The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       CODA Searching for the Gleam

      ‘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 by what they had seen, and as they had been taken to all the showplaces and nothing else this is perhaps not remarkable.’ The British footfall through the Soviet Union in the early 1930s was, if not heavy, then at least regular and highly questing. Many on the left regarded the Soviet Union as a successful, planned, egalitarian society, the one place where the problems that beset Britain had, as they saw it, been resolved. Those who went made the journey because they wanted to see the Soviet system for themselves, to have their opinions about what was wrong with Britain — the decay of capitalism, the class system, the searing inequalities of wealth and opportunity — confirmed, and to bring some lessons back home. ‘We saw in the Soviet Union the negation of the immoralities of industrial capitalism and the system of private profit,’ the political activist and author Margaret Cole recalled. ‘We were eager to follow the gleam … The hopes for what the makers of the Revolution set out to achieve compared to the dead hopelessness of breadlines and the dole were more than enough to outweigh doubts.’

      Sidney and Beatrice Webb went for a two-month tour in the summer of 1932, sailing on the Russian steamer Smolny. As befitted two Fabians and rigorous social investigators, in the months before their departure the Webbs had immersed themselves in ‘Soviet literature of all types … [but] at present we cannot make our way to any settled estimate of success or failure … All I know is that I wish Russian communism to succeed,’ Beatrice wrote.

      Lenin had translated the Webbs’ Theory and Practice of Trade Unionism into Russian (‘An example of the quality of boredom being twice blessed,’ thought Malcolm Muggeridge), and by virtue of this the Webbs had become ‘ikons in the Soviet Union’, and were given a superior tour to that allowed to most Intourist visitors, though their itinerary was the usual one: collective farms, schools, clinics, factories. When they came to dine with Reader Bullard (‘At least he came to dinner and she came to two pieces of toast and a glass of red wine. Nine out of ten tourists have their insides upset by bad food, and Mrs Webb is one of the nine’) they explained that they were ‘mainly interested in the organisation of the State, the way the wheels go round, and they seem СКАЧАТЬ