Читать книгу Richard Titmuss - Stewart John - Страница 11
ОглавлениеPolitics: the Liberal Party, the ‘Fleet Street Parliament’, and Forward March
This chapter examines Titmuss’s political activism in the 1930s, a difficult decade for British society, and into the early part of the Second World War. Throughout the 1930s fear of another war was ever-present, and the Depression after the 1929 crash further exacerbated socioeconomic disruption in the ‘traditional’ industrial areas. A sense of foreboding was compounded by psychological ideas which stressed the irrational, unconscious, dimensions of human behaviour. For instance, the psychiatrist John Bowlby and the Labour politician Evan Durbin co-authored a book entitled Personal Aggressiveness and War which discussed, among other things, what they described as ‘irrational acquisitiveness’.1 Titmuss and Bowlby were already acquainted by this point, and their paths were to cross on various occasions over the coming years. Both were to be signatories, for example, to a letter to the Prime Minister in 1965 on the extent of child poverty.2 Titmuss, too, was concerned with ‘acquisitiveness’, and saw psychological factors as contributing to international conflict. Gloom and doom, though, was not the whole story. Compared to continental Europe, Britain was politically stable, with the National Government, dominated by the Conservatives, elected in 1931, and returned to power in 1935. Some parts of the country, including London, saw the development of new industries, and new ways of living characterised by improved living standards leading to higher levels of home ownership, and the acquisition of new consumer goods. Yet this, in turn, highlights significant regional differences, and, overall, there was a highly charged political and cultural atmosphere. It was in this unsettling environment that Titmuss became politically active.
The Liberal Party and the Fleet Street Parliament
In spring 1932 Titmuss was welcomed into Hendon Young Liberal Association by its honorary secretary, J.M. Henderson, who told him that Liberals were ‘few and far between in Hendon, but we are very keen’.3 This would appear to be the J.M. Henderson who, a few years later, was to become Titmuss’s literary agent, acting on behalf of the company Stephen Aske.4 Titmuss became an enthusiastic Liberal activist. In summer 1935, for instance, he sent a long piece to his local newspaper, outlining his views about the party’s current position. Titmuss conceded that many people could not remember living under a Liberal government and, since 1918, liberalism had been ‘fighting the reactionary movements engendered by the War’. The British people had ‘witnessed and endured the spectacle of two pitiful Labour Governments, both timorous, both fearful and both failing to fulfil their pledges’. These minority administrations had been in power in 1924 and 1929–31 respectively, with the latter ultimately brought down by the economic catastrophe of 1929. The National Government had overseen an increase of those on poor relief, while ignoring evidence about distress among the unemployed. Demands for a foreign policy more attuned to the maintenance of peace had likewise gone unheard. The country did not want ‘Socialism’, but this would be forced upon it unless the Liberal Party could be revived. More positively, the latter endured because ‘it represents the English mind at its best’.5 The Liberal Party was undoubtedly struggling. Already in third place after the Conservatives and Labour, and badly divided, it had split further in the early 1930s when a group under Herbert Samuel had left the National Government. Membership was declining, in some areas local councillors were forming anti-socialist alliances with Conservatives, and parliamentary representation was to be further reduced, to a mere 21 MPs, at the general election of November 1935.6
Undaunted, Titmuss did his bit. In the late 1960s he recalled being shouted down in the East End of London ‘when I tried to speak against the Mosley invasion’.7 This refers to Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, and suggests Titmuss’s presence at the so-called Battle of Cable Street when the fascists were defeated in their attempt to stage an especially provocative march. If so, this was courageous, given the Blackshirts’ propensity to violence. A more congenial environment for political debate was provided by the Fleet Street Parliament, a debating society modelled on the House of Commons. It met at the St Bride’s Institute in Fleet Street, Central London. By 1935 Titmuss was being described as ‘The Leader of the Liberal Party’, and in this capacity he wrote to the Liberal MP for Middlesbrough, and Herbert Samuel supporter, Ernest Young, about a debate the latter was to lead. Titmuss’s preference was that Young ‘attack the Socialists’ Programme. They are very strong in the [Fleet Street] Parliament and since last October we have had a succession of Bills nationalising the Banks, Industry, Transport and so on’.8 Young duly spoke in favour of a motion denouncing the ‘principles and policy of the Socialist Party’ as ‘incompatible with the needs of a progressive nation’. If enacted, they would result in a ‘condition of reaction’ gravely prejudicial to ‘the best interests of the British people’.9 Titmuss clearly thought this event successful, telling a colleague that ‘Liberalism was very much alive and fighting last night’.10 Titmuss evidently thought little of the Labour Party. Although Labour had suffered a traumatic defeat in 1931, it had won control of the London County Council (LCC) in 1934. Under Herbert Morrison’s leadership, it was pursuing policies on matters such as healthcare which were, by contemporary standards, radical.11 Titmuss would have been well aware of such developments but, nonetheless, saw Labour as spineless, even reactionary, with only the Liberals offering a progressive alternative to the National Government.
