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ОглавлениеTitmuss and the Eugenics Society in war
In the course of the 1940s, Titmuss continued to play an active part in the Eugenics Society which, as we saw in Chapter 4, he had joined in the late 1930s. This was prompted by his interest in population and population health. But it likewise afforded him the opportunity to network with well-connected individuals who were to become important figures in promoting his career, such as Carr-Saunders and Hubback. This chapter examines Titmuss’s work for the Society during the Second World War, especially from early 1942. He was editor of Eugenics Review for the first two editions of that year, standing in for Maurice Newfield while he was unwell. From the outbreak to the end of the war he also contributed six articles and a number of book reviews to the journal, as well as taking to task, in the correspondence columns and in debate, critics of his own approach to population issues. He participated in Society meetings, during the early part of the war was on its Emergency Committee, and by the end he was on its council, the latter an elected position. Titmuss published his third book, Birth, Poverty and Wealth: A Study of Infant Mortality, with Eugenics Society support. He was also co-opted, in 1943, onto the Population Investigation Committee (PIC), set up by the Eugenics Society in the mid-1930s.
Committee man, editor, and contributor
With the outbreak of war one immediate consequence for the Eugenics Society was that C.P. Blacker was called up to the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), so depriving the organisation of one of its most active members and administrators. An emergency meeting of the council was called shortly afterwards. It was agreed to set up an Emergency Committee, chaired by Lord Horder, of ‘nine members able to attend regularly, with power to co-opt’, which would ‘act on behalf of Council for the duration of the war’. Titmuss was one of these, as were Carr-Saunders and Hubback.1 He was undoubtedly in favour of the creation of the Emergency Committee, telling Ursula Grant-Duff in mid-September that there was an overriding need to ‘see that the work of the Eugenics Society is kept alive’.2 And as we saw in Chapter 4, he was soon in demand as a source of information, being requested to provide the next meeting of the Emergency Committee with proposals for children’s allowances, and his findings on the physical condition of the army.
Titmuss was clearly becoming an active figure in the Society, something further recognised by his membership of the Homes in Canada Service Committee. This small body originated when the Society’s Canadian sister organisation offered to receive child evacuees. It was to identify ‘certain eugenically important groups’ not presently covered by the British government’s own overseas evacuation scheme. An example of such a neglected group would be children who had won scholarships to non-grant-aided schools (that is, not a ‘traditional’ grammar school), and the criteria for selection were ‘intelligence, good heredity and good health’. A panel of doctors had been approved by the Homes in Canada Service Committee to apply these ‘fundamental eugenic safeguards’. Superficially, it seems surprising that Titmuss should have become associated with such an apparently conservative eugenic project. However, it was also explained that the committee had ‘resolved … that poverty alone will in no case be allowed to stand in the way of any parent who wished to take advantage of Canadian hospitality’. Clearly sensitive about this issue, it was further stressed that the Eugenics Society had established a fund, for which it was also issuing an appeal, so that ‘none of the selected children should be kept back by reason of poverty’.3 It seems likely that Titmuss had some say in this formulation, and it is notable that the committee was chaired by another reform eugenicist, C.F. Chance. To put it another way, the notion that a child from a poor background could nonetheless be intelligent would have run counter to the sort of eugenics decried by Titmuss.
Titmuss continued to play his part in the administration of the Eugenics Society, for example being re-elected to the revived council in May 1945. Among his fellow councillors were a number of individuals who had played, or would play, a part in his life, including L.J. Cadbury, Carr-Saunders, Grant-Duff, the demographer David Glass, and the eminent biologist Julian Huxley.4 But we now turn to his more public work on the Society’s behalf, starting with his temporary editorship of Eugenics Review. This began in autumn 1941, with Titmuss taking over for the editions of January and April 1942.5 Finding someone to take on this sort of onerous task in wartime would have been problematical for any organisation, so that he stepped forward is indicative of Titmuss’s commitment to the Eugenics Society. It was not, after all, as if he had nothing else to do.
