from January 1940.23 Titmuss’s article, and the response to it, thus came at a time when, notwithstanding that there was only very limited military action (the ‘Phoney War’), the British people were being asked to make sacrifices for the national good. And, of course, nobody could have confidently predicted the events which were shortly to follow, including the fall of France and the Battle of Britain. With the benefit of historical hindsight, 1940 has been identified as the ‘fulcrum of the twentieth century’, when the European order suffered staggering blows from which it was to take a long time to recover.24
In his original contribution, Titmuss argued that restrictions on consumption would unnecessarily punish the poor. It was ‘perfectly clear’ that a large section of the population could not cut down on their food intake ‘without running a grave risk to their health – and to the nation’s well-being’. Those with large families, moreover, were most at risk, for it was well known that ‘the more children there are in a family the lower is the standard of nutrition’. This was ‘startlingly illustrated’ by the fact that the death rate from bronchitis and pneumonia in one year olds from the poorest classes exceeded that of infants in rich and middle class families by 572 per cent. Any reduction in food consumption would inevitably lead to a reduction in family size, just as had happened in the First World War – for Titmuss, a serious threat to Britain’s future. This was particularly ironic in the present circumstances, since if the ‘under-privileged had maintained the same birth-rate as the rich during the last thirty years we should not now have had sufficient man-power to fight this war’. There should, therefore, be true equality of sacrifice, and strict controls on prices and profits.25 Titmuss was thus questioning part of the narrative of rationing, which in fact was popularly accepted, that there should be ‘fair shares for all’, and thereby equal contributions to the war effort by all parts of society.
Titmuss’s article provoked a disgusted response from Dr Alice Mahony Jones (for British readers of a certain age she was, indeed, from Tunbridge Wells). As we shall see, his consequent reply questioned the coherence of Jones’s argument, and he had a point – hers is a difficult letter to understand, or even summarise. But, in essence, Jones challenged especially Titmuss’s claim about infant mortality and class, ‘if only to prevent its return as a boomerang via Hamburg’. This now rather obscure geographical reference alludes to the location of the broadcasting station which transmitted the English language ‘Germany Calling’ programme, often led by the Anglo-Irishman (William Joyce) nicknamed ‘Lord Haw Haw’. Jones questioned Titmuss’s suggestion of malnutrition (a word he had not in fact used) among poor children, at least in the sense of not having enough to eat (which is not what ‘malnutrition’ means). Rather, such children were being given the wrong foodstuffs (which is what ‘malnutrition’ means). And, according to her own records, over a 14-year period the average weight of babies born to the poorer classes had ‘exceeded that of richer ones; which does not suggest that the mothers suffer from malnutrition’. If Titmuss’s data were correct, then the discrepancy in mortality was primarily due to the ‘ignorance and incompetence of the mothers’, attributable to low levels of intelligence and a lack of knowledge of hygiene. These could be addressed through education. Regarding the birth rate, and in a surprisingly progressive tone given what had gone before, she suggested allowances be paid to the mother for each child under the age of five alongside a recognition, ‘in all classes’, that the ‘risk and ordeal of child-bearing’ was something ‘brave and public spirited, and not … a subject for condolence or crude humour’.26 This part of Jones’s letter could have been written by Titmuss’s friend Eleanor Rathbone, whose book The Case for Family Allowances had recently been published.
Responding, Titmuss claimed to be ‘astonished to find in a member of the medical profession such abysmal ignorance of the progress made in the science of nutrition during the past fifteen years’. Her views about maternal incompetence and ignorance were, moreover, similar to those held in the eighteenth century, ‘when it was assumed that the poor represented an inferior strain of the population and that excessive infantile mortality was Nature’s salutary way of eliminating the unfit’. Titmuss recommended that Jones read various analyses of the relationship between income and nutritional standards, including that by the British Medical Association’s Committee on Nutrition. As to ignorance and incompetence, he preferred to ‘believe that the art of motherhood is as high in this country as anywhere in the world’. Titmuss noted, too, Jones’s jibe about providing propaganda material for the Germans. In retaliation, he asserted that she ‘apparently prefers to let it be known that the mass of the British working-class are too ignorant and incompetent to bear the responsibility of children’. But he was not interested in the ‘nightly comic opera performance from Hamburg’, preferring instead to get at the truth of ‘the condition of the people of this country’.27 All this again places Titmuss firmly in the ‘progressive’ camp, and again shows his willingness to argue his case to a general readership in a publication, The Spectator, of a much more conservative disposition than its left-wing equivalent, The New Statesman and Nation.
As to Titmuss and Jones, theirs was, on one level, a relatively trivial spat, albeit on the important subject of the relationship between poverty and ill health. But it also reveals something of Titmuss’s views and character. It shows, for example, what he was up against in terms of what he clearly saw as reactionary and entrenched attitudes towards the poorest stratum of the working class, and especially its mothers. To put this in context, the recent evacuation of children from areas under threat from Luftwaffe bombing had not been unproblematic, involving negative perceptions of working class children and mothers among those upon whom they were billeted or who dealt with them by way of, for instance, voluntary social work. These perceptions did not go away, feeding into post-war debates about ‘problem families’ in which Titmuss would have a part to play.28 There is a further twist here in that, as we shall see in the next chapter, Titmuss, the first person to comprehensively document the evacuation process, was to put a more positive spin on wartime social attitudes in Problems of Social Policy. This is pre-figured, in his argument with Jones, by his defence of working class mothers, a commonly demonised group. And for those inclined to over-read Titmuss’s membership of the Eugenics Society, his rejection of the idea that the poor should be constantly weeded out by ‘Nature’ is notable. Perhaps less appealing is his rather condescending dismissal of Jones’s remarks (silly though some of them were), not least as Jones was dealing with mothers and children on a daily basis, and of the ‘nightly comic opera performance from Hamburg’, a legitimate cause for concern. But there is also a potentially more serious problem, one which would come back to haunt Titmuss. His admirable resistance to the misrepresentation of working class mothers was part of a general unwillingness to blame the poor for their plight. Poverty thus becomes a purely structural problem which has, on this account, little to do with individual behaviour. This was to lay Titmuss open to the criticism that he had an unrealistic view of human nature and, perhaps equally damagingly, that he denied agency to the poor themselves.
Such potential problems, and Jones’s critique, notwithstanding, Titmuss continued to use his undoubtedly up-to-date knowledge of nutritional science to effect, in the following case for the benefit of the wartime civilian and military population as a whole. In the summer of 1941 Gwilym Lloyd-George, recently appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, wrote to Eleanor Rathbone about a letter she had passed on from Titmuss. The original does not seem to have survived, but Lloyd-George reminded Rathbone that it had concerned ‘the waste of food values in cooking by restaurants’. He agreed that it was, undoubtedly, the case that ‘vegetables are wrongly cooked in many catering establishments, in the cook-houses of the fighting forces, and in private homes’. Attempts to educate the public were being undertaken.29
