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ОглавлениеThe Titmuss gospel and progressive opinion
Previous chapters outlined a broad political, and social, historical sketch of British society as the 1930s moved towards war. But the points Stefan Collini makes about the era’s cultural atmosphere should also be acknowledged. As he puts it, the inter-war period was notable for increasing concerns centred around the notion of cultural decline, alongside anxieties about the morally destructive effects of ‘modernity’. One component of such critiques was ‘a challenge to the category of “the economic”’. On one level, this was part of a longstanding rejection, on the part of English radicalism, of traditional political economy, and of related ideas such as the ‘cash nexus’. But what was new was a ‘more sustained questioning of the place of economic activity in human life’, alongside ‘a more wide-ranging exploration of the alleged cultural significance of its accepted centrality in “modern” society’. For this Chapter, what is especially important is that Collini sees R.H. Tawney, an intellectual mentor to Titmuss, as one of the principal exponents of such an analysis.1 Tom Rogan, in a study which deals in detail with Tawney, likewise suggests that, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critics of capitalism focused especially on its ‘moral or spiritual desolation’.2 This was, therefore, an important constituent of the contemporary intellectual environment.
Titmuss was determined to get his views across to as wide an audience as possible, and so sought to broadcast these in both scholarly and popular outlets. His co-authored ‘Penguin Special’, discussed in the last chapter, was an example of a publication aimed at both markets, as well as targeting those of like mind, namely ‘progressive opinion’. This chapter builds on the preceding two as we further examine Titmuss’s engagement with progressive opinion in particular. As part of this, we also examine his critique of what he saw as contemporary society’s moral shortcomings, not least the obsession with economic matters at the expense of what was, or could be, truly valuable in human affairs. For Titmuss, this complemented his concerns over population, as well as informing his more overtly political activities.
One sign of Titmuss’s commitment to spreading his message, along with his growing self-confidence as a writer, was, as we saw in Chapter 3, his engagement of J.M. Henderson as his literary agent. Henderson’s task was to try and place Titmuss’s writings with various print media outlets. For instance, he told Titmuss in spring 1939 that The Spectator had accepted the piece, discussed in the previous chapter, on health and manpower.3 A few months later, Titmuss sent Henderson the talk which he was about to deliver to the Liberal Summer School, discussed in Chapter 3, and ‘which might appeal to one of the better class monthlies’, for example Sociological Review. And if Henderson wished to ‘add to my qualifications you may be interested to know that I have just been awarded a Leverhulme Research Grant for work on Vital Statistics’.4 Titmuss’s article did not appear in Sociological Review, but his letter is revealing in showing that, given the award of the Leverhulme grant, he was being taken seriously as a researcher. Throughout his career he was to prove adept at gaining funding for his research, often out of necessity in the light of LSE frugality. In this context it is revealing that when, in 1940, he applied to become a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, that body expressed surprise that he was not one already.5 The correspondence with Henderson illustrates, too, Titmuss’s strategy of reaching out to general audiences, such as the readership of The Spectator, as well as a more specialised group, his fellow social scientists (of whom, it has to be acknowledged, there were not that many in inter-war Britain).
