contentious the whole field of eugenics could be, though, is illustrated by Lancelot Hogben’s review. Hogben was a biologist who had been, at one point, Professor of Social Biology at the LSE, later becoming first editor of the British Journal of Social Medicine. He was famously combative, politically on the left, and notably hostile to eugenics on both methodological and social grounds.29 Hogben had, in addition, been one of the early, non-Eugenics Society, members of the PIC.30 In his review, in the leading science journal Nature, Hogben attacked Galton, and his modern-day followers. He berated the ‘combination of naivete and nonsense’ uttered by ‘reputedly competent men of science’ regarding the supposed predominance of nature over nurture. Such nonsense was ‘transparently belied’ by work on human nutrition and, in Titmuss’s case, on mortality data. Titmuss had made accessible in a ‘readable narrative facts too apt to remain buried in census volumes on the shelves of libraries’. His book was, therefore, ‘a refreshing indication that there is a rising generation of statisticians and social biologists’ who had ‘thought their way through the luxuriant growth of misconceptions which Galton’s generation planted and Pearson’s followers watered’. Titmuss’s work was ‘temperate and stimulating, lucid and well-documented’. He had raised problems which urgently needed addressing ‘above the fog of political indignation to the level of a factual analysis of human needs and human knowledge available for implementing their satisfaction’. As such, the book deserved ‘a wide circulation among those who cherish what Bacon called the true and rightful goal of science’.31
In private at least, Titmuss must have been delighted with such a glowing notice, in an important journal, from such a high-profile scientist. The Eugenics Society was less impressed. In an editorial in Eugenics Review, Newfield acknowledged the positive aspects of Hogben’s review. All such praise was ‘well merited’, and it was gratifying that it was being used in material advertising the book. Nonetheless, Hogben had not only commended Titmuss, he had also, and not for the first time, launched his familiar attack on Galton. Consequently, Horder and Blacker had, on behalf of the Eugenics Society, written to the editor of Nature suggesting that Hogben was preoccupied with what eugenicists were saying 30 years earlier. Nor had it been acknowledged that Titmuss had been a member of the Society’s council for a number of years, had acted as editor of Eugenics Review, and that ‘the publication of his book was made possible by a grant from the Society – a fact clearly acknowledged by the author in his preface’. Nature was, therefore, responsible for a false impression being created and, thereby, for its refutation. The letter, though, was not published on the basis that, as far as far as Nature was concerned, its content would serve no ‘useful purpose’.32 If nothing else, this episode illustrates Hogben’s ability to get under people’s skins and, by the same token, the Eugenics Society’s sensitivity to criticism concerning the nature/nurture debate.
The Population Investigation Committee
Titmuss was far from being alone in his concerns about population, and population health. A Royal Commission on Population was set up in 1944 by the coalition government’s Home Secretary, and former Labour leader of the LCC, Herbert Morrison, reporting in 1948. When Titmuss joined the PIC, in 1943, he told fellow member R.R. Kuczynski that he had recently been called to see Morrison’s private secretary, as ‘Herbert is going to make a speech about the birth rate’.33 This summons is yet another indicator of Titmuss’s assumed authority in the field, although he was also, of course, by this point a government employee. Among the Royal Commission members well known to Titmuss were Carr-Saunders, while witnesses included Blacker, Hubback, Glass, and Cyril Bibby, a regular contributor to Eugenics Review.34 A quarter of a century later, Bibby was to send Titmuss a letter of support during ‘The Troubles’ at the LSE. As Pat Thane notes, the Commission’s Report admitted concern about the birth rate, and recommended the expansion of certain welfare benefits and services. Ultimately, though, it ‘expressed some lasting fears but offered no solutions’.35 In any event, the post-war ‘baby boom’ was to resolve at least the birth rate issue.
The Population Investigation Committee was set up jointly by the Eugenics Society and PEP in the mid-1930s, yet another manifestation of contemporary concern about population issues. After the war, it was absorbed by the LSE, and founded the journal Population Studies. The latter had Glass as its editor, and an advisory board on which Titmuss sat along with, among others, Kuczynski and T.H. Marshall.36 At various points the PIC received funding not only from the Eugenics Society, but also from the Carnegie Corporation and the Nuffield Foundation.37 As its longstanding chair, Carr-Saunders, noted around the time of the committee’s creation, the Eugenics Society had been moved to set it up by ‘the fact that the population position in this country now presents, both from the quantitative and qualitative points of view, very serious and urgent problems’.38 As Chris Renwick points out, Carr-Saunders was a key figure in the 1930s as a social scientist, and sought to promote a reform-oriented eugenics, so edging it away from proposals associated with ‘negative’ eugenics such as sterilisation.39 His position as chair was, therefore, crucial. Among the early members of the committee were Marshall, Blacker, Hubback, and Huxley.40 The PIC’s activities were curtailed on the outbreak of war before being revived in 1943. This revival was, as Eugenics Review reported, in part prompted by Titmuss’s agitation on the Eugenics Society’s council in 1942, and facilitated by Blacker’s return from the RAMC. The Eugenics Society also granted £500 per annum for two years in support of the PIC’s activities.41
Titmuss, although not a member of this body until its reconstitution in 1943, when he was ‘elected by unanimous consent’, was nonetheless interested in its work from the outset, known to a number of its members, and prepared to send it suggestions for research. For example, in 1940 he reviewed Leybourne and White’s Education and the Birth Rate, a book resulting from two years of ‘intensive research sponsored by the Population Investigation Committee’ which brought together ‘for the first time a wealth of social statistics relating to the structure of the educational system in this country in its bearing upon family size’. One key finding was that there existed ‘enormous hidden reserves of intellectual capacity … among the children of the 60 per cent of income earners who receive on the average less than 60s a week’. As matters presently stood, such children could not realise their potential, something which was even more detrimental to society when it was acknowledged that this group would constitute ‘the bulk of our future population’. So it was in the 90 per cent of children currently attending state-run elementary schools that the ‘national problems of quantity and quality lie’.42 Educational inequality, and the unused intellect of working class children, were ideas which Titmuss was to continue to pursue.
Also the early 1940s, it was noted that ‘Mr R.M. Titmuss, while not a member of the Committee’, had written that there were ‘two short-term pieces of work which the Committee might investigate’ – the incidence of first births, classified by factors such as regional and class differences, and problems of maternity in wartime.43
