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ОглавлениеTitmuss in the twentieth century
Richard Morris Titmuss was born in October 1907, and died in April 1973. His life thus embraced a period central to British social welfare history. At the time of his birth the reforming Liberal governments of 1906–14 were enacting measures such as old age pensions. In his inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1950, Titmuss acknowledged ‘the great surge forward in legislation for collective help’ in the decade preceding the First World War.1 That conflict was followed by the uncertainties of the inter-war era, the consequences of which informed Titmuss’s early work, and political activities. By the late 1930s, now married to social worker Kathleen (Kay) Caston Miller, he had produced his first published volume, Poverty and Population, which opened with the striking statement that there could be ‘no subject of more fundamental importance to any nation than the physical and mental well-being of its people’.2 Titmuss was, at this point, an active member of the Liberal Party. His research, again mostly on population and population health, continued into the Second World War. But his most significant wartime activity came with his engagement to contribute to the series of official histories of the war on the Home Front. Titmuss’s volume, Problems of Social Policy, was published in 1950, contributed to a life-changing advance in his career, and continues to influence how we perceive wartime Britain. The war also engendered much discussion about post-war social reconstruction, of which Titmuss was a committed advocate, leading him to shift his political allegiance to the Labour Party.
The wartime coalition, and the Labour governments of 1945–51, duly instituted measures which came to be collectively known as the ‘welfare state’. Perhaps most famously, the National Health Service (NHS) was created. Titmuss later described this as ‘one of the most unsordid and civilised actions in the history of health and welfare policy’.3 Nonetheless, he viewed the ‘welfare state’ as unfinished business. The expression itself, moreover, had acquired unwelcome, and inaccurate, connotations. Particularly for the political right, it implied state-provided services aimed primarily at the poor, and which were an economic burden on the rest of society. Titmuss usually put the phrase in inverted commas, a practice followed here, and saw his role as promoting a more positive, more socially just, version of state-sponsored welfare. For Titmuss, social policy required a moral purpose, aimed at promoting social solidarity and cohesion, and at reducing inequalities.
The ‘welfare state’ was central to the post-war consensus which lasted until the early 1970s. This purportedly (it is a matter of debate) saw broad political agreement based on Keynesian economic management, and ‘welfare state’ consolidation and expansion. Consequently, the period has been described as that of the ‘classic welfare state’. The Conservative Party dominated politically, being in office from 1951 to 1964, and again from 1970 to 1974. Partly as a result of the success of Problems of Social Policy, Titmuss was appointed as the first Professor of Social Administration at the LSE, where he remained for the rest of his life. As is often remarked, this appointment was unusual, not least in Titmuss’s lack of formal academic qualifications.
His department had been, prior to his arrival, primarily concerned with training social workers. Titmuss set about developing, indeed creating, what would ultimately be called the field of Social Policy, at first almost single-handedly, and became its pre-eminent figure. Titmuss moved Social Administration away from vocational training, or simply describing the social services. Although he did not neglect such matters, he also sought to promote original research, and to influence policy. This partly explains the eventual abandonment, near the end of Titmuss’s life, of the term ‘Social Administration’, and its replacement by ‘Social Policy’ (although the passing of ‘Social Administration’ was lamented by some).4 The field’s expansion, led by the LSE, further involved the recruitment of individuals who themselves became among its leading figures, for example Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend. The Titmuss group became known, collectively, as the ‘Titmice’. This was not a very good joke, could be used either affectionately or satirically, and the expression will not be employed again (confusingly, Titmuss used it to refer to himself and Kay),5 but it does convey the tight-knit nature of the group around Titmuss, and his leadership role within it.
