and attitudes had very specific origins. The ‘welfare state’ therefore ‘began not with the Beveridge Report, but when the last troops left the beaches in May, 1940, and Britain stood alone against the forces of Nazi Germany’.67
Not everyone accepts Titmuss’s analysis, however. Another early review of Problems of Social Policy came from the distinguished historian of Britain, C.L. Mowat. Mowat found it an ‘admirable work’, paying due attention especially to the Blitz and evacuation. Significantly, though, he argued that the foundations of the ‘welfare state’ had been laid well before 1939, albeit that the war had highlighted the need for social reconstruction.68 Some 40 years later, Jose Harris, reviewing the war on the Home Front and the contribution of Titmuss’s history to its understanding, commended her former doctoral supervisor as ‘still perhaps the most influential and imaginatively compelling historian of the domestic and civilian theatre of war’. But she questioned a number of his premises, remarking, for example, that some of the policies described by Titmuss as deriving directly from the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ had more complicated, less solidaristic, origins. A case in point was family allowances, which ‘Titmuss had portrayed as one of the direct practical outcomes of the Dunkirk spirit’, but was in fact the result of various trade-offs between government departments.69
Others have made similar points. Bernard Harris acknowledges the expansion of school meals provision during the war, while commenting that Titmuss ‘almost certainly exaggerated the humanitarian “generosity” in the development of the service’. Harris also remarks that by 1945 around one third of elementary school children and one half of secondary school children were receiving meals.70 Impressive as this expanded service was, it is some way from the ‘social service’ Titmuss claimed it to be. At a more abstract level, Jose Harris points to the uncritical notion of ‘Britishness’ employed in the Civil Histories. In the particular case of Titmuss, he found underlying the operations of wartime social policy ‘a more intangible national identity and national will’.71 Problematic as this undoubtedly is, it nonetheless points to Titmuss’s English patriotism. More generally, while participation in wars can have an impact on social policy (and, Titmuss insisted, vice versa), it cannot simply be a sole explanatory factor. Sweden’s emerging ‘welfare state’, a product of the 1930s and of which Titmuss was surely aware, is not explained by invoking war. And while popular demand for post-war social reconstruction did mount in the last few years of the war, this was, Ross McKibbin suggests, as much due to rapid changes in British politics, and the extraordinary reception of the Beveridge Report, as with processes such as evacuation.72 In another recent analysis, David Edgerton argues that Titmuss’s account of the creation of the ‘welfare state’ continues to structure contemporary narratives.73 This is overstated, at least with regard to academic historians, although it is certainly true that varying interpretations of the origins of the ‘welfare state’ are available. But Edgerton has a point with respect to popular perceptions of modern British history, wherein it remains a commonplace that the ‘welfare state’ was an outcome of the Second World War.
Problems of Social Policy remains an important contribution to our understanding of the Second World War and its aftermath. But its arguments do need to be treated with caution in the light of historical research, especially over the last half century. Titmuss’s interpretation should be seen for what it is – a product of its time, when ‘progressives’ were hopeful that a new society could be constructed in the wake of a devastating conflict. For instance, in the same year as Titmuss’s volume appeared, T.H. Marshall published his own work outlining, as he saw it, British society’s progression from civil, to political, to social rights, the last embodied in the post-war ‘welfare state’.74 Equally, it is significant that the hard questioning of Titmuss’s interpretation began in the last quarter of the twentieth century, an era of welfare retrenchment, and one where the post-war consensus, if it existed in the first place, was well and truly over. Not by coincidence, by this point, too, the Titmuss ‘paradigm’ itself was coming under severe scrutiny. As is often remarked, the questions historians (including Titmuss) ask are shaped by the era in which they themselves live.
The Blitz, for Titmuss a key moment of the Second World War, involved the predominantly night-time bombing of Britain’s major urban areas. It started in autumn 1940, following the Luftwaffe’s failure to capture control of the skies during the Battle of Britain, and continued until spring 1941. The campaign sought both to cause economic damage, and to undermine civilian morale. Titmuss gives a vivid account of the assault’s impact on London in chapter 14 of Problems of Social Policy, noting that, at least initially, it caused ‘muddle and confusion’ among the authorities.75 However, while immense devastation was caused, the economy survived, and civilian morale held up. Although the Blitz ended in 1941, concerns about renewed aerial attack meant that civil defence measures remained in place, and were most notably called upon when, towards the end of the conflict, Germany targeted London with missiles and rockets.
Titmuss played a part in civil defence, although after the first aerial assault had done its worst. Along with some 300 other ‘night volunteers’ over the course of the war, he was a firewatcher at St Paul’s Cathedral. Others performing this role included Hancock, and two other historians, H.J. Habakkuk and W.N. Medlicott, the latter becoming Titmuss’s colleague in 1953. As relief from their stressful and tiring duties, coming as they did for many on top of demanding daytime jobs, night volunteers could attend, a history of St Paul’s records, ‘lectures delivered by Members of the Watch to their colleagues, to alleviate the monotony of the nightly exercises’. These included Medlicott on economic warfare and, perhaps less enticingly, a talk entitled ‘Aluminium’.76 In a letter published shortly after Titmuss’s death, Hancock described how from ‘early in 1942 until the end of the war’ Titmuss did ‘duty every Wednesday night as a member of St Paul’s Watch’. His colleagues ‘respected his skill with the firehose and loved him as a man’. And, in that much-repeated depiction, Hancock suggested that to some of his fellow volunteers Titmuss ‘was known as El Greco, in view of the resemblance that they saw in him to the elongated saints of that great painter’.77 In less elevated language, although showing a sense of solidarity among the firewatchers, a few months after the war’s end ‘Titters’ was invited to a party for St Paul’s volunteers.78
Titmuss was, in fact, rather late in joining the firewatchers. From January 1941 it had been compulsory for all those not involved in work of national importance.79 In Titmuss’s case, he may originally have been exempted either because of his employment with the County Fire Office or by the various government departments with which he was by then involved. In any event, he spent just over 50 hours per month guarding St Paul’s. Writing to Kay in 1944, he described the impact of Germany’s new terror weapon, the V1 flying bomb, colloquially known as the ‘doodlebug’. Titmuss had had a ‘grandstand view’ of one of these from the cathedral’s roof. It had flown above the dome before its engine cut out, then exploding in the Hatton Garden area. Titmuss had clearly had a good sight of this terrifying weapon, describing it as ‘Fearsome’. The following week, in another
