Introduction

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.

Parents Revolt

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’. Rather than producing an academic work of demography the authors had, in a reference to wartime rationing, ‘preferred to use the short supply of paper to prove the fall in the birth-rate as a public danger’. Birth control had become increasingly available and, since the First World War, been practised by the working class. This was not least because of a labour market so hostile ‘that it seemed abject folly to produce children who could neither be adequately nourished nor sufficiently educated to secure a satisfactory livelihood’. But the authors also provided a solution to this problem, in essence the replacement of a competitive society by one driven by the principle, with Webb alluding to Marx, ‘From each man according to his faculty, and to each man according to his need’.