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8

Titmuss and the media in the 1940s: a growing reputation

Introduction

We saw in Chapter 3 that, in the 1930s, Titmuss had employed a literary agent. This relationship does not appear to have survived the outbreak of war, with Titmuss now often contacting editors and journals directly. And such was Titmuss’s growing reputation, at least in the first half of the 1940s primarily regarding population, that he began to be approached by publishers themselves, as well as by various organisations. He was also politically active down to the early 1940s, and although his employment as a civil servant curtailed his public activities, he continued to be in demand, especially as plans for post-war social reconstruction gathered momentum. This reinforces the previously noted idea of Titmuss seeking to spread his ideas to as wide and diverse an audience as possible, so promoting his ‘progressive’ views. The 1940s were important, too, in providing the further platform of radio broadcasts. As always, it is difficult not to be impressed by Titmuss’s work-rate. Such outputs, and again this was to feature throughout his career, often provided a handsome financial supplement to his salary. It would be impossible, and not especially enlightening, to list all of Titmuss’s contributions to various media during the period under consideration. So here we look at some of his more significant, or interesting, interventions. The aim is less to discuss their content in detail. Rather, it is to give a sense of the range of Titmuss’s engagement.

Writing and lecturing

Illustrating a number of these points, in November 1943 the publisher Victor Gollancz, founder of the Left Book Club which operated as a ‘sort of reading “Popular Front”’, asked Titmuss for a contribution on population and poverty to the journal Left News. Titmuss agreed, on condition that the piece be unsigned, given that he was now a civil servant. He was paid two guineas per 1,000 words for ‘The Casualties of Inequality’, in which he referred to himself in the third person, and cited Birth, Poverty and Wealth.¹ A guinea was, in pre-decimalisation currency, one pound and one shilling, while the average wage at this time was between six and seven pounds per week. Titmuss’s fee was, therefore, not insubstantial. As this episode also illustrates, it is clear that Titmuss’s ideas were valued by those on the political left, perhaps reinforcing the idea of a shift away from the Liberal Party, although not necessarily liberalism. In late 1942, he was invited by Elizabeth Bunbury, a leading member of the Socialist Medical Association (SMA), the group of left-wing doctors affiliated to the Labour Party to which his friend Jerry Morris was close, to lecture on ‘public health’ to medical students. By this point, Titmuss and Morris were beginning to contribute to the advance of social medicine, a discipline which sought to develop new approaches to preventive medicine. Titmuss felt obliged to turn this request down since his attachment to the Cabinet Office made it ‘very difficult for me to address an open meeting on the subject of public health’.² Although nothing came of this particular invitation, at least immediately, what is notable here was that Titmuss was asked in the first place, and the implication that he might be prepared to talk to closed meetings. In the future, he was to work closely with the SMA on issues such as social work and health. Titmuss’s assumed expertise in public health is likewise noteworthy.

In 1943, meanwhile, the Association for Education in Citizenship, which Eva Hubback had co-founded in 1934, published his Problems of Population in the series ‘Handbooks for Discussion Groups’. The series was designed, by way of both descriptive material and the questions posed by the author, to stimulate debate in groups assembled to engage with what the Association saw as significant contemporary issues. The generic title of the series was ‘Unless We Plan Now’, and other contributors included Morris on health. As the organisation’s name suggests, it was yet another of those bodies promoting ‘progressive’, or ‘middle’, opinion in the 1930s in the face of widespread socioeconomic disruption and international tension. By the 1940s, though, the focus was firmly on post-war reconstruction.

Titmuss’s contribution to the series was very similar in content and presentation to a second pamphlet discussed immediately below, so just a couple of points from the first publication are worth highlighting. Titmuss started off by claiming that people often asked why so much fuss was made about population, remarking further that it did not really concern them. But that was ‘precisely where they are wrong’. He then went on to explain why this was so, before moving on more specifically, and in now familiar terms, to the issue of parenthood. In Western societies, ‘parents have deliberately decided to limit their families through continence, by employing birth control and by marrying late in life’. This, and associated trends, had some ‘unpleasant consequences’, potentially including increased unemployment. Family allowances would, under the right circumstances, help, but other issues also had to be addressed. What was the impact, for example, of the ‘social and economic atmosphere’ on possible parenthood? In the last resort, then, this was a problem for ‘parents both actual and potential’, and was thus ‘one for the people to decide’. It was ‘they who give the community its future citizens, it is for them to decide what form of society – whether their own or some form not yet in existence – will encourage and not deter parenthood’.³ His qualifications notwithstanding, Titmuss’s support for family allowances should be seen in the broader context of such measures rising up the domestic political agenda, as social reconstruction became the order of the day. Family allowances continued to be promoted by his friend Eleanor Rathbone, their implementation was one of the ‘Assumptions’ of the Beveridge Report, and the Labour Party and the previously reluctant Trades Union Congress were increasingly supportive.⁴

