Sir James Barr and the Liverpool Branch of the Eugenics Education Society, 1910-1916

The Liverpool Branch of the Eugenics Education Society had a brief but energetic life, its history, and that of the eugenics movement in Liverpool, being inextricably linked with Sir James Barr (1849-1938), who was instrumental in founding the Branch, was central to its work and who continued to spread the eugenic message after the Branch had ceased to operate.

Sir James Barr was a charismatic Ulster Scot, born at Cumber in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He took his medical degree at Glasgow University (1873). His association with Liverpool began in 1874 with his appointment as house physician at the Northern Hospital and continued until his retirement to the South of England in 1926. He was described as “… a protagonist of Eugenics and racial improvement at a time when few medical men dared to prejudice their position by holding views in advance of public opinion.” It is probable that his eugenic views would have been reinforced, if not actually shaped, by his appointment in 1877 as medical officer at HM Prison, Kirkdale, and later by his work as the visiting medical officer to the asylums at Tuebrook and Haydock Lodge. He confessed to having come into contact with “… all classes of society, from the highest to the lowest, from the saint to the lowest wretches who disgrace humanity…” adding that the “… firm grip of the hand [from] a prisoner … on his way to the scaffold...” had made a lasting impression on him. At HM Prison, Kirkdale, he had been severely wounded while defending a prisoner from attack by another prisoner. A man of some sensitivity, who had sat during the night with sick prisoners, these experiences would have had a profound effect on him.

The decision to form a branch of the Eugenics Education Society in Liverpool was taken at a meeting held in the Liverpool Medical Institution on 20th October 1910, attended by Sir James Barr, then a national vice-president of the Eugenics Education Society, Mrs Sybil Gotto, the national secretary and leading members of the medical profession and University in Liverpool. Sir James Barr was quoted as saying that as it was to be an educational society they wanted only men and women of intelligence. Thus those invited to this inaugural meeting were carefully selected from men and women thought to possess more than average intelligence…”. The Branch did not have a large membership, probably an average of around 40. A list of the members circa 1911 shows that there were 44 members of whom 13 were women. The medical profession and the University were well represented and the members included R P Houston, the Conservative Member of Parliament for the West Toxteth Division of Liverpool.

The foundation of the Branch was reported in the local newspapers under the headlines “Survival of the Fittest, Eliminating the Insane and Undesirable, Sir James Barr’s Advocacy.” In its own report The Eugenics Review emphasised the close links between the Branch, Liverpool University and the Liverpool medical profession.

The Branch rules provided that members would “… consist of men and women who recognise the national and racial importance of Eugenics … and desire to spread a knowledge of the laws of heredity, so far as they were known, and so far as a knowledge of them would lead to an improvement in the race.”. Membership comprised Ordinary Members and Associate Members and subscriptions were fixed at 10/6d per annum and 2/6d per annum, respectively.

Between 1910 and 1916, members of the Branch, locally, and Sir James Barr, nationally and internationally, were active in promoting the eugenics message; their activities being published in the Eugenics Reviews of the period. Sir James Barr was particularly active in this work. His Liverpool lecture on “Eugenics” had inspired a correspondence lasting some three weeks in the Liverpool Courier. He addressed the Section of Child Study and Eugenics at the Dublin Congress in 1911, in which, perhaps reflecting contemporary national concerns about German military power and rearmament, he advocated the fostering of a military spirit to stop national decadence. He contributed articles to American scientific journals such as the American Practitioner in 1913, “The Positive Aspects of Eugenics”, and American Medicine in 1917, “The New Way of National Life”. Perhaps more importantly he was well placed to use his eminent position in the medical profession to promote eugenics in ways not open to other members of the Branch. He achieved this in two ways.

