Lewis, John Macnicol, Robert Page, Margaret Pelling, Sally Sheard, Nick Timmins, and John Welshman. Draft chapters were read by Linda Bryder, George Campbell Gosling, Janet Greenlees, John Hall, Harry Hendrick, Eddy Higgs, Vicky Long, Ann Oakley, Glen O’Hara, Margaret Pelling, Chris Renwick, Sally Sheard, Sue Stewart, and John Welshman. I am grateful to each of them for their comments. Ann Oakley also helpfully corrected a number of factual errors in the penultimate draft.
This book is dedicated to Ada Mary Susan Stewart, born July 2019, and to her parents, Caitlin and Neil, uncle Jim, and grandmother Sue.
Also available in the LSE Pioneers in Social Policy series
The Passionate Economist
How Brian Abel-Smith Shaped Global Health and Social Welfare
By Sally Sheard
“Sheard provides powerful evidence as to why Brian Abel-Smith, through his incisive and infl uential contributions to the development of health and social welfare policy both in Britain and further afi eld, should be regarded as one of the titans of post-1945 social administration.” Journal of Social Policy
HB £45.00 ISBN 9781447314844
576 pages November 2013
For more information about the book and to order a copy visit
policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/lse-pioneers-in-social-policy
Titmuss in the twentieth century
Richard Morris Titmuss was born in October 1907, and died in April 1973. His life thus embraced a period central to British social welfare history. At the time of his birth the reforming Liberal governments of 1906–14 were enacting measures such as old age pensions. In his inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1950, Titmuss acknowledged ‘the great surge forward in legislation for collective help’ in the decade preceding the First World War.1 That conflict was followed by the uncertainties of the inter-war era, the consequences of which informed Titmuss’s early work, and political activities. By the late 1930s, now married to social worker Kathleen (Kay) Caston Miller, he had produced his first published volume, Poverty and Population, which opened with the striking statement that there could be ‘no subject of more fundamental importance to any nation than the physical and mental well-being of its people’.2 Titmuss was, at this point, an active member of the Liberal Party. His research, again mostly on population and population health, continued into the Second World War. But his most significant wartime activity came with his engagement to contribute to the series of official histories of the war on the Home Front. Titmuss’s volume, Problems of Social Policy, was published in 1950, contributed to a life-changing advance in his career, and continues to influence how we perceive wartime Britain. The war also engendered much discussion about post-war social reconstruction, of which Titmuss was a committed advocate, leading him to shift his political allegiance to the Labour Party.
The wartime coalition, and the Labour governments of 1945–51, duly instituted measures which came to be collectively known as the ‘welfare state’. Perhaps most famously, the National Health Service (NHS) was created. Titmuss later described this as ‘one of the most unsordid and civilised actions in the history of health and welfare policy’.3 Nonetheless, he viewed the ‘welfare state’ as unfinished business. The expression itself, moreover, had acquired unwelcome, and inaccurate, connotations. Particularly for the political right, it implied state-provided services aimed primarily at the poor, and which were an economic burden on the rest of society. Titmuss usually put the phrase in inverted commas, a practice followed here, and saw his role as promoting a more positive, more socially just, version of state-sponsored welfare. For Titmuss, social policy required a moral purpose, aimed at promoting social solidarity and cohesion, and at reducing inequalities.
The ‘welfare state’ was central to the post-war consensus which lasted until the early 1970s. This purportedly (it is a matter of debate) saw broad political agreement based on Keynesian economic management, and ‘welfare state’ consolidation and expansion. Consequently, the period has been described as that of the ‘classic welfare state’. The Conservative Party dominated politically, being in office from 1951 to 1964, and again from 1970 to 1974. Partly as a result of the success of Problems of Social Policy, Titmuss was appointed as the first Professor of Social Administration at the LSE, where he remained for the rest of his life. As is often remarked, this appointment was unusual, not least in Titmuss’s lack of formal academic qualifications.
His department had been, prior to his arrival, primarily concerned with training social workers. Titmuss set about developing, indeed creating, what would ultimately be called the field of Social Policy, at first almost single-handedly, and became its pre-eminent figure. Titmuss moved Social Administration away from vocational training, or simply describing the social services. Although he did not neglect such matters, he also sought to promote original research, and to influence policy. This partly explains the eventual abandonment, near the end of Titmuss’s life, of the term ‘Social Administration’, and its replacement by ‘Social Policy’ (although the passing of ‘Social Administration’ was lamented by some).4 The field’s expansion, led by the LSE, further involved the recruitment of individuals who themselves became among its leading figures, for example Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend. The Titmuss group became known, collectively, as the ‘Titmice’. This was not a very good joke, could be used either affectionately or satirically, and the expression will not be employed again (confusingly, Titmuss used it to refer to himself and Kay),5 but it does convey the tight-knit nature of the group around Titmuss, and his leadership role within it.
The eminent sociologist, T.H. Marshall, instrumental in Titmuss’s appointment, acknowledged in his own work on Social Policy his intellectual debt to his colleagues at the LSE, ‘most of whom are now members of the remarkable team headed by Professor Titmuss’.6 In a lecture in 1972, the Cambridge economist, and later Nobel Prize winner, James Meade, expressed his gratitude for the comments of ‘that remarkable triad of professors – Titmuss, Townsend and Abel-Smith – who were responsible for putting (poverty) back into the political arena’.7 More critically, in the mid-1960s Geoffrey Howe, a rising star in the Conservative Party who frequently crossed swords with Titmuss, identified one recent manifestation of the Fabian Society as ‘Prof Titmuss and his insidious circus of disciples at the London School of Economics’. This piece was entitled ‘The Fabian Threat to Freedom’.8 For Howe, and those of like mind, state welfare created dependency, while diminishing individual responsibility and freedom of choice. Nor were critics confined to the political right. The 1960s also saw the rise of the New Left. Primarily an intellectual movement based around re-readings of Marx, the New Left gained some traction in higher education, notably through its journal New Left Review. Ralph
