appeared an LSE colleague of Titmuss’s and among those who had supported his appointment, acknowledged the book’s ‘exceptional merits’. He also defended the writing of history while it was actually happening because the volume was full of ‘enlightening comments which could only be made by someone with direct personal knowledge of the situation’, assisted by ‘others whose experiences will never be recorded’. There were shortcomings. The title was misleading, as the text dealt only with ‘social problems directly created by enemy action – or in fact one can be more precise and say by air raids’. Evacuation, and the medical treatment of air raid casualties, were the main areas covered. It was, moreover, ‘easier to see what the machine did than what it was’, by which Marshall presumably meant the actual workings of the administrative process. Nonetheless, the ‘historical problem most clearly in Prof Titmuss’s mind’ was the impact of the ‘war experience on the development of the social services and the evolution of the Welfare State’. Here Marshall found Titmuss both ‘subtle and profound’, especially in his analysis of the ‘spur given to the planning of a National Health Service’ by the clash between public sector and voluntary hospitals. The latter were institutions dependent on fees, charitable donations, or subscriptions, and were abolished by the NHS. Titmuss had, Marshall remarked, ‘some bitter things to say’ about them. More generally, the attitude of social service providers had changed, not least because war ‘largely eliminates the class element from social service’.57
The book was also noticed in the US. George Rosen, a leading figure in American public health, and effectively founder of the social history of medicine, described Titmuss as a ‘well known British social scientist’ who had done an ‘exceedingly competent job’ in producing a work ‘also full of human interest’. It was ‘must reading for all public health workers, both as professional persons and as citizens’.58 Without over-reading these comments, it is revealing that Titmuss’s work should be deemed interesting to American readers. Back in Britain, the publisher, Freddy Warburg, congratulated Titmuss on the book’s ‘magnificent press’. Titmuss should feel ‘pretty proud of the work you have done, which must have been long and intensive’. Warburg wanted to know Titmuss’s plans – this was a few months before his LSE appointment – and suggested meeting to discuss whatever he might next want to write about.59 While nothing seems to have come of this, it does further indicate the interest stimulated by Problems of Social Policy.
Less positively, at least for Titmuss, his book also prompted a letter from G.E. Haynes, General Secretary of the National Council of Social Service. The two had lunch scheduled at the Athenaeum, and Haynes wanted to alert Titmuss to an issue he especially wanted to discuss. The Council was ‘beginning, alas!, to prepare our part in the Civil Defence programme. I would like your reactions very much in view of your most admirable study of the position during the last war’.60 The 1948 Civil Defence Act had established the Civil Defence Corps, a voluntary body whose duty would be to support rescue services during a national emergency. Given that by the early 1950s the Cold War was under way, essentially this meant an attack by the Soviet Union. Britain was not the only country making such plans. The day after Haynes’s letter, Titmuss received another, this time from someone who was to be a long-term correspondent, John Morgan at the University of Toronto. Morgan enclosed copies of an article he had written for the Canadian Welfare Council’s journal, subsequently more widely circulated in print and through talks by Morgan, which had been based on Problems of Social Policy. Canadian Civil Defence Planning, he told Titmuss, had until now been almost entirely in the hands of the military, with little account being taken of welfare issues. Morgan concluded with the more welcome news that ‘I believe a substantial number of copies of your book will now have been ordered by Public authorities in order that they may study the problem. I hope this may make some contribution to the dollar problem’.61 In response, Titmuss, entering into the spirit of Morgan’s joke about Britain’s challenging financial position, suggested that ‘HM Government will, I am sure, be glad to know that a few more dollars are coming in!’ It was, though, shocking to think that the machinery of civil defence was being re-established. He had recently met with Haynes, who had sought advice about ‘possible civil defence functions for the Council and about what steps they might usefully take in advance of an “emergency” (that awful word again!). I found it hard to give him helpful advice’.62 It is ironic that Titmuss’s volume, which drew positive messages from the Second World War experience, was seen as offering guidance on how to prepare for another conflict.
Rethinking Problems of Social Policy
Titmuss’s book had a huge impact on academic interpretations of Britain on the Home Front, as well as on popular perceptions (many of which persist into the twenty-first century).63 Some 15 years after his review, Marshall claimed, in his famous text on social policy, that ‘Britain’s experience in the war was unique’, and, given the circumstances under which it was fought, this explained why ‘the concept of the Welfare State first took shape in England [sic]’. The scale of the conflict, and the country’s vulnerability to attack, required ‘sacrifices from all and equally for help given ungrudgingly and without discrimination to all who were in need’. The source for these claims was Problems of Social Policy.64
Titmuss himself repeatedly returned to the relationship between war and social reform. In his contribution to a series of lectures on ‘War and Society’ in the mid-1950s, later reprinted in Essays on ‘The Welfare State’, he started with the claim that little historical research had been done on war’s social and economic impact on whole populations, following this with a wide-ranging survey going back to the ancient Greeks (and including the purported lack of attention in Jane Austen’s novels to the Napoleonic Wars). He then turned to war and social policy, noting that this relationship had developed in three stages: first because of concerns about the quantity of military recruits, second because of concerns about the quality of potential military recruits, and third through a broader concern with population health, and especially that of children, ‘the next generation of recruits’. Overall, this manifested ‘the increasing concern of the State in time of war with the biological characteristics of its people’. Hence the ‘waging of modern war presupposes and imposes a great increase in social discipline’, tolerable only if ‘social inequalities are not intolerable’. Only then would the ‘co-operation of the masses’ be won. War and social policy thus had profound reciprocal influences. Titmuss conceded that this was not ‘the whole story in the evolution of social policy’, although he saw this last point as underpinned by faith more than by reason.65 This opaque caveat seems to imply that however much one paid lip service to other factors, war remained the locomotive of social advance. Harris suggests that here Titmuss is shown more as a ‘didactic social theorist’, in contrast to the ‘subtle and finely nuanced social historian’ evident in Problems of Social Policy.66
While overplaying the contrast between the two works, this makes an important point. Nonetheless, by the time of his speech Titmuss was convinced that his version of the origins of post-war reconstruction was historically accurate. In a lecture on ‘The Social Services’ in the early 1950s, Titmuss agreed that the Beveridge Report had given ‘rational expression to shared experiences and aspirations during the war’. In turn, this meant that the war, characterised by social solidarity and cohesion, had ‘effectively crystallised the demand for services open to all citizens, and good enough
