.16 Nonetheless, Titmuss’s early education was probably less than satisfactory, partly because illness curtailed his school attendance. By Gowing’s account, Titmuss’s parents were not up to much. His mother is presented as ‘incompetent domestically’, although if this was part of the story which came from Kay it should be treated with care for, as we shall see, she was no admirer of her mother-in-law. Morris, meanwhile, is portrayed as failing as a farmer. This precipitated a move to Hendon, North London, in 1922, where he set up a haulage business. Again, this is generally portrayed as unsuccessful.17 It would certainly appear that Morris Titmuss was not in the vanguard of British entrepreneurship. But the context is also important. After the First World War an agricultural depression took hold, with prices for crops such as wheat falling dramatically, while the limited measures of protection accorded to agriculture were abolished in 1921. The British economy as a whole, following a post-war boom, began to contract from the early 1920s onwards although, to balance this, London and the South East were largely spared the miseries of the inter-war slump. Morris may have been feckless, or unlucky, or, most probably, a combination of the two. But, as Oakley observes, he was able to leave farming without leaving any debt behind, continued to pay at least his older son’s school fees, and bought the Hendon house. The last was an end-terrace building which would have been, in Oakley’s words, ‘sparklingly new then’, part of the suburban expansion London was then experiencing. Home ownership was, at this time, characteristic not of the working class, most of whom rented, but rather the middle class. So perhaps Morris was not so feckless after all. In any event, the move to Hendon saw the end of Titmuss’s time at St Gregory’s (which was about to happen anyway), and the start of his short time at Clark’s Commercial College, situated at Chancery Lane in Central London.18 Coincidentally, this was close to the institution where Titmuss would come to play a leading role, the LSE.
Following his bookkeeping course, he was then employed by Standard Telephones, based in North London, as well as helping out with his father’s business. However, in 1926 Morris died. According to an insurance policy application which Titmuss made some 40 years later, his father’s cause of death was angina, from which he had suffered for ‘some months’ (in a very un-Titmuss like mistake, he got Morris’s year of death wildly wrong).19 This did pose financial problems, although again Oakley suggests that the ‘extent of the family’s poverty had perhaps been a little exaggerated’. Nonetheless, this was a life-changing moment for Titmuss. Through a contact of his mother’s, he was taken on, initially as a probationary clerk, by the County Fire Office. Titmuss, still only in his late teens, now became the family bread-winner.20 His mother, from now until her death in 1972, relied on him as her sole source of financial support.21
The County Fire Office had been founded in 1807 and, by its own account, was an ‘association of noblemen and gentlemen’. It was one of 19 such companies founded in the first decade of the nineteenth century, a testament to contemporary trends in industrialisation and urbanisation. As Harold Raynes notes, it had ‘some individual characteristics’, and sought to ‘seek support from the counties where there was a demand for fire insurance and a desire for local responsibility’. Around the time Titmuss joined, the company had acquired a new building at 30 Regent Street, in London’s West End. This was the office to which Titmuss was to commute for the next decade and a half. The First World War and its aftermath brought considerable changes to the County Fire Office, including the employment of women, and the range of coverage it offered. Various staff benefits were introduced, including schemes to assist with house purchase, and a staff canteen. The company clearly saw itself as progressive, with many staff enjoying long periods of service.22 Whether Titmuss (or any of the other staff) felt the same way is open to question. By the time he came left he had become increasingly disgruntled with his insurance career, notwithstanding his promotion, at the relatively young age of 32, to London Inspector a few years earlier.23
As later chapters show, even before this point he was devoting much of his time to political activities, and to research on population issues. And as a profile written in the 1960s suggested, once promoted to inspector he could ‘do his inspecting at home by phone in the mornings which left the afternoons free for study’.24 Presumably, this information was provided by Titmuss himself. But back at the beginning of his insurance career, he was initially paid £85 per annum, rising by £20 per annum to, ultimately, £265 per annum. Gowing, as we have seen, was sceptical about Titmuss’s formal schooling, suggesting that he was largely ‘self-educated with a special interest in working out mathematical problems’.25 Again, this presumably came, by way of Kay, from Titmuss himself but he clearly had, and further developed, mathematical skills. As Oakley suggests, at County Fire Office he learned ‘not only the essentials of the insurance business but how to read and analyse the statistics of life, death and sickness’.26 Titmuss’s own early research was very much into such issues of morbidity and mortality. It is difficult to know whether Titmuss actually enjoyed any of his time at County Fire Office, as opposed to learning a lot from it. As will become apparent later in this volume, though, the private insurance industry was to become something of a bête-noire on account of its purported economic power, and its promotion of benefits, notably occupational pensions, outside of state-provided welfare. In Chapter 15, for example, we shall see how this shaped one of his most famous publications, The Irresponsible Society. His criticisms were, then, those of an informed insider.
