The term ‘eugenics’ was first used by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in 1883. Its etymological roots lie in the Greek words for ‘good’ or ‘well’ and ‘born’. Eugenics was to be the science (and practice) of improving human stock ‘to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable’. The Eugenic Education Society (as it was originally called) was formed in 1907 in order to spread the knowledge of hereditary factors and how they could be applied to the improvement of the race — the ‘self direction of evolution’, as the logo for the Second International Eugenics Conference in 1921 proclaimed. Membership declined after the First World War, but revived again — though never reaching the same level — in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and by 1932 it had reached 768. Obviously this was a select number, but the Eugenics Society never sought a mass membership: rather it aimed to influence the legislative process by permeating the medical profession, the media and universities, and in the 1930s some very distinguished people took an interest in its work, including Julian Huxley, G.K. Chesterton. George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Keynes, J.B.S. Haldane, Richard Titmuss and A.M. Carr-Saunders (Director of the London School of Economics from 1937).
Central to eugenics was the conviction that a large part of those who came to be known as the ‘social problem group’ of the dependent and destitute were the result of genetic defects. But how could this be relevant to the Depression, when the number of unemployed (those who were necessarily economically and socially dependent, and sometimes all but destitute) had risen to three million, since three million people could hardly be congenitally ‘unfit’? How did eugenics shed any light on the fact that unemployment was regional, concentrated in certain industries like shipbuilding, mining and heavy engineering, and not in other occupations?
Eugenicists were sceptical of the notion that poverty and ill health were linked to social and economic factors: rather they blamed the fecklessness and feeble-mindness of the lower orders. Many tended to be persuaded not by the findings of Dr Corry Mann, whose research in the London docklands led him to conclude that poor health was caused by low incomes, and that better pay resulted in better food, with consequent health benefits, but by investigations such as those undertaken by two academics in Glasgow. ‘What is not demonstrated,’ they wrote, ‘is that simple increase in income would be followed by improvement in the condition of children. Bad parents, irrespective of their income tend to select bad houses, as the money is often spent on other things. The saying “what is the matter with the poor is poverty” is not substantiated by these investigations.’
To eugenicists, the ever greater numbers of unemployed served as vindication of what they had ‘known’ all along: the threat posed by the differential birthrate, whereby those of low intelligence reproduced at a greater rate than those of higher intelligence, and the fear that society was threatened by a small minority of the hereditarily inferior who would ‘swamp’ it if they were not controlled. If, as eugenicist doctors such as Raymond Cattell ‘proved’, the unemployed had low IQs, were ‘hereditarily defective individuals’, ‘social inefficients’, as the Eugenics Review had it, they would just go on breeding more unemployables, a veritable ‘standing army of biological misfits’. Unless they were stopped.
The upper and middle classes were clearly producing fewer offspring than those lower down the social scale. For Julian Huxley, the differential birthrate was already dysgenic by 1925: ‘The proportion of desirables is decreasing, of undesirables increasing. The situation must be got in hand. But it is impossible to persuade the classes which have adopted contraceptive methods to drop them by appeal to self-control. The way to stop the rot is to diffuse these practices equally through all strata of society.’ Although the first birth control clinic had been set up in London by Dr Marie Stopes in 1921, and in 1930 the British Medical Association reluctantly gave qualified approval to doctors providing contraceptive advice to married women, the eugenicists feared that it was upper- and middle-class wives who were making rather too effective use of such knowledge, while those who in their view needed it most were confounded by the mess of pessaries, jellies, douches, ‘womb veils’, ointments, douches, tablets, condoms and diaphragms on offer, and relied instead on unreliable methods such as coitus interruptus or unsuitable domestic substances. What was needed was a foolproof means of contraception — preferably ‘the regular consumption by mouth of a substance preventing fertilisation, taken at daily, or better at weekly or monthly intervals’ — which ‘even the stupidest and therefore the most undesirable members of society’ could manage, a Eugenics Society Memorandum concluded.
But ‘the pill’ was decades away, so would ‘diffusion’ mean compulsion? ‘No public assistance without control of birth rates’, the psychologist Raymond Cattell bleakly sloganised. Julian Huxley’s solution to the tendency (as he saw it) ‘for the stupid to inherit the earth, and the shiftless and the imprudent and the dull’, was much the same: to make unemployment relief conditional upon a man’s agreement to father no more children. ‘Infringement of this order could possibly be met by a short period of segregation in a labour camp. After three or six months’ separation from his wife he would be likely to be more careful the next time.’ The zoologist Dr E.W. MacBride, who had managed to ‘demonstrate’ the innate inferiority of working-class children, went further, suggesting in 1930 that ‘In the last resort compulsory sterilisation will have to be inflicted as a penalty for the economic sin of producing more children than the parents can support,’ though he did suggest that before that last resort was reached, ‘Citizens should receive instruction from the State in the means of birth control.’
In 1932 the Minister of Health appointed a committee to make recommendations on the sterilisation of the ‘feeble-minded’ in England and Wales. Under the chairmanship of Sir Laurence Brock, the Committee included three enthusiastic eugenicists, one of whom was Brock himself. After untangling the family histories of so-called defectives and assessing whether they produced feeble-minded offspring themselves, the Brock Committee concluded that a quarter of a million people in Britain were suitable candidates for voluntary sterilisation on account of being ‘mental defectives’. It was unanimous in believing that it was justified in allowing and even encouraging ‘mentally defective and mentally disordered patients to adopt the only certain method of preventing procreation’: sterilisation. In reaching this conclusion, the Committee had privileged any studies that suggested that defectiveness was hereditary — ‘Broadly speaking stupid people will produce stupid children,’ Dr MacBride had asserted — despite dissent from such witnesses as J.B.S. Haldane and Lancelot Hogben, who argued that there could be no scientific certainty on this point, rather that the evidence suggested environmental factors were more likely to be to blame. The Committee did, however, reject compulsory sterilisation.
The Eugenics Society was delighted with the Brock Committee’s findings, and confident that if ‘the general public could be educated to distinguish between sterilization and castration many members of the Social Problem Group would avail themselves of facilities for voluntary sterilization in order to prevent the birth of unwanted children’.
However, no legislation was forthcoming. It was considered that the public was not behind such a programme, the Roman Catholic Church believed that sterilisation violated the God-given right to reproduce, and by the time the Brock Committee made its recommendations in the summer of 1934, the Nazi Party had embarked on a compulsory sterilisation and euthanasia programme in Germany which increasingly discredited the eugenicists and made repugnant to most people the idea of sterilising — even voluntarily — groups and classes of people.
‘A party of English doctors and scientists passed through,’ wrote the British Consul in Leningrad, Reader Bullard, in his diary on 26 July 1931. ‘Mostly much impressed