with Oakley claiming that her parents ‘were always careful with money: in fact it’s a bit of a puzzle what they spent their money on’. On a more personal level, and in what was to be a longstanding source of uneasiness in Titmuss’s life, Kay and his mother did not get on, with the latter also making constant emotional demands of him.45 As to what Kay did, when Titmuss met her she was the organising secretary of the Fulham Fellowship for the Unemployed, and later its honorary secretary and treasurer, from 1932 until its demise in 1940. She also took on other, related, roles. So Kay was in employment for a number of years of married life. But after 1940 she never again worked outside the home.46
This brings us back to the problematic issue of the nature of the relationship between Kay and her husband. Oakley suggests that the six years between Kay’s first meeting Titmuss and her leaving employment was her mother’s ‘golden period’. Kay was certainly busy with her own work, which in some ways was more socially significant than her husband’s at this point, but, and part of her later Titmuss mythology, in her view she was also leading him towards his true destiny as a leading thinker on social welfare.47 Gowing further elaborates on Kay’s role by suggesting that, from the time they had met, and under Kay’s influence, ‘Richard’s interests had become social and political’, the ‘new found radicalism’ noted earlier.48 In other words, Kay’s project was to be shaping, supporting, and promoting Titmuss’s career. A particular version of Titmuss’s life and work was put forward by Kay until the end of his life, and has had a shelf-life beyond. This was Kay as the defender of the faith, defender of a man who had risen from poverty, formulated, with her background but essential assistance, new ways of thinking about social welfare, and was, to those of a like mind, someone to be loved and admired. Again to quote Oakley, when invited, with Titmuss, to a Buckingham Palace garden party in 1970, Kay ‘treasured this day, just as she treasured all Richard’s claims to fame’.49 And as Kay told Walter Adams shortly after Titmuss’s memorial service, at that event ‘it was wonderful to have so many friends gathered in St Martin’s and we were honoured and comforted by the consciousness of so much warmth and sympathy around us’. It had ‘meant a great deal when one has lost so much’.50 For Oakley, all this was to the frustration of her mother’s unacknowledged desires. She agrees that Kay ‘never said to me that, had she not married Richard Titmuss, she might have had a satisfying career of her own’. However, the ‘documentary remnants of her life bequeathed to me and the way she talked about the past, that past before I was born, did speak wistfully of an uncompleted journey’.51
We should pause momentarily to unpick some of this before examining Titmuss’s own attitude to marriage. On the question of Kay’s influence, it was certainly the case, as Gowing suggests, that in his first published book, which came out in 1938 and is discussed in Chapter 4, he acknowledged his wife as having given him insights into the lives of the unemployed. But Gowing over-reads this when she writes that Kay had made ‘social values and social concerns his central issue’.52 Politically, Kay herself was no radical. As we have seen, in 1935 she claimed no interest in politics, and this had caused a certain coolness between her and Titmuss. Titmuss was politically aware enough to have joined the Liberal Party in 1932, before he encountered Kay. To reiterate an earlier point, it thus seems improbable that the activism Titmuss was displaying by 1935 had been solely caused by meeting Kay. Ultimately, we can never know the true extent of Kay’s influence on her husband. But from the Second World War onwards she was certainly to provide him with a domestic platform which allowed him to pursue his relentless work schedule.
Back in the 1930s, though, it is undoubtedly true that Kay had direct experience of working with the unemployed. This may well have been important for Titmuss since locally unemployment rates were low. Looking round him, Titmuss would have seen a region, London and the South East, where new industries were thriving, the suburbs expanding (he lived in one himself), and the small number of unemployed were relatively invisible. Kay may, therefore, have alerted him to problems on his doorstep of which he had been unaware in a strictly personal sense (although he could not conceivably have been ignorant of the devastation being wrought on the traditional industrial areas). As to Kay giving up her career in order to support Titmuss, there is clearly a case to be made. But, as always, it is important to see this in context. Kay was actually unusual in continuing to work after her marriage, albeit for only a few years. In the inter-war era only 10 per cent of the workforce consisted of married women, a group which constituted 16 per cent of the female workforce. The huge change in this situation was to come after the Second World War, and was analysed by, among others, Titmuss.53 Kay may have been thwarted in her career, but hers was, nonetheless, not an unusual experience. This is not to condone it, simply to suggest that the picture is complex. Oakley’s ‘uncompleted journey’ was not confined to Mrs Titmuss.
Yet for Oakley, Titmuss had, for various reasons, a ‘passion for the stable breadwinner-father formula of family life’ – he was, and remained, in other words, a supporter of the ‘traditional’ family.54 She agrees that he was, in important ways, a radical who analysed to effect various social divisions. But when it came to gender it was ‘as though for him the social divisions between men and women were different from all other social divisions. They were not about power’.55 What she is arguing here is that while Titmuss was clear-sighted about, say, the way in which social inequality involved the exercise of power by one part of society over another, he could not, or would not, see existing social arrangements as also embracing the exercise of power by men over women. In the case of Kay and Titmuss, this could be clearly seen on the domestic front as they engaged in ‘their tireless enactment of gendered ideology’. Her parents, Oakley suggests, were to collect ‘around themselves a coterie of people who shared their commitment to improving public and personal welfare through the analytic and prescriptive power of thought … Actually, he thought and discussed and she served the meals’.56
As an outsider, it is again difficult to know what to make of this. Oakley, of course, knew her parents in ways that nobody else could. However, whatever the particular dynamics of the Titmuss marriage, McKibbin, while acknowledging that society was dominated by men, nonetheless points to the complicated nature of gender relations in middle class households. In the search for ‘companionate marriage’ not only were men expected to perform at least some domestic tasks, it was also assumed that husband and wife would have ‘interests and friends in common’. Needless to say, this was not unproblematic. But, at the very least, it did suggest a not completely subordinate role for middle class women.57 Of course, none of this necessarily tells us much about the actual nature and texture of Titmuss and Kay’s relationship. But it is suggestive. So, for instance, while Titmuss may well have done little more around the house than wash the dishes, at least early on in their relationship he and Kay clearly had mutually enjoyable interests in common, such as hiking. Nor is it to reject wholesale the argument that Kay sacrificed her career to the project that was Richard Titmuss. Arguably, though, it was Kay who drove this project forward, albeit that Titmuss was undoubtedly ambitious in his own right.
If the details of Titmuss’s early life are patchy,