Also in 1943 came an important opportunity to influence a much larger, and captive, audience when Titmuss was approached by Major R.L. Wakeford of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA). This body had been set up in 1941 to provide compulsory educational instruction about contemporary issues for rank and file soldiers. Central to its programme was the series Current Affairs, which aimed ‘to provide a background of knowledge against which events can be assessed and understood’. Publications in the series, written by experts commissioned by ABCA, were thus designed to stimulate discussion groups consisting of troops, and led by officers. By the time of Titmuss’s contribution, the series was very much geared to post-war reconstruction, something which the army’s internal enquiries had revealed as of considerable interest to its personnel. The educational benefits were also seen to extend even wider given that, as one senior general put it, ‘millions of men and women [in the army] were ill-educated’, and there was thus an obligation to return them to civilian life educationally better equipped.⁵

The troops’ interest in post-war reconstruction, and the centrality of education, matched the mood on the Home Front, especially since the 1942 publication of the Beveridge Report. One early indicator of the creation of what was to become the ‘welfare state’ was the passage of the 1944 Education Act. This had achieved all-party support, significantly expanded educational provision and associated welfare measures such as school meals, and was a piece of legislation to which Titmuss’s inspiration, Tawney, had made a notable contribution.⁶ Eva Hubback’s daughter, meanwhile, suggests that the army’s approach to what was effectively another form of education for citizenship was strongly influenced by the ‘Handbooks for Discussion’ series.⁷ The bureau was to be blamed, retrospectively, by the Conservative Party for ‘radicalising’ the army, so contributing to Labour’s landslide win at the 1945 general election.⁸

Wakeford explained to Titmuss that what he wanted was a pamphlet on the ‘population problem’ which officers could use in their group discussions.⁹ The result was Fewer Children: The Population Problem, which came out in December 1944, that is a few months after the Normandy landings, and hence as the Second World War was entering its final phase. Unsurprisingly, this publication revisited a number of concerns about which Titmuss had been exercised for some time, and would continue to be so for some time to come. The editorial introduction, aimed at the officers charged with leading discussion and melodramatically entitled ‘The Birth of a Nation: A Problem that Governs All Others’, noted that Titmuss’s contribution was about a subject which was ‘fundamental. It is about our population’. Essentially, the British population was ‘not replacing itself and is, therefore, heading towards extinction’, and so ‘Titmuss shows in his article how certain changes are already inevitably due within the lifetime of most of us in the Army today’. This was, then, ‘a cause for alarm but not despondency’. The anonymous author had clearly taken Titmuss’s message to heart. Various suggestions were given as to how a discussion might be structured, for example by asking the troops how many children their parents and their grandparents respectively had had. This could then be backed up by use of the illustrations contained in the pamphlet, and transferred to a blackboard.¹⁰

Titmuss himself drew extensively, as might be expected, on his own demographic research and, especially, Parents Revolt, discussed in the next chapter. For instance, he suggested that the population of England and Wales would fall from just under 41 million in 1940 to just over 37 million by 1970, then further still, to just under 20 million, by 2000. Crucially, the proportion of the population under 30 years of age would steadily decrease. All this would be brought about by an ongoing decline in the birth rate. What lay behind this? The pamphlet was, as noted, overtly educational, and designed to stimulate discussion. So Titmuss posed a series of provocative questions. Was ‘mass selfishness the cause of the falling birth rate?’ Did the ‘the majority of married couples only want to have a “good time”’? Had the ‘desire for children, the wish to carry on the family, the demand for a happy family life diminished among modern parents?’ If ‘selfishness’ was not the cause, what was? ‘These’, Titmuss suggested, were ‘points for you to discuss’.¹¹ The way these questions were posed might be seen as channelling discussion in the sort of directions Titmuss himself wanted. We have seen from previous chapters, and will see on many other occasions, that Titmuss was very much of the view that ‘selfishness’, a key component of the ‘acquisitive society’, was at the heart of the matter, in turn a product of the psychological strains induced by contemporary capitalism. His predictions on future population size were, as previously, wildly out.

Nonetheless, taken together these two pamphlets do, once again, illustrate what Titmuss saw as the centrality of the population question, and his belief that this was something with which society had to deal urgently. Family allowances, shortly to be introduced by the outgoing wartime government, were necessary, but not sufficient, to address the problem. More fundamental was the unwillingness of parents to have children, so resulting in ‘unpleasant consequences’, such as the falling birth rate and an ageing population. Ultimately, the underlying issue was selfishness and acquisitiveness – married couples having a ‘good time’ at the expense of starting or expanding their families. Such challenging arguments were consciously constructed to stimulate discussion and debate. Titmuss knew as well as anyone that for many people, married or otherwise, a ‘good time’ had not been their experience in the crisis-ridden 1930s, or during total war in the 1940s. However, his own diagnosis, and prognosis, were clear enough. More broadly, the invitations to contribute to both these series of publications, but especially that of the ABCA, are yet further indicators of his burgeoning reputation.

