28 - ‘It Really is hell’: Disruption at the LSE

Summary

Introduction

The 1960s saw student unrest across Western Europe and North America, and the LSE was one of the main British participants by way of what came to be called ‘The Troubles’. Titmuss did not approve. In April 1969 his old friend Margaret Gowing, now at the University of Kent, hoped that ‘things aren't as bad as they sound for you but I fear they probably are. It must be hard with departments and friends on different sides etc: presumably a complete civil war. I am sorry’. Titmuss replied that at ‘the moment most of us here are living from hour to hour – it really is hell’.The following month it was announced that David Donnison was leaving, as The Times put it, the ‘embattled LSE’, to take up another post. Donnison admitted to ‘feeling like the proverbial rat leaving the sinking ship’. But the School had not become ‘a more attractive place to work recently’, and he only wished that he ‘was leaving when morale was higher’. What was it that reduced Titmuss, and Donnison, to such despair?

Titmuss and students

Titmuss was justly famed for taking considerable care of his students at a time when this was not necessarily the norm in British higher education. While he could be disparaging about their middle class backgrounds, on a personal level he was kind, attentive, and supportive, and devoted to education in all forms. During his final illness, although in considerable pain, he went out of his way to maintain his teaching commitments as best as he could. In the October preceding his death, he told his second year students that he had been ‘deeply touched by those lovely flowers’ he had discovered on his return from yet another hospital stay. He would be back with them as soon as possible, and would share his experiences of the NHS. As well as having ‘hobnobbed’ with other patients, he had even been ‘allowed to have a seminar with students – nurses and medicare!’m Such recollections were to form the basis of the Postscript to the posthumously published Social Policy: An Introduction.