Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John

Although this is difficult to substantiate one way or another, what is notable about this volume is that Titmuss had clearly been gathering material for some time, going back at least six years. This strongly suggests that concern about the issues with which his script dealt, primarily Britain’s foreign and defence policy since 1931, pre-dated his meeting Kay. What it had to say is discussed more fully in the next chapter, but here it is worth noting Titmuss’s take on patriotism. This was ‘not synonymous with the state of the country’s armaments and defence forces’. His own ‘love for my country is not pride in her ability to make war. It cannot be defined’. Nor was he hostile to the British Empire. On the contrary, one of his most stinging criticisms of the post-1931 Conservative-dominated government was that it had refused, in its foreign policy, to ‘accept the challenge to prove that Britain is fitted to fill the role and responsibility of a great power and of a great Empire’.³⁹

Even when married, Titmuss, and Kay, kept up a relentless schedule of activities. In a letter to a friend, Kay wrote that a number of pieces of Titmuss’s correspondence to various newspapers and journals had been published, and more were being prepared. The previous evening, she continued, she had come home around midnight ‘to find all the lights on in the flat and the wireless on and Richard fast asleep in bed with a book in his hand. It seemed most odd’.⁴⁰ By his own account, in the decade before starting work on Problems of Social Policy in the early 1940s, Titmuss had been ‘reading and studying privately’, had ‘attended evening classes at various institutes’, and, crucially, had ‘interested myself in social and economic questions’.⁴¹ We can already see here some of Titmuss’s defining features, which in many respects he retained for the rest of his life. He had a relentless drive for self-improvement, became engaged in numerous activities by way of a range of associations and clubs, and was increasingly committed to political and social activism. He (and Kay) was thus participating in what McKibbin describes as the ‘informal sociability’ characteristic of the inter-war middle classes (this is contrasted with the supposedly ‘spontaneous sociability’ of the working classes). An important feature of ‘informal sociability’ was joining clubs through which friendship, and sometimes professional, networks were created.⁴² Networking was to become a notable Titmuss trait. Although it raises a whole range of other issues, it is perhaps worth noting in this context Oakley’s observation, which pertains mostly to her parents’ post-war lives, but may be revealing about even the early stages of their marriage. She debates whether, in the last resort, her father had any friends. His diaries, to which she had access, essentially record meetings and other work-related activities. So ‘he might have been lonely. They were both lonely, the way you can only be lonely in a publicly successful marriage’.⁴³

How did this marriage come about? After a certain amount of procrastination, with money almost certainly being a concern, Kay and Titmuss married on 6 February 1937 at an Anglican church in Lewisham, South London. Their first home together was a flat in Pimlico.⁴⁴ Financial frugality seems to have been built into the relationship, with Oakley claiming that her parents ‘were always careful with money: in fact it’s a bit of a puzzle what they spent their money on’. On a more personal level, and in what was to be a longstanding source of uneasiness in Titmuss’s life, Kay and his mother did not get on, with the latter also making constant emotional demands of him.⁴⁵ As to what Kay did, when Titmuss met her she was the organising secretary of the Fulham Fellowship for the Unemployed, and later its honorary secretary and treasurer, from 1932 until its demise in 1940. She also took on other, related, roles. So Kay was in employment for a number of years of married life. But after 1940 she never again worked outside the home.⁴⁶

This brings us back to the problematic issue of the nature of the relationship between Kay and her husband. Oakley suggests that the six years between Kay’s first meeting Titmuss and her leaving employment was her mother’s ‘golden period’. Kay was certainly busy with her own work, which in some ways was more socially significant than her husband’s at this point, but, and part of her later Titmuss mythology, in her view she was also leading him towards his true destiny as a leading thinker on social welfare.⁴⁷ Gowing further elaborates on Kay’s role by suggesting that, from the time they had met, and under Kay’s influence, ‘Richard’s interests had become social and political’, the ‘new found radicalism’ noted earlier.⁴⁸ In other words, Kay’s project was to be shaping, supporting, and promoting Titmuss’s career. A particular version of Titmuss’s life and work was put forward by Kay until the end of his life, and has had a shelf-life beyond. This was Kay as the defender of the faith, defender of a man who had risen from poverty, formulated, with her background but essential assistance, new ways of thinking about social welfare, and was, to those of a like mind, someone to be loved and admired. Again to quote Oakley, when invited, with Titmuss, to a Buckingham Palace garden party in 1970, Kay ‘treasured this day, just as she treasured all Richard’s claims to fame’.⁴⁹ And as Kay told Walter Adams shortly after Titmuss’s memorial service, at that event ‘it was wonderful to have so many friends gathered in St Martin’s and we were honoured and comforted by the consciousness of so much warmth and sympathy around us’. It had ‘meant a great deal when one has lost so much’.⁵⁰ For Oakley, all this was to the frustration of her mother’s unacknowledged desires. She agrees that Kay ‘never said to me that, had she not married Richard Titmuss, she might have had a satisfying career of her own’. However, the ‘documentary remnants of her life bequeathed to me and the way she talked about the past, that past before I was born, did speak wistfully of an uncompleted journey’.⁵¹

We should pause momentarily to unpick some of this before examining Titmuss’s own attitude to marriage. On the question of Kay’s influence, it was certainly the case, as Gowing suggests, that in his first published book, which came out in 1938 and is discussed in Chapter 4, he acknowledged his wife as having given him insights into the lives of the unemployed. But Gowing over-reads this when she writes that Kay had made ‘social values and social concerns his central issue’.⁵² Politically, Kay herself was no radical. As we have seen, in 1935 she claimed no interest in politics, and this had caused a certain coolness between her and Titmuss. Titmuss was politically aware enough to have joined the Liberal Party in 1932, before he encountered Kay. To reiterate an earlier point, it thus seems improbable that the activism Titmuss was displaying by 1935 had been solely caused by meeting Kay. Ultimately, we can never know the true extent of Kay’s influence on her husband. But from the Second World War onwards she was certainly to provide him with a domestic platform which allowed him to pursue his relentless work schedule.

Back in the 1930s, though, it is undoubtedly true that Kay had direct experience of working with the unemployed. This may well have been important for Titmuss since locally unemployment rates were low. Looking round him, Titmuss would have seen a region, London and the South East, where new industries were thriving, the suburbs expanding (he lived in one himself), and the small number of unemployed were relatively invisible. Kay may, therefore, have alerted him to problems on his doorstep of which he had been unaware in a strictly personal sense (although he could not conceivably have been ignorant of the devastation being wrought on the traditional industrial areas). As to Kay giving up her career in order to support Titmuss, there is