14 Facts About Richard Titmuss

Richard Titmuss founded the academic discipline of social administration and held the founding chair in the subject at the London School of Economics.

Richard Titmuss is honoured in the Richard Titmuss Chair in Social Policy at the LSE, which is currently held by Julian Le Grand.

Richard Titmuss is honoured by the annual Richard Titmuss Memorial Lecture in the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Richard Titmuss was born 16 October 1907 at Lane Farm, Stopsley, near Luton, Bedfordshire, the second child of farmer Morris Richard Titmuss and Maud Louise, of farming background.

Richard Titmuss was brought up in the countryside and left St Gregory's preparatory school at 14 with no formal qualifications, having suffered from illness which curtailed his attendance.

Stewart observes of Morris Richard Titmuss's eventually curtailed farming endeavours and later similarly fraught efforts to operate a haulage business that this work took place amidst the financial upheavals following the First World War, and that all things considered "he was able to leave farming without leaving any debt behind, continued to pay his older son's school fees", and bought the terraced house at Hendon to which the family relocated.

Lane Farm came to consist of 329 acres of arable and 34 of pastoral land, on which Morris Richard Titmuss kept ten cows, eight other cattle, and six working horses, and employed five men and a boy in the business of selling milk and cultivating the land for the growth of animal feed.

The Richard Titmuss family relocated to a small terraced house at Hendon, where Morris Richard Titmuss tried to turn around a "struggling haulage business", dying of heart problems in 1926.

Per Oakley, the seventeenth-century Richard Titmuss family were "well-off inhabitants" of Fairlands farm, "now a public park in Stevenage", with a predominant farming tradition from then on.

Around this time, Richard Titmuss was active in the British Eugenics Society.

Richard Titmuss contributed to a number of government committees on the health service and social policy.

Richard Titmuss did some consulting in Africa, sometimes together with Professor Brian Abel-Smith, who was later his successor in his chair.

Richard Titmuss's concerns focused especially on issues of social justice.

Richard Titmuss held his chair from 1950, after brief spells in the Cabinet Office and the Social Medicine Research Unit, until his death in 1973.