International affairs: ‘Crime and Tragedy’
Titmuss’s political interests were not only domestic. As we saw in the previous chapter, he and Kay attended peace conferences in Geneva and Birmingham in 1936. The international situation, and the National Government’s handling of foreign affairs, were of considerable concern to those on the liberal and progressive left, who, consequently, tended to support the League of Nations. The League, based in Geneva, had been set up after the First World War as an intergovernmental body aimed at resolving international disputes on a peaceful, cooperative, basis. It sought to prevent the sort of misunderstandings, and military alliances, which, it was widely believed, had resulted in the immensely destructive conflict which had broken out in 1914. By the mid-1930s, however, the League had suffered a number of blows. For example, the US had always stood apart, and shortly after coming to power the Nazi regime in Germany had quit. British supporters of the League were organised in the League of Nations Union, one of a number of bodies seeking stable and peaceful international relations. It conducted the so-called ‘Peace Ballot’, the result of which was announced in July 1935. This showed overwhelming support for, among other things, the use of economic sanctions by League members against any country pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, and continuing British membership of the League.12
Another organisation concerned with peaceful international relations, the Council for Action for Peace and Reconstruction, was set up in July 1935 at a convention held at London’s Caxton Hall. The driving force here was former Liberal leader and Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and the founding meeting attracted over 2,500 delegates, including 82 MPs. Addressing the meeting on its first day, Lord Cecil of Chelwood, a leading figure in the creation of the League of Nations, told delegates that the ‘Abyssinian question’ – Abyssinia is now called Ethiopia – ‘was the most serious foreign complication … since the War’. The convention’s resolution supporting all moves towards a peaceful resolution of international disputes therefore had a particular sense of urgency.13 The following day Lloyd George, in what The Times described as his ‘Call to Arms’, proposed that efforts should be made to secure the return of MPs, irrespective of party affiliation, who supported the Council’s aims. He also suggested that the current international situation was worse than that of 1914 while, on the domestic front, there was an urgent need to tackle unemployment.14
Titmuss attended the Caxton Hall meeting, writing in its aftermath to the Council’s organising secretary. A special meeting of the Fleet Street Parliamentary Liberal Party had been held, had unanimously endorsed ‘the resolutions adopted by the Council of Action … in regard to Peace and Reconstruction’, and had pledged itself to ‘support the proposals and policy’ outlined in the manifesto issued by the council.15 Shortly afterwards, in the St Bride’s Institute’s journal The Bridean, Titmuss argued that the Liberal Party’s role was to ‘fight to lift from the hearts of the people the dread of war, and from their homes the anxiety and misery of want and destitution’.16 But soon after Titmuss’s article appeared, the Abyssinian situation took a further turn for the worse when that country was invaded by Italy, notwithstanding that both countries were League of Nations members. These events were blows from which the organisation did not recover. The European situation was to continue to deteriorate with, over the coming few years, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the consequences of the already aggressive foreign policy of Nazi Germany.
Titmuss was alive to these issues. In a further piece for The Bridean, in 1936, he wrote that Europe was ‘rattling back to barbarism’. So the ‘problem of organising peace is now – more than ever – of paramount importance. It is, in fact, the condition of survival’. The Fleet Street Parliament’s Liberals, were, therefore, ‘fully prepared to subordinate all party interests to supporting with all our energies’ any policy, whoever proposed it, which sought to rebuild and strengthen the League of Nations, and to organise ‘a worldwide non aggression, arbitration and mutual assistance treaty’ based on the League’s covenant, and open to all countries. A treaty of this sort, effectively an ‘International Popular Front’, would bring diplomatic, security, and economic benefits to all participants. Such a plan offered the British people, confronted by an ‘anarchic world’, the ‘only chance of removing the danger of another European conflagration’. War would not be avoided, on the other hand, by ‘an armaments race, isolation or negative pacifism’.17 Titmuss had clearly been impressed by the French and Spanish Popular Fronts, seeing them as a model for cross-party cooperation on an international scale. Calls for a British Popular Front were not confined to the Labour and Communist parties. There were those within the Liberal Party who advocated political alliances to combat fascism and appeasement. Titmuss was, as we shall see, close to one of the most fervent Liberal advocates of this position, Richard Acland, and his own pronouncements put him likewise in this camp.18 Titmuss’s rejection of ‘negative pacifism’ is similarly a rebuke to those, not a few in the 1930s, who argued that pacifism was, by itself, an acceptable moral, and political, position.
