Moving away from talks entirely focused on population issues, Titmuss was on the Historical Association’s list of speakers by the mid-1940s. The Association had been set up in the early twentieth century to support history teaching in schools, and in 1947 Titmuss was thanked for his ‘co-operation in the past’, and asked to confirm the topics on which he was prepared to speak. In addition to population, he proposed the history of the health and social services from the beginning of the nineteenth century.15 As we saw in Chapter 6, this was a topic in which Titmuss had a strong interest, and further evidence of his historical approach. In the same year, he agreed to speak to the Six Point Group on the subject of ‘Family Equality’. The Group was a small, but high-powered and influential, feminist body seeking full equality in the political, occupational, moral, social, economic, and legal spheres – the six points. It had an important platform in the journal Time and Tide. By the mid-1940s it was led by a number of impressive individuals, including leading SMA activist and Labour MP Edith Summerskill. During the war the organisation had been in touch with the Ministry of Health over issues around evacuation, so it is highly likely that Titmuss knew, or knew of, some of its key players.16 The Six Point Group, like many at the time, was certainly concerned with what Time and Tide described, in early 1946, as ‘The Problem of the Family’. The solution to this was complicated, but would require ‘positive measures’ to arrest the decline in family size, and these would have ‘fundamental effects on educational, housing, health and taxation policy’.17 Although, once again, Titmuss’s address does not seem to have survived, such views closely accorded with his own, almost certainly the reason for his invitation. More generally, that Titmuss should receive invitations from such different organisations is, once again, indicative of his growing reputation, and can only have boosted his sense of self. That Titmuss spoke to the Six Point Group was especially noteworthy for, as we shall see, some of his most important lectures in the 1950s were to address, in the title of one of them, ‘The Position of Women’. This, in turn, raises important questions about Titmuss’s more general approach to gender equality, and how this informed, for example, his dispute with LSE social workers in the mid-1950s.
Titmuss maintained his pre-war strategy of placing articles in a wide range of publications, and of using talks and addresses as platforms to publicise, and test, his views. This mix of activities was to continue for the rest of his life. But what is especially interesting in the 1940s was Titmuss’s burgeoning work for the broadcast media. Titmuss’s engagement with the BBC, at this time a monopoly provider of such media, was something he shared with his future close friend and colleague, Richard Crossman, who worked for the Corporation’s German Service.18 From around 1941, Richard Weight suggests, there was an increase in BBC output dealing with social issues, especially those to do with social reconstruction. These broadcasts were made by ‘planning experts, doctors, educationalists and church leaders’ who, in turn, were to be the ‘technocrats, philanthropists and bureaucrats’ populating the ‘policy-making committees of the Welfare State and the Planned Economy’. Here they would work alongside voluntary and professional bodies, with the ultimate task of offering policy advice.19 Titmuss thus needs to be seen in this broader framework, while bearing in mind also the moral, rather than simply technocratic, underpinnings of his work.
In early summer 1942, Titmuss was contacted by the novelist, essayist, and polemicist George Orwell, who between 1941 and 1943 was talks producer at the BBC’s Empire Service India Section. Orwell asked Titmuss if he would consider ‘doing a talk for us in the series which we shall be broadcasting to India during June and July’. The series, called ‘AD 2000’, would deal with India’s future, ‘the idea being that it is an attempt to forecast what is likely to be happening fifty or sixty years hence’. Orwell was looking for someone to discuss India’s population ‘problem’, and Titmuss was ‘much the most suitable person to do it, and you could approach it from whatever angle you liked’. It is not clear whether Titmuss and Orwell knew each other personally, but they certainly had friends and acquaintances in common, for instance the publisher Victor Gollancz.20 The way Orwell formulated his request also implies knowledge of Titmuss’s ideas. Titmuss clearly agreed to Orwell’s suggestion, for around two weeks later Orwell got back to him with thanks for the script he had been sent. It was ‘just the kind of thing I wanted’.21 Titmuss was duly commissioned, for a fee of ten guineas, to talk for 20 minutes on the ‘Indian Population Problem’ on a programme to be transmitted on 3 July by the Indian Empire Service.22 The context here is the accelerating, and ultimately successful, demand within India for self-government. More specifically, Titmuss’s talk came just a few months after the catastrophic loss to the British Empire of the base at Singapore which further advanced the nationalist cause across Asia, while posing a military threat to India itself. This was perhaps the lowest point in what John Darwin describes as the ‘Strategic Abyss’ which Britain had been facing since the late 1930s.23 The potential for a rapid expansion of India’s population, in contrast to the situation in Britain, was a topic to which Titmuss returned on a number of occasions.
A few months later, Titmuss appeared on the BBC Home Service. He had been asked to participate, the fee this time being seven guineas, in a discussion programme entitled ‘Too Few Babies’, to be broadcast in mid-November 1942.24 As the title suggests, the basic premise here was that the British population would face serious decline unless the birth rate improved. In the course of the discussion, Titmuss responded to another participant, a Mrs Norris, who had argued that any such rise could help make ‘the world spiritually whole again’ (she did not specify how this might happen). Titmuss suggested, possibly tongue in cheek, that this raised ‘a new point, which is probably too big to deal with tonight’. But there was general agreement that ‘we cannot hope to induce people to have more children until economic insecurity and the fear of war have been eliminated. We’ve got to have more economic planning to achieve security’. He then addressed the spirituality question more directly, arguing that ‘in another sense we’ve also got to return to higher social values – call them spiritual if you like – less snobbery, less “keeping up with the Jones’s” in every field’.25 Titmuss did not spell out here his critique of the ‘acquisitive society’, but it is clearly implicit in what he said, not least in the (now virtually unused) expression, ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’. Likewise his call for ‘economic planning’ returned to a well-established concern about the consequences of unbridled capitalism, as did the need for ‘higher social values’. This particular programme seems to have evoked quite a reaction. A BBC employee sent Titmuss some letters the Corporation had received, and in response he claimed that he had had ‘many reactions to the broadcast and everyone [sic] of them has been exceptionally favourable’. ‘A number of people whose judgement I respect’, he continued, ‘were all impressed by the content of the discussion and, curiously enough, the delivery – not excepting my own.’ Turning on the charm, he told his correspondent – presumably either the interviewer or the producer – that he attributed this ‘to the careful grooming you gave us all and I think you are to be congratulated on handling such a thorny topic’.26
The following year, Titmuss was again contacted by the BBC, this time by its European Talks Editor, who had been given his name by the Royal Statistical Society. The topic the editor was looking into was the birth rate in the Allied powers (he used the expression ‘United Nations’, coined by President Roosevelt in 1942), as compared to that of the Axis powers. ‘In particular’, he continued, ‘of course, we would like to bring out that Hitler is destroying Germany’s future by once again sacrificing German manpower’.27 As we have seen, this was a topic Titmuss had addressed on a number of occasions, and presumably explains his recommendation by the Royal Statistical Society. The subject, Titmuss responded, was not an easy one to handle in a ‘popular manner’, but he did submit a script which argued that the German armed forces were facing an acute manpower shortage, while suffering huge casualties on the Eastern Front. The population aged between 16 and 24 years was now in decline, and so the ‘seeds sown by the Kaiser and his war lords in 1914’ had at last begun ‘to bear fruit. But this time it is barren fruit’.28