Colin Bertram

At the March Council Meeting, Peter Diggory as the Institute’s President, presented the Galton Plate to Colin Bertram in recognition of his outstanding service to the Institute.

Colin served as a biologist in both Arctic and Antarctic explorations in the 1930s. When the second world war broke out he used his expertise to produce the Army’s handbook on cold weather equipment. He was then sent as Chief Fisheries Officer to Palestine and the Middle East. In 1945 he was appointed to a fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he remained as tutor and senior tutor for the next 27 years. This was no cloistered existence, for during this time he was also Director of the Scott Polar Institute for seven years, Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society and Chairman of its expeditions committee for ten years, and he also held visiting professorships in New Zealand and Guyana.

Colin joined the Eugenics Society as a student in the 1930s. He is now our most respected and longest serving Fellow. With the possible exception of C. P. Blacker, Colin Bertram has done more for us and had a greater influence on our actions than anyone else. He joined Council in 1949 and wrote one of our earliest Occasional Papers (No  5 "On Population Trends and the World’s Biological Resources"), a serious warning against overpopulation at a time of demographic optimism. In 1951 he developed this theme in his Galton Lecture. He and C. P. Blacker served as the Eugenics Society’s delegates to the First World Population Conference in Bombay where they joined Lady Houghton and others in founding the International Planned Parenthood Federation whose first offices were provided rent free by the Eugenics Society in its Eccleston Square premises.

From 1957 to 1961, Colin was General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, a post which was then a part-time scientific appointment and involved his travelling to Eccleston Square twice a week from Cambridge. He and C. P. Blacker provided exceptional leadership during this highly productive period in our history. In 1958 he wrote a further Occasional Paper on West Indian immigration which was circulated to all MPs and favourably reviewed in The Times.

In 1959 it fell to Colin to deal with the Eugenics Society’s inheritance of the Marie Stopes Clinic and for twenty years he served on the committee of management, chairing it for most of the time. This phase of the Eugenics Society’s history still needs to be properly recorded, but the fact that it was able to manage the clinic to the benefit of the whole birth control movement as well as to its own credit was primarily due to Colin Bertram.

Colin finally retired from Council at the 1995 Annual General Meeting.