The eminent sociologist, T.H. Marshall, instrumental in Titmuss’s appointment, acknowledged in his own work on Social Policy his intellectual debt to his colleagues at the LSE, ‘most of whom are now members of the remarkable team headed by Professor Titmuss’.6 In a lecture in 1972, the Cambridge economist, and later Nobel Prize winner, James Meade, expressed his gratitude for the comments of ‘that remarkable triad of professors – Titmuss, Townsend and Abel-Smith – who were responsible for putting (poverty) back into the political arena’.7 More critically, in the mid-1960s Geoffrey Howe, a rising star in the Conservative Party who frequently crossed swords with Titmuss, identified one recent manifestation of the Fabian Society as ‘Prof Titmuss and his insidious circus of disciples at the London School of Economics’. This piece was entitled ‘The Fabian Threat to Freedom’.8 For Howe, and those of like mind, state welfare created dependency, while diminishing individual responsibility and freedom of choice. Nor were critics confined to the political right. The 1960s also saw the rise of the New Left. Primarily an intellectual movement based around re-readings of Marx, the New Left gained some traction in higher education, notably through its journal New Left Review. Ralph Miliband, an LSE colleague of Titmuss’s (although distinctly uncollegial when it came to the Department of Social Administration), wrote in the Review’s first edition of the ‘sickness of Labourism’. The Labour Party had, admittedly, made some moderate gains in the post-war era, but these were the exception, not the rule. What was needed was an actively socialist programme, and Miliband was sceptical about this being formulated by Labour as presently constituted. By such accounts, welfare propped up, rather than challenged, capitalism.9
Titmuss and his circle were at various points highly influential on Labour’s welfare thinking, part of the reason behind Howe’s attack, and Miliband’s disdain. Arthur Seldon of the free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), another long-time Titmuss adversary, remarked in the mid-1990s that while, generally speaking, ‘Ideas Are Not Enough’, nonetheless in the 1960s ‘sociologists’ played a central role in Labour Party policy. He cited the activities of, among others, Abel-Smith and Townsend – however, no doubt deliberately, he declined to mention Titmuss himself.10 More sympathetically, David Donnison, a Titmuss recruit to the LSE in 1956, noted Titmuss’s contribution, on Labour’s behalf, to areas such as social security reform.11 The return of a Labour government in 1964 raised expectations for positive welfare measures. But caution is required here. It has been argued that the Titmuss group was highly influential in shaping Labour’s pensions policy in the mid-1950s, but much less so in the late 1960s, the group’s ongoing close relationship to leading Labour politicians notwithstanding.12 It was perhaps such limitations which made another former colleague, David Piachaud, remark, in an otherwise sympathetic obituary, that in ‘terms of direct political influence Titmuss was not outstanding’.13
Titmuss did not place the various dimensions of his work in separate compartments, and others clearly saw him in this holistic light. In 1960, for instance, he was approached by Kingsley Martin, editor of the left-wing journal New Statesman. Martin told him that Richard Crossman, prominent Labour politician and longstanding Titmuss supporter, had suggested that he ‘might be induced to spend a few evenings trying to work out some unofficial policy on such subjects as education, science and the state and nuclear development’. Other members of the proposed small group were to be the scientist, novelist, and senior civil servant C.P. Snow, and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Patrick Blackett. Martin hoped that Titmuss would join them, commenting that there was a ‘complete absence of serious thinking on the Left’.14 It is unclear whether Titmuss did meet up with the others, but that he was invited to do so is a tribute to the intellectual esteem in which he was held. We can see here, too, the Labour Party seeking to embrace modernisation, a move which culminated in Harold Wilson’s famous praise, the ‘white heat’ of the new ‘scientific revolution’, a phenomenon with which Snow and Blackett were closely associated.15 But it was as an authority on welfare that Titmuss was most well-known, with Crossman describing him, in 1971, as ‘one of the great creative minds of our social services’.16
If Titmuss’s life began at the time of the Edwardian Liberal welfare reforms, and embraced the coming of the ‘welfare state’, what was the situation as it came to an end? By the early 1970s the post-war consensus was under threat. While the ‘welfare state’ had always had its critics, it now faced serious challenges. The IEA’s free-market ideas, to take but one, were gaining ground, and were avidly consumed by Margaret Thatcher, soon to be Conservative Party leader. The era of neo-liberalism was about to commence, something which would have profoundly disturbed Titmuss. On one level, relating an individual life to the events and processes which that life witnessed is a conceit. But using Titmuss’s lifespan as a sort of framing device is, nonetheless, revealing. It is particularly so with regard to the span of his academic career, coinciding as it did with the era of the ‘classic welfare state’.
Titmuss’s contribution to social analysis took various forms. In the case of publications, these ranged from scholarly monographs to short newspaper articles. There were a lot of them. Matthew Hough has identified nearly 200 pieces, conceivably an underestimate.17 The present volume engages with just under 100 published items, not including book reviews or letters to the press, both of which Titmuss also used to bring his ideas to public attention. He was, too, a frequent contributor to radio programmes from the 1940s onwards, and later appeared several times on television. Titmuss was, to put it mildly, keen to get his ideas across. It is important to stress this point. Titmuss was not the sort of social scientist who, for example, conducted interviews or dealt with the ‘clients’ of the ‘welfare state’ face to face. Rather, his research strength lay in the analysis of large volumes of empirical data. The resulting analyses were then to be disseminated as widely as possible, and used to inform policy formation. Such was Titmuss’s dominance of his field up to his death that his ideas are seen as constituting a ‘paradigm’.
