In my last article, we saw how Malthus was the prototype for predicting the doom that was named after him.

Malthusianism led to the adjacent ideas of Neo-Malthusianism, Eugenics and Euthanasia. In this article I will encompass all of these using the term “population controllers.”1

“New Bottles for Old Wine”

These ideas are not new and they can be found in previous eras. That said, their advocates disguise them in contemporary clothing so that they fit with the mores of the era in which they reappear.

For instance, compare Marie Stopes 1919 article for the Daily Mail:2

“Are these puny-faced, gaunt, blotchy, ill-balanced, feeble, ungainly, withered children the young of an imperial race? Why has Mrs. Jones had nine children six died, one defective? Nor is it for Mrs. Jones to take the initiative. Isn’t it for the leisured, the wise, to go to her and tell her what are the facts of life, the meaning of what she is doing, and what she ought to do? … Mrs. Jones is destroying the race!”

… with Julian Huxley’s 1946 UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy:3

“Biological inequality is, of course, the bedrock fact on which all of eugenics is predicated. But it is not usually realised that the two types of inequality have quite different and indeed contrary eugenic implications. The inequality of mere difference is desirable, and the preservation of human variety should be one of the two primary aims of eugenics. But the inequality of level or standard is undesirable, and the other primary aim of eugenics should be the raising of the mean level of all desirable qualities. While there may be dispute over certain qualities, there can be none over a number of the most important, such as a healthy constitution, a high innate general intelligence, or a special aptitude such as that for mathematics or music.

“At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”

Obviously, there are differences in the style of the speakers, the publications in which their words appeared, the context and the audience. Despite these differences though there is common ground in that they are both concerned with the “dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness”.

While the form changes, the substance does not. Nor do the solutions which involve:

• increased top-down control, usually by government or supra-national bodies,

• the restriction of births, and

• the increase of deaths.

It is instructive to look at the iteration of these ideas in previous eras because the alien form makes it easier for us to see the substance.

Neo-Malthusianism

In 1924 the New Generation League was established by Neo-Malthusians who did not believe that the Malthusian League could be given a make-over. The league itself was dissolved in 1927. Since then, the movement has fragmented into its components, for instance, to the Family Planning Association for the advocates of contraception and for the enthusiasts of the Malthusian catastrophe, to repackaged Malthusianism including (and not limited to) the Club of Rome, Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb, Global Warming and Climate Change.

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Euthanasia

H.G. Wells was an early advocate of euthanasia. In 1901, he envisaged the brave men of the New Republic who would ensure “that only those who are fit to live freely in an orderly world-state should be permitted to live”.4

“The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully, and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence. To make life convenient for the breeding of such people will seem to them not the most virtuous and amiable thing in the world, as it is held to be now, but an exceedingly abominable proceeding. Procreation is an avoidable thing for sane persons of even the most furious passions, and the men of the New Republic will hold that the procreation of children who, by the circumstances of their parentage, must be diseased bodily or mentally—I do not think it will be difficult for the medical science of the coming time to define such circumstances—is absolutely the most loathsome of all conceivable sins. They will hold, I anticipate, that a certain portion of the population—the small minority, for example, afflicted with indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental disorders, with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving for intoxication—exists only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, and on the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foresee any reason to suppose that they will hesitate to kill when that sufferance is abused. And I imagine also the plea and proof that a grave criminal is also insane will be regarded by them not as a reason for mercy, but as an added reason for death. I do not see how they can think otherwise on the principles they will profess.

“The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess. They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while; like Abraham, they will have the faith to kill, and they will have no superstitions about death. They will naturally regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseased or helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than a crime. And since they will regard, as indeed all men raised above a brutish level do regard, a very long term of imprisonment as infinitely worse than death, as being, indeed, death with a living misery added to its natural terror, they will, I conceive, where the whole tenor of a man’s actions, and not simply some incidental or impulsive action, seems to prove him unfitted for free life in the world, consider him carefully, and condemn him, and remove him from being. All such killing will be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made painful or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime. If deterrent punishments are used at all in the code of the future, the deterrent will neither be death, nor mutilation of the body, nor mutilation of the life by imprisonment, nor any horrible things like that, but good scientifically caused pain, that will leave nothing but a memory. Yet even the memory of overwhelming pain is a sort of mutilation of the soul. The idea that only those who are fit to live freely in an orderly world-state should be permitted to live, is entirely against the use of deterrent punishments at all. Against outrageous conduct to children or women, perhaps, or for very cowardly or brutal assaults of any sort, the men of the future may consider pain a salutary remedy, at least during the ages of transition while the brute is still at large. But since most acts of this sort done under conditions that neither torture nor exasperate, point to an essential vileness in the perpetrator, I am inclined to think that even in these cases the men of the coming time will be far less disposed to torture than to kill. They will have another aspect to consider. The conscious infliction of pain for the sake of the pain is against the better nature of man, and it is unsafe and demoralizing for any one to undertake this duty. To kill under the seemly conditions science will afford is a far less offensive thing. The rulers of the future will grudge making good people into jailers, warders, punishment-dealers, nurses, and attendants on the bad. People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others are better out of it. That is a current sentiment even to-day, but the men of the New Republic will have the courage of their opinions.” [Emphasis added]

Wells’ fellow Fabian G.B Shaw also didn’t want to punish anybody:

“I object to all punishment whatsoever. I don’t want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit. But it must be evident to all of you, you must all know half a dozen people at least, who are no use in this world; who are more trouble than they are worth. And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioners and say every five years or every seven years, just put them there, and say, sir or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence; if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”

The Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society was founded by Dr Charles Killick-Millard and others in 1935.5 In the aftermath of World War II, it became the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. This was changed to EXIT in the 1970s. From the 1980s it was the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, then in 2006 it became Dignity in Dying.

The form changes while the substance persists. In our times, who would not advocate dignity in dying?

Of course, the devil is in the details, but there are indications from Canada’s MAID program that euthanasia is being offered as an alternative to dignity in living. As government budgets tighten, time will tell whether spending money to save lives will morph into spending lives to save money.6

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Eugenics

The Eugenics Education Society was founded by Sybil Gotto in 1907. In 1926 it changed its name to the Eugenics Society. World War II gave the movement a PR problem and membership of the Society began to fall. The solution, adopted in February 1960, was to: “pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful with the US Eugenics Society.” You might call me a nit-picker, but “crypto” comes from the Greek for “secret” not “less obvious”.7

In 1964 the society it held a symposium on Biological Aspects of Social Problems. Such was its success, that it was followed symposia on Genetic and Environmental Factors in Human Ability (1965), Social and Genetic Influences on Life and Death (1966), and Genetic and Environmental Influences on Behaviour (1967). At the end of 1968, the society ceased publication of the Eugenics Review and replaced it with the Journal of Biosocial Science.

The recommendation to change the name of the society to something “less evocative” was not adopted until 1989 when it became the Galton Institute. In 2021 it changed its name to the even-less-evocative Adelphi Genetics Forum.

Eugenics in the early Twentieth Century is particularly useful because eugenicists did not mince their words. In an era in which the poor did not have the vote, the social caste system was more rigid, and media and communication was less far-reaching, they didn’t need to. They frequently displayed their materialism and their disdain for humanity as a badge of honour.

In our times, the advocates of eugenics are much more guarded, not least because of the negative consequences of advocating eugenic ideas. We saw this following the publication of Toby Young’s The Fall of Meritocracy in The Quadrant in 2015 and in the resignation of Andrew Sabisky in 2020.8

Time and again the old ideas are repackaged and everything old becomes new. Tired, old, pessimistic ideas that didn’t work last time appear to be new and urgent. A new generation of dupes is found to earnestly parrot: “We. Have. To. Act. Now!”

And, as we will see in Part 2, the actions they advocate are amongst the worst ideas in history.

“Malthusianism” isn’t a word that fills people with dread, nor one that makes for compelling headlines. Nonetheless, it is a concept that has had, and continues to have, a disastrous impact.

To the extent that people are aware of it, Malthusianism asserts that the materials and resources in the world are limited while the number of humans is potentially unlimited. From this it follows that unless comprehensive action is taken, humanity is doomed to undergo the Malthusian catastrophe of war, pestilence and famine.

The idea appeals to many people because it makes intuitive sense. The crush on their train, held up in traffic jams or (less frequently) a visit to a casualty ward of an NHS hospital - all these are reminders that they live in an overcrowded world. As a result, it doesn’t draw much attention, let alone warrant a challenge. Malthusians - though they are not badged as such - are invariably presented by the media as thoughtful, kindly visionaries striving to save humanity from itself and even “saving the planet.”

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How my interest started

In 1922 Dr Halliday Sutherland’s book Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians was published.1 It drew a writ for libel from Marie Stopes. Their legal battle continued for two-and-a-half years. He won in the High Court in March 1923, she won in the Court of Appeal in July of the same year, and he won in the House of Lords in November 1924.

Dr Sutherland was my grandfather, so naturally I sought information about the case. The most abundant sources were the many biographies of Stopes which fed the accepted history, the gist of which is:

• Stopes opened the Mothers’ Clinic, Britain’s first family planning clinic, in March 1921 to give women better access to birth control

• Sutherland, a convert to Roman Catholicism, accused her of “exposing the poor to experiment”

• Stopes was compelled to defend herself from the accusation that she was performing experiments on poor people.

It is an archetypal story of a feminist campaigner who tries to help her poorer sisters and is viciously attacked by Roman Catholic patriarchs. When I investigated further though, I found that the accepted history was a patchwork of true facts that presented a lie. I call this the “Catholics against Contraceptives” schema.2

Using both Stopes’ and Sutherland’s personal papers, court documents and the transcript of the trial, I added the true facts that had been omitted, minimised or obfuscated in the biographies of Stopes. These included:

• Stopes’ membership of the Malthusian League (motto: Non Quantitas Sed Qualitas) and the Eugenics Education Society. Her 1918 book Married Love was facilitated by the League’s Secretary, Binnie Dunlop, who arranged the financing of its publication.

• Stopes’ goal was “to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood” [emphasis added] through the provision of contraceptives to poor and working-class women. The motto of the Mothers’ Clinic “Babies in the right place” aimed at a “reduction of the birth rate at the wrong end of the social scale and increase of the birth rate at the right end of the social scale.”3

• Sutherland’s role in the forefront in the fight against tuberculosis, a disease of poverty that killed 70,000 and disabled 150,000 Britons each year. Mainstream eugenicists regarded Consumption (tuberculosis of the lungs) as a racial disease, primarily caused by a person’s genetic inheritance. In contrast, Sutherland argued that Consumption was primarily an infectious condition. Mainstream eugenicists thought that the efforts of doctors such as Dr Sutherland to prevent and cure tuberculosis was dysgenic because it promoted the survival and propagation of the so-called “unfit”.

• Sir James Barr, a prominent supporter of Stopes, expressed the mainstream eugenic view when he said that Consumption formed: “a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit” and that, for this reason, the disappearance of tuberculosis would be “nothing short of a national calamity.”4

• Stopes’ campaigned for an Act of Parliament to compulsorily sterilise those she referred to as “parasites” whose children were “the spawn of drunkards”.