As a worker in the insurance industry, where, then, was Titmuss located in the social structure of inter-war Britain? We have seen that one version of his early life stresses the modesty of his background. But after joining County Fire Office, Titmuss’s occupation, and to a lesser extent his income, placed him squarely in the middle class, albeit initially very much at its lower end. More than this, he was part of the ‘new’ middle class, broadly ‘progressive’ in outlook, and so of a different disposition to the ‘old’ middle class consisting of professions such as doctors and lawyers. Titmuss’s career in insurance, furthermore, coincided with what Ross McKibbin has characterised as a sort of middle class ‘golden age’. Stable and rising salaries, such as that enjoyed by Titmuss, combined with falling prices and an undemanding fiscal regime, meant that this social group was especially economically advantaged, while the threat of unemployment was considerably less than that faced by the manual working classes.27 Titmuss’s training was very much ‘on the job’, but, as we shall see further in a later chapter, he was clearly a good enough statistician to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and to gain a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for his research, albeit largely on the basis of his published rather than professional work. Nonetheless, the two were clearly complementary, and that Titmuss was promoted to inspector at a relatively young age further attests to his abilities. The field of statistics itself can be seen as part of the ‘triumph of science-based expertise’ which had taken place between 1880 and 1929. It had effectively been created by Karl Pearson, a leading figure in a movement with which Titmuss too was to be associated, eugenics.28 The further twist here is that Titmuss was later to express scepticism about aspects of the work, and behaviour, of ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’. But throughout his career he continued to employ statistical techniques and data, data which he clearly saw as hard, scientific evidence for the sort of moral arguments he sought to make.
At the memorial service held for Titmuss shortly after his death one of the speakers was Richard Crossman. While Crossman mostly talked, understandably, about Titmuss’s public activities, he also claimed that ‘Richard’s home life was an inspiration not only to him but to those of us who partook of Kay’s hospitality’. The two were similar types, he suggested, for example in their naivety in certain (unspecified) matters.29 Kay wrote a few days later to thank Crossman for his contribution. It was ‘hard to face the future without Richard and sad that he had to leave us when there was so much he still wanted to do’.30 The view of the Titmuss marriage as a close, loving, partnership has long been another part of the standard narrative of his life. Gowing, for instance, talks of the ‘deep love’ between Titmuss and Kay, and that this was the ‘mainstay of his life to the very end’.31 Again, given that she gained much of her information from Kay, this sort of depiction is to be expected (although, of course, that does not make it untrue). And to be fair, Gowing had known Titmuss for around 30 years by the time of his death. Of their respective personalities, Kay, at least for some, was an individual difficult to warm to, while Titmuss, for those who did not buy into his mission, could be vain and arrogant.32 Oakley quotes Townsend as claiming that he found Kay ‘small-minded – someone who often made carping or destructive comments about others and who did not have interesting things to say about her own activities’.33 Abel-Smith helped Kay after Titmuss’s death until her own death 15 years later. But he later confided to Oakley that he had never really liked her mother.34 Given that Titmuss left few personal papers, and was famously reticent about private matters, it is difficult to know what to make of all this. The following account of his life outside work in the 1930s is, therefore, for the most part confined to factual material.
