Titmuss played a part in civil defence, although after the first aerial assault had done its worst. Along with some 300 other ‘night volunteers’ over the course of the war, he was a firewatcher at St Paul’s Cathedral. Others performing this role included Hancock, and two other historians, H.J. Habakkuk and W.N. Medlicott, the latter becoming Titmuss’s colleague in 1953. As relief from their stressful and tiring duties, coming as they did for many on top of demanding daytime jobs, night volunteers could attend, a history of St Paul’s records, ‘lectures delivered by Members of the Watch to their colleagues, to alleviate the monotony of the nightly exercises’. These included Medlicott on economic warfare and, perhaps less enticingly, a talk entitled ‘Aluminium’.76 In a letter published shortly after Titmuss’s death, Hancock described how from ‘early in 1942 until the end of the war’ Titmuss did ‘duty every Wednesday night as a member of St Paul’s Watch’. His colleagues ‘respected his skill with the firehose and loved him as a man’. And, in that much-repeated depiction, Hancock suggested that to some of his fellow volunteers Titmuss ‘was known as El Greco, in view of the resemblance that they saw in him to the elongated saints of that great painter’.77 In less elevated language, although showing a sense of solidarity among the firewatchers, a few months after the war’s end ‘Titters’ was invited to a party for St Paul’s volunteers.78
Titmuss was, in fact, rather late in joining the firewatchers. From January 1941 it had been compulsory for all those not involved in work of national importance.79 In Titmuss’s case, he may originally have been exempted either because of his employment with the County Fire Office or by the various government departments with which he was by then involved. In any event, he spent just over 50 hours per month guarding St Paul’s. Writing to Kay in 1944, he described the impact of Germany’s new terror weapon, the V1 flying bomb, colloquially known as the ‘doodlebug’. Titmuss had had a ‘grandstand view’ of one of these from the cathedral’s roof. It had flown above the dome before its engine cut out, then exploding in the Hatton Garden area. Titmuss had clearly had a good sight of this terrifying weapon, describing it as ‘Fearsome’. The following week, in another letter to Kay, he noted that evacuation following the renewed aerial assault had resulted in more evacuees from London than during the first Blitz, and that, partly in consequence, London was getting ‘appreciably emptier’. A few days later, in a further letter to his wife, he recorded that 59 flying bombs had passed over or close to the cathedral, a new record.80 The impact of these new weapons was more formally recorded in Problems of Social Policy, where it was noted that, for instance, procedures such as evacuation operated better in this period than earlier in the war.81
Producing Problems of Social Policy proved a demanding task, but Titmuss rose to the challenge. In so doing, he constructed a narrative about the Home Front which became highly influential. For Titmuss himself, what he saw as the social cohesion and solidarities of wartime Britain became a framework for his understanding of what might be achieved, but whose legacy had not been properly fulfilled. Indeed, for some of his later critics, Titmuss was more at home in the 1940s than in the ‘Affluent Society’ which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As ever with Titmuss, his work in the 1940s consumed him. The next three chapters deal with some of his other activities, undertaken alongside the monumental project of writing his wartime history.
Notes
1R.H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1932, pp 140–60. I am grateful to Professor Ann Oakley for alerting me to this work.
2TITMUSS/ADD/1/18, letter, 15 January 1951, RMT to A.A. Blytheway, Ministry of Labour and National Service.
3TITMUSS/7/59, letter, 7 December 1951, RMT to Carr-Saunders.
4TITMUSS/ADD/1/18, letter, 21 July 1952, RMT to Richard Hammond, Ministry of Food.
5K. Hancock, ‘Preface’, in S. Ferguson and H. Fitzgerald, Studies in the Social Services, London, HMSO, 1954.
6This paragraph draws on Oakley, Man and Wife; and J. Harris, ‘Thucydides Amongst the Mandarins: Hancock and the World War II Civil Histories’, in D.A. Low (ed), Keith Hancock: The Legacies of an Historian, Carlton South, Melbourne University Press, 2001, pp 122–48.
7TITMUSS/7/44, memorandum, 3 June 1944, Hancock to ‘Mr Titmuss, Mr Davidson, Mr Wormald’.
8TITMUSS/7/44, Hancock, ‘Circular to Historians’, 27 November 1945, p 1 and passim.
9W.K. Hancock, ‘Preface’, in W.K. Hancock and M. Gowing, British War Economy, London, HMSO, 1949, pp x, xi–xii, xiii.
10Harris, ‘Thucydides’, p 131.
11TITMUSS/7/44, letter, ? November 1943, RMT to Hancock; R.M. Titmuss, ‘Recent German Vital Statistics’, Lancet, 1942, II, p 434.
12A. Oakley, ‘Legacies of Altruism Richard Titmuss, Marie Meinhardt, and Health Policy Research in the 1940s’, Social Policy and Society, 18, 3, 2019, pp 385–6.
13F. Grundy and R.M. Titmuss, Report on Luton, Luton, The Leagrave Press, 1945, pp 139, 24–5.
14TITMUSS/7/44, letter, 25 February 1944, RMT to Hancock.
15TITMUSS/7/44, letter, 10 October 1944, Hancock to Wrigley.
16Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p xi.
17TITMUSS/ADD/1/30, letter, 16 November 1949, RMT to Acheson.
18TITMUSS/ADD/1/18, letter, 21 November 1950, RMT to Acheson.