understandably sought clarification.14 No such Scottish volume materialised. There were also constant wrangles about the employment of research assistants, and the amount of material Titmuss had to handle. One positive outcome here was that in autumn 1944 Hancock was able to tell Sir John Wrigley, Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Health, that Titmuss had been allocated a ‘new assistant to help him grapple with his greatly extended task’.15 In Problems of Social Policy Titmuss duly acknowledged the assistance of Mrs B.E. Pollard, Miss R. Hurtsfield, and, especially, Hilde Fitzgerald.16
As publication neared, Titmuss was increasingly convinced that the Stationery Office was not operating efficiently. In late 1949 he wrote to the Cabinet Office official with whom he frequently dealt, A.B. Acheson, with a series of complaints. Summing up, Titmuss told him that it seemed ‘a pity to invest so much labour and expense in the preparation of the Official Histories and then to be so dilatory and casual about publication and sales’.17 A year later, he again complained to Acheson, this time that no copies of his volume appeared to be available for sale, notwithstanding that it had been out for nearly nine months. He was fending off enquiries about its availability, and had first raised this issue the previous July.18 In reply, Acheson reported that, in fact, sales had already exceeded over 2,500 copies, and that it had been advertised in around 16 journals.19 As Harris points out, in the event the volumes by Titmuss, Hancock, and Postan ‘sold in substantial numbers’.20 But, again, we see Titmuss’s unhappiness when matters appear not to go his way.
The central problem which he and his team faced, at least by his account, was that evidence, and commentary, arrived in a haphazard, unsystematic way. When drafts were produced, they were scrutinised not only by the Cabinet Office, but also by the government departments on whose evidence Titmuss depended, and which were wary about any criticisms perceived as levelled against them. They could also be maddeningly slow in responding. The Civil Service’s culture was challenging, perhaps especially to a newcomer. Shortly after the war’s end, for instance, Norman Brook, an immensely powerful figure soon to be Secretary to the Cabinet, told Hancock that Titmuss’s draft chapters which he had read were ‘very readable and interesting’, so promising ‘a good book’. He also had some mildly critical comments.21 Two years later, though, Brook, now Sir Norman, was more demanding. He produced a ten-page memorandum which identified three main criticisms of Titmuss’s work: that the ‘treatment of pre-war estimates of the probable scale of attack … is out of scale and to some extent out of place’, that the book was written ‘too exclusively from the Ministry of Health angle’, and that the draft had taken ‘insufficient account of the co-ordination of Civil Defence work’. Brook, who had first-hand administrative experience in a number of these areas, then elaborated at length.22 Others picked up such points. A Treasury official, identified only by the initials P.D.P., disputed Titmuss’s criticisms of his department (which, in the published version, were in fact relatively mild). But ‘quite apart from the Treasury interest’, he had found the volume a ‘thoroughly bad book’. It was a ‘niggling production, written from a single, very narrow, point of view’. Brook’s comment that it was the ‘war as seen from the Ministry of Health Registry’ was exactly right. Finally, the book’s title was misleading as a range of ‘social policy’ issues were not covered. So, the ‘proper thing to do’ was to ‘tear it up and start all over again’.23 We might recall here Hancock’s comments on the clarity of what constituted wartime social policy, and that Titmuss was the person to write about it.
Brook was problematic in another, related, way. Titmuss addressed his criticisms in April 1948, accepting some points, rejecting others.24 As he told Acheson the following July, Brook had not, as yet, responded. Nor had he received any Treasury feedback, so presumably the document cited earlier had not yet reached him.25 The following month, Titmuss informed Hancock that he had had a useful discussion with Acheson, and had apologised to him for all the difficulties he had apparently created. It was unfair on Acheson to have to sort everything out, though Titmuss had found it ‘very hard to restrain my temper’. He again complained of the lack of feedback from both Brook and the Treasury, before apologising for this ‘outburst’. But he had ‘not quite simmered down yet’.26 Further difficulty from Brook came in spring 1949. As writing neared completion, Hancock raised a series of issues, mainly to do with the availability of new evidence. Hancock told Brook that Titmuss had been the only contributor who had ‘always done what he ought to have done at the right time and in the right way’. For ‘this reason alone – but of course there are others – I must do my utmost to win his willing consent as author of the book, if I, as editor, should be convinced that in certain parts there is still room for substantial improvement’. Both Titmuss and Hancock should look at the new evidence ‘with a completely fresh and open mind’, and achieving this would be helped by everyone ‘tackling in the same spirit the new revealed problems of handling drafts for circulation and getting the final copy through the printing stage’.27 It is clear that Titmuss was resistant to what he undoubtedly saw as unnecessary extra work. More positively, we again see Hancock’s faith in him, both as an historian and, as Harris puts it, as a ‘tough potential ally in the face of excessive official back-tracking and obstruction’.28
Another episode of this type occurred a few months later. Titmuss received a letter from Acheson on behalf of himself, Brook, and another Cabinet Office official, A. Johnston. The three had a number of criticisms of the latest version of Titmuss’s volume, by this time at galley proof stage and, in principle at least, only a few months from publication. For instance, ‘Mr Johnston still feels that it is unfortunate that so little is said about what the emergency medical service did for air raid casualties’.29 Titmuss’s immediate response was a four-page letter to Hancock, a letter which ‘I simply loathe writing to you’, because he thought that the issues raised by Acheson had been resolved at an earlier meeting in Oxford between all interested parties. But he was also anxious that Hancock not think he was suffering from ‘persecution mania’. Nonetheless, the Oxford meeting notwithstanding, there had been a stream of written and verbal comments from the Cabinet Office, so that ‘now my mood is one of rebellion’. He then took on Brook and Johnston’s criticisms. On the issue of the Emergency Medical Service and air raid casualties, to use the example raised by Johnston, this would involve new research, rewriting another chapter on the hospitals, and encroaching on another volume in the series, that on the medical services. Ominously, he expected more such Cabinet Office criticism. ‘Quite frankly’, he told Hancock, ‘I cannot stand any more of this.’ The Cabinet Office did not seem to appreciate the toll his work had taken on his health, and on his leisure time. He had had one week off in 15 months, and in this particular week had worked almost every day. There was also the possibility of a loss of income due to difficulties in his relationship with the Medical Research Council, by which he was at this point employed (see Chapter 9). After a further series of complaints, again about the Stationery Office, he concluded: ‘It would be astonishing if, by now, you were not tired and critical of this letter and of me. I am very, very sorry, Keith.’
