– they were to be referred to, in this capacity, as ‘militiamen’ – before being transferred to the Army Reserve. This was a form of conscription, the first in peacetime in Britain, and further evidence of the sense that the country was heading towards war.49
In a piece published in The Spectator around the time of the act’s passage, Titmuss noted that in the previous year some 42,000 potential recruits had been rejected on medical grounds by the regular army. The majority had been between 18 and 20 years old, and so some would be conscripted under the terms of the 1939 Act. Since such conscripts would be medically inspected, this afforded the state an opportunity to gather information on this particular cohort, while raising concerns about the potential physical state of the militia. Titmuss then brought forward data which showed that over 50 per cent of those volunteering between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s had been rejected on medical or physical grounds. The total number involved was 650,000 – over double the number to be conscripted. This could not be solely attributed to the effects of unemployment as most of the potential recruits were in work, and hence it was a ‘grave indictment of the nation’s health’, suggesting that malnutrition among children and young people was ‘vastly more widespread than has so far been recognised’. The lesson was clear ‘to everyone who realises that we do not fight by guns alone’. If the nation’s manpower was to ‘marshalled in common defence then there should be not only the equalisation of wealth by conscription’, but also ‘the equalisation of health’. Poverty in Britain was a reminder that ‘freedom is best defended by attacking want’. If the people had to ‘rise in defence of their homes then let them demand that their homes should not be hovels and that their children should not be malnourished’.50
Titmuss pursued this theme for the rest of 1939. In November, the Eugenics Society Emergency Committee agreed that he should speak at the next meeting on ‘your findings with regard to the physical condition of the men of the new Army’.51 Titmuss also had letters on military health published in The Times, The New Statesman and Nation, and The Spectator. He commended The Times for highlighting the discrepancy between rejection rates on medical grounds for potential recruits to the regular army, and those conscripted to the militia. But the situation was even worse than reported, and he produced evidence to show why. Titmuss conceded, though, that as far as the militiamen were concerned only a small sample was as yet available. So he called on officialdom, in the interests of ‘the many sociologists, medical men, and others who are concerned with the state of public health’, to bring forward ‘an authoritative explanation’ of the apparent discrepancy.52
His contribution to The New Statesman and Nation made similar points, as well as explicitly citing a speech by Prime Minister Chamberlain, delivered since the publication of Titmuss’s letter to The Times. Chamberlain had made claims which, if true, refuted the work of those such as John Boyd Orr who had provided estimates of ‘the number of people existing in this country on a diet deficient in every essential respect’. It takes little imagination to work out what position Titmuss took. He concluded that it had been brought to his attention that young men rejected as unfit by the regular army had been passed as ‘fit for service’ by the militia, notwithstanding that an ‘insignificant’ period of time had elapsed between the two examinations. Therefore, in the ‘likely event of a considerable number of Militiamen electing to adopt one of the Defence Forces as a career’, was ‘the Government … prepared to transfer them without further medical examination’?53 Correspondence in The Spectator, meanwhile, derived from Titmuss’s article and involved, among other things, rebutting an army officer’s claim that his own observations revealed an immense improvement in the condition of recruits, thanks partly to the expansion of the social services.54 Essentially, Titmuss was arguing that the armed forces’ physical capacity could be undermined by bringing in recruits from the militia, and that this in turn reflected the poor condition of large swathes of the British population. This was clearly an injustice in itself, but also raised issues about potential military efficiency and performance. As he pithily put it in a book review at the beginning of 1940, ‘the functional capacity of nation whether at peace or war depends on the nutritional state of its people’.55
During the latter part of the 1930s, and into the early part of the Second World War, Titmuss was not only politically active in a direct sense, he was also conducting research, and making polemical interventions, in the fields of population and population health. In both areas he saw himself as a contributing to arguments for what he would have seen as social progress, and in so doing he was prepared to take on leadership responsibilities. He was also beginning to establish himself as an influential figure in the Eugenics Society, and had made a number of contacts who were to prove important to his subsequent career. With the coming of war, his analyses of population and related issues led to his employment by various government departments. As if all this were not enough, and once again we have to remind ourselves that he had a full-time job, Titmuss was also keen further to make his mark on a wider audience as an exponent of ‘progressive opinion’, and it is to this we next turn.
Notes
1P. Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p 338.
2R.A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, pp 234, 316. For an approach to Titmuss’s association with the Eugenics Society which does not always take the same line as this volume, A. Oakley, ‘Making Medicine Social: The Cases of the Two Dogs with Bent Legs’, in D. Porter (ed), Social Medicine and Medical Sociology in the Twentieth Century, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1997; and A. Oakley, ‘Eugenics, Social Medicine and the Career of Richard Titmuss in Britain, 1935–50’, British Journal of Sociology, 42, 2, 1991, pp 165–94.
3D. Hopkinson, Family Inheritance: A Life of Eva Hubback, London, Staple Press, 1954, pp 128, 134, 160.
4B. Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, p 296 and Chapter 10 passim.
5Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 119, 148; and Father and Daughter, p 114.
6L. Bland and L. Hall, ‘Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole’, in A. Bashford and P. Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p 216.
7M. Freeden, ‘Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity’, Historical Journal, 22, 3, 1979, p 671.
8Soloway, Demography, p 316.
9Titmuss, Poverty and Population, pp 1,
