for what was, by the late 1930s, inevitable war.
The Eugenics Society (originally the Eugenics Education Society) was founded in 1907. It was a small but influential body campaigning for greater attention to be paid to issues of heredity and population quality. Among its members in the 1930s and 1940s were William Beveridge, and his successor as LSE director from 1937, the social scientist Alexander Carr-Saunders. Titmuss was introduced to the society in 1937 by the LSE demographer and refugee from Nazi Germany Robert René Kuczynski, remaining a member until shortly before his death. Kuczynski, who had published alarming predictions about population decline in Western Europe, had favourably noted Titmuss’s statistical skills. Titmuss gained further kudos with the Society when, a year later, he published Poverty and Population, which impressed, in particular, reform-minded eugenicists such as Carr-Saunders, Society General Secretary C.P. Blacker, and Lord Horder, the King’s physician. The Society, it has been argued, appealed primarily to certain elements of the middle class.2 This can be construed to include both members of the professional middle class – doctors such as Blacker – and those, like Titmuss, from the ‘new’ middle class. Titmuss became an active Society member, and, in addition to its usefulness as a platform for his ideas, it gave him the opportunity, which he was not slow to take up, to gain important and influential contacts.
While Titmuss had a genuine, almost obsessive, interest in population issues, there can be little doubt that he used the Society to advance his career. As we shall see, it was one of its leading members, the social reformer and feminist Eva Hubback, who suggested Titmuss to the historian Keith Hancock as a potential contributor to the wartime histories. Hubback was, indeed, to play a considerable part in his life. A woman of extraordinary energy and commitment, she played a key role not only in the Eugenics Society, but also in, among other organisations, the Association for Education in Citizenship (which she co-founded in 1934) and for which Titmuss was to write a pamphlet during the war, and the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. She was deeply interested in population issues, including birth control and, as her daughter records, was familiar ‘with the writings of Carr-Saunders and later of D.V. Glass, Alva Myrdal and Richard Titmuss, and indeed became friends with all these experts whom she met on common intellectual ground’.3
In the 1930s, like many progressive intellectuals, Hubback ‘hovered’, as Brian Harrison puts it, between Liberal and Labour. Harrison suggests that ‘Titmuss resembled her in this’, with socialism for him becoming the way to ‘keep up the birth-rate’. This is overstating the case, and Harrison is on firmer ground when he remarks that it was one of Hubback’s ‘most fruitful suggestions’ that Titmuss contribute a volume of the war histories.4 Another important Society contact was Carr-Saunders, first chair of the Population Investigation Committee set up by the Society in 1936 (Hubback was also a member), and discussed in Chapter 7 as Titmuss came to play a prominent role on it. Carr-Saunders was to be a key player in Titmuss’s LSE appointment. Oakley records that the two had, by that point, been in correspondence for at least a decade, and that this involved meetings at Carr-Saunders’s club, The Athenaeum. Carr-Saunders, too, was close to Hancock.5
So what was eugenics? For Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall, eugenics is ‘too often discussed as if it were a clearly understood ideology, stable over time, and predictive of particular attitudes and sympathies in its adherents’. It is more plausible, then, to ‘argue that there was no one monolithic eugenics, either in beliefs or policy implications’. It could thus be embraced by, for instance, a wide range of political opinion.6 Certainly for its conservative, hard-line, adherents, eugenics involved the belief that an individual’s social circumstances were shaped by inherited genes, rather than by socioeconomic environment – nature rather than nurture. But as Michael Freeden suggests, there could also be an ‘ideological affinity’ between eugenics and ‘progressive thought’.7 In Titmuss’s case, this involved emphasis more on social environment, and less on biological inheritance. For Titmuss and those of like mind, the ‘genetic question’ could not be dealt with until there was greater equality in socioeconomic circumstances, brought about by ameliorative social intervention – nurture rather than nature. This brought him into disfavour with more ‘traditional’ Society members who thought that any form of intervention was dangerously counterproductive, and that nature should be allowed to weed out ‘undesirables’. Richard Soloway claims that Titmuss was ‘appalled by some of the reactionaries’ he met on joining the Society, although it is unclear why he should have been unaware of them in the first place.8 The approach adopted by Titmuss can be illustrated by a brief examination of Poverty and Population, his first major work.
As we have seen, this book contained a highly complimentary foreword by Lord Horder. And as an epigraph to the volume, Titmuss quoted King George V, who had asserted that ‘The Foundations of National Glory are set in the Homes of the People’. Titmuss acknowledged his new wife Kay’s contribution, ‘not only by her part in the publication of this book, but through her work among the unemployed and forgotten men and women of London’. Through her he had been able to visualise ‘the human significance, and often the human tragedy, hidden behind each fact, and the purblind social waste that the forces of poverty and unemployment relentlessly generate’. Two points already stand out. First, the clear relationship, for Titmuss, between poverty and unemployment, the scourges of 1930s Britain, and ‘social waste’, one of his recurring themes and part of his critique of ‘monopoly capitalism’. Second, Titmuss was not going to produce a book which took a hard-line hereditarian approach to individual, and collective, social problems. Underpinning his argument was the belief that Britain’s population was both ageing and about to decline. That the latter was not, in fact, the case does not undermine the validity of Titmuss’s central argument. One consequence of changing population structure was that it was from the ‘poorer sections of the population, that the architects of the future are being increasingly disproportionately recruited’. This was problematic because this part of society suffered excess rates of mortality, and of morbidity, which were both concerns in themselves, as well as having implications for future generations. Poverty and deprivation were, though, concentrated in particular areas of the country. For example, when compared with the Home Counties, the North of England had, in terms of infant mortality, 65 per cent more excess deaths. Government reporting of such data was, Titmuss suggested, and for by no means the last time, misleading or inadequate. The book’s aim, therefore, was to ‘assess the extent, character and causes’ of this ‘social waste’.9
Titmuss then proceeded to statistically analyse these issues, and to propose solutions. Summarising his findings, he suggested that in the North of England, and in Wales, some half a million excess deaths had occurred in the previous decade. The evidence showed that behind such data lay the ‘presence of intense poverty’ on a widespread and considerable scale. These deaths were ‘not only a national, social and economic problem of fundamental importance’, they also were a humanitarian disaster, ‘a problem that cannot be dismissed, because they need not have died when they did’. The first priority, therefore, was to attend to the needs of children and mothers living in poverty. In what reads like a genuinely angry passage, but also illustrates his occasional tendency to priggishness and didacticism, Titmuss claimed these problems were being ignored or denied because of ‘British stoicism and complacency’. Indeed, he had started the book
