Research
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Books: Research
In his obituary of Titmuss, Michael Young suggested that he was ‘more renowned outside his country than within, having a royal following in the United States’. When Abel-Smith and Kay Titmuss prepared the posthumously published Social Policy: An Introduction, meanwhile, they remarked that Titmuss’s works were ‘widely read in the United States and elsewhere’. They had thus sought to ensure that ‘British institutions are readily intelligible to North American and other students of social policy’. And, as previous chapters have shown, Titmuss engaged strongly with American scholars and federal agencies, especially from 1957 onwards. He thus commented directly, on occasion, on American welfare initiatives, while also commending, in particular, the NHS to American audiences. He was, therefore, at the heart of transatlantic policy networks, wherein those on the liberal left sought to promote social welfare in the pursuit of a better society. These interactions were also personal, with Titmuss acquiring loyal friends and admirers in North America, just as in Britain. He clearly derived considerable satisfaction from virtually all aspects of these transatlantic contacts. So what was his impact on American ways of thinking about welfare, allowing that ‘impact’ is intangible and difficult to measure? Why was it that Ida Merriam, in her obituary, claimed that ‘Richard Titmuss was one of the great human beings of our time’? The aim here is to give a sense of how Titmuss was perceived by Americans working in the same field. A number of American associates commented directly on Titmuss’s influence, or potential for influence.
After 1945, life expectancy in Britain continued to rise, partly because of the benefits of the ‘welfare state’, full employment, and the revolution in medical science. While the population as a whole grew, those over 65 years constituted a slowly increasing proportion of the total. In terms of welfare provision, the restructuring of the national insurance scheme in the late 1940s proved problematic. The value of the contributory pension, in any event designed as a subsistence award, was declining thanks to inflation. The scheme’s flat-rate basis further exacerbated the issue of the pension’s value. Many pensioners remained victims of poverty, and so were increasingly reliant on means-tested awards. The whole structure had shaky actuarial foundations in that pensions were paid for not by historic contributions but effectively by younger workers. Entitlement to a state pension came at 65 years for men and 60 for women, ages which had no particular economic or medical rationale but which were apparently fixed and inflexible. Although legislated for by a Labour government, there was nothing especially ‘socialist’ about the pensions scheme. Rather, it embodied Beveridge’s liberalism. Thus policy challenges persisted. The incoming 1951 Conservative government considered whether targeted, rather than universal, benefits were the way forward. And as John Macnicol points out, the 1950s saw a ‘small but growing lobby of free market opinion … arguing that state pension ages should be raised’. By such accounts, expenditure on pensions was ‘dysfunctional’ as it did not ‘invest in youthful human capital’. Rather, it ‘diverted resources to a non-working, unproductive section of the population’ which consumed, rather than produced, wealth.
This chapter examines Titmuss’s political activism in the 1930s, a difficult decade for British society, and into the early part of the Second World War. Throughout the 1930s fear of another war was ever-present, and the Depression after the 1929 crash further exacerbated socioeconomic disruption in the ‘traditional’ industrial areas. A sense of foreboding was compounded by psychological ideas which stressed the irrational, unconscious, dimensions of human behaviour. For instance, the psychiatrist John Bowlby and the Labour politician Evan Durbin co-authored a book entitled Personal Aggressiveness and War which discussed, among other things, what they described as ‘irrational acquisitiveness’. Titmuss and Bowlby were already acquainted by this point, and their paths were to cross on various occasions over the coming years. Both were to be signatories, for example, to a letter to the Prime Minister in 1965 on the extent of child poverty. Titmuss, too, was concerned with ‘acquisitiveness’, and saw psychological factors as contributing to international conflict. Gloom and doom, though, was not the whole story. Compared to continental Europe, Britain was politically stable, with the National Government, dominated by the Conservatives, elected in 1931, and returned to power in 1935. Some parts of the country, including London, saw the development of new industries, and new ways of living characterised by improved living standards leading to higher levels of home ownership, and the acquisition of new consumer goods. Yet this, in turn, highlights significant regional differences, and, overall, there was a highly charged political and cultural atmosphere.
This chapter starts with a discussion of Titmuss’s only publication jointly authored with Kay, Parents Revolt, published in 1942. Titmuss later claimed that it had been ‘partly written in an air raid shelter in Pimlico’, the area of London where he and Kay lived. This work once again engages with Titmuss’s major preoccupations of the 1930s and 1940s, his concerns about population, population health, and the moral implications of materialism, and was clearly intended to reach a wider audience than simply those interested in eugenics or demography. In this respect, Parents Revolt links more closely with the material discussed in Chapters 5 and 8. Further examples of Titmuss’s interventions in these fields are then briefly discussed, before turning to the logical outcome of his interests in population health. This was the engagement by Titmuss, and Jerry Morris, with the emerging discipline of social medicine, and the subsequent creation of the Social Medicine Research Unit. It is shown that Titmuss and Morris were among the pioneers of social medicine in Britain, especially through the publication of what were to become foundational articles for the field. The subtitle of Titmuss and Kay’s volume, A Study in the Declining Birth-Rate in Acquisitive Societies, was revealing for, as we have seen, Titmuss was much taken with Tawney’s notion of the ‘acquisitive society’. The book included a preface by the veteran Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb, who claimed that it raised, ‘in a series of brilliantly graphic chapters’, the ‘crucial question of the fall of the birth-rate, threatening the survival of the white race’.
