Kay wrote a few days later to thank Crossman for his contribution. It was ‘hard to face the future without Richard and sad that he had to leave us when there was so much he still wanted to do’.30 The view of the Titmuss marriage as a close, loving, partnership has long been another part of the standard narrative of his life. Gowing, for instance, talks of the ‘deep love’ between Titmuss and Kay, and that this was the ‘mainstay of his life to the very end’.31 Again, given that she gained much of her information from Kay, this sort of depiction is to be expected (although, of course, that does not make it untrue). And to be fair, Gowing had known Titmuss for around 30 years by the time of his death. Of their respective personalities, Kay, at least for some, was an individual difficult to warm to, while Titmuss, for those who did not buy into his mission, could be vain and arrogant.32 Oakley quotes Townsend as claiming that he found Kay ‘small-minded – someone who often made carping or destructive comments about others and who did not have interesting things to say about her own activities’.33 Abel-Smith helped Kay after Titmuss’s death until her own death 15 years later. But he later confided to Oakley that he had never really liked her mother.34 Given that Titmuss left few personal papers, and was famously reticent about private matters, it is difficult to know what to make of all this. The following account of his life outside work in the 1930s is, therefore, for the most part confined to factual material.
Starting with leisure activities, as a young man Titmuss played chess to a reasonable standard (although he was to give it up as too time-consuming), and was a fan, and player, of both cricket and football.35 The former, in terms of its cross-class appeal, was England’s ‘national’ sport, and an important component of English national identity. Among Titmuss’s other leisure activities was hiking and youth hostelling, in Britain and abroad. He was thus part of a broader trend in the 1930s which saw a shift from formal (that is, rules-based) sport to, as McKibbin puts it, ‘more informal and socially casual activities’. At the end of the decade, there were ‘about 500,000 regular walkers and nearly 300 youth hostels’, with membership of the Youth Hostel Association rising from 6,000 in 1934 to 83,000 in 1939. This rapid expansion had a number of causes, including a growing perception of the countryside as a recreational resource, something which reminds us of Titmuss’s fondness for rural Bedfordshire. Both the middle and working classes took up pastimes such as hiking, with part of the appeal being that a more or less equal number of men and women participated.36
It was on such a walking tour of North Wales that Kay and Titmuss first met, in summer 1934. She had been born in South London on 20 January 1903, and was thus four years older. As was common at that time, both still lived at home, Titmuss with his mother in North London, where he was to remain until his marriage in 1937. Clearly both Kay and Titmuss were keen walkers, undertaking in 1935, for example, a tour of the Black Forest in Germany. Nor were their leisure activities confined to the outdoors. In a letter to a friend in 1935 Kay wrote that, though not interested in politics herself, she had agreed for Titmuss’s sake to attend a meeting at which he was speaking. Titmuss was by this point, as described in the next chapter, active in Liberal Party politics, not least by way of the debating society to which he belonged, the Fleet Street Parliament (again, coincidentally, close to the LSE). But Kay had not been impressed by the meeting, and this caused what turned out to be a temporary division between them, with her religious beliefs adding to the mix. Soon afterwards, though, they were planning their wedding. Titmuss’s political activities also included campaigning for a peaceful solution to international problems. Both he and Kay, again before their marriage, attended the World Youth Congress and International Peace Conference in Geneva in summer 1936. Titmuss was a delegate to both meetings, representing the National League of Young Liberals and Youth House, Camden. Closer to home, Kay and Titmuss also attended another youth peace conference in the same year, this time in Birmingham.37
Amidst all this, Titmuss also found time to write a work, in 1936, principally entitled ‘Crime and Tragedy’, but with the alternatives ‘Government by Betrayal’ and ‘Creation of Anarchy’. Written under the pseudonym Richard Caston (Caston was Kay’s middle name) this was rejected by various publishers. By Gowing’s account, the work was informed by his ‘new found radicalism’, implicitly attributed to Kay.38 Although this is difficult to substantiate one way or another, what is notable about this volume is that Titmuss had clearly been gathering material for some time, going back at least six years. This strongly suggests that concern about the issues with which his script dealt, primarily Britain’s foreign and defence policy since 1931, pre-dated his meeting Kay. What it had to say is discussed more fully in the next chapter, but here it is worth noting Titmuss’s take on patriotism. This was ‘not synonymous with the state of the country’s armaments and defence forces’. His own ‘love for my country is not pride in her ability to make war. It cannot be defined’. Nor was he hostile to the British Empire. On the contrary, one of his most stinging criticisms of the post-1931 Conservative-dominated government was that it had refused, in its foreign policy, to ‘accept the challenge to prove that Britain is fitted to fill the role and responsibility of a great power and of a great Empire’.39
Even when married, Titmuss, and Kay, kept up a relentless schedule of activities. In a letter to a friend, Kay wrote that a number of pieces of Titmuss’s correspondence to various newspapers and journals had been published, and more were being prepared. The previous evening, she continued, she had come home around midnight ‘to find all the lights on in the flat and the wireless on and Richard fast asleep in bed with a book in his hand. It seemed most odd’.40 By his own account, in the decade before starting work on Problems of Social Policy in the early 1940s, Titmuss had been ‘reading and studying privately’, had ‘attended evening classes at various institutes’, and, crucially, had ‘interested myself in social and economic questions’.41 We can already see here some of Titmuss’s defining features, which in many respects he retained for the rest of his life. He had a relentless drive for self-improvement, became engaged in numerous activities by way of a range of associations and clubs, and was increasingly committed to political and social activism. He (and Kay) was thus participating in what McKibbin describes as the ‘informal sociability’ characteristic of the inter-war middle classes (this is contrasted with the supposedly ‘spontaneous sociability’ of the working classes). An important feature of ‘informal sociability’ was joining clubs through which friendship, and sometimes professional, networks were created.42 Networking was to become a notable Titmuss trait. Although it raises a whole range of other issues, it is perhaps worth noting in this context Oakley’s observation, which pertains mostly to her parents’ post-war lives, but may be revealing about even the early stages of their marriage. She debates whether, in the last resort, her father had any friends. His diaries, to which she had access, essentially record meetings and other work-related activities. So ‘he might have been lonely. They were both lonely, the way you can only be lonely in a publicly successful marriage’.43
How did this marriage come about? After a certain amount of procrastination, with money almost certainly being a concern, Kay and Titmuss married on 6 February 1937 at an Anglican church in Lewisham, South London. Their first home together was a flat in Pimlico.44
