to death, along with Titmuss’s somewhat obsessive, if commendable, concern with population health and diet, this would have been a fairly low-level exchange of views. But, as noted, many foodstuffs in wartime Britain were rationed. Others were in short supply, not least because of the difficulty of importing them from abroad as German U-boats attacked incoming convoys. So eating nutritionally valuable foods such as vegetables, cooked properly, was important if individual, and population, health were to be maintained. Equally, and again this was to be an important feature of Titmuss’s thought throughout his career, while his approach was fundamentally underpinned by his moralism, he was also a firm believer in scientific investigation, and the use of science and scientific data to inform his arguments. These were, in many instances, key components of progressive thought, including the version of eugenics which Titmuss espoused, and its approach to social problems.
This part of this volume has shown, first, something of Titmuss’s background, his employment with the County Fire Office, and his marriage to Kay. His origins and early life were certainly modest, throwing into relief his subsequent career. From the perspective of Titmuss as a public figure, we have encountered his commitment, in the 1930s, to the Liberal Party, various organisations associated with ‘progressive opinion’, and then, in the early part of the war, Forward March. He was also, by the 1930s, committed to carrying out his own research, especially around concerns over the British population’s future size and health. Here, as at all points in his career, Titmuss was adept at networking, and this was an important component of his involvement with the Eugenics Society. By the same token he was not, it would appear, lacking in self-confidence when it came to promoting his ideas, whether through public speaking or in print. These ideas at this point can be characterised as broadly ‘progressive’, or left liberal, and we have seen here and in preceding chapters how this informed, for instance, his moral critique of the ‘acquisitive society’. Such a society was, by such an account, not only wasteful in terms of its own human resources, it was also cruel and inhumane. Both Titmuss and his ideas were, by the time war came, already catching the attention of important and influential people. In the next part, we examine how all this played out throughout the rest of the Second World War and into the immediate post-war era, by the end of which Titmuss had been installed as first Professor of Social Administration at the LSE.
Notes
1S. Collini, ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong? Cultural Critics and “Modernity” in Inter-War Britain’, in E.H.H. Green and D.M. Tanner (eds), The Strange Survival of Liberal England: Political Leaders, Moral Values and the Reception of Economic Decline, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp 247–8.
2T. Rogan, The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2017, p 1.
3TITMUSS/7/47, letter, 23 May 1939, Henderson of Stephen Aske, to RMT.
4TITMUSS/7/47, letter, undated but summer 1939, RMT to Henderson.
5Oakley, Man and Wife, p 89.
6TITMUSS/7/49, letter, 23 August 1941, RMT to Town and Country Planning Association.
7R.M. Titmuss, ‘Planning and the Birth-rate’, Town and Country Planning, XI, 33, 1941, pp. 83–5 (emphasis in the original).
8P. Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp 129–30.
9A. Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning, Progress and Political “Agreement”’, English Historical Review, LXXIX, CCCXI, 1964, pp 285–98.
10D. Ritschel, ‘Next Five Years Group’, and R.C. Whiting, ‘Political and Economic Planning’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
11R.M. Titmuss, ‘The End of Economic Parenthood’, The New Statesman and Nation, 9 August 1941, p 130 (emphasis in the original).
12Ibid, pp 130–31.
13Ibid, p 131.
14M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth Century Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp 223ff, and passim.
15Cited in Rogan, The Moral Economists, p 44.
16N. Dennis and A.H. Halsey, English Ethical Socialism: Thomas More to R.H. Tawney, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, p 1.
17S. Collini, Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp 181, 193.
18M. Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp 180–81.
19J. Offer, An Intellectual History of British Social Policy: Idealism versus Non-Idealism, Bristol, Policy Press, 2006, p 4.
20R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, London, G. Bell and Sons, 1921, and subsequent reprints. For the work’s status, B. Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–64, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007.
21L. Goldman, The Life of R.H. Tawney, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p 189ff.
22Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, pp 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 241–2.
23D. Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, pp 224, 271.
24D. Reynolds, ‘1940: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century’, International Affairs, 66, 2, 1990, pp 325–50.
25R.M. Titmuss, ‘Can the Poor Save?’, The Spectator, 23 February 1940, pp 244–5.
26A.M.