If Titmuss was active in the printed media, the 1940s also afforded him the opportunity to hone further his public-speaking skills, already well developed by the outbreak of war through participation in bodies such as the Fleet Street Parliament, by addressing a wide variety of audiences. Many of those interviewed for this book spoke of Titmuss’s engaging style when leading discussions or lecturing, and this aspect of his personality, as well as his acknowledged research skills, appears to have led to a number of invitations as a speaker. To show the diversity of his audiences, we take three examples from the mid-1940s. In May 1946 the director of the Royal Navy Current Affairs course wrote thanking him ‘for coming down to speak to us last week and giving us such an instructive talk on Population Problems’. A cheque for two guineas was attached.¹² The text of this talk does not seem to have survived, but there is no reason to assume that Titmuss deviated from his previous stance on this issue. The navy had resisted compulsory discussion groups as held in the army, but in the immediate post-war years put on a number of classes in current affairs and citizenship, and it was presumably to one of these that Titmuss had contributed.¹³ Among other speakers employed to such ends by the navy was someone Titmuss was going to have a lot to do with in later years, the future Labour leader and Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. It is likely, in fact, that by this point they already knew each other given that both worked in wartime Whitehall, Wilson famously for Beveridge.¹⁴

Moving away from talks entirely focused on population issues, Titmuss was on the Historical Association’s list of speakers by the mid-1940s. The Association had been set up in the early twentieth century to support history teaching in schools, and in 1947 Titmuss was thanked for his ‘co-operation in the past’, and asked to confirm the topics on which he was prepared to speak. In addition to population, he proposed the history of the health and social services from the beginning of the nineteenth century.¹⁵ As we saw in Chapter 6, this was a topic in which Titmuss had a strong interest, and further evidence of his historical approach. In the same year, he agreed to speak to the Six Point Group on the subject of ‘Family Equality’. The Group was a small, but high-powered and influential, feminist body seeking full equality in the political, occupational, moral, social, economic, and legal spheres – the six points. It had an important platform in the journal Time and Tide. By the mid-1940s it was led by a number of impressive individuals, including leading SMA activist and Labour MP Edith Summerskill. During the war the organisation had been in touch with the Ministry of Health over issues around evacuation, so it is highly likely that Titmuss knew, or knew of, some of its key players.¹⁶ The Six Point Group, like many at the time, was certainly concerned with what Time and Tide described, in early 1946, as ‘The Problem of the Family’. The solution to this was complicated, but would require ‘positive measures’ to arrest the decline in family size, and these would have ‘fundamental effects on educational, housing, health and taxation policy’.¹⁷ Although, once again, Titmuss’s address does not seem to have survived, such views closely accorded with his own, almost certainly the reason for his invitation. More generally, that Titmuss should receive invitations from such different organisations is, once again, indicative of his growing reputation, and can only have boosted his sense of self. That Titmuss spoke to the Six Point Group was especially noteworthy for, as we shall see, some of his most important lectures in the 1950s were to address, in the title of one of them, ‘The Position of Women’. This, in turn, raises important questions about Titmuss’s more general approach to gender equality, and how this informed, for example, his dispute with LSE social workers in the mid-1950s.

On the air

Titmuss maintained his pre-war strategy of placing articles in a wide range of publications, and of using talks and addresses as platforms to publicise, and test, his views. This mix of activities was to continue for the rest of his life. But what is especially interesting in the 1940s was Titmuss’s burgeoning work for the broadcast media. Titmuss’s engagement with the BBC, at this time a monopoly provider of such media, was something he shared with his future close friend and colleague, Richard Crossman, who worked for the Corporation’s German Service.¹⁸ From around 1941, Richard Weight suggests, there was an increase in BBC output dealing with social issues, especially those to do with social reconstruction. These broadcasts were made by ‘planning experts, doctors, educationalists and church leaders’ who, in turn, were to be the ‘technocrats, philanthropists and bureaucrats’ populating the ‘policy-making committees of the Welfare State and the Planned Economy’. Here they would work alongside voluntary and professional bodies, with the ultimate task of offering policy advice.¹⁹ Titmuss thus needs to be seen in this broader framework, while bearing in mind also the moral, rather than simply technocratic, underpinnings of his work.

