of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Population Investigation Committee, London, Oxford University Press, 1948, p v.
50TITMUSS/4/544, ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the Joint Committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Population Investigation Committee Regarding and Inquiry into the Maternity Services, 27th June 1945’.
51W. Nicoll, ‘Dame Juliet Evangeline Rhys Williams’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004; Oakley, Man and Wife, p 111.
52TITMUSS/4/544, letter, 29 October 1947, RMT to Dr J.W.B. Douglas, Director of the survey.
53‘Shortage of Midwives’, The Times, 21 April 1947, p 8.
Titmuss and the media in the 1940s: a growing reputation
We saw in Chapter 3 that, in the 1930s, Titmuss had employed a literary agent. This relationship does not appear to have survived the outbreak of war, with Titmuss now often contacting editors and journals directly. And such was Titmuss’s growing reputation, at least in the first half of the 1940s primarily regarding population, that he began to be approached by publishers themselves, as well as by various organisations. He was also politically active down to the early 1940s, and although his employment as a civil servant curtailed his public activities, he continued to be in demand, especially as plans for post-war social reconstruction gathered momentum. This reinforces the previously noted idea of Titmuss seeking to spread his ideas to as wide and diverse an audience as possible, so promoting his ‘progressive’ views. The 1940s were important, too, in providing the further platform of radio broadcasts. As always, it is difficult not to be impressed by Titmuss’s work-rate. Such outputs, and again this was to feature throughout his career, often provided a handsome financial supplement to his salary. It would be impossible, and not especially enlightening, to list all of Titmuss’s contributions to various media during the period under consideration. So here we look at some of his more significant, or interesting, interventions. The aim is less to discuss their content in detail. Rather, it is to give a sense of the range of Titmuss’s engagement.
Illustrating a number of these points, in November 1943 the publisher Victor Gollancz, founder of the Left Book Club which operated as a ‘sort of reading “Popular Front”’, asked Titmuss for a contribution on population and poverty to the journal Left News. Titmuss agreed, on condition that the piece be unsigned, given that he was now a civil servant. He was paid two guineas per 1,000 words for ‘The Casualties of Inequality’, in which he referred to himself in the third person, and cited Birth, Poverty and Wealth.1 A guinea was, in pre-decimalisation currency, one pound and one shilling, while the average wage at this time was between six and seven pounds per week. Titmuss’s fee was, therefore, not insubstantial. As this episode also illustrates, it is clear that Titmuss’s ideas were valued by those on the political left, perhaps reinforcing the idea of a shift away from the Liberal Party, although not necessarily liberalism. In late 1942, he was invited by Elizabeth Bunbury, a leading member of the Socialist Medical Association (SMA), the group of left-wing doctors affiliated to the Labour Party to which his friend Jerry Morris was close, to lecture on ‘public health’ to medical students. By this point, Titmuss and Morris were beginning to contribute to the advance of social medicine, a discipline which sought to develop new approaches to preventive medicine. Titmuss felt obliged to turn this request down since his attachment to the Cabinet Office made it ‘very difficult for me to address an open meeting on the subject of public health’.2 Although nothing came of this particular invitation, at least immediately, what is notable here was that Titmuss was asked in the first place, and the implication that he might be prepared to talk to closed meetings. In the future, he was to work closely with the SMA on issues such as social work and health. Titmuss’s assumed expertise in public health is likewise noteworthy.
In 1943, meanwhile, the Association for Education in Citizenship, which Eva Hubback had co-founded in 1934, published his Problems of Population in the series ‘Handbooks for Discussion Groups’. The series was designed, by way of both descriptive material and the questions posed by the author, to stimulate debate in groups assembled to engage with what the Association saw as significant contemporary issues. The generic title of the series was ‘Unless We Plan Now’, and other contributors included Morris on health. As the organisation’s name suggests, it was yet another of those bodies promoting ‘progressive’, or ‘middle’, opinion in the 1930s in the face of widespread socioeconomic disruption and international tension. By the 1940s, though, the focus was firmly on post-war reconstruction.
Titmuss’s contribution to the series was very similar in content and presentation to a second pamphlet discussed immediately below, so just a couple of points from the first publication are worth highlighting. Titmuss started off by claiming that people often asked why so much fuss was made about population, remarking further that it did not really concern them. But that was ‘precisely where they are wrong’. He then went on to explain why this was so, before moving on more specifically, and in now familiar terms, to the issue of parenthood. In Western societies, ‘parents have deliberately decided to limit their families through continence, by employing birth control and by marrying late in life’. This, and associated trends, had some ‘unpleasant consequences’, potentially including increased unemployment. Family allowances would, under the right circumstances, help, but other issues also had to be addressed. What was the impact, for example, of the ‘social and economic atmosphere’ on possible parenthood? In the last resort, then, this was a problem for ‘parents both actual and potential’, and was thus ‘one for the people to decide’. It was ‘they who give the community its future citizens, it is for them to decide what form of society – whether their own or some form not yet in existence – will encourage and not deter parenthood’.3 His qualifications notwithstanding, Titmuss’s support for family allowances should be seen in the broader context of such measures rising up the domestic political agenda, as social reconstruction became the order of the day. Family allowances continued to be promoted by his friend Eleanor Rathbone, their implementation was one of the ‘Assumptions’ of the Beveridge Report, and the Labour Party and the previously reluctant Trades Union Congress were increasingly supportive.4
Also in 1943 came an important opportunity to influence a much larger, and captive, audience when Titmuss was approached by Major R.L. Wakeford of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA). This body had been set up in 1941 to provide compulsory educational instruction about contemporary issues for rank and file soldiers. Central to its programme was the series Current Affairs, which aimed ‘to provide a background of knowledge against which events can be assessed and understood’. Publications in the series, written by experts commissioned by ABCA, were thus designed to stimulate discussion groups consisting of troops, and led by officers. By the time of Titmuss’s contribution, the series was very much geared to post-war reconstruction, something which the army’s internal enquiries had revealed as of considerable interest to its personnel. The educational benefits were also seen to extend even wider given that, as one senior general put it, ‘millions of men and women [in the army] were ill-educated’, and there was thus an obligation to return them to civilian life educationally better equipped.5
The troops’ interest in post-war reconstruction,
