Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John

Titmuss started off by claiming that people often asked why so much fuss was made about population, remarking further that it did not really concern them. But that was ‘precisely where they are wrong’. He then went on to explain why this was so, before moving on more specifically, and in now familiar terms, to the issue of parenthood. In Western societies, ‘parents have deliberately decided to limit their families through continence, by employing birth control and by marrying late in life’. This, and associated trends, had some ‘unpleasant consequences’, potentially including increased unemployment. Family allowances would, under the right circumstances, help, but other issues also had to be addressed. What was the impact, for example, of the ‘social and economic atmosphere’ on possible parenthood? In the last resort, then, this was a problem for ‘parents both actual and potential’, and was thus ‘one for the people to decide’. It was ‘they who give the community its future citizens, it is for them to decide what form of society – whether their own or some form not yet in existence – will encourage and not deter parenthood’.³ His qualifications notwithstanding, Titmuss’s support for family allowances should be seen in the broader context of such measures rising up the domestic political agenda, as social reconstruction became the order of the day. Family allowances continued to be promoted by his friend Eleanor Rathbone, their implementation was one of the ‘Assumptions’ of the Beveridge Report, and the Labour Party and the previously reluctant Trades Union Congress were increasingly supportive.⁴

      Also in 1943 came an important opportunity to influence a much larger, and captive, audience when Titmuss was approached by Major R.L. Wakeford of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA). This body had been set up in 1941 to provide compulsory educational instruction about contemporary issues for rank and file soldiers. Central to its programme was the series Current Affairs, which aimed ‘to provide a background of knowledge against which events can be assessed and understood’. Publications in the series, written by experts commissioned by ABCA, were thus designed to stimulate discussion groups consisting of troops, and led by officers. By the time of Titmuss’s contribution, the series was very much geared to post-war reconstruction, something which the army’s internal enquiries had revealed as of considerable interest to its personnel. The educational benefits were also seen to extend even wider given that, as one senior general put it, ‘millions of men and women [in the army] were ill-educated’, and there was thus an obligation to return them to civilian life educationally better equipped.⁵

      The troops’ interest in post-war reconstruction, and the centrality of education, matched the mood on the Home Front, especially since the 1942 publication of the Beveridge Report. One early indicator of the creation of what was to become the ‘welfare state’ was the passage of the 1944 Education Act. This had achieved all-party support, significantly expanded educational provision and associated welfare measures such as school meals, and was a piece of legislation to which Titmuss’s inspiration, Tawney, had made a notable contribution.⁶ Eva Hubback’s daughter, meanwhile, suggests that the army’s approach to what was effectively another form of education for citizenship was strongly influenced by the ‘Handbooks for Discussion’ series.⁷ The bureau was to be blamed, retrospectively, by the Conservative Party for ‘radicalising’ the army, so contributing to Labour’s landslide win at the 1945 general election.⁸

      Wakeford explained to Titmuss that what he wanted was a pamphlet on the ‘population problem’ which officers could use in their group discussions.⁹ The result was Fewer Children: The Population Problem, which came out in December 1944, that is a few months after the Normandy landings, and hence as the Second World War was entering its final phase. Unsurprisingly, this publication revisited a number of concerns about which Titmuss had been exercised for some time, and would continue to be so for some time to come. The editorial introduction, aimed at the officers charged with leading discussion and melodramatically entitled ‘The Birth of a Nation: A Problem that Governs All Others’, noted that Titmuss’s contribution was about a subject which was ‘fundamental. It is about our population’. Essentially, the British population was ‘not replacing itself and is, therefore, heading towards extinction’, and so ‘Titmuss shows in his article how certain changes are already inevitably due within the lifetime of most of us in the Army today’. This was, then, ‘a cause for alarm but not despondency’. The anonymous author had clearly taken Titmuss’s message to heart. Various suggestions were given as to how a discussion might be structured, for example by asking the troops how many children their parents and their grandparents respectively had had. This could then be backed up by use of the illustrations contained in the pamphlet, and transferred to a blackboard.¹⁰

      Titmuss himself drew extensively, as might be expected, on his own demographic research and, especially, Parents Revolt, discussed in the next chapter. For instance, he suggested that the population of England and Wales would fall from just under 41 million in 1940 to just over 37 million by 1970, then further still, to just under 20 million, by 2000. Crucially, the proportion of the population under 30 years of age would steadily decrease. All this would be brought about by an ongoing decline in the birth rate. What lay behind this? The pamphlet was, as noted, overtly educational, and designed to stimulate discussion. So Titmuss posed a series of provocative questions. Was ‘mass selfishness the cause of the falling birth rate?’ Did the ‘the majority of married couples only want to have a “good time”’? Had the ‘desire for children, the wish to carry on the family, the demand for a happy family life diminished among modern parents?’ If ‘selfishness’ was not the cause, what was? ‘These’, Titmuss suggested, were ‘points for you to discuss’.¹¹ The way these questions were posed might be seen as channelling discussion in the sort of directions Titmuss himself wanted. We have seen from previous chapters, and will see on many other occasions, that Titmuss was very much of the view that ‘selfishness’, a key component of the ‘acquisitive society’, was at the heart of the matter, in turn a product of the psychological strains induced by contemporary capitalism. His predictions on future population size were, as previously, wildly out.

      Nonetheless, taken together these two pamphlets do, once again, illustrate what Titmuss saw as the centrality of the population question, and his belief that this was something with which society had to deal urgently. Family allowances, shortly to be introduced by the outgoing wartime government, were necessary, but not sufficient, to address the problem. More fundamental was the unwillingness of parents to have children, so resulting in ‘unpleasant consequences’, such as the falling birth rate and an ageing population. Ultimately, the underlying issue was selfishness and acquisitiveness – married couples having a ‘good time’ at the expense of starting or expanding their families. Such challenging arguments were consciously constructed to stimulate discussion and debate. Titmuss knew as well as anyone that for many people, married or otherwise, a ‘good time’ had not been their experience in the crisis-ridden 1930s, or during total war in the 1940s. However, his own diagnosis, and prognosis, were clear enough. More broadly, the invitations to contribute to both these series of publications, but especially that of the ABCA, are yet further indicators of his burgeoning reputation.

      If Titmuss was active in the printed media, the 1940s also afforded him the opportunity to hone further his public-speaking skills, already well developed by the outbreak of war through participation in bodies such as the Fleet Street Parliament, by addressing a wide variety of audiences. Many of those interviewed for this book spoke of Titmuss’s engaging style when leading discussions or lecturing, and this aspect of his personality, as well as his acknowledged research skills, appears to have led to a number of invitations as a speaker. To show the diversity of his audiences, we take three examples from the mid-1940s. In May 1946 the director of the Royal Navy Current Affairs course wrote thanking him ‘for coming down to speak to us last week and giving us such an instructive talk on Population Problems’. A cheque for two guineas was attached.¹² The text of this talk does not seem to have survived, but there is no reason to assume that Titmuss deviated from his previous stance on this issue. The navy had resisted compulsory discussion groups as held in the army, but in the immediate post-war years put on a number of classes in current affairs and citizenship, and it was presumably to one of these that Titmuss had contributed.¹³ Among other speakers employed to such ends by the navy was someone Titmuss was going to have a lot to do with in later