38Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 5.
39TITMUSS/7/2, typescript ‘Crime and Tragedy’, pp 9, 56.
40Cited in Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 58–9.
41LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, R.M. Titmuss, ‘Application for the Chair of Social Administration’, undated but 1950.
42McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, p 87.
43Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 64–5.
44Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 49, 54.
45Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 63, 52ff.
46Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 19, 37, 47.
47Ibid, pp 3, 60–61.
48Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 5.
49Oakley, Man and Wife, p 8.
50LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, letter, 9 June 1973, Kay to Adams.
51Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 68.
52Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 5.
53H. McCarthy, ‘Social Science and Married Women’s Employment in Post-War Britain’, Past and Present, 233, 1, 2016, pp 269, 277, and passim.
54Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 56.
55Oakley, Man and Wife, p 4.
56Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 8, 63 (emphasis in the original).
57McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp 518–20.
58Ibid, p 237.
Politics: the Liberal Party, the ‘Fleet Street Parliament’, and Forward March
This chapter examines Titmuss’s political activism in the 1930s, a difficult decade for British society, and into the early part of the Second World War. Throughout the 1930s fear of another war was ever-present, and the Depression after the 1929 crash further exacerbated socioeconomic disruption in the ‘traditional’ industrial areas. A sense of foreboding was compounded by psychological ideas which stressed the irrational, unconscious, dimensions of human behaviour. For instance, the psychiatrist John Bowlby and the Labour politician Evan Durbin co-authored a book entitled Personal Aggressiveness and War which discussed, among other things, what they described as ‘irrational acquisitiveness’.1 Titmuss and Bowlby were already acquainted by this point, and their paths were to cross on various occasions over the coming years. Both were to be signatories, for example, to a letter to the Prime Minister in 1965 on the extent of child poverty.2 Titmuss, too, was concerned with ‘acquisitiveness’, and saw psychological factors as contributing to international conflict. Gloom and doom, though, was not the whole story. Compared to continental Europe, Britain was politically stable, with the National Government, dominated by the Conservatives, elected in 1931, and returned to power in 1935. Some parts of the country, including London, saw the development of new industries, and new ways of living characterised by improved living standards leading to higher levels of home ownership, and the acquisition of new consumer goods. Yet this, in turn, highlights significant regional differences, and, overall, there was a highly charged political and cultural atmosphere. It was in this unsettling environment that Titmuss became politically active.
The Liberal Party and the Fleet Street Parliament
In spring 1932 Titmuss was welcomed into Hendon Young Liberal Association by its honorary secretary, J.M. Henderson, who told him that Liberals were ‘few and far between in Hendon, but we are very keen’.3 This would appear to be the J.M. Henderson who, a few years later, was to become Titmuss’s literary agent, acting on behalf of the company Stephen Aske.4 Titmuss became an enthusiastic Liberal activist. In summer 1935, for instance, he sent a long piece to his local newspaper, outlining his views about the party’s current position. Titmuss conceded that many people could not remember living under a Liberal government and, since 1918, liberalism had been ‘fighting the reactionary movements engendered by the War’. The British people had ‘witnessed and endured the spectacle of two pitiful Labour Governments, both timorous, both fearful and both failing to fulfil their pledges’. These minority administrations had been in power in 1924 and 1929–31 respectively, with the latter ultimately brought down by the economic catastrophe of 1929. The National Government had overseen an increase of those on poor relief, while ignoring evidence about distress among the unemployed. Demands for a foreign policy more attuned to the maintenance of peace had likewise gone unheard. The country did not want ‘Socialism’, but this would be forced upon it unless the Liberal Party could be revived. More positively, the latter endured because ‘it represents the English mind at its best’.5 The Liberal Party was undoubtedly struggling. Already in third place after the Conservatives and Labour, and badly divided, it had split further in the early 1930s when a group under Herbert Samuel had left the National Government. Membership was declining, in some areas local councillors were forming anti-socialist alliances with Conservatives, and parliamentary representation was to be further reduced, to a mere 21 MPs, at the general election of November 1935.6
Undaunted, Titmuss did his bit. In the late 1960s he recalled being shouted down in the East End of London ‘when I tried to speak against the Mosley invasion’.7 This refers to Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, and suggests