Titmuss also began to approach organisations directly with potential articles, another sign of his self-belief. In late summer 1941 he sent a piece on ‘Planning and the Birth Rate’ to the Town and Country Planning Association, a progressive professional body which sought to encourage the humanistic planning of the built environment.6 The Association was clearly impressed, for the article appeared soon afterwards in its journal. Titmuss started by claiming that recent discussions of post-war reconstruction, at this point very much in their early stages, had tended to focus on material issues, understandably given the impact of physical destruction. But such a focus forgot that ‘national life cannot continue unless the population replaces itself, that is, unless parents desire children’. Social reconstruction, thus conceptually enlarged, thereby entered ‘the realm of moral values; of social attitudes to parenthood; of belief in the future of man’. Titmuss then raised his usual concerns about declining fertility and imminent population decline. He also, appropriately given his audience, discussed building data and the need to embrace house planning’s social aspects, for example the particular needs of large families. But what is perhaps most striking is his underlying philosophy. If an environment could be created wherein parents consciously desired children, then ‘the physical environment, the multiple and interlocked social agencies for communal existence must be attuned to social values rooted in a co-operative and not a competitive way of life’.7
We should pause here to say something about planning, an important strand in progressive thinking from the 1930s. At that time, unbridled capitalism appeared to have failed. It had brought about the Great Depression, the associated socioeconomic and political instability, and a questioning of some of the central tenets of classical political economy. Planning was likewise inherent in reform-inclined eugenics, given its mission to rectify shortcomings in the quality of the racial stock. Progressive opinion was, as we have seen, often happy to go along with this, and Titmuss certainly shared such ideas. And there were models of planning which seemed to show the way forward. While most progressives would have rejected the Soviet Union’s political system, nonetheless its Five Year Plans appeared to be transforming its economy, as well as providing a barrier to the Great Depression’s ravages. In the United States, meanwhile, President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ was more politically acceptable, an example of a liberal democracy intervening to promote economic revival and stave off social instability. Lloyd George, for instance, promoted the idea of a ‘British New Deal’. Social research was also looking into issues such as perceived problems in the social services and the healthcare system.8 Planning was seen as the solution to such ills, based as it was, or claimed to be, on empiricism and rationalism. To put it another way, it was ‘scientific’. Planning thus appealed to what Arthur Marwick famously described as ‘middle opinion’, that is those critical of both free-market capitalism and Soviet communism, found in groups such as PEP, the Popular Front, the Next Five Years Group, and Lloyd George’s Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction.9 Titmuss was linked to a number of these bodies, and was close to some of their leading figures. For instance, the Next Five Years Group included Laurence Cadbury and Eleanor Rathbone.10
But to return to Titmuss’s underlying philosophy, also in 1941 The New Statesman and Nation, a leading journal of progressive opinion whose readership was expanding rapidly under Kingsley Martin’s editorship, published Titmuss’s punchy, provocatively titled, article, ‘The End of Economic Parenthood’. This was a relatively short piece, but worth considering closely as it articulates further some of the ideas hinted at in the Town and Country Planning piece, most notably social attitudes towards families and family size, and, underlying this, what Titmuss saw as modern capitalism’s warping of morality. The broader context of both these pieces is crucial. The bombing of British towns and cities was a recent memory, bringing, as it had, huge physical damage, a large number of civilian casualties, and, as in autumn 1939, the movement of significant numbers of people out of the country’s urban areas – events described by Titmuss in Problems of Social Policy. And while Britain itself remained unconquered, in summer 1941 Hitler further escalated the conflict by invading the Soviet Union, initially with considerable military success. The United States had yet to enter the war, so while Britain had been reprieved, this conceivably might have been only temporary.
Titmuss started his New Statesman piece with a series of propositions with which, he suspected, most people would disagree. These were that there was a relationship between the declining birth rate and the present ‘battle for existence’, these two phenomena being ‘twin expressions of one and the same thing’, and that the growth of monopoly capitalism and the production and sale of contraceptive devices were correlated. As a rhetorical technique, this was a clever way of drawing the reader’s attention to purportedly irreconcilable positions while, simultaneously, suggesting that there might be more to them than met the eye. In any event, Titmuss continued, there were only two ways under human control which could lead to humanity’s extinction: mass suicide and the failure to reproduce. Again this is rhetorically clever, implying that the war itself was a form of mass suicide, and that the failure to reproduce might, too, be seen in this light. Given that Britain, with the rest of Europe, was failing to reproduce its population, two consequences of the conflict were possible, namely a ‘tremendous speed up … in the process of the dying out of the human race’, or a ‘complete reversal in our way of life so that an environment will emerge in which parents desire children’. Titmuss stressed that he was talking about the advanced capitalist societies, as the population of countries such as China was bound to rise ‘by hundreds of millions’ over the next 50 years. Although he did not have space to discuss this, the consequences of ‘an enormously increasing Asiatic population’ for the future of mankind raised ‘the most fundamental questions’.11