Starting with leisure activities, as a young man Titmuss played chess to a reasonable standard (although he was to give it up as too time-consuming), and was a fan, and player, of both cricket and football.35 The former, in terms of its cross-class appeal, was England’s ‘national’ sport, and an important component of English national identity. Among Titmuss’s other leisure activities was hiking and youth hostelling, in Britain and abroad. He was thus part of a broader trend in the 1930s which saw a shift from formal (that is, rules-based) sport to, as McKibbin puts it, ‘more informal and socially casual activities’. At the end of the decade, there were ‘about 500,000 regular walkers and nearly 300 youth hostels’, with membership of the Youth Hostel Association rising from 6,000 in 1934 to 83,000 in 1939. This rapid expansion had a number of causes, including a growing perception of the countryside as a recreational resource, something which reminds us of Titmuss’s fondness for rural Bedfordshire. Both the middle and working classes took up pastimes such as hiking, with part of the appeal being that a more or less equal number of men and women participated.36
It was on such a walking tour of North Wales that Kay and Titmuss first met, in summer 1934. She had been born in South London on 20 January 1903, and was thus four years older. As was common at that time, both still lived at home, Titmuss with his mother in North London, where he was to remain until his marriage in 1937. Clearly both Kay and Titmuss were keen walkers, undertaking in 1935, for example, a tour of the Black Forest in Germany. Nor were their leisure activities confined to the outdoors. In a letter to a friend in 1935 Kay wrote that, though not interested in politics herself, she had agreed for Titmuss’s sake to attend a meeting at which he was speaking. Titmuss was by this point, as described in the next chapter, active in Liberal Party politics, not least by way of the debating society to which he belonged, the Fleet Street Parliament (again, coincidentally, close to the LSE). But Kay had not been impressed by the meeting, and this caused what turned out to be a temporary division between them, with her religious beliefs adding to the mix. Soon afterwards, though, they were planning their wedding. Titmuss’s political activities also included campaigning for a peaceful solution to international problems. Both he and Kay, again before their marriage, attended the World Youth Congress and International Peace Conference in Geneva in summer 1936. Titmuss was a delegate to both meetings, representing the National League of Young Liberals and Youth House, Camden. Closer to home, Kay and Titmuss also attended another youth peace conference in the same year, this time in Birmingham.37
Amidst all this, Titmuss also found time to write a work, in 1936, principally entitled ‘Crime and Tragedy’, but with the alternatives ‘Government by Betrayal’ and ‘Creation of Anarchy’. Written under the pseudonym Richard Caston (Caston was Kay’s middle name) this was rejected by various publishers. By Gowing’s account, the work was informed by his ‘new found radicalism’, implicitly attributed to Kay.38 Although this is difficult to substantiate one way or another, what is notable about this volume is that Titmuss had clearly been gathering material for some time, going back at least six years. This strongly suggests that concern about the issues with which his script dealt, primarily Britain’s foreign and defence policy since 1931, pre-dated his meeting Kay. What it had to say is discussed more fully in the next chapter, but here it is worth noting Titmuss’s take on patriotism. This was ‘not synonymous with the state of the country’s armaments and defence forces’. His own ‘love for my country is not pride in her ability to make war. It cannot be defined’. Nor was he hostile to the British Empire. On the contrary, one of his most stinging criticisms of the post-1931 Conservative-dominated government was that it had refused, in its foreign policy, to ‘accept the challenge to prove that Britain is fitted to fill the role and responsibility of a great power and of a great Empire’.39
Even when married, Titmuss, and Kay, kept up a relentless schedule of activities. In a letter to a friend, Kay wrote that a number of pieces of Titmuss’s correspondence to various newspapers and journals had been published, and more were being prepared. The previous evening, she continued, she had come home around midnight ‘to find all the lights on in the flat and the wireless on and Richard fast asleep in bed with a book in his hand. It seemed most odd’.40 By his own account, in the decade before starting work on Problems of Social Policy in the early 1940s, Titmuss had been ‘reading and studying privately’, had ‘attended evening classes at various institutes’, and, crucially, had ‘interested myself in social and economic questions’.41 We can already see here some of Titmuss’s defining features, which in many respects he retained for the rest of his life. He had a relentless drive for self-improvement, became engaged in numerous activities by way of a range of associations and clubs, and was increasingly committed to political