p 289.
27R.M. Titmuss, letter, ‘Can the Poor Save?’, The Spectator, 8 March 1940, p 331.
28See the references in J. Welshman, Underclass: A History of the Excluded since 1880, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2nd edn 2013.
29TITMUSS/7/49, letter, 13 June 1941, Lloyd-George to Rathbone.
FROM PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL POLICY TO THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
Problems of Social Policy: researching and firewatching
From late 1941, Titmuss was engaged in researching and writing Problems of Social Policy, published in 1950. This was part of the ‘History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Civil Series’. Intriguingly, ‘Problems of Social Policy’ was the title of a passage in a 1932 work by Tawney.1 It was originally planned that Titmuss write two volumes on the wartime social services. In January 1951, he told a government official that the second was due later that year, and he would send him a draft when revisions had been made.2 But by this point Titmuss was fully occupied at the LSE. In a letter to the School’s director in late 1951, Titmuss complained about his workload. Consequently, he had had ‘to shelve indefinitely editorial work on the second volume’.3 By the summer of 1952, Titmuss had thrown in the towel, telling another government official that Margaret Gowing was taking over. He had been ‘reluctantly forced to give it up owing to extreme pressures of work here. I am finding that there are limits to human endurance!’4 The book which ultimately appeared had an introductory chapter by Gowing, but the principal authors were Sheila Ferguson and Hilde Fitzgerald. In a generous preface, Hancock noted that it had initially been envisaged that these two would work alongside Titmuss. But ill health, and the ‘pressure of University duties’, had led the latter to resign as principal author. Nonetheless, he had ‘continued to give assistance to his two colleagues, and the book they have now completed conforms closely to his original plan’. The volume itself made frequent references to Titmuss’s earlier work.5 As his correspondence suggests, Titmuss was not averse to letting others know how much he had to do, a habit maintained for the rest of his career. While Titmuss’s volume was not published until 1950, it is appropriate to deal with it here as it dominated his life for most of the 1940s.
The Civil Histories series arose from the deliberations, in mid-1941, of the Cabinet committee responsible for the War Cabinet’s Historical Section.6 The proposal received significant backing from senior politicians, and from a committee of professional historians, including Tawney, which advised the Historical Section. Keith Hancock, Professor of History at the University of Birmingham, was given overall control, with Titmuss recommended to him by Eva Hubback. At last, in January 1942, Titmuss was able to resign from his insurance job, and join the Cabinet Office, almost doubling his income. Hancock was to play an important part in Titmuss’s life in the 1940s. Outside work, they went on walking tours of North Wales and were firewatchers at St Paul’s Cathedral. Most importantly, though, Hancock became an admirer of Titmuss’s historical skills. In 1944, for example, he suggested that Titmuss lead a small group working on the histories ‘for discussion and mutual criticism’.7 In November 1945, meanwhile, Hancock told his historians that while up until now it had been impossible to give definitive instructions as to what any published outputs might look like, he was now ‘authorised to invite you to prepare a history publication’. Fourteen pages of guidelines were provided.8 In the preface to his own volume, Hancock outlined the origins of the series, what it sought to do, and the issues which had confronted the authors. It had been ‘accepted in the first place as a necessary war task and thereafter sustained with intense concentration of purpose and effort’. As well as following the ‘usual critical methods of professional historians’, contributors had been ‘compelled by the unusual problems confronting them to exercise a good deal of ingenuity in their methods of research’. While the official go-ahead for the series as a whole came just after the war ended, Hancock noted, too, that three volumes had previously been agreed, and that of these the ‘problems of war time social policy stood clearly defined and were entrusted to Mr R.M. Titmuss’.9 Hancock’s faith in Titmuss was to be crucial in the deliberations, at the end of the decade, over the proposed Chair in Social Administration at the LSE.
Titmuss’s research involved dealing with numerous official bodies, and a huge volume of material. As Jose Harris suggests, Titmuss and Michael Postan, writing on wartime industrial production, had particular problems since, in both cases, there was ‘the conceptual problem of how to interpret [the evidence], in an era when the very nature of total war seemed to insist that everything was integrally related to everything else’.10 Titmuss was also required to carry out other official work. In late 1943, for example, he told Hancock that the Ministry of Health had requested a statistical study of current trends in British and German morbidity and mortality, and that this would take around one week. The matter was to be raised in the House of Lords by Lord Cranborne, who had read a piece by Titmuss in The Lancet, presumably his brief analysis of German health data.11 Titmuss only spoke English, and he was assisted by the refugee German economist, Marie Meinhardt. Meinhardt was later to help Morris and Titmuss with their early research in social medicine.12 Titmuss was also engaged, in a return to his roots, as statistical advisor to Luton Town Council. The outcome was a book, co-authored with Fred Grundy, the Medical Officer of Health. The authors made it clear that they were not providing a ‘plan for reconstruction’, but rather sought to present ‘basic physical and social facts as a guide to planning’. The work also noted the impact of evacuation, a central theme in Problems of Social Policy. At least as far as Luton was concerned, the ‘reception, medical inspection and billeting of 8,000 evacuees in three days passed off without confusion’. It was likewise recorded that infestation rates among evacuees, a source of much popular criticism, were no higher than those found in the local population.13
It is clear that Titmuss often felt frustrated, stressed, and angry during the writing of his volume. There was, for example, confusion over who was to cover what territory. In early 1944, Titmuss told Hancock that he had recently sent a draft on evacuation to the Department of Health for Scotland. The latter had responded that ‘Professor Mackintosh has