Titmuss used his editorial platform to revisit some of his preoccupations. In the January edition, for instance, he noted the startling decline in the German birth rate, claiming that such a ‘large decrease can hardly be interpreted by the Nazis as an encouraging feature’. It was a ‘vote of No Confidence’ in the regime, its various exhortations to the German population to reproduce notwithstanding. He also noted that the Eugenics Society, and he might also have cited himself here, had consistently argued for better quality data on British population trends, and that ‘after a stern battle with the powers of obscurantism’ the Population (Statistics) Act had been passed in 1938. The war had, without due cause, delayed the publication of up-to-date material. Citing the recent work by the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, Titmuss continued that Britain would soon be ‘faced with a population crisis’ and the sooner ‘adequate statistics on current fertility patterns and other factors’ were provided, the sooner a ‘eugenic approach to the problem of man’s continuing refusal to reproduce’ could be formulated.6
In the April edition, meanwhile, Titmuss noted the limited publication of the Registrar General’s review of 1938, a year which for ‘students of population’ marked ‘the end of an epoch’. It was the last ‘in which the forces of life and death were undisturbed by war’, and the first since 1911 when comprehensive data became available for the analysis of fertility by way of the 1938 Act. Titmuss then gave a summary of this material while referring readers to his own article in the same edition, discussed later. The other issue with which this engaged was, in the wake of a memorandum produced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, family allowances. This was primarily a technical document to do with costings, giving no sense of whether or not the government was inclined to introduce such a measure. Without attributing the quote of which he clearly approved, Titmuss finished with the view of ‘one commentator’: that ‘the food, the clothing, the cots, the nursery accommodation represented by this or that sum of money socially desirable – and who doubts that they are – the millions given to the families is simply facilitating the distribution of the socially desirable goods to the people socially most eligible for them’.7
Titmuss also contributed to Eugenics Review as an author, for example with an important article, ‘Eugenics and Poverty’, co-written with François Lafitte and published in January 1942. This was partly concerned with the impact of the socioeconomic environment on individual and collective health, an approach central to social medicine. However, it also had more general, but equally important, things to say about eugenics, its philosophical underpinnings, and its aspirations. For Titmuss and Lafitte, eugenics was the ‘use of scientific means to attain an ethical end’, the latter being a ‘higher level of mental and physical health’ and ‘an increase in the biological efficiency of human beings’. ‘Eugenists [sic]’ sought a ‘higher level of health – ie of “wholeness”’ as an end in itself for ‘the human personality is an end in itself’, and because they wished to see ‘human beings in the mass become more completely human’. The Nazis, by contrast, were interested in human health, and biological efficiency, ‘only to the extent that they further the immoral purposes of a tyranny whose highest aim is total warfare’. An individual’s genetic endowment, moreover, did not of itself ‘suffice to produce “whole” human beings’. Even those with a good genetic inheritance required a ‘healthy environment’. This embraced factors such as economic opportunities and the ‘psychological and moral atmosphere’. Only then could an individual attain the ‘full mental and physical stature of a “whole” adult’ potentially available to all human beings. Crucially, though, so entangled were the ‘factors of “nature” and “nurture” of which each human being is the end-product’, and so ‘scanty still’ was knowledge of human genetics, ‘that no eugenist can afford to neglect the study of environmental factors – especially of social and economic conditions’. The authors examined the evidence of various social and health surveys. They concluded that while on one level social progress had taken place, the poorest in society were ‘relatively worse off to-day than forty years ago’. The ‘flight from parenthood’, and its implications for the size and structure of future populations, were likewise noted.8 All these were ideas which Titmuss had been propagating since the 1930s.
Three particular points stand out here. First, the notion that eugenicists should take account of environmental factors was provocative, for this was exactly what the movement’s conservatives had argued against from the outset. That they still had influence was indicated by, for example, the Eugenics Society’s debate over the Beveridge Report. Here, Titmuss took other speakers to task for focusing on a tiny minority of the population, the so-called ‘social problem group’, and neglecting the bulk of the population who would benefit by Beveridge’s proposals.9 Titmuss and Lafitte must therefore be seen as part of what Bland and Hall describe as an influential grouping within the Society, ‘growing throughout the 1930s under Blacker’s tenure as general secretary’, which constituted a ‘liberal/leftist progressive tendency’. This group saw eugenics as part of a ‘wider vision of a scientific approach to the management of society as a whole’.10 It is, in this context, likewise notable that Titmuss and Lafitte emphasised the moral underpinnings of their ideas.
Second, the emphasis on the ‘whole’ and ‘wholeness’ deserves comment, given its prominence in the article. It further reflects Titmuss’s adherence to a holistic, organic view of society which we have encountered on various occasions. The sort of holistic standpoint which Titmuss and Lafitte expressed was thus another example of the participation by such social commentators in a broader intellectual movement seeking to critique the perceived problems of modernity. For those on the progressive left, organic metaphors might be employed to ‘focus on self-regulating equilibrium and solidarity’ among society’s constituent parts in order to ‘justify gradualism and piecemeal government interventions in social life’.11 As we saw in the last chapter, the wartime ‘solidarity’ of the British people was central to Problems of Social Policy, and to Titmuss’s aspirations for post-war society.