and social activism. He (and Kay) was thus participating in what McKibbin describes as the ‘informal sociability’ characteristic of the inter-war middle classes (this is contrasted with the supposedly ‘spontaneous sociability’ of the working classes). An important feature of ‘informal sociability’ was joining clubs through which friendship, and sometimes professional, networks were created.42 Networking was to become a notable Titmuss trait. Although it raises a whole range of other issues, it is perhaps worth noting in this context Oakley’s observation, which pertains mostly to her parents’ post-war lives, but may be revealing about even the early stages of their marriage. She debates whether, in the last resort, her father had any friends. His diaries, to which she had access, essentially record meetings and other work-related activities. So ‘he might have been lonely. They were both lonely, the way you can only be lonely in a publicly successful marriage’.43
How did this marriage come about? After a certain amount of procrastination, with money almost certainly being a concern, Kay and Titmuss married on 6 February 1937 at an Anglican church in Lewisham, South London. Their first home together was a flat in Pimlico.44 Financial frugality seems to have been built into the relationship, with Oakley claiming that her parents ‘were always careful with money: in fact it’s a bit of a puzzle what they spent their money on’. On a more personal level, and in what was to be a longstanding source of uneasiness in Titmuss’s life, Kay and his mother did not get on, with the latter also making constant emotional demands of him.45 As to what Kay did, when Titmuss met her she was the organising secretary of the Fulham Fellowship for the Unemployed, and later its honorary secretary and treasurer, from 1932 until its demise in 1940. She also took on other, related, roles. So Kay was in employment for a number of years of married life. But after 1940 she never again worked outside the home.46
This brings us back to the problematic issue of the nature of the relationship between Kay and her husband. Oakley suggests that the six years between Kay’s first meeting Titmuss and her leaving employment was her mother’s ‘golden period’. Kay was certainly busy with her own work, which in some ways was more socially significant than her husband’s at this point, but, and part of her later Titmuss mythology, in her view she was also leading him towards his true destiny as a leading thinker on social welfare.47 Gowing further elaborates on Kay’s role by suggesting that, from the time they had met, and under Kay’s influence, ‘Richard’s interests had become social and political’, the ‘new found radicalism’ noted earlier.48 In other words, Kay’s project was to be shaping, supporting, and promoting Titmuss’s career. A particular version of Titmuss’s life and work was put forward by Kay until the end of his life, and has had a shelf-life beyond. This was Kay as the defender of the faith, defender of a man who had risen from poverty, formulated, with her background but essential assistance, new ways of thinking about social welfare, and was, to those of a like mind, someone to be loved and admired. Again to quote Oakley, when invited, with Titmuss, to a Buckingham Palace garden party in 1970, Kay ‘treasured this day, just as she treasured all Richard’s claims to fame’.49 And as Kay told Walter Adams shortly after Titmuss’s memorial service, at that event ‘it was wonderful to have so many friends gathered in St Martin’s and we were honoured and comforted by the consciousness of so much warmth and sympathy around us’. It had ‘meant a great deal when one has lost so much’.50 For Oakley, all this was to the frustration of her mother’s unacknowledged desires. She agrees that Kay ‘never said to me that, had she not married Richard Titmuss, she might have had a satisfying career of her own’. However, the ‘documentary remnants of her life bequeathed to me and the way she talked about the past, that past before I was born, did speak wistfully of an uncompleted journey’.51
We should pause momentarily to unpick some of this before examining Titmuss’s own attitude to marriage. On the question of Kay’s influence, it was certainly the case, as Gowing suggests, that in his first published book, which came out in 1938 and is discussed in Chapter 4, he acknowledged his wife as having given him insights into the lives of the unemployed. But Gowing over-reads this when she writes that Kay had made ‘social values and social concerns his central issue’.52 Politically, Kay herself was no radical. As we have seen, in 1935 she claimed no interest in politics, and this had caused a certain coolness between her and Titmuss. Titmuss was politically aware enough to have joined the Liberal Party in 1932, before he encountered Kay. To reiterate an earlier point, it thus seems improbable that the activism Titmuss was displaying by 1935 had been solely caused by meeting Kay. Ultimately, we can never know the true extent of Kay’s influence on her husband. But from the Second World War onwards she was certainly to provide him with a domestic platform which allowed him to pursue his relentless work schedule.
