Читать книгу Richard Titmuss - Stewart John - Страница 12
ОглавлениеThe Eugenics Society, Poverty and Population, and ‘Manpower and Health’
The last chapter examined Titmuss’s political activities in the 1930s and early 1940s. Demanding as these undoubtedly were, Titmuss also found time for other forms of social and political engagement. Among his early research interests were population, and population health. He was convinced, as were many others at this time, that Britain’s population was in decline, and that this promised problems for the future. Nonetheless, as Pat Thane puts it, Titmuss was ‘the most persistent, prolific, and one of the most immoderate demographic pessimists’ of the 1930s and beyond.1 We shall encounter this pessimism in this, and later, chapters. Titmuss was, further, concerned about population health, arguing that proper analysis of the rates of morbidity and mortality revealed significant class and regional disparities in health experience and outcomes. Such concerns led to membership of the Eugenics Society, his first major publication, and conclusions with serious implications, at least in his view, for Britain’s preparedness for what was, by the late 1930s, inevitable war.
The Eugenics Society (originally the Eugenics Education Society) was founded in 1907. It was a small but influential body campaigning for greater attention to be paid to issues of heredity and population quality. Among its members in the 1930s and 1940s were William Beveridge, and his successor as LSE director from 1937, the social scientist Alexander Carr-Saunders. Titmuss was introduced to the society in 1937 by the LSE demographer and refugee from Nazi Germany Robert René Kuczynski, remaining a member until shortly before his death. Kuczynski, who had published alarming predictions about population decline in Western Europe, had favourably noted Titmuss’s statistical skills. Titmuss gained further kudos with the Society when, a year later, he published Poverty and Population, which impressed, in particular, reform-minded eugenicists such as Carr-Saunders, Society General Secretary C.P. Blacker, and Lord Horder, the King’s physician. The Society, it has been argued, appealed primarily to certain elements of the middle class.2 This can be construed to include both members of the professional middle class – doctors such as Blacker – and those, like Titmuss, from the ‘new’ middle class. Titmuss became an active Society member, and, in addition to its usefulness as a platform for his ideas, it gave him the opportunity, which he was not slow to take up, to gain important and influential contacts.
While Titmuss had a genuine, almost obsessive, interest in population issues, there can be little doubt that he used the Society to advance his career. As we shall see, it was one of its leading members, the social reformer and feminist Eva Hubback, who suggested Titmuss to the historian Keith Hancock as a potential contributor to the wartime histories. Hubback was, indeed, to play a considerable part in his life. A woman of extraordinary energy and commitment, she played a key role not only in the Eugenics Society, but also in, among other organisations, the Association for Education in Citizenship (which she co-founded in 1934) and for which Titmuss was to write a pamphlet during the war, and the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. She was deeply interested in population issues, including birth control and, as her daughter records, was familiar ‘with the writings of Carr-Saunders and later of D.V. Glass, Alva Myrdal and Richard Titmuss, and indeed became friends with all these experts whom she met on common intellectual ground’.3
In the 1930s, like many progressive intellectuals, Hubback ‘hovered’, as Brian Harrison puts it, between Liberal and Labour. Harrison suggests that ‘Titmuss resembled her in this’, with socialism for him becoming the way to ‘keep up the birth-rate’. This is overstating the case, and Harrison is on firmer ground when he remarks that it was one of Hubback’s ‘most fruitful suggestions’ that Titmuss contribute a volume of the war histories.4 Another important Society contact was Carr-Saunders, first chair of the Population Investigation Committee set up by the Society in 1936 (Hubback was also a member), and discussed in Chapter 7 as Titmuss came to play a prominent role on it. Carr-Saunders was to be a key player in Titmuss’s LSE appointment. Oakley records that the two had, by that point, been in correspondence for at least a decade, and that this involved meetings at Carr-Saunders’s club, The Athenaeum. Carr-Saunders, too, was close to Hancock.5
So what was eugenics? For Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall, eugenics is ‘too often discussed as if it were a clearly understood ideology, stable over time, and predictive of particular attitudes and sympathies in its adherents’. It is more plausible, then, to ‘argue that there was no one monolithic eugenics, either in beliefs or policy implications’. It could thus be embraced by, for instance, a wide range of political opinion.6 Certainly for its conservative, hard-line, adherents, eugenics involved the belief that an individual’s social circumstances were shaped by inherited genes, rather than by socioeconomic environment – nature rather than nurture. But as Michael Freeden suggests, there could also be an ‘ideological affinity’ between eugenics and ‘progressive thought’.7 In Titmuss’s case, this involved emphasis more on social environment, and less on biological inheritance. For Titmuss and those of like mind, the ‘genetic question’ could not be dealt with until there was greater equality in socioeconomic circumstances, brought about by ameliorative social intervention – nurture rather than nature. This brought him into disfavour with more ‘traditional’ Society members who thought that any form of intervention was dangerously counterproductive, and that nature should be allowed to weed out ‘undesirables’. Richard Soloway claims that Titmuss was ‘appalled by some of the reactionaries’ he met on joining the Society, although it is unclear why he should have been unaware of them in the first place.8 The approach adopted by Titmuss can be illustrated by a brief examination of Poverty and Population, his first major work.