It becomes apparent that the issues at play in the case were far wider than the simplistic “Catholics against Contraceptives” schema. By portraying Dr Sutherland as a zealous Catholic, the biographers of Stopes were able to omit, downplay of obfuscate how central Neo-Malthusian and eugenic ideas were to her work.

A side effect was that Sutherland’s brave public opposition to these then-fashionable movements was removed from the historical record. It was this, and the discovery of grotesque lies about him, that led me to try to correct the historical record. I set up the hallidaysutherland.com website and writing Exterminating Poverty (published in 2020).

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Now back to the point of this article: What was it that Sutherland found so offensive?

Thomas Robert Malthus

Sutherland set out his comprehensive refutation of Malthusianism in Birth Control.

The Rev. Thomas Malthus, M.A., in 1798 published his Essay on the Principle of Population. His pamphlet was an answer to Condorcet and Godwin, who held that vice and poverty were the result of human institutions and could be remedied by an even distribution of property. Malthus, on the other hand, believed that population increased more rapidly than the means of subsistence, and consequently that vice and poverty were always due to overpopulation and not to any particular form of society or of government. He stated that owing to the relatively slow rate at which the food supply of countries was increased, a high birth-rate inevitably led to all the evils of poverty, war, and high death-rates. In an infamous passage he wrote that there was no vacant place for the superfluous child at Nature’s mighty feast ; that Nature told the child to be gone ; and that she quickly executed her own order. This passage was modified in the second, and deleted from the third edition of the Essay. In later editions he maintained that vice and misery had checked population, that the progress of society might have diminished rather than increased the “evils resulting from the principle of population,” and that by “moral restraint “overpopulation could be prevented.

…

In order to avoid the evils of overpopulation, Malthus advised people not to marry, or, if they did, to marry late in life and to limit the number of their children by the exercise of self-restraint. He reprobated all artificial and unnatural methods of birth control as immoral, and as removing the necessary stimulus to industry; but he failed to grasp the whole truth that an increase of population is necessary as a stimulus not only to industry, but also as essential to man’s moral and intellectual progress.

The Neo-Malthusians

The Malthusian League accept the theory of their revered teacher, but, curiously enough, they reject his advice “as being impracticable and productive of the greatest possible evils to health and morality.” On the contrary, they advise universal early marriage, combined with artificial birth control. Although their policy is thus in flat contradiction to the policy of Malthus, there are two things common to both. Each is based on the same fallacy, and the aim of both is wide of the mark. Indeed, the Neo-Malthusian, like Malthus, has “a mist of speculation over his facts, and a vapour of fact over his ideas.” Moreover, as will be shown here, the path of the Malthusian League, although at first glance an easy way out of many human difficulties, is in reality the broad road along which a man or a nation travels to destruction ; and as guides the Neo-Malthusians are utterly unsafe, since they argue from (a) false premises to (b) false deductions.

In the remaining nine chapters, Sutherland delivered a root and branch rejection of Malthus’ doctrine.

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In particular, he attacked the suggestion that artificial birth control was the answer, calling it:

A Quack Remedy for Poverty

Artificial birth control is one of the many quack remedies advertised for the cure of poverty, and G. K. Chesterton has given the final answer to the Malthusian assertion that some form of birth control is essential because houses are scarce:

“Consider that simple sentence, and you will see what is the matter with the modern mind. I do not mean the growth of immorality; I mean the genesis of gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two more hats; to find out whose business it is to make hats, and induce him to make hats; to agitate against an absurd delay in delivering hats; to punish anybody who has promised hats and failed to provide hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads are rather more important than hats is dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics. The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would prefer the lives of boys to the mathematical arrangement of hats, — all these things are alike to be ignored. The logic of enlightenment is merciless; and we duly summon the headsman to disguise the deficiencies of the hatter. For it makes very little difference to the logic of the thing, that we are talking of houses and not of hats .... The fundamental fallacy remains the same; that we are beginning at the wrong end, because we have never troubled to consider at what end to begin.”

The creation of a Servile State

The passage that was the subject of the libel dispute with Stopes has been published many times. The paragraph that followed has not. In it, Sutherland suggested that “the policy of birth control opens the way to an extension of the Servile State”:5

… the policy of birth control opens the way to an extension of the Servile State, because women as well as men could then be placed under conditions of economic slavery. Hitherto, the rule has been that during child-bearing age a woman must be supported by her husband, and the general feeling of the community has been opposed to any conditions likely to force married women on to the industrial market. In her own home a woman works hard, but she is working for the benefit of her family and not directly for the benefit of a stranger. If, instead of bearing children, women practise birth control, and if children are to be denied to the poor as a privilege of the rich, then it would be very easy to exploit the women of the poorer classes. If women have no young children why should they be exempt from the economic pressure that is applied to men? And indeed, where birth control is practised women tend more and more to supplant men, especially in ill-paid grades of work. One of the birth controllers has suggested that young couples, who otherwise could not afford to marry, should marry but have no children, and thus continue to work at their respective employments during the day. As the girl would have little time for cooking and other domestic duties, this immoralist is practically subverting the very idea of a home! The English poor have already lost even the meaning of the word “property,” and if the birth controllers had their way the meaning of the word “home” would soon follow. The aim of birth control is generally masked by falsehood, but the urging of this policy on the poor points unmistakably to the Servile State. [emphasis added]

Sutherland particularly loathed Malthusianism because it created a natural law.

The Poverty of the Masses is a Natural Law

Both the supporters and the opponents of Malthus are often mistaken in considering his greatest achievement to be a policy of birth control. Malthus did a greater and a more evil thing. He forged a law of nature, namely, that there is always a limited and insufficient supply of the necessities of life in the world. From this false law he argued that, as population increases too rapidly, the newcomers cannot hope to find a sufficiency of good things; that the poverty of the masses is not due to conditions created by man, but to a natural law; and that consequently this law cannot be altered by any change in political institutions. This new doctrine was eagerly adopted by the rich, who were thus enabled to argue that Nature intended that the masses should find no room at her feast; and that therefore our system of industrial capitalism was in harmony with the Will of God. Most comforting dogma! Most excellent anodyne for conscience against acceptance of those rights of man that, being ignored, found terrible expression in the French Revolution! Without discussion, without investigation, and without proof, our professors, politicians, leader-writers, and even our well-meaning socialists, have accepted as true the bare falsehood that there is always an insufficient supply of the necessities of life; and to-day this heresy permeates all our practical politics. In giving this forged law of nature to the rich, Malthus robbed the poor of hope. Such was his crime against humanity. In the words of Thorold Rogers, Malthusianism was part and parcel of “a conspiracy, conceived by the law and carried out by parties interested in its success, to cheat the English workman of his wages, to tie him to the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into immediate poverty.” When Malthusians enter a slum for the purpose of preaching birth control, it is right that the people should be told what is written on the passports of these strangers. [emphasis added]

Real world consequences

On page 70 of Birth Control, Dr Sutherland wrote that: “Moral catastrophes inevitably lead to physical catastrophes,” in other words, morality has real-world consequences:6

When Malthusians cite the Irish famines as proof of over-population, the falsity of their argument is revealed. In 1727 the population of Ireland was about two millions, the birth-rate about 50 per thousand, and the people were in abject misery. It was then that Swift, master of satire, proposed as a remedy for the over-population of Ireland, that the English people should cultivate a taste for roasted Irish babies, and thus bring delicacies to England and prosperity to Ireland. In 1838, when the population of Ireland was about eight millions, McCulloch [quoted by Henry George, Progress and Poverty, p 95] stated that the poverty of the Irish people was due to density of population, and that the population was more than double that which the country “with its existing means of production” could support in comfort. A blacker economic lie was never told. It was neither the imprudence nor the high birth-rate of the Irish people that made them choose the potato as their staple food, but the certain knowledge that if they produced anything else, it would be taken from them to pay the rackrents of absentee landlords, themselves in the hands of London Jews. Even during her famine, Ireland was a food-exporting country, and “the existing means of production” were capable of supporting a larger population than the country then contained. “Even during the famine, grain and meat and butter and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving, and past trenches into which the dead were piled.” [Henry George. Progress and Poverty, p. 94]

The End of European Civilisation

Sutherland railed against the destructiveness of Malthusianism in the conclusion to Birth Control:

Our declining birth-rate is a fact of the utmost gravity, and a more serious position has never confronted the British people. Here in the midst of a great nation, at the end of a victorious war, the law of decline is working, and by that law the greatest empires in the world have perished. In comparison with that single fact all other dangers, be they war, of politics, or of disease, are of little moment. Attempts have already been made to avert the consequences by partial endowment of motherhood and by saving infant life. Physiologists are now seeking the endocrinous glands and the vitamins for a substance to assist procreation. ‘Where are my children?’ was the question shouted yesterday from the cinemas. ‘Let us have children, children at any price,’ will be the cry of tomorrow.

And all these thoughts were once in the mind of Augustus, Emperor of the world from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from Mount Atlas to the Danube and the Rhine. The Catholic Church has never taught that ‘an avalanche of children’ should be brought into the world regardless of consequences. God is not mocked; as men sow, so shall they reap, and against a law of nature both the transient amelioration wrought by philanthropists and the subtle expediences of scientific politicians are alike futile. If our civilisation is to survive we must abandon those ideals that lead to decline. There is only one civilisation immune from decay, and that civilisation endures on the practical eugenics once taught by a united Christendom and now expounded almost solely by the Catholic Church.”

In 1928 Dr Sutherland predicted:

It may have seemed fanciful when he made it, but many of us will recognise the world in which we live.7

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The “accepted” history of the legal battle between Marie Stopes and Dr Halliday Sutherland in the early 1920s is a simple narrative: a progressive feminist gives contraceptives to her poorer sisters and is attacked by a Catholic reactionary who wanted to impose his church’s dogma on Protestant Britain.

The academics and institutions who promulgate this version omit or downplay the ideology that was at the heart of that dispute: eugenics. Without this component the Stopes v Sutherland legal battle cannot be properly understood, because eugenics was fundamental to her work in birth control and to his criticism of her work.

The uncomfortable legacy of eugenics

In the second half of the Twentieth Century, Stopes’ biographers seem to have become increasingly uncomfortable about her eugenic enthusiasms, and they cope with it in different ways. One biography admitted that Stopes’ eugenic views were “uncomfortably” close to those of the Nazis (an odd way to put it, given Stopes would have been comfortable with her own views). Another said that Stopes was a eugenicist, but she wasn’t a very good one. Yet another labels her a “maverick” eugenicist (which may distances her from the Eugenics Education Society, but not from her eugenic beliefs). Yet others focus on her work in birth control and eugenics, if mentioned at all, is an incidental afterthought.

The primary evidence for Stopes’ eugenic beliefs are her own words and actions. These include: her court testimony under oath, her decades of service as President of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, the Society’s manifesto, the brand names of her contraceptives, her advocacy for laws to sterelise the unfit and her descriptions of the poor as “wastrels”, “parasites” and “the spawn of drunkards”. Then there’s the logo of her Mothers’ Clinic.

Yet when challenged with these primary sources, institutions respond not by correcting the record, but by invoking a circular defense: “This is a recognized part of academic debate.”