Third, there is the point about ‘total warfare’. By the time of the article’s publication, Britain had seen off the initial German threat. More than this, though, the Nazi regime had a few months earlier launched its assault on the Soviet Union, and the barbarity of the war on the Eastern Front was already evident. Small wonder that Titmuss and Lafitte distinguished sharply between what they meant by ‘eugenics’ and the immorality of the Nazi regime. Even more recently, Japan had attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, followed by its successful assault on the British base at Singapore. So the war spread to the Far East, with Hitler making the conflict truly global by declaring war on America.
Titmuss also wrote more specifically on population issues. In an April 1942 piece on the birth rate, he concluded that underneath the existing data there was a ‘serious and continuous fall in reproduction’, and that the ‘loss in unborn casualties to the end of 1941 exceeds by 100 per cent the number of civilians killed by enemy action from the air’.12 Titmuss returned to the subject the following year. Here he acknowledged an upward trend, something unexpected given ‘the known effects of previous wars on fertility’. But the rate had certainly fallen from 1939 to the end of 1941, potentially leading a decline to ‘an abnormally low level’. It might be assumed that this recent upswing would give Titmuss cause for hope, although this would have dented his previously unshakeable population pessimism. Not so. He instead finished his article by posing two questions. Did the upswing ‘herald a permanent change? Should we not rather say, after taking account of the remarkable combination of favourable influences, that the time of reproduction, which has been receding for over sixty years, has not yet turned?’13 Demographic gloom remained the order of the day. Titmuss also continued to review books for the journal, for instance Clarice Burns’s study of Durham, Infant and Maternal Mortality in Relation to Size of Family and Rapidity of Breeding. He found this flawed, especially on the impact of social factors, a subject close to his own heart, but ‘otherwise valuable’.14
As well as editorialising, writing, and reviewing for Eugenics Review, Titmuss contributed to Eugenics Society meetings. The following example illustrates this point and, once again, his wartime preoccupations. In autumn 1943 Titmuss received a letter from Blacker, now back from the army, working for the Ministry of Health, and soon to publish an important report on mental health services. Blacker was having problems organising the Members’ Meeting, scheduled for 16 November, and he asked Titmuss if he would be prepared to speak, possibly drawing on his recently published Birth, Poverty and Wealth. He would be grateful for anything Titmuss could do, as it was ‘not easy to get this Society going again properly’.15 Titmuss obliged. He delivered his talk, ‘Social Environment and Eugenics’, to the meeting chaired by Horder, with an abstract released to the press.16 And, as requested by Blacker, Titmuss’s address was duly published in Eugenics Review.
Titmuss did draw on his recent publication, and also took the opportunity to give a historical account of the development of eugenics, and to use this to stress the importance of environment. He started by addressing the legacy of Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, founder of eugenics and strict hereditarian.17 Titmuss argued that it would be wrong to condemn Galton’s hereditarian analysis without understanding the context in which it was formulated. By the same token, however, those who held ‘strongly to-day to the Galtonian viewpoint’ were ‘equally unjustified because they refuse to evaluate the social history of the last fifty years and because they ignore the immense advances made by the social sciences’. No doubt Titmuss counted himself, not unreasonably, as a contributor to social scientific knowledge. Despite a recent volume by Horder on ‘obscurantism’, there were still ‘too many obscurantists about’. Titmuss was clearly in no mood to pander to the Eugenics Society’s traditionalist and, as he saw it, reactionary elements. But he did not entirely dismiss hereditarian ideas. In a concluding passage which embraced a number of his concerns, Titmuss argued that if
we wish to reap a richer harvest – in terms of quality – in the future, when the quantity of our population will be declining, then it is for us not to be content only with weeding out the demonstrably unfit; we must look equally to the improvement of the social environment.18
So in a situation of declining population, a central tenet of Titmuss’s beliefs at this point, the ‘demonstrably unfit’ needed ‘weeding out’. Titmuss gave no indication of who these might be, and who might make decisions about them, on one level a classic example of traditional eugenicist value judgement. On another, though, the need to improve the social environment was unequivocally reasserted.