As we have seen, this book contained a highly complimentary foreword by Lord Horder. And as an epigraph to the volume, Titmuss quoted King George V, who had asserted that ‘The Foundations of National Glory are set in the Homes of the People’. Titmuss acknowledged his new wife Kay’s contribution, ‘not only by her part in the publication of this book, but through her work among the unemployed and forgotten men and women of London’. Through her he had been able to visualise ‘the human significance, and often the human tragedy, hidden behind each fact, and the purblind social waste that the forces of poverty and unemployment relentlessly generate’. Two points already stand out. First, the clear relationship, for Titmuss, between poverty and unemployment, the scourges of 1930s Britain, and ‘social waste’, one of his recurring themes and part of his critique of ‘monopoly capitalism’. Second, Titmuss was not going to produce a book which took a hard-line hereditarian approach to individual, and collective, social problems. Underpinning his argument was the belief that Britain’s population was both ageing and about to decline. That the latter was not, in fact, the case does not undermine the validity of Titmuss’s central argument. One consequence of changing population structure was that it was from the ‘poorer sections of the population, that the architects of the future are being increasingly disproportionately recruited’. This was problematic because this part of society suffered excess rates of mortality, and of morbidity, which were both concerns in themselves, as well as having implications for future generations. Poverty and deprivation were, though, concentrated in particular areas of the country. For example, when compared with the Home Counties, the North of England had, in terms of infant mortality, 65 per cent more excess deaths. Government reporting of such data was, Titmuss suggested, and for by no means the last time, misleading or inadequate. The book’s aim, therefore, was to ‘assess the extent, character and causes’ of this ‘social waste’.9
Titmuss then proceeded to statistically analyse these issues, and to propose solutions. Summarising his findings, he suggested that in the North of England, and in Wales, some half a million excess deaths had occurred in the previous decade. The evidence showed that behind such data lay the ‘presence of intense poverty’ on a widespread and considerable scale. These deaths were ‘not only a national, social and economic problem of fundamental importance’, they also were a humanitarian disaster, ‘a problem that cannot be dismissed, because they need not have died when they did’. The first priority, therefore, was to attend to the needs of children and mothers living in poverty. In what reads like a genuinely angry passage, but also illustrates his occasional tendency to priggishness and didacticism, Titmuss claimed these problems were being ignored or denied because of ‘British stoicism and complacency’. Indeed, he had started the book by condemning the ‘governing outlook on life of the majority of English people today’ (like many at this time, Titmuss routinely conflated England and Britain). This embraced the ‘unreasoning belief’ that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and in so doing the population clung to the ‘principles of the obscurantist’. The continuance of ‘their contented, dull, mass-belief lives, and their happy but nevertheless asocial preoccupation with respectable ritual’ depended on ‘the trends of to-day and the shape of tomorrow remaining hidden’. Nothing must be allowed to disturb ‘their faith in the rigidity and rightness of the only society they know; not even the future prospects of national suicide’.10 There was more in the same vein. This was not to be the last time Titmuss was to castigate his fellow citizens for their short-sightedness and moral shortcomings.