Back in the 1930s, though, it is undoubtedly true that Kay had direct experience of working with the unemployed. This may well have been important for Titmuss since locally unemployment rates were low. Looking round him, Titmuss would have seen a region, London and the South East, where new industries were thriving, the suburbs expanding (he lived in one himself), and the small number of unemployed were relatively invisible. Kay may, therefore, have alerted him to problems on his doorstep of which he had been unaware in a strictly personal sense (although he could not conceivably have been ignorant of the devastation being wrought on the traditional industrial areas). As to Kay giving up her career in order to support Titmuss, there is clearly a case to be made. But, as always, it is important to see this in context. Kay was actually unusual in continuing to work after her marriage, albeit for only a few years. In the inter-war era only 10 per cent of the workforce consisted of married women, a group which constituted 16 per cent of the female workforce. The huge change in this situation was to come after the Second World War, and was analysed by, among others, Titmuss.53 Kay may have been thwarted in her career, but hers was, nonetheless, not an unusual experience. This is not to condone it, simply to suggest that the picture is complex. Oakley’s ‘uncompleted journey’ was not confined to Mrs Titmuss.
Yet for Oakley, Titmuss had, for various reasons, a ‘passion for the stable breadwinner-father formula of family life’ – he was, and remained, in other words, a supporter of the ‘traditional’ family.54 She agrees that he was, in important ways, a radical who analysed to effect various social divisions. But when it came to gender it was ‘as though for him the social divisions between men and women were different from all other social divisions. They were not about power’.55 What she is arguing here is that while Titmuss was clear-sighted about, say, the way in which social inequality involved the exercise of power by one part of society over another, he could not, or would not, see existing social arrangements as also embracing the exercise of power by men over women. In the case of Kay and Titmuss, this could be clearly seen on the domestic front as they engaged in ‘their tireless enactment of gendered ideology’. Her parents, Oakley suggests, were to collect ‘around themselves a coterie of people who shared their commitment to improving public and personal welfare through the analytic and prescriptive power of thought … Actually, he thought and discussed and she served the meals’.56
As an outsider, it is again difficult to know what to make of this. Oakley, of course, knew her parents in ways that nobody else could. However, whatever the particular dynamics of the Titmuss marriage, McKibbin, while acknowledging that society was dominated by men, nonetheless points to the complicated nature of gender relations in middle class households. In the search for ‘companionate marriage’ not only were men expected to perform at least some domestic tasks, it was also assumed that husband and wife would have ‘interests and friends in common’. Needless to say, this was not unproblematic. But, at the very least, it did suggest a not completely subordinate role for middle class women.57 Of course, none of this necessarily tells us much about the actual nature and texture of Titmuss and Kay’s relationship. But it is suggestive. So, for instance, while Titmuss may well have done little more around the house than wash the dishes, at least early on in their relationship he and Kay clearly had mutually enjoyable interests in common, such as hiking. Nor is it to reject wholesale the argument that Kay sacrificed her career to the project that was Richard Titmuss. Arguably, though, it was Kay who drove this project forward, albeit that Titmuss was undoubtedly ambitious in his own right.
If the details of Titmuss’s early life are patchy, the broad outlines are clear enough. He grew up in modest, possibly very modest, but not impoverished, circumstances. He was educated at an institution which does not seem to have shone academically, but there is no reason to suppose that it was any worse than the many other private and preparatory schools then in existence, and which catered in the inter-war era for over a quarter of a million scholars.58 And, in any event, Titmuss’s poor health did little to enhance his educational experience. Titmuss’s first major employer, the County Fire Office, provided him with, if nothing else, financial security and a solid foundation in statistical analysis. He was clearly good at his job. So far, so relatively straightforward. We have an ambitious, talented, young man, keen, as we shall see in the next three chapters, to make an impact on inter-war society, although at this point his future successes could hardly have been anticipated. In making his mark, and here matters become more complicated, he was supported and encouraged by Kay. But at what cost to her? Ultimately, this is an extremely difficult question to answer. For present purposes, what we can say is that her experience was hardly untypical, oppressive and constricting as we might now perceive it to be.