To give some flavour of this, we take an article from 1964, revealingly entitled ‘The Limits of the Welfare State’. For Titmuss, ‘neo-classical economics and the private market’ could not deal with social costs deriving from, for instance, the impact of automation on the labour market or, and here he took a distressing contemporary example, the effect of the drug thalidomide. This had been prescribed, without proper testing, to pregnant women in 1963–64, resulting in deformities to their children. It was a central claim of Titmuss’s that the free market (or economic growth itself, for that matter) could not deal adequately with social dislocation, social inequality, and social injustice. As he often did, Titmuss next gave an historical account of how welfare had developed in the capitalist West. He then posed questions such as ‘Has “The Welfare State” abolished poverty, social deprivation and exploitation?’ Some argued precisely this point, especially those social scientists propounding the ‘end of ideology’ – that is, that a consensus on social and economic affairs had been reached in the Western democracies, and that economic growth had eliminated poverty, as manifested by the emergence, by the 1960s, of ‘The Affluent Society’. For Titmuss this was wrong on various counts, not least that it was ‘unhistorical’. In Britain there was growing evidence that income inequality had increased, not decreased, since 1945. It was necessary, therefore, to ‘find imaginative ways and new institutional means of combining humanity in administration with redistributive social justice in the future development of welfare policies’. In order to enable this, society needed ‘different rules domestically to live by; more examples of altruism to look up to’.18
Such a brief summary does scant justice to Titmuss’s arguments. But we can discern some of his principal concerns. These included scepticism about the free market (and, consequently, free-market economists), and the need to locate contemporary social developments in their historical context. Notable, too, is that the advent of the ‘welfare state’ had not, contrary to certain current analyses, solved society’s problems, and indeed that some of these were increasing – notably inequality. And we encounter for the first time in this volume Titmuss’s promotion of ‘altruism’, his belief that, at their best, individuals could care for the wellbeing of strangers, and that this could, and should, be promoted by the state acting on behalf of society as a whole. Social services could encourage such altruistic behaviour if properly constructed, and humanely and flexibly administered. One component of this was that ‘welfare professionals’ should act not in their own interests, but in the interests of those they served. Such issues underpinned Titmuss’s approach to welfare, giving his ideas considerable intellectual strength (as well as certain intellectual weaknesses).
As to his aspirations for his emerging field, Titmuss told an American sociologist he frequently cited, Robert Merton, that ‘in thinking about the subject of social policy research’ he had been stimulated by one of Merton’s papers.19 Published in 1949, this had discussed the extent to which social science could, and should, influence policy. In a passage which may have especially appealed to Titmuss, Merton argued that the ‘higher the social standing of a discipline, the more likely it will be to recruit able talents, the greater its measure of financial support, and the greater its actual accomplishments’.20 By the time of Titmuss’s correspondence with Merton, 1957, he had recruited ‘talents’ such as Abel-Smith, was actively pursuing research funding, and had already made a difference to policy making by way of, most notably, the Guillebaud Committee’s enquiry into NHS finances.
There can be no doubt that Titmuss was viewed, at least on the liberal left, as pre-eminent in analyses of the ‘welfare state’. This was further recognised in obituaries, and subsequent recollections. Marshall claimed that Titmuss had ‘exerted an influence, academic and political, at home and abroad, which has not been surpassed by any British social scientist of his generation’.21 Commenting on another aspect of Titmuss’s work, one often neglected, A.J. Isserlis pointed to his role in promoting better race relations through, especially, membership of the Community Relations Commission between 1968 and 1971. Titmuss’s approach was underpinned by ‘an awareness of the structural economic and social weaknesses in the community that created or threatened disadvantage for black, brown and white alike’.22 Tributes were not confined to Britain. The social policy writer and sometime US federal official, Alvin Schorr, in an edited volume on American child welfare services, observed that Titmuss had died while the collection was being completed. It was a ‘mark of his influence’, Schorr wrote, ‘that besides myself, three of the authors represented here in one way or another took instruction from him’. Taken as a whole, the volume variously expressed ‘three general points of view that (Titmuss) spent his life representing or exploring’, namely ‘an emphasis on the distributive consequences of social policy … a stubborn belief in altruism as a motive power for social policy … and a preoccupation with how individuals fare in social policy’.23 And, as we shall see, for some Titmuss’s legacy endures in the twenty-first century.