Many of these issues were addressed in Birth, Poverty and Wealth: A Study of Infant Mortality, which came out in 1943. Prior to publication, Titmuss circulated a draft to leading Eugenics Society members Blacker, Newfield, and Byrom Bramwell, chair of council, and possibly others. In a letter to Bramwell, Blacker remarked of Titmuss’s manuscript that he had been impressed with its argument, and its presentation of statistical material. He agreed with Bramwell, who clearly had also read and commented on the draft, that ‘political’ commentary should be reduced, as the ‘left-wing humanitarians and professional idealists will provide as much of that as we are likely to want’. On the same day, Blacker also wrote to Newfield, noting that the book was ‘original and important’, that he approved of the Society’s financial support, and equally of the decision to keep this quiet for the moment. ‘You and I’, he continued, ‘think that it would be a eugenically desirable thing to reduce or abolish the gradient of inequality.’ But this would not be the view of the older generation, still represented on the council.19 Newfield also provided the book’s introduction. Editor of Eugenics Review from the early 1930s, Newfield was reform minded, described himself as a ‘liberal socialist’, and sought to transform the Review from a journal speaking to the converted to one which embraced debates on issues such as birth control.20 Newfield duly praised Titmuss’s diligence, and suggested that the chances of survival, and healthy subsequent development, for any new-born child depended ‘of course on his congenital equipment’. But he immediately added the important rider, ‘but only in part’. To a ‘very large measure’ survival and development relied, too, on ‘such external influences as the wealth of his parents and their capacity to take advantage of the medical knowledge and social services available for his welfare’.21
In his acknowledgements, Titmuss thanked Morris, Newfield, and the psychiatrist and Society member Aubrey Lewis for their input. He also thanked the Leverhulme Trust and the Council of the Eugenics Society for the grants they had awarded, while stressing that these bodies, and his colleagues, were not ‘in any way committed to my conclusions. For these and for the collation of the data from which they are derived I take the full responsibility myself’.22 Titmuss was being cautious here as he knew, as Blacker had suggested to Newfield, that his arguments would not appeal to more ‘traditional’ eugenicists for whom heredity was all. The Society grant was, meanwhile, effectively a subsidy to the book’s publishers, Hamish Hamilton. Blacker grumbled to Titmuss that the Eugenics Society had not received any review copies of his work, and that ‘our subsidy of £100 was, in the event, a gift to HH’. All in all, the publishers had shown ‘either carelessness or discourtesy to the society’.23 In fact, and as Blacker almost certainly knew, having such a work published without some form of subvention would have been difficult, especially in wartime.
So what arguments did Titmuss put forward? In a sense, the title says it all. Infant mortality was now, as it always had been, ‘a broad reflection of the degree of civilisation attained by any given community’. Carefully laying out his data, Titmuss then addressed the view that extreme contrasts in infant mortality were the ‘outward and inevitable expression of a defective genetic constitution’. The evidence did not support this analysis, however, and so ‘we are left with environment, in the widest sense of the term, as the greater determinant’ of differential rates. Such an approach was backed up by, for example, recent advances in the social and medical sciences. Titmuss conceded that Britain’s infant mortality rate had declined, but noted, too, that it had done so to a much greater extent in other countries, such as Holland. Indeed the relatively poor data for Scotland was ‘sufficiently disturbing to warrant a full-length study’, with Glasgow singled out as a city which had performed extremely badly when compared to, among others, Chicago and Oslo. As to what caused all this, inequalities of income and wealth were the culprits. Not only were the poor more vulnerable to infant mortality, the situation had actually worsened, again a recurring theme in his work. For Titmuss, the ‘inescapable lesson’ of his study was that the ‘infants of the poor are relatively worse off to-day than they were before the 1914 war’. British society was thus, notwithstanding increased social service expenditure, ‘further away from the goal of equalised health than we were thirty years ago’. Was it, therefore, too much to suggest that ‘if the gradient of economic inequality had become gentler with the years, a statistical study of infant mortality would have yielded results very different from those recorded in this book?’.24 Blacker’s observation about how this would be received by more conventional eugenicists is easy to understand in the light of such arguments.