But Poverty and Population certainly had an impact. One of its reviewers, in an article entitled ‘The Waste of Life’, was B. Seebohm Rowntree, one of the pioneers of poverty research. His work on York, some 30 years earlier, had been a landmark in social investigation, and he had recently re-surveyed that city. Titmuss’s book, Rowntree suggested, was ‘important and startling’, and brought home the ‘true significance of the falling birth rate’. In turn, this emphasised the need to care properly for the younger generation, a task at which contemporary society, and contemporary policy, were signally failing. With touching naivety, Rowntree concluded that if ‘every Member of Parliament could be made to read this book, the demand to remedy the crying evils which it reveals would be irresistible’.11 Titmuss was less impressed by Rowntree. Over 30 years later, he told his friend Tom Simey that he agreed that Rowntree had been overrated. This he attributed partly to ‘the fact that these early pioneers by virtue of being pioneers have been credited with remarkable intellectual powers’.12
In the context of Titmuss’s critique of official statistics, and Rowntree’s plea that politicians read Titmuss’s work, it is worth stressing the lengths to which government departments went to deny any connection between unemployment, low income, poverty, and deprivation. The official line was that, in the case of the unemployed, the benefits they might claim were adequate to ensure their families’ and their own survival and health. The findings of researchers such as the nutritionist John Boyd Orr, for example his pioneering Food, Health, and Income, were ignored or downplayed in Whitehall, although they did have an impact on researchers such as Titmuss, and on more ‘progressive’ politicians and think tanks.13 Individuals like Titmuss and Boyd Orr were very much operating on their own initiative, and their work was crucial in bringing social problems to light in pre-war Britain. Given what seemed like wilful blindness on the authorities’ part to the effects of unemployment and poverty, it might seem rather ironic that in 1937 the National Government introduced the Physical Training and Recreation Act. This sought to encourage British citizens to engage in more physical exercise, and was prompted by concerns that other nations, especially Nazi Germany, were pulling ahead of Britain at a time when the international situation was rapidly deteriorating. For critics, the idea that already malnourished individuals might benefit from exerting more energy was simply laughable, and in fact the campaign never really took off, and was quietly dropped on the outbreak of war. Titmuss was among these critics, noting that the ‘inauguration of the Government’s campaign does little more than imply the existence of ill-health and inefficiency in our midst today’.14 Nonetheless, the campaign did recognise, however feebly, that population health had military implications. This was an issue Titmuss was soon to address.
To return to the Eugenics Society, in October 1939 Titmuss joined its Emergency Committee, and by the early 1940s was playing a leading role in the organisation, and in the production of its quarterly publication, Eugenics Review.15 Shortly afterwards, when Britain had staved off the immediate threat of invasion, aerial bombing had ceased, and Germany had turned its attention to the Soviet Union, discussions over post-war reconstruction began to move up the political agenda. One important landmark was the previously noted Beveridge Report of 1942. The Beveridge Committee had been set up in the summer of 1941, and in November Titmuss wrote to Blacker, now a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, on the Emergency Committee’s behalf. Titmuss had raised, at a previous committee meeting, the idea that the organisation should submit evidence to Beveridge. Would Blacker prepare a memorandum as, in Titmuss’s view, there was ‘no one in the Society competent to prepare such a memorandum apart from yourself’? Titmuss also commented that, given his knowledge of how Beveridge operated from his own participation on a Political and Economic Planning (PEP) Committee on Social Security, any document put forward should be brief.16 Blacker replied, not unreasonably, that he did not, in fact, know very much about social security and, rather revealingly, that in any case he had given little thought to eugenics for the past two years.17 Nothing seems to have come of Titmuss’s initiative, and the Eugenics Society was not among the bodies listed as having given evidence to Beveridge.
Titmuss’s exchange with Blacker is nonetheless revealing. First, there is mention of his involvement with PEP, an unofficial body undertaking important social research in the 1930s. It is not entirely clear exactly what level of engagement Titmuss had with this organisation. PEP’s practice of, for the most part, publishing its findings anonymously adds to the problems of identifying particular authors. Nor is there any mention of Titmuss in any of its main histories. Nonetheless, he did keep a file of material relating to PEP and knew, or came to know, a number of those actively involved, including Carr-Saunders, and François Lafitte, a leading figure in the organisation in the 1940s.18 There are also at least two pieces in the PEP journal Planning, the first in 1936 and the second in 1940, which show Titmuss-like concerns. The first draws on material which Titmuss was to use in Poverty and Population, while the second makes similar points to a pamphlet he produced for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, discussed in Chapter 8.19 This piece also cited Poverty and Population. None of this is conclusive, and, given the contemporary interest in population issues, it is unsurprising that similar sources were used, and at least on some occasions similar conclusions reached. But it is suggestive, shows the tight-knit circles in which Titmuss moved, and his association with ‘progressive opinion’, of which PEP was an important part in the 1930s and beyond. Second, why did Titmuss approach Blacker to write a memorandum in the first place, given his own interests in issues of this sort, and his willingness to use most opportunities presented to advance his own research and heighten his own profile? In part, the answer must lie in the fact that by late 1941 he was gearing up to carry out research for the Cabinet Office. Even Titmuss may have felt that doing detailed work for a Eugenics Society submission to Beveridge was a commitment too far, as well as contravening Civil Service regulations.