BBC misinformation

This was the case when I complained to the BBC about an interview on The Emma Barnett Show on 17 November 2020 in which Dr Lesley Hall, a recognised expert on Marie Stopes, discussed Stopes with Emma Barnett. Barnett’s final question to Hall was: “Do we know why she [i.e. Stopes] was so committed to offering as she puts it reproductive choices, was it anything to do with eugenics?” Hall’s answer was:

“Very little… it was basically about enabling women to control their health and space out… to have healthy babies… she was very much about healthier babies and she saw that basically about enabling women to, you know, control their own motherhood and have space babies out and to be able to be better mothers.”

I complained because it is a demonstrably false statement. After several iterations of the complaints process, during which I provided large amount of primary evidence, the BBC’s Complaints Director concluded the matter as follows:

“Disagreement between experts and different interpretation of evidence is, I think it is reasonable to say, a recognised part of academic and historic debate.”

Well, yes it is, but let’s be very clear as to who the experts were in this case: on the one hand you have Dr Lesley Hall and on the other you have the Dr Marie Stopes, represented by her words, actions and artefacts. Yet according to the BBC, the moderator in this debate, Stopes came second!

And here’s the trap: How do you correct history when the gatekeepers treat primary sources as merely one opinion in a debate over the sanitised version that they prefer?

In 2025, this trap has a new mechanism: artificial intelligence systems that perpetuate institutional falsehoods at scale.

The AI Amplification Problem

I recently asked Claude (Anthropic’s AI), Chat GPT, Grok and Meta AI to tell me about the Stopes v Sutherland trial, and they dutifully retrieved results from “authoritative” sources including the BBC, academic institutions and mainstream historical accounts. These sources presented the sanitized narrative: Stopes as birth control pioneer and Sutherland as Catholic opponent. Eugenics, if mentioned at all, was a minor afterthought.

As you may know, AI is trained to defer to institutional authority and “expert” sources. It synthesises what it learns into responses that perpetuate the false history. How can AI obtain the correct information when it is doing exactly what it’s designed to do: privileging “reliable” sources like the BBC?

Now at this point, a sensible person might suggest that I contact the “reliable” source, politely inform them that their information is not correct, provide citations and references so they can check the accuracy of your assertions.

Er, no.

You see, the complaint above was the second time I complained to the BBC about its misinformation about Stopes. The first was in 2014, I complained about the BBC’s history website which perpetuates the “Catholics against contraceptives” trope and fails to mention eugenics. It was during that complaints process that the BBC abruptly “archived” the page. In this case, “archive” has a meaning peculiar to the BBC in that they left the article online and will not update it. And because it is the BBC’s page, it ranks highly in searches of Marie Stopes, and it continues to misinform all who read it today.

But what happens when the reliable sources are reliably wrong?

The Recursive Reinforcement Loop

Here’s the new, AI-amplified version of the problem:

1. Dominant institutions (BBC, universities) publish sanitised histories

2. Search algorithms prioritise these “authoritative” sources

3. AI systems train on and defer to these high-authority sources

4. Users query AI about historical topics, receiving the institutional narrative

5. New content creators use AI for research, perpetuating the sanitised version

6. This AI-generated content gets indexed, creating more “sources” for the false narrative

7. Corrections are dismissed as “one perspective” in “academic debate”

8. The loop accelerates, with each iteration making the false history more entrenched

The BBC can “archive” the problematic article—keeping it online (and indexed) while refusing to correct it. AI systems continue to reference it. The false history becomes computationally reinforced.

And if you challenge it, you are assumed to be wrong not based on your evidence, but because everyone else has a different view.

When Institutions Can’t Admit Error

The complaint revealed that the BBC preferred to defend an inaccurate broadcast over incorporating documented evidence. Why?

Possible reasons:

• Admitting error would undermine Hall’s credibility as their “expert”

• Correcting the narrative would require revisiting decades of similar coverage

• The simplified “feminist heroine vs. Catholic patriarchy” narrative serves contemporary political preferences

• Institutional ego prevents acknowledging a corrector from outside the academy might be right

But now add the AI dimension: Once false information is established in “authoritative” sources, it becomes exponentially harder to correct because every AI system trained on those sources will propagate the error.

The BBC’s refusal to correct isn’t just institutional stubbornness—it’s now a permanent corruption of the information ecosystem.

The Orwellian Resolution

The BBC’s Complaints Director effectively ruled that Stopes herself lost the debate about her own motivations. When an institution can dismiss a historical figure’s sworn testimony as merely “one interpretation,” we’ve entered dangerous epistemological territory.

Now consider the AI layer: Systems designed to synthesize “reliable information” are computationally amplifying this Orwellian outcome. Marie Stopes’ explicit statements about her eugenic motivations are being algorithmically overridden by a 2020 BBC interview with an academic who claims those motivations were minimal.

Primary sources lose to secondary opinions, at scale.

The Contemporary Stakes

Look, I get that the controversies over the legal battle between Stopes and Sutherland may not keep you awake at night, but this isn’t pedantic historical nitpicking, and it’s not just about the 1920s. My complaints to the BBC reveals something urgent about our information ecosystem:

When institutions can dismiss primary sources as “opinion” and AI systems amplify institutional sources as “authoritative,” we’ve created a machine for perpetuating falsehoods.

Their sanitised history:

• Disrespects the victims of British eugenics

• Prevents understanding of how eugenic ideology operated

• Obscures legitimate objections (like Sutherland’s) to dangerous pseudoscience

And now AI systems will entrench these institutional errors, making historical truth harder to establish.

The Unanswered Question

The BBC’s response exposes not just one error, but a system that cannot self-correct even when confronted with irrefutable evidence—and that system is now teaching machines what to believe.

The question becomes: If institutions won’t correct demonstrable falsehoods when presented with primary sources, and AI systems amplify those institutional falsehoods as authoritative truth, what mechanism remains for historical accuracy in the age of artificial intelligence?

I set up hallidaysutherland.com to correct the false information about Dr Halliday Sutherland and to recognise him as an early outspoken critic of eugenics. In the face of academic and institutional intransigence, I wrote Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it to correct the record. You can watch a trailer of the book on YouTube (2 mins 30 secs).

Meanwhile the Catch-22 is now running on servers, at scale, in real-time.

Dr Halliday Sutherland (my grandfather) opposed the proliferation of contraceptives at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. In his 1922 book “Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians”, he wrote about Britain’s first family planning clinic—opened by Dr Marie Stopes and her husband Humphrey Roe in March 1921—in which he implied that she was “Exposing the Poor to Experiment”. Stopes sued him for libel and he was arraigned in the High Court in 1923.

When I began to look into his motivation, an answer was readily available in the biographies of Stopes, namely, that Sutherland was a Roman Catholic convert, that Catholics don’t like contraceptives, and that converts are more zealous than cradle-Catholics. After a lot of research, I have debunked this false “Catholics against contraceptives” narrative. What some historians simplistically portrayed as a battle about contraceptives involved more fundamental issues which are set out in the article that follows.

At this point, if you are still reading, you might be asking “Why should I care? How does any of this matter to me given everything that is going on?”

My short answer is that many current events are ‘noise’ that distract us from reading the ‘signal’. The signal becomes evident from the study of history, because many of the agenda creating or shaping current events are not new. The discernible patterns of history distinguish the signal from the noise.

My longer answer is that is does matter, because schemas and stories underlie our perception and influence how we see the world. These are the things that “everyone knows,” yet don’t know where or when they learned them (James Delingpole has written about this phenomenon and the stories include: the apple that fell on Newton’s head that led him to ‘discover’ gravity, Edward Jenner’s observation that milkmaids were immune to smallpox, that Marie Antoinette said “let them eat cake”, and so on). If these schemas are positive, we are likely to accept more of the same (and the opposite if negative). For this reason it is vital that the schemas are correct and based on fact, lest we perceive things as ‘good’ when we should perceive them as ‘bad’.

Whether you know her name, the schema concerning contraceptives is that Dr Marie Stopes liberated British women by giving them reproductive choice. In the article below, I will show that not only is this schema false, but that the true story reveals the anti-human intent of the population controllers.

From time to time, you read about the falling birth rate in the media. One such article was “Remarkable decline in fertility rates” by James Gallagher, Health and Science correspondent of the BBC’s website on 9^th November 2018[1]. It began:

“There has been a remarkable global decline in the number of children women are having, say researchers. Their report found fertility rate falls meant nearly half of countries were now facing a ‘baby bust’ - meaning there are insufficient children to maintain their population size. The researchers said the findings were a ‘huge surprise’. And there would be profound consequences for societies with ‘more grandparents than grandchildren’.”

Were Dr Halliday Sutherland (1882 — 1960) alive today, he would likely have scoffed at the statement that the findings were a “huge surprise”. In the British context, he had predicted this outcome in the conclusion to his 1922 book “Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians”:

“Our declining birth-rate is a fact of the utmost gravity, and a more serious position has never confronted the British people. Here in the midst of a great nation, at the end of a victorious war, the law of decline is working, and by that law the greatest empires in the world have perished. In comparison with that single fact all other dangers, be they war, of politics, or of disease, are of little moment… ‘Let us have children, children at any price,’ will be the cry of tomorrow.”[2]

It wasn’t a “one-off”. A newspaper reported a 1924 speech in which he warned that the:

“…campaign in favour of birth control was a national danger. They could not point to any nation in the whole history of the world who adopted this vice and did not perish. The advocates of artificial birth control were clever people, well organised, well financed, and by every art – pictured, screened, staged and spoken – they were deliberately making an appeal to the lowest qualities in a nation weakened by war…The wildest Communist on the Clyde had done less to sow the seeds of revolution than had these Hedonists.”[3]

In 1929, he was quoted as saying:

“The cataclysm which may end the eighth known epoch in civilisation may be a lack of European children.”[4]

And in 1944, he wrote:

“The trend of the birth-rate in Britain is towards national eclipse-in the form of a dwindling population in which, for the first time in our history, old men and old women will outnumber boys and girls. Photos of a bevy of grandchildren around an aged couple are likely to be replaced by pictures of an only child surrounded by its thirty surviving progenitors, including sixteen great-great-grandparents aged 80 and upwards. All will be poorer. Young adults will have to support a larger number of old people. The infirm and old will have fewer young workers to help them. And these are only a few of the dangers in the inverted social pyramid that we have been building in Britain and in the Dominions overseas.”[5]

Sutherland’s outspoken opposition to the population controllers — primarily Malthusians and the Eugenicists — was a major part of his eventful life. Born in 1882, by 1911 he was known as an authority on Consumption (tuberculosis of the lungs).[6] As Medical Officer of the “St Marylebone Dispensary for the Prevention of Consumption”, he gave public talks on the prevention and cure of the disease, edited and contributed to a book by international experts,[7] produced Britain’s first public-health cinema film,[8] and established an “Open-Air” school for consumptive children in a bandstand of Regent’s Park.[9]

In 1923 he was the defendant in the Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial (of which more later). In 1933 his autobiographical book “Arches of the Years” made the Publishers’ Weekly list.[10] G.K. Chesterton described him as:

“A born writer, especially a born story-teller. Dr. Sutherland, who is distinguished in medicine, is an amateur in the sense that he only writes when he has nothing better to do. But when he does, it could hardly be done better.”[11]

He met some of the heads of state of his era, including Pope Pius XI in 1931,[12] Eamon de Valera in 1935 and 1955, [13] and General Franco in 1946[14]. A talk during his 1939-40 speaking tour of Australia was attended by a former prime minister[15] and he made 15-minute broadcast on the national radio network, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.[16]

Sutherland is all but forgotten today and, if he is remembered at all, it is as the defendant in the Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial of 1923. This singular event has had more impact on how he is perceived today than any other in his eventful life.