Understanding Titmuss: David Reisman
The present volume is the first full-scale account of Titmuss’s life. But here we should acknowledge David Reisman’s pioneering work, first published in 1977. Outside of Titmuss’s daughter Ann Oakley’s partly biographical (and autobiographical) accounts, this is the only full-length study of Titmuss’s ideas and, to a much lesser extent, his life.24 A second edition appeared in 2001. What did Reisman have to say? We can only give a flavour here, while acknowledging that much of what he argues, and his attempt to assemble a coherent account of what Titmuss was about, retains value. Reisman is complimentary about Titmuss in that he sees him as an ‘original, creative and sensitive thinker whose work has not always won the understanding it deserves’. He was, moreover, a ‘maverick and an outsider’. In terms of ideas, Titmuss was, for example, a ‘believer in voluntarism and getting involved’, unsurprising for someone who was a ‘committed communitarian’. Nonetheless, he had little to say about the voluntary sector’s role in welfare provision, in part because Titmuss derived his conviction from ‘value-consensus’, arguing that ‘the citizen, where dependent, has a right to service. Voluntarism, however, is by its very nature discretionary’. Reisman also draws attention to what he considers some of Titmuss’s weaknesses. He ‘never saw the need to make his underlying system fully explicit’ (one of Reisman’s aspirations), while his argument that the Second World War had generated post-1945 social reconstruction was inadequate when explaining other welfare systems. As Reisman puts it, ‘Titmuss was an English author. In describing the relationship between welfare and war, Titmuss knew that he was writing about his own country, and not about the whole of the race’. Concluding, Reisman suggests that nobody before or since Titmuss ‘has produced an intellectual map capable of situating and integrating so large a number of seemingly unconnected variables in the all-encompassing inquiry into welfare and society’.25
These selected extracts scarcely do justice to Reisman’s text. But they do raise analytical points, some with which the present author would agree, others not. That about war and welfare, for example, is well made, and contains significant elements of truth, while being more complex than Reisman allows. And it is certainly true that Titmuss was a ‘committed communitarian’. However, he was also committed to defending individual rights, and individual choice. Similarly, that Titmuss was an ‘English author’ is unarguable, although again something which can be further developed. As we shall see, Titmuss can be seen as belonging to a very English, radical, tradition. This is not to say, though, that he did not engage with welfare policies in other countries. Equally, a case can be made that Titmuss’s work has not always been fully understood, and he was certainly an unusual figure in post-war British academic life. But was he really an ‘outsider’? It can be argued that he was, by his death, an ‘Establishment’ figure, although again this is not straightforward. Titmuss’s attitude to universalism, and discretion, meanwhile, was rather more complicated than is conventionally claimed, as was his attitude to voluntarism. And while it is true that Titmuss did not produce a work synthesising his approach to welfare, it is debatable whether he nonetheless produced an ‘intellectual map’, or at least one capable of rebuffing the increasingly demanding claims of neo-liberalism. However, and as Reisman implies, Titmuss’s angular, and holistic, approach did provide him with original insights. So Reisman offers an important platform for our understanding of Titmuss; but more can be said.
Many of those interviewed for this volume remembered Titmuss as supportive, personally and professionally, and as a compelling individual. It is clear, too, that younger colleagues such as Tony Lynes and Mike Reddin benefitted, at least in the first instance, from Titmuss’s encouragement. Similarly, while critical of the overwhelmingly middle class composition of the student population of his day, he was caring and thoughtful with individual students. In one of the most striking (and much quoted) depictions of him, the Labour politician Shirley Williams recalled ‘Richard Titmuss, the London School of Economics professor with the gaunt face and the burning eyes of an El Greco saint’.26 Williams was not unique in her reference to Titmuss’s looks in these terms, which, in fact, pre-date her. But her portrayal of Titmuss is both powerful and has had a long shelf life. A.H. Halsey, sociologist and friend of Titmuss’s, likewise suggested the El Greco comparison, with Titmuss as an ‘ascetic divine’. But Halsey made the important qualification that Titmuss was no ‘saint, but a secular agnostic’. He was, though, a ‘remarkable figure’ who was ‘unsparing in his loyalty to his College and his country, a mark of integrity for the vast majority of those who knew him, whether at work in Houghton Street or at his modest home in Acton with his wife and daughter’. Reflecting on Titmuss’s time at the LSE, Halsey recalled that going to see him in his office would ‘always remain among my most vivid memories’. An ‘indefatigable and imaginative autodidact’, he continued to be, even after his 1972 election as a Fellow of the British Academy and numerous honorary degrees, a ‘devotee of the spirit rather than the conventions of academic institutions’.27 As Halsey suggests, Titmuss often went out of his way to welcome visitors to both the LSE and his home. He also provided advice and support where it was not strictly required. Given the unremitting pace of his own work schedule this was, to use one of his own key words, altruistic.