A few months later an official of the National Peace Council congratulated Titmuss on the setting up of a ‘Youth Peace Council’.19 It would be stretching the point to describe Titmuss as a ‘youth’ by this time, but this does, once more, illustrate his commitment to issues about which he felt strongly. These included the current state of British society, and, especially urgent as the 1930s drew to a close, the international situation. For those such as Titmuss these were not separate matters, but interlinked. Support for rearmament, and growing opposition to the appeasement of dictatorships, by both the Liberal and the Labour parties, have to be seen as part of a broader condemnation of a social order lacking in principles, unthinkingly devoted to free-market capitalism, and prepared to neglect or obfuscate problems both at home and abroad. As David Edgerton points out, it was liberal and socialist internationalists who were, in reality, most alert to the threat of, especially, Nazism, rather than the supposed pragmatists engaging in appeasement.20
Titmuss’s concerns about international politics were forcefully articulated in his unpublished mid-1930s book ‘Crime and Tragedy’ (alternative titles: ‘Government by Betrayal’ and ‘Creation of Anarchy’). It dealt with the culpability, as Titmuss saw it, of the National Government for the state of international affairs. This was an angry text, dedicated to ‘Those Who Laid Down Their Lives That Others Might Uphold the Divine Right to Use Bombing Planes’. Titmuss praised those, including Lord Cecil, ‘who have worked unremittingly for the strengthening of World Government’. His book sought to show how ‘the Government by their supine handling of Foreign Policy since 1931’ had ‘allowed the Nation to drift far along the path that leads inexorably to international insanity’. While Britain was not solely responsible for the deteriorating situation, nonetheless, given the country’s world role, it was ‘chiefly to blame’. Discussing the constructive ends to which the League of Nations might be employed, Titmuss melodramatically suggested that it was ‘for this belief and a passionate conviction in the power of the British Empire to lead the Nations towards the banishment of anarchy from the earth that I am prepared to lay down my life’.21
Titmuss then cited numerous examples of Britain’s failure to support the League, for instance over Abyssinia. This had resulted in messages from across the world expressing ‘astonishment at the part played by the British Government in a shameless and callous betrayal of the League’. The ‘name of England, and all that it means to us’ was thus ‘splashed with mud and abuse from every corner of the globe’. Britain’s actions were a betrayal of those, suffering under oppression and dictatorship, who had looked to it for hope. Equally betrayed had been those who thought the League of Nations ‘the one good thing born of 1918’, and who remembered ‘our glorious heritage of freedom and democracy’. Again showing a talent for melodrama, Titmuss then suggested that ‘Generations unborn will rise one day and curse these flag-bedecked Conservative leaders’ for seeking to reward aggression, and their failure to exert British leadership. The Abyssinian and other foreign policy setbacks were unreservedly attributed to the National Government. Conservatism refused ‘to allow Great Britain to take its rightful place at Geneva. We must not take the initiative’. Its ‘creed’ asserted that Britain ‘must be one of a crowd in the League. We must be indistinguishable in the comity of nations [and so] must not take one step in advance of the most turbulent and backward South American or Balkan State’. Consequently, disarmament talks had gone nowhere (hence, in part, the rise of Hitler), and British society itself was, as fears of war grew, becoming militarised. Such fears had ‘spread over the country like a noisome cloud of poison gas’, and were being used to suppress protest.22
A further impact of the National Government’s approach to foreign policy could be seen in its dealings with the empire. In 1932 the Ottawa Conference, responding to the 1929 economic crisis, had set up a tariff system whereby the British economy was ‘protected’ by a series of barriers to foreign imports, while also setting up purportedly favourable arrangements with the British Dominions – ‘imperial preference’. But this did not result in a form of ‘empire free trade’. Leaders of the Dominions also sought to protect their own economies. More broadly, this was an important step in ending Britain’s historic, if by now somewhat tattered, commitment to international free trade. For Titmuss this was highly unwelcome. The conference had allowed the ‘appearance of economic nationalism in some of its worst aspects’, and had had a disruptive effect on the global economy. Because of the horse-trading over preferences between Britain and the Dominions, furthermore, the National Government had come ‘nearer than any previous administration has ever done to shattering the British Empire into small pieces’. Outside the empire, British policy was, on the one hand, to advocate collective security (whether it actually did anything about this was another matter, at least by Titmuss’s account in the rest of his book), while simultaneously supporting ‘economic policies which can only lead to impoverishment and unemployment in Europe, to the spread of hunger and fear, and to the rise of despotic governments with huge armaments and supported by neurotic and desperate peoples’. At Ottawa the British government had ‘presented to the world an imperialistic example of naked uneconomic [sic] nationalism. Mussolini and Hitler soaked it all in’.23
Titmuss’s political concerns were, in the 1930s, as much with the international as with the domestic situation. He was clearly incensed at what he saw as the betrayal of the League of Nations, and British foreign policy’s ‘supine’ role. He actively engaged with these issues through participation in meetings, his leadership role in the Fleet Street Parliament, and his writings. His unpublished ‘Crime and Tragedy’ is notably intemperate in its language, especially when it came to the Conservative Party. Perhaps more surprisingly, Titmuss also saw a leadership role in world affairs for both Britain and the British Empire. His positive view of the empire was not especially unusual at the time as it could be seen, and perhaps Titmuss saw it this way, as a form of international cooperation which, at least on some levels, seemed to work. It is equally notable that, in the context of the empire and more broadly, he was hostile to economic protectionism, a classic Liberal Party position. For liberal thinkers such as Titmuss, free trade was crucial in combatting nationalism and militarism.
