[1] 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 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.

[3] Stewart observes of Morris 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.

Morris Titmuss's "middle-class, potentially income-draining, pursuits" included horse-racing; in 1908, his horse "Red Eagle" won the Hertfordshire Hunt Point-to-Point Steeplechase.

Eventually, having spent twenty years at Lane Farm, Morris Titmuss fell foul of a post-World War I government initiative to maximize cultivation of human food and provide smallholdings for ex-servicemen; the Bedfordshire War Agricultural Executive Committee decided to remove two fields (one sown with white clover, the other pasture)- totalling almost 33 acres- from Morris Titmuss's control, without which, he protested, his cows' milk-production could not continue at its present rate.

[6] 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.

[7] 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.

His final and perhaps the most important book, The Gift Relationship expressed his own philosophy of altruism in social and health policy and, like much of his work, emphasized his preference for the values of public service over private or commercial forms of care.

He, by contrast argued in favour of trying to make inadequate institutions work better for the benefit of the poor even if his involvement with them had the potential to sully the purity of his reputation.

However, his emphasis on the potential for the private or quasi markets within the NHS differs markedly from that of Titmuss who strongly believed in the state and universal services that were allocated exclusively on the basis of needs (instead of income or prestige).

In this she chronicles the important role Kay played in supporting his early work, and in co-authoring their book Parents' Revolt (1942), which focused on the decline of the birth rate.