Titmuss, ‘Man-Power and Health’, The Spectator, 26 May 1939, pp 896–7.
51EUGENICS, SA/EUG/C.333, letter, 10 November 1939, Business Secretary, Eugenics Society, to RMT.
52R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘Physique of the Recruit: Militiamen and Regulars’, The Times, 22 June 1939, p 12.
53R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘The Health of the Militia’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 July 1939, p 15.
54R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘The Health of the Militia’, The Spectator, 21st July 1939, p 96.
55R.M. Titmuss, ‘National Health’, Eugenics Review, 31, 4, January 1940, p 219.
The Titmuss gospel and progressive opinion
Previous chapters outlined a broad political, and social, historical sketch of British society as the 1930s moved towards war. But the points Stefan Collini makes about the era’s cultural atmosphere should also be acknowledged. As he puts it, the inter-war period was notable for increasing concerns centred around the notion of cultural decline, alongside anxieties about the morally destructive effects of ‘modernity’. One component of such critiques was ‘a challenge to the category of “the economic”’. On one level, this was part of a longstanding rejection, on the part of English radicalism, of traditional political economy, and of related ideas such as the ‘cash nexus’. But what was new was a ‘more sustained questioning of the place of economic activity in human life’, alongside ‘a more wide-ranging exploration of the alleged cultural significance of its accepted centrality in “modern” society’. For this Chapter, what is especially important is that Collini sees R.H. Tawney, an intellectual mentor to Titmuss, as one of the principal exponents of such an analysis.1 Tom Rogan, in a study which deals in detail with Tawney, likewise suggests that, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critics of capitalism focused especially on its ‘moral or spiritual desolation’.2 This was, therefore, an important constituent of the contemporary intellectual environment.
Titmuss was determined to get his views across to as wide an audience as possible, and so sought to broadcast these in both scholarly and popular outlets. His co-authored ‘Penguin Special’, discussed in the last chapter, was an example of a publication aimed at both markets, as well as targeting those of like mind, namely ‘progressive opinion’. This chapter builds on the preceding two as we further examine Titmuss’s engagement with progressive opinion in particular. As part of this, we also examine his critique of what he saw as contemporary society’s moral shortcomings, not least the obsession with economic matters at the expense of what was, or could be, truly valuable in human affairs. For Titmuss, this complemented his concerns over population, as well as informing his more overtly political activities.
One sign of Titmuss’s commitment to spreading his message, along with his growing self-confidence as a writer, was, as we saw in Chapter 3, his engagement of J.M. Henderson as his literary agent. Henderson’s task was to try and place Titmuss’s writings with various print media outlets. For instance, he told Titmuss in spring 1939 that The Spectator had accepted the piece, discussed in the previous chapter, on health and manpower.3 A few months later, Titmuss sent Henderson the talk which he was about to deliver to the Liberal Summer School, discussed in Chapter 3, and ‘which might appeal to one of the better class monthlies’, for example Sociological Review. And if Henderson wished to ‘add to my qualifications you may be interested to know that I have just been awarded a Leverhulme Research Grant for work on Vital Statistics’.4 Titmuss’s article did not appear in Sociological Review, but his letter is revealing in showing that, given the award of the Leverhulme grant, he was being taken seriously as a researcher. Throughout his career he was to prove adept at gaining funding for his research, often out of necessity in the light of LSE frugality. In this context it is revealing that when, in 1940, he applied to become a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, that body expressed surprise that he was not one already.5 The correspondence with Henderson illustrates, too, Titmuss’s strategy of reaching out to general audiences, such as the readership of The Spectator, as well as a more specialised group, his fellow social scientists (of whom, it has to be acknowledged, there were not that many in inter-war Britain).
Titmuss also began to approach organisations directly with potential articles, another sign of his self-belief. In late summer 1941 he sent a piece on ‘Planning and the Birth Rate’ to the Town and Country Planning Association, a progressive professional body which sought to encourage the humanistic planning of the built environment.6 The Association was clearly impressed, for the article appeared soon afterwards in its journal. Titmuss started by claiming that recent discussions of post-war reconstruction, at this point very much in their early stages, had tended to focus on material issues, understandably given the impact of physical destruction. But such a focus forgot that ‘national life cannot continue unless the population replaces itself, that is, unless parents desire children’. Social reconstruction, thus conceptually enlarged, thereby entered ‘the realm of moral values; of social attitudes to parenthood; of belief in the future of man’. Titmuss then raised his usual concerns about declining fertility and imminent population decline. He also, appropriately given his audience, discussed building data and the need to embrace house planning’s social aspects, for example the particular needs of large families. But what is perhaps most striking is his underlying philosophy. If an environment could be created wherein parents consciously desired children, then ‘the physical environment, the multiple and interlocked social agencies for communal existence must be attuned to social values rooted in a co-operative and not a competitive way of life’.7
We should pause here to say something about planning, an important strand in progressive thinking from the 1930s. At that time, unbridled capitalism appeared to have failed. It had brought about the Great Depression, the associated socioeconomic and political instability, and a questioning of some of the central tenets of classical political economy. Planning was likewise inherent in reform-inclined eugenics, given its mission to rectify shortcomings in the quality of the racial stock. Progressive opinion was, as we have seen, often happy to go along with this, and Titmuss certainly shared such ideas. And there were models of planning which seemed to show the way forward. While most progressives would have rejected the Soviet Union’s political system, nonetheless its Five Year Plans appeared to be transforming its economy, as well as providing a barrier to the Great Depression’s ravages. In the United States, meanwhile, President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ was more politically acceptable, an example of a liberal democracy intervening to promote economic revival and stave off social instability. Lloyd George, for instance, promoted the idea of a ‘British New Deal’.
