C P Blacker, R A Fisher and L Penrose on Eugenic Fundamentals

The eugenic beliefs of the Eugenics Society were originally formed by Sir Francis Galton who, influenced by the principle of improving the hereditary characters of Man by natural selection as proposed by his half-cousin Charles Darwin¹, believed that humans could improve their stock by encouraging the procreation of the fittest among them and discouraging that of the less fit. Its original name was ‘Eugenics Education Society’. This reflected the fact that its primary aim was to provide information primarily to citizens who were in the reproductive period of their lives and encourage them to plan their family after making an estimate of the quality and social value likely to be contributed by their offspring to the community. Thus they urged aspiring parents to regulate their reproductive behaviour according to whether or not they should have a child in the light of the forecast level of improvement to which the national race or stock would rise. The methods by which they hoped to accomplish this were relatively settled among members of the Society but became modified first by the replacement of ‘common-sense’ ways by more rigorous mathematical methods, as developed notably by Pearson and Fisher, of making the assessments of social value. R A Fisher, an ardent eugenist, had joined the Eugenics Education Society in 1912 before going down from Cambridge University in 1913. This terminated his two years’ presidency of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society of which Pauline Mazumdar says ‘For two years, from May 1911 to May 1913, it was one of the most active of the Eugenic Education Society’s outposts’².

The Society’s procedures later became modified by the advent of new methods of contraception, by discovery concerning a new paradigm of the mechanism of heredity and by alteration of the beliefs and attitudes prevailing in society. The appointment of Dr Carlos Blacker in 1931 as secretary of the Eugenics Society is a significant index of the beginning of the change. The critical advice from Lionel Penrose, a Professor of Genetics, provided from outside the Society the opportunity for introducing it to the new concept of heredity which had its beginning in 1900 with the appreciation and dissemination of the work of Mendel obscurely published in 1866.

Leonard Darwin, second youngest of Charles Darwin’s eight children, was educated privately at Clapham Grammar school, at 18 entered the Royal Military Academy Woolwich and served for twenty years as an instructor in the Royal Engineers with whom he went abroad on several scientific expeditions. He spent three years as a Liberal Unionist MP and was then elected to the Council of the Royal Geographical Society and became its president 1908-11. In 1909 he delivered a lecture to the Eugenics Education Society and to his surprise two years later at the age of sixty-one was invited to become its president where, through its change of name to the Eugenics Society in 1926, he served from 1911 to 1928. He was a self-effacing man conservative both in his nature and politics and belonged to the upper middle class. He thought, as Galton did, the inequality of men lay primarily in their inborn qualities. He repudiated environmental reform as a key to racial progress³ and thought the most important aspect of the Eugenics Education Society’s task was to be a ‘pro-natalist propaganda agency dedicated to encouraging the “eugenically fit” to have more children’⁴. Darwin deplored the dysgenic consequence of a volunteer army in World War I (i.e. depleting the number and reducing the proportion of superior, abler individuals) and consequently supported the conversion to conscription and was active in allying the Eugenic Society to the Professional Classes War Relief Council.

Carlos Blacker was educated at Eton and Oxford where he attained distinction in biology under the tutelage of Julian Huxley. In France he was decorated for gallantry in the Coldstream Guards during World War I but he lost a brother there. However he held that war was dysgenic because it killed people who tended to be above the physical average and deterred thoughtful people from parenthood. He was deeply shaken by his war experience and in coming to terms with it acknowledged a debt to Freud’s writings which stimulated in him an interest in psychiatry. Qualifying in medicine in 1925 Blacker became a registrar in Guy’s Hospital’s psychiatric department for three years and continued his study at the Maudsley Hospital. He later became a part-time member of its teaching staff and was later the first chairman of the newly established Simon Population Trust. In 1931 Blacker was appointed General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, not without some misgivings of Darwin, its chairman⁵. The differences in outlook, aspirations and in judgement of these two men during their partnership in office in the Eugenics Society led to tensions which have been ably traced by Richard Soloway⁶. Two prominent issues here were Darwin’s reluctance to endorse Blacker’s deep-rooted conviction that research and provision of contraception should be a major feature in the Eugenic Society’s strategy to reduce the fecundity of the lower, less able classes and his disagreement with Blacker’s aspiration to redirect more of the Eugenic Society’s effort from education and propaganda to research and promotion of contraception.