But why, in Western societies, should parents have to be encouraged to ‘desire’ children (a point also made in the Town and Country Planning piece)? Among the characteristics of such societies over recent decades were improvements in public health and the greater availability of contraception. So capitalist societies had gained more and more control over both the death rate and the birth rate. Focusing on the latter, why had the ability to control it been increasingly exercised? Here we can begin to discern what was to be a consistent theme in Titmuss’s thought, for he argued that the most ‘fundamental factor’ was the ‘psychological atmosphere of a society which places acquisitiveness before children’. Humanity’s impulse to serve the community – the ‘altruism’ which became increasingly central to Titmuss’s philosophy – had been denied by a society which told people that they must seek their own interests. Individuals were encouraged to regard wealth as ‘an index of biological success’, use that wealth to seek power, and ‘relegate morals to a two-hour session of platitudes on the seventh day’. In such an environment, one which was an ‘unpleasant, unhealthy, and immoral blend of acquisitiveness and fear’, children were viewed as ‘economic handicaps’.12
Nor, in reality, did competitive individualism achieve much in terms of upward mobility because of the ‘chains of a static society’. Consequently, the struggle for success became ‘more and more demoniac’. Given the identification of children as economic burdens, so individuals increasingly controlled reproduction, and thus expressed in ‘a biological sense … feelings of moral frustration’. Such frustration created a ‘morally unhealthy society’, and all that had happened in inter-war international relations was ‘but an outward expression of an inward disease’. Modern war was, then, a ‘temporary index of a morally unhealthy society’. Even worse, though, a ‘declining replacement rate’ was a ‘permanent expression of the same thing’. The present conflict, therefore, was not just another bout of Anglo-German antagonism, or even a more generalised expression of human nature, it was also ‘a reflection on a mass scale of the individual’s disease’. The end of an era had been reached, and ‘vast and permanent changes’ were needed to Britain’s way of life. Failure to reverse the ‘refusal to reproduce’ might result in ‘some other species, perhaps a race of sub-men’, arising ‘to take our place’. Control of fertility was essential, Titmuss conceded, to ‘a rational world civilization’. But without an understanding of what it could mean, ‘then control means extinction’. Thus in 1941 Britain was fighting not only for national survival, but also to ‘release that deep, long-frustrated desire in man to serve humanity and not self’.13 Titmuss, it should be emphasised, was not alone in his concerns about the psychological impact of modernity. As Mathew Thomson shows, psychology had a huge cultural impact, at both popular and intellectual levels, in post-1918 Britain. It was also beginning to influence left-wing political thought, most notably in the work of the economist Evan Durbin (encountered in Chapter 3), much admired by, among others, Tawney.14
R.H. Tawney and The Acquisitive Society
These two pieces tell us much about Titmuss’s approach by the early 1940s, and should be seen alongside, for example, the contemporaneous arguments encountered Chapter 3 where Titmuss had used the platform of Unser Kampf to make similar points. They again show, too, Titmuss reaching out to different audiences: the general, informed, readership of The New Statesman and the more specialist readers of Town and Country Planning. In terms of ideas, an obvious starting place is that parents must once again ‘desire’ children, rather than seeing them as economic handicaps. But they were being denied the opportunity to so by the ethos of an acquisitive society, a particular expression of monopoly capitalism. Once more, we find a clear acknowledgement of Tawney’s notion of an ‘acquisitive society’, a society which, in one formulation by Tawney, had grown ‘sick through the absence of a moral ideal’.15 It is thus important to outline briefly what ethical socialism involved, and Tawney’s account of why society had been taken ‘sick’, an idea also adopted by Titmuss.
Ethical socialism has been described as a ‘radical tradition which makes heroic claims on people and on the society that nurtures them’. It offered a ‘guide to social reform aimed at creating optimal conditions for the highest possible moral attainments of every person’ and, as such, was a theory both of human nature and of society. The ‘good society’, then, could encourage but ‘could not ensure the creation of exemplary citizens’. Rather, the individual could not be absolved from making moral choices, and it was for society to facilitate such decision taking.16 The authors of this analysis were themselves undergraduates at the LSE immediately after the Second World War, that is, while Tawney was still teaching there, and just before Titmuss’s arrival. One, A.H. Halsey, became a friend of Titmuss’s, and his daughter’s sociology tutor. In any event, it was within the intellectual framework of ethical socialism that Tawney wrote of the ‘acquisitive society’, a concept which Titmuss was to utilise in various formulations for the rest of his career as a weapon with which to lambast the morally corrupting effects of contemporary capitalism.
