Читать книгу Richard Titmuss - Stewart John - Страница 15
ОглавлениеProblems of Social Policy: researching and firewatching
From late 1941, Titmuss was engaged in researching and writing Problems of Social Policy, published in 1950. This was part of the ‘History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Civil Series’. Intriguingly, ‘Problems of Social Policy’ was the title of a passage in a 1932 work by Tawney.1 It was originally planned that Titmuss write two volumes on the wartime social services. In January 1951, he told a government official that the second was due later that year, and he would send him a draft when revisions had been made.2 But by this point Titmuss was fully occupied at the LSE. In a letter to the School’s director in late 1951, Titmuss complained about his workload. Consequently, he had had ‘to shelve indefinitely editorial work on the second volume’.3 By the summer of 1952, Titmuss had thrown in the towel, telling another government official that Margaret Gowing was taking over. He had been ‘reluctantly forced to give it up owing to extreme pressures of work here. I am finding that there are limits to human endurance!’4 The book which ultimately appeared had an introductory chapter by Gowing, but the principal authors were Sheila Ferguson and Hilde Fitzgerald. In a generous preface, Hancock noted that it had initially been envisaged that these two would work alongside Titmuss. But ill health, and the ‘pressure of University duties’, had led the latter to resign as principal author. Nonetheless, he had ‘continued to give assistance to his two colleagues, and the book they have now completed conforms closely to his original plan’. The volume itself made frequent references to Titmuss’s earlier work.5 As his correspondence suggests, Titmuss was not averse to letting others know how much he had to do, a habit maintained for the rest of his career. While Titmuss’s volume was not published until 1950, it is appropriate to deal with it here as it dominated his life for most of the 1940s.
The Civil Histories series arose from the deliberations, in mid-1941, of the Cabinet committee responsible for the War Cabinet’s Historical Section.6 The proposal received significant backing from senior politicians, and from a committee of professional historians, including Tawney, which advised the Historical Section. Keith Hancock, Professor of History at the University of Birmingham, was given overall control, with Titmuss recommended to him by Eva Hubback. At last, in January 1942, Titmuss was able to resign from his insurance job, and join the Cabinet Office, almost doubling his income. Hancock was to play an important part in Titmuss’s life in the 1940s. Outside work, they went on walking tours of North Wales and were firewatchers at St Paul’s Cathedral. Most importantly, though, Hancock became an admirer of Titmuss’s historical skills. In 1944, for example, he suggested that Titmuss lead a small group working on the histories ‘for discussion and mutual criticism’.7 In November 1945, meanwhile, Hancock told his historians that while up until now it had been impossible to give definitive instructions as to what any published outputs might look like, he was now ‘authorised to invite you to prepare a history publication’. Fourteen pages of guidelines were provided.8 In the preface to his own volume, Hancock outlined the origins of the series, what it sought to do, and the issues which had confronted the authors. It had been ‘accepted in the first place as a necessary war task and thereafter sustained with intense concentration of purpose and effort’. As well as following the ‘usual critical methods of professional historians’, contributors had been ‘compelled by the unusual problems confronting them to exercise a good deal of ingenuity in their methods of research’. While the official go-ahead for the series as a whole came just after the war ended, Hancock noted, too, that three volumes had previously been agreed, and that of these the ‘problems of war time social policy stood clearly defined and were entrusted to Mr R.M. Titmuss’.9 Hancock’s faith in Titmuss was to be crucial in the deliberations, at the end of the decade, over the proposed Chair in Social Administration at the LSE.
Titmuss’s research involved dealing with numerous official bodies, and a huge volume of material. As Jose Harris suggests, Titmuss and Michael Postan, writing on wartime industrial production, had particular problems since, in both cases, there was ‘the conceptual problem of how to interpret [the evidence], in an era when the very nature of total war seemed to insist that everything was integrally related to everything else’.10 Titmuss was also required to carry out other official work. In late 1943, for example, he told Hancock that the Ministry of Health had requested a statistical study of current trends in British and German morbidity and mortality, and that this would take around one week. The matter was to be raised in the House of Lords by Lord Cranborne, who had read a piece by Titmuss in The Lancet, presumably his brief analysis of German health data.11 Titmuss only spoke English, and he was assisted by the refugee German economist, Marie Meinhardt. Meinhardt was later to help Morris and Titmuss with their early research in social medicine.12 Titmuss was also engaged, in a return to his roots, as statistical advisor to Luton Town Council. The outcome was a book, co-authored with Fred Grundy, the Medical Officer of Health. The authors made it clear that they were not providing a ‘plan for reconstruction’, but rather sought to present ‘basic physical and social facts as a guide to planning’. The work also noted the impact of evacuation, a central theme in Problems of Social Policy. At least as far as Luton was concerned, the ‘reception, medical inspection and billeting of 8,000 evacuees in three days passed off without confusion’. It was likewise recorded that infestation rates among evacuees, a source of much popular criticism, were no higher than those found in the local population.13
It is clear that Titmuss often felt frustrated, stressed, and angry during the writing of his volume. There was, for example, confusion over who was to cover what territory. In early 1944, Titmuss told Hancock that he had recently sent a draft on evacuation to the Department of Health for Scotland. The latter had responded that ‘Professor Mackintosh has agreed to write the war history from the Scottish angle’, and that this was to be ‘complete in itself’. This was, as Titmuss put it, ‘news to me’, and he understandably sought clarification.14 No such Scottish volume materialised. There were also constant wrangles about the employment of research assistants, and the amount of material Titmuss had to handle. One positive outcome here was that in autumn 1944 Hancock was able to tell Sir John Wrigley, Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Health, that Titmuss had been allocated a ‘new assistant to help him grapple with his greatly extended task’.15 In Problems of Social Policy Titmuss duly acknowledged the assistance of Mrs B.E. Pollard, Miss R. Hurtsfield, and, especially, Hilde Fitzgerald.16
As publication neared, Titmuss was increasingly convinced that the Stationery Office was not operating efficiently. In late 1949 he wrote to the Cabinet Office official with whom he frequently dealt, A.B. Acheson, with a series of complaints. Summing up, Titmuss told him that it seemed ‘a pity to invest so much labour and expense in the preparation of the Official Histories and then to be so dilatory and casual about publication and sales’.17 A year later, he again complained to Acheson, this time that no copies of his volume appeared to be available for sale, notwithstanding that it had been out for nearly nine months. He was fending off enquiries about its availability, and had first raised this issue the previous July.18 In reply, Acheson reported that, in fact, sales had already exceeded over 2,500 copies, and that it had been advertised in around 16 journals.19 As Harris points out, in the event the volumes by Titmuss, Hancock, and Postan ‘sold in substantial numbers’.20 But, again, we see Titmuss’s unhappiness when matters appear not to go his way.