Government statistics and population health in peace and war
Titmuss had not exactly been idle over the preceding years. We now look at another of his obsessions, the poor quality of government statistical data, and the implications of poor population health, German as well as British, for the impending war. Titmuss’s scepticism about government data was a recurring complaint from the 1930s onwards. Always keen to draw on history, Titmuss was fond of referencing population analysts from as far back as the seventeenth century, such as John Graunt and William Petty, key figures in the creation of ‘political arithmetic’.20 In a post-war review, Titmuss described Graunt and Petty as ‘pioneers not only of medical statistics and vital statistics but of the numerical method as applied to the phenomena of human society’.21 By implication, the virtues of past researchers simply highlighted the vices of contemporary official data collection and analysis. Specifically on the latter, in early 1939 Titmuss wrote to H.W. Singer at the University of Manchester. Singer was a German refugee, one of John Maynard Keynes’s first doctoral students, and later famed for his work on the economics of developing countries. Titmuss had recently read a Ministry of Health report which denied any link between population health and economic distress. This contradicted both his own work and that of Singer. In response, Singer claimed that he knew that the Ministry fought shy of this linkage because of its ‘undue aversion to more refined statistical methods’.22 But while Singer was making a valid methodological point, there was more to it in that political concerns also came into play.
There was a coda to this exchange which reflects well on Titmuss. In July 1940, he wrote to the Ministry of Information protesting about the ‘harsh and altogether shameful policy applied to the internment of refugees’. The government was hypocritical in claiming to seek to defend Europe while behaving in this way, and its actions were having a negative impact on American public opinion. Titmuss explicitly cited Singer’s case. The latter had helped Titmuss in his own work, and contributed to the Pilgrim Trust’s survey Men Without Work, an important study of the corrosive effects of unemployment. But he was now interned near Liverpool.23 Why? Over the preceding two months the German armed forces had had stunning successes in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France. This had prompted the government to intern ‘enemy aliens’, that is British-based nationals of countries at war with Britain. By the time of Titmuss’s letter, France had fallen, and British and French military personnel had been evacuated from Dunkirk. The government was also tightening control over society through measures such as the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, passed in May 1940. Most of the population felt a German invasion to be imminent.24 To take a stand on refugees in this understandably tense atmosphere showed courage on Titmuss’s part, and further evidence of his concern for civil liberties. Around this time Lafitte published an exposure of the treatment of ‘enemy aliens’, which Titmuss reviewed in early 1941. Lafitte’s book reminded British society of a ‘crime we committed in 1940, and for which we have not yet made full restitution’. It was necessary to ‘understand the nature of the war we are fighting, and that we discriminate, not between Britons and “aliens” or between “friendly aliens” and “enemy aliens” in the present way’. Rather, what was required was to distinguish between ‘those who stand for freedom and those who stand for tyranny in every country’. As Lafitte had demonstrated, the refugee issue was ‘indissolubly linked with the whole character and conduct of the present war’.25
To return to official data, in spring 1941, Titmuss, in a piece primarily concerned with inequalities in health outcomes, noted that for over three decades ‘we have relied on a Cost of Living Index based on family budgets collected soon after the Boer War’. While this might have been acceptable down to 1914, a lamentable lack of action ‘during the twenty uneasy years following the Armistice’ accurately reflected society’s failure to understand that the ‘condition of the people must always be at the root of all political doctrine in a democratic system’. The punchy title of this piece was ‘The Cost of Living and Dying’.26 A few months later, in a letter to the BMJ, Titmuss protested about what he called ‘the statistical black-out’ of medical data in England. This was not the case for Scotland, though, where material released showed ‘a serious rise in both infantile and maternal mortality’. Immediate measures were required to deal with these. If the medical profession, and local authorities, were to act effectively, then information was crucial. Should the latter need to be withheld for security reasons, then ‘let the authorities be democratically frank and tell us so’. Either way, the situation should be consistent across the whole country.27
