many at this time, Titmuss routinely conflated England and Britain). This embraced the ‘unreasoning belief’ that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and in so doing the population clung to the ‘principles of the obscurantist’. The continuance of ‘their contented, dull, mass-belief lives, and their happy but nevertheless asocial preoccupation with respectable ritual’ depended on ‘the trends of to-day and the shape of tomorrow remaining hidden’. Nothing must be allowed to disturb ‘their faith in the rigidity and rightness of the only society they know; not even the future prospects of national suicide’.10 There was more in the same vein. This was not to be the last time Titmuss was to castigate his fellow citizens for their short-sightedness and moral shortcomings.
But Poverty and Population certainly had an impact. One of its reviewers, in an article entitled ‘The Waste of Life’, was B. Seebohm Rowntree, one of the pioneers of poverty research. His work on York, some 30 years earlier, had been a landmark in social investigation, and he had recently re-surveyed that city. Titmuss’s book, Rowntree suggested, was ‘important and startling’, and brought home the ‘true significance of the falling birth rate’. In turn, this emphasised the need to care properly for the younger generation, a task at which contemporary society, and contemporary policy, were signally failing. With touching naivety, Rowntree concluded that if ‘every Member of Parliament could be made to read this book, the demand to remedy the crying evils which it reveals would be irresistible’.11 Titmuss was less impressed by Rowntree. Over 30 years later, he told his friend Tom Simey that he agreed that Rowntree had been overrated. This he attributed partly to ‘the fact that these early pioneers by virtue of being pioneers have been credited with remarkable intellectual powers’.12
In the context of Titmuss’s critique of official statistics, and Rowntree’s plea that politicians read Titmuss’s work, it is worth stressing the lengths to which government departments went to deny any connection between unemployment, low income, poverty, and deprivation. The official line was that, in the case of the unemployed, the benefits they might claim were adequate to ensure their families’ and their own survival and health. The findings of researchers such as the nutritionist John Boyd Orr, for example his pioneering Food, Health, and Income, were ignored or downplayed in Whitehall, although they did have an impact on researchers such as Titmuss, and on more ‘progressive’ politicians and think tanks.13 Individuals like Titmuss and Boyd Orr were very much operating on their own initiative, and their work was crucial in bringing social problems to light in pre-war Britain. Given what seemed like wilful blindness on the authorities’ part to the effects of unemployment and poverty, it might seem rather ironic that in 1937 the National Government introduced the Physical Training and Recreation Act. This sought to encourage British citizens to engage in more physical exercise, and was prompted by concerns that other nations, especially Nazi Germany, were pulling ahead of Britain at a time when the international situation was rapidly deteriorating. For critics, the idea that already malnourished individuals might benefit from exerting more energy was simply laughable, and in fact the campaign never really took off, and was quietly dropped on the outbreak of war. Titmuss was among these critics, noting that the ‘inauguration of the Government’s campaign does little more than imply the existence of ill-health and inefficiency in our midst today’.14 Nonetheless, the campaign did recognise, however feebly, that population health had military implications. This was an issue Titmuss was soon to address.
To return to the Eugenics Society, in October 1939 Titmuss joined its Emergency Committee, and by the early 1940s was playing a leading role in the organisation, and in the production of its quarterly publication, Eugenics Review.15 Shortly afterwards, when Britain had staved off the immediate threat of invasion, aerial bombing had ceased, and Germany had turned its attention to the Soviet Union, discussions over post-war reconstruction began to move up the political agenda. One important landmark was the previously noted Beveridge Report of 1942. The Beveridge Committee had been set up in the summer of 1941, and in November Titmuss wrote to Blacker, now a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, on the Emergency Committee’s behalf. Titmuss had raised, at a previous committee meeting, the idea that the organisation should submit evidence to Beveridge. Would Blacker prepare a memorandum as, in Titmuss’s view, there was ‘no one in the Society competent to prepare such a memorandum apart from yourself’? Titmuss also commented that, given his knowledge of how Beveridge operated from his own participation on a Political and Economic Planning (PEP) Committee on Social Security, any document put forward should be brief.16 Blacker replied, not unreasonably, that he did not, in fact, know very much about social security and, rather revealingly, that in any case he had given little thought to eugenics for the past two years.17 Nothing seems to have come of Titmuss’s initiative, and the Eugenics Society was not among the bodies listed as having given evidence to Beveridge.
Titmuss’s exchange with Blacker is nonetheless revealing. First, there is mention of his involvement with PEP, an unofficial body undertaking important social research in the 1930s. It is not entirely clear exactly what level of engagement Titmuss had with this organisation. PEP’s practice of, for the most part, publishing its findings anonymously adds to the problems of identifying particular authors. Nor is there any mention of Titmuss in any of its main histories. Nonetheless, he did keep a file of material relating to PEP and knew, or came to know, a number of those actively involved, including Carr-Saunders, and François Lafitte, a leading figure in the organisation in the 1940s.18 There are also at least two pieces in the PEP journal Planning, the first in 1936 and the second in 1940, which show Titmuss-like concerns. The first draws on material which Titmuss was to use in Poverty and Population, while the second makes similar points to a pamphlet he produced for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, discussed in Chapter 8.19 This piece also cited Poverty and Population. None of this is conclusive, and, given the contemporary interest in population issues, it is unsurprising that similar sources were used, and at least on some occasions similar conclusions reached. But it is suggestive, shows the tight-knit circles in which Titmuss moved, and his association with ‘progressive opinion’, of which PEP was an important part in the 1930s and beyond. Second, why did Titmuss approach Blacker to write a memorandum in the first place, given his own interests in issues of this sort, and his willingness to use most opportunities presented to advance his own research and heighten his own profile? In part, the answer must lie in the fact that by late 1941 he was gearing up to carry out research for the Cabinet Office. Even Titmuss may have felt that doing detailed work for a Eugenics Society submission to Beveridge was a commitment too far, as well as contravening Civil Service regulations.
Government statistics and population health in peace and war
Titmuss had not exactly been idle over the preceding years. We now look at another of his obsessions, the poor quality of government statistical data, and the implications of poor population health, German as well as British, for the impending war. Titmuss’s scepticism about government data was a recurring complaint from the 1930s onwards. Always keen to draw on history, Titmuss was fond of referencing population analysts from as far back as the seventeenth century, such as John Graunt and William Petty, key figures in the creation of ‘political arithmetic’.20 In a post-war review, Titmuss described Graunt and Petty as ‘pioneers not only of medical statistics and vital statistics but of the numerical method as applied to the phenomena