Sir James Barr was a leading member, and a former president, of the Liverpool Medical Institute. The Liverpool Medico-Chirurgical Journal, its well-respected journal, was first published in 1857 and had been edited by Sir James Barr between 1881 and 1897. In 1911 he was Chairman of the Journal Committee; a position in which he could exercise some influence over the Journal’s contents. The July 1911 edition of the Journal contained a section devoted to eugenics; a rare departure from its normal content of medical and surgical papers. Four papers, each representing a different eugenic concern, were published. Sir James Barr defined the “Aim and Scope of Eugenics”. A. M Paterson, M.D., Professor of Anatomy at Liverpool University took up the themes of the Woman question and birth control in “The Child as an Asset of the Empire”, in which he denigrated the modern woman’s desire for freedom from and within marriage as epitomised by modern “sex-novels”. He argued that the first duty of women was the bearing of children and the mothering of the race. Mr Damer Harrisson, KHS, M.Ch, FRCSE, took the theme of “The Eugenic Aspect of the Feeble-minded Child” in which he drew attention to the fact that the state was evading its responsibility for the feeble-minded who were becoming an increasing source of national disaster and used pedigrees to demonstrate that their degeneration was hereditary. Finally, Charles J. Macalister, MD (Edin.), FRCP (Lond), contributed an “Address on the Eugenics Question and its Limitations” in which he argued that tendency to disease could be explained in Mendelian terms of dominants and recessives. The publication of these papers put the eugenic message before a wide and influential audience of medical practitioners and academics and was a coup for the Branch.

In July 1912 Sir James Barr had been elected as President of the British Medical Association and the eightieth annual conference of the institution was held in Liverpool from 23rd to 26th July, dates which clashed with the first International Conference of the Eugenics Education Society. His election may well have been seen as an accolade for the medical profession in Liverpool and, in particular, for the Liverpool Medical Institute, of which he was a prominent and active member and a former president. However, he provoked a storm among Catholic members of the local medical profession when he used his presidential address to deliver a eugenic theme. Taking Henri Bergson’s theme for his Huxley lecture (1911) he turned Bergson’s questions, “Who are we? What are we doing here? Whence do we come and whither do we go?”, upon the medical profession. He argued that doctors must point the way to renew the race from the mentally and physically fit and prevent moral and physical degenerates from adding to the race and that no one has the right to bequeath feeble-minded degenerates on the next generation. “The feeble-minded are a growing incubus on the nation and should be subjected, humanely, to sterilisation or segregation, although the latter is more likely to be accepted.” Using such emotive headlines as “Mutilating Eugenicists, Catholic Medical Men Condemn Sterilisation” The Daily Post and Mercury reported that Catholic doctors “… unreservedly condemn the suggested sterilisation of the unfit…” describing sterilisation as “… a crime against humanity …”.

Besides propagating the eugenic message the Branch involved itself in wider issues. It protested strongly against abandonment of the Mental Deficiency Bill, a private member’s bill, drafted by the Eugenics Education Society, sending copies of their resolution to the Home Secretary and to local members of parliament. Later, in January 1915, concerned at the adverse effects of the war on the professional classes, in particular those not covered either by the Queen’s Fund or the Prince of Wales’s Fund, the Branch was instrumental in forming a Professional Classes War Relief Committee. It was also involved in the work of the Committee on Venereal Diseases.

In common with other provincial branches the Liverpool Branch suspended activities in 1916, a direct consequence of the War. Sir James Barr, as a Lieut-Colonel in the Territorial Force Royal Army Medical Corps and a member of the Central War Committee, was engaged on important war work. The war had been particularly dysgenic for him in that his son, S. Tudor Barr, Lieutenant, King’s Own Third Hussars, had been killed in action. In his future eugenic writings he would point to the “comrades of the Great War”, the virile fighting men, as the best hope for the future of the race. He also saw the flu epidemic of 1918 as compensating for the dysgenic effects of the war. Attempts to revive the Branch in 1919 were defeated by the difficulties this would have entailed. It was not, however, the end of eugenic activity within the City. Sir James Barr, who had once declined to refer to birth control in one of his addresses, was one of several eugenicists inspired by Marie Stopes’s vision. He accepted a vice-presidency in the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress and became a patron of Stopes’s Mothers Clinic. Within the University of Liverpool the eugenic spirit was continued by men such as R D Laurie, Cyril Burt, A M Carr-Saunders, David Caradog Jones and others.