The central problem which he and his team faced, at least by his account, was that evidence, and commentary, arrived in a haphazard, unsystematic way. When drafts were produced, they were scrutinised not only by the Cabinet Office, but also by the government departments on whose evidence Titmuss depended, and which were wary about any criticisms perceived as levelled against them. They could also be maddeningly slow in responding. The Civil Service’s culture was challenging, perhaps especially to a newcomer. Shortly after the war’s end, for instance, Norman Brook, an immensely powerful figure soon to be Secretary to the Cabinet, told Hancock that Titmuss’s draft chapters which he had read were ‘very readable and interesting’, so promising ‘a good book’. He also had some mildly critical comments.21 Two years later, though, Brook, now Sir Norman, was more demanding. He produced a ten-page memorandum which identified three main criticisms of Titmuss’s work: that the ‘treatment of pre-war estimates of the probable scale of attack … is out of scale and to some extent out of place’, that the book was written ‘too exclusively from the Ministry of Health angle’, and that the draft had taken ‘insufficient account of the co-ordination of Civil Defence work’. Brook, who had first-hand administrative experience in a number of these areas, then elaborated at length.22 Others picked up such points. A Treasury official, identified only by the initials P.D.P., disputed Titmuss’s criticisms of his department (which, in the published version, were in fact relatively mild). But ‘quite apart from the Treasury interest’, he had found the volume a ‘thoroughly bad book’. It was a ‘niggling production, written from a single, very narrow, point of view’. Brook’s comment that it was the ‘war as seen from the Ministry of Health Registry’ was exactly right. Finally, the book’s title was misleading as a range of ‘social policy’ issues were not covered. So, the ‘proper thing to do’ was to ‘tear it up and start all over again’.23 We might recall here Hancock’s comments on the clarity of what constituted wartime social policy, and that Titmuss was the person to write about it.
Brook was problematic in another, related, way. Titmuss addressed his criticisms in April 1948, accepting some points, rejecting others.24 As he told Acheson the following July, Brook had not, as yet, responded. Nor had he received any Treasury feedback, so presumably the document cited earlier had not yet reached him.25 The following month, Titmuss informed Hancock that he had had a useful discussion with Acheson, and had apologised to him for all the difficulties he had apparently created. It was unfair on Acheson to have to sort everything out, though Titmuss had found it ‘very hard to restrain my temper’. He again complained of the lack of feedback from both Brook and the Treasury, before apologising for this ‘outburst’. But he had ‘not quite simmered down yet’.26 Further difficulty from Brook came in spring 1949. As writing neared completion, Hancock raised a series of issues, mainly to do with the availability of new evidence. Hancock told Brook that Titmuss had been the only contributor who had ‘always done what he ought to have done at the right time and in the right way’. For ‘this reason alone – but of course there are others – I must do my utmost to win his willing consent as author of the book, if I, as editor, should be convinced that in certain parts there is still room for substantial improvement’. Both Titmuss and Hancock should look at the new evidence ‘with a completely fresh and open mind’, and achieving this would be helped by everyone ‘tackling in the same spirit the new revealed problems of handling drafts for circulation and getting the final copy through the printing stage’.27 It is clear that Titmuss was resistant to what he undoubtedly saw as unnecessary extra work. More positively, we again see Hancock’s faith in him, both as an historian and, as Harris puts it, as a ‘tough potential ally in the face of excessive official back-tracking and obstruction’.28
Another episode of this type occurred a few months later. Titmuss received a letter from Acheson on behalf of himself, Brook, and another Cabinet Office official, A. Johnston. The three had a number of criticisms of the latest version of Titmuss’s volume, by this time at galley proof stage and, in principle at least, only a few months from publication. For instance, ‘Mr Johnston still feels that it is unfortunate that so little is said about what the emergency medical service did for air raid casualties’.29 Titmuss’s immediate response was a four-page letter to Hancock, a letter which ‘I simply loathe writing to you’, because he thought that the issues raised by Acheson had been resolved at an earlier meeting in Oxford between all interested parties. But he was also anxious that Hancock not think he was suffering from ‘persecution mania’. Nonetheless, the Oxford meeting notwithstanding, there had been a stream of written and verbal comments from the Cabinet Office, so that ‘now my mood is one of rebellion’. He then took on Brook and Johnston’s criticisms. On the issue of the Emergency Medical Service and air raid casualties, to use the example raised by Johnston, this would involve new research, rewriting another chapter on the hospitals, and encroaching on another volume in the series, that on the medical services. Ominously, he expected more such Cabinet Office criticism. ‘Quite frankly’, he told Hancock, ‘I cannot stand any more of this.’ The Cabinet Office did not seem to appreciate the toll his work had taken on his health, and on his leisure time. He had had one week off in 15 months, and in this particular week had worked almost every day. There was also the possibility of a loss of income due to difficulties in his relationship with the Medical Research Council, by which he was at this point employed (see Chapter 9). After a further series of complaints, again about the Stationery Office, he concluded: ‘It would be astonishing if, by now, you were not tired and critical of this letter and of me. I am very, very sorry, Keith.’30
Not all commentators were critical, though. In December 1943, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, F.M. Powicke, informed Hancock that he had read Titmuss’s draft on evacuation ‘with much admiration’. Titmuss had a ‘natural gift, cultivated and strengthened by his earlier experience, for the exposition of complicated fact in the manner of a historical student’. He could, moreover, on occasion ‘write with much force and clarity’. Hancock had been ‘fortunate to have found Mr Titmuss’, and Powicke hoped ‘very much that every facility, finance included, will be given him to complete the full plan of the Social Services survey’.31 In early 1946, James Alison Glover, Deputy Senior Medical Officer at the Ministry of Health, told Titmuss that he had studied the material supplied ‘with attention’. It was an ‘admirable study of recent history, brilliantly expressed’. Although Glover had been involved in a number of the events described, Titmuss had thrown fresh light on some of these, while bringing others to his attention for the first time. Glover had a few minor suggestions but, overall, he ‘very warmly’ congratulated Titmuss.32 From the Department of Health for Scotland, meanwhile, A. Bruce Auckland responded to Titmuss’s drafts on evacuation. Again, only minor changes were suggested. Auckland added that he had had ‘several complimentary comments on the way the chapters have been written … One person said you were “making a grand job of it”’.33 From a Scottish civil servant, gushing praise indeed.