The case arose when Dr Marie Stopes, a famous paleobotanist and celebrity author of “Married Love” (1918), sued him for libel. Stopes and her husband, Humphrey Roe, had opened the Mothers’ Clinic—the first birth control clinic in the British Empire—in Holloway, London in May 1921.[17] Sutherland wrote about the clinic in “Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians” in 1922:

“Exposing the Poor to Experiment.”

“In the midst of a London slum a woman, who is a doctor of German philosophy (Munich), has opened a Birth Control Clinic, where working women are instructed in a method of contraception described by Professor McIlroy as ‘The most harmful method of which I have had experience’. When we remember that millions are being spent by the Ministry of Health and by Local Authorities – on pure milk for necessitous expectant and nursing mothers, on Maternity Clinics to guard the health of mothers before and after childbirth, for the provision of skilled midwives, and on Infant Welfare Centres – it is truly amazing that this monstrous campaign of birth control should be tolerated by the Home Secretary. Charles Bradlaugh was condemned to jail for a less serious crime.”[18]

Stopes challenged him to debate the issue and, when he did not reply, she served a writ for libel. The case opened in the High Court on February 21, 1923 and, during the five days of the trial, the greatest physicians of the era testified for both sides. When the special jury found that the defamatory words were “true in substance and in fact” Sutherland won. Stopes did not give up there and, encouraged by the jury’s decision that the statements were not fair comment and that they had awarded her damages of £100, she appealed. The decision was reversed in the Court of Appeal in July 1923. Sutherland then appealed to the House of Lords (at the time Britain’s highest court) and he won conclusively in 1924.[19]

Challenging Stopes was no easy feat. She was supported by the ‘big names’ of that era such as Bertrand Russell, J.M. Keynes, G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells as well as many others who were as eminent but are less well-known today. When Sutherland received the writ, he did not have the money to fight the case and contemplated defending himself in court. With his wife, (my grandmother Muriel) and their young family (my aunt Jane, and uncles John and Peter), he faced financial ruin until a journalist contacted the Archdiocese of Westminster and began the difficult and protracted process of raising money to fight the case.

By contrast, the star of Dr Marie Stopes burned bright during her lifetime and, since her death in 1958, it rose high in the heavens. She has been the subject of at least five biographies,[20] two plays,[21] one operetta and one dramatised documentary.[22] She was nominated as “Woman of the Millennium” by readers of Britain’s Guardian newspaper[23] and one of the “Greatest Britons” by viewers of the BBC.[24] In 2008 she was commemorated for “Family Planning” on postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail.[25]

The comments that accompanied her nomination for “Woman of the Millenium” illustrate why she was celebrated. According to one, she was “The great liberator of women’s excessive childbearing,” while another said: “I can think of no other woman who has done so much towards freeing women from their purely biological role. Women today have her to be grateful for.”[26]

In “Marie Stopes is one of the Great Britons”, the Guardian gushed:

“On Sunday October 20, the BBC announced its viewers’ “Greatest Britons” … Find out why Dr Marie Stopes deserves to be called a Great Briton. Women, can you imagine your body being the property of your husband? Being permanently pregnant through ignorance? Then thank Dr Marie Stopes. The lifestyle and personal fulfilment enjoyed by British women today owes more than many realise to this remarkable character.”[27]

After “Birth Control” was published, Stopes wrote a review for Birth Control News had depicted him as a puppet of the Catholic Church, saying that his book would:

“… impose only on those who are more ignorant than he is. It is nicely calculated to encourage the biased in their prejudices, for now, when speaking about birth control, they can say” ‘A doctor says so!’ They will probably forget that he is a Roman Catholic doctor. The omissions from the book are quite as remarkable as its lies.”[28]

The biographers and hagiographers of Stopes followed her lead and it has led to the creation of a “Catholics against contraceptives” schema in the collective unconscious of Britons. This excerpt from an online biography from B.B.C. History is a good example of the received/accepted history:

“In 1921, Stopes opened a family planning clinic in Holloway, north London, the first in the country. It offered a free service to married women and also gathered data about contraception. In 1925, the clinic moved to central London and others opened across the country. By 1930, other family planning organisations had been set up and they joined forces with Stopes to form the National Birth Control Council (later the Family Planning Association).

“The Catholic church was Stopes’s fiercest critic. In 1923, Stopes sued Catholic doctor Halliday Sutherland for libel. She lost, won at appeal and then lost again in the House of Lords, but the case generated huge publicity for Stopes’s views.

“Stopes continued to campaign for women to have better access to birth control…”[29]

In other words, Sutherland was motivated by Catholic dogma and … that’s it! No other causes are mentioned.

The schema provokes an indignant response from those who disagree with the Church’s teaching on contraception, some of whom are disaffected Catholics. A measure of the effectiveness of the schema is that this author, a grandson of Dr Sutherland and named after him, believed it for many years! Given that no one, family or otherwise, told him the version you are about to read, it is likely that they believed it as well.

The “Catholics against contraceptives” schema is essentially false. The evidence that debunks it include primary and secondary sources including: the transcript of the trial, biographies of Stopes and autobiographies of Sutherland, papers of Stopes and Sutherland and papers in the archive at the Archdiocese of Westminster. The narrow “Catholics against contraceptives” schema ignores the overarching issue: population control as manifested in Malthusianism and British class-based eugenics. Yes, the case included a dispute about contraceptives, but these were merely one of the tools by which wider Malthusian and eugenic aims would be achieved.

Stopes’ clinic was a eugenic project: she fitted her “ProRace” brand cervical caps to the poor women who attended the clinic while campaigning for the compulsory sterilisation of those who did not.

Sutherland opposed contraceptives on grounds that were not religious per se and thought that making them generally available would (1) lead to national decline and (2) would lead to a British slave state in which the poor were not allowed to have children and had no societal role other than as workers. While Sutherland was a Catholic and was supported by the Catholic Church, his opposition to eugenics had arisen when eugenic thought began to hinder his work as a tuberculosis specialist and he was on record as opposing eugenics long before he became a Roman Catholic.

Given that these claims radically alter the narrative, I have placed each claim as a subheading and provide my evidence that this was the case below.

“…the overarching issue: population control as manifested in Malthusianism and British class-based eugenics. Yes, the case included a dispute about contraceptives, but these were merely one of the tools by which wider Malthusian and eugenic aims would be achieved.”

The growth, quality and size rate of the population in Britain was the source of much attention and, for some, a cause for concern at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

In the 100 years to 1901, the population had increased from approximately 11 million to 37 million people[30] which alarmed the Malthusians who believed that over-population would lead to war, famine and disease.[31]

From a recorded high of 36.3 births per 1,000 in 1876 the birth rate had steadily dropped and by 1901 had fallen to 28.5, a decline of more than 21 percent.[32] This caused concern to those who wondered who would populate the British Empire, Sutherland among them.

Eugenicists noticed that the falling birth rate was over-represented in the wealthier classes and under-represented among the poorer classes. This “differential birth rate” led Karl Pearson, Galton’s protégé to write “one half of each succeeding generation was produced by no more than a quarter of its married predecessor, and that the prolific quarter was disproportionately located among the dregs of society.”[33] Their concerns that the quality of British “racial stocks” were deteriorating were confirmed by the rejection rate of recruits to the army in the Boer and First World wars.

Stopes was a member of the Malthusian League[34] and the Eugenics Education Society (E.E.S.)[35] She left the E.E.S. in 1921 because she was “annoyed that the Society refused to place birth control prominently on its platform” and set up the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress (C.B.C.).[36]

Stopes’ clinic was a eugenic project: she fitted her “ProRace” brand cervical caps to the poor women who attended the clinic while campaigning for the compulsory sterilisation of those who did not.

Stopes testified under oath on the second day of the Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial that:

“The object of the Society is to counteract the steady evil which has been growing for a good many years of the reduction of the birth rate just on the part of the thrifty, wise, well-contented, and generally sound members of our community, and the reckless breeding from the C.3 end, and the semi-feebleminded, the careless, who are proportionately increasing in our community because of the slowing of the birth rate at the other end of the social scale. Statistics show that every year the birth rate from the worst end of our community is increasing in proportion to the birth rate at the better end, and it was in order to try to right that grave social danger that I embarked upon this work.”[37]

“The Tenets of the C.B.C.” specified those who should be prevented from reproduction:

“9. AS REGARDS THE POPULATION AT PRESENT. We say that there are unfortunately many men and women who should be prevented from procreating children at all, because of their individual ill-health, or the diseased and degenerate nature of the offspring that they may be expected to produce. These considerations would not apply to a better and healthier world.

“10.—There are many women unfortunately so constructed—suffering from weakness of certain organs—that they would risk death if they were to attempt to bear children, and who, therefore, should not bear them.

“11.—There are unfortunately many couples so ill-provided with this world’s goods, or with means to acquire them, that they cannot support further children, and therefore should not bear them. Women, owing their own or their husband’s incapacity to be self-supporting, may be permanently or temporarily in such a position owing to disaster or unemployment.”[38]

There is further evidence, such as the logo and slogan of the clinic (a lantern encircled by: “Joyous and deliberate motherhood, a sure light in our racial darkness”)[39] and the brands of cervical cap dispensed there (“Prorace” and “Racial”)[40].

The evidence that Stopes campaigned for compulsory sterilisation of so-called “C.3” women: In September 1920, she sent a copy of her book “Radiant Motherhood” to Frances Stevenson secretary (mistress, and later wife) of Prime Minister, Lloyd George. According to June Rose:

“… she drew attention to the chapter on eugenics in which she commented on the tens of thousands of ‘stunted, warped and inferior infants, who would invariably drain the resources of those with a sense of responsibility’”.

In the covering letter she urged Sevenson to get Mr George to read it because it would “help him in real fact more than a dozen Ministries will ever do.”[41]

Stopes also lobbied parliamentary candidates in the 1921 election asking them to sign a declaration:

“I agree with the present position of breeding chiefly from the C3 population and burdening and discouraging the A1 is nationally deplorable, and if I am elected to Parliament I will press the Ministry of Health to give such scientific information through the Ante-natal Clinics, Welfare Centres and other institutions in its control as will curtail the C3 and increase the A1”[42]

In “Wise Parenthood” Stopes endorsed the gold pin (or spring) which, once fitted, could not be removed without the assistance of a doctor:

“It is, therefore, the one and only method (apart from actual sterilisation) which is applicable and of real help to the lowest and most negligent strata of society. It is therefore a method of the greatest possible racial and social value and should become widely known and practiced.”[43]

Stopes was, she insisted, a scientist, yet the imprecise language she used to designate (and denigrate) those to be sterilized was anything but scientific: “hopelessly bad cases, bad through inherent disease, or drunkenness or character”; the “degenerate, feeble minded and unbalanced”; and “parasites.”[44] Note that “inherent disease” included conditions that we know today are primarily infectious, such as tuberculosis.

