was one where materialism – the ‘money tokens’ Titmuss wrote about to Acland – rather than morality predominated, to the detriment of both individuals and the wider social sphere. Titmuss advocated, as an alternative, a society which recognised human interconnectedness, so encouraging altruism to operate. This would bring out the best in individuals, to their own and society’s benefit. Hence the importance he attached to ‘moral values’ when recollecting the formation of his own thought at the time of the Popular Front.
Third, Titmuss could be somewhat contradictory. He deprecated compromise and ‘hairsplitting’, and his early reaction to the Labour Party was one of undisguised hostility. He likewise opposed the wartime electoral truce. He was, however, keen on cross-party collaboration, and by the early part of the war was advocating a ‘Lib-Lab front on Common Ownership’. This was some way from his earlier condemnation of Labour and, notably, its plans for nationalisation. Britain’s domestic wartime experience, and Titmuss’s perceptions of it, undoubtedly shifted his views towards more collectivist solutions to social problems. So perhaps by the early 1940s Titmuss was, consciously or otherwise, beginning to move his political allegiance, at least in party terms, from Liberal to Labour. But when we come to assess Titmuss’s life and work, it will be argued that in certain respects he remained true to a version of Edwardian progressivism, as espoused by the New Liberals prior to 1914.
Finally, for Titmuss, as for his colleagues on the liberal left, the 1930s was a grim decade. The collapse of the international order, the National Government’s use of protectionist economic measures, and the descent into war were indicators of the ‘anarchic world’ condemned by Titmuss. Hence, as the Manifesto for the Common Men had stated, the need to ‘build a new world based on a new morality’. On the domestic front there had to be, as Titmuss put it, a ‘new kind of society’. An essential plank in this new society was health, the ‘criterion of any new order’ (an unfortunate phrase, given its adoption by the Nazi regime). In part, what was required was social intervention to address poor health outcomes. But ‘health’ also had a broader meaning, one which had been developed in Edwardian progressivism, namely the active promotion of wellbeing at both individual and social levels. Freeden suggests that this was, ultimately, to mutate into ‘welfare’, and was in accord with organic views of society such as those held by Titmuss.52 It is notable, too, that in the 1930s some on the political left were developing the notion of a ‘right’ to health, the latter to embrace not only curative, but also preventive, medicine. In certain instances, this was underpinned by explicitly organic reasoning.53 As we shall see in Chapter 9, Titmuss was to be central to the emergence of social medicine, which sought to see beyond the clinical dimensions of ill health to their socioeconomic context.
The 1930s had a profound impact on Titmuss. He was engaged politically through activism on behalf of the Liberal Party, activism which embraced both domestic and international politics. In both areas he forcefully criticised the National Government, sometimes in highly charged language. When war came, Titmuss remained politically committed, working closely with Acland on Forward March, although by this time it is possible to discern a shift away from the Liberal Party, if not liberalism. As we shall see in Chapter 6, his perceptions of the 1930s and the early years of the Second World War were to shape his analysis of wartime Britain on the Home Front which, in turn, reinforced his demands for wholesale social reconstruction once the conflict was over. Before that, though, we turn in the next two chapters to some of Titmuss’s other activities in the 1930s and early 1940s, which again focus on his commitment to his version of ‘progressive’ politics.
Notes
1E.F.M. Durbin and J. Bowlby, Personal Aggressiveness and War, London, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1939, p 126 and passim.
2TITMUSS/2/214, letter, 22 December 1965, Child Poverty Action Group to Harold Wilson.
3TITMUSS/8/1, letter, 13 May 1932, Henderson to RMT.
4Oakley, Man and Wife, p 65.
5TITMUSS/8/2, draft letter, 27 July 1935, RMT to editor, Hendon and Finchley Times.
6D. Dutton, A History of the Liberal Party since 1900, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edn 2013, Ch 3 and Appendix 1.
7TITMUSS/8/14, letter, 30 April 1969, RMT to Robin Blackburn; also Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 191.
8TITMUSS/8/1, letter, 16 January 1935, RMT to Young.
9TITMUSS/8/1, ‘Notice of Meeting of Fleet Street Parliament, 11th February 1935’.
10TITMUSS/8/1, letter, 12 February 1935, RMT to Miss W. Reeve, National League of Young Liberals.
11J. Stewart, ‘“The Finest Municipal Hospital Service in the World”? Contemporary Perceptions of the London County Council’s Hospital Provision, 1929–1939’, Urban History, 32, 2, 2005, pp 327–44.
12D. Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, pp 61ff.
13‘The “Call to Action”’, The Times, 2 July 1935, p 18.
14‘The “Council of Action”: Mr Lloyd George’s Call to Arms’, The Times, 3 July 1935, p 9.
15TITMUSS/8/1, letter, 23 July 1935, RMT to Organising Secretary.
16TITMUSS/8/1, clipping from The Brideian, September 1935, R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Liberal “Attack”’, p 5.
17TITMUSS/8/1, clipping from The Brideian, September 1936, R.M. Titmuss, ‘The Liberal Party’, p 9.
18M. Pugh, ‘The Liberal Party and the Popular Front’, English Historical Review, CXXI, 494, 2006, pp 1327–50.
19TITMUSS/8/2, letter, 10 December 1936, National Organiser to RMT.
20D. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History, London, Allen Lane, 2018, p 61.
21TITMUSS/7/2, typescript, ca 120 pages, ‘Crime and Tragedy’, pp 2, 4, 5, 9.