In 1938 Titmuss attended the Liberal Summer School held in Oxford, although he did not contribute to it formally.24 The following year, though, he was on the platform in Cambridge. Writing shortly after Titmuss’s death, the historian Keith Hancock, from the early 1940s an important figure in his life, claimed that Titmuss had been persuaded to attend by some ‘young Liberals who belonged to his suburban cricket team’.25 In fact, Titmuss was suggested to the General Secretary of the Liberal Summer Schools, Sydney Brown, by the broadcaster F. Buckley Hargreaves. Hargreaves had passed on to Brown the view of the King’s physician, Lord Horder, that Titmuss’s first book, Poverty and Population, was ‘the best of its kind he has ever come across’.26 Horder had provided the foreword for this volume, discussed in the next chapter, and it supplied much of the material for his Cambridge address. Also speaking that morning was the leading businessman, authority on population issues, and Eugenics Society stalwart, Laurence J. Cadbury, whom Titmuss almost certainly knew. Cadbury spoke on ‘A Population Policy and Family Allowances’, an issue with which he was becoming increasingly concerned to the extent that he actually granted them to his own employees.27 Prior to the event, Titmuss contacted Cadbury suggesting they compare notes in order to avoid any duplication of content. He also told him that he intended to carry on where the Oxford economist Roy Harrod had left off at the Oxford Summer School, remarking that Harrod’s paper was in his view ‘rather sensational’. Although Titmuss did not elaborate on what he meant here, in Poverty and Population he had upbraided Harrod for indulging in ‘alarming prophecies’.28 As we shall later see, this was, at least as far as population was concerned, a bit rich coming from Titmuss.
Titmuss’s talk, ‘Contemporary Poverty, Regional Distribution and Social Consequences’, was very much in line with his current preoccupations, also discussed in more detail in the next chapter. He started with information on the ‘geographical incidence of such accompaniments of poverty as severe infantile mortality’. Arguing that there was ‘no biological reason’ why the infant mortality rate could not be reduced to 30 per 1,000 throughout the whole country (the national average at this point was 58), he then pointed to huge discrepancies between, for example, the Home Counties and Wales. He also compared English urban areas, unfavourably, with foreign cities such as Amsterdam. Titmuss then went on to attack the government’s ‘wishful thinking’ over the fitness of army recruits. In so doing, officials and politicians were consciously rejecting the work of researchers such as the nutritionist John Boyd Orr.29 His speech seems to have been well received. Sydney Brown told him that after ‘the ovation the School gave you yesterday you don’t need any word of mine to tell you how very much your address was appreciated’. It was, moreover, ‘excellent that our final session should deal with constructive policy after the rather grim week we have had’.30 Given that the Summer School took place shortly before the outbreak of war, there can be little doubt as to what her concluding remark refers.
Titmuss was also contacted by Gerald Barry, managing editor of the leading Liberal newspaper News Chronicle, asking for two articles based on his talk (it probably helped that Cadbury chaired the paper’s board). These Titmuss duly delivered to his literary agent, Henderson, a few days later.31 More broadly, Titmuss’s Cambridge speech had been given alongside those of leading Liberal figures such as Lord Samuel, surely a sign of his growing status as a polemical commentator on current affairs. As Michael Freeden points out, this particular Summer School marked a positive step on the Liberal Party’s part to promoting the idea of family allowances, both to alleviate family poverty and to address fears about a declining population, issues with which Titmuss was deeply engaged. As such, family allowances constituted an appeal to ‘progressive opinion’ at a time when the labour movement remained divided about the issue, although Freeden rightly suggests that the ‘insecurity and fears generated by the international crisis’, rather than committed plans for social reform, profoundly shaped the mainstream Liberal agenda.32 Nonetheless the appeal of liberalism for Titmuss, and of Titmuss for liberalism, is apparent.
Titmuss’s support for ‘progressive opinion’ was also manifested in, for example, the invitation he received to join the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) from its founder, Ronald Kidd. Kidd informed Titmuss that he had been given his name by Ursula Grant-Duff, Eugenics Society stalwart and supporter of the Titmuss family. In response, Titmuss enclosed his subscription, telling Kidd that, as ‘an author and writer on social questions’, the NCCL was carrying out work of ‘great importance’, and he wished him well in his membership drive.33 This correspondence took place just after the outbreak of war, when civil liberties were, for bodies like the NCCL, under threat. On Titmuss’s part, it should therefore be seen as a statement of his position, and in line with his objections to what he saw as unacceptable treatment of refugees, noted further in the next chapter. In the years before the outbreak of war, Titmuss was politically active on a range of fronts, all underpinned by his commitment to the Liberal Party.