By the end of his career Tawney was, Collini notes, a ‘distinguished social and economic historian and doyen of the English tradition of ethical socialism’. Indeed, it was only a slight exaggeration to say that ‘Tawney became a historian in order to understand the origins of the distinctive pathology of modern society, namely the priority accorded to the pursuit of financial gain’.17 Michael Freeden, meanwhile, claims that Tawney ‘ascribed a powerful sense of altruistic fellowship to an ethically construed sense of community’. Freeden further contends that Tawney’s assertion of individual rights (not individualism) was part of his attempt to chart a version of social democracy ‘in an area hewn out between the denial of political liberty by both fascism and communism’, and ‘the denial of equal economic opportunities by the plutocracies of the West’.18 Titmuss has often been seen as a successor to Tawney. In one of many academic works making this linkage, John Offer argues that Titmuss was ‘impressed by Tawney’s writings’, that Tawney had a background in philosophical idealism, and that the latter hence went on to inform Titmuss’s own thought.19 Philosophical idealism, which argued an organic view of society, is another concept which recurs throughout this volume.
The Acquisitive Society was published in 1921, underwent many reprints, and, although not without its critics, became something of a Bible for strands of the British left.20 Lawrence Goldman comments that the book was a ‘work of transition’, embracing Tawney’s earlier ‘moralism’ but also reflecting the author’s ‘growing social experience, economic knowledge, and desire to make general rather than personal arguments’.21 The timing was also important, for the devastation of the First World War, in which Tawney had played a courageous part, was fresh in British minds, one reason why Tawney’s arguments are so powerful and impassioned. That Titmuss was delivering his own critique of the acquisitive society in the articles under discussion during the second, even more devastating, global conflict of the twentieth century adds to the urgency, and seriousness, of his arguments. This is not the place to make a detailed critique of Tawney’s work. Rather, the aim is to pick out certain ideas and arguments, focusing primarily on the chapter entitled ‘The Acquisitive Society’, which might be seen as having particular meaning for Titmuss as he developed his own take on modern Britain, and its ills.
Tawney argued that during the Industrial Revolution the idea became embedded ‘in England and in America’ that ‘property was held by an absolute right on an individual basis’. Consequently, ‘the enjoyment of property and the direction of industry’ did not require the provision of any ‘social justification’, as they were ‘regarded as rights which stand by their own virtue, not functions to be judged by the success with which they contribute to a social purpose’. During the nineteenth century, moreover, ‘the significance of the opposition between individual rights and social functions’ had been obscured by ‘the doctrine of the inevitable harmony between private interests and public good’. So was created ‘what may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth’. This had been a powerful idea that had ‘laid the whole of the modern world under its spell’. It promised to ‘the strong unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength’ and to the weak ‘the hope that they too one day may be strong’. In so doing, it made ‘the individual the centre of his own universe’ and, crucially, ‘dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediencies’. In such societies people did not become ‘religious or wise’, for to do so would be to accept limitations on the pursuit of wealth. There was thus an ‘appearance of freedom’, if it was accepted that such freedom was in pursuit of an object – wealth – which was nonetheless ‘limited and immediate’. In his conclusion, Tawney claimed that modern society was obsessed by economic matters, a ‘poison’ which ‘inflames every wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer’. Society could not solve its problems until that poison was expelled. To do so, it must ‘rearrange its scale of values’ so as to ‘regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life’. Its members would have to ‘renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service, because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in a fever’. In short, the ‘instrumental character of economic activity’ had to be put in a position of ‘subordination to the social purpose for which it is carried on’.22
It is not hard to see here what appealed to Titmuss. Tawney’s arguments were historically grounded, as were so many of Titmuss’s. The latter’s critique of individualism, at least as understood and practised under contemporary capitalism, matches that of Tawney, as does his related appeal to ‘community’ and the best it can enable in individuals given the opportunity. It was to be a constant in Titmuss’s thought that, just as for Tawney, society and its aspirations could not be satisfied simply by the claims of economics, or the market, or materialism. But perhaps most interestingly in the context of Titmuss’s early wartime writings is Tawney’s notion of ‘the whole community in a fever’. For Titmuss, too, modern society had a pathological problem, deriving from the psychological strains of modernity, and the consequent disastrous moral sickness at both social and individual levels. The idea that societies, like individuals, could be ‘sick’ was, again, a recurring theme in Titmuss’s social analysis. It also sits well with the notion, noted in Chapter 3, of an ‘organic’ society, with its emphasis on human interconnectedness. Society can damage the individual, which, in turn, does further damage to the organism as a whole.