And in 1949, the Ministry of Education’s Permanent Secretary, Sir John Maud, told Brook that he had not had time to fully absorb the part of Titmuss’s draft dealing with the later stages of evacuation, the hospital services, and social care. But several colleagues had ‘studied it carefully’. From what they had told him, and what he had gleaned from his own preliminary reading, it was clear that ‘it is a fair, well balanced and wise appreciation of what took place’.34 This was an especially intriguing letter. Maud, like Brook, was a high-flying civil servant, and they would have known each other well. So did Brook seek Maud’s advice, or did Maud offer it unsolicited? Was Maud aware of the criticisms of Titmuss by Brook and his colleagues that was currently circulating? It would have been surprising if he was not. In any event, Titmuss had supporters in Whitehall, as well as critics. This even extended to the Treasury. In March 1950 Titmuss wrote to an official thanking him for ‘the trouble you took in writing letters about reviews of my War History. The article in the Manchester Guardian yesterday was excellent and pleased us all’.35
The tensions involved in the volume’s production notwithstanding, Titmuss’s labours undoubtedly made an impact, even before its actual publication. Shortly after the announcement that the series would go ahead, Titmuss was contacted by the Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, and editor of Economic History Review, Michael Postan. Postan had been educated at the LSE (including by Tawney), had taught there, and was central to the Civil Histories series. It was with his editorial hat on that he wrote, offering Titmuss the chance to ‘introduce yourself to economic historians’ by contributing an article to the Review ‘on public health services during the last forty years or, say, since Lloyd George’. Were he to do this for publication in the coming year, ‘it would probably also serve as a background study for your synoptic volume’. Titmuss regretfully turned this offer down, due to the demands of Problems of Social Policy. The type of study Postan had suggested, Titmuss agreed, did not presently exist, and was ‘something I have wanted to do for a while, but have never had the time’.36 It was a small enough incident in its own way, but nonetheless Postan, like Hancock and Powicke a professional historian, clearly had a positive view of Titmuss’s own historical abilities.
Titmuss’s analysis of the war’s domestic impact can be summarised as follows. First, the conflict engendered a sense of social solidarity and moral purpose – the Dunkirk or Blitz ‘spirit’ – where everyone was in it together, sharing equally in necessary sacrifice, while fundamentally questioning pre-existing ideas and practices. Second, the war revealed, notably through the process of evacuation, the poor condition of Britain’s urban working class. This awakened the nation’s conscience and had both immediate effects, for instance a more humane attitude on the part of social service providers, as well as contributing to rising demands for post-war social reconstruction. Social solidarity further enabled a consensus over such reconstruction. Third, British citizens came to see the government as the mechanism whereby social injustices could, indeed should, be remedied, and the government duly responded. This contrasted with the official inertia of the 1930s. Fourth, the war and its aftermath, with the rapidly expanding social services eventually coalescing in the ‘welfare state’, again stood in contrast to the economic depression, and poor social provision, of the preceding decades. As John Welshman elaborates, Problems of Social Policy articulated many of what were to become key features of the ‘Titmuss paradigm – his optimism about human nature, belief in universal services, and opposition to means testing’.37
Titmuss’s work runs to over 500 pages, plus appendices. On one level it is a detailed analysis of particular areas of experience, and of health and social service provision. The volume remains indispensable to those working on civilian life and official policy during the Second World War. Structurally, it adopted for the most part a chronological approach, starting with the build-up to war. Then comes the era of ‘The Invisible War’, whose main characteristic was the first wave of evacuation of children from areas threatened by aerial attack. This is followed by a section on the impact of aerial bombing when it actually arrived, including an important discussion of civilian mental health. This had been of concern before 1939, particularly to psychiatrists and government officials who had feared a collapse in morale. But Titmuss demonstrated that these fears had not been realised. The next part deals with ‘The Long Years’ following the Blitz. It describes both the second wave of evacuation, and hospital care for the civilian casualties of war as well as for those who needed such treatment for ‘normal’ reasons. Throughout the book, Titmuss was not unwilling to criticise local authorities and voluntary agencies. Nonetheless, such bodies had often learned from experience, and adapted positively. Eleven statistical appendices follow the main text. Later, however, the focus is not on the data Titmuss gathered and analysed, monumental task though this was, or on issues such as the mechanics of evacuation, or the workings of the administrative machine. Rather, we examine the conclusions Titmuss drew from the civilian experience of war. This comes in the last chapter, challengingly entitled ‘Unfinished Business’.
First, though, we briefly consider Titmuss’s methodological approach. He noted the huge volume of material available to him, official and unofficial, within which lay ‘the essential facts for a history of the social services during the Second World War’. The historian therefore had to untangle changes in policy on a case-specific basis before assessing ‘the results achieved’. The outcome would thus be a ‘social history’ (not, it is worth remarking, a generally recognised branch of historical study at this time). But writing such a work was difficult, especially when the author was ‘so close to events’. A further problem was generalising at the expense of ‘concreteness’. He had, therefore, selected problems for ‘exact investigation’, using the method of ‘selective illustration’. Titmuss then outlined the book’s structure, noting that in its final part the ‘dominant theme’ was the strain of war on family life because the ‘needs that arose challenged the existing character of social service, shifted the emphasis in policy, and called into play new instruments of welfare’.38 It is worth digressing here to consider Tawney’s 1932 inaugural lecture at the LSE. Here he argued that history was concerned with ‘the life of society, and with the records of the past as a means to that end’. There was, then, some truth in ‘the paradox that all history is the history of the present’. Strikingly, Tawney also suggested that societies changed not simply because of economic factors, but through a range of interconnected causes, with the ‘most neglected factor in social development’ being war.39 We do not know whether Titmuss was aware of this lecture, and, of course, he drew much of his analysis from his own experiences. Nonetheless, his approach and conclusions do, in the light of Tawney’s views, suggest his mentor’s influence. So what of Titmuss’s ‘dominant theme’ and ‘unfinished business’?