The coming of the Second World War saw, as Ross McKibbin puts it, the pre-war party system ‘Thrown Off Course’. While before 1939 the Conservative Party had established ‘a political supremacy which seemed unchallengeable’, soon the demands of ‘total war’ led to the creation of the wartime coalition government. This was led by Winston Churchill, a Conservative, but also included leading figures from other parties, for instance, as Deputy Prime Minister, Labour leader Clement Attlee. An electoral truce whereby, in the event of by-elections, no rival candidates were put up to those of the incumbent party more or less held throughout the war. The end of fighting in Europe saw the first general election in ten years, and the unexpected landslide victory of the Labour Party. During the conflict itself, post-war social reconstruction became a prominent theme in domestic politics once the various severe crises of the early years had abated.34 In short, the political landscape fundamentally changed between 1939 and 1945. It is therefore appropriate at this point to discuss Titmuss’s involvement with Forward March, one of the predecessors of the better known Common Wealth Party. Although this discussion extends slightly beyond the notional end of this part of the book (1941), Titmuss’s engagement had its origins in his earlier participation in Liberal politics. Titmuss had strong, rather unconventional, views about the political situation in the early part of the conflict, views which he was happy to broadcast.
Common Wealth was founded in July 1942 by a merger of the writer J.B. Priestley’s 1941 Committee, and Sir Richard Acland’s organisation, Forward March. It was to go on to win a number of by-elections, in defiance of the wartime electoral truce. The organisation’s principal slogans were ‘Common Ownership’, ‘Vital Democracy’, and ‘Morality in Politics’, alongside the demand that the Beveridge Report be implemented in full, and immediately.35 The key figure in Common Wealth was the eccentric former Liberal MP, Acland, encountered earlier as a supporter of a Popular Front. Titmuss was active in the various factions which were to become Common Wealth, an organisation which, Acland’s biographer suggests, appealed ‘essentially to the more modest, professional middle classes, notably in London and on Merseyside’.36 This no doubt applied to its predecessors, and accurately enough describes Titmuss. Acland and Titmuss had been in touch since at least late 1938 when they had entered into a correspondence over one of Titmuss’s obsessions of the time, population health. Titmuss had also been among those who, having been sent a copy by the author, had responded to Acland’s 1940 Penguin best-seller Unser Kampf (Our Struggle, an allusion to Hitler’s Mein Kampf). This was part of Acland’s strategy to form a broad, progressive political front looking forward to post-war social reconstruction. Titmuss told Acland that while ‘as a Liberal’ he might disagree on ‘a few side issues’, nonetheless he accepted ‘your major argument for Common Ownership with all that implies in national and international relations’. If a majority of the ‘Liberals and Labour accept your case’, then the ‘Lib-Lab front on Common Ownership must become a reality’.37 Acland’s response also contained an invitation to a Forward March meeting to be held at the Commons in early March 1940. Titmuss accepted, adding that in his view ‘the most important and urgent step’ would be to ‘break the political truce’. This meant, he argued, ‘continuous pressure’ on the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, and required the formation of an ‘ALL-PARTY COMMITTEE’.38
An ‘Unser Kampf’ group (presumably an alternative name for Forward March) was formed, and in spring 1940 issued a ‘Manifesto of the Common Men’. This sought to ‘build a new world based on a new morality. To put into practice in our public life the principles which we pay lip service to in our churches’, and it was to such ends that ‘we invite the co-operation of our fellow-men’. Titmuss, describing himself as a ‘Writer and Statistician’, agreed to be a signatory to this document.39 A few weeks later, he became chairman of the group’s Home Policy Committee, and, as such, party to a discussion which noted that the government now had complete power over both capital and labour, something which could be used for either progressive or reactionary ends. There was no effective parliamentary opposition, so wartime policies should focus on ‘new moral imperatives’ – again a very Titmuss notion – such as the ‘permanent conscription of capital’ and ‘workers representation’.40 During Acland’s brief spell in the army, Titmuss once more took a leadership role, telling a correspondent that he ‘personally felt that the work should go on and that some direction was needed in Acland’s absence.41 He also seems to have been a member of Forward March’s ‘Inner Executive’, a small body of five individuals which included Acland and Titmuss’s friend, François Lafitte.42
Further reinforcing this idea of Titmuss in a leadership role, by spring of 1941 he was, apparently, chair of the Unser Kampf group, and consequently dealing with various enquiries to the organisation. For instance, he responded to a correspondent who had approached Unser Kampf with what appears to have been proposals based on the idea of Social Credit. The latter argued for the establishment of a form of economic democracy, particularly by way of monetary reform. In reply, Titmuss suggested that while he agreed that much was wrong with the present monetary system, nonetheless it would be mistaken to think that ‘drastic change in the monetary system and its operation would create – by itself – a new kind of society’. The system was ‘part and parcel of an acutely acquisitive society’ and Unser Kampf had recently publicised what it saw as the consequences of such ‘acquisitiveness … as it impinges on our war effort’.43 The phrase ‘acquisitive society’ alludes to the work of the ethical socialist, R.H. Tawney, a recurring figure in this volume. Titmuss also gave talks on behalf of Forward March, for example to the latter’s Ealing Group in May 1942 on ‘Private Profit versus the Health Subsistence and Conservation of the People’.44