Notes
1M. Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss, 1907–1973’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LXI, 1975, pp 3–30.
2‘The Observer Profile: Welfare Professor’, The Observer, 22 March 1959, p 13.
3G. Moorhouse, ‘The Poverty Lobby’, The Guardian, 3 December 1966, p 7.
4LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, R.M. Titmuss, ‘Application for the Chair of Social Administration’, undated but 1950.
5COHEN, Box 235, folder 7, letter, 1 October 1973, Kay Titmuss to Eloise and Wilbur Cohen (emphasis in the original).
6Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 39–40.
7A.H. Halsey, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
8See, for instance, the description in Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 6–7.
9Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 30 (emphasis in the original).
10LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, letters, 27 July 1973, Gowing to Adams; and 23 and 24 July 1973, Adams to Gowing.
11H. Glennerster, Richard Titmuss: Forty Years On: CASE/180, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London, 2014, p 1.
12For an account of Titmuss’s forebears, Oakley, Man and Wife, p 21ff.
13W. Page (ed), The Victoria History of the County of Bedfordshire: Volume 2, London, Archibald Constable and Co, 1908, pp 348, 374.
14Oakley, Man and Wife, p 27.
15Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 3.
16Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 45–6.
17Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, pp 3–4.
18Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 51.
19LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, Allied Assurance Company Ltd: Proposal for Life Assurance, 20 February 1958.
20Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 52.
21Oakley, Man and Wife, p 27.
22The information here comes from the celebratory account, A. Noakes, The County Fire Office, 1807–1957, London, H.F. and G. Witherby, 1957, pp 3, 161, 163, 166; and from H.E. Raynes, A History of British Insurance, London, Pitman, 1948, pp 230–32.
23LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, R.M. Titmuss, ‘Application for the Chair of Social Administration’, undated but 1950.
24TITMUSS/2/140, cutting from the ‘Pendennis’ column, ‘Dark Corners in the Affluent Society’, The Observer, 1 April 1962, p 12.
25Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, pp 3–4.
26Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 52.
27R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, Part II.
28T. Porter, ‘Statistical Utopianism in an Age of Aristocratic Efficiency’, Osiris, 17, 2002, p 212.
29CROSSMAN, MSS.154/3/TM/7–11, typescript of Crossman’s address at Titmuss’s Memorial Service, 6 June 1973, St Martins-in-the-Field, London.
30CROSSMAN, MSS.154/3/TM/17, letter, 12 June 1973, Kay to Crossman.
31Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 8.
32Author interview with Frank Field MP, 5 November 2015.
33Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 75.
34Sheard, The Passionate Economist, p 280.
35Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 4.
36McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp 332–9, 379.
37Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 21, 31–3, 44, 50–52.
38Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 5.
39TITMUSS/7/2, typescript ‘Crime and Tragedy’, pp 9, 56.
40Cited in Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 58–9.
41LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, R.M. Titmuss, ‘Application for the Chair of Social Administration’, undated but 1950.
42McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, p 87.
43Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 64–5.
44Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 49, 54.
45Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 63, 52ff.
46Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 19, 37, 47.
47Ibid, pp 3, 60–61.
48Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 5.
49Oakley, Man and Wife, p 8.
50LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, letter, 9 June 1973, Kay to Adams.
51Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 68.
52Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 5.
53H. McCarthy, ‘Social Science and Married Women’s Employment in Post-War Britain’, Past and Present, 233, 1, 2016, pp 269, 277, and passim.
54Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 56.
55Oakley, Man and Wife, p 4.
56Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 8, 63 (emphasis in the original).
57McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp 518–20.
58Ibid, p 237.
