The Cedric Carter Memorial Medal is awarded by the Institute on a triennial basis to recipients who, in the opinion of Council, have made outstanding contributions either to the work of the Institute or in the general field of eugenics. Council’s nomination for the 1994 award is a reminder - as was that of Lady Houghton six years ago - of the Institute’s radical pioneering past; in this case the Society’s practical involvement with birth control provision through the Marie Stopes Clinic.
The Clinic was operated by the Eugenics Society - through a legal subsidiary named the Marie Stopes Memorial Foundation (of which Faith Schenk was Company Secretary) - from 30 May 1960 until 19 March 1976. The MSMF Board managed the Clinic through a Director who was responsible to the Board for the day-to-day running of an organisation which operated from ten in the morning to eight in the evening on every working day; which offered 500 doctor supervised sessions a year and which, in addition to giving birth control advice to 10,000 patients a year, pioneered the training of overseas nurses, the operation of domiciliary birth control services in London and Southampton, marital difficulties sessions and pregnancy-testing laboratories. The Director responsible for the oversight of all these activities from the outset and for the first nine years of the Clinic’s control by the Eugenics Society was Helen Brook. Mrs. Brook, as she then was (her husband, Robin, a former Director of the Bank of England and High Sheriff of the County of London, was knighted in 1974), was a superb and tireless administrator. When she resigned the Directorship in 1969 the Eugenics Society’s Annual Report for that year recorded “its indebtedness for her work, enthusiasm and encouragement which, particularly in the early days of management, have continued in no small measure to the present smooth running of the Clinic.”
This measured testimony hardly did justice to Helen Brook’s unique and innovating talents. In every year of her Directorship she initiated some new development: the introduction of male doctors into what had previously been an exclusively female milieu, cervical smear sessions and clinic open-days for local authority personnel. In the last year of her Directorship alone - 1969 - she established vasectomy clinics and a pregnancy advisory service to parallel those initiated by ALRA, securing for the professional supervision of these services the help of Mr Peter Diggory who had been advisor to David Steel throughout the parliamentary passage of the 1967 Abortion Act. Mr Diggory, in turn, was able to attract, as part-time consultant to the Clinic, Miss Dorothea (“Kay”) Kerslake, a highly respected consultant surgeon who had pioneered vacuum aspiration procedures in this country. The Clinic thus became the first and, for a time, the only centre in London where both vasectomy and pregnancy termination could be obtained on an out-patient basis.
Helen Brook’s most lasting and widely-acclaimed achievement, however, had been started five years earlier when, in 1964, she persuaded the Board to give her the personal use of clinic and office space on the top floor of the Whitfield Street premises and a grant of £1,000 - £8,000 at today’s values - to set up a Young People’s Advisory Centre which, on four evenings a week provided doctor-supervised birth control sessions for the young unmarried under the leadership of Dr. Faith Spicer. To offer contraceptive advice to the young and unmarried (many under the age of legal consent) thirty years ago was a courageous and highly controversial undertaking. The Family Planning Association was hostile and even the more enlightened Board of the Stopes Clinic was relieved that although being carried out on its premises it was undertaken at a degree removed by the semi-detached Advisory Centre which later became the Brook Advisory Centre Ltd. Nevertheless, under this mutually agreeable arrangement, the Board gave its fullest support to the project which in its first three years of operation provided contraceptive instruction to 7,000 single girls.
Helen Brook’s retirement as Director of the Marie Stopes Clinic was undertaken to enable her to devote all her time to the development and expansion of the Brook Advisory clinics. That growth, from a single clinic begun with the support of the Eugenics Society in two upstairs rooms of the Marie Stopes Clinic, to the nation-wide organisation which now provides contraceptive advice to 53,000 girls each year, is a chapter in twentieth century social history.
Brook Advisory has 27 clinics in England, Wales and Scotland, as well as a clinic in Belfast which operates under conditions of perpetual siege. The importance of such an organisation in a society where half a million women are single parents (and a third of these have never married), where one family in five is headed by a single parent and the birth rate amongst under-16s is 9.3 per 1,000 (one of the highest in Europe) cannot be over-stated. In 1990 there were, in England and Wales, 8,600 pregnancies amongst girls aged 13 to 15 resulting in 4,100 abortions and 4,300 live births.
In everything which has been written about the Brook Advisory, its founder and her colleagues have always given gracious acknowledgement to the early support of the Eugenics Society. Cedric Carter, one of the most distinguished past-Presidents of the Eugenics Society, and amongst the three long-serving representatives of the Society on the Marie Stopes Board, used to describe it as a “workshop of applied eugenics”. He would have approved Council’s choice of recipient for this year’s medal.