The Social Context of Eugenic Thought

Whereas 507,000 of the increase in Britain’s population from 1931-9 had come through immigration(1), over 400,000 had made enquiries about possible emigration from the end of the war to August 1947.(2) These reflected the views of the Chiefs of Staff and Sir Henry Tizard, who in April and May of the preceding year had argued that the United Kingdom, as the most vulnerable target to atomic weapons of any of the great powers, should disperse its industrial and scientific resources as well as its skilled manpower to the Commonwealth.(3) As the most widely dispersed of the world’s political groups, the British Empire offered “incomparable opportunities for the redistribution of vulnerable industries and stocks and for the posting and training of military, naval and air formations.”(4)

“Don’t help to starve and suffocate each other,” urged the Australian Minister of Immigration in The Times.(5) The secretary of the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf - a canon of the Church of England - actually set the figure of 35 millions as the demographic slimming target for Britain(6), whilst the Eugenics Society’s own ‘gloomy Dean’, W R Inge, was positively radiant as he contemplated a return to pre-industrial England with the population living mainly on the land.(7)

Even secular pundits, like the war-time Brains Truster, C E M Joad (8), said Amen to this nunc dimittis: a diaspora for which the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer saw no alternative.(9) Nor indeed did the Labour Leader of the Lords - a former medical professor - who told that august Chamber that “The Government considered it right that Britain should afford the expenses of the population which migrated to the Empire.”(10)

The eighty year old pre-war President of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems rephrased the question he had asked twenty-one years earlier in a famous lecture “Our Crowded Island”; “If we find the utmost difficulty in feeding 48 millions, how shall we be able to feed a still larger number?”(11)

Even the pre-war export of children was resumed, the first party leaving for Australia in October 1947 and by 1951, 2,118 had been dispatched. The Women's Group on Public Welfare hoped to improve the operations of some nine other voluntary emigration societies by providing a feedback, in association with the National Council of Social Service, on the results.(12)

Apart from children (13), the 174,945 British adults who went to Canada between 1946 and 1952 accounted for thirty per cent of all entrants to that Dominion during that period.(14) Perhaps even more would have gone there and to Australia but for the invocation of the United Nations declaration on human rights in the case of Mrs O’Keefe in 1949.(15) Contemplating the exodus, Brinley Thomas took to the BBC to sound a note of warning: “It is not much comfort to John Bull to have to become a chronic invalid in order that his children overseas should live happily ever after … it is by no means obvious that a wise defence policy requires a mass exodus from this island.”(16)

With a birth rate well below replacement level, the maintenance of a large flow of emigration was thought by the Royal Commission on the Population as “hardly practicable or desirable”.(17) Their opinion, though written in 1945, was not published till 1949 when the reproduction rate had improved from twenty to ten per cent below replacement level.(18)

So they called for an annual immigration of 170,000 young adults over the years 1949-1959 to compensate for the low birth-cohorts of the previous decade. Hopefully they looked to the Republic of Ireland and Europe for such immigrants but were not optimistic that either could supply such numbers. So they concluded that Britain was demographically incapable of supplying emigrants in the numbers suggested.

Nor were they alone in this opinion. Fifteen years earlier the Economic Advisory Committee had warned the Dominions that when the time came that they would once again welcome immigrants it might not be in the economic interest of Britain to supply them.(19) Indeed, in the year before war began the Dominions were urged to search outside the United Kingdom for immigrants and it was suggested that “The admission of a carefully regulated flow of foreign immigrants of assimilable types, preferably from those countries whose inhabitants were sprung originally from the same stock as ourselves and who share our outlook in many directions has much to commend it.”(20)

So too, far from encouraging emigration, Brinley Thomas also wanted to encourage immigration. Citing the migration from the depressed areas between the wars, he argued that Britain, by losing men and capital, could become “the depressed area of the Commonwealth, prematurely aged, struggling with a crippling load of debt”, having “to abdicate the leadership of the Western European democracies and live on the charity of the English speaking world.”(21)

Help was however in the country, for to assist it during the war large numbers of West Indians had come to join the services and were demobilised here, where they found some of their countrymen who had come to work in industry. Some had married. Many of them decided to stay and supply the acute shortage of labour. Indeed, London Transport even sent over a recruiting officer to the West Indies to persuade yet more to come. This was greatly helped by the United States shutting the door to all but selected immigrants in 1948. The SS Empire Windrush - the ship which brought the first consignment to England - deserves to become as well known in demographic history as the Mayflower.

The paranoia which in America generated the panic identification of flying objects in space was replicated in Britain by fears that the island was being invaded by immigrants wanting family allowances, spectacles and free false teeth. Their capacity to obtain these ‘privileges’ intended for whites only was attributed to the Gujarati doctors who were scattered all over the country and provided with unlimited prescription pads. Here, indeed, was the final fulfilment of the mythology of the cargo cult.

(1) Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth, 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1973, p71.

(2) The Times 29 August 1947.

(3) R W Clark, Sir Henry Tizard.

(4) The Times, 27 April 1946.

(5) A A Colwell, The Times, 29 August 1947.

(6) Canon P J Andrews, Exeter Express, 10 June 1948.

(7) The Hibbert Journal, January 1948.

(8) Sunday Dispatch, 7 October 1945 (C E M Joad).

(9) The Times, 28 February 1928 (Dr Hugh Dalton).

(10) Hansard, November 1947 (Lord Addison).

(11) Sir Charles Arden-Close, “Our Crowded Island”, Eugenics Review XL (1948-9) p29. In 1927 he had delivered his presidential address to the Geographical Association on “Population and Migration”.

(12) Child Emigration, National Council of Social Service, 1951; John Moss, Child Migration to Australia, HMSO, 1953, p49.

(13) Kenneth Bagnell, The Little Immigrants, Macmillan, 1950.

(14) David Corbett, Canada’s Immigration Policy, University of Toronto Press, 1957, p90.

(15) A C Palfreyman, The Administration of the White Australian Policy, Melbourne University Press, 1967, pp 21, 88.

(16) Brinley Thomas, “Migration and the British Commonwealth”, BBC Talk, 21 May 1948.

(17) Papers of the Royal Commission on Population, Volume III, Report of Economics Committee, p20.

(18) Report of the Royal Commission on the Population, p122.

(19) Committee on Empire Migration, Cmd 4075 (1932), pp ix, para 57.

(20) Report of the Overseas Settlement Board May 1939, Cmd 5766 (1938, pp xiv para 48.)

(21) Brinley Thomas, “Does our Migration Policy make Sense?”, ‘Migration and the British Commonwealth’, Eugenics Review XL (1948-9), p131.