By 1945 the state had ‘assumed and developed a measure of direct concern for the health and well-being of the population’, a change which, when contrasted with the 1930s, was ‘little short of remarkable’. This had been achieved through both new and existing services, embracing all social classes. National resources were pooled and risks shared, and acceptance ‘of these principles moved forward the goals of welfare’. Titmuss acknowledged that little of this was planned in advance, but insisted that, for instance, ‘the condition of evacuated mothers and children aroused the conscience of the nation’, which led directly to proposals for reform, leading in turn to state action. To take another example, the expansion of state-provided school meals, previously a poorly regarded scheme, generated something ‘very close to a revolution in the attitude of parents, teachers and children’. From a service with a Poor Law taint, it had become ‘a social service, fused into school life, and making its own contribution to the physical nurture of the children and to their social education’. Further positive attitudinal change could be found in the ‘quality of the Assistance Board’s work, and in the relationship between its officers and its clients’, another contrast to the 1930s. Here Titmuss was referring to the Unemployment Assistance Board, set up in 1934, the cause of much resentment among the unemployed because of its intrusive methods of assessing benefit. Analysing an indicator of social wellbeing in which he had a longstanding interest, Titmuss recorded a wartime fall in the infant mortality rate which would have been ‘considered as a remarkable achievement in peace time’. Indeed, the data showed not just a decline, but one historically almost unprecedented. Reviewing the population’s health more generally, government action after 1939 to ‘safeguard the nation’s health’ had been ‘far more effective than anyone expected or thought feasible’ before that date. But what Titmuss was especially keen to emphasise was a change in values early in the conflict when invasion threatened, followed by the bombing of major urban areas. If ‘dangers were to be shared, then resources should also be shared’. So commonality of purpose meant benefits in common, but also obligations on the part of individuals, one to another – ‘Dunkirk, and all that name evokes, was an important event in the war-time history of the social services’. The subsequent difficult years ‘served only to reinforce the war-warmed impulse of people for a more generous society’.40
It should be stressed that Titmuss was neither naïve, nor an unthinking optimist, anxious only to show the British at their best. He recognised that, even with the improvements which had been made, certain social problems still had to be addressed – hence the ‘Unfinished Business’. It is therefore important to remember that the book was published in 1950, by which time the key measures of the ‘welfare state’ were in place. We do not know precisely when Titmuss wrote this chapter, but it seems likely that he was already looking forward to what social policy might achieve. What we do get, though, is the very strong sense that the war had brought about a fundamental change, especially in social values. The clear message of this chapter, and it is different in tone from the statistically dense other parts of the book, was that people working together, with duties as well as rights, can, within a framework of beneficent state action, build a better society – the new Jerusalem promised by Labour leader Clement Attlee during his successful 1945 election campaign.
In August 1944, Titmuss told Lady Allen of Hurtwood (Marjory Allen) that any history of the wartime social services would be incomplete ‘without reference to the work of the voluntary organisations operating in this field’. He was, therefore, seeking information from Allen in her capacity as Chair of the Nursery School Association, a body which campaigned for expanded pre-school educational provision. A meeting was duly arranged for late September.41 Although their early correspondence is formal, it seems likely that Titmuss and Allen already knew each other. Both moved in ‘progressive’ political circles. Allen’s husband, for instance, had founded the ‘Next Five Years Group’, a body committed to social and economic reform, especially active in the mid-1930s.42 In any event, they built up a working relationship in which Allen sought Titmuss’s advice, while he made a number of revealing comments about the current state of welfare provision, and thereby his own approach to the social services.
Shortly before their meeting, Allen wrote to The Times on ‘Children in “Homes”: Wards of State or Charity’. She raised the issue, as yet unaddressed by plans for reconstruction, of ‘those children who, because of their family misfortune, find themselves under the guardianship of a Government Department or one of the many charitable organisations’. Many were being brought up ‘under conditions that are generations out of date and are unworthy of our traditional care for children’. Of these, a large number still lived ‘under the chilly stigma of “charity”’, and in both public sector and charitable homes many staff lacked formal training, and were not subject to inspection. Allen therefore called for a public enquiry into ‘this largely uncivilised territory’.43 Even such a brief summary might suggest why Titmuss and she would get along, the lack of professionalism in children’s homes being a case in point. And Allen, like Titmuss, was highly critical of ‘charities’ which, due to their dependence on state support, were not truly voluntary bodies. Early in 1945 she expanded her case in the pamphlet Whose Children?, a copy of which she sent to Titmuss. Titmuss recorded that at their September meeting some of the points Allen had raised related to the unrepresentative composition of the governing bodies of many voluntary homes while, in her view, the ‘Orphanages and Homes run by the Roman Catholic Church are the worst’.44
In response, Titmuss noted that Allen’s analysis would be incorporated into Problems of Social Policy. In a revealing comment about what he saw as the current shortcomings of officials in both voluntary and public welfare, he told her that ‘You know it is the same type of mind that dominates the governing bodies of the charitable homes and the Public Assistance Committees. But what minds and what a shocking indictment it is!’45 He was also critical of any welfare provision which smacked of ‘charity’, and the stigma it entailed. But it would be wrong to read Titmuss’s letter as an attack on voluntarism as such, for what he was suggesting was that the manner in which social services were delivered was just as important as who was doing the delivering. As far as the voluntary sector was concerned, a distinction could also be made between patronising ‘charity’, which might actually be heavily reliant on state support, and unselfish, altruistic voluntarism.
Partly because of Allen’s agitation, an official committee, chaired by Dame Myra Curtis, was set up to examine the situation of children ‘deprived of a normal home life’. Allen told Titmuss how pleased she was with how quickly the government had acted, and that the committee’s ‘terms of reference are excellent and very wide’.46 The Curtis Committee reported in 1946, with its major proposals being incorporated into the 1948 Children Act, an important, if sometimes neglected, component of the ‘welfare state’. Among the recommendations implemented were that local authority children’s departments should be established, and that there should be a move away from large-scale residential homes towards adoption, and boarding out. All this was very much in line with contemporary thought about children and the family in post-war society, including the desirability, whenever possible, of keeping children with their biological parents. Much to her annoyance, Allen was not invited to join the Curtis Committee, but she did devote her considerable energies to ensuring it proceeded in an acceptable direction. She set up an informal discussion group on the subject, which Titmuss joined.47 When called to appear before the committee, Allen again sought Titmuss’s assistance. She had drafted a memorandum, and would be ‘greatly fortified if you would read it through and tell me whether you think it has any value’. In a passage illustrating the regard in which Titmuss was now held, Allen claimed that she had had great difficulty in writing one particular section, and was worried about its accuracy, so ‘I can, of course, delete the section entirely if you feel that it is not adequate’.48 Titmuss’s response does not appear to have survived, but Allen did write again a few weeks later enclosing a copy of her submission. ‘You will see, with amusement I expect’, she wrote, ‘that I have used quite shamelessly many of the valuable points you raise in your letter.’49
A few years later, as the Children Bill made its way through Parliament, Allen once more sought Titmuss’s advice. She was preparing an article for The Times, and part of her criticism of the Bill was that it did not ‘abolish the idea of children on the proceeds of charity’, by which she meant that homeless children might still come under the supervision of a certain type of voluntary body. She also criticised the major children’s charities as being ‘so vast they are almost like a chain-store and the child as an individual is lost’. At the other end of the spectrum, some children’s homes were small and poor, both financially and in terms of ideas. She especially wanted Titmuss to comment on her ‘paragraph about the voluntary organisations not in fact being voluntary’.50 Titmuss presumably did so, and Allen’s article was duly published. This generally welcomed the Bill but was critical, as Allen’s correspondence with Titmuss would suggest, about the potential role of voluntary organisations (although she was careful, like Titmuss, to defend the voluntary principle). Returning to a common theme in her (and Titmuss’s) approach, Allen argued that it would be a ‘fine thing to abolish altogether the necessity for any child to be dependent on charity’.51
Titmuss’s engagement with Allen is revealing. She was a seasoned campaigner, ten years his senior, whom he had initially contacted because he wanted material for Problems of Social Policy. This he duly received and incorporated, along with the findings of the Curtis Committee, in a passage on evacuation which noted that ‘some local authorities did not take all their normal welfare responsibilities seriously’, and that the use of voluntary visitors to be responsible for the care of evacuated children was ‘sometimes little more than a way of enabling visitors and their friends to obtain a supply of domestic servants and labourers’. More positively, though, Titmuss acknowledged the role of bodies such as the Nursery School Association in pressing local authorities to provide nursery accommodation for evacuees.52 It was Allen who then turned to Titmuss for advice and information. They had a number of ideas in common about social service provision, and shared a degree of scepticism about certain types of voluntary organisation. Both, too, were concerned with the quality of staff carrying out welfare functions, and determined to remove any stigma attached to services provided on a charitable basis, in particular. Of course, this should not be overstated. No doubt Titmuss and Allen disagreed about certain policy issues, but their mutual respect is striking.
