such as Amsterdam. Titmuss then went on to attack the government’s ‘wishful thinking’ over the fitness of army recruits. In so doing, officials and politicians were consciously rejecting the work of researchers such as the nutritionist John Boyd Orr.29 His speech seems to have been well received. Sydney Brown told him that after ‘the ovation the School gave you yesterday you don’t need any word of mine to tell you how very much your address was appreciated’. It was, moreover, ‘excellent that our final session should deal with constructive policy after the rather grim week we have had’.30 Given that the Summer School took place shortly before the outbreak of war, there can be little doubt as to what her concluding remark refers.
Titmuss was also contacted by Gerald Barry, managing editor of the leading Liberal newspaper News Chronicle, asking for two articles based on his talk (it probably helped that Cadbury chaired the paper’s board). These Titmuss duly delivered to his literary agent, Henderson, a few days later.31 More broadly, Titmuss’s Cambridge speech had been given alongside those of leading Liberal figures such as Lord Samuel, surely a sign of his growing status as a polemical commentator on current affairs. As Michael Freeden points out, this particular Summer School marked a positive step on the Liberal Party’s part to promoting the idea of family allowances, both to alleviate family poverty and to address fears about a declining population, issues with which Titmuss was deeply engaged. As such, family allowances constituted an appeal to ‘progressive opinion’ at a time when the labour movement remained divided about the issue, although Freeden rightly suggests that the ‘insecurity and fears generated by the international crisis’, rather than committed plans for social reform, profoundly shaped the mainstream Liberal agenda.32 Nonetheless the appeal of liberalism for Titmuss, and of Titmuss for liberalism, is apparent.
Titmuss’s support for ‘progressive opinion’ was also manifested in, for example, the invitation he received to join the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) from its founder, Ronald Kidd. Kidd informed Titmuss that he had been given his name by Ursula Grant-Duff, Eugenics Society stalwart and supporter of the Titmuss family. In response, Titmuss enclosed his subscription, telling Kidd that, as ‘an author and writer on social questions’, the NCCL was carrying out work of ‘great importance’, and he wished him well in his membership drive.33 This correspondence took place just after the outbreak of war, when civil liberties were, for bodies like the NCCL, under threat. On Titmuss’s part, it should therefore be seen as a statement of his position, and in line with his objections to what he saw as unacceptable treatment of refugees, noted further in the next chapter. In the years before the outbreak of war, Titmuss was politically active on a range of fronts, all underpinned by his commitment to the Liberal Party.
The coming of the Second World War saw, as Ross McKibbin puts it, the pre-war party system ‘Thrown Off Course’. While before 1939 the Conservative Party had established ‘a political supremacy which seemed unchallengeable’, soon the demands of ‘total war’ led to the creation of the wartime coalition government. This was led by Winston Churchill, a Conservative, but also included leading figures from other parties, for instance, as Deputy Prime Minister, Labour leader Clement Attlee. An electoral truce whereby, in the event of by-elections, no rival candidates were put up to those of the incumbent party more or less held throughout the war. The end of fighting in Europe saw the first general election in ten years, and the unexpected landslide victory of the Labour Party. During the conflict itself, post-war social reconstruction became a prominent theme in domestic politics once the various severe crises of the early years had abated.34 In short, the political landscape fundamentally changed between 1939 and 1945. It is therefore appropriate at this point to discuss Titmuss’s involvement with Forward March, one of the predecessors of the better known Common Wealth Party. Although this discussion extends slightly beyond the notional end of this part of the book (1941), Titmuss’s engagement had its origins in his earlier participation in Liberal politics. Titmuss had strong, rather unconventional, views about the political situation in the early part of the conflict, views which he was happy to broadcast.
Common Wealth was founded in July 1942 by a merger of the writer J.B. Priestley’s 1941 Committee, and Sir Richard Acland’s organisation, Forward March. It was to go on to win a number of by-elections, in defiance of the wartime electoral truce. The organisation’s principal slogans were ‘Common Ownership’, ‘Vital Democracy’, and ‘Morality in Politics’, alongside the demand that the Beveridge Report be implemented in full, and immediately.35 The key figure in Common Wealth was the eccentric former Liberal MP, Acland, encountered earlier as a supporter of a Popular Front. Titmuss was active in the various factions which were to become Common Wealth, an organisation which, Acland’s biographer suggests, appealed ‘essentially to the more modest, professional middle classes, notably in London and on Merseyside’.36 This no doubt applied to its predecessors, and accurately enough describes Titmuss. Acland and Titmuss had been in touch since at least late 1938 when they had entered into a correspondence over one of Titmuss’s obsessions of the time, population health. Titmuss had also been among those who, having been sent a copy by the author, had responded to Acland’s 1940 Penguin best-seller Unser Kampf (Our Struggle, an allusion to Hitler’s Mein Kampf). This was part of Acland’s strategy to form a broad, progressive political front looking forward to post-war social reconstruction. Titmuss told Acland that while ‘as a Liberal’ he might disagree on ‘a few side issues’, nonetheless he accepted ‘your major argument for Common Ownership with all that implies in national and international relations’. If a majority of the ‘Liberals and Labour accept your case’, then the ‘Lib-Lab front on Common Ownership must become a reality’.37 Acland’s response also contained an invitation to a Forward March meeting to be held at the Commons in early March 1940. Titmuss accepted, adding that in his view ‘the most important and urgent step’ would be to ‘break the political truce’. This meant, he argued, ‘continuous pressure’ on the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, and required the formation of an ‘ALL-PARTY COMMITTEE’.38
An ‘Unser Kampf’ group (presumably an alternative name for Forward March) was formed, and in spring 1940 issued a ‘Manifesto of the Common Men’. This sought to ‘build a new world based on a new morality. To put into practice in our public life the principles which we pay lip service to in our churches’, and it was to such ends that ‘we invite the co-operation of our fellow-men’. Titmuss, describing himself as a ‘Writer and Statistician’, agreed to be a signatory to this document.39 A few weeks later, he became chairman of the group’s Home Policy Committee, and, as such, party to a discussion which noted that the government now had complete power over both capital and labour, something which could be used for either progressive or reactionary ends. There was no effective parliamentary opposition, so wartime policies should focus on ‘new moral imperatives’ – again a very Titmuss notion – such as the ‘permanent conscription of capital’ and ‘workers representation’.40 During Acland’s brief spell in the army, Titmuss once more took a leadership role, telling a correspondent that he ‘personally felt that the work should go on and that some direction was needed in Acland’s absence.41