Sutherland opposed contraceptives on grounds that were not religious per se and thought that making them generally available would (1) lead to national decline and (2) would lead to a British slave state in which the poor were not allowed to have children and had no societal role other than as workers.

While Sutherland was bound to Catholic dogma in relation to contraceptives, his disapproval of them did not emanate solely from his Catholicism.

While serving as Surgeon on H.M.S. Empress of Britain during the First World War Sutherland was required “to supervise the distribution of ‘prophylactic packets’ to men shortly before they went on shore for a few hours’ leave at Sierra Leone.” He asked the Captain if he could be excused on the grounds that he objected “to acting as the doorkeeper to a brothel. I submitted that some of the men had wives or sweethearts in England, that some were mere boys, and that the ‘packet might deprive a man of his last thought of self-control.’”[45] At the time of this incident, Sutherland was not a Catholic but a member of the Church of Scotland.

Sutherland’s 1922 warning that the indiscriminate distribution of contraceptives would lead to the depopulation of Britain was quoted in at the beginning of this article (“the law of decline is working, and by that law the greatest empires in the world have perished.”).

While the words that were the subject of the libel trial have been quoted frequently, the following paragraphs have not been. It is in these in which Sutherland objects not just to Stopes’ Clinic, but also to the eugenic aims of her work which, he argued, would create a slave state in Britain in which the poor had no societal role other than as workers.

“If, instead of bearing children, women practice birth control, and if children are to be denied to the poor and a privilege of the rich, then it would be very easy to exploit the women of the poorer classes…The English poor have already lost even the meaning of the word “property,” and if the birth controllers had their way the meaning of the word “home” would soon follow. The aim of birth control is generally masked by falsehood, but the urging of this policy on the poor points unmistakably to the Servile State”[46]

The Servile State was the title of the book written by his contemporary Hilaire Belloc.

While Sutherland was a Catholic and was supported by the Catholic Church, his opposition to eugenics had arisen when eugenic thought began to hinder his work as a tuberculosis specialist and he was on record as opposing eugenics long before he became a Roman Catholic.

None of Stopes’ biographers have “joined the dots” to explain how a medical specialist in tuberculosis in 1912 comes to accuse Stopes of “exposing the poor to experiment” ten years later other than that he was a Roman Catholic. Yet Sutherland began to oppose eugenics years before he became a Roman Catholic. He had been “brought up a Scots Presbyterian” but was in 1904 “in theory an agnostic and in practice an atheist.”[47]

When Sutherland commenced specialising in tuberculosis, consumption was thought to be primarily caused by a person’s heredity. Adherents of eugenics thought that the disease would best be eliminated by breeding out the tuberculous from British racial stocks[48]. He changed his mind and in 1912, he published research that showed that consumption was primarily caused by infection.[49]

The next step in his religious journey occurred on the outbreak of World War 1 when he joined the Church of Scotland. “In August 1914 there came the hazards of war, and for me the time had come when it was expedient to make my peace with God. At a few hours’ notice the Church of Scotland admitted me to her membership.”[50]

Sutherland spoke out against eugenicists in a 1917 speech “Consumption: Its Cause and Cure”. In it he attacked them as an obstacle to the prevention and cure of consumption describing them as “race breeders with the souls of cattle breeders”.[51]

In 1919, Sutherland was accepted into the Catholic Church.[52] Social historian Ann Farmer debunks the belief of eugenicists “that opposition to eugenics was directed by the Catholic Church” and pointed out that “it is more likely that Laetitia Fairfield, Chesterton, and Sutherland, all converts, were drawn to the Church because of their criticism of eugenics/reproductive control”.[53]

The example of eugenics hindering the work is provided by Sir James Barr, president of the British Medical Association who pointed out that through curing disease, “Nature’s method of eliminating the unfit has been at least partially suspended by our efforts.” Barr proposed that doctors act considering not merely the needs of the patients but the needs of the race. He mentioned the efforts to treat and cure tuberculosis:

“If we could only abolish the tubercle bacillus in these islands we would get rid of tuberculous disease, but we should at the same time raise up a race peculiarly susceptible to this infection—a race of hothouse plants which would not flourish in any other environment. We would thus increase at an even greater rate than we are doing at present, nervous instability, the numbers of insane and feeble-minded. Nature, on the other hand, weeds out those who have not got the innate power of recovery from disease, and by means of the tubercle bacillus and other pathogenic organisms she frequently does this before the reproductive age, so that a cheek is put on the multiplication of idiots and the feeble-minded. Nature’s methods are thus of advantage to the- race rather than to the individual.”[54]

In 1918 speech he was more explicit:

“...the elimination of the tubercle bacillus is not worth aiming at. It forms a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit...Personally, I am of opinion...that if to-morrow the tubercle bacillus were non-existent, it would be nothing short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance.”[55]

In 1921, Barr wrote to congratulate Stopes on the opening of her Mothers’ Clinic:

“You and your husband have inaugurated a great movement which I hope will eventually get rid of our C3 population and exterminate poverty. The only way to raise an A1 population is to breed them.”[56]

He became a vice-president of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress and testified for the plaintiff on the first day of the trial.

Given all of this evidence, it is surprising that the “Catholics against contraceptives” narrative had not already been debunked. That said, it is unlikely that the false narrative will not change anytime soon for the following reasons:

Firstly, there are vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Reputations of academics and institutions are built on, and benefit from, the false narrative, and they are unlikely to agitate for change. Would, for instance, the biographers of Stopes who have misunderstood Sutherland’s motives admit this shortcoming and revise their work?

Secondly, it is likely that historians of Stopes may feel pressure to adhere to the party line. When “Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution” was published in 1992, an interview with June Rose, the author, was published in The Independent. It read:

“What the author reveals about her subject will cause a great deal of controversy, possibly exposing the biographer to ridicule, perhaps even cries of betrayal. “I am very apprehensive about the book’s reception,” she said.

“…She does not talk easily about herself and is somewhat fearful of being known as the woman who brought Marie Stopes crashing from her pedestal.” [57] (McCrystal, 1992)

Thirdly, as narratives go, doctor curing the sick beats elitist eugenicist snob every time! The narrative that would replace the existing false one has great secular appeal and might cause the realignment of sympathy from Stopes to Sutherland. For these reasons, it is likely that the old narrative will continue.

[1] See: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46118103 viewed 11 June 2019.

[2] “Birth Control” (1922) Messrs. Harding & More, Ambrosden Press, 119 High Holborn, London, W.C.1. Page 155. See: https://archive.org/details/birthcontrolstat00suth/page/154 viewed 21 June 2019.

[3] “Dangers of Birth Control”. Weekly Freeman’s Journal, Saturday 24 May 1924. Page 7.

[4] Uxbridge and West Drayton Gazette. Friday 27 September 1929. Page 21.

[5] “Control of Life” (1944) by Dr Halliday Sutherland. Burns, Oates and Washbourne, Ltd. London S.W.1.

[6] Consumption was the name for tuberculosis of the lungs. The disease killed 50,000 each year in Britain at that time, a further 20,000 died from other forms of the disease, and a further 150,000 would be disabled (Source: Sutherland, H. (1917). Consumption: Its Cause and Cure. London: Red Triangle Press). When the disease struck the breadwinner, whole families would be thrown into destitution. According to Sutherland, tuberculosis was the cause of 10 percent of pauperism in Britain at that time. See: Sutherland, H., & (Editor). (1911). The Control and Eradication of Tuberculosis. London and Edinburgh: William Green and Son. See: https://archive.org/details/39002010860915.med.yale.edu/page/6 viewed 21 June 2019.

[7] Sutherland, H., & (Editor). (1911). The Control and Eradication of Tuberculosis. London and Edinburgh: William Green and Son. See: https://archive.org/details/39002010860915.med.yale.edu/page/6 viewed 21 June 2019.

[8] The film was “The Story of John M’Neil” and it can be viewed free of charge at the British Film Institute website: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-story-of-john-mneil-1911-online.

[9] See: http://www.formerchildrenshomes.org.uk/open_air_school_regents_park.html (viewed 21 June 2019) and https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/regentsparkoas.html (viewed 21 June 2019). There are photographs of the school at: https://hallidaysutherland.com/pictures/ viewed 21 June 2019.

[10] “Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999” (1992) by Michael Korda, Barnes and Noble Books, New York. Page 67.

[11] “Documents of the Twentieth Century” by G.K. Chesterton The Listener December 12, 1934.

[12] See: https://hallidaysutherland.com/2019/03/01/pope-pius-xi/ viewed 21 June 2019.

[13] See: https://hallidaysutherland.com/2015/09/01/hgs-meets-de-valera-1/ and https://hallidaysutherland.com/2015/10/01/a-second-meeting-with-eamon-de-valera/ viewed 21 June 2019.

[14] See: https://hallidaysutherland.com/2018/11/01/franco/ viewed 21 June 2019.

[15] See: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2516648 viewed 21 June 2019.

[16] See: https://hallidaysutherland.com/2017/01/26/what-the-british-empire-means-to-the-world/ viewed 21 June 2019.

[17] Rose, J. (1992). Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Page 144.

[18] Sutherland, H. (1922). Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians. London: Harding & More. Page 101. See: https://archive.org/details/birthcontrolstat00suth/page/100 viewed 21 June 2019.

[19] Femina Books. (1967). The Trial of Marie Stopes (1st ed.). (M. Box, Ed.) London: Femina Books Ltd.

[20] The five biographies are: “The Authorized Life of Marie C. Stopes” (1924) by Aylmer Maude, “Marie Stopes: A Biography” (1962) by Keith Briant, “Passionate Crusader” (1977) by Ruth Hall “Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution” (1992) by June Rose and “Marie Stopes’ Sexual Revolution and the Birth Control Movement” (2018) by Marion Clare Debenham. All of these subscribe to the “Catholics against contraceptives” schema. None of them make the link between Dr Sutherland’s work as a doctor specialising in tuberculosis to his subsequent opposition to Stopes.

[21] The plays: “Married Love” reviewed in The Stage and Television Today 19 May 1988, Page 11 (see: https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0001180/19880519/071/0011 viewed 21 June 2019) and Escaping the Storm by Peter John Cooper (See:

viewed 21 June 2019).

[22] “Marie Stopes: Sexual Revolutionary” was shown on BBC One on 25 June 1970 (See: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1970-06-25 viewed 21 June 2019).

[23] See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/23/gender.women viewed 11 June 2019.

[24] See: https://www.theguardian.com/microsite/mariestopes/uk/story/0,,813612,00.html viewed 11 June 2019.

[25] See: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2602221/New-stamps-mark-women-of-distinction-Marie-Stopes.html viewed 11 June 2019.

[26] See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/23/gender.women viewed 21 June 2019.

[27] See: https://www.theguardian.com/microsite/mariestopes/uk/story/0,,813612,00.html viewed 21 June 2019.

[28] Hall, R. (1977). Passionate Crusader: The Life of Marie Stopes. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Page 207.

[29] See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/stopes_marie_carmichael.shtml viewed 17 June 2019.

