close friend and colleague, Richard Crossman, who worked for the Corporation’s German Service.18 From around 1941, Richard Weight suggests, there was an increase in BBC output dealing with social issues, especially those to do with social reconstruction. These broadcasts were made by ‘planning experts, doctors, educationalists and church leaders’ who, in turn, were to be the ‘technocrats, philanthropists and bureaucrats’ populating the ‘policy-making committees of the Welfare State and the Planned Economy’. Here they would work alongside voluntary and professional bodies, with the ultimate task of offering policy advice.19 Titmuss thus needs to be seen in this broader framework, while bearing in mind also the moral, rather than simply technocratic, underpinnings of his work.
In early summer 1942, Titmuss was contacted by the novelist, essayist, and polemicist George Orwell, who between 1941 and 1943 was talks producer at the BBC’s Empire Service India Section. Orwell asked Titmuss if he would consider ‘doing a talk for us in the series which we shall be broadcasting to India during June and July’. The series, called ‘AD 2000’, would deal with India’s future, ‘the idea being that it is an attempt to forecast what is likely to be happening fifty or sixty years hence’. Orwell was looking for someone to discuss India’s population ‘problem’, and Titmuss was ‘much the most suitable person to do it, and you could approach it from whatever angle you liked’. It is not clear whether Titmuss and Orwell knew each other personally, but they certainly had friends and acquaintances in common, for instance the publisher Victor Gollancz.20 The way Orwell formulated his request also implies knowledge of Titmuss’s ideas. Titmuss clearly agreed to Orwell’s suggestion, for around two weeks later Orwell got back to him with thanks for the script he had been sent. It was ‘just the kind of thing I wanted’.21 Titmuss was duly commissioned, for a fee of ten guineas, to talk for 20 minutes on the ‘Indian Population Problem’ on a programme to be transmitted on 3 July by the Indian Empire Service.22 The context here is the accelerating, and ultimately successful, demand within India for self-government. More specifically, Titmuss’s talk came just a few months after the catastrophic loss to the British Empire of the base at Singapore which further advanced the nationalist cause across Asia, while posing a military threat to India itself. This was perhaps the lowest point in what John Darwin describes as the ‘Strategic Abyss’ which Britain had been facing since the late 1930s.23 The potential for a rapid expansion of India’s population, in contrast to the situation in Britain, was a topic to which Titmuss returned on a number of occasions.
A few months later, Titmuss appeared on the BBC Home Service. He had been asked to participate, the fee this time being seven guineas, in a discussion programme entitled ‘Too Few Babies’, to be broadcast in mid-November 1942.24 As the title suggests, the basic premise here was that the British population would face serious decline unless the birth rate improved. In the course of the discussion, Titmuss responded to another participant, a Mrs Norris, who had argued that any such rise could help make ‘the world spiritually whole again’ (she did not specify how this might happen). Titmuss suggested, possibly tongue in cheek, that this raised ‘a new point, which is probably too big to deal with tonight’. But there was general agreement that ‘we cannot hope to induce people to have more children until economic insecurity and the fear of war have been eliminated. We’ve got to have more economic planning to achieve security’. He then addressed the spirituality question more directly, arguing that ‘in another sense we’ve also got to return to higher social values – call them spiritual if you like – less snobbery, less “keeping up with the Jones’s” in every field’.25 Titmuss did not spell out here his critique of the ‘acquisitive society’, but it is clearly implicit in what he said, not least in the (now virtually unused) expression, ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’. Likewise his call for ‘economic planning’ returned to a well-established concern about the consequences of unbridled capitalism, as did the need for ‘higher social values’. This particular programme seems to have evoked quite a reaction. A BBC employee sent Titmuss some letters the Corporation had received, and in response he claimed that he had had ‘many reactions to the broadcast and everyone [sic] of them has been exceptionally favourable’. ‘A number of people whose judgement I respect’, he continued, ‘were all impressed by the content of the discussion and, curiously enough, the delivery – not excepting my own.’ Turning on the charm, he told his correspondent – presumably either the interviewer or the producer – that he attributed this ‘to the careful grooming you gave us all and I think you are to be congratulated on handling such a thorny topic’.26
The following year, Titmuss was again contacted by the BBC, this time by its European Talks Editor, who had been given his name by the Royal Statistical Society. The topic the editor was looking into was the birth rate in the Allied powers (he used the expression ‘United Nations’, coined by President Roosevelt in 1942), as compared to that of the Axis powers. ‘In particular’, he continued, ‘of course, we would like to bring out that Hitler is destroying Germany’s future by once again sacrificing German manpower’.27 As we have seen, this was a topic Titmuss had addressed on a number of occasions, and presumably explains his recommendation by the Royal Statistical Society. The subject, Titmuss responded, was not an easy one to handle in a ‘popular manner’, but he did submit a script which argued that the German armed forces were facing an acute manpower shortage, while suffering huge casualties on the Eastern Front. The population aged between 16 and 24 years was now in decline, and so the ‘seeds sown by the Kaiser and his war lords in 1914’ had at last begun ‘to bear fruit. But this time it is barren fruit’.28 It is not clear if this piece was actually broadcast, although Titmuss did receive four guineas, and was commissioned to do a talk at some future date on the German birth rate.29 The subject was certainly timely, given Germany’s heavy defeat earlier in 1943 at Stalingrad, and the Red Army’s subsequent remorseless advances.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
