at County Fire Office he learned ‘not only the essentials of the insurance business but how to read and analyse the statistics of life, death and sickness’.26 Titmuss’s own early research was very much into such issues of morbidity and mortality. It is difficult to know whether Titmuss actually enjoyed any of his time at County Fire Office, as opposed to learning a lot from it. As will become apparent later in this volume, though, the private insurance industry was to become something of a bête-noire on account of its purported economic power, and its promotion of benefits, notably occupational pensions, outside of state-provided welfare. In Chapter 15, for example, we shall see how this shaped one of his most famous publications, The Irresponsible Society. His criticisms were, then, those of an informed insider.
As a worker in the insurance industry, where, then, was Titmuss located in the social structure of inter-war Britain? We have seen that one version of his early life stresses the modesty of his background. But after joining County Fire Office, Titmuss’s occupation, and to a lesser extent his income, placed him squarely in the middle class, albeit initially very much at its lower end. More than this, he was part of the ‘new’ middle class, broadly ‘progressive’ in outlook, and so of a different disposition to the ‘old’ middle class consisting of professions such as doctors and lawyers. Titmuss’s career in insurance, furthermore, coincided with what Ross McKibbin has characterised as a sort of middle class ‘golden age’. Stable and rising salaries, such as that enjoyed by Titmuss, combined with falling prices and an undemanding fiscal regime, meant that this social group was especially economically advantaged, while the threat of unemployment was considerably less than that faced by the manual working classes.27 Titmuss’s training was very much ‘on the job’, but, as we shall see further in a later chapter, he was clearly a good enough statistician to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and to gain a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for his research, albeit largely on the basis of his published rather than professional work. Nonetheless, the two were clearly complementary, and that Titmuss was promoted to inspector at a relatively young age further attests to his abilities. The field of statistics itself can be seen as part of the ‘triumph of science-based expertise’ which had taken place between 1880 and 1929. It had effectively been created by Karl Pearson, a leading figure in a movement with which Titmuss too was to be associated, eugenics.28 The further twist here is that Titmuss was later to express scepticism about aspects of the work, and behaviour, of ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’. But throughout his career he continued to employ statistical techniques and data, data which he clearly saw as hard, scientific evidence for the sort of moral arguments he sought to make.
At the memorial service held for Titmuss shortly after his death one of the speakers was Richard Crossman. While Crossman mostly talked, understandably, about Titmuss’s public activities, he also claimed that ‘Richard’s home life was an inspiration not only to him but to those of us who partook of Kay’s hospitality’. The two were similar types, he suggested, for example in their naivety in certain (unspecified) matters.29 Kay wrote a few days later to thank Crossman for his contribution. It was ‘hard to face the future without Richard and sad that he had to leave us when there was so much he still wanted to do’.30 The view of the Titmuss marriage as a close, loving, partnership has long been another part of the standard narrative of his life. Gowing, for instance, talks of the ‘deep love’ between Titmuss and Kay, and that this was the ‘mainstay of his life to the very end’.31 Again, given that she gained much of her information from Kay, this sort of depiction is to be expected (although, of course, that does not make it untrue). And to be fair, Gowing had known Titmuss for around 30 years by the time of his death. Of their respective personalities, Kay, at least for some, was an individual difficult to warm to, while Titmuss, for those who did not buy into his mission, could be vain and arrogant.32 Oakley quotes Townsend as claiming that he found Kay ‘small-minded – someone who often made carping or destructive comments about others and who did not have interesting things to say about her own activities’.33 Abel-Smith helped Kay after Titmuss’s death until her own death 15 years later. But he later confided to Oakley that he had never really liked her mother.34 Given that Titmuss left few personal papers, and was famously reticent about private matters, it is difficult to know what to make of all this. The following account of his life outside work in the 1930s is, therefore, for the most part confined to factual material.
Starting with leisure activities, as a young man Titmuss played chess to a reasonable standard (although he was to give it up as too time-consuming), and was a fan, and player, of both cricket and football.35 The former, in terms of its cross-class appeal, was England’s ‘national’ sport, and an important component of English national identity. Among Titmuss’s other leisure activities was hiking and youth hostelling, in Britain and abroad. He was thus part of a broader trend in the 1930s which saw a shift from formal (that is, rules-based) sport to, as McKibbin puts it, ‘more informal and socially casual activities’. At the end of the decade, there were ‘about 500,000 regular walkers and nearly 300 youth hostels’, with membership of the Youth Hostel Association rising from 6,000 in 1934 to 83,000 in 1939. This rapid expansion had a number of causes, including a growing perception of the countryside as a recreational resource, something which reminds us of Titmuss’s fondness for rural Bedfordshire. Both the middle and working classes took up pastimes such as hiking, with part of the appeal being that a more or less equal number of men and women participated.36
It was on such a walking tour of North Wales that Kay and Titmuss first met, in summer 1934. She had been born in South London on 20 January 1903, and was thus four years older. As was common at that time, both still lived at home, Titmuss with his mother in North London, where he was to remain until his marriage in 1937. Clearly both Kay and Titmuss were keen walkers, undertaking in 1935, for example, a tour of the Black Forest in Germany. Nor were their leisure activities confined to the outdoors. In a letter to a friend in 1935 Kay wrote that, though not interested in politics herself, she had agreed for Titmuss’s sake to attend a meeting at which he was speaking. Titmuss was by this point, as described in the next chapter, active in Liberal Party politics, not least by way of the debating society to which he belonged, the Fleet Street Parliament (again, coincidentally, close to the LSE). But Kay had not been impressed by the meeting, and this caused what turned out to be a temporary division between them, with her religious beliefs adding to the mix. Soon afterwards, though, they were planning their wedding. Titmuss’s political activities also included campaigning for a peaceful solution to international problems. Both he and Kay, again before their marriage, attended the World Youth Congress and International Peace Conference in Geneva in summer 1936. Titmuss was a delegate to both meetings, representing the National League of Young Liberals and Youth House, Camden. Closer to home, Kay and Titmuss also attended another youth peace conference in the same year, this time in Birmingham.37
Amidst all this, Titmuss also found time to write a work, in 1936, principally entitled ‘Crime and Tragedy’, but with the alternatives ‘Government by Betrayal’ and ‘Creation of Anarchy’. Written under the pseudonym Richard Caston (Caston was Kay’s middle name) this was rejected by various publishers. By Gowing’s account, the work was informed by his ‘new found radicalism’,