[30] Soloway, R. A. (1990). Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth Century Britain (Digital Edition). University of North Carolina Press.

[31] Incredibly, the Malthusian League called for a moratorium on children during the First World War. The reasons summarised by Richard Soloway as follows: “War babies could only consume, not produce; many would be fatherless; their mothers would have to neglect them for war work, and they would be particularly vulnerable to the hard winters and fuel and food shortages which were bound to come. Convinced that the war had been caused by overpopulation in the first place, the Malthusian League thought it foolish to produce another generation of surplus people whose presence would only compound the difficulties of the reconstruction.” See: Neo-Malthusians, Eugenists, and the Declining Birth-Rate in England 1900-1918 by Richard A. Soloway. “Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies” Vol.10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 226-286.

[32] Soloway, R. A. (1990). Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth Century Britain (Digital Edition). University of North Carolina Press.

[33] Kevles, D. J. (2004). In The Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (5th Printing ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

[34] Hall, R. (1977). Passionate Crusader: The Life of Marie Stopes. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Page 198.

[35] Searle, G. (1976). Eugenics and Politics in Britain 1900-1914. Leyden: Noordhoff International Publishing. Page 102. According to Searle, Stopes joined the Eugenics Education Society in 1912.

[36] “The Racial Imperatives of Sex: Birth Control and Eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in the Interwar Years” by Jane Carey, Monash University Women’s History Review 21, no. 5 (2012): 733-752. http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rwhr20/21/5

[37] C Femina Books. (1967). The Trial of Marie Stopes (1st ed.). (M. Box, Ed.) London: Femina Books Ltd. Page 76.

[38] “The Tenets of the CBC” were published in Appendix C of “The Authorised Life of Marie C. Stopes” by Aylmer Maud. Williams & Norgate Ltd, Covent Garden 1924. See https://archive.org/details/b29977587/page/222 viewed 19 June 2019.

[39] See: https://hallidaysutherland.com/2018/03/11/babies-in-the-right-place/ viewed 21 June 2019.

[40] See: http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/objects/display?id=92338 and https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/racial-brand-size-2-contraceptive-cap-made-by-bcm-news-photo/90763429 viewed 21 June 2019.

[41] Rose, J. (1992). Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Page 138.

[42] Ibid. Page 161.

[43] Stopes, M. C. (1920). Wise Parenthood: A Practical Sequel to Married Love (6th ed.). London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Ltd, London. Page 37. Retrieved January 3, 2019, from https://archive.org/details/cihm_990552/page/n7.

[44] Stopes, M. (1921). Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those who are Creating the Future. London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Limited. Chapter 20. Retrieved December 29, 2018, from https://archive.org/details/radiantmotherhoo00stopuoft/page/n5

[45] Sutherland, H. (1944). Control of Life. London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, Ltd. Page 132.

[46] Sutherland, H. (1922). Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians. London: Harding & More. Page 102. See: https://archive.org/details/birthcontrolstat00suth/page/102 viewed 21 June 2019.

[47] Sutherland, H. (1956). Irish Journey. London: Geoffrey Bles. Page 11.

[48] For example, Tuberculosis, Heredity and Environment being a lecture by Karl Pearson, F.R.S. at the Galton laboratory for National Eugenics on 12 March 1912 and in particular, the final paragraph. See: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/77020#page/5/mode/1up viewed 19 June 2019.

[49] “The Soil and the Seed in Tuberculosis” by Halliday Sutherland British Medical Journal. 1912 Nov 23; 2(2708): 1434–1437. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2334807/ viewed 19 June 2019.

[50] Sutherland, H. (1934). A Time to Keep. Geoffrey Bles. Page 208.

[51] See: https://hallidaysutherland.com/research/consumption-its-cause-and-cure/ viewed 21 June 2019.

[52] Sutherland, H. (1934). A Time to Keep. Geoffrey Bles. Page 239.

[53] Farmer, A. (2008). By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Page 139.

[54] Barr, S. J. (1912, July 27). President’s Address Delivered at the Eightieth Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association. British Medical Journal, 157-163. Retrieved January 6, 2019, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2334152/

[55] Barr, S. J. (1918, September 21). The future of the medical profession. British Medical Journal, 318-321. Retrieved July 16, 2018, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2341835/

[56] Stopes, M. (1921). Queen’s Hall Meeting on Constructive Birth Control: Speeches and Impressions. London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Ltd. Second edition.

[57] McCrystal, C. (1992, August 23). Notebook: “The monster and the master race: She altered women’s lives for ever. But a new book reveals that Marie Stopes’s motives were distinctly dubious.” The Independent. Retrieved May 23, 2019, from https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/notebook-the-monster-and-the-master-race-she-altered-womens-lives-for-ever-but-a-new-book-reveals-1541975.html

Note: This post was previously published on Thinking Coalition’s Substack as “Is eugenics making a comeback?”

Last week, I walked part of the South Downs Way. Prior to setting out, I looked at the Ordnance Survey map and was pleased to note the frequent “tumulus” and “tumuli” symbols along the route. I would be walking through an ancient and pleasant landscape.

On the ground however, I found the “tumulus” and “tumuli” to be underwhelming when compared to what I had imagined I might see.

The result was that, when I ascended Old Winchester Hill (in Hampshire), I was thrilled to see the emergence of worn, but clearly visible, ramparts. Beyond them, at the top of the hill, the ground flattened and mounds and a depression indicated that there had once been a settlement here.

A visitors’ guide told me I was standing on the site of an ancient Hill-Fort, thought to have been first inhabited almost four thousand years ago. Protected by ramparts on one side and a steep escarpment on the other, it was the perfect defensible position. A chalk path led evenly along the ridge, providing not only easy walking access to and from the site, but also allowing the traveller to be observed at some distance from the fort.

Naturally, I wondered about the people who lived here and what it might have been like. While an artist’s impression depicted a fence and thatched huts, the hilltop provided little protection from the wind and the rain.

I was the only visitor. The emptiness of the place (and my weary legs) led me to reflect on the impermanence of life.

I don’t know how, why or when the settlement ended, but I am glad that they—whoever “they” were—came down from the hill, because it was these people, others like them, and their descendants who gave me all of the things that I enjoyed: a Christian civilisation, the English language, a sense of humour, clean clothes, sturdy boots, a well-marked path, navigation aids, a map, smooth roads, comfortable accommodation, cooked food, clean water and good beer.

At around the time I stood on Old Winchester Hill, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe stood in the House of Lords to support of the “Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill”. Drawing attention to the growth in world population over the previous century, he urged his fellow Lords to:

“Just think what the 2025 numbers would be if abortion had not been legalised or there had not been wide-scale usage and advocacy of contraception. Indeed, the growth of homosexuality throughout society has reduced the number of children that we would have had. Had the churches had their way, we would have had a very much bigger population than we presently have, facing the difficulties we have with climate change.”

“Had the churches had their way …”

The institutions that Brooke portrayed as miscreants had been the cornerstone for British civilisation! It was strange that he either didn’t notice it, or chose not to, given that the chamber in which he spoke is arguably the pinnacle of that civilisation. Instead, he depicted the churches as the ‘madman at the wheel’ of the population bus.[i] Brooke is not the first person to gloss over the agenda behind (or adjacent to) Malthusianism, leaving us to imagine that it was pushed by earnest, caring people. In contrast, here is the reality:

Contraception

Britain’s first family planning clinic (the Mothers’ Clinic, Holloway, March 1921) was founded by Dr Marie Stopes and Humphrey Roe formerly members of the Malthusian League.[ii] Their clinic was the first step in a project to apply eugenic breeding in Britain.[iii] While the Clinic gave contraceptives to the poor women who wanted them, Stopes campaigned for the compulsory sterelisation of those who did not, and she advocated the dangerous “Gold Spring” device for “C3” mothers. Had the woman celebrated for giving women “reproductive choice” had her way, that choice would have been made by a state official.

Britain’s second family planning clinic (the Walworth Womens Welfare Centre, Walworth, October 1921) was a project of the Malthusian League (Motto: “Non quantitas sed qualitas”). The Centre was run by Dr Norman Haire, an advocate for the compulsory sterilisation of the so-called unfit, as well as infanticide for “those who at birth are obviously below a (variable) minimum standard.”[iv]

Compulsory sterelisation

In July 1931, Major Archibald Church MP (Labour) proposed a bill (drafted by the Eugenics Society) in the House of Commons[v] “to enable mental defectives to undergo sterilizing operations or sterilizing treatment upon their own application, or that of their spouses or parents or guardians.” With admirable honesty, Church admitted that the measure was “… in advance of public opinion” and that if it were adopted, it would be “merely a first step… before bringing in a Bill for the compulsory sterilization of the unfit.”[vi] The motion was defeated.

Abortion

Many of the advocates behind the Abortion Law Reform Act 1967 were members of, or were associated with, the Eugenics Society (the Malthusian League had been dissolved in 1927). They used the bogey-man of unsafe “backstreet” abortions to push the measure though. The passing of the Act enabled the comparison of legal and “backstreet” abortions. When the number of women arriving in casualty wards from botched “backstreet” abortions was measured as a proportion of the number alleged to be taking place, the failure rate was found to be significantly lower than those carried out legally in NHS hospitals and clinics.[vii] This meant that either the “backstreet” abortions provided a better standard of care than the NHS, or that the number had been grossly exaggerated to enable the measure to pass.

Homosexuality

In “Life Without Birth” (1970), Stanley Johnson revealed that government support for homosexual unions was motivated by a desire to reduce the birth rate from marriages rather than on the merits of such unions. He also disclosed the existence of a secret inter-departmental committee on population within the civil service.[viii]

These examples explode the myth that, but for earnest, kindly progressives, we would have experienced a Malthusian catastrophe. The grim reality is that the population agenda has been, from the get-go, pushed by those who embody the combination of a “master of the universe” attitude with a disgust for humanity. Their mawkish “I want what’s best for you” is nothing more than a thin veneer for marketing purposes.

And yet, we are encouraged to imagine that the euthanasia laws are somehow different.

Lord Brooke pointed out that those with means could travel to Dignitas in Switzerland to die and framed “assistance with dying for the terminally ill as an act of caring, compassion and love. For those without the funds for that, this Bill, amended as the House sees fit, provides just that: for them to do it at their home.” Brooke concluded: “Who am I to deny that those less able to afford it should not have that choice?”

If you ignore what it is that is being offered, it was a compelling moment for egalitarian dignity.

The population agenda has a long history, going back (at least) to the Reverend T.R. Malthus whose “Essay on the Principle of Population” was published in 1798.

My interest arose from my grandfather, Dr Halliday Sutherland, who fought against the Eugenicists and Malthusians of the 1920s. His 1922 book “Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians” led Stopes to sue him (unsuccessfully) for libel in 1923.

Dr Sutherland opposed them because he saw where it would end up.Indeed, his 1936 short-story “The Perfect Eugenic State” featured a lethal chamber to kill undesirables.

In “Control of Life” (1944) Dr Sutherland observed:

“When responsible and thoughtful members of Society begin to advocate the prevention and destruction of human life by means of contraceptives, abortion, infanticide, sterilisation and euthanasia, it is an evil omen, and a sign of a civilisation whose creative power is spent.”

