Roy Harrod

By 1943 Harrod was describing the shrinking birth rate as presenting problems of

"unprecedented gravity which the Beveridge report would do little to solve

British institution of public opinion survey - foreshadows overhaul of Services, education system and eugenic propaganda

An April shower of letters to The Times in 1942 had contained further thunder

and lightning in the letter from the Presidents of both the Headmasters' Association

and the Headmasters' Conference illuminating the fact that as many as one fifth of

the pupils in 107 schools were only children and nearly two fifths were only sons

[18].

Describing this as "alarming" The Journal of Education asked "who will create

new professions and new enterprises if the only son succeeds the father?" [19]. Even

an attempt in May 1942 to abate such apprehensions by re-issuing the comparatively

optimistic forecasts originally prepared by the Registrar-General for the

Royal Commission which had examined the redistribution of the population,

backfired. For it suggested that only a gradual rise in fertility was needed during

the next two or three decades to offset what it agreed was a "serious fall in the

number of reproductive women bound not to appear over that time" [20]. This

infuriated that paladin of procreation, Roy Harrod. And Harrod was a pre-war

natalist as well as being a Christ Church Colleague of the Prime Minister's intimate

advisor Lord Cherwell. Criticising it as likely to "assuage and even remove the

concern over future depopulation which the correspondents betrayed", he in turn

evoked a rebuke from the Registrar-General, reminding him that "a social policy

which tended to relieve the economic burden of children would halt the trend".

Another who found the Registrar-General's conclusions "most regrettable" in

that they would "induce the general public to believe that the prevention of a

population decline was an easy matter" was the veteran demographer, R. R.

Kuczynski, who regarded it as "more important than ever to realise that Britain's

population problem" was "serious and extremely difficult to solve" [21].

"The one child family has come to be the thing," complained Richard and

Kathleen Titmus, "families of four and five are looked upon as 'soliparious and

eccentric'." They traced the cause of what they called The Parents' Revolt to

individualist and acquisitive nature of society [22]. Their denunciation of Capitalism

as a biological failure, argued The Lancet, would not "put such a sense of

community values into English- and American-speaking peoples as to restrain them

from race-suicide" [23].

Another explained the pre-war attitude when "a couple of children was as much

as anyone had a right to expect, while in some quarters the soliparious union was

the rule" to "that convenient and debilitating slogan 'Safety First'" [24].

Such was the interest that the British Institute of Public Opinion undertook a

survey in April 1942 which later revealed that 76 per cent of a representative cross

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W. H. G. Armytage

section of the population had incomes too small for large families and 14 per cent

thought they could educate a large family better [25].

This survey was central to the first section of the interim report of some 200

doctors who had been qualified for less than 21 years or who were under 45. It was

circulated to all medical practitioners for discussion, and proposed, not only a

"universal system of free education with opportunities for all children and planned

vocational training" but a "planned housing policy, so that homes and their

surroundings may be suitable for the happy growth of three or more children".

They suggested it be supplemented by "an educational campaign throughout the

country to popularise families of 3 or more children". And to study the effects of all

this a Demographic Research Department was proposed, analogous to the Medical

Research Council [26]