There can be little doubt that Titmuss played an important role in Forward March. In summer 1941, Acland told him that he felt something important was about to happen and, although he did not specify what, perhaps he, like Titmuss, saw the evacuation from Dunkirk the previous year, and the subsequent Blitz, as transformative moments in British history. In any event, something prompted him to reflect on Forward March’s own recent history. Reviewing the last 15 months, Acland gratefully acknowledged all the people who had helped the organisation. But, he continued, ‘I look back also on that meeting we had outside the dining room of the House of Commons when you and I tried to think up in a hurry one or two practical conclusions to which we hoped that first meeting might perhaps lead’. This was clearly the meeting to which Titmuss had been invited in March 1940. ‘Since then’, Acland flatteringly suggested, ‘you and only you have remained with us quite steadily in good times and bad’. Throughout, Titmuss had given ‘the wisest advice’, and whenever he had agreed to do something it had happened. As things presently stood, it was ‘quite clear to me that the next stages of our enterprise could not be accomplished without your steady guidance and advice almost from day to day’.45
In reply, Titmuss told Acland that he would continue to do what he could before going on to make an important statement of his own beliefs. Looking back to the era of the Popular Front, that is the mid-1930s, he could see that ‘what counted most with me at the very beginning was sincerity in public life’. And, as he began to ‘think more deeply’, there came the ‘importance of ideas; moral values’. Equally importantly, there must be ‘no compromise’. Although not a Christian himself, he was perhaps appealing to Acland’s Christian socialism when he suggested that while ‘Christ would not admit hairsplitting’, nonetheless ‘one outstanding feature of our time is the ability of the progressive to hairsplit’. Perhaps this was because progressives symbolised ‘the age of indecision from which I hope we are now emerging’. In his own work, meanwhile, he was hoping soon to complete ‘my study of Infant Mortality and Social Class’ – what was to be Birth, Poverty and Wealth. His text had been vetted by ‘other experts’, and showed conclusively that the working class, and the poor, were now worse off in relative terms than before the First World War. Clarifying his point, he continued that this was ‘in terms of health, which incidentally should be the criterion of any new order. The fact that no one has previously studied the subject indicates that in an acquisitive society even research concentrates on money tokens – not health’.46
Unfortunately, at least for Acland, Titmuss was unable to fulfil the role the former had envisaged for him, although the two kept in touch. Titmuss also compiled a file about Common Wealth, including a draft response to the Beveridge Report written by Lafitte. Years later, he was to send this to Abel-Smith, describing it as a ‘fragment of history’.47 The Beveridge Report, published in 1942, was not the revolutionary work sometimes claimed (including by its author). Essentially, it proposed rationalising and expanding existing social insurance schemes, while making, admittedly important, arguments for healthcare reform, family allowances, and the maintenance of full employment. Sir William’s proposals caught the popular mood, though, appearing at a point when there were growing expectations that the war would be won, with social reconstruction to follow. In time, Titmuss became highly critical of Beveridge. But, like many others, he was thrilled by the report’s appearance. A quarter of a century later, he recalled ‘the excitement I and my friends felt’ on first reading it. Despite the stresses of the war’s early years, ‘we still believed as democrats that we could change society; that we could build a better world for all including the poor’. They thought, too, that with ‘hard work, responsibility and imagination’ they could bring about the end of the ‘hated stigma of the poor law means test’, and the associated view that anyone ‘dependent on the State for income maintenance and public services’ should be regarded as inferior, a ‘second class citizen, and … social failure’.48 But to return to Common Wealth, by late 1941 Titmuss had begun researching what was to become Problems of Social Policy. As he informed Acland in summer 1942, because of this work for the Cabinet Office he could not be so publicly active on Forward March’s behalf. But as he also told Acland, his attitudes had not changed.49
How, then, does this fit with the correspondence between Titmuss and Kingsley Martin, editor of New Statesman, where the former claimed that he had moved over to socialism, albeit a socialism which, in an important qualification, ‘derives from a moral not an economic impetus’?50 This is, therefore, an appropriate point to discuss Titmuss’s political engagement from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, and the insights it affords to his thinking. First, Titmuss threw himself wholeheartedly into Liberal, and more broadly progressive, political activity. He took on a leadership role at a time when he had a full-time job, and when, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, he was also carrying out research, engaged with organisations such as the Eugenics Society, and promoting his ideas to an ever wider audience. Demanding as his political activities were, they were crucial in honing his speaking, writing, and organisational skills, put to good effect in the rest of his career. It is also striking how he saw himself. He was, by his own account, an ‘author and writer on social questions’, a ‘writer and a statistician’, someone whose work had been scrutinised by ‘other experts’. And his various activities were sufficiently well known for him to appear as an invited speaker at the Liberal Summer School in Cambridge.
