It would certainly appear that Morris Titmuss was not in the vanguard of British entrepreneurship. But the context is also important. After the First World War an agricultural depression took hold, with prices for crops such as wheat falling dramatically, while the limited measures of protection accorded to agriculture were abolished in 1921. The British economy as a whole, following a post-war boom, began to contract from the early 1920s onwards although, to balance this, London and the South East were largely spared the miseries of the inter-war slump. Morris may have been feckless, or unlucky, or, most probably, a combination of the two. But, as Oakley observes, he was able to leave farming without leaving any debt behind, continued to pay at least his older son’s school fees, and bought the Hendon house. The last was an end-terrace building which would have been, in Oakley’s words, ‘sparklingly new then’, part of the suburban expansion London was then experiencing. Home ownership was, at this time, characteristic not of the working class, most of whom rented, but rather the middle class. So perhaps Morris was not so feckless after all. In any event, the move to Hendon saw the end of Titmuss’s time at St Gregory’s (which was about to happen anyway), and the start of his short time at Clark’s Commercial College, situated at Chancery Lane in Central London.18 Coincidentally, this was close to the institution where Titmuss would come to play a leading role, the LSE.
Following his bookkeeping course, he was then employed by Standard Telephones, based in North London, as well as helping out with his father’s business. However, in 1926 Morris died. According to an insurance policy application which Titmuss made some 40 years later, his father’s cause of death was angina, from which he had suffered for ‘some months’ (in a very un-Titmuss like mistake, he got Morris’s year of death wildly wrong).19 This did pose financial problems, although again Oakley suggests that the ‘extent of the family’s poverty had perhaps been a little exaggerated’. Nonetheless, this was a life-changing moment for Titmuss. Through a contact of his mother’s, he was taken on, initially as a probationary clerk, by the County Fire Office. Titmuss, still only in his late teens, now became the family bread-winner.20 His mother, from now until her death in 1972, relied on him as her sole source of financial support.21
The County Fire Office had been founded in 1807 and, by its own account, was an ‘association of noblemen and gentlemen’. It was one of 19 such companies founded in the first decade of the nineteenth century, a testament to contemporary trends in industrialisation and urbanisation. As Harold Raynes notes, it had ‘some individual characteristics’, and sought to ‘seek support from the counties where there was a demand for fire insurance and a desire for local responsibility’. Around the time Titmuss joined, the company had acquired a new building at 30 Regent Street, in London’s West End. This was the office to which Titmuss was to commute for the next decade and a half. The First World War and its aftermath brought considerable changes to the County Fire Office, including the employment of women, and the range of coverage it offered. Various staff benefits were introduced, including schemes to assist with house purchase, and a staff canteen. The company clearly saw itself as progressive, with many staff enjoying long periods of service.22 Whether Titmuss (or any of the other staff) felt the same way is open to question. By the time he came left he had become increasingly disgruntled with his insurance career, notwithstanding his promotion, at the relatively young age of 32, to London Inspector a few years earlier.23
As later chapters show, even before this point he was devoting much of his time to political activities, and to research on population issues. And as a profile written in the 1960s suggested, once promoted to inspector he could ‘do his inspecting at home by phone in the mornings which left the afternoons free for study’.24 Presumably, this information was provided by Titmuss himself. But back at the beginning of his insurance career, he was initially paid £85 per annum, rising by £20 per annum to, ultimately, £265 per annum. Gowing, as we have seen, was sceptical about Titmuss’s formal schooling, suggesting that he was largely ‘self-educated with a special interest in working out mathematical problems’.25 Again, this presumably came, by way of Kay, from Titmuss himself but he clearly had, and further developed, mathematical skills. As Oakley suggests, at County Fire Office he learned ‘not only the essentials of the insurance business but how to read and analyse the statistics of life, death and sickness’.26 Titmuss’s own early research was very much into such issues of morbidity and mortality. It is difficult to know whether Titmuss actually enjoyed any of his time at County Fire Office, as opposed to learning a lot from it. As will become apparent later in this volume, though, the private insurance industry was to become something of a bête-noire on account of its purported economic power, and its promotion of benefits, notably occupational pensions, outside of state-provided welfare. In Chapter 15, for example, we shall see how this shaped one of his most famous publications, The Irresponsible Society. His criticisms were, then, those of an informed insider.
As a worker in the insurance industry, where, then, was Titmuss located in the social structure of inter-war Britain? We have seen that one version of his early life stresses the modesty of his background. But after joining County Fire Office, Titmuss’s occupation, and to a lesser extent his income, placed him squarely in the middle class, albeit initially very much at its lower end. More than this, he was part of the ‘new’ middle class, broadly ‘progressive’ in outlook, and so of a different disposition to the ‘old’ middle class consisting of professions such as doctors and lawyers. Titmuss’s career in insurance, furthermore, coincided with what Ross McKibbin has characterised as a sort of middle class ‘golden age’. Stable and rising salaries, such as that enjoyed by Titmuss, combined with falling prices and an undemanding fiscal regime, meant that this social group was especially economically advantaged, while the threat of unemployment was considerably less than that faced by the manual working classes.27 Titmuss’s training was very much ‘on the job’, but, as we shall see further in a later chapter, he was clearly a good enough statistician to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and to gain a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for his research, albeit largely on the basis of his published rather than professional work. Nonetheless, the two were clearly complementary, and that Titmuss was promoted to inspector at a relatively young age further attests to his abilities. The field of statistics itself can be seen as part of the ‘triumph of science-based expertise’ which had taken place between 1880 and 1929. It had effectively been created by Karl Pearson, a leading figure in a movement with which Titmuss too was to be associated, eugenics.28 The further twist here is that Titmuss was later to express scepticism about aspects of the work, and behaviour, of ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’. But throughout his career he continued to employ statistical techniques and data, data which he clearly saw as hard, scientific evidence for the sort of moral arguments he sought to make.
At the memorial service held for Titmuss shortly after his death one of the speakers was Richard Crossman. While Crossman mostly talked, understandably, about Titmuss’s public activities, he also claimed that ‘Richard’s home life was an inspiration not only to him but to those of us who partook of Kay’s hospitality’. The two were similar types, he suggested, for example in their naivety in certain (unspecified)