From late 1941, Titmuss was engaged in researching and writing Problems of Social Policy, published in 1950. This was part of the ‘History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Civil Series’. Intriguingly, ‘Problems of Social Policy’ was the title of a passage in a 1932 work by Tawney. It was originally planned that Titmuss write two volumes on the wartime social services. In January 1951, he told a government official that the second was due later that year, and he would send him a draft when revisions had been made. But by this point Titmuss was fully occupied at the LSE. In a letter to the School’s director in late 1951, Titmuss complained about his workload. Consequently, he had had ‘to shelve indefinitely editorial work on the second volume’. By the summer of 1952, Titmuss had thrown in the towel, telling another government official that Margaret Gowing was taking over. He had been ‘reluctantly forced to give it up owing to extreme pressures of work here. I am finding that there are limits to human endurance!’ The book which ultimately appeared had an introductory chapter by Gowing, but the principal authors were Sheila Ferguson and Hilde Fitzgerald. In a generous preface, Hancock noted that it had initially been envisaged that these two would work alongside Titmuss. But ill health, and the ‘pressure of University duties’, had led the latter to resign as principal author. Nonetheless, he had ‘continued to give assistance to his two colleagues, and the book they have now completed conforms closely to his original plan’. The volume itself made frequent references to Titmuss’s earlier work. As his correspondence suggests, Titmuss was not averse to letting others know how much he had to do, a habit maintained for the rest of his career. While Titmuss’s volume was not published until 1950, it is appropriate to deal with it here as it dominated his life for most of the 1940s.
Although he may have objected to the description, by the 1960s Titmuss was, undoubtedly, one of the ‘great and the good’, a public intellectual constantly called upon to sign petitions, join committees, and offer an opinion on a range of issues. In 1962, for instance, he was a signatory to a telegram to the chairman of the Council of Ministers in Budapest. British scholars and scientists, it stated, were ‘grieved by news of the failing health of eminent legal historian István Bibó’. Bibó, a prominent member of the Hungarian government which had briefly defied the Soviet Union, had been imprisoned in 1957. His early release, the cable continued, would contribute to the establishment of friendly links between Hungarian and Western intellectuals. Other signatories included A.J. Ayer, Julian Huxley, and Bertrand Russell. Sent at the height of the Cold War, this intervention was part of a broader campaign to secure the rights of ‘prisoners of conscience’. In spring 1964, meanwhile, Titmuss was approached by George Martin (a drama teacher, not the producer of the Beatles) to join the General Council of the proposed International Centre in Covent Garden. The aim was to use the site, soon to be vacated by the historic fruit and vegetable market, for conference, artistic, and scientific purposes. Titmuss agreed, and produced a paragraph for a proposed report which read: ‘London deserves an International Centre in the Covent Garden area on the lines proposed. London needs these facilities for education and relaxation in a planned environment of public gardens. It is the only civilized response if London is still to be London’.
This is the first full-length biography of Richard Titmuss, a pioneer of social policy research and an influential figure in Britain’s post-war welfare debates.
Drawing on his own papers, publications, and interviews with those who knew him, the book discusses Titmuss’s ideas, particularly those around the principles of altruism and social solidarity, as well as his role in policy and academic networks at home and overseas. It is an enlightening portrait of a man who deepened our understanding of social problems as well as the policies that respond most effectively to them.
The expression ‘welfare state’, which Titmuss disliked, is problematic, not least in implying planned, integrated services. But this has never been the case. To take the example of the NHS, in Titmuss’s lifetime this had a tripartite structure whose three components were the hospital service, primary care, and local authority services. All this was troublesome from the outset because of, for instance, the different geographical boundaries used by each part. To focus on local authorities, these had retained responsibility for public health, under the supervision of a Medical Officer of Health (MOH). Among local authorities’ other responsibilities were the personal social services, education (including the school meals and medical services), and housing. They varied, moreover, in their political composition, and potentially in policy implementation. Add to this that Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland had, to varying degrees, their own organisational structures and welfare cultures, and it will be evident that the ‘welfare state’ was far from a centralised, monolithic institution. Against this confusing background, this chapter examines Titmuss’s involvement with changes in Scottish social work and, contemporaneously, with the Seebohm Committee, set up in late 1965 to review local authority social work services in England and Wales. Titmuss viewed both these developments as broadly positive, and as having wider implications. As he told the first meeting of the Social Administration Association in 1967, in a speech seeking to clarify further his field’s scope, the ‘problems of how to teach social administration in non-specialist as well as specialist ways will receive added force’ when, alongside other policy developments, Seebohm reported, and the impending changes in Scottish social work took effect.
By the mid-1950s Titmuss’s reputation was spreading abroad. For instance, in 1955 he was asked by the Technical Assistance Department of the United Nations to take part in seminar, in Vienna, on comparative social research. As we shall see in a later chapter, by this point he was also becoming well known in the United States. Here we examine four public addresses from the first half of the 1950s. In 1952 Titmuss delivered the Millicent Fawcett Lecture, in 1955 the James Seth and the Eleanor Rathbone Lectures, and in 1956 he spoke at the International Conference on Social Work. The first, second, and fourth of these were reproduced, in 1958, in Essays on ‘The Welfare State’. Although the Rathbone Lecture and the social work talk had already appeared in print, they had done so as a Liverpool University pamphlet, and in a rather obscure American professional journal. The Fawcett Lecture was previously unpublished. The Seth Lecture, given in Edinburgh, is included because of its insights into the ‘philosophical’ background to Titmuss’s approach to welfare. These were far from the only public addresses Titmuss gave in this period, and we shall variously encounter others. But each was important both in its own right, and as illustrating central themes in Titmuss’s thought as he sought to develop a ‘philosophy of welfare’ in his early years at the LSE. A brief summary of the four speeches is given, followed by an attempt to draw out the main points Titmuss sought to make. Titmuss’s Millicent Fawcett Lecture, ‘The Position of Women: Some Vital Statistics’, was delivered at Bedford College, London, in early 1952.