As we have seen in his articles for Town and Country Planning and The New Statesman, Titmuss argued that the problems societies had in reproducing themselves were not distinct from but, on the contrary, were fundamentally linked to, and even among the causes of, the present war. Materialism and selfishness, and the psychological damage they inflicted, led to a declining birth rate, personal stress and unhappiness, and conflict. The message was clear, and built on and enlarged that of Tawney. A ‘morally unhealthy’ society had to be replaced by one which prioritised cooperation over competition, and enabled the release of humanity’s inherent altruism. Civilisation was at stake in the 1940s, with the possible alternative being a ‘race of sub-men’. In short, morality had to replace the constant seeking of material gain. Titmuss’s revulsion at the single-minded pursuit of material gain at the expense of all truly human sentiments was to be a further constant thread in his thought, informing his views on matters apparently diverse as how social workers went about their professional duties, the perils of an ‘Affluent Society’ in post-war Britain, and voluntary blood donation.
Saving the poor and feeding the masses
Just as ‘progressive opinion’ did not have the political field to itself, so too were Titmuss’s views not unchallenged. In early 1940, for instance, The Spectator published his article ‘Can the Poor Save?’ The timing here is important as, in autumn 1939, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, had presented his first wartime budget. Unsurprisingly, this was geared to the demands of Britain’s prosecution of the war, squeezing taxpayers and consumers of goods such as sugar and tobacco. Shortly afterwards, following some government hesitation, the rationing of foodstuffs was gradually introduced. Bacon and butter, for instance, had restricted availability from January 1940.23 Titmuss’s article, and the response to it, thus came at a time when, notwithstanding that there was only very limited military action (the ‘Phoney War’), the British people were being asked to make sacrifices for the national good. And, of course, nobody could have confidently predicted the events which were shortly to follow, including the fall of France and the Battle of Britain. With the benefit of historical hindsight, 1940 has been identified as the ‘fulcrum of the twentieth century’, when the European order suffered staggering blows from which it was to take a long time to recover.24
In his original contribution, Titmuss argued that restrictions on consumption would unnecessarily punish the poor. It was ‘perfectly clear’ that a large section of the population could not cut down on their food intake ‘without running a grave risk to their health – and to the nation’s well-being’. Those with large families, moreover, were most at risk, for it was well known that ‘the more children there are in a family the lower is the standard of nutrition’. This was ‘startlingly illustrated’ by the fact that the death rate from bronchitis and pneumonia in one year olds from the poorest classes exceeded that of infants in rich and middle class families by 572 per cent. Any reduction in food consumption would inevitably lead to a reduction in family size, just as had happened in the First World War – for Titmuss, a serious threat to Britain’s future. This was particularly ironic in the present circumstances, since if the ‘under-privileged had maintained the same birth-rate as the rich during the last thirty years we should not now have had sufficient man-power to fight this war’. There should, therefore, be true equality of sacrifice, and strict controls on prices and profits.25 Titmuss was thus questioning part of the narrative of rationing, which in fact was popularly accepted, that there should be ‘fair shares for all’, and thereby equal contributions to the war effort by all parts of society.
Titmuss’s article provoked a disgusted response from Dr Alice Mahony Jones (for British readers of a certain age she was, indeed, from Tunbridge Wells). As we shall see, his consequent reply questioned the coherence of Jones’s argument, and he had a point – hers is a difficult letter to understand, or even summarise. But, in essence, Jones challenged especially Titmuss’s claim about infant mortality and class, ‘if only to prevent its return as a boomerang via Hamburg’. This now rather obscure geographical reference alludes to the location of the broadcasting station which transmitted the English language ‘Germany Calling’ programme, often led by the Anglo-Irishman (William Joyce) nicknamed ‘Lord Haw Haw’. Jones questioned Titmuss’s suggestion of malnutrition (a word he had not in fact used) among poor children, at least in the sense of not having enough to eat (which is not what ‘malnutrition’ means). Rather, such children were being given the wrong foodstuffs (which is what ‘malnutrition’ means). And, according to her own records, over a 14-year period the average weight of babies born to the poorer classes had ‘exceeded that of richer ones; which does not suggest that the mothers suffer from malnutrition’. If Titmuss’s data were correct, then the discrepancy in mortality was primarily due to the ‘ignorance and incompetence of the mothers’, attributable to low levels of intelligence and a lack of knowledge of hygiene. These could be addressed through education. Regarding the birth rate, and in a surprisingly progressive tone given what had gone before, she suggested allowances be paid to the mother for each child under the age of five alongside a recognition, ‘in all classes’, that the ‘risk and ordeal of child-bearing’ was something ‘brave and public spirited, and not … a subject for condolence or crude humour’.26 This part of Jones’s letter could have been written by Titmuss’s friend Eleanor Rathbone, whose book The Case for Family Allowances had recently been published.