In early summer 1942, Titmuss was contacted by the novelist, essayist, and polemicist George Orwell, who between 1941 and 1943 was talks producer at the BBC’s Empire Service India Section. Orwell asked Titmuss if he would consider ‘doing a talk for us in the series which we shall be broadcasting to India during June and July’. The series, called ‘AD 2000’, would deal with India’s future, ‘the idea being that it is an attempt to forecast what is likely to be happening fifty or sixty years hence’. Orwell was looking for someone to discuss India’s population ‘problem’, and Titmuss was ‘much the most suitable person to do it, and you could approach it from whatever angle you liked’. It is not clear whether Titmuss and Orwell knew each other personally, but they certainly had friends and acquaintances in common, for instance the publisher Victor Gollancz.²⁰ The way Orwell formulated his request also implies knowledge of Titmuss’s ideas. Titmuss clearly agreed to Orwell’s suggestion, for around two weeks later Orwell got back to him with thanks for the script he had been sent. It was ‘just the kind of thing I wanted’.²¹ Titmuss was duly commissioned, for a fee of ten guineas, to talk for 20 minutes on the ‘Indian Population Problem’ on a programme to be transmitted on 3 July by the Indian Empire Service.²² The context here is the accelerating, and ultimately successful, demand within India for self-government. More specifically, Titmuss’s talk came just a few months after the catastrophic loss to the British Empire of the base at Singapore which further advanced the nationalist cause across Asia, while posing a military threat to India itself. This was perhaps the lowest point in what John Darwin describes as the ‘Strategic Abyss’ which Britain had been facing since the late 1930s.²³ The potential for a rapid expansion of India’s population, in contrast to the situation in Britain, was a topic to which Titmuss returned on a number of occasions.

A few months later, Titmuss appeared on the BBC Home Service. He had been asked to participate, the fee this time being seven guineas, in a discussion programme entitled ‘Too Few Babies’, to be broadcast in mid-November 1942.²⁴ As the title suggests, the basic premise here was that the British population would face serious decline unless the birth rate improved. In the course of the discussion, Titmuss responded to another participant, a Mrs Norris, who had argued that any such rise could help make ‘the world spiritually whole again’ (she did not specify how this might happen). Titmuss suggested, possibly tongue in cheek, that this raised ‘a new point, which is probably too big to deal with tonight’. But there was general agreement that ‘we cannot hope to induce people to have more children until economic insecurity and the fear of war have been eliminated. We’ve got to have more economic planning to achieve security’. He then addressed the spirituality question more directly, arguing that ‘in another sense we’ve also got to return to higher social values – call them spiritual if you like – less snobbery, less “keeping up with the Jones’s” in every field’.²⁵ Titmuss did not spell out here his critique of the ‘acquisitive society’, but it is clearly implicit in what he said, not least in the (now virtually unused) expression, ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’. Likewise his call for ‘economic planning’ returned to a well-established concern about the consequences of unbridled capitalism, as did the need for ‘higher social values’. This particular programme seems to have evoked quite a reaction. A BBC employee sent Titmuss some letters the Corporation had received, and in response he claimed that he had had ‘many reactions to the broadcast and everyone [sic] of them has been exceptionally favourable’. ‘A number of people whose judgement I respect’, he continued, ‘were all impressed by the content of the discussion and, curiously enough, the delivery – not excepting my own.’ Turning on the charm, he told his correspondent – presumably either the interviewer or the producer – that he attributed this ‘to the careful grooming you gave us all and I think you are to be congratulated on handling such a thorny topic’.²⁶

The following year, Titmuss was again contacted by the BBC, this time by its European Talks Editor, who had been given his name by the Royal Statistical Society. The topic the editor was looking into was the birth rate in the Allied powers (he used the expression ‘United Nations’, coined by President Roosevelt in 1942), as compared to that of the Axis powers. ‘In particular’, he continued, ‘of course, we would like to bring out that Hitler is destroying Germany’s future by once again sacrificing German manpower’.²⁷ As we have seen, this was a topic Titmuss had addressed on a number of occasions, and presumably explains his recommendation by the Royal Statistical Society. The subject, Titmuss responded, was not an easy one to handle in a ‘popular manner’, but he did submit a script which argued that the German armed forces were facing an acute manpower shortage, while suffering huge casualties on the Eastern Front. The population aged between 16 and 24 years was now in decline, and so the ‘seeds sown by the Kaiser and his war lords in 1914’ had at last begun ‘to bear fruit. But this time it is barren fruit’.²⁸ It is not clear if this piece was actually broadcast, although Titmuss did receive four guineas, and was commissioned to do a talk at some future date on the German birth rate.²⁹ The subject was certainly timely, given Germany’s heavy defeat earlier in 1943 at Stalingrad, and the Red Army’s subsequent remorseless advances.