target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_86e05623-eca0-578b-b9f2-88c5fa87c82f">77Sir K. Hancock, ‘Richard Titmuss’, letter to The Times, 15 May 1973, p 18.
78TITMUSS/7/53, letter, 13 September 1945, A.S.G. Butler to RMT.
79D. Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, p 512.
80Oakley, Man and Wife, p 150, cited p 234, cited p 241, cited p 251.
81Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p 323.
Titmuss and the Eugenics Society in war
In the course of the 1940s, Titmuss continued to play an active part in the Eugenics Society which, as we saw in Chapter 4, he had joined in the late 1930s. This was prompted by his interest in population and population health. But it likewise afforded him the opportunity to network with well-connected individuals who were to become important figures in promoting his career, such as Carr-Saunders and Hubback. This chapter examines Titmuss’s work for the Society during the Second World War, especially from early 1942. He was editor of Eugenics Review for the first two editions of that year, standing in for Maurice Newfield while he was unwell. From the outbreak to the end of the war he also contributed six articles and a number of book reviews to the journal, as well as taking to task, in the correspondence columns and in debate, critics of his own approach to population issues. He participated in Society meetings, during the early part of the war was on its Emergency Committee, and by the end he was on its council, the latter an elected position. Titmuss published his third book, Birth, Poverty and Wealth: A Study of Infant Mortality, with Eugenics Society support. He was also co-opted, in 1943, onto the Population Investigation Committee (PIC), set up by the Eugenics Society in the mid-1930s.
Committee man, editor, and contributor
With the outbreak of war one immediate consequence for the Eugenics Society was that C.P. Blacker was called up to the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), so depriving the organisation of one of its most active members and administrators. An emergency meeting of the council was called shortly afterwards. It was agreed to set up an Emergency Committee, chaired by Lord Horder, of ‘nine members able to attend regularly, with power to co-opt’, which would ‘act on behalf of Council for the duration of the war’. Titmuss was one of these, as were Carr-Saunders and Hubback.1 He was undoubtedly in favour of the creation of the Emergency Committee, telling Ursula Grant-Duff in mid-September that there was an overriding need to ‘see that the work of the Eugenics Society is kept alive’.2 And as we saw in Chapter 4, he was soon in demand as a source of information, being requested to provide the next meeting of the Emergency Committee with proposals for children’s allowances, and his findings on the physical condition of the army.
Titmuss was clearly becoming an active figure in the Society, something further recognised by his membership of the Homes in Canada Service Committee. This small body originated when the Society’s Canadian sister organisation offered to receive child evacuees. It was to identify ‘certain eugenically important groups’ not presently covered by the British government’s own overseas evacuation scheme. An example of such a neglected group would be children who had won scholarships to non-grant-aided schools (that is, not a ‘traditional’ grammar school), and the criteria for selection were ‘intelligence, good heredity and good health’. A panel of doctors had been approved by the Homes in Canada Service Committee to apply these ‘fundamental eugenic safeguards’. Superficially, it seems surprising that Titmuss should have become associated with such an apparently conservative eugenic project. However, it was also explained that the committee had ‘resolved … that poverty alone will in no case be allowed to stand in the way of any parent who wished to take advantage of Canadian hospitality’. Clearly sensitive about this issue, it was further stressed that the Eugenics Society had established a fund, for which it was also issuing an appeal, so that ‘none of the selected children should be kept back by reason of poverty’.3 It seems likely that Titmuss had some say in this formulation, and it is notable that the committee was chaired by another reform eugenicist, C.F. Chance. To put it another way, the notion that a child from a poor background could nonetheless be intelligent would have run counter to the sort of eugenics decried by Titmuss.
Titmuss continued to play his part in the administration of the Eugenics Society, for example being re-elected to the revived council in May 1945. Among his fellow councillors were a number of individuals who had played, or would play, a part in his life, including L.J. Cadbury, Carr-Saunders, Grant-Duff, the demographer David Glass, and the eminent biologist Julian Huxley.4 But we now turn to his more public work on the Society’s behalf, starting with his temporary editorship of Eugenics Review. This began in autumn 1941, with Titmuss taking over for the editions of January and April 1942.5 Finding someone to take on this sort of onerous task in wartime would have been problematical for any organisation, so that he stepped forward is indicative of Titmuss’s commitment to the Eugenics Society. It was not, after all, as if he had nothing else to do.
Titmuss used his editorial platform to revisit some of his preoccupations. In the January edition, for instance, he noted the startling decline in the German birth rate, claiming that such a ‘large decrease can hardly be interpreted by the Nazis as an encouraging feature’. It was a ‘vote of No Confidence’ in the regime, its various exhortations to the German population to reproduce notwithstanding. He also noted that the Eugenics Society, and he might also have cited himself here, had consistently argued for better quality data on British population trends, and that ‘after a stern battle with the powers of obscurantism’ the Population (Statistics) Act had been passed in 1938. The war had, without due cause, delayed the publication of up-to-date material. Citing the recent work by the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, Titmuss continued that Britain would soon be ‘faced with a population crisis’ and the sooner ‘adequate statistics on current fertility patterns and other factors’ were provided, the sooner a ‘eugenic approach to the problem of man’s continuing refusal to reproduce’ could be formulated.6
In the April edition, meanwhile, Titmuss noted the limited publication of the Registrar General’s review of 1938, a year which for ‘students of population’ marked ‘the end of an epoch’. It was the last ‘in which the forces of life and death were undisturbed by war’, and the first since 1911 when comprehensive data became available for the analysis of fertility by way of the 1938 Act. Titmuss then gave a summary of this material while referring readers to his own article in the same edition, discussed later. The other issue with which this engaged was, in the wake of a memorandum produced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, family allowances. This was primarily a technical document to do with costings, giving no sense of whether or not the government was inclined to introduce such a measure. Without attributing the quote of which he clearly approved, Titmuss finished with the view of ‘one commentator’: that ‘the food, the clothing, the cots, the nursery
