Brian Abel-Smith’s biographer, Sally Sheard, says the welfare state we have in Britain today is essentially the dream of three men: Richard Titmuss, Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith, otherwise known as ‘the Titmice’. Through a variety of routes – academic analysis, policy research, political networking – they adapted and promoted the implementation of the ‘cradle-to-grave’ philosophy of William Beveridge’s original vision. The Titmice’s modus operandi established an unbeatably effective model for the research-policy relationship. Their department at LSE was the only place in Britain in the 1950s and ’60s where serious social policy research was done; its work informed the Labour Party’s social policy programme for a decade, and was the inspiration behind the policies of the Labour government in 1964–70. It’s probably the most influential 20th-century example of an academic group capturing governmental thinking, and the key to its success was the intellectual and moral leadership provided by Richard Titmuss. In an alternative, pseudo-religious representation, the Titmice were known as God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. This formula chimed with the depictions that crowd the obituaries of Richard Titmuss as a ‘high priest’, ‘a saint’, ‘a prophet’ and ‘an ascetic divine’ who, with his lean face and compelling eyes, might well have been painted by El Greco.

So long as I was a child, I was firmly annexed to the repository of perfect family happiness represented by the Blue Plaque House. But once I began to emerge from childhood, matters were bound to get more untidy. Even children like me, good home-loving daughters, ultimately grow up. In my first account of my childhood, Taking it like a woman, I saw my emancipation largely in terms of entry into the world of male friendships. It was boyfriends who broke the spell. Deprived of brothers, and with only two distant boy cousins and no male schoolmates, the erotic pull of masculinity provided the spur needed for me to question the Blue Plaque House’s occupation of my life and identity. But, yet, hang on a minute, who were those masculine mischief-makers? I met no boys through my own restricted social circles, although I did have an avid correspondence on thin rice paper with a young man in Nagoya, Japan, whose exact address I can still recite.