meanwhile, accord with Titmuss’s own preoccupations. For instance, he wondered whether longstanding family allowance schemes abroad had been of any assistance in raising the birth rate.36 Oakley also records a visit, as a child, to the Cornish cottage once occupied by Rathbone, suggesting a more than professional relationship between the latter and the Titmuss family.37 Titmuss’s friendship with Rathbone, who was also an intimate and collaborator of Eva Hubback’s, further illustrates the close-knit, and influential, circles within which he increasingly moved.
Titmuss’s growing reputation as an expert on population health resulted in work for the British state. This reputation, combined with his networking skills, meant that, as Oakley puts it, by early 1941 ‘the Ministries of Food and Information were fighting for his services’.38 Other departments likewise sought his expertise. In autumn 1940 he told Kingsley Martin that he was ‘at present advising the Ministry of Health’ on an in-depth investigation of German vital statistics. No results were as yet available, and the work was being kept secret ‘as we do not wish the Germans to forbid the export to certain countries’ of various publications.39 In the letter to Blacker in late 1941 noted earlier, Titmuss also told him that he was working for the Ministry of Economic Warfare ‘on the trend of German Vital Statistics’, and that thus far a fair amount of material had been accumulated. The ‘trend of the conception rate’ was ‘rather fascinating – the birth-rate is dropping much more sharply than in this country’.40 It is not clear whether these were two separate projects, but the point is that Titmuss was in demand in official circles.
Titmuss had already engaged with German population data, and it continued to be yet another of his concerns. In March 1939, for instance, he wrote to the editors of the American publication Population Index seeking information as to where he could find data on mortality rates for various countries, including Germany and the UK. This was one of several such letters searching out German mortality statistics.41 One outcome was an article in The Spectator, published just after the outbreak of war, addressing ‘Hitler’s Man-Power Problem’. This, Titmuss claimed, underlay every social and military issue in Germany. For ‘six propaganda-riddled years’ the Nazi government had tried to force up the birth rate ‘with every conceivable weapon’. Policies included family allowances, and the banning of contraception, but all had been unsuccessful. There were two main contributory factors to Germany’s ‘demographic battle’. The first was that Nazi ideology, ‘trimmed of all its mysticism’, was simply ‘a reversion to the ethnic level of the jungle’. Such an environment needed a high birth rate because it also entailed a high death rate, and the latter had been going up steadily under Nazi rule. The second was the continuing demographic impact of the First World War, which had seen both significant deaths and casualties, and the beginnings of a downturn in the birth rate. So Germany was not reproducing itself and, on the available information, its population would eventually decline. Hitler, then, for all his talk of the ‘sacredness of motherhood’, had chosen a path with the ‘surest means of destroying the fittest of his people, forcing down the birth-rate, and of making certain that the German population will eventually decline. Of this sowing, like many others, Germany will eventually reap the harvest’.42
Titmuss’s analysis, including the point about the ‘finest’ being lost, was later shared by Hitler himself who, as the war went on and military losses mounted while the birth rate continued to fall, became increasingly concerned about his country’s demographic future.43 Titmuss returned to these matters in 1940 when reviewing a work on German medical data. This showed that mortality rates were increasing in every age-group in German society, and especially those aged 1–15 years and those aged 20–45 years, and this was ‘borne out by the preliminary results of an investigation the present author is carrying out’. Similarly, and once again unlike most comparable societies, the German infant mortality rate was rising. The one ‘indisputable conclusion’ which could be drawn from the book under review was that ‘freedom is the first condition for the biological advancement of the individual and of the social group’.44
In the run-up to the publication of the Spectator piece, Titmuss, writing on Eugenics Society matters to Ursula Grant-Duff, asked her if she had read the recent book by R.R. Kuczynski, Titmuss’s entrée to the Society. This was Living Space and Population Problems, and Titmuss told Grant-Duff that he had been in touch with Kuczynski ‘regarding certain aspects of the decline in Germany’s birth-rate during the war – the last one’. The ‘most significant fact’ was that over 40 per cent of German women who had married in 1933/34 had not given birth.45 As his own article had suggested, this was a knock-on effect of the First World War, and one reason why Germany had an even poorer record in population replacement than Britain. Grant-Duff would certainly have been interested in Titmuss’s observations not only from a eugenic point of view but also because she was, as Oakley notes, keenly interested in German affairs, and a fluent speaker of the language.46
Titmuss and Kuczynski, meanwhile, had a growing friendship, one outcome of which was that in 1946 the former wrote to the Home Office in support of Kuczynski’s application for British citizenship. Titmuss noted that he had ‘been personally acquainted’ with Kuczynski for around seven years, and had known of him as an authority on population for some time previously. The two had been meeting at fortnightly intervals as friends, and because of ‘our joint interest in population developments’, in which capacity Kuczynksi was ‘one of the greatest living authorities in this field’. Titmuss had a ‘very high opinion of his character as a scholar and as a citizen’. With his usual generosity in such matters, he concluded that Britain was indebted to Dr Kuczynski for his soon to be published population history of the empire. So ‘we should welcome Dr Kuczynski as a British Citizen. I am delighted that he has applied for naturalisation in this country and not in the United States’.47
Titmuss also helped other refugees from Nazi oppression. In early 1941 he was contacted by a member of the Czechoslovakian government in exile, its Minister of Social Welfare, M.V. Ambros. Ambros sought Titmuss’s advice about basic information on wartime conditions, and was trying to put together a picture of what Central Europe might look like after the war. He was especially concerned with health and food in relation to women and children. Titmuss responded almost immediately, declaring that he had ‘admired the work of the Czech Republic before the entry of Hitler’, and so would be ‘glad to help you in any way possible’. Always generous with his time, he suggested a meeting. This appears to have taken place, and in a further letter Titmuss suggested that Ambros might find it useful to approach bodies working on similar projects, for example that led by the highly experienced civil servant and politician Sir John Anderson under the auspices of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Titmuss also offered to introduce Ambros to contacts at the Ministry of Health, as well as giving him advice on how to organise any data he gathered, urging him to identify whether particular food components, for example vitamins, were likely to be in short supply post-war.48
But Titmuss’s first concern was Britain’s population health. Having identified serious problems among the population as a whole, as war became increasingly inevitable he turned his attention to their implications for the armed forces. The immediate context was the Military Training Act of