This is further reflected in an approach to Titmuss by another titled lady involved in social welfare, Lady Reading, Chair of the Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS). This organisation, which Reading had founded, and in which she remained the dominant figure, had been heavily involved in wartime social service. It was essentially a hierarchical, middle class body, although during the war it successfully recruited significant numbers of working class women. It continued, post-war, to play an important part in the voluntary social services. In Problems of Social Policy it was the voluntary organisation most frequently referred to. While commentary was mostly factual, Titmuss acknowledged, for example, that in dealing with London’s homeless the ‘contribution made by voluntary workers, and notably by the Women’s Voluntary Services, was, perhaps, greater in this field of war-time service than any other’. He suggested, though, that, as in the public sector, there were different levels of efficiency and organisation so that the ‘quality of work … of the local centres of the Women’s Voluntary Services varied enormously’. Nonetheless, organisations such as the WVS could react quickly to events – at best they were ‘flexible’ – and on occasion had been instrumental in forcing the state, local and national, into action, and in promoting liaison between service providers. Voluntary bodies might also act as the voice of evacuees, as the WVS had notably done in autumn 1941. The organisation had initially met, and ‘to some degree engendered, a great deal of opposition from old established voluntary societies and some local councils’.53 It had, in other words, shown up the passiveness, and unwillingness to adapt, in parts of both the public and the voluntary sectors. A recent historian of the WVS, James Hinton, suggests that finding homes for evacuees ‘brought out the best and the worst’ of its leaders in rural areas, and Titmuss certainly provided evidence for such arguments.54 But he accorded organisations like the WVS considerable, if qualified, respect in his wartime history. This is both because they deserved it, and because the middle class WVS volunteers contributed to wartime social solidarity.
In her letter, Lady Reading apologised for writing to Titmuss ‘out of the blue’, but she believed that ‘Solly Zuckerman may already have told you how much I would like to have an opportunity of talking with you’. Zuckerman, indirectly related to Lady Reading by marriage, was a prominent zoologist and government advisor. It seems likely that he knew Titmuss through the latter route, although he had also had contact with the Eugenics Society in the 1930s. Lady Reading informed Titmuss that she had ‘read with so much interest “Problems of Social Policy” and there are obviously implications here which are tremendously important from the WVS point of view’. In reply, Titmuss told her that he had already informed Zuckerman that he was happy to meet her, and was ‘naturally anxious to know what you think of my “Problems of Social Policy”’.55 This exchange again reveals how well regarded Titmuss now was, and the circles in which he moved. While no record of the actual meeting appears to exist, judging by the tone of the correspondence there is no reason to think that it would have been anything other than amicable and constructive.
For the most part, Problems of Social Policy was favourably received, and not only by Lady Reading. The anonymous review in The Manchester Guardian, to which Titmuss alluded, was entitled ‘The War and the Civilian: Creation of the Welfare State’, a conjunction which neatly sums up the volume’s argument. Titmuss had produced a ‘fascinating book which deserves wide attention’, and was far more than simply an account of official policy. It was also ‘a study of the background of present-day politics’. How many in America, or Britain for that matter, realised that the ‘present “Welfare State”’ was ‘the outcome of the years of stress. It was in a real sense the creation of the German bombers and not of theoretical planners’. Summing up, the piece noted, again acutely, ‘Mr Titmuss’s judicious appraisal of the two sides of the national balance sheet’. On the one hand there was, for instance, ‘the maintenance of a fair degree of health … and the community spirit’. On the other, though, problems included ‘the temporary weakening of the family … and the slow recovery of the social services’.56
T.H. Marshall, by the time his review appeared an LSE colleague of Titmuss’s and among those who had supported his appointment, acknowledged the book’s ‘exceptional merits’. He also defended the writing of history while it was actually happening because the volume was full of ‘enlightening comments which could only be made by someone with direct personal knowledge of the situation’, assisted by ‘others whose experiences will never be recorded’. There were shortcomings. The title was misleading, as the text dealt only with ‘social problems directly created by enemy action – or in fact one can be more precise and say by air raids’. Evacuation, and the medical treatment of air raid casualties, were the main areas covered. It was, moreover, ‘easier to see what the machine did than what it was’, by which Marshall presumably meant the actual workings of the administrative process. Nonetheless, the ‘historical problem most clearly in Prof Titmuss’s mind’ was the impact of the ‘war experience on the development of the social services and the evolution of the Welfare State’. Here Marshall found Titmuss both ‘subtle and profound’, especially in his analysis of the ‘spur given to the planning of a National Health Service’ by the clash between public sector and voluntary hospitals. The latter were institutions dependent on fees, charitable donations, or subscriptions, and were abolished by the NHS. Titmuss had, Marshall remarked, ‘some bitter things to say’ about them. More generally, the attitude of social service providers had changed, not least because war ‘largely eliminates the class element from social service’.57
The book was also noticed in the US. George Rosen, a leading figure in American public health, and effectively founder of the social history of medicine, described Titmuss as a ‘well known British social scientist’ who had done an ‘exceedingly competent job’ in producing a work ‘also full of human interest’. It was ‘must reading for all public health workers, both as professional persons and as citizens’.58 Without over-reading these comments, it is revealing that Titmuss’s work should be deemed interesting to American readers. Back in Britain, the publisher, Freddy Warburg, congratulated Titmuss on the book’s ‘magnificent press’. Titmuss should feel ‘pretty proud of the work you have done, which must have been long and intensive’. Warburg wanted to know Titmuss’s plans – this was a few months before his LSE appointment – and suggested meeting to discuss whatever he might next want to write about.59 While nothing seems to have come of this, it does further indicate the interest stimulated by Problems of Social Policy.
