As these extracts from his last writings in this section of the book show, Richard Titmuss was not just an international figure; he also made the academic subject of social policy international. The issues of equity and social justice it posed were truly global in their implications. How could human need be confined to national boundaries? This comes out clearly in the first extract. For students at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), it was their first taste of the subject, the first lecture in the core course all had to attend. There was no dreary attempt to define social policy, no beginning with the English Poor Law; instead, Titmuss jumped right into the dilemma of clashing priorities between good ends and a world stage for the subject. Nor was the world the comfortable world of advanced industrial societies.

To be international, for Titmuss, meant being as concerned with the developing world as with the developed rich north, indeed more so. He was a friend and admirer of Julius Nyerere, the independence leader of Tanzania whose work he mentions in this piece. He urged developing countries to balance economic development with social development long before the idea ever entered the heads of those in the World Bank or other international agencies. Ever practical in his follow through, he launched an MSc at the LSE in Social Planning in Developing Counties to train those from the third world in social planning.

In 1957 Titmuss and James Meade, later to win a Nobel Prize for Economics, were asked to help the small island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean draw up an economic and a social plan for their country. Their parallel volumes (Meade et al, 1960; Titmuss and Abel-Smith, 1961) form an exemplar of that approach. Unlike so many economic plans of that period that lie forgotten in some dusty archive, they provided a foundation for a remarkably successful economy: following Meade’s advice, it developed a diversified economy; following Titmuss’s advice, it adopted a politically difficult policy of population control which in combination has supported an infrastructure of basic health, education and social security.