Described as "one of the more imaginative members" of the Organisation, McTaggart continued mineral chlorination studies and early in 1944, Ian Kraitzer joined the research group in what was to become the Minerals Utilization Section of the future CSIR Division of Industrial Chemistry (created 1959), and then by a young recruit, Isabel Joy Bear as a Junior Laboratory Assistant, and later by Charles Alsope, together seeking new uses for titanium tetrachloride. In the alkoxides of titanium, in particular the properties of polymerised butyl titanate, they discovered an excellent vehicle for heat-resisting paint pigments; it was a use of titanium esters that was patented by CSIR, a project in which the Defence laboratories joined Kraitzer and McTaggart s laboratory tests with paint formulation studies by Defence laboratories George Winter (who later joined the Division of Mineral Chemistry). After McTaggart presented an account of their findings in Paris and London, industrial firms in England and the USA were soon marketing the new paint, and its heat-resistance was still attracting attention as late as 1962, though with no acknowledgment of the Australian contribution.
McTaggart and Jean Lehmann married in 1944. After the war in 1947 and during a period of residency in Europe and the USA he worked with H J Emeléus in the chemistry labs in Cambridge,