A further, insightful, aspect of Titmuss’s character comes in a review of his second collection of essays, Commitment to Welfare, published in 1968. The reviewer was Donald MacRae, Professor of Sociology at the LSE. This was a sharp, although not unfriendly, critique, returned to in Chapter 20. But for present purposes what is important is that MacRae distinguished between what he called the ‘Roundheads’ of Social Administration and the ‘Cavaliers’ of Sociology.28 This notion of Titmuss as an ascetic, serious-minded individual devoted to his work has much to commend it, and was one which he himself promoted. And although on one level an apparently flippant comment, MacRae’s distinction between the two fields hints at the tensions between their respective departments. Such tensions notwithstanding, Titmuss came to be highly regarded at the School, both as an academic and as someone called upon to play a part in its governance. The latter suggests a political player, not an El-Greco saint. Famously, another LSE colleague, the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, described him as a ‘snake in saint’s clothing’.29
Titmuss also had his own, very human, foibles. His daughter, Ann, attended Haberdashers’ Aske’s school, which she disliked.30 As Titmuss’s personnel files show, this was supported by an educational grant from the LSE which continued when Ann went to Somerville College, Oxford. In the first instance, the award was of £50 per annum, the present-day equivalent of more than £1500. The same files reveal, too, that however hostile Titmuss was to private insurance companies, he always made sure his own occupational pension was up to the mark.31 These were exactly the sort of occupational ‘extras’ available to middle class professionals which Titmuss would critique in works like The Social Division of Welfare, although it might be argued that he would have been foolish to turn them down. Titmuss was not above meals in West End clubs, nor in helping aristocratic ladies with their charitable activities. And, on the domestic front, Oakley records that it was Kay who did all the work, including child care.32 Titmuss was hardly the only man to play a limited domestic role in mid-twentieth century Britain, but again this sits uneasily with his progressive, egalitarian, pronouncements.
In his working life Titmuss, although supportive, as noted, nonetheless had an inner circle of male colleagues – notably Abel-Smith and, initially at least, Townsend. And what started off as a joke on Abel-Smith’s part, that Titmuss was ‘God’, appears to have been taken more seriously by other department members. He had his acolytes. In the context of the LSE more broadly, two events were especially distressing to him, and further illustrate aspects of his personality. The first was his dispute with some female social work tutors in the mid-1950s. Titmuss undoubtedly had strong working relationships, and relationships of mutual respect, with certain female academics and public figures. Notable among these were the social scientists Barbara Wootton and Dorothy Wedderburn, both of whom had made their way in academic life in difficult circumstances, given that it was then an overwhelmingly male-dominated preserve. The hierarchical and gender-biased nature of British academic life forms an important backdrop to Titmuss’s LSE career, and it is revealing that some have reported that he was supportive of female colleagues.33 Nonetheless, Titmuss undeniably had serious issues with certain social work staff. Was the underlying issue here his attitude to women, his own insecurities, or was it just another example of the departmental politicking common in academic life?
The second series of events which particularly upset Titmuss at the LSE were ‘The Troubles’ of the late 1960s. Initially, these concerned the controversial choice of a new director, chosen by a selection committee which included Titmuss. The disruption spread, amid accusations of left-wing troublemaking, leading at one point to the LSE’s closure. The broader context was student activism over issues such as the Vietnam War, and apartheid South Africa. Titmuss was a vigorous opponent of racial discrimination, and critical of American intervention in Vietnam. Indeed, in certain respects he was a typical member of the post-war liberal-left intellectual elite. The point, though, was that he stayed loyal to the School and its leadership, and continued to hold classes throughout the disruption and shutdown. Such loyalty did not necessarily, as some have suggested, represent a move to the political right. Rather, it might be argued that it showed personal courage, and an unwillingness to follow fashion.
