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Further reinforcing this idea of Titmuss in a leadership role, by spring of 1941 he was, apparently, chair of the Unser Kampf group, and consequently dealing with various enquiries to the organisation. For instance, he responded to a correspondent who had approached Unser Kampf with what appears to have been proposals based on the idea of Social Credit. The latter argued for the establishment of a form of economic democracy, particularly by way of monetary reform. In reply, Titmuss suggested that while he agreed that much was wrong with the present monetary system, nonetheless it would be mistaken to think that ‘drastic change in the monetary system and its operation would create – by itself – a new kind of society’. The system was ‘part and parcel of an acutely acquisitive society’ and Unser Kampf had recently publicised what it saw as the consequences of such ‘acquisitiveness … as it impinges on our war effort’.43 The phrase ‘acquisitive society’ alludes to the work of the ethical socialist, R.H. Tawney, a recurring figure in this volume. Titmuss also gave talks on behalf of Forward March, for example to the latter’s Ealing Group in May 1942 on ‘Private Profit versus the Health Subsistence and Conservation of the People’.44
There can be little doubt that Titmuss played an important role in Forward March. In summer 1941, Acland told him that he felt something important was about to happen and, although he did not specify what, perhaps he, like Titmuss, saw the evacuation from Dunkirk the previous year, and the subsequent Blitz, as transformative moments in British history. In any event, something prompted him to reflect on Forward March’s own recent history. Reviewing the last 15 months, Acland gratefully acknowledged all the people who had helped the organisation. But, he continued, ‘I look back also on that meeting we had outside the dining room of the House of Commons when you and I tried to think up in a hurry one or two practical conclusions to which we hoped that first meeting might perhaps lead’. This was clearly the meeting to which Titmuss had been invited in March 1940. ‘Since then’, Acland flatteringly suggested, ‘you and only you have remained with us quite steadily in good times and bad’. Throughout, Titmuss had given ‘the wisest advice’, and whenever he had agreed to do something it had happened. As things presently stood, it was ‘quite clear to me that the next stages of our enterprise could not be accomplished without your steady guidance and advice almost from day to day’.45
In reply, Titmuss told Acland that he would continue to do what he could before going on to make an important statement of his own beliefs. Looking back to the era of the Popular Front, that is the mid-1930s, he could see that ‘what counted most with me at the very beginning was sincerity in public life’. And, as he began to ‘think more deeply’, there came the ‘importance of ideas; moral values’. Equally importantly, there must be ‘no compromise’. Although not a Christian himself, he was perhaps appealing to Acland’s Christian socialism when he suggested that while ‘Christ would not admit hairsplitting’, nonetheless ‘one outstanding feature of our time is the ability of the progressive to hairsplit’. Perhaps this was because progressives symbolised ‘the age of indecision from which I hope we are now emerging’. In his own work, meanwhile, he was hoping soon to complete ‘my study of Infant Mortality and Social Class’ – what was to be Birth, Poverty and Wealth. His text had been vetted by ‘other experts’, and showed conclusively that the working class, and the poor, were now worse off in relative terms than before the First World War. Clarifying his point, he continued that this was ‘in terms of health, which incidentally should be the criterion of any new order. The fact that no one has previously studied the subject indicates that in an acquisitive society even research concentrates on money tokens – not health’.46
Unfortunately, at least for Acland, Titmuss was unable to fulfil the role the former had envisaged for him, although the two kept in touch. Titmuss also compiled a file about Common Wealth, including a draft response to the Beveridge Report written by Lafitte. Years later, he was to send this to Abel-Smith, describing it as a ‘fragment of history’.47 The Beveridge Report, published in 1942, was not the revolutionary work sometimes claimed (including by its author). Essentially, it proposed rationalising and expanding existing social insurance schemes, while making, admittedly important, arguments for healthcare reform, family allowances, and the maintenance of full employment. Sir William’s proposals caught the popular mood, though, appearing at a point when there were growing expectations that the war would be won, with social reconstruction to follow. In time, Titmuss became highly critical of Beveridge. But, like many others, he was thrilled by the report’s appearance. A quarter of a century later, he recalled ‘the excitement I and my friends felt’ on first reading it. Despite the stresses of the war’s early years, ‘we still believed as democrats that we could change society; that we could build a better world for all including the poor’. They thought, too, that with ‘hard work, responsibility and imagination’ they could bring about the end of the ‘hated stigma of the poor law means test’, and the associated view that anyone ‘dependent on the State for income maintenance and public services’ should be regarded as inferior, a ‘second class citizen, and … social failure’.48 But to return to Common Wealth, by late 1941 Titmuss had begun researching what was to become Problems of Social Policy. As he informed Acland in summer 1942, because of this work for the Cabinet Office he could not be so publicly active on Forward March’s behalf. But as he also told Acland, his attitudes had not changed.49
How, then, does this fit with the correspondence between Titmuss and Kingsley Martin, editor of New Statesman, where the former claimed that he had moved over to socialism, albeit a socialism which, in an important qualification, ‘derives from a moral not an economic impetus’?50 This is, therefore, an appropriate point to discuss Titmuss’s political engagement from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, and the insights it affords to his thinking. First, Titmuss threw himself wholeheartedly into Liberal, and more broadly progressive, political activity. He took on a leadership role at a time when he had a full-time job, and when, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, he was also carrying out research, engaged with organisations such as the Eugenics Society, and promoting his ideas to an ever wider audience. Demanding as his political activities were, they were crucial in honing his speaking, writing, and organisational skills, put to good effect in the rest of his career. It is also striking how he saw himself. He was, by his own account, an ‘author and writer on social questions’, a ‘writer and a statistician’, someone whose work had been scrutinised by ‘other experts’. And his various activities were sufficiently well known for him to appear as an invited speaker at the Liberal Summer School in Cambridge.
Second, we must ask what kind of liberal Titmuss was, in the sense of the ideas he held. Freeden identifies what he calls a left-liberalism in this period, with its ongoing adherence to ‘ethical liberalism’. This embraced a ‘communitarian ethic’, and continued to base its social analysis on an ‘organic holism’. Such ‘organic holism’, in turn, pervaded its ‘assessment of social structure and function’. There is much here which fits with what we have so far noted of Titmuss’s ideas. For instance, his acceptance of Acland’s plans for ‘Common Ownership’ indicate a commitment to a communitarian ethic. Perhaps most revealingly, though, is Titmuss’s use of the expression ‘acquisitive society’. This phrase derived from the title of a book by R.H. Tawney, whom Titmuss much admired and who, as Freeden remarks, appealed to those who were on the left-wing end of the liberal spectrum.