Less positively, at least for Titmuss, his book also prompted a letter from G.E. Haynes, General Secretary of the National Council of Social Service. The two had lunch scheduled at the Athenaeum, and Haynes wanted to alert Titmuss to an issue he especially wanted to discuss. The Council was ‘beginning, alas!, to prepare our part in the Civil Defence programme. I would like your reactions very much in view of your most admirable study of the position during the last war’.60 The 1948 Civil Defence Act had established the Civil Defence Corps, a voluntary body whose duty would be to support rescue services during a national emergency. Given that by the early 1950s the Cold War was under way, essentially this meant an attack by the Soviet Union. Britain was not the only country making such plans. The day after Haynes’s letter, Titmuss received another, this time from someone who was to be a long-term correspondent, John Morgan at the University of Toronto. Morgan enclosed copies of an article he had written for the Canadian Welfare Council’s journal, subsequently more widely circulated in print and through talks by Morgan, which had been based on Problems of Social Policy. Canadian Civil Defence Planning, he told Titmuss, had until now been almost entirely in the hands of the military, with little account being taken of welfare issues. Morgan concluded with the more welcome news that ‘I believe a substantial number of copies of your book will now have been ordered by Public authorities in order that they may study the problem. I hope this may make some contribution to the dollar problem’.61 In response, Titmuss, entering into the spirit of Morgan’s joke about Britain’s challenging financial position, suggested that ‘HM Government will, I am sure, be glad to know that a few more dollars are coming in!’ It was, though, shocking to think that the machinery of civil defence was being re-established. He had recently met with Haynes, who had sought advice about ‘possible civil defence functions for the Council and about what steps they might usefully take in advance of an “emergency” (that awful word again!). I found it hard to give him helpful advice’.62 It is ironic that Titmuss’s volume, which drew positive messages from the Second World War experience, was seen as offering guidance on how to prepare for another conflict.
Rethinking Problems of Social Policy
Titmuss’s book had a huge impact on academic interpretations of Britain on the Home Front, as well as on popular perceptions (many of which persist into the twenty-first century).63 Some 15 years after his review, Marshall claimed, in his famous text on social policy, that ‘Britain’s experience in the war was unique’, and, given the circumstances under which it was fought, this explained why ‘the concept of the Welfare State first took shape in England [sic]’. The scale of the conflict, and the country’s vulnerability to attack, required ‘sacrifices from all and equally for help given ungrudgingly and without discrimination to all who were in need’. The source for these claims was Problems of Social Policy.64
Titmuss himself repeatedly returned to the relationship between war and social reform. In his contribution to a series of lectures on ‘War and Society’ in the mid-1950s, later reprinted in Essays on ‘The Welfare State’, he started with the claim that little historical research had been done on war’s social and economic impact on whole populations, following this with a wide-ranging survey going back to the ancient Greeks (and including the purported lack of attention in Jane Austen’s novels to the Napoleonic Wars). He then turned to war and social policy, noting that this relationship had developed in three stages: first because of concerns about the quantity of military recruits, second because of concerns about the quality of potential military recruits, and third through a broader concern with population health, and especially that of children, ‘the next generation of recruits’. Overall, this manifested ‘the increasing concern of the State in time of war with the biological characteristics of its people’. Hence the ‘waging of modern war presupposes and imposes a great increase in social discipline’, tolerable only if ‘social inequalities are not intolerable’. Only then would the ‘co-operation of the masses’ be won. War and social policy thus had profound reciprocal influences. Titmuss conceded that this was not ‘the whole story in the evolution of social policy’, although he saw this last point as underpinned by faith more than by reason.65 This opaque caveat seems to imply that however much one paid lip service to other factors, war remained the locomotive of social advance. Harris suggests that here Titmuss is shown more as a ‘didactic social theorist’, in contrast to the ‘subtle and finely nuanced social historian’ evident in Problems of Social Policy.66
While overplaying the contrast between the two works, this makes an important point. Nonetheless, by the time of his speech Titmuss was convinced that his version of the origins of post-war reconstruction was historically accurate. In a lecture on ‘The Social Services’ in the early 1950s, Titmuss agreed that the Beveridge Report had given ‘rational expression to shared experiences and aspirations during the war’. In turn, this meant that the war, characterised by social solidarity and cohesion, had ‘effectively crystallised the demand for services open to all citizens, and good enough for all, without distinction of class’. Poor services were thus ‘inconsistent with the principle of universal “fair shares” on which the war was being fought’. But these ideas and attitudes had very specific origins. The ‘welfare state’ therefore ‘began not with the Beveridge Report, but when the last troops left the beaches in May, 1940, and Britain stood alone against the forces of Nazi Germany’.67
Not everyone accepts Titmuss’s analysis, however. Another early review of Problems of Social Policy came from the distinguished historian of Britain, C.L. Mowat. Mowat found it an ‘admirable work’, paying due attention especially to the Blitz and evacuation. Significantly, though, he argued that the foundations of the ‘welfare state’ had been laid well before 1939, albeit that the war had highlighted the need for social reconstruction.68 Some 40 years later, Jose Harris, reviewing the war on the Home Front and the contribution of Titmuss’s history to its understanding, commended her former doctoral supervisor as ‘still perhaps the most influential and imaginatively compelling historian of the domestic and civilian theatre of war’. But she questioned a number of his premises, remarking, for example, that some of the policies described by Titmuss as deriving directly from the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ had more complicated, less solidaristic, origins. A case in point was family allowances, which ‘Titmuss had portrayed as one of the direct practical outcomes of the Dunkirk spirit’, but was in fact the result of various trade-offs between government departments.69
Others have made similar points. Bernard Harris acknowledges the expansion of school meals provision during the war, while commenting that Titmuss ‘almost certainly exaggerated the humanitarian “generosity” in the development of the service’. Harris also remarks that by 1945 around one third of elementary school children and one half of secondary school children were receiving meals.70 Impressive as this expanded service was, it is some way from the ‘social service’ Titmuss claimed it to be. At a more abstract level, Jose Harris points to the uncritical notion of ‘Britishness’ employed in the Civil Histories. In the particular case of Titmuss, he found underlying the operations of wartime social policy ‘a more intangible national identity and national will’.71 Problematic as this undoubtedly is, it nonetheless points to Titmuss’s English patriotism. More generally, while participation in wars can have an impact on social policy (and, Titmuss insisted, vice versa), it cannot simply be a sole explanatory factor. Sweden’s emerging ‘welfare state’, a product of the 1930s and of which Titmuss was surely aware, is not explained by invoking war. And while popular demand for post-war social reconstruction did mount in the last few years of the war, this was, Ross McKibbin suggests, as much due to rapid changes in British politics, and the extraordinary reception of the Beveridge Report, as with processes such as evacuation.72 In another recent analysis, David Edgerton argues that Titmuss’s account of the creation of the ‘welfare state’ continues to structure contemporary narratives.73 This is overstated, at least with regard to academic historians, although it is certainly true that varying interpretations of the origins of the ‘welfare state’ are available. But Edgerton has a point with respect to popular perceptions of modern British history, wherein it remains a commonplace that the ‘welfare state’ was an outcome of the Second World War.