Leonard Darwin’s reluctance was shared by R A Fisher a stalwart eugenist whose wife shared his eugenist views as their daughter, Joan Box, relates:

Eugenic practice accorded with theory for the Fishers and started with the investment of their own physical and economic resources in the next generation. Eventually they raised a family of two sons and six daughters⁷

As a Cambridge undergraduate he was influential in forming the Cambridge University Eugenics Society and became its first president. Box also reports that he had a strong aversion to contraception and said in 1922

‘that encouragement of the practice of contraception would eventually defeat itself. Meanwhile he deplored the fact that contraception was being practiced by educated people. with the immediate dysgenic effect of increasing disparity between different classes.’⁸.

And Daniel J Kevles (1985) quotes him as saying ‘some people welcomed contraception because their temperaments disposed them to favour sexual anarchy’ and notes that he suspected that a majority of the group eager to do well by their children regarded contraception “with some degree of reluctance or aversion” and submitted to it under force of economic pressure⁹. Blacker’s success on this front resulted in the retirement from membership of many of the Society’s ‘mainline’ eugenic adherents and their replacement, often on the instigation of Blacker, by respected physicians and other professionals (for instance Lord Horder, Sir Humphrey Rolleston, Professor Sir Aubrey Lewis, Dr Eliot Slater, Professor Solly Zuckerman, Sir Julian Huxley) and also in attracting an enormous bequest to support education and popularisation of contraception. Blacker also encouraged Dr Marie Stopes¹⁰ (an active Society member) the zealous and energetic advocate of birth-control on behalf of the Society and the scientific enthusiasm of Sir Julian Huxley in support of research into, facilitation and popularisation of the use of contraceptives. He won strong support for the Society’s Birth Control Investigation Committee which diverted funds from the Twitchin bequest to the Society for education and popularisation to research for more reliable and acceptable contraceptive methods.

Particulars of the route by which this change in policy was made are commented on by Joan Fisher Box, in her biography of her father, Sir Ronald Fisher;

Blacker however was also assailed from another direction. The Eugenics Society’s aim was to improve the physical and mental qualities of future generations so that the population’s proportion of stable, successful people would increase with the decrease in the number of those assumed to be liabilities. Neither group was operationally defined but among the latter were identified families with children in receipt of Poor Law relief, mental defectives and prostitutes. Biological inheritance was, following the model of Charles Darwin’s proposition of natural selection and survival of the fittest, assumed to be the mechanism which largely determined into which of these two categories individuals and, more significantly, families fell. Galton had laid the ground for this eugenic position in ‘Hereditary Genius’ (1869)¹² in a form consistent with the biological knowledge, scientific resources and expectations of his time. However from the beginning of the twentieth century an enormous, sustained leap forward occurred in knowledge of the physiological and pathological mechanisms of genetics and their relation to human birth anomalies and diseases. Lionel Penrose was among the foremost contributing to this development.

A significant influence on Penrose’s outlook and character was formed by his upbringing and schooling as a Quaker. He graduated from Cambridge in 1921 having studied the Moral Sciences Tripos which included mathematical logic. He studied psychology and then became interested in psychiatry to the extent of spending about a year in Vienna, meeting Freud and other leading psychiatrists and undergoing psychoanalysis under Siegfried Bernfeld for the shorter time then customary than later became usual.¹³ This was with a view to deciding whether it was based on scientific principles and was amenable to scientific investigation on which question he finally published a negative answer (1953)¹⁴. He then studied medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, qualified in 1928, took up a research post in Cardiff City Mental Hospital and obtained an MD by writing a thesis on a single schizophrenic patient. In 1930 he was appointed by the Medical Research Council to direct a 7-year research programme at the Royal Eastern Counties’ Institution, Colchester on the causes and genetics of mental deficiency and in 1938 his report was published by the Medical Research Council¹⁵. The subject remained an absorbing interest for the rest of his life and gained comprehensive expression in the four editions of his outstanding textbook The Biology of Mental Defect¹⁶. He was appointed Director of Research in the Psychiatric Section, Ontario Department of Health in 1939.where he remained for six years. He made significant findings in epidemiological research from recorded data on hospitalised psychotics in Ontario the main portion of which has been recently made available in a paper published by Crow¹⁷. His field of work broadened on his appointment in 1945 to the University of London Professorship of Eugenics, endowed by Galton, which he was later able to have renamed the Chair of Human Genetics. He remained there until 1965 and then directed for a further seven years the Kennedy-Galton Centre for Research and Diagnosis in Mental Deficiency, a genetics research unit which he had established 20 years previously in Harperbury Hospital for mental defectives near St Albans in co-operation with its superintendent Dr Alec Shapiro. He explained that ‘Galton’ was in the name in reference to the aspiration to embody the scientific attitude of Sir Francis Galton in the work carried out there.