More specifically on the question of population health and war, in 1939 Titmuss was co-author of Our Food Problem: A Study of National Security. Titmuss’s fellow author was Frederick (‘Bill’) Le Gros Clark, despite his blindness a prolific writer, and a leading activist in organisations such as the Committee Against Malnutrition. Le Gros Clark was clearly an admirer of Titmuss, having recommended him, for example, as a speaker on malnutrition to the Medical Society at University College Hospital (UCH) in London.28 As we shall see in Chapter 9, political radicals at UCH were central to the development of social medicine. Titmuss had previously contacted Le Gros Clark suggesting a joint survey of the depressed areas, but the actual outcome of their collaboration was to be their book.29 The volume was part of the popular, and influential, ‘Penguin Specials’ series whose aim was, as Nicholas Joicey puts it, ‘to provide a topical commentary on international and domestic events’. Published in paperback, and relatively cheaply priced, the series was a ‘phenomenal success’, with a ‘significant number of titles’ selling over 100,000 copies.30 It should also be seen as part of a broader demand, especially from those on the progressive left, for informed commentary on current affairs, domestic and international.31
As the title of the Le Gros Clark and Titmuss book suggests, it was written with the deepening European crisis very much in mind. If war came, Britain would have to call upon its citizens ‘for a show of courage and endurance as great as any that their forefathers had reason to display’. In order to do so, though, national ‘stamina’ would have to be increased. This could be done through, for example, state-subsidised milk for all pregnant and nursing mothers, all young children, all schoolchildren, and young workers up to at least the age of 25. The last group should also have access to subsidised canteens. While such schemes would undeniably be expensive, ‘we must take some measures if we are to survive’, and, in so doing, take a chance with the consequences. All this was ‘democratic’, for the ‘same rules of feeding hold good for rich and poor alike’. And while Britain was certainly living ‘through a serious phase in our history’, measures such as those suggested ‘could in a remarkably short time establish the physical and spiritual stamina of our people on a foundation that would be well-nigh unassailable’. There was such a flimsy ‘borderline between normal and sub-normal humanity’ that the ‘sacrifices we would have to make are trivial in comparison’.32 Phrases such as ‘normal and sub-normal humanity’ jar on the modern ear. But these are seen here as positions on a spectrum, rather than the fixed entities a more ‘hard-line’ eugenicist would claim. In summer 1939 Le Gros Clark wrote to Titmuss enclosing a cheque for £11. This reflected the proportion of the book, around one fifth, written by the latter. Sales were ‘at present almost thirty thousand. Not bad but might be better’.33 This was a considerable achievement, and one way in which Titmuss’s views were being brought a wider reading public.
This particular volume was also cited as an authority in Eleanor Rathbone’s own Penguin Special, The Case for Family Allowances, in which she noted, too, that she was ‘indebted to Mr R.M. Titmuss for his help in providing me with some of my facts and figures’.34 Rathbone was a leading advocate of family allowances, a supporter of refugees, a campaigner for women’s rights, and an independent MP. Oakley suggests that she paid Titmuss to do certain calculations, and to read the entire script, resulting in an eight-page memorandum which Rathbone duly took on board.35 Although the document in the Titmuss archives is undated, unsigned, and slightly shorter than Oakley suggests, it looks to be Titmuss’s response to Rathbone’s manuscript. Some of the comments, meanwhile, accord with Titmuss’s own preoccupations. For instance, he wondered whether longstanding family allowance schemes abroad had been of any assistance in raising the birth rate.36 Oakley also records a visit, as a child, to the Cornish cottage once occupied by Rathbone, suggesting a more than professional relationship between the latter and the Titmuss family.37 Titmuss’s friendship with Rathbone, who was also an intimate and collaborator of Eva Hubback’s, further illustrates the close-knit, and influential, circles within which he increasingly moved.
Titmuss’s growing reputation as an expert on population health resulted in work for the British state. This reputation, combined with his networking skills, meant that, as Oakley puts it, by early 1941 ‘the Ministries of Food and Information were fighting for his services’.38 Other departments likewise sought his expertise. In autumn 1940 he told Kingsley Martin that he was ‘at present advising the Ministry of Health’ on an in-depth investigation of German vital statistics. No results were as yet available, and the work was being kept secret ‘as we do not wish the Germans to forbid the export to certain countries’ of various publications.39 In the letter to Blacker in late 1941 noted earlier, Titmuss also told him that he was working for the Ministry of Economic Warfare ‘on the trend of German Vital Statistics’, and that thus far a fair amount of material had been accumulated. The ‘trend of the conception rate’ was ‘rather fascinating – the birth-rate is dropping much more sharply than in this country’.40 It is not clear whether these were two separate projects, but the point is that Titmuss was in demand in official circles.