Responding, Titmuss claimed to be ‘astonished to find in a member of the medical profession such abysmal ignorance of the progress made in the science of nutrition during the past fifteen years’. Her views about maternal incompetence and ignorance were, moreover, similar to those held in the eighteenth century, ‘when it was assumed that the poor represented an inferior strain of the population and that excessive infantile mortality was Nature’s salutary way of eliminating the unfit’. Titmuss recommended that Jones read various analyses of the relationship between income and nutritional standards, including that by the British Medical Association’s Committee on Nutrition. As to ignorance and incompetence, he preferred to ‘believe that the art of motherhood is as high in this country as anywhere in the world’. Titmuss noted, too, Jones’s jibe about providing propaganda material for the Germans. In retaliation, he asserted that she ‘apparently prefers to let it be known that the mass of the British working-class are too ignorant and incompetent to bear the responsibility of children’. But he was not interested in the ‘nightly comic opera performance from Hamburg’, preferring instead to get at the truth of ‘the condition of the people of this country’.27 All this again places Titmuss firmly in the ‘progressive’ camp, and again shows his willingness to argue his case to a general readership in a publication, The Spectator, of a much more conservative disposition than its left-wing equivalent, The New Statesman and Nation.
As to Titmuss and Jones, theirs was, on one level, a relatively trivial spat, albeit on the important subject of the relationship between poverty and ill health. But it also reveals something of Titmuss’s views and character. It shows, for example, what he was up against in terms of what he clearly saw as reactionary and entrenched attitudes towards the poorest stratum of the working class, and especially its mothers. To put this in context, the recent evacuation of children from areas under threat from Luftwaffe bombing had not been unproblematic, involving negative perceptions of working class children and mothers among those upon whom they were billeted or who dealt with them by way of, for instance, voluntary social work. These perceptions did not go away, feeding into post-war debates about ‘problem families’ in which Titmuss would have a part to play.28 There is a further twist here in that, as we shall see in the next chapter, Titmuss, the first person to comprehensively document the evacuation process, was to put a more positive spin on wartime social attitudes in Problems of Social Policy. This is pre-figured, in his argument with Jones, by his defence of working class mothers, a commonly demonised group. And for those inclined to over-read Titmuss’s membership of the Eugenics Society, his rejection of the idea that the poor should be constantly weeded out by ‘Nature’ is notable. Perhaps less appealing is his rather condescending dismissal of Jones’s remarks (silly though some of them were), not least as Jones was dealing with mothers and children on a daily basis, and of the ‘nightly comic opera performance from Hamburg’, a legitimate cause for concern. But there is also a potentially more serious problem, one which would come back to haunt Titmuss. His admirable resistance to the misrepresentation of working class mothers was part of a general unwillingness to blame the poor for their plight. Poverty thus becomes a purely structural problem which has, on this account, little to do with individual behaviour. This was to lay Titmuss open to the criticism that he had an unrealistic view of human nature and, perhaps equally damagingly, that he denied agency to the poor themselves.
Such potential problems, and Jones’s critique, notwithstanding, Titmuss continued to use his undoubtedly up-to-date knowledge of nutritional science to effect, in the following case for the benefit of the wartime civilian and military population as a whole. In the summer of 1941 Gwilym Lloyd-George, recently appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, wrote to Eleanor Rathbone about a letter she had passed on from Titmuss. The original does not seem to have survived, but Lloyd-George reminded Rathbone that it had concerned ‘the waste of food values in cooking by restaurants’. He agreed that it was, undoubtedly, the case that ‘vegetables are wrongly cooked in many catering establishments, in the cook-houses of the fighting forces, and in private homes’. Attempts to educate the public were being undertaken.29 If this had only been about the famous British tendency to boil vegetables to death, along with Titmuss’s somewhat obsessive, if commendable, concern with population health and diet, this would have been a fairly low-level exchange of views. But, as noted, many foodstuffs in wartime Britain were rationed. Others were in short supply, not least because of the difficulty of importing them from abroad as German U-boats attacked incoming convoys. So eating nutritionally valuable foods such as vegetables, cooked properly, was important if individual, and population, health were to be maintained. Equally, and again this was to be an important feature of Titmuss’s thought throughout his career, while his approach was fundamentally underpinned by his moralism, he was also a firm believer in scientific investigation, and the use of science and scientific data to inform his arguments. These were, in many instances, key components of progressive thought, including the version of eugenics which Titmuss espoused, and its approach to social problems.
