As well as editorialising, writing, and reviewing for Eugenics Review, Titmuss contributed to Eugenics Society meetings. The following example illustrates this point and, once again, his wartime preoccupations. In autumn 1943 Titmuss received a letter from Blacker, now back from the army, working for the Ministry of Health, and soon to publish an important report on mental health services. Blacker was having problems organising the Members’ Meeting, scheduled for 16 November, and he asked Titmuss if he would be prepared to speak, possibly drawing on his recently published Birth, Poverty and Wealth. He would be grateful for anything Titmuss could do, as it was ‘not easy to get this Society going again properly’.15 Titmuss obliged. He delivered his talk, ‘Social Environment and Eugenics’, to the meeting chaired by Horder, with an abstract released to the press.16 And, as requested by Blacker, Titmuss’s address was duly published in Eugenics Review.
Titmuss did draw on his recent publication, and also took the opportunity to give a historical account of the development of eugenics, and to use this to stress the importance of environment. He started by addressing the legacy of Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, founder of eugenics and strict hereditarian.17 Titmuss argued that it would be wrong to condemn Galton’s hereditarian analysis without understanding the context in which it was formulated. By the same token, however, those who held ‘strongly to-day to the Galtonian viewpoint’ were ‘equally unjustified because they refuse to evaluate the social history of the last fifty years and because they ignore the immense advances made by the social sciences’. No doubt Titmuss counted himself, not unreasonably, as a contributor to social scientific knowledge. Despite a recent volume by Horder on ‘obscurantism’, there were still ‘too many obscurantists about’. Titmuss was clearly in no mood to pander to the Eugenics Society’s traditionalist and, as he saw it, reactionary elements. But he did not entirely dismiss hereditarian ideas. In a concluding passage which embraced a number of his concerns, Titmuss argued that if
we wish to reap a richer harvest – in terms of quality – in the future, when the quantity of our population will be declining, then it is for us not to be content only with weeding out the demonstrably unfit; we must look equally to the improvement of the social environment.18
So in a situation of declining population, a central tenet of Titmuss’s beliefs at this point, the ‘demonstrably unfit’ needed ‘weeding out’. Titmuss gave no indication of who these might be, and who might make decisions about them, on one level a classic example of traditional eugenicist value judgement. On another, though, the need to improve the social environment was unequivocally reasserted.
Many of these issues were addressed in Birth, Poverty and Wealth: A Study of Infant Mortality, which came out in 1943. Prior to publication, Titmuss circulated a draft to leading Eugenics Society members Blacker, Newfield, and Byrom Bramwell, chair of council, and possibly others. In a letter to Bramwell, Blacker remarked of Titmuss’s manuscript that he had been impressed with its argument, and its presentation of statistical material. He agreed with Bramwell, who clearly had also read and commented on the draft, that ‘political’ commentary should be reduced, as the ‘left-wing humanitarians and professional idealists will provide as much of that as we are likely to want’. On the same day, Blacker also wrote to Newfield, noting that the book was ‘original and important’, that he approved of the Society’s financial support, and equally of the decision to keep this quiet for the moment. ‘You and I’, he continued, ‘think that it would be a eugenically desirable thing to reduce or abolish the gradient of inequality.’ But this would not be the view of the older generation, still represented on the council.19 Newfield also provided the book’s introduction. Editor of Eugenics Review from the early 1930s, Newfield was reform minded, described himself as a ‘liberal socialist’, and sought to transform the Review from a journal speaking to the converted to one which embraced debates on issues such as birth control.20 Newfield duly praised Titmuss’s diligence, and suggested that the chances of survival, and healthy subsequent development, for any new-born child depended ‘of course on his congenital equipment’. But he immediately added the important rider, ‘but only in part’. To a ‘very large measure’ survival and development relied, too, on ‘such external influences as the wealth of his parents and their capacity to take advantage of the medical knowledge and social services available for his welfare’.21
In his acknowledgements, Titmuss thanked Morris, Newfield, and the psychiatrist and Society member Aubrey Lewis for their input. He also thanked the Leverhulme Trust and the Council of the Eugenics Society for the grants they had awarded, while stressing that these bodies, and his colleagues, were not ‘in any way committed to my conclusions. For these and for the collation of the data from which they are derived I take the full responsibility myself’.22 Titmuss was being cautious here as he knew, as Blacker had suggested to Newfield, that his arguments would not appeal to more ‘traditional’ eugenicists for whom heredity was all. The Society grant was, meanwhile, effectively a subsidy to the book’s publishers, Hamish Hamilton. Blacker grumbled to Titmuss that the Eugenics Society had not received any review copies of his work, and that ‘our subsidy of £100 was, in the event, a gift to HH’. All in all, the publishers had shown ‘either carelessness or discourtesy to the society’.23 In fact, and as Blacker almost certainly knew, having such a work published without some form of subvention would have been difficult, especially in wartime.
So what arguments did Titmuss put forward? In a sense, the title says it all. Infant mortality was now, as it always had been, ‘a broad reflection of the degree of civilisation attained by any given community’. Carefully laying out his data, Titmuss then addressed the view that extreme contrasts in infant mortality were the ‘outward and inevitable expression of a defective genetic constitution’. The evidence did not support this analysis, however, and so ‘we are left with environment, in the widest sense of the term, as the greater determinant’ of differential rates. Such an approach was backed up by, for example, recent advances in the social and medical sciences. Titmuss conceded that Britain’s infant mortality rate had declined, but noted, too, that it had done so to a much greater extent in other countries, such as Holland. Indeed the relatively poor data for Scotland was ‘sufficiently disturbing to warrant a full-length study’, with Glasgow singled out as a city which had performed extremely