This article is from the January issue of Total Politics
In 1910, soon after being appointed home secretary, Winston Churchill found time to sit down with a recently published pamphlet entitled The Sterilization of the Degenerates. Its American author, Dr HC Sharp, opened with an apocalyptic warning that “the degenerate class” was reproducing more quickly than the general population and thus threatening the “purity of the race”. It was not only Dr Sharp’s diagnosis that interested Churchill, however, but also his prescription. Picking up a thick blue pencil, Churchill marked the passages where Sharp argued that sterilisation, which since 1907 had been mandatory for mentally unfit prisoners in Sharp’s home state of Indiana, should be practised on all degenerates. Churchill was sufficiently impressed to ask his officials how a similar law might be implemented in Britain. The reply, from Dr Horatio Donkin, chief medical adviser of prisons, that the Indiana law was “a monument of ignorance and hopeless mental confusion” did not dissuade Churchill. “I am drawn to this subject in spite of many parliamentary misgivings,” he explained. “It is bound to come some day.”
He was only half-right. Internationally, sterilisation programmes proved popular. In total, 32 US states followed Indiana’s lead in introducing compulsory sterilisation for the ‘mentally defective’. Similar laws were also passed in Scandinavia and Germany; indeed, the Nazi’s 1933 ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ was explicitly modelled on the Indiana law. But in Britain compulsory sterilisation never reached the statute book. What was introduced, despite “parliamentary misgivings”, was legislation to segregate forcibly the “feeble-minded” from the general population, and sexually segregate them from each other to prevent their reproduction. This law, the closest Britain came to eugenic legislation, was the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.
When Churchill had arrived at the Home Office, his in-tray contained the 1908 report of the Royal Commission on the care and control of the feeble-minded. This particular Commission, established in 1904 during Arthur Balfour’s previous Conservative administration, was a response to the concerns with national efficiency triggered by Britain’s poor showing in the second Boer War (1899–1902) and horror stories concerning the number of potential military recruits who had been turned away on grounds of physical incapacity. The Commission estimated that there were almost 150,000 “feeble-minded” persons – defined as “capable of earning a living under favourable circumstances”, but unable to compete “on equal terms” or manage their affairs with “ordinary prudence” – in Britain. Although constituting only 0.46 per cent of the population, the ‘feeble-minded’ were deemed a significant social problem, both because they made up nearly one-fifth of those in workhouses and 10 per cent of all prisoners, and also because of their reputedly rampant fecundity. In response the Commission proposed sterilisation and detention in ‘labour colonies’, where the ‘feeble-minded’ could be put to work.
The Commission’s recommendations were in danger of being lost amid the turmoil of the People’s Budget and the two general elections of 1910. To counter this, Churchill wrote to prime minister Herbert Asquith in December 1910, urging legislation to stop the “multiplication of the unfit” and arguing that “the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed”. He also supplied his cabinet colleagues with copies of another pamphlet, The Feeble-Minded: A Social Danger (1909), this one by Royal Commission member AF Tredgold. In his covering note, Churchill described it as “a concise, and, I am afraid not exaggerated, statement of the serious problems to be faced”. Outside Parliament, pressure was also brought to bear by The Times, the joint efforts of the Eugenics Education Society, established in 1907, and the National Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded, led by the formidable Ellen Pinsent. Frustrated by government inaction, the two groups drafted their own Feeble-Minded Control Bill and found a supportive backbencher – the radical Tory JW Hills – to introduce it. A second backbench bill, the Mental Deficiency Bill, was introduced by another Conservative MP, Gershom Stewart.
Both were withdrawn in 1912 when the new home secretary, Reginald McKenna, finally introduced the government’s Mental Deficiency Bill. The bill proposed adding a new category of ‘feeble-minded’ to English law; those deemed so could be compulsorily detained, and segregated from society, even though they had neither committed a crime nor been certified. A new central Board of Control to co-ordinate the care of the mentally defective was to be established. This would oversee the new sexually segregated colonies. Notably absent from the bill was any provision for compulsory sterilisation.
There followed an extraordinary – if numerically one-sided – parliamentary battle. Stewart’s bill had received Conservative, Liberal and Labour backing, and there was similar cross-party support for McKenna’s bill. In July 1912, a motion to have the bill postponed fell by 242 to 19.