Titmuss had already engaged with German population data, and it continued to be yet another of his concerns. In March 1939, for instance, he wrote to the editors of the American publication Population Index seeking information as to where he could find data on mortality rates for various countries, including Germany and the UK. This was one of several such letters searching out German mortality statistics.41 One outcome was an article in The Spectator, published just after the outbreak of war, addressing ‘Hitler’s Man-Power Problem’. This, Titmuss claimed, underlay every social and military issue in Germany. For ‘six propaganda-riddled years’ the Nazi government had tried to force up the birth rate ‘with every conceivable weapon’. Policies included family allowances, and the banning of contraception, but all had been unsuccessful. There were two main contributory factors to Germany’s ‘demographic battle’. The first was that Nazi ideology, ‘trimmed of all its mysticism’, was simply ‘a reversion to the ethnic level of the jungle’. Such an environment needed a high birth rate because it also entailed a high death rate, and the latter had been going up steadily under Nazi rule. The second was the continuing demographic impact of the First World War, which had seen both significant deaths and casualties, and the beginnings of a downturn in the birth rate. So Germany was not reproducing itself and, on the available information, its population would eventually decline. Hitler, then, for all his talk of the ‘sacredness of motherhood’, had chosen a path with the ‘surest means of destroying the fittest of his people, forcing down the birth-rate, and of making certain that the German population will eventually decline. Of this sowing, like many others, Germany will eventually reap the harvest’.42
Titmuss’s analysis, including the point about the ‘finest’ being lost, was later shared by Hitler himself who, as the war went on and military losses mounted while the birth rate continued to fall, became increasingly concerned about his country’s demographic future.43 Titmuss returned to these matters in 1940 when reviewing a work on German medical data. This showed that mortality rates were increasing in every age-group in German society, and especially those aged 1–15 years and those aged 20–45 years, and this was ‘borne out by the preliminary results of an investigation the present author is carrying out’. Similarly, and once again unlike most comparable societies, the German infant mortality rate was rising. The one ‘indisputable conclusion’ which could be drawn from the book under review was that ‘freedom is the first condition for the biological advancement of the individual and of the social group’.44
In the run-up to the publication of the Spectator piece, Titmuss, writing on Eugenics Society matters to Ursula Grant-Duff, asked her if she had read the recent book by R.R. Kuczynski, Titmuss’s entrée to the Society. This was Living Space and Population Problems, and Titmuss told Grant-Duff that he had been in touch with Kuczynski ‘regarding certain aspects of the decline in Germany’s birth-rate during the war – the last one’. The ‘most significant fact’ was that over 40 per cent of German women who had married in 1933/34 had not given birth.45 As his own article had suggested, this was a knock-on effect of the First World War, and one reason why Germany had an even poorer record in population replacement than Britain. Grant-Duff would certainly have been interested in Titmuss’s observations not only from a eugenic point of view but also because she was, as Oakley notes, keenly interested in German affairs, and a fluent speaker of the language.46
Titmuss and Kuczynski, meanwhile, had a growing friendship, one outcome of which was that in 1946 the former wrote to the Home Office in support of Kuczynski’s application for British citizenship. Titmuss noted that he had ‘been personally acquainted’ with Kuczynski for around seven years, and had known of him as an authority on population for some time previously. The two had been meeting at fortnightly intervals as friends, and because of ‘our joint interest in population developments’, in which capacity Kuczynksi was ‘one of the greatest living authorities in this field’. Titmuss had a ‘very high opinion of his character as a scholar and as a citizen’. With his usual generosity in such matters, he concluded that Britain was indebted to Dr Kuczynski for his soon to be published population history of the empire. So ‘we should welcome Dr Kuczynski as a British Citizen. I am delighted that he has applied for naturalisation in this country and not in the United States’.47
Titmuss also helped other refugees from Nazi oppression. In early 1941 he was contacted by a member of the Czechoslovakian government in exile, its Minister of Social Welfare, M.V. Ambros. Ambros sought Titmuss’s advice about basic information on wartime conditions, and was trying to put together a picture of what Central Europe might look like after the war. He was especially concerned with health and food in relation to women and children. Titmuss responded almost immediately, declaring that he had ‘admired the work of the Czech Republic before the entry of Hitler’, and so would be ‘glad to help you in any way possible’. Always generous with his time, he suggested a meeting. This appears to have taken place, and in a further letter Titmuss suggested that Ambros might find it useful to approach bodies working on similar projects, for example that led by the highly experienced civil servant and politician Sir John Anderson under the auspices of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Titmuss also offered to introduce Ambros to contacts at the Ministry of Health, as well as giving him advice on how to organise any data he gathered, urging him to identify whether particular food components, for example vitamins, were likely to be in short supply post-war.48
But Titmuss’s first concern was Britain’s population health. Having identified serious problems among the population as a whole, as war became increasingly inevitable he turned his attention to their implications for the armed forces. The immediate context was the Military Training Act of spring 1939 under the terms of which 20 and 21 year old males were to be called up for six months of military training – they were to be referred to, in this capacity, as ‘militiamen’ – before being transferred to the Army Reserve. This was a form of conscription, the first in peacetime in Britain, and further evidence of the sense that the country was heading towards war.49