Problems of Social Policy remains an important contribution to our understanding of the Second World War and its aftermath. But its arguments do need to be treated with caution in the light of historical research, especially over the last half century. Titmuss’s interpretation should be seen for what it is – a product of its time, when ‘progressives’ were hopeful that a new society could be constructed in the wake of a devastating conflict. For instance, in the same year as Titmuss’s volume appeared, T.H. Marshall published his own work outlining, as he saw it, British society’s progression from civil, to political, to social rights, the last embodied in the post-war ‘welfare state’.74 Equally, it is significant that the hard questioning of Titmuss’s interpretation began in the last quarter of the twentieth century, an era of welfare retrenchment, and one where the post-war consensus, if it existed in the first place, was well and truly over. Not by coincidence, by this point, too, the Titmuss ‘paradigm’ itself was coming under severe scrutiny. As is often remarked, the questions historians (including Titmuss) ask are shaped by the era in which they themselves live.
The Blitz, for Titmuss a key moment of the Second World War, involved the predominantly night-time bombing of Britain’s major urban areas. It started in autumn 1940, following the Luftwaffe’s failure to capture control of the skies during the Battle of Britain, and continued until spring 1941. The campaign sought both to cause economic damage, and to undermine civilian morale. Titmuss gives a vivid account of the assault’s impact on London in chapter 14 of Problems of Social Policy, noting that, at least initially, it caused ‘muddle and confusion’ among the authorities.75 However, while immense devastation was caused, the economy survived, and civilian morale held up. Although the Blitz ended in 1941, concerns about renewed aerial attack meant that civil defence measures remained in place, and were most notably called upon when, towards the end of the conflict, Germany targeted London with missiles and rockets.
Titmuss played a part in civil defence, although after the first aerial assault had done its worst. Along with some 300 other ‘night volunteers’ over the course of the war, he was a firewatcher at St Paul’s Cathedral. Others performing this role included Hancock, and two other historians, H.J. Habakkuk and W.N. Medlicott, the latter becoming Titmuss’s colleague in 1953. As relief from their stressful and tiring duties, coming as they did for many on top of demanding daytime jobs, night volunteers could attend, a history of St Paul’s records, ‘lectures delivered by Members of the Watch to their colleagues, to alleviate the monotony of the nightly exercises’. These included Medlicott on economic warfare and, perhaps less enticingly, a talk entitled ‘Aluminium’.76 In a letter published shortly after Titmuss’s death, Hancock described how from ‘early in 1942 until the end of the war’ Titmuss did ‘duty every Wednesday night as a member of St Paul’s Watch’. His colleagues ‘respected his skill with the firehose and loved him as a man’. And, in that much-repeated depiction, Hancock suggested that to some of his fellow volunteers Titmuss ‘was known as El Greco, in view of the resemblance that they saw in him to the elongated saints of that great painter’.77 In less elevated language, although showing a sense of solidarity among the firewatchers, a few months after the war’s end ‘Titters’ was invited to a party for St Paul’s volunteers.78
Titmuss was, in fact, rather late in joining the firewatchers. From January 1941 it had been compulsory for all those not involved in work of national importance.79 In Titmuss’s case, he may originally have been exempted either because of his employment with the County Fire Office or by the various government departments with which he was by then involved. In any event, he spent just over 50 hours per month guarding St Paul’s. Writing to Kay in 1944, he described the impact of Germany’s new terror weapon, the V1 flying bomb, colloquially known as the ‘doodlebug’. Titmuss had had a ‘grandstand view’ of one of these from the cathedral’s roof. It had flown above the dome before its engine cut out, then exploding in the Hatton Garden area. Titmuss had clearly had a good sight of this terrifying weapon, describing it as ‘Fearsome’. The following week, in another letter to Kay, he noted that evacuation following the renewed aerial assault had resulted in more evacuees from London than during the first Blitz, and that, partly in consequence, London was getting ‘appreciably emptier’. A few days later, in a further letter to his wife, he recorded that 59 flying bombs had passed over or close to the cathedral, a new record.80 The impact of these new weapons was more formally recorded in Problems of Social Policy, where it was noted that, for instance, procedures such as evacuation operated better in this period than earlier in the war.81
Producing Problems of Social Policy proved a demanding task, but Titmuss rose to the challenge. In so doing, he constructed a narrative about the Home Front which became highly influential. For Titmuss himself, what he saw as the social cohesion and solidarities of wartime Britain became a framework for his understanding of what might be achieved, but whose legacy had not been properly fulfilled. Indeed, for some of his later critics, Titmuss was more at home in the 1940s than in the ‘Affluent Society’ which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As ever with Titmuss, his work in the 1940s consumed him. The next three chapters deal with some of his other activities, undertaken alongside the monumental project of writing his wartime history.
Notes
1R.H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1932, pp 140–60. I am grateful to Professor Ann Oakley for alerting me to this work.
2TITMUSS/ADD/1/18, letter, 15 January 1951, RMT to A.A. Blytheway, Ministry of Labour and National Service.
3TITMUSS/7/59, letter, 7 December 1951, RMT to Carr-Saunders.
4TITMUSS/ADD/1/18, letter, 21 July 1952, RMT to Richard Hammond, Ministry of Food.
5K. Hancock, ‘Preface’, in S. Ferguson and H. Fitzgerald, Studies in the Social Services, London, HMSO, 1954.
6This paragraph draws on Oakley, Man and Wife; and J. Harris, ‘Thucydides Amongst the Mandarins: Hancock and the World War II Civil Histories’, in D.A. Low (ed), Keith Hancock: The Legacies of an Historian, Carlton South, Melbourne University Press, 2001, pp 122–48.
7TITMUSS/7/44, memorandum, 3 June 1944, Hancock to ‘Mr Titmuss, Mr Davidson, Mr Wormald’.
8TITMUSS/7/44, Hancock, ‘Circular to Historians’, 27 November 1945, p 1 and passim.
9W.K. Hancock, ‘Preface’, in W.K. Hancock and M. Gowing, British War Economy, London, HMSO, 1949, pp x, xi–xii, xiii.
10Harris, ‘Thucydides’, p 131.
11TITMUSS/7/44, letter, ? November 1943, RMT to Hancock; R.M. Titmuss, ‘Recent German Vital Statistics’, Lancet, 1942, II, p 434.