Leading the opposition was the maverick Liberal Josiah Wedgwood, the self-styled “last of the radicals”. The great-grandson of the founder of the pottery dynasty, Wedgwood had entered Parliament as MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1906, and was to retain his seat for 36 years. He became a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s first cabinet, and already by 1910 disaffection with the Liberals combined with marriage difficulties – “I was nearly off my head at the time”, he later recalled – helped to explain his extraordinary commitment in opposing McKenna. During a last-ditch stand over two late-night sittings in July 1913, Wedgwood tabled 120 amendments and made 150 interventions, sustaining himself, it was said, on sticks of chocolate, brought by a sympathetic Conservative from the Commons bar, and swigs of barley water. The Daily Mail praised him for setting a new record for parliamentary obstruction, but the final Commons vote was lost by a crushing 180 to 3.
It is easy to see a romantic grandeur in Wedgwood’s heroic defeat. In recent years, historians have also suggested that the absence of Churchill’s favoured policy of sterilisation from the Act, and the fact that the test of ‘feeble-mindedness’ was one of capacity – whether or not an individual can care for him or herself – rather than heredity, marked a defeat for the eugenicists. That, however, would be too positive a reading of the Act and the motives of its supporters in the House.
It is certainly true that MPs supporting the bill made humanitarian, financial and moral arguments more often than they made a eugenic case. The Royal Commission had highlighted how “costly and ineffective”, not to mention inhumane, it was for the mentally defective to be in prisons and workhouses. Many MPs envisaged the proposed colonies not as places of punishment, but as a form of institutional care, with therapeutic possibilities. Under the Act, for example, the law relating to having “unlawful and carnal knowledge” of a mentally ill woman was changed so that the onus was now on the man to prove that he had no reason to suspect that the woman was “defective”.
This moral agenda, however, often tipped into misogyny. Thus Alfred Lyttelton regaled the House with tales of women with “no control over themselves”, transmitting “loathsome diseases”, and returning to the workhouse each winter with a new illegitimate child. A move to create a new category of “sexually feeble-minded” for promiscuous women was defeated, but the Act did include the clause that being in receipt of poor relief at the time of giving birth to, or being pregnant with, an illegitimate child was sufficient to render a woman feeble-minded, and hence liable for compulsory institutionalisation.
Wedgwood’s grounds for opposing the bill were equally varied. Besides railing against “eugenic cranks”, he complained of the class and gender bias, and objected to the lack of any adequate inspection regime for the labour colonies. Alongside the Marquess of Salisbury, who led the Lords’ opposition, Wedgwood also complained about the precedent created by ceding parliamentary power to medical experts and strengthening an already over-mighty executive by leaving the determination of rules under the Act to ministers. Most fundamentally for Wedgwood, the bill was an assault on individual liberty: “a Bill for putting people who have committed no crime whatever to prison for life”.
Recognising the range of arguments, however, should not blind us to the centrality of eugenics to these parliamentary debates. It was a eugenic analysis that defined the problem of feeble-mindedness. And the segregation solution was as eugenic in its motivations as sterilisation. Indeed, many eugenicists favoured segregation because they feared sterilisation might promote sexual immorality. Others, like Churchill, preferred sterilisation on cost grounds but were, as he explained in his letter to Asquith, ready to accept segregation until such time as the public came round. Eugenics also set the tone for parliamentary debates. The bill’s extra-parliamentary opponents, including those redoubtable Catholic men of letters, Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, mocked “the feeble-minded bill” for its eugenic character. The Eugenics Society greeted its passing as a triumph.
In the broad sweep of history, the Mental Deficiency Act was one of the throes in the ‘strange death of liberal England’. Its immediate consequences, however, were far milder than the furore surrounding its passage might suggest. Local authorities were slow to build new institutions, parents proved unco-operative in having their children labelled feeble-minded, and many doctors were reluctant to certify patients, when the science behind the category was so obviously dubious. After a year, the Board of Control reported that there were only 6,612 persons in specialist institutions for the mentally defective, and the bulk of these were transfers from asylums and workhouses.
In the longer run, many were unjustly detained under the terms of the Act, a fact highlighted in the National Council for Civil Liberties’ groundbreaking 1951 report, 50,000 Outside the Law. It took another eight years before the Mental Health Act 1959 finally repealed McKenna’s legislation. By that time, few could be found who openly endorsed eugenic assumptions. When, in 1974, Keith Joseph complained – in terms that would have had Churchill reaching for his blue pencil – of the threat to the “balance of our population” from adolescent girls “in social classes four and five” reproducing too quickly, the resultant outcry killed off his hopes of the Tory leadership, and led to the right wing rallying behind Margaret Thatcher. But that is another story.
Dr David Stack is a reader in history at the University of Reading