In a piece published in The Spectator around the time of the act’s passage, Titmuss noted that in the previous year some 42,000 potential recruits had been rejected on medical grounds by the regular army. The majority had been between 18 and 20 years old, and so some would be conscripted under the terms of the 1939 Act. Since such conscripts would be medically inspected, this afforded the state an opportunity to gather information on this particular cohort, while raising concerns about the potential physical state of the militia. Titmuss then brought forward data which showed that over 50 per cent of those volunteering between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s had been rejected on medical or physical grounds. The total number involved was 650,000 – over double the number to be conscripted. This could not be solely attributed to the effects of unemployment as most of the potential recruits were in work, and hence it was a ‘grave indictment of the nation’s health’, suggesting that malnutrition among children and young people was ‘vastly more widespread than has so far been recognised’. The lesson was clear ‘to everyone who realises that we do not fight by guns alone’. If the nation’s manpower was to ‘marshalled in common defence then there should be not only the equalisation of wealth by conscription’, but also ‘the equalisation of health’. Poverty in Britain was a reminder that ‘freedom is best defended by attacking want’. If the people had to ‘rise in defence of their homes then let them demand that their homes should not be hovels and that their children should not be malnourished’.50
Titmuss pursued this theme for the rest of 1939. In November, the Eugenics Society Emergency Committee agreed that he should speak at the next meeting on ‘your findings with regard to the physical condition of the men of the new Army’.51 Titmuss also had letters on military health published in The Times, The New Statesman and Nation, and The Spectator. He commended The Times for highlighting the discrepancy between rejection rates on medical grounds for potential recruits to the regular army, and those conscripted to the militia. But the situation was even worse than reported, and he produced evidence to show why. Titmuss conceded, though, that as far as the militiamen were concerned only a small sample was as yet available. So he called on officialdom, in the interests of ‘the many sociologists, medical men, and others who are concerned with the state of public health’, to bring forward ‘an authoritative explanation’ of the apparent discrepancy.52
His contribution to The New Statesman and Nation made similar points, as well as explicitly citing a speech by Prime Minister Chamberlain, delivered since the publication of Titmuss’s letter to The Times. Chamberlain had made claims which, if true, refuted the work of those such as John Boyd Orr who had provided estimates of ‘the number of people existing in this country on a diet deficient in every essential respect’. It takes little imagination to work out what position Titmuss took. He concluded that it had been brought to his attention that young men rejected as unfit by the regular army had been passed as ‘fit for service’ by the militia, notwithstanding that an ‘insignificant’ period of time had elapsed between the two examinations. Therefore, in the ‘likely event of a considerable number of Militiamen electing to adopt one of the Defence Forces as a career’, was ‘the Government … prepared to transfer them without further medical examination’?53 Correspondence in The Spectator, meanwhile, derived from Titmuss’s article and involved, among other things, rebutting an army officer’s claim that his own observations revealed an immense improvement in the condition of recruits, thanks partly to the expansion of the social services.54 Essentially, Titmuss was arguing that the armed forces’ physical capacity could be undermined by bringing in recruits from the militia, and that this in turn reflected the poor condition of large swathes of the British population. This was clearly an injustice in itself, but also raised issues about potential military efficiency and performance. As he pithily put it in a book review at the beginning of 1940, ‘the functional capacity of nation whether at peace or war depends on the nutritional state of its people’.55
During the latter part of the 1930s, and into the early part of the Second World War, Titmuss was not only politically active in a direct sense, he was also conducting research, and making polemical interventions, in the fields of population and population health. In both areas he saw himself as a contributing to arguments for what he would have seen as social progress, and in so doing he was prepared to take on leadership responsibilities. He was also beginning to establish himself as an influential figure in the Eugenics Society, and had made a number of contacts who were to prove important to his subsequent career. With the coming of war, his analyses of population and related issues led to his employment by various government departments. As if all this were not enough, and once again we have to remind ourselves that he had a full-time job, Titmuss was also keen further to make his mark on a wider audience as an exponent of ‘progressive opinion’, and it is to this we next turn.
Notes
1P. Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p 338.
2R.A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, pp 234, 316. For an approach to Titmuss’s association with the Eugenics Society which does not always take the same line as this volume, A. Oakley, ‘Making Medicine Social: The Cases of the Two Dogs with Bent Legs’, in D. Porter (ed), Social Medicine and Medical Sociology in the Twentieth Century, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1997; and A. Oakley, ‘Eugenics, Social Medicine and the Career of Richard Titmuss in Britain, 1935–50’, British Journal of Sociology, 42, 2, 1991, pp 165–94.
3D. Hopkinson, Family Inheritance: A Life of Eva Hubback, London, Staple Press, 1954, pp 128, 134, 160.
4B. Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, p 296 and Chapter 10 passim.
5Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 119, 148; and Father and Daughter, p 114.
6L. Bland and L. Hall, ‘Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole’, in A. Bashford and P. Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p 216.
7M. Freeden, ‘Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity’, Historical Journal, 22, 3, 1979, p 671.
