Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John

Street Parliament, and his writings. His unpublished ‘Crime and Tragedy’ is notably intemperate in its language, especially when it came to the Conservative Party. Perhaps more surprisingly, Titmuss also saw a leadership role in world affairs for both Britain and the British Empire. His positive view of the empire was not especially unusual at the time as it could be seen, and perhaps Titmuss saw it this way, as a form of international cooperation which, at least on some levels, seemed to work. It is equally notable that, in the context of the empire and more broadly, he was hostile to economic protectionism, a classic Liberal Party position. For liberal thinkers such as Titmuss, free trade was crucial in combatting nationalism and militarism.

Liberal Summer School

In 1938 Titmuss attended the Liberal Summer School held in Oxford, although he did not contribute to it formally.²⁴ The following year, though, he was on the platform in Cambridge. Writing shortly after Titmuss’s death, the historian Keith Hancock, from the early 1940s an important figure in his life, claimed that Titmuss had been persuaded to attend by some ‘young Liberals who belonged to his suburban cricket team’.²⁵ In fact, Titmuss was suggested to the General Secretary of the Liberal Summer Schools, Sydney Brown, by the broadcaster F. Buckley Hargreaves. Hargreaves had passed on to Brown the view of the King’s physician, Lord Horder, that Titmuss’s first book, Poverty and Population, was ‘the best of its kind he has ever come across’.²⁶ Horder had provided the foreword for this volume, discussed in the next chapter, and it supplied much of the material for his Cambridge address. Also speaking that morning was the leading businessman, authority on population issues, and Eugenics Society stalwart, Laurence J. Cadbury, whom Titmuss almost certainly knew. Cadbury spoke on ‘A Population Policy and Family Allowances’, an issue with which he was becoming increasingly concerned to the extent that he actually granted them to his own employees.²⁷ Prior to the event, Titmuss contacted Cadbury suggesting they compare notes in order to avoid any duplication of content. He also told him that he intended to carry on where the Oxford economist Roy Harrod had left off at the Oxford Summer School, remarking that Harrod’s paper was in his view ‘rather sensational’. Although Titmuss did not elaborate on what he meant here, in Poverty and Population he had upbraided Harrod for indulging in ‘alarming prophecies’.²⁸ As we shall later see, this was, at least as far as population was concerned, a bit rich coming from Titmuss.

Titmuss’s talk, ‘Contemporary Poverty, Regional Distribution and Social Consequences’, was very much in line with his current preoccupations, also discussed in more detail in the next chapter. He started with information on the ‘geographical incidence of such accompaniments of poverty as severe infantile mortality’. Arguing that there was ‘no biological reason’ why the infant mortality rate could not be reduced to 30 per 1,000 throughout the whole country (the national average at this point was 58), he then pointed to huge discrepancies between, for example, the Home Counties and Wales. He also compared English urban areas, unfavourably, with foreign cities such as Amsterdam. Titmuss then went on to attack the government’s ‘wishful thinking’ over the fitness of army recruits. In so doing, officials and politicians were consciously rejecting the work of researchers such as the nutritionist John Boyd Orr.²⁹ His speech seems to have been well received. Sydney Brown told him that after ‘the ovation the School gave you yesterday you don’t need any word of mine to tell you how very much your address was appreciated’. It was, moreover, ‘excellent that our final session should deal with constructive policy after the rather grim week we have had’.³⁰ Given that the Summer School took place shortly before the outbreak of war, there can be little doubt as to what her concluding remark refers.

Titmuss was also contacted by Gerald Barry, managing editor of the leading Liberal newspaper News Chronicle, asking for two articles based on his talk (it probably helped that Cadbury chaired the paper’s board). These Titmuss duly delivered to his literary agent, Henderson, a few days later.³¹ More broadly, Titmuss’s Cambridge speech had been given alongside those of leading Liberal figures such as Lord Samuel, surely a sign of his growing status as a polemical commentator on current affairs. As Michael Freeden points out, this particular Summer School marked a positive step on the Liberal Party’s part to promoting the idea of family allowances, both to alleviate family poverty and to address fears about a declining population, issues with which Titmuss was deeply engaged. As such, family allowances constituted an appeal to ‘progressive opinion’ at a time when the labour movement remained divided about the issue, although Freeden rightly suggests that the ‘insecurity and fears generated by the international crisis’, rather than committed plans for social reform, profoundly shaped the mainstream Liberal agenda.³² Nonetheless the appeal of liberalism for Titmuss, and of Titmuss for liberalism, is apparent.

Titmuss’s support for ‘progressive opinion’ was also manifested in, for example, the invitation he received to join the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) from its founder, Ronald Kidd. Kidd informed Titmuss that he had been given his name by Ursula Grant-Duff, Eugenics Society stalwart and supporter of the Titmuss family. In response, Titmuss enclosed his subscription, telling Kidd that, as ‘an author and writer on social questions’, the NCCL was carrying out work of ‘great importance’, and he wished him well in his membership drive.³³ This correspondence took place just after the outbreak of war, when civil liberties were, for bodies like the NCCL, under threat. On Titmuss’s part, it should therefore be seen as a statement of his position, and in line with his objections to what he saw as unacceptable treatment of refugees, noted further in the next chapter. In the years before the outbreak of war, Titmuss was politically active on a range of fronts, all underpinned by his commitment to the Liberal Party.

Forward March

The coming of the Second World War saw, as Ross McKibbin puts it, the pre-war party system ‘Thrown Off Course’. While before 1939 the Conservative Party had established ‘a political supremacy which seemed unchallengeable’, soon the demands of ‘total war’ led to the creation of the wartime coalition government. This was led by Winston Churchill, a Conservative, but also included leading figures from other parties, for instance, as Deputy Prime Minister, Labour leader Clement Attlee. An electoral truce whereby, in the event of by-elections, no rival candidates were put up to those of the incumbent party more or less held throughout the war. The end of fighting in Europe saw the first general election in ten years, and the unexpected landslide victory of the Labour Party. During the conflict itself, post-war social reconstruction became a prominent theme in domestic politics once the various severe crises of the early years had abated.³⁴ In short, the political landscape fundamentally changed between 1939 and 1945. It is therefore appropriate at this point to discuss Titmuss’s involvement with Forward March, one of the predecessors of the better known Common Wealth Party. Although this discussion extends slightly beyond the notional end of this part of the book (1941), Titmuss’s engagement had its origins in his earlier participation in Liberal politics. Titmuss had strong, rather unconventional, views about the political situation in the early part of the conflict, views which he was happy to broadcast.

Common Wealth was founded in July 1942 by a merger of the writer J.B. Priestley’s 1941 Committee, and Sir Richard Acland’s organisation, Forward March. It was to go