Second, we must ask what kind of liberal Titmuss was, in the sense of the ideas he held. Freeden identifies what he calls a left-liberalism in this period, with its ongoing adherence to ‘ethical liberalism’. This embraced a ‘communitarian ethic’, and continued to base its social analysis on an ‘organic holism’. Such ‘organic holism’, in turn, pervaded its ‘assessment of social structure and function’. There is much here which fits with what we have so far noted of Titmuss’s ideas. For instance, his acceptance of Acland’s plans for ‘Common Ownership’ indicate a commitment to a communitarian ethic. Perhaps most revealingly, though, is Titmuss’s use of the expression ‘acquisitive society’. This phrase derived from the title of a book by R.H. Tawney, whom Titmuss much admired and who, as Freeden remarks, appealed to those who were on the left-wing end of the liberal spectrum.51 But for present purposes, for its critics an ‘acquisitive society’ was one where materialism – the ‘money tokens’ Titmuss wrote about to Acland – rather than morality predominated, to the detriment of both individuals and the wider social sphere. Titmuss advocated, as an alternative, a society which recognised human interconnectedness, so encouraging altruism to operate. This would bring out the best in individuals, to their own and society’s benefit. Hence the importance he attached to ‘moral values’ when recollecting the formation of his own thought at the time of the Popular Front.
Third, Titmuss could be somewhat contradictory. He deprecated compromise and ‘hairsplitting’, and his early reaction to the Labour Party was one of undisguised hostility. He likewise opposed the wartime electoral truce. He was, however, keen on cross-party collaboration, and by the early part of the war was advocating a ‘Lib-Lab front on Common Ownership’. This was some way from his earlier condemnation of Labour and, notably, its plans for nationalisation. Britain’s domestic wartime experience, and Titmuss’s perceptions of it, undoubtedly shifted his views towards more collectivist solutions to social problems. So perhaps by the early 1940s Titmuss was, consciously or otherwise, beginning to move his political allegiance, at least in party terms, from Liberal to Labour. But when we come to assess Titmuss’s life and work, it will be argued that in certain respects he remained true to a version of Edwardian progressivism, as espoused by the New Liberals prior to 1914.
Finally, for Titmuss, as for his colleagues on the liberal left, the 1930s was a grim decade. The collapse of the international order, the National Government’s use of protectionist economic measures, and the descent into war were indicators of the ‘anarchic world’ condemned by Titmuss. Hence, as the Manifesto for the Common Men had stated, the need to ‘build a new world based on a new morality’. On the domestic front there had to be, as Titmuss put it, a ‘new kind of society’. An essential plank in this new society was health, the ‘criterion of any new order’ (an unfortunate phrase, given its adoption by the Nazi regime). In part, what was required was social intervention to address poor health outcomes. But ‘health’ also had a broader meaning, one which had been developed in Edwardian progressivism, namely the active promotion of wellbeing at both individual and social levels. Freeden suggests that this was, ultimately, to mutate into ‘welfare’, and was in accord with organic views of society such as those held by Titmuss.52 It is notable, too, that in the 1930s some on the political left were developing the notion of a ‘right’ to health, the latter to embrace not only curative, but also preventive, medicine. In certain instances, this was underpinned by explicitly organic reasoning.53 As we shall see in Chapter 9, Titmuss was to be central to the emergence of social medicine, which sought to see beyond the clinical dimensions of ill health to their socioeconomic context.
The 1930s had a profound impact on Titmuss. He was engaged politically through activism on behalf of the Liberal Party, activism which embraced both domestic and international politics. In both areas he forcefully criticised the National Government, sometimes in highly charged language. When war came, Titmuss remained politically committed, working closely with Acland on Forward March, although by this time it is possible to discern a shift away from the Liberal Party, if not liberalism. As we shall see in Chapter 6, his perceptions of the 1930s and the early years of the Second World War were to shape his analysis of wartime Britain on the Home Front which, in turn, reinforced his demands for wholesale social reconstruction once the conflict was over. Before that, though, we turn in the next two chapters to some of Titmuss’s other activities in the 1930s and early 1940s, which again focus on his commitment to his version of ‘progressive’ politics.
Notes
1E.F.M. Durbin and J. Bowlby, Personal Aggressiveness and War, London, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1939, p 126 and passim.
2TITMUSS/2/214, letter, 22 December 1965, Child Poverty Action Group to Harold Wilson.
3TITMUSS/8/1, letter, 13 May 1932, Henderson to RMT.
4Oakley, Man and Wife, p 65.
5TITMUSS/8/2, draft letter, 27 July 1935, RMT to editor, Hendon and Finchley Times.
6D. Dutton, A History of the Liberal Party since 1900, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edn 2013, Ch 3 and Appendix 1.
7TITMUSS/8/14, letter, 30 April 1969, RMT to Robin Blackburn; also Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 191.
8TITMUSS/8/1, letter, 16 January 1935, RMT to Young.
9TITMUSS/8/1, ‘Notice of Meeting of Fleet Street Parliament, 11th February 1935’.