8Soloway, Demography, p 316.
9Titmuss, Poverty and Population, pp 1, x–xi, xiii, xxvi.
10Ibid, pp 308–9, 3–4.
11B.S. Rowntree, ‘The Waste of Life’, The Listener, 8 December 1938, Supplement p xix.
12TITMUSS/3/399, letter, 24 October 1962, RMT to Tom Simey, University of Liverpool. Simey had written the entry on Rowntree for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
13For a survey of material of this sort, and a critique of official attitudes, C. Webster, ‘Healthy or Hungry Thirties?’, History Workshop, 13, Spring 1982, pp 110–29.
14Titmuss, Poverty and Population, p xxiv.
15EUGENICS, SA/EUG/A/1/32, Eugenics Society, Annual Report, 1939–40.
16EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 16 November 1941, RMT to Blacker.
17EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 19 November 1941, Blacker to RMT.
18R.C. Whiting, ‘Political and Economic Planning’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
19‘The Coming Fall in Population’, Planning, 73, 21 April 1936, pp 3–15; and ‘Population Facts and Trends’, Planning, 165, 9 April 1940, pp 3–15.
20For a favourable reference to Graunt, see R.M. Titmuss, Birth, Poverty and Wealth: A Study of Infant Mortality, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1943, p 94.
21RMT, review of Major Greenwood, Medical Statistics from Graunt to Farr, in The Economic History Review, 3, 1, 1950, p 146. I am grateful to Dr Margaret Pelling for this reference.
22TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 31 January 1939, RMT to Singer; and letter, 2 February 1939, Singer to RMT.
23TITMUSS/7/48, letter, 29 July 1940, RMT to Ministry of Information.
24D. Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, Ch 15.
25R.M. Titmuss, ‘Aliens and Refugees’, Eugenics Review, 32, 4, January 1941, pp 136–7.
26R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Cost of Living and Dying’, The New Statesman and Nation, 5 April 1941, p 357.
27R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘Medical Statistics in Wartime’, British Medical Journal, II, 1941, p 562.
28TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 9 March 1939, John Humphrey, UCH Medical Society, to RMT.
29Oakley, Man and Wife, p 81.
30N. Joicey, ‘A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books 1935–c.1951’, Twentieth Century British History, 4, 1, 1993, p 31.
31Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, p 107ff where the author talks of a ‘reading “Popular Front”’.
32F. Le Gros Clark and R.M. Titmuss, Our Food Problem: A Study of National Security, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1939, pp 91–2, 176–7, 178, 182.
33TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 28 July 1939, Le Gros Clark to RMT.
34E.F. Rathbone, The Case for Family Allowances, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1940, pp 51–2 and prefatory ‘Note’.
35Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 126–7.
36TITMUSS/4/534, undated, unsigned, seven-page typescript, p 7.
37A. Oakley, Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880–1920, Bristol, Policy Press, 2018, pp 7–8.
38Ibid, p 146.
39TITMUSS/7/48, letter, 10 September 1940, RMT to Martin.
40EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 16 November 1941, RMT to Blacker.
41TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 22 March 1939, RMT to Editors, Population Index, School of Public Affairs, Princeton University.
42R.M. Titmuss, ‘Hitler’s Man-Power Problem’, The Spectator, 20 October 1939, pp 539–40.
43R.J. Evans, The Third Reich at War, London, Allen Lane, 2008, p 543.
44R.M. Titmuss, ‘Rassenhygiene’, Eugenics Review, 32, 2, July 1940, pp 62–4, reviewing M. Gumpert, Heil Hunger!
45EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333 letter, 18 September 1939, RMT to Grant-Duff; the book alluded to was R.R. Kuczynski, Living Space and Population Problems, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1939.
46Oakley, Man and Wife, p 113.
47TITMUSS/7/54, letter, 15 March 1946, RMT to Under Secretary of State, the Home Office.
48TITMUSS/7/49, letters, 28 February 1941 Ambros to RMT, 2 March 1941, RMT to Ambros, 17 March 1941, RMT to Ambros.
49Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, p 158ff.
50R.M. Titmuss, ‘Man-Power and Health’, The Spectator, 26 May 1939, pp 896–7.
51EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 10 November 1939, Business Secretary, Eugenics Society, to RMT.
52R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘Physique of the Recruit: Militiamen and Regulars’, The Times, 22 June 1939, p 12.
53R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘The Health of the Militia’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 July 1939, p 15.
54R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘The Health of the Militia’, The Spectator, 21st July 1939, p 96.
55R.M. Titmuss, ‘National Health’, Eugenics Review, 31, 4, January 1940, p 219.
