have been unaware of them in the first place.8 The approach adopted by Titmuss can be illustrated by a brief examination of Poverty and Population, his first major work.
As we have seen, this book contained a highly complimentary foreword by Lord Horder. And as an epigraph to the volume, Titmuss quoted King George V, who had asserted that ‘The Foundations of National Glory are set in the Homes of the People’. Titmuss acknowledged his new wife Kay’s contribution, ‘not only by her part in the publication of this book, but through her work among the unemployed and forgotten men and women of London’. Through her he had been able to visualise ‘the human significance, and often the human tragedy, hidden behind each fact, and the purblind social waste that the forces of poverty and unemployment relentlessly generate’. Two points already stand out. First, the clear relationship, for Titmuss, between poverty and unemployment, the scourges of 1930s Britain, and ‘social waste’, one of his recurring themes and part of his critique of ‘monopoly capitalism’. Second, Titmuss was not going to produce a book which took a hard-line hereditarian approach to individual, and collective, social problems. Underpinning his argument was the belief that Britain’s population was both ageing and about to decline. That the latter was not, in fact, the case does not undermine the validity of Titmuss’s central argument. One consequence of changing population structure was that it was from the ‘poorer sections of the population, that the architects of the future are being increasingly disproportionately recruited’. This was problematic because this part of society suffered excess rates of mortality, and of morbidity, which were both concerns in themselves, as well as having implications for future generations. Poverty and deprivation were, though, concentrated in particular areas of the country. For example, when compared with the Home Counties, the North of England had, in terms of infant mortality, 65 per cent more excess deaths. Government reporting of such data was, Titmuss suggested, and for by no means the last time, misleading or inadequate. The book’s aim, therefore, was to ‘assess the extent, character and causes’ of this ‘social waste’.9
Titmuss then proceeded to statistically analyse these issues, and to propose solutions. Summarising his findings, he suggested that in the North of England, and in Wales, some half a million excess deaths had occurred in the previous decade. The evidence showed that behind such data lay the ‘presence of intense poverty’ on a widespread and considerable scale. These deaths were ‘not only a national, social and economic problem of fundamental importance’, they also were a humanitarian disaster, ‘a problem that cannot be dismissed, because they need not have died when they did’. The first priority, therefore, was to attend to the needs of children and mothers living in poverty. In what reads like a genuinely angry passage, but also illustrates his occasional tendency to priggishness and didacticism, Titmuss claimed these problems were being ignored or denied because of ‘British stoicism and complacency’. Indeed, he had started the book by condemning the ‘governing outlook on life of the majority of English people today’ (like many at this time, Titmuss routinely conflated England and Britain). This embraced the ‘unreasoning belief’ that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and in so doing the population clung to the ‘principles of the obscurantist’. The continuance of ‘their contented, dull, mass-belief lives, and their happy but nevertheless asocial preoccupation with respectable ritual’ depended on ‘the trends of to-day and the shape of tomorrow remaining hidden’. Nothing must be allowed to disturb ‘their faith in the rigidity and rightness of the only society they know; not even the future prospects of national suicide’.10 There was more in the same vein. This was not to be the last time Titmuss was to castigate his fellow citizens for their short-sightedness and moral shortcomings.
But Poverty and Population certainly had an impact. One of its reviewers, in an article entitled ‘The Waste of Life’, was B. Seebohm Rowntree, one of the pioneers of poverty research. His work on York, some 30 years earlier, had been a landmark in social investigation, and he had recently re-surveyed that city. Titmuss’s book, Rowntree suggested, was ‘important and startling’, and brought home the ‘true significance of the falling birth rate’. In turn, this emphasised the need to care properly for the younger generation, a task at which contemporary society, and contemporary policy, were signally failing. With touching naivety, Rowntree concluded that if ‘every Member of Parliament could be made to read this book, the demand to remedy the crying evils which it reveals would be irresistible’.11 Titmuss was less impressed by Rowntree. Over 30 years later, he told his friend Tom Simey that he agreed that Rowntree had been overrated. This he attributed partly to ‘the fact that these early pioneers by virtue of being pioneers have been credited with remarkable intellectual powers’.12
In the context of Titmuss’s critique of official statistics, and Rowntree’s plea that politicians read Titmuss’s work, it is worth stressing the lengths to which government departments went to deny any connection between unemployment, low income, poverty, and deprivation. The official line was that, in the case of the unemployed, the benefits they might claim were adequate to ensure their families’ and their own survival and health. The findings of researchers such as the nutritionist John Boyd Orr, for example his pioneering Food, Health, and Income, were ignored or downplayed in Whitehall, although they did have an impact on researchers such as Titmuss, and on more ‘progressive’ politicians and think tanks.13 Individuals like Titmuss and Boyd Orr were very much operating on their own initiative, and their work was crucial in bringing social problems to light in pre-war Britain. Given what seemed like wilful blindness on the authorities’ part to the effects of unemployment and poverty, it might seem rather ironic that in 1937 the National Government introduced the Physical Training and Recreation Act. This sought to encourage British citizens to engage in more physical exercise, and was prompted by concerns that other nations, especially Nazi Germany, were pulling ahead of Britain at a time when the international situation was rapidly deteriorating. For critics, the idea that already malnourished individuals might benefit from exerting more energy was simply laughable, and in fact the campaign never really took off, and was quietly dropped on the outbreak of war. Titmuss was among these critics, noting that the ‘inauguration of the Government’s campaign does little more than imply the existence of ill-health and inefficiency in our midst today’.14 Nonetheless, the campaign did recognise, however feebly, that population health had military implications. This was an issue Titmuss was soon to address.
To return to the Eugenics Society, in October 1939 Titmuss joined its Emergency Committee, and by the early 1940s was playing a leading role in the organisation, and in the production of its quarterly publication, Eugenics Review.15 Shortly afterwards, when Britain had staved off the immediate threat of invasion, aerial bombing had ceased, and Germany had turned its attention to the Soviet Union, discussions over post-war reconstruction began to move up the political agenda. One important landmark was the previously noted Beveridge Report of 1942. The Beveridge Committee had been set up in the summer of 1941, and in November Titmuss wrote to Blacker, now a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, on the Emergency Committee’s behalf. Titmuss had raised, at a previous committee meeting, the idea that the organisation should submit evidence to Beveridge. Would Blacker prepare a memorandum as, in Titmuss’s view, there was ‘no one in the Society competent to prepare such a memorandum apart from yourself’? Titmuss also commented that, given his knowledge of how Beveridge operated from his own participation on a Political and Economic Planning (PEP) Committee on Social Security, any document put forward should be brief.16