And it would seem that this is the point at which we are today.

I would venture that if the Malthusians had their way, we (or rather the persons that had been permitted to live) would still be on top of Old Winchester Hill. It is time to reinvigorate the creative power that led us down the hill and to reject the worn-out, fusty Malthusian ideas.

[i] Malthusians attack Christians for their opposition to contraception, as if the churches solely pushed population growth as an end in itself. They somehow manage to ignore the comprehensive role of the churches in managing and caring for the people: schools, hospitals, the law, and so on.

[ii] It was Binnie Dunlop, Secretary of the Malthusian League, who introduced Stopes to Roe.

[iii] See “Tenets of the CBC” https://hallidaysutherland.com/2018/05/15/the-tenets-of-the-c-b-c/

[iv] In his foreword to “Lysistrata: Woman’s Future and Future Women” A.M. Ludovici (1926), Haire wrote: “There can be no doubt that much of our present-day ‘ humanitarianism “ only results in wasting on the hopelessly unfit money and care which might be spent very profitably on the fit, and in keeping alive those who should never have been born. With the decay of sentimentalism, infanticide must come to be practised on those who at birth are obviously below a (variable) minimum standard, and sterilization (destruction of fertility without interference with sexual potency or pleasure) on those whose deficiency becomes unmistakable only at a more advanced age. Contraception will be used mainly to ensure an optimum interval between births in the interest of both mother and child, and to limit the offspring to a (variable) number most suitable in the individual, financial, and social circumstances of each family.”

[v] See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2984766 and https://hallidaysutherland.com/2020/09/01/sterilization/

[vi] See: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1931/jul/21/sterilization

[vii] See: “By Their Fruits. Eugenics, population control and the abortion debate” Ann Farmer (2008).

[viii] In “Life Without Birth” Johnson wrote: “The fourth and last plank in the strategy, if it was felt that within the context of marriage parents would always want “too many” children, would be to discourage marriage itself as we know it. In order to preserve other fundamental freedoms for society as a whole, the government would attempt to limit the opportunities for breeding by limiting the opportunities for marriage. It would use the weapons of the modern state (still, of course, within the “context of voluntarism”) not just in pursuit of antinatalist policies but of antinuptialist policies as well. This might involve promoting - for some proportion of the society - other forms of union (homosexual or heterosexual) which from a demographic standpoint may be more desirable.”

At Christmas in 2013, I travelled from my home in Sydney to visit my mother in Britain.

One morning I was up early. I went to the cellar to sort through a tea packing case of my belongings: books, old photographs, record albums and sentimental things too heavy for the journey to Australia. The records interested me the most: my son was an enthusiast for “vinyl” and I wanted to give them to him. I was going to spend the next little while experiencing the joy that comes from rediscovering albums like “L.A. Woman”, the psychic pain that comes from rediscovering the “less inspired” choices, and the physical pain that comes from spending too much time in a cold, damp cellar.

I opened the door to the cellar and walked down the stone steps. I saw my tea case in the corner in the dim light. A brown leather suitcase lay on the floor in front of me. I picked it up and noticed one corner of the suitcase was rotten from damp. I placed the case on the stone floor and looked inside. Lots of papers, bound and loose, some typed but the majority handwritten.  I carried the documents up to the kitchen where it was brighter, and considerably warmer.

These were the manuscripts of my grandfather: Halliday Sutherland; born 1882; died 1960. Doctor, author and pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis, the major killer disease of the era, which took him into the slums of London to care for the sick. Defendant in the 1923 Stopes v Sutherland libel trial, which arose from his vehement public opposition to eugenicist “race” scientists and Neo-Malthusians, and defence of poor and working class people. Halliday had faced financial ruin against an opponent with significantly better financial resources. He was rescued by his supporters, who raised money to pay his legal bills, and by his winning the case in 1924.

I laid the papers on the kitchen table. Here the handwritten foolscap for his book A Time to Keep. A red folder contained a radio play he had written. The letter acknowledging receipt from the BBC was held to the front of the file by a paper clip, the rust staining the page. On a long thin envelope, Halliday had written: New Zealand. Broadcasts by Halliday Sutherland. 5. Talks on Finland. January to March 1940.  Brown paper tied with parcel string was labelled Manuscript (incomplete). In My Path. November 1936. A manilla folder with loose paper, letters and a photograph.

Then a typed manuscript of his 1956 book Irish Journey.  I knew that it contained material which had been of topical interest earlier in 2013, because in one chapter, Sutherland had described his April 1955 visit to the Magdalene Laundry at Galway. In February 2013, the Irish Taoiseach had apologised, on behalf of the Irish state, to the women who had been held in Magdalene institutions across Ireland.

To visit the Magdalene Institution, Halliday had sought permission from the Bishop of Galway, the Most Reverend Michael John Browne. They met at 11 a.m. at the Bishop’s Palace. The manuscript recorded their conversation set out as if it were a play—odd, because Halliday’s usual style was prose. Now what followed was five pages of:

Bishop: …

Myself: …

Bishop: …

…and so on.

On reading the record of the conversation, it quickly became clear why it had been recorded this way: The spoken words, even without an author’s embellishment, convey the hostility of the Most Reverend Michael John Browne. Res ipsa loquitur.

Bishop: So you’re writing a book about Ireland?

Myself: I hope so.

Bishop: Well, if you write anything wrong it will come back on you. Remember that.

Eight lines later:

Bishop: There you are. Trying to write about Ireland without knowing our background.

Myself: I’m willing to learn.

On the next page, Halliday got to the point, and an already frosty meeting became colder:

Myself: My Lord, I would like to see the Magdalen Home Laundry.

Bishop: Are you going to write it up?

Myself: Until I see it I don’t know whether there is anything to write about.

Bishop: I am their Bishop. It is my duty to defend these nuns. I have done so in the past and I shall do so again.

Myself:  Is there anything to hide?

Bishop: No, there is nothing to hide.

Myself: Are the girls paid?

Bishop: No, they are not paid. By their work they pay for their board. I suppose that offends your Welfare State principles.

Myself: Some of us think that England has gone too far with the Welfare State.

Bishop: Why do you want to see the Magdalen Home?

Myself: I want to see how you treat unmarried mothers. Many of these girls come to England. It is said that fifty-five percent of the Girls in British Catholic Rescue Homes are Irish.

At this point Halliday was openly challenging the Bishop: Why are so many unmarried mothers crossing the Irish Sea to England? Is it something to do with your treatment of them? The Most Reverend Michael John Browne rebutted the challenge.

Bishop: That is propaganda. Father Craven began it. Cardinal Bourne repeated it. For twenty-five years I have asked for the figures. They can’t give them. Do you know the figures?

Myself: No I’m trying to get them.

Bishop: You will find there are only a few. Hundreds of decent Irish girls are going to England. At this moment your Government are advertising high salaries for Irish girls to go to England as nurses in your mental hospitals.

Myself: English priests say that most of the Irish lose their Faith within six months of coming to England.

Bishop: Then why don’t your English priests look after the Irish instead of throwing bastards in our face?

Myself: My Lord, no one is throwing bastards in your face.

Remember, “bastard” was a stronger word in 1955 than it is today, accompanied by stigma and inferior legal rights. Later in the conversation though, a deal was struck:

Bishop: Are you prepared to submit anything you propose to write about the Magdalen Home for approval by the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Mercy?

Myself: I am, My Lord.

Bishop: Then I permit you to go there.

Myself: Thank you, My Lord…

The first rule of negotiation is: when you have got what you want, stop talking. Nothing you can say will improve the outcome; everything you say might put the deal at risk. Halliday kept talking:

…Years ago I wrote there could be no peace between our two countries until England remembers and Ireland forgets. I am tired of meeting Irishmen in London who speak as though Cromwell had left Ireland the day before yesterday.

Bishop: Forget? Did you ask the Spaniards to forget? No, because they would not have listened to you. We are not commanded to forget but to forgive. I like your books but your theology is all wrong.

Why did Halliday say something so contentious after he had received the permission he sought?

A story Ian Sutherland (my father and Halliday’s son) told my brother might explain it: For many of his books, Halliday travelled to foreign parts and on his return would write about his experiences. His trip to Ireland followed this pattern, but the Irish book had an additional purpose. As a Scot married to an Irish woman, Halliday wanted to write something to reconcile the historic differences between Ireland and England.

Shortly after he had arrived in Ireland, Halliday had asked an Irish Catholic priest to say mass for his son Vincent, who had been killed, aged 21, in the war. The priest refused. Vincent had served in British forces. No mass.

Halliday was hurt by the priest’s reaction. Frustrated too, because as a Scot he was well aware of the violent history between his country and England. How could there ever be peace if a priest, given the choice between compassion and enmity, chose enmity? According to Ian, this had led to a change in the timbre of the book.

All that said, Halliday now had the permission he wanted. He had stuck to his side of the deal. When he had finished writing Irish Journey, he sent a draft of Chapter VII The Magdalene Home to the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Mercy. The Mother Superior had censored the draft, and returned the approved version for publication.

No one knew what the uncensored version contained, all parties taking their knowledge to the grave.

I was now holding that draft. I felt my stomach tighten when I saw Convent of Mercy, St Vincents, Galway embossed in the top right-hand corner of a page, the date 13 October, 1955 and read:

Dear Dr. Sutherland,

I return herewith your typescript containing your article about the Magdalen Home. If it makes no difference to you we would much prefer you did not include this article in your book at all. Should it not be possible for you to comply with our wishes in this matter would you kindly exclude the paragraph marked on page 122, and that marked at the end of page 123. I do not remember hearing anyone say that a girl ever ‘howled’ to be readmitted. They do come along and ask sometimes. Would you also kindly omit the piece marked on page 124.

Yours sincerely,

[signature] Sister M. Fidelma.

Mother Superior

I cleared a space on the table and photographed each page. I include copies of these photographs for readers of this blog. For the first time, readers can see Halliday Sutherland’s uncensored manuscript as well as the instructions as to which parts to remove. [UPDATE 13 January 2021: you can read higher resolution scans of the manuscript here (go to the dot points half-way down the page)]

Look at the signature in the letter. Is the handwriting of the person who signed the letter and amended the draft the same person? You be the judge.

The most frequently-occurring change in the draft is amending “Magdalene House” to “the Magdalen Home”. At the foot of the page, Sutherland starts his account of his visit to the Mother and Baby Home at Tuam. At time of writing, this institution is in the news in Ireland and internationally when it was reported that around 800 infants had been buried in a disused septic tank, and the Media have run stories – often shocking – as to how they came to be there.

Halliday’s meeting with Bishop Browne starts on the page below.

The visit to the Galway Laundry began at 5 o’clock. Halliday was introduced by the Mother Superior of the Convent of Mercy to the Sister-in-charge and six nuns who managed the laundry. He began questioning them about the 73 girls in their charge.

Page 122 contains the first significant amendment – a deletion. The deleted part reads:

“Yes, some of them cannot read or write. A few are sent by Probation Officers into whose care the girl was placed by the Justice before whom she was charged with some criminal offence.”

On page 123 the second significant amendment appears. The redacted text reads:

“Do they try to escape?”