This part of this volume has shown, first, something of Titmuss’s background, his employment with the County Fire Office, and his marriage to Kay. His origins and early life were certainly modest, throwing into relief his subsequent career. From the perspective of Titmuss as a public figure, we have encountered his commitment, in the 1930s, to the Liberal Party, various organisations associated with ‘progressive opinion’, and then, in the early part of the war, Forward March. He was also, by the 1930s, committed to carrying out his own research, especially around concerns over the British population’s future size and health. Here, as at all points in his career, Titmuss was adept at networking, and this was an important component of his involvement with the Eugenics Society. By the same token he was not, it would appear, lacking in self-confidence when it came to promoting his ideas, whether through public speaking or in print. These ideas at this point can be characterised as broadly ‘progressive’, or left liberal, and we have seen here and in preceding chapters how this informed, for instance, his moral critique of the ‘acquisitive society’. Such a society was, by such an account, not only wasteful in terms of its own human resources, it was also cruel and inhumane. Both Titmuss and his ideas were, by the time war came, already catching the attention of important and influential people. In the next part, we examine how all this played out throughout the rest of the Second World War and into the immediate post-war era, by the end of which Titmuss had been installed as first Professor of Social Administration at the LSE.
Notes
1S. Collini, ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong? Cultural Critics and “Modernity” in Inter-War Britain’, in E.H.H. Green and D.M. Tanner (eds), The Strange Survival of Liberal England: Political Leaders, Moral Values and the Reception of Economic Decline, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp 247–8.
2T. Rogan, The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2017, p 1.
3TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 23 May 1939, Henderson of Stephen Aske, to RMT.
4TITMUSS/7/47, letter, undated but summer 1939, RMT to Henderson.
5Oakley, Man and Wife, p 89.
6TITMUSS/7/49, letter, 23 August 1941, RMT to Town and Country Planning Association.
7R.M. Titmuss, ‘Planning and the Birth-rate’, Town and Country Planning, XI, 33, 1941, pp. 83–5 (emphasis in the original).
8P. Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp 129–30.
9A. Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning, Progress and Political “Agreement”’, English Historical Review, LXXIX, CCCXI, 1964, pp 285–98.
10D. Ritschel, ‘Next Five Years Group’, and R.C. Whiting, ‘Political and Economic Planning’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
11R.M. Titmuss, ‘The End of Economic Parenthood’, The New Statesman and Nation, 9 August 1941, p 130 (emphasis in the original).
12Ibid, pp 130–31.
13Ibid, p 131.
14M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth Century Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp 223ff, and passim.
15Cited in Rogan, The Moral Economists, p 44.
16N. Dennis and A.H. Halsey, English Ethical Socialism: Thomas More to R.H. Tawney, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, p 1.
17S. Collini, Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp 181, 193.
18M. Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp 180–81.
19J. Offer, An Intellectual History of British Social Policy: Idealism versus Non-Idealism, Bristol, Policy Press, 2006, p 4.
20R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, London, G. Bell and Sons, 1921, and subsequent reprints. For the work’s status, B. Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–64, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007.
21L. Goldman, The Life of R.H. Tawney, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p 189ff.
22Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, pp 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 241–2.
23D. Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, pp 224, 271.
24D. Reynolds, ‘1940: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century’, International Affairs, 66, 2, 1990, pp 325–50.
25R.M. Titmuss, ‘Can the Poor Save?’, The Spectator, 23 February 1940, pp 244–5.
26A.M. Jones, letter, ‘Can the Poor Save?’, The Spectator, 1t March 1940, p 289.
27R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘Can the Poor Save?’, The Spectator, 8 March 1940, p 331.
28See the references in J. Welshman, Underclass: A History of the Excluded since 1880, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2nd edn 2013.
29TITMUSS/7/49, letter, 13 June 1941, Lloyd-George to Rathbone.