For such traditionalists there was, though, to be no respite. Reviewing the book in Eugenics Review, R.R. Kuczynski told its readers that it was a ‘brilliant study of infant mortality’. Summarising Titmuss’s work, Kuczynski noted the importance of social class, that the situation had actually deteriorated over the past few decades, and that other countries had performed better – here he cited the author’s comparison of Glasgow with other cities. So it was ‘very much to be desired that the conclusions arrived at by Mr Titmuss be universally known’. Parliament, and the general public, were being ‘spoon-fed with complacent statements about the allegedly extraordinary decrease in our infant mortality rate’, without acknowledgement of how much better results had been achieved elsewhere.25 The notice in The Times, meanwhile, was largely descriptive but broadly sympathetic, notably remarking that Titmuss’s findings were in ‘complete disagreement’ with Galton’s prioritising of nature over nurture.26 Kuczynski’s brother, Jürgen, was clearly also a fan. In his capacity as chair of a branch of the Association of Scientific Workers, he suggested a talk by Titmuss on the subject of his book. As the branch secretary told Titmuss, a large proportion of his membership was ‘drawn from the medical and allied sciences, and we feel sure that they would especially welcome the opportunity of taking part in the proposed meeting’.27 It is not clear whether Titmuss did talk to this body, his employment as a civil servant possibly preventing him from doing so, but the invitation indicates the sort of impact the book was having. His old political ally Richard Acland, meanwhile, wrote to ‘congratulate you on the amazing reviews you are getting for your book’ while conceding that he had not actually read it himself, a common enough fate for academic authors.28
Just how contentious the whole field of eugenics could be, though, is illustrated by Lancelot Hogben’s review. Hogben was a biologist who had been, at one point, Professor of Social Biology at the LSE, later becoming first editor of the British Journal of Social Medicine. He was famously combative, politically on the left, and notably hostile to eugenics on both methodological and social grounds.29 Hogben had, in addition, been one of the early, non-Eugenics Society, members of the PIC.30 In his review, in the leading science journal Nature, Hogben attacked Galton, and his modern-day followers. He berated the ‘combination of naivete and nonsense’ uttered by ‘reputedly competent men of science’ regarding the supposed predominance of nature over nurture. Such nonsense was ‘transparently belied’ by work on human nutrition and, in Titmuss’s case, on mortality data. Titmuss had made accessible in a ‘readable narrative facts too apt to remain buried in census volumes on the shelves of libraries’. His book was, therefore, ‘a refreshing indication that there is a rising generation of statisticians and social biologists’ who had ‘thought their way through the luxuriant growth of misconceptions which Galton’s generation planted and Pearson’s followers watered’. Titmuss’s work was ‘temperate and stimulating, lucid and well-documented’. He had raised problems which urgently needed addressing ‘above the fog of political indignation to the level of a factual analysis of human needs and human knowledge available for implementing their satisfaction’. As such, the book deserved ‘a wide circulation among those who cherish what Bacon called the true and rightful goal of science’.31
In private at least, Titmuss must have been delighted with such a glowing notice, in an important journal, from such a high-profile scientist. The Eugenics Society was less impressed. In an editorial in Eugenics Review, Newfield acknowledged the positive aspects of Hogben’s review. All such praise was ‘well merited’, and it was gratifying that it was being used in material advertising the book. Nonetheless, Hogben had not only commended Titmuss, he had also, and not for the first time, launched his familiar attack on Galton. Consequently, Horder and Blacker had, on behalf of the Eugenics Society, written to the editor of Nature suggesting that Hogben was preoccupied with what eugenicists were saying 30 years earlier. Nor had it been acknowledged that Titmuss had been a member of the Society’s council for a number of years, had acted as editor of Eugenics Review, and that ‘the publication of his book was made possible by a grant from the Society – a fact clearly acknowledged by the author in his preface’. Nature was, therefore, responsible for a false impression being created and, thereby, for its refutation. The letter, though, was not published on the basis that, as far as far as Nature was concerned, its content would serve no ‘useful purpose’.32 If nothing else, this episode illustrates Hogben’s ability to get under people’s skins and, by the same token, the Eugenics Society’s sensitivity to criticism concerning the nature/nurture debate.
The Population Investigation Committee
Titmuss was far from being alone in his concerns about population, and population health. A Royal Commission on Population was set up in 1944 by the coalition government’s Home Secretary, and former Labour leader of the LCC, Herbert Morrison, reporting in 1948. When Titmuss joined the PIC, in 1943, he told fellow member R.R. Kuczynski that he had recently been called to see Morrison’s private secretary, as ‘Herbert is going to make a speech about the birth rate’.33 This summons is yet another indicator of Titmuss’s assumed authority in the field, although he was also, of course, by this point a government employee. Among the Royal Commission members well known to Titmuss were Carr-Saunders, while witnesses included Blacker, Hubback, Glass, and Cyril Bibby, a regular contributor to Eugenics Review.34 A quarter of a century later, Bibby was to send Titmuss a letter of support during ‘The Troubles’ at the LSE. As Pat Thane notes, the Commission’s Report admitted concern about the birth rate, and recommended the expansion of certain welfare benefits and services. Ultimately, though, it ‘expressed some lasting fears but offered no solutions’.35 In any event, the post-war ‘baby boom’ was to resolve at least the birth rate issue.
