2: ‘As the son of a farmer…’: origins, early employment, and personal life

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Titmuss’s early life, unremarkable in many respects, has nonetheless been the subject of dispute. Shortly after his death Margaret Gowing, a friend with whom he had worked during the Second World War, produced an account of his life which has proved influential for how Titmuss has since been viewed. Gowing’s narrative remains important, and will be drawn upon in what follows. In certain respects, however, Gowing’s was a partial account which consolidated the by then standard view of Titmuss’s origins and career. Put simply, this stressed the deprivations of his childhood and youth, so throwing into sharp contrast his eventual place as Britain’s leading authority on social policy, an expert advising governments at home and abroad, and public intellectual. For instance, a sympathetic profile in The Observer in 1959 noted the challenges Titmuss’s family had faced, and how Titmuss himself claimed to have learned little at school, save an enduring love for cricket and football. A few years later, another newspaper article suggested that the origins of ‘The Poverty Lobby’ of the 1960s lay in the early hardships of one of its members, Titmuss. While colleagues such as Abel-Smith were middle class, and had come to socialism ‘by conviction’, Titmuss had reached this position ‘by experience’. The last point begs more questions than it answers, not least the nature of Titmuss’s political beliefs. In his application for the LSE chair in 1950 Titmuss said little of his formal education save that, ‘As the son of a farmer’, he had been sent to ‘a preparatory school in Bedfordshire which drew most of its pupils from farmers in the district’.

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