“Last year a girl climbed a twenty foot drain pipe. At the top she lost her nerve and fell. She was fortunate. She only broke her pelvis. She won’t try it again.”

Page 124 contains the third significant amendment. A passage relating to corporal punishment is removed from the book:

“…For that kind of thing the girl gets six strokes of the cane, three on each hand.”

A Nun: Sometimes on the legs.

“I suppose only the Sister-in-charge may inflict corporal punishment.”

“Yes, and the only time I gave it I felt positively ill.”

I have included all of the remaining pages below for completeness and for readers of this blog to assess the changes for themselves.

My lightheartedness had passed. I left the house and walked to the park, now appreciative of the weak winter sunlight after the dark world of of aggressive prelates, intolerant societies, fearful girls and harsh institutions. On a bridge, I stopped to watch the ducks in the river below, floating gently in the eddies of the oil-dark water. The records could wait.

EPILOGUE

In the 1958 American edition of Irish Journey, Halliday Sutherland added a preface in which he wrote:

In 1955 I wrote Irish Journey and this book has been damned by faint praise from every newspaper critic in Ireland. I was not surprised, because all the critics have ignored my main criticism, which concerns the Irish secular clergy. In my opinion they have too much political power. They hold themselves aloof from their people, and are too fond of money.

In the bad old days, when Ireland was subject to the foreign power of England, the parish priest was probably the only educated man in an Irish village. The foreign power has been driven out, the people are better educated, but the parish priest is loathe to relinquish his political power.

During my Irish holiday, I was assaulted by a total stranger in a Tipperary hotel. The incident was reported in all the Dublin papers, and when I returned to my Dublin hotel, the receptionist said to me, “Will you be writing about it?” I told her I would, and she replied, “That won’t be nice.” She was obviously afraid that the record of this incident would spoil Ireland as a show place.

Ireland is certainly a wonderful show place, and heaven may reflect Killarney; but as a Scotsman I think Loch Lomond, twenty miles from Glasgow, is more beautiful.

Another day a well-known man called at the hotel to see me. I met him in the lounge, but he asked me out to his car, I asked him where we were going and he said, ” Nowhere, but there were too many people in the lounge who might overhear what I am going to ask you, and that is not to mention me in your book.”

“And why not?”

“They wouldn’t like it.”

I know that he meant the Irish hierarchy, It is strange how the shadow of the hierarchy falls on the most unexpected places in the public life of Ireland.

If Ireland goes communist within the next ten years, I think the secular clergy will be to blame.

The “Catholic Medical Guardian” of London gave my book an excellent review and said that my account of the assault on myself in a Tipperary hotel recalled the best chapters in “Handy Andy”. But a copy of my book was sent to a nun in Dublin who replied, “This book should be burnt by the public hangman.”

I only hope that what I have written will be more appreciated in the clearer air in the United States of America.

Ireland is currently debating the issues around eight hundred infant bodies found in an unused septic tank at the mother-and-baby home at Tuam. What is done as a result of these noisy, conflicting voices will determine whether this state of affairs has changed, and by how much.

©Mark Sutherland 2014

First published 2014 on hallidaysutherland.com

If Professor E. W. MacBride be correct — and there can be none familiar with the facts who would differ from him — that unless the birth rate of the mentally defective be restricted, ‘the British Nation as a virile people, is doomed,’ it appears probable that politicians and people will both have to face all three — Sterilization, Segregation, and the Lethal Chamber.

Richard J.A. Berry MD FRCS FRSE. Letter to the Eugenics Review July 1930.

Such concerns led the Society to publish a draft sterilization bill in 1928 and to establish a Committee for Legalising Eugenic Sterelization the following year.

One of the committee members, Major Archibald Church MP, rose in the House of Commons on 21st July 1931, to request:

“That leave be given to bring in a Bill to enable mental defectives to undergo sterilizing operations or sterilizing treatment upon their own application, or that of their spouses or parents or guardians; and for purposes connected therewith. I realise, and those associated with me realise, that in making this request we are asking the House to do something which may be regarded as in advance of public opinion. That in itself is a difficulty. We realise that we have to convert a large section of the people of this country to a full appreciation of what we propose to do with those who are in every way a burden to their parents, a misery to themselves and in my opinion a menace to the social life of the community. I should be failing m my duty to the House if I did not state that in my opinion, although perhaps not in the opinion of those associated with me, this Bill is merely a first step in order that the community as a whole should be able to make an experiment on a small scale so that later on we may have the benefit of the results and experience gained in order to come to conclusions before bringing in a Bill for the compulsory steriliation [sic] of the unfit.

Major Archibald Church MP, House of Commons Debate 21 July 1931. Hansard vol 255 cc1249-57.

Dr Hyacinth Morgan (like Church, a member of the Labour party) opposed the bill. He urged the Commons to defeat “… this pagan, anti-democratic, anti-Christian, unethical Bill.” Church’s motion was defeated 167 to 89.

Church’s admissions that the measure was “… in advance of public opinion” and that, if adopted, it would be “merely a first step… before bringing in a Bill for the compulsory sterilization of the unfit” were admirably open. This straightforward approach did not survive this setback.

At this moment “three weighty organisations” began to agitate in favour of sterilization and they sought to influence public opinion. There was “a concerted petition for an official inquiry [which] was submitted to the then Minister of Health.” Subsequently, the Minister established a Departmental Committee on Sterilization in June 1932.

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The apparent groundswell of support was deceptive because, according to John Macnicol, the secretary of the Eugenics Society, C.P. Blacker:

“… admitted in private that the lobbying technique of the society was to make it appear as if the demand for an official enquiry emanated from these large bodies, whereas in fact it was the society that was masterminding the campaign.”

Three committee members (Sir Lawrence Brock (Chairman), R.A. Fisher and A.F. Tredgold) were members of the Eugenics Society and a fourth (Miss Ruth Darwin) was the daughter of a member (Horace Darwin).

According to Macnicol:

“Between June 1932 and January 1934 the Brock committee held thirty-six meetings and interviewed sixty witnesses. Dominated by its chairman, who pulled every string to assist the society in its campaign (thus flagrantly violating civil service neutrality), the committee’s report recommended the legalization of voluntary sterilization for three identifiable categories of patient — mental defectives of the mentally disordered, persons suffering from a transmissable physical disability (for example, hereditary blindness), or persons likely to transmit mental disorder or defect.”

Brock also met secretly with Blacker to advise him on how to improve the wording of the Eugenics Society’s draft sterlization bill.

While the Ministry of Health was more sympathetic to the cause, ministers and officials remained sensitive to the mood of the House of Commons and the bill was not reintroduced. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 led to the eugenic proposals being shelved and, when it ended in 1945, eugenics had a public relations problem. The agenda of the Eugenics Society was suspended.

For a little while, anyway.

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Sources/further reading:

The Voluntary Sterilization Campaign in Britain 1918-39 by John Macnicol.

Eugenic Sterelisation: Europe’s Shame by Charles Webster.

The sterilization proposals: A history of their development by C.P. Blacker (Eugenics Review 1931 Jan; 22(4): 239–247).

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It’s natural that parents and family play a key role at the beginning, sharing the work with teachers and friends. Followed by bosses, colleagues, writers, presenters, speakers, advertisers, meme creators, salesmen, doctors, nurses, sergeants, journalists and even the five thugs who attacked me in Hastings on a dark winter’s night in the 1980s.

For many years, my narrative ‘feed’ explained the world, or seemed to, until anomalies provoked unanswered questions and caused distruption. Like a flaw in a badly-photoshopped picture, the anomaly became the prominent feature that demanded attention.

In recent years, I wondered why the traditional media reported how much more infectious a particular Covid variant was, but paid no attention to its comparative lethality. Or discussed cases, but failed to mention whether the ‘case’ was developing, had, or had recovered from Covid. Why did people ignore—even after it had been brought to their attention—the February 2020 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, co-authored by Dr Anthony Fauci, which said “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS…” Why did they insist I “follow the science” when what they really meant was “follow the authority” and ignore other valid sources of information?

Then there were everyday things about which I thought I knew the answer, right up until the point at which the question was put: “Why do businesses have to grow?” “What is capitalism?” “What is money? How is it created?”

It bothered me, for not only did I not know the answers but that I didn’t have the desire (prior to that point) to find out the answer.

When I began to ask and discuss these issues, there was on occasions, discouragement. “Why are you talking about that?” or a patronising “don’t worry about it.” It seemed that these topics were outside the perennially acceptable ones, such as Sydney property prices, the footy and what was on the telly.

The disruptions had begun in earnest on December 20th, 2013, when I tripped over an old leather suitcase containing the papers of my grandfather, Dr Halliday Sutherland. As a consequence, I learned that that the ‘accepted’ history of an event in which he had been involved was false (very much to his detriment) and knew that unless I fixed it, no one else was going to bother.

Fixing it led me to study the ideologies against which Dr Sutherland had fought in the early 20th Century: Malthusianism and Eugenics.

As expected, my research led me to challenge many of the assumptions I had in relation to his times. What I didn’t expect was that it challenged the assumptions I had in relation to my own even more profoundly. For instance, how many other cases were there in which the accepted history was significantly incorrect? Or that institutions and people I thought were interested in the truth—historians, biographers and the like—would welcome my research. They didn’t.

The result was that the research became a project, a campaign, a website a blog, a book and created a writing habit (an itch that I will use Substack to scratch). Those who hold the keys to the accepted narrative are, at best, unwilling to budge and, at worst, prevaricate on these matters, I suspect because the truth does not match the agenda they wish to promote.

In this Substack, I will outline Dr Sutherland’s work and reveal the products of my research, shining a light on some of the less well-lit tunnels in the ‘rabbit hole’, particularly in relation to eugenics, Malthusianism and population control. While these matters are historical, they are useful because they inform where we are today. As I wrote in Exterminating Poverty:

In 2015, while beginning the research for this book in London, I met Ann Farmer whose books (By Their Fruits and Prophets and Priests) concerned aspects of Dr Sutherland’s work. We discussed the eugenicists of one-hundred years ago and compared them to their modern equivalents. Ann said that she would rather deal with the eugenicists back then than with the ones today. Given the vile language used to describe those they considered inferior this surprised me, so I asked her why. She replied that the eugenicists of one-hundred years ago openly stated their aims whereas the eugenicists today conceal their hand. Indeed, the concealment has been so successful that many people are under the impression that eugenics somehow ceased to exist after 1945.

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It is vitally important that these events become widely known because, contrary to the popular impression that eugenics stopped after 1945, it is still with us today. The fact is that eugenics never really went away, so much as to undergo a makeover and assume a new disguise.

The harsh words of the eugenicists of one-hundred years ago (for instance, Marie Stopes’ reference to “an imbecile or monster or degenerate or diseased child” in the High Court) have been replaced with the innocuous language of medicine (for instance, the Nuchal Translucency Procedure to test for Down Syndrome). While the language has changed, the moral issues have not.

We would do well to remember the words of Dr Halliday Sutherland: “Moral catastrophes inevitably lead to physical catastrophes.”

I hope my work will be of interest to a general reader as well as those who are interested in these topics. I don’t plan to charge for my work and aim to one article each month on the last day of the month.

I hope you enjoy it. Please subscribe!

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