This biography does not attempt to cover every aspect of Titmuss’s life, or to catalogue, far less analyse, every item he published, committee he sat on, or event he attended. Although his personal life is not ignored, it has been dealt with at some length by Oakley. Rather, the volume seeks to place Titmuss’s life in its political, policy, and academic contexts, and to evaluate him in that light. This is not unreasonable, not least because of Titmuss’s own obsession, to put it mildly, with his work, and the almost unbelievably punishing schedule to which he submitted himself throughout his adult life.
To give a further flavour of this, and simply to call attention to some of his activities during his last decade, Titmuss was a member of the Royal Commission on Medical Education, and of various race relations bodies. In 1967 he joined the Supplementary Benefits Commission (SBC), becoming deputy chairman the following year, a post he retained until his death. Along with colleagues including David Donnison, Robert Pinker, and Garth Plowman, Titmuss was on the Editorial Committee of the Journal of Social Policy, founded in 1972 as a publication of the Social Administration Association (later, Social Policy Association).34 In 1964 his friend Peter Shore, then at the Labour Party Research Department, asked him to comment on a draft paper, the ultimate outcome of which was the establishment of the Open University.35 In autumn 1965, meanwhile, Titmuss received a letter from Tony Crosland, Labour’s Secretary of State for Education and Science. Crosland had heard that Titmuss was to serve on the newly created Social Science Research Council (SSRC). In a hand-written addition, Crosland noted that he was ‘very pleased that you are doing something for us in this Dept.’.36 The LSE’s director, in a memorandum to the appropriate LSE committee, commented that Titmuss, along with the anthropologist Raymond Firth and the statistician Claus Moser, had agreed to serve on the SSRC, and strongly recommended that this be duly endorsed. It was in both the national interest and the ‘interests of the School’ that the three professors take up their posts.37 Titmuss only served on the council for around a year (the appointment had been for three years), almost certainly because of the volume of his other commitments.38 Nonetheless, the original invitation was a clear indicator of his standing.
More obscurely, although reflecting his broader social concerns, Titmuss agreed to sponsor the Concord Films Council, a body dedicated to using film to promote peace ‘and particularly to relate massive arms expenditure to the needs of the under-privileged and underfed peoples of the world’. Other sponsors included the playwright Arnold Wesker and the journalist Ritchie Calder.39 Of course, on occasion Titmuss turned down requests. One of the more implausible came in 1963 from Bishop Thomas Craske who told him that the Church of England was investigating why young men did not come forward for ordination. ‘It would help us greatly’, the Bishop wrote, ‘if you could, in the light of your own experience and conversations with young men, let us have your views on the subject.’ The non-believer Titmuss declined on the grounds of insufficient knowledge.40 All this (and there was much, much more) was undertaken while holding a full-time post at the LSE, and producing a stream of publications. Such a relentless pace surely affected his health, poor from childhood. It also raises the question of what sort of life he had outside work. The central point is, again, that Titmuss should be seen, and saw himself, as a public figure, and it is in that light that the bulk of this volume is constructed.
To make my own position clear, I firmly believe that historical insights can constructively inform contemporary policy debates.41 Understanding a major figure in post-war Social Policy can, and should, help illustrate how we might better contribute to the kind of discussions taking place in the first decades of the twenty-first century, many of the issues with which Titmuss grappled still being with us. This is not to say that the solutions he offered to the problems of his own times were necessarily ‘right’, or can be unthinkingly transferred into a much-changed world. Nonetheless, asking the appropriate questions, and attempting to evaluate Titmuss’s analyses, can illuminate both change and continuity in welfare policy formation and practice, and the nature of the social problems which such policies seek to address.
The remainder of the volume is divided into six parts. The first, ‘Early Life and Career to the End of 1941’, embraces Titmuss’s origins, limited formal education, and marriage to Kay. His employment in commercial insurance, political commitments, research into population and population health, and relationship to ‘progressive opinion’ in the 1930s and early 1940s are then discussed. The second part, ‘From Problems of Social Policy to the London School of Economics’, covers the period from 1941 to 1950, and begins with a major shift in his career, his engagement to write Problems of Social Policy. This did not, however, keep Titmuss from other activities, scholarly and otherwise. For instance, he continued his involvement with the Eugenics Society, begun before the war. He was also developing a significant media presence, both through publications and on the radio. Part II ends with Titmuss’s LSE appointment, and his inaugural lecture wherein he outlined his plans for ‘Social Administration’. Titmuss’s only child, Ann, had been born in 1944, and his new career was to impact not only on Titmuss himself, but also on Kay and their daughter.