The Population Investigation Committee was set up jointly by the Eugenics Society and PEP in the mid-1930s, yet another manifestation of contemporary concern about population issues. After the war, it was absorbed by the LSE, and founded the journal Population Studies. The latter had Glass as its editor, and an advisory board on which Titmuss sat along with, among others, Kuczynski and T.H. Marshall.36 At various points the PIC received funding not only from the Eugenics Society, but also from the Carnegie Corporation and the Nuffield Foundation.37 As its longstanding chair, Carr-Saunders, noted around the time of the committee’s creation, the Eugenics Society had been moved to set it up by ‘the fact that the population position in this country now presents, both from the quantitative and qualitative points of view, very serious and urgent problems’.38 As Chris Renwick points out, Carr-Saunders was a key figure in the 1930s as a social scientist, and sought to promote a reform-oriented eugenics, so edging it away from proposals associated with ‘negative’ eugenics such as sterilisation.39 His position as chair was, therefore, crucial. Among the early members of the committee were Marshall, Blacker, Hubback, and Huxley.40 The PIC’s activities were curtailed on the outbreak of war before being revived in 1943. This revival was, as Eugenics Review reported, in part prompted by Titmuss’s agitation on the Eugenics Society’s council in 1942, and facilitated by Blacker’s return from the RAMC. The Eugenics Society also granted £500 per annum for two years in support of the PIC’s activities.41
Titmuss, although not a member of this body until its reconstitution in 1943, when he was ‘elected by unanimous consent’, was nonetheless interested in its work from the outset, known to a number of its members, and prepared to send it suggestions for research. For example, in 1940 he reviewed Leybourne and White’s Education and the Birth Rate, a book resulting from two years of ‘intensive research sponsored by the Population Investigation Committee’ which brought together ‘for the first time a wealth of social statistics relating to the structure of the educational system in this country in its bearing upon family size’. One key finding was that there existed ‘enormous hidden reserves of intellectual capacity … among the children of the 60 per cent of income earners who receive on the average less than 60s a week’. As matters presently stood, such children could not realise their potential, something which was even more detrimental to society when it was acknowledged that this group would constitute ‘the bulk of our future population’. So it was in the 90 per cent of children currently attending state-run elementary schools that the ‘national problems of quantity and quality lie’.42 Educational inequality, and the unused intellect of working class children, were ideas which Titmuss was to continue to pursue.
Also the early 1940s, it was noted that ‘Mr R.M. Titmuss, while not a member of the Committee’, had written that there were ‘two short-term pieces of work which the Committee might investigate’ – the incidence of first births, classified by factors such as regional and class differences, and problems of maternity in wartime.43 At the meeting at which he was admitted to membership, Titmuss argued that there was reason to believe that the policies now being considered by the Ministry of Health for post-war housing ‘paid insufficient attention to demographic problems, in particular provision for large families’. After discussion, a housing subcommittee was duly formed consisting of Horder, Hubback, Glass, and Titmuss.44 Titmuss’s concern with housing and family size was not new. In his 1941 piece for Town and Country Planning, discussed in Chapter 5, he had argued the need for future housing plans to take family size into account.
Titmuss began to play an active part in the PIC, especially on some of its committees. For instance, he sat on the General Purposes Sub-Committee which, in July 1943, set up another subcommittee, on maternity services and child welfare. Members included Titmuss, Glass, Hubback, Lafitte, and Blacker.45 At its first meeting, it was agreed that its work should take place in two phases: first, a short-term investigation to establish the facts about existing services, and, second, a more comprehensive survey, potentially to be used as the basis of recommendations for post-war reconstruction. Titmuss and Lafitte were given the task of preparing a draft statement.46 A few months later it was agreed that the pre-war ‘Programme of Future Research’ should be updated and include references to housing, maternity provision, and child welfare. Titmuss, along with Glass and Kuczynski, was charged with this redrafting, although most of the work seems to have been done by Glass.47 These three were also initially asked to prepare a memorandum on the ‘Reform of Vital Statistics’, to be submitted to the Royal Commission on Population, although this was not in fact used as Carr-Saunders, Glass, and Kuczynski were to be members of the Royal Commission’s Statistics Committee.48 Nonetheless, his early involvement does remind us of Titmuss’s lifelong concern over the quality of official data. His employment as a civil servant, on the other hand, no doubt curtailed any more public activities on the PIC’s behalf.