12A. Oakley, ‘Legacies of Altruism Richard Titmuss, Marie Meinhardt, and Health Policy Research in the 1940s’, Social Policy and Society, 18, 3, 2019, pp 385–6.
13F. Grundy and R.M. Titmuss, Report on Luton, Luton, The Leagrave Press, 1945, pp 139, 24–5.
14TITMUSS/7/44, letter, 25 February 1944, RMT to Hancock.
15TITMUSS/7/44, letter, 10 October 1944, Hancock to Wrigley.
16Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p xi.
17TITMUSS/ADD/1/30, letter, 16 November 1949, RMT to Acheson.
18TITMUSS/ADD/1/18, letter, 21 November 1950, RMT to Acheson.
19TITMUSS/ADD/1/18, letter, 1 December 1950, Acheson to RMT.
20Harris, ‘Thucydides’, p 123.
21TITMUSS/7/44, memorandum, 12 November 1945, Brook to Hancock.
22TITMUSS/7/44, memorandum, undated but early 1948, ‘Official Histories: Mr Titmuss’ Volumes on “Social Policy”. Comments by Sir Norman Brook’, p 1 and passim.
23TITMUSS/7/44, memorandum, 29 April 1948, ‘P.D.P.’, Treasury, ‘Outline of Social Policy’, pp 1–2. It is unclear to whom this was addressed.
24TITMUSS/7/44, memorandum, 21 April 1948, RMT to Brook.
25TITMUSS/7/44, memorandum, 13 July 1948, RMT to Acheson.
26TITMUSS/7/44, letter, 7 August 1948, RMT to Hancock.
27TITMUSS/ADD/1/33, letter, 25 March 1949, Hancock to Brook.
28Harris, ‘Thucydides’, p 136.
29TITMUSS/ADD/1/33, letter, 18 July 1949, Acheson to RMT.
30TITMUSS/ADD/1/33, letter, 21 July 1949, RMT to Hancock.
31TITMUSS/7/44, letter, 5 December 1943, Powicke to Hancock.
32TITMUSS/7/44, letter, 5 February 1946, Glover to RMT.
33TITMUSS/7/44, letter, 12 May 1947, Auckland to RMT.
34TITMUSS/7/44, letter, 8 April 1949, Maud to Brook.
35TITMUSS/7/58, letter, 21 March 1950, RMT to S.C. Leslie, Economic Information Unit, The Treasury.
36TITMUSS/7/54, letter, 22 January 1946, Postan to RMT; and letter, 4 February 1946, RMT to Postan.
37J. Welshman, ‘The Unknown Titmuss’, Journal of Social Policy, 33, 2, 2004, p 232.
38Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, pp ix–xi.
39R.H. Tawney, ‘The Study of Economic History’, Economica, 39, 1, 1933, pp 9, 10, 15.
40Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, pp 506–8, 510, 515, 521–2, 532, 508.
41ALLEN, MSS.121/CC/3/3/25, letter, 31 August 1944, RMT to Allen; and MSS.121/CC/3/1/56, letter, 18 September 1944, RMT to Allen.
42D. Ritschel, ‘Next Five Years Group’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
43Marjory Allen, letter, The Times, 15 July 1944, p 5.
44TITMUSS/7/44, RMT notes ‘Talk with Lady Allen on 29th September 1944’, p 1.
45ALLEN, MSS.121/CC/3/3/29, letter, 13 February 1945, RMT to Allen (emphasis in the original).
46ALLEN, MSS121/CC/3/3/28, letter, 4 January 1945, Allen to RMT.
47ALLEN, MSS.121/CC/3/3/31, letter, 7 March 1945, Allen to RMT, and MSS.121/CC/3/3/32, RMT to Allen.
48ALLEN, MSS.121/CC/3/3/33, letter, 28 May 1945, Allen to RMT.
49ALLEN, MSS.121/CC/3/3/34, letter, 13 June 1945, Allen to RMT.
50TITMUSS/7/56, letter, undated but spring 1948, Allen to RMT.
51Lady Allen of Hurtwood, ‘The Children Bill: Providing Home Life for the Homeless’, The Times, 7 May 1948, p 5.
52Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p 391 and note 5, p 169 and note 2.
53Ibid, pp 169, 229 note 3, 266, 267, 299.
54J. Hinton, Women, Social Leadership, and the Second World War: Continuities of Class, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p 152.
55TITMUSS/7/58, letter, 1 August 1950, Reading to RMT; and letter, 10 August 1950, RMT to Reading.
56‘The War and the Civilian: Creation of the Welfare State’, The Manchester Guardian, 20 March 1950, p 6.
57T.H. Marshall, ‘Wartime Social Policy’, Economic History Review, 4, 2, 1951, pp 263–6.
58G. Rosen, American Journal of Public Health, 41, June 1951, pp 733–4.
59TITMUSS/7/58, letter, 20 April 1950, Freddy Warburg, Martin Secker and Warburg, to RMT.
60TITMUSS/7/59, letter, 16 January 1951, Haynes to RMT.
61TITMUSS/7/59, letter, 17 January 1951, Morgan to RMT.
62TITMUSS/7/59, letter, 8 February 1951, RMT to Morgan.
63Although Harris suggests that the influence was probably by way of a process of diffusion, rather than direct: ‘Thucydides’, p 141.
64Marshall, Social Policy, pp 75, 7.
65R.M. Titmuss, ‘War and Social Policy’, in Essays on ‘The Welfare State’, London, George Allen and Unwin, 3rd edn 1976, pp 75, 76–7, 78–81, 85–7.
66J. Harris, ‘War and Social History: Britain and the Home Front during the Second World War’, Contemporary European History, 1, 1, 1992, p 31, n 43.
67TITMUSS/2/163, typescript ‘The Social Services’, nd but first half of the 1950s, pp 8, 1.
68C.L. Mowat, ‘The Approach to the Welfare State in Great Britain’, The American Historical Review, 58, 1, 1952, pp 61–2.
69Harris, ‘War and Social History’ pp 18, 31ff.
70B. Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1995, p 156.
71Harris, ‘Thucydides’, p 141.
72R. McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p 123ff.
73D. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History, London, Allen Lane, 2018, p 223.
74T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1950.
75Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p 257.
76W.R. Matthews, St Paul’s Cathedral in Wartime, London, Hutchison, 1946, Appendices 1 and 3. Appendix 2 gives an account of a typical night’s work.
77Sir K. Hancock, ‘Richard Titmuss’, letter to The Times, 15 May 1973, p 18.
78TITMUSS/7/53, letter, 13 September 1945, A.S.G. Butler to RMT.
79D. Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, p 512.
80Oakley, Man and Wife, p 150, cited p 234, cited p 241, cited p 251.
81Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p 323.
