Titmuss himself repeatedly returned to the relationship between war and social reform. In his contribution to a series of lectures on ‘War and Society’ in the mid-1950s, later reprinted in Essays on ‘The Welfare State’, he started with the claim that little historical research had been done on war’s social and economic impact on whole populations, following this with a wide-ranging survey going back to the ancient Greeks (and including the purported lack of attention in Jane Austen’s novels to the Napoleonic Wars). He then turned to war and social policy, noting that this relationship had developed in three stages: first because of concerns about the quantity of military recruits, second because of concerns about the quality of potential military recruits, and third through a broader concern with population health, and especially that of children, ‘the next generation of recruits’. Overall, this manifested ‘the increasing concern of the State in time of war with the biological characteristics of its people’. Hence the ‘waging of modern war presupposes and imposes a great increase in social discipline’, tolerable only if ‘social inequalities are not intolerable’. Only then would the ‘co-operation of the masses’ be won. War and social policy thus had profound reciprocal influences. Titmuss conceded that this was not ‘the whole story in the evolution of social policy’, although he saw this last point as underpinned by faith more than by reason.65 This opaque caveat seems to imply that however much one paid lip service to other factors, war remained the locomotive of social advance. Harris suggests that here Titmuss is shown more as a ‘didactic social theorist’, in contrast to the ‘subtle and finely nuanced social historian’ evident in Problems of Social Policy.66
While overplaying the contrast between the two works, this makes an important point. Nonetheless, by the time of his speech Titmuss was convinced that his version of the origins of post-war reconstruction was historically accurate. In a lecture on ‘The Social Services’ in the early 1950s, Titmuss agreed that the Beveridge Report had given ‘rational expression to shared experiences and aspirations during the war’. In turn, this meant that the war, characterised by social solidarity and cohesion, had ‘effectively crystallised the demand for services open to all citizens, and good enough for all, without distinction of class’. Poor services were thus ‘inconsistent with the principle of universal “fair shares” on which the war was being fought’. But these ideas and attitudes had very specific origins. The ‘welfare state’ therefore ‘began not with the Beveridge Report, but when the last troops left the beaches in May, 1940, and Britain stood alone against the forces of Nazi Germany’.67
Not everyone accepts Titmuss’s analysis, however. Another early review of Problems of Social Policy came from the distinguished historian of Britain, C.L. Mowat. Mowat found it an ‘admirable work’, paying due attention especially to the Blitz and evacuation. Significantly, though, he argued that the foundations of the ‘welfare state’ had been laid well before 1939, albeit that the war had highlighted the need for social reconstruction.68 Some 40 years later, Jose Harris, reviewing the war on the Home Front and the contribution of Titmuss’s history to its understanding, commended her former doctoral supervisor as ‘still perhaps the most influential and imaginatively compelling historian of the domestic and civilian theatre of war’. But she questioned a number of his premises, remarking, for example, that some of the policies described by Titmuss as deriving directly from the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ had more complicated, less solidaristic, origins. A case in point was family allowances, which ‘Titmuss had portrayed as one of the direct practical outcomes of the Dunkirk spirit’, but was in fact the result of various trade-offs between government departments.69
Others have made similar points. Bernard Harris acknowledges the expansion of school meals provision during the war, while commenting that Titmuss ‘almost certainly exaggerated the humanitarian “generosity” in the development of the service’. Harris also remarks that by 1945 around one third of elementary school children and one half of secondary school children were receiving meals.70 Impressive as this expanded service was, it is some way from the ‘social service’ Titmuss claimed it to be. At a more abstract level, Jose Harris points to the uncritical notion of ‘Britishness’ employed in the Civil Histories. In the particular case of Titmuss, he found underlying the operations of wartime social policy ‘a more intangible national identity and national will’.71 Problematic as this undoubtedly is, it nonetheless points to Titmuss’s English patriotism. More generally, while participation in wars can have an impact on social policy (and, Titmuss insisted, vice versa), it cannot simply be a sole explanatory factor. Sweden’s emerging ‘welfare state’, a product of the 1930s and of which Titmuss was surely aware, is not explained by invoking war. And while popular demand for post-war social reconstruction did mount in the last few years of the war, this was, Ross McKibbin suggests, as much due to rapid changes in British politics, and the extraordinary reception of the Beveridge Report, as with processes such as evacuation.72 In another recent analysis, David Edgerton argues that Titmuss’s account of the creation of the ‘welfare state’ continues to structure contemporary narratives.73 This is overstated, at least with regard to academic historians, although it is certainly true that varying interpretations of the origins of the ‘welfare state’ are available. But Edgerton has a point with respect to popular perceptions of modern British history, wherein it remains a commonplace that the ‘welfare state’ was an outcome of the Second World War.
Problems of Social Policy remains an important contribution to our understanding of the Second World War and its aftermath. But its arguments do need to be treated with caution in the light of historical research, especially over the last half century. Titmuss’s interpretation should be seen for what it is – a product of its time, when ‘progressives’ were hopeful that a new society could be constructed in the wake of a devastating conflict. For instance, in the same year as Titmuss’s volume appeared, T.H. Marshall published his own work outlining, as he saw it, British society’s progression from civil, to political, to social rights, the last embodied in the post-war ‘welfare state’.74 Equally, it is significant that the hard questioning of Titmuss’s interpretation began in the last quarter of the twentieth century, an era of welfare retrenchment, and one where the post-war consensus, if it existed in the first place, was well and truly over. Not by coincidence, by this point, too, the Titmuss ‘paradigm’ itself was coming under severe scrutiny. As is often remarked, the questions historians (including Titmuss) ask are shaped by the era in which they themselves live.
The Blitz, for Titmuss a key moment of the Second World War, involved the predominantly night-time bombing of Britain’s major urban areas. It started in autumn 1940, following the Luftwaffe’s failure to capture control of the skies during the Battle of Britain, and continued until spring 1941. The campaign sought both to cause economic damage, and to undermine civilian morale. Titmuss gives a