One notable PIC initiative was the formation of a committee, jointly with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, to survey maternity services. The enquiry was funded by grants from the National Birthday Trust Fund, set up in 1928 to tackle problems of maternal mortality, and the Nuffield Foundation. As the subtitle of the published report makes clear, the focus was very much to be on the ‘Social and Economic Aspects of Pregnancy and Childbirth’.49 This was a sign of the times, reflecting the analyses of commentators such as Titmuss, and contemporary developments in social medicine. The investigation was chaired by Professor James Young, a leading figure in obstetrics and gynaecology, and included Titmuss, Blacker, Glass, and Lady Rhys Williams.50 Rhys Williams had been a founder member of the National Birthday Trust Fund, was a prominent member of the Economic Research Council, a leading advocate of improvements in maternity services, and, in the early part of the Second World War, had published on issues close to Titmuss’s heart, notably family allowances. She was active in the Liberal Party, as was Titmuss until the early 1940s. Oakley points out that the two had corresponded prior to the war on issues around infant mortality, and that Rhys Williams had been impressed by Titmuss’s work.51
Titmuss did a considerable amount of reading, and statistical commentary, on various drafts of the report, eventually published in 1948. For example, in autumn 1947 he acknowledged the receipt of five draft chapters, and asked of his correspondent that he be allowed to retain copies as these would be ‘extremely useful to me as a member of the Midwifery Working Party’.52 This was a reference to the Working Party set up by the Ministry of Health and the Scottish Office to look into the recruitment and training of midwives. Titmuss had been engaged as a representative of the Cabinet Office, and the Working Party, which was chaired by Mary Stocks (later a prominent figure on BBC radio, and a biographer of Eleanor Rathbone), also included Dr Albertine Winner from the Ministry of Health, someone with whom Titmuss enjoyed a long and friendly relationship, and presumably known to him already.53 The more general point is that Titmuss was, by this point, clearly identified as an authority on issues around childbirth, and it is notable that, in his application to the LSE, he drew attention to his Working Party membership.
Titmuss played an active part in the Eugenics Society, and its offshoot the PIC, throughout the war. As before 1939, he was determined to promote a version of eugenics which prioritised nurture over nature, and to address issues of population health. His commitment to the Society was reciprocated by its support for Birth, Poverty and Wealth, a work which focused especially on infant mortality. While not saying anything which Titmuss had not said before, it nonetheless consolidated his views, and should be seen more broadly as a further contribution to ‘progressive opinion’, and proposals for post-war reconstruction. Importantly, at least for Titmuss, it was well received. The next chapter examines further aspects of his media profile.
Notes
1‘Annual Report, 1939–40’, Eugenics Review, 32, 1, 1940, p 32.
2EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.33, letter, 18 September 1939, RMT to Ursula Grant-Duff.
3‘Notes of the Quarter’, Eugenics Review, 32, 2, 1940, pp 47–8.
4‘Eugenics Society: Annual Meeting and Election of Officers and Council’, Eugenics Review, 37, 2, 1945, p 73.
5‘Annual Report, 1941–2’, Eugenics Review, 34, 1, 1942, p 40.
6‘Notes of the Quarter’, Eugenics Review, 33, 4, 1942, pp 99–105.
7‘Notes of the Quarter’, Eugenics Review, 34, 1, 1942, pp 3–9.
8R.M. Titmuss and F. Lafitte, ‘Eugenics and Poverty’, Eugenics Review, 33, 4, 1942, pp 106–12 (emphasis in the original).
9‘Eugenic Aspects of Social Security’, Eugenics Review, 36, 1, 1944, pp 17–24.
10L. Bland and L. Hall, ‘Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole’, in A. Bashford and P. Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p 218.
11C. Lawrence and G. Weisz, ‘Medical Holism: The Context’, in C. Lawrence and G. Weisz (eds), Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–1950, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, p 7.
12R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Effect of the War on the Birth Rate’, Eugenics Review, 34, 1, 1942, p 12.
13R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Significance of Recent Birth-Rate Figures’, Eugenics Review, 35, 2, 1943, pp 36–8.
14R.M. Titmuss, ‘Infant and Maternal Mortality’, Eugenics Review, 34, 3, 1942, pp 85–90.
15EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 20 October 1943, Blacker to RMT.
16EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, flyer, ‘The Eugenics Society, Members’ Meeting Tuesday November 16th 1943’ and ‘For the Press: Abstract of Paper’, 11 November 1943.
17R.A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth Century Britain, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, pp 18ff.
18R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Social Environment and Eugenics’, Eugenics Review, 36, 2, 1944, pp 56, 57.
19EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 30 June 1942, Blacker to Bramwell; and letter, 30 June 1942, Blacker to Newfield.
20Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, p 201.
21Titmuss, Birth, Poverty and Wealth, p 5.
22Ibid, pp 9–10.
23EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 20 October 1943, Blacker to RMT.
24Titmuss, Birth, Poverty and Wealth, pp 11, 59–60, 62, 88, 90 (emphasis in the original), 99, 100–101.
25R.R. Kuczynski, ‘Infant Mortality’, Eugenics Review, 35, 3–4, 1943, pp 86–7.
26Medical Correspondent, ‘The Infant Mortality Rate’, The Times, 29 September 1943, p 5.
27TITMUSS/7/51, letter, 1 December 1943, E.P. Whelan, Branch Secretary, Central London Branch of the Association of Scientific Workers, to RMT.
28TITMUSS/8/5, letter, 15 October 1943, Acland to RMT.
29R. Bud, ‘Lancelot Thomas Hogben’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
30PIC, SA/PIC/A/1/1, the document by C.P. Blacker, ‘Investigation of Medical Causes of Infertility’, nd, but presumably 1937/38 lists, at p 1, PIC members.
31L. Hogben, ‘Infant Mortality’, Nature, 152, 3860, 23 October 1943, pp 460–61. Karl Pearson was an important statistician and central to the propagation of Galton’s views.
32‘Notes of the Quarter’, Eugenics Review, 35, 3/4, 1943, pp 54–5.
33TITMUSS/7/51, letter, 1 May 1943, RMT to Dr Kuczynski.
34Report of the Royal Commission on Population, Cmd.7695, London, HMSO, 1949.
35P. Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p 209.
36TITMUSS/4/546, Minutes of a Meeting of the General Purposes Committee, PIC, 12 June 1946 where it was agreed to set up the journal, and noted that the LSE would provide accommodation for PIC personnel.
37E. Grebenik, ‘Demographic Research in Britain, 1936–1986’, Population Studies, 45, S1, 1991, pp 3–30; and C. Renwick, ‘Eugenics, Population Research, and Social Mobility Studies in Early and Mid-Twentieth Century Britain’, The Historical Journal, 59, 3, 2016, pp 845–67.
38PIC, SA/PIC/A/1/1, A.M. Carr-Saunders, ‘Memorandum on the Work of the Population Investigation Committee’, undated but 1937/38, p 1.
39Renwick, ‘Eugenics’, p 855ff.
40PIC, SA/PIC/A/1/1, C.P. Blacker, ‘Investigation of Medical Causes of Infertility’, undated but 1937/38, p 1; and SA/PIC/A/1/2/2, ‘Application to the Nuffield Foundation, 9 April 1945’, p 1 and attachment.
41‘Annual Report 1939–40’, Eugenics Review, 32, 1, 1940, p 32; and ‘Notes of the Quarter’, Eugenics Review, 35, 1, 1943, pp 4–7.
42R.M. Titmuss, Eugenics Review, 32, 2, 1940, pp 61–2.
43PIC, SA/PIC/A/1/1, ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the General Purposes Sub-Committee of the Population Investigation Committee, 16 February 1943, p 2; and Memorandum, ‘Summary of Researches Proposed’, undated but 1942 (?).
44PIC, SA/PIC/A/1/1, ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the General Purposes Sub-Committee of the Population Investigation Committee, 16 February 1943, p 2.
45TITMUSS/4/543, Minutes of a Meeting of the General Purposes Sub-Committee, 1 July 1943, p 2.
46PIC, SA/PIC/A/1/2/2, Minutes of a Meeting of the Sub-Committee on Maternity and Child Welfare, 26 July 1943, p 1.
47PIC, SA/PIC/A/1/2/1, Minutes of a Meeting of the General Purposes Sub-Committee of the Population Investigation Committee, 24 September 1943.
48PIC, SA/PIC/A/1/2/1, Minutes of a Meeting of the General Purposes Sub-Committee of the Population Investigation Committee, 5 May 1944; and Minutes of a Meeting of the Population Investigation Committee, 4 December 1944.
49Maternity in Great Britain: A Survey of Social and Economic Aspects of Pregnancy and Childbirth Undertaken by a Joint Committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Population Investigation Committee, London, Oxford University Press, 1948, p v.
50TITMUSS/4/544, ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the Joint Committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Population Investigation Committee Regarding and Inquiry into the Maternity Services, 27th June 1945’.
51W. Nicoll, ‘Dame Juliet Evangeline Rhys Williams’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004; Oakley, Man and Wife, p 111.
52TITMUSS/4/544, letter, 29 October 1947, RMT to Dr J.W.B. Douglas, Director of the survey.
53‘Shortage of Midwives’, The Times, 21 April 1947, p 8.
