the threat of, especially, Nazism, rather than the supposed pragmatists engaging in appeasement.20
Titmuss’s concerns about international politics were forcefully articulated in his unpublished mid-1930s book ‘Crime and Tragedy’ (alternative titles: ‘Government by Betrayal’ and ‘Creation of Anarchy’). It dealt with the culpability, as Titmuss saw it, of the National Government for the state of international affairs. This was an angry text, dedicated to ‘Those Who Laid Down Their Lives That Others Might Uphold the Divine Right to Use Bombing Planes’. Titmuss praised those, including Lord Cecil, ‘who have worked unremittingly for the strengthening of World Government’. His book sought to show how ‘the Government by their supine handling of Foreign Policy since 1931’ had ‘allowed the Nation to drift far along the path that leads inexorably to international insanity’. While Britain was not solely responsible for the deteriorating situation, nonetheless, given the country’s world role, it was ‘chiefly to blame’. Discussing the constructive ends to which the League of Nations might be employed, Titmuss melodramatically suggested that it was ‘for this belief and a passionate conviction in the power of the British Empire to lead the Nations towards the banishment of anarchy from the earth that I am prepared to lay down my life’.21
Titmuss then cited numerous examples of Britain’s failure to support the League, for instance over Abyssinia. This had resulted in messages from across the world expressing ‘astonishment at the part played by the British Government in a shameless and callous betrayal of the League’. The ‘name of England, and all that it means to us’ was thus ‘splashed with mud and abuse from every corner of the globe’. Britain’s actions were a betrayal of those, suffering under oppression and dictatorship, who had looked to it for hope. Equally betrayed had been those who thought the League of Nations ‘the one good thing born of 1918’, and who remembered ‘our glorious heritage of freedom and democracy’. Again showing a talent for melodrama, Titmuss then suggested that ‘Generations unborn will rise one day and curse these flag-bedecked Conservative leaders’ for seeking to reward aggression, and their failure to exert British leadership. The Abyssinian and other foreign policy setbacks were unreservedly attributed to the National Government. Conservatism refused ‘to allow Great Britain to take its rightful place at Geneva. We must not take the initiative’. Its ‘creed’ asserted that Britain ‘must be one of a crowd in the League. We must be indistinguishable in the comity of nations [and so] must not take one step in advance of the most turbulent and backward South American or Balkan State’. Consequently, disarmament talks had gone nowhere (hence, in part, the rise of Hitler), and British society itself was, as fears of war grew, becoming militarised. Such fears had ‘spread over the country like a noisome cloud of poison gas’, and were being used to suppress protest.22
A further impact of the National Government’s approach to foreign policy could be seen in its dealings with the empire. In 1932 the Ottawa Conference, responding to the 1929 economic crisis, had set up a tariff system whereby the British economy was ‘protected’ by a series of barriers to foreign imports, while also setting up purportedly favourable arrangements with the British Dominions – ‘imperial preference’. But this did not result in a form of ‘empire free trade’. Leaders of the Dominions also sought to protect their own economies. More broadly, this was an important step in ending Britain’s historic, if by now somewhat tattered, commitment to international free trade. For Titmuss this was highly unwelcome. The conference had allowed the ‘appearance of economic nationalism in some of its worst aspects’, and had had a disruptive effect on the global economy. Because of the horse-trading over preferences between Britain and the Dominions, furthermore, the National Government had come ‘nearer than any previous administration has ever done to shattering the British Empire into small pieces’. Outside the empire, British policy was, on the one hand, to advocate collective security (whether it actually did anything about this was another matter, at least by Titmuss’s account in the rest of his book), while simultaneously supporting ‘economic policies which can only lead to impoverishment and unemployment in Europe, to the spread of hunger and fear, and to the rise of despotic governments with huge armaments and supported by neurotic and desperate peoples’. At Ottawa the British government had ‘presented to the world an imperialistic example of naked uneconomic [sic] nationalism. Mussolini and Hitler soaked it all in’.23
Titmuss’s political concerns were, in the 1930s, as much with the international as with the domestic situation. He was clearly incensed at what he saw as the betrayal of the League of Nations, and British foreign policy’s ‘supine’ role. He actively engaged with these issues through participation in meetings, his leadership role in the Fleet Street Parliament, and his writings. His unpublished ‘Crime and Tragedy’ is notably intemperate in its language, especially when it came to the Conservative Party. Perhaps more surprisingly, Titmuss also saw a leadership role in world affairs for both Britain and the British Empire. His positive view of the empire was not especially unusual at the time as it could be seen, and perhaps Titmuss saw it this way, as a form of international cooperation which, at least on some levels, seemed to work. It is equally notable that, in the context of the empire and more broadly, he was hostile to economic protectionism, a classic Liberal Party position. For liberal thinkers such as Titmuss, free trade was crucial in combatting nationalism and militarism.
In 1938 Titmuss attended the Liberal Summer School held in Oxford, although he did not contribute to it formally.24 The following year, though, he was on the platform in Cambridge. Writing shortly after Titmuss’s death, the historian Keith Hancock, from the early 1940s an important figure in his life, claimed that Titmuss had been persuaded to attend by some ‘young Liberals who belonged to his suburban cricket team’.25 In fact, Titmuss was suggested to the General Secretary of the Liberal Summer Schools, Sydney Brown, by the broadcaster F. Buckley Hargreaves. Hargreaves had passed on to Brown the view of the King’s physician, Lord Horder, that Titmuss’s first book, Poverty and Population, was ‘the best of its kind he has ever come across’.26 Horder had provided the foreword for this volume, discussed in the next chapter, and it supplied much of the material for his Cambridge address. Also speaking that morning was the leading businessman, authority on population issues, and Eugenics Society stalwart, Laurence J. Cadbury, whom Titmuss almost certainly knew. Cadbury spoke on ‘A Population Policy and Family Allowances’, an issue with which he was becoming increasingly concerned to the extent that he actually granted them to his own employees.27 Prior to the event, Titmuss contacted Cadbury suggesting they compare notes in order to avoid any duplication of content. He also told him that he intended to carry on where the Oxford economist Roy Harrod had left off at the Oxford Summer School, remarking that Harrod’s paper was in his view ‘rather sensational’. Although Titmuss did not elaborate on what he meant here, in Poverty and Population he had upbraided Harrod for indulging in ‘alarming prophecies’.28 As we shall later see, this was, at least as far as population was concerned, a bit rich coming from Titmuss.
Titmuss’s talk, ‘Contemporary Poverty, Regional Distribution and Social Consequences’, was very much in line with his current preoccupations, also discussed in more detail in the next chapter. He started with information on the ‘geographical incidence of such accompaniments of poverty as severe infantile mortality’. Arguing that there was ‘no biological reason’ why the infant mortality rate could not be reduced to 30 per 1,000 throughout the whole country (the national average at
