Richard Titmuss
| Richard Titmuss | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 16 October 1907 |
| Died | 6 April 1973 (aged 65) |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Social policy, social work |
| Institutions | London School of Economics |
| Spouse | Kathleen Miller |
Richard Morris Titmuss CBE, FBA (1907–1973) was a pioneering British social researcher and teacher. He founded the academic discipline of Social Administration (now largely known in universities as Social Policy) and held the founding chair in the subject at the London School of Economics.
His books and articles of the 1950s helped to define the characteristics of Britain's post World War II welfare state and of a universal welfare society, in ways that parallel the contributions of Gunnar Myrdal in Sweden. He is honoured in the Richard Titmuss Chair in Social Policy at the LSE, which is currently held by Julian Le Grand.
He is also honoured by the annual Richard Titmuss Memorial Lecture in the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Titmuss was born in 1907, the second child of a farmer; he was brought up in the countryside and left school at 14 with no formal qualifications. An autodidact, he worked for a large insurance company as an actuary for 16 years whilst simultaneously pursuing an interest in social topics through reading, debating and writing. His initial concerns were with such issues as insurance and the age structure of the population, migration, unemployment and re-armament, foreign policy and the peace movement. In 1938 he published Poverty and Population, which focused on the regional differences between the North and South. In 1939, he published Our Food Problem. Around this time, Titmuss was also active in the British Eugenics Society.
In 1942, he was recruited to write a volume in the civil series of the official war history, Problems of Social Policy, a work which established his reputation as well as securing him the new chair at the London School of Economics. In this process, he was strongly supported by the sociologist T. H. Marshall.
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