10TITMUSS/8/1, letter, 12 February 1935, RMT to Miss W. Reeve, National League of Young Liberals.
11J. Stewart, ‘“The Finest Municipal Hospital Service in the World”? Contemporary Perceptions of the London County Council’s Hospital Provision, 1929–1939’, Urban History, 32, 2, 2005, pp 327–44.
12D. Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, pp 61ff.
13‘The “Call to Action”’, The Times, 2 July 1935, p 18.
14‘The “Council of Action”: Mr Lloyd George’s Call to Arms’, The Times, 3 July 1935, p 9.
15TITMUSS/8/1, letter, 23 July 1935, RMT to Organising Secretary.
16TITMUSS/8/1, clipping from The Brideian, September 1935, R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Liberal “Attack”’, p 5.
17TITMUSS/8/1, clipping from The Brideian, September 1936, R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Liberal Party’, p 9.
18M. Pugh, ‘The Liberal Party and the Popular Front’, English Historical Review, CXXI, 494, 2006, pp 1327–50.
19TITMUSS/8/2, letter, 10 December 1936, National Organiser to RMT.
20D. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History, London, Allen Lane, 2018, p 61.
21TITMUSS/7/2, typescript, ca 120 pages, ‘Crime and Tragedy’, pp 2, 4, 5, 9.
22Ibid, pp 56, 71, 96–7.
23Ibid, pp 42–4.
24TITMUSS/8/4, Brochure for Liberal Summer School, Randolph Hotel, Oxford, July/August 1938.
25Letter, Sir K. Hancock, ‘Richard Titmuss’, The Times, 15 May 1973, p 18.
26TITMUSS/8/4, letter, 27 February 1939, Hargreaves to RMT.
27TITMUSS/8/4, Brochure for Liberal Summer School, University Arms Hotel, Cambridge, August 1939, p 19. On Cadbury and family allowances, see R.A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth Century Britain, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, p 306.
28TITMUSS/8/4, letter, 18 June 1939, RMT to Cadbury; R.M. Titmuss, Poverty and Population: A Factual Study of Contemporary Waste, London, Macmillan, 1938, p 33.
29‘Liberal Summer School: Family Allowances to be an Issue at the Next Election’, The Manchester Guardian, 10 August 1939, p 15. The infant mortality rate is the number of deaths of infants under one year of age per 1,000 live births.
30TITMUSS/8/4, letter, 10 August 1939, Brown to RMT.
31TITMUSS/7/47, letters, 11 August 1939, Barry to RMT; and 16 August 1939, RMT to Henderson.
32M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Though, 1914–1939, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, p 344.
33TITMUSS/7/47, letters, 22 November 1939, Kidd to RMT; and 29 November 1939, RMT to Kidd.
34R. McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, Ch 4.
35P. Addison, The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945, London, Pimlico edn, 1992, p 546ff.
36A.F. Thompson, ‘Sir Richard Thomas Dyke Acland’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
37TITMUSS/8/6, letter, 17 February 1940, RMT to Acland (emphasis in the original).
38TITMUSS/8/5, letters, 19 February 1940, Acland to RMT; and 1 March 1940, RMT to Acland (emphasis in the original).
39TITMUSS/8/5, letter, 19 March 1940, RMT to Secretary, ‘Manifesto of the Common Men’; and Notice of Meeting of the Unser Kampf Group, 26 March 1940.
40TITMUSS/8/6, ‘Home Policy Committee: Resume of Discussions 31st May, 1940’, p 1 and signed by RMT.
41TITMUSS/8/6, letter, 4 March 1941, RMT to Kenneth Ingram.
42TITMUSS/8/5, ‘Unapproved Minutes of a Meeting of the Inner Executive of the Forward March Held … on Thursday 2nd April at 7pm’. No year but Kay Titmuss has written 1941?, which looks right.
43TITMUSS/8/6, letter, 5 April 1941, to W.F. Kissack.
44TITMUSS/8/6, letter, 21 April 1942, Wilfred Brown to RMT.
45TITMUSS/8/7, letter, 4 June 1941, Acland to RMT.
46TITMUSS/8/7, letter, 21t June 1941, RMT to Acland (emphasis in the original).
47TITMUSS/2/83, typescript ‘Statement to Branches on the Beveridge Report’ with attached note, 28 November 1955, RMT to Abel-Smith.
48R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Right to Social Security’, in R.M. Titmuss and M. Zander, Unequal Rights, London, CPAG, 1968, p 3.
49TITMUSS/8/6, letter, 5 June 1942, RMT to Acland.
50Cited in A.H. Halsey, No Discouragement: An Autobiography, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996, p 217.
51Freeden, Liberalism Divided, pp 223ff., 313ff.
52M. Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth Century Progressive Thought, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp 175–7, 182–4.
53J. Stewart, ‘“Man against Disease”: The Medical Left and the Lessons of Science’, in D. Leggett and C. Sleigh (eds), Scientific Governance in Britain, 1914–79, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016, pp 199–216.
