Titmuss in the twentieth century

Richard Morris Titmuss was born in October 1907, and died in April 1973. His life thus embraced a period central to British social welfare history. At the time of his birth the reforming Liberal governments of 1906– 14 were enacting measures such as old age pensions. In his inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1950, Titmuss acknowledged ‘the great surge forward in legislation for collective help’ in the decade preceding the First World War. That conflict was followed by the uncertainties of the inter-war era, the consequences of which informed Titmuss's early work, and political activities. By the late 1930s, now married to social worker Kathleen (Kay) Caston Miller, he had produced his first published volume, Poverty and Population, which opened with the striking statement that there could be ‘no subject of more fundamental importance to any nation than the physical and mental well-being of its people’. Titmuss was, at this point, an active member of the Liberal Party. His research, again mostly on population and population health, continued into the Second World War. But his most significant wartime activity came with his engagement to contribute to the series of official histories of the war on the Home Front. Titmuss's volume, Problems of Social Policy, was published in 1950, contributed to a life-changing advance in his career, and continues to influence how we perceive wartime Britain. The war also engendered much discussion about post-war social reconstruction, of which Titmuss was a committed advocate, leading him to shift his political allegiance to the Labour Party.

The wartime coalition, and the Labour governments of 1945– 51, duly instituted measures which came to be collectively known as the ‘welfare state’. Perhaps most famously, the National Health Service (NHS) was created. Titmuss later described this as ‘one of the most unsordid and civilised actions in the history of health and welfare policy’. Nonetheless, he viewed the ‘welfare state’ as unfinished business. The expression itself, moreover, had acquired unwelcome, and inaccurate, connotations. Particularly for the political right, it implied state-provided services aimed primarily at the poor, and which were an economic burden on the rest of society.