One early indicator of the creation of what was to become the ‘welfare state’ was the passage of the 1944 Education Act. This had achieved all-party support, significantly expanded educational provision and associated welfare measures such as school meals, and was a piece of legislation to which Titmuss’s inspiration, Tawney, had made a notable contribution.6 Eva Hubback’s daughter, meanwhile, suggests that the army’s approach to what was effectively another form of education for citizenship was strongly influenced by the ‘Handbooks for Discussion’ series.7 The bureau was to be blamed, retrospectively, by the Conservative Party for ‘radicalising’ the army, so contributing to Labour’s landslide win at the 1945 general election.8
Wakeford explained to Titmuss that what he wanted was a pamphlet on the ‘population problem’ which officers could use in their group discussions.9 The result was Fewer Children: The Population Problem, which came out in December 1944, that is a few months after the Normandy landings, and hence as the Second World War was entering its final phase. Unsurprisingly, this publication revisited a number of concerns about which Titmuss had been exercised for some time, and would continue to be so for some time to come. The editorial introduction, aimed at the officers charged with leading discussion and melodramatically entitled ‘The Birth of a Nation: A Problem that Governs All Others’, noted that Titmuss’s contribution was about a subject which was ‘fundamental. It is about our population’. Essentially, the British population was ‘not replacing itself and is, therefore, heading towards extinction’, and so ‘Titmuss shows in his article how certain changes are already inevitably due within the lifetime of most of us in the Army today’. This was, then, ‘a cause for alarm but not despondency’. The anonymous author had clearly taken Titmuss’s message to heart. Various suggestions were given as to how a discussion might be structured, for example by asking the troops how many children their parents and their grandparents respectively had had. This could then be backed up by use of the illustrations contained in the pamphlet, and transferred to a blackboard.10
Titmuss himself drew extensively, as might be expected, on his own demographic research and, especially, Parents Revolt, discussed in the next chapter. For instance, he suggested that the population of England and Wales would fall from just under 41 million in 1940 to just over 37 million by 1970, then further still, to just under 20 million, by 2000. Crucially, the proportion of the population under 30 years of age would steadily decrease. All this would be brought about by an ongoing decline in the birth rate. What lay behind this? The pamphlet was, as noted, overtly educational, and designed to stimulate discussion. So Titmuss posed a series of provocative questions. Was ‘mass selfishness the cause of the falling birth rate?’ Did the ‘the majority of married couples only want to have a “good time”’? Had the ‘desire for children, the wish to carry on the family, the demand for a happy family life diminished among modern parents?’ If ‘selfishness’ was not the cause, what was? ‘These’, Titmuss suggested, were ‘points for you to discuss’.11 The way these questions were posed might be seen as channelling discussion in the sort of directions Titmuss himself wanted. We have seen from previous chapters, and will see on many other occasions, that Titmuss was very much of the view that ‘selfishness’, a key component of the ‘acquisitive society’, was at the heart of the matter, in turn a product of the psychological strains induced by contemporary capitalism. His predictions on future population size were, as previously, wildly out.
Nonetheless, taken together these two pamphlets do, once again, illustrate what Titmuss saw as the centrality of the population question, and his belief that this was something with which society had to deal urgently. Family allowances, shortly to be introduced by the outgoing wartime government, were necessary, but not sufficient, to address the problem. More fundamental was the unwillingness of parents to have children, so resulting in ‘unpleasant consequences’, such as the falling birth rate and an ageing population. Ultimately, the underlying issue was selfishness and acquisitiveness – married couples having a ‘good time’ at the expense of starting or expanding their families. Such challenging arguments were consciously constructed to stimulate discussion and debate. Titmuss knew as well as anyone that for many people, married or otherwise, a ‘good time’ had not been their experience in the crisis-ridden 1930s, or during total war in the 1940s. However, his own diagnosis, and prognosis, were clear enough. More broadly, the invitations to contribute to both these series of publications, but especially that of the ABCA, are yet further indicators of his burgeoning reputation.
If Titmuss was active in the printed media, the 1940s also afforded him the opportunity to hone further his public-speaking skills, already well developed by the outbreak of war through participation in bodies such as the Fleet Street Parliament, by addressing a wide variety of audiences. Many of those interviewed for this book spoke of Titmuss’s engaging style when leading discussions or lecturing, and this aspect of his personality, as well as his acknowledged research skills, appears to have led to a number of invitations as a speaker. To show the diversity of his audiences, we take three examples from the mid-1940s. In May 1946 the director of the Royal Navy Current Affairs course wrote thanking him ‘for coming down to speak to us last week and giving us such an instructive talk on Population Problems’. A cheque for two guineas was attached.12 The text of this talk does not seem to have survived, but there is no reason to assume that Titmuss deviated from his previous stance on this issue. The navy had resisted compulsory discussion groups as held in the army, but in the immediate post-war years put on a number of classes in current affairs and citizenship, and it was presumably to one of these that Titmuss had contributed.13 Among other speakers employed to such ends by the navy was someone Titmuss was going to have a lot to do with in later years, the future Labour leader and Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. It is likely, in fact, that by this point they already knew each other given that both worked in wartime Whitehall, Wilson famously for Beveridge.14
Moving away from talks entirely focused on population issues, Titmuss was on the Historical Association’s list of speakers by the mid-1940s. The Association had been set up in the early twentieth century to support history teaching in schools, and in 1947 Titmuss was thanked for his ‘co-operation in the past’, and asked to confirm the topics on which he was prepared to speak. In addition to population, he proposed the history of the health and social services from the beginning of the nineteenth century.15 As we saw in Chapter 6, this was a topic in which Titmuss had a strong interest, and further evidence of his historical approach. In the same year, he agreed to speak to the Six Point Group on the subject of ‘Family Equality’. The Group was a small, but high-powered and influential, feminist body seeking full equality in the political, occupational, moral, social, economic, and legal spheres – the six points. It had an important platform in the journal Time and Tide. By the mid-1940s it was led by a number of impressive individuals, including leading SMA activist and Labour MP Edith Summerskill. During the war the organisation had been in touch with the Ministry of Health over issues around evacuation, so it is highly likely that Titmuss knew, or knew of, some of its key players.16 The Six Point Group, like many at the time, was certainly concerned with what Time and Tide described, in early 1946, as ‘The Problem of the Family’. The solution to this was complicated, but would require ‘positive measures’ to arrest the decline in family size, and these would have ‘fundamental effects on educational, housing, health and taxation policy’.17 Although, once again, Titmuss’s address does not seem to have survived, such views closely accorded with his own, almost certainly the reason for his invitation. More generally, that Titmuss should receive invitations from such different organisations is, once again, indicative of his growing reputation, and can only have boosted his sense of self. That Titmuss spoke to the Six Point Group was especially noteworthy for, as we shall see, some of his most important lectures in the 1950s were to address, in the title of one of them, ‘The Position of Women’. This, in turn, raises important questions about Titmuss’s more general approach to gender equality, and how this informed, for example, his dispute with LSE social workers in the mid-1950s.
Titmuss