In Part III, we examine Titmuss’s ‘First Decade at the LSE’. In this period he gave a number of public addresses articulating some of his key preoccupations. His growing fame, and influence, led to work for official bodies such the Guillebaud Committee, which examined the finances of the NHS. He also became increasingly involved with the Labour Party, particularly its attempts to reformulate its pensions policy. Titmuss was, as his inaugural lecture had intimated, keen to build up research in the Department of Social Administration. But there were problems in the 1950s over the training of social workers, an unhappy episode in Titmuss’s career. More positively, his already impressive publication record was further enhanced by two important works, Essays on ‘The Welfare State’ and The Irresponsible Society.
Part IV, ‘Power and Influence: Titmuss 1960 to 1973’, is the longest, dealing as it does with Titmuss at the height of his powers. We start off with his role in tributes to an individual whom he greatly admired, the historian and ethical socialist R.H. Tawney. Titmuss also took an interest in mental health, one reason why he was invited by the Labour government to join the Royal Commission on Medical Education. He was in demand abroad as well, and his work in Mauritius, Tanzania, and Israel is duly examined. Back home he had a significant input to the reform of Scottish social work, and this complemented his engagement with the Seebohm Committee, set up in 1965 to report on local authority social services. A further contribution to public life came through membership of the Finer Committee, concerned with the problems facing one-parent families. Nor did he stop publishing and writing. Part IV also embraces Titmuss’s engagement with the United States. Sometimes seen as an archetypal Englishman (he loved gardening and cricket), Titmuss’s interest in welfare systems outside Britain has been somewhat overlooked. In recognition of his public service, Titmuss was made CBE, at Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s nomination, in the 1966 New Year’s Honours List.42
Like its predecessor, Part V, ‘Troubles’, deals with Titmuss in the 1960s and early 1970s, but here the emphasis is on issues which caused him considerable upset. Titmuss’s tenure at the Supplementary Benefits Commission was marked by his loyalty to that body, its policies, and its staff, all of which he defended against what he saw as unwarranted criticism, often from people he considered friends. Challenging, too, was the issue of race relations. Titmuss had a track record of opposing hostility to immigrants, and discrimination, and his support for the Labour government was put under strain by certain of its policies. Titmuss was also an opponent of the Vietnam War, and, closer to home, of Britain’s attempts to join what was then called the Common Market. But of even greater concern was, first, his longstanding dispute with the IEA over the role of the market in healthcare provision. This was extremely stressful, although it had a positive outcome in that it spurred Titmuss to produce what turned out to be his last major work, The Gift Relationship. Second, even closer to home Titmuss was a major participant in the so-called ‘Troubles’ which beset the LSE in the late 1960s. He resisted what he saw as bullying, and ill-informed, behaviour by staff and student protestors. Titmuss’s always fragile health took a turn for the worse in the early 1970s, and Part V concludes with his death, and its aftermath. Finally, in Part VI, an attempt is made to assess Titmuss’s life and work.
Notes
1R.M. Titmuss, ‘Social Administration in a Changing Society’, British Journal of Sociology, 2, 3, 1951, p 189. Reprinted in Essays on ‘The Welfare State’.
2R.M. Titmuss, Poverty and Population, London, Macmillan, 1938.
3R.M. Titmuss, ‘Role of the Family Doctor Today in the Context of Britain’s Social Services’, The Lancet, I, 1965, p 1.
4Most social policy academics see their subject as a ‘field’ rather than a ‘discipline’. I am grateful to, especially, the late Professor David Donnison (interviewed by the author 4 December 2015 and 11 February 2016), for clarifying this point.
5Oakley, Man and Wife, p 202.
6T.H. Marshall, Social Policy, London, Hutchinson, 1965, p 7.
7J.E. Meade, ‘Poverty in the Welfare State’, Oxford Economic Papers, 24, 1972, pp 289–326.
8G. Howe, ‘The Fabian Threat to Freedom’, The Daily Telegraph, 4 January 1967, p 14.
9R. Miliband, ‘The Sickness of Labourism’, New Left Review, 1, 1, Jan/Feb 1960, pp 5–9. I owe the point about Miliband’s attitude to Titmuss’s Department to Professor Jose Harris.
10A. Seldon, ‘Ideas Are Not Enough’, in D. Marquand and A. Seldon (eds), The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain, London, Fontana, 1996, p 268.
11D. Donnison, ‘The Academic Contribution to Social Reform’, Social Policy and Administration, 34, 1, 2000, pp 34, 37.
12S. Thornton, ‘Richard Crossman, the Civil Service, and the Case of the Disappearing Pension’, Public Policy and Administration, 20, 2, 2005, pp 67–80.
13D. Piachaud, ‘Titmuss – Teacher and Thinker’, New Statesman, 13 April 1973, p 521.
14TITMUSS/7/68, letter, 8 May 1960, Martin to RMT.
15D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p 216ff.
16R. Crossman, The Politics of Pensions: Eleanor Rathbone Memorial Lecture, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1972, p 7.
17M. Hough, ‘Bibliography of Published Works by Richard Titmuss’, in R.M. Titmuss, Poverty and Population: Volume 1 of the Palgrave Macmillan Archive Edition of the Writings on Social Policy and Welfare of Richard M. Titmuss, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002, pp xxi–xxxv.
18R. Titmuss, ‘The Limits of the Welfare State’, New Left Review, 1/27, Sept/Oct 1964, pp 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37.
19TITMUSS/7/65, letter, 17 July 1957, RMT to Merton, Columbia University, New York.
20R.K. Merton, ‘The Role of Applied Social Science in the Formation of Policy: A Research Memorandum’, Philosophy of Science, 16, 3, 1949, pp 161–81, p 164.
21T.H. Marshall, ‘Richard Titmuss: An Appreciation’, British Journal of Sociology, 24, 2, 1973, p 137.
22A.J. Isserlis, ‘Richard Titmuss: 1907–73’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2, 2, 1973, pp 185–6.
23A.L. Schorr, ‘Introduction’, in A.L. Schorr (ed), Children and Decent People, New York, Basic Books, 1974, p xvi.
24D. Reisman, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Society, London, Heinemann, 1977, with Preface by R. Pinker. Oakley’s main works pertaining to her father’s life are Man and Wife, and Father and Daughter.
25D. Reisman, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Society, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2nd edn 2001, pp 4, 5, 64–5, 67, 4, 197, 269.
26S. Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves: The Autobiography, London, Virago, 2009, p 138.
27A.H. Halsey, No Discouragement: An Autobiography, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996, pp 58, 216. Houghton Street is still one of the LSE’s main thoroughfares.
28D. MacRae, ‘Roundheads’, New Statesman, 1 July 1968, pp 175–6.
29Cited in Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 244.
30Ibid, pp 21–3, 92.
31See, for example, LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, R.M. Titmuss, ‘London School of Economics and Political Science, Educational Allowance, Application for the year ended 31st July 1952’ ‘London School of Economics and Political Science, Educational Allowance, Application for the year ended 31st July 1965’; and, on occupational pensions, the correspondence between the School, the University of London, the Alliance Assurance Company, and the Inland Revenue, spring 1958.
32Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 8.
33Interviews with Professor Pat Thane, a PhD student in the LSE Social Administration Department in the1960s, 9 March 2016; and with Professor Jose Harris, one of Titmuss’s doctoral students, also 1960s, 18 July 2016.
34M. Powell, ‘Social Policy and Administration: Journal and Discipline’, Social Policy and Administration, 40, 3, 2006, p 239.
35TITMUSS/7/72, letter, 15 May 1964, Shore to RMT.
36LSE/Staff File/Titmuss, letter, ? October 1965, Crosland to RMT.
37LSE/Staff File/Titmuss, memorandum, undated but October 1965, Sydney Caine to School Standing Committee.
38LSE/Staff File/Titmuss, letter, 21 November 1966, RMT to Caine.
39TITMUSS/7/71, letters, 29 June 1963, Concord Films Council to RMT; and 3 July 1963, RMT to Council.
40TITMUSS/7/71, letters, ? July 1963, Craske to RMT; and 1 August 1963, RMT to Craske.
41For this type of approach see ‘What We Do’ on the website of the organisation History and Policy, www.historyandpolicy.org; also M. Powell and J. Stewart, ‘Themed Section on History and Policy: Introduction’, Social Policy and Society, 4, 3, 2005, pp 293–4.
42‘The New Year Honours’, The Times, 1 January 1966, p 5.
