The Social Context Of Eugenic Thought

By Professor W H G Armytage

XIV “A Greying Britain: The Road to Gerontopia”

Though the then 12 per cent did not rise half as much - indeed by 1971 it had only risen to 16 per cent - the Beveridge horrorscope prompted the eighty year old Sir Charles Arden Close to insist that his co-evals “must learn to take a larger share in the nation’s work” as on “general grounds” it was “highly desirable that other units of the British Commonwealth should increase their relatively sparse populations by immigration from this country.”(1)

As the United Kingdom passed the fifty million mark on 31 December 1947 with the largest age group between 35 and 45, and the prospect of a grey Britain by the 1970’s was confirmed by the Royal Commission on the Population, Roy Harrod conjured up a picture of the ‘Old Man of the Sea’ preparing to strangle and crush us to death. The crushing would be effected by the insupportable cost of retirement pensions which would have more than doubled by 1978, resulting in another 4 shillings in the pound on income tax.(2)

A further implication of the gerontopia of the 1970’s was foreseen by the Royal Commission: the strength of the old age pensioners as a political pressure group. Indeed it foresaw English society becoming “dangerously unprogressive, falling behind other communities not only in technical efficiency and economic welfare but in intellectual and artistic achievement as well.”(3)

All this added up in Roy Harrod’s mind to a grim answer: that there was “no rule of conduct which forces us, irrespective of the consequences, to succour and prolong the life of the aged.” He saw the question as “one of expediency” and pleaded for the “application of common-sense” in advocating a Special Royal Commission on the Aged. And in the meantime, “All the special medical research into the diseases of old age should be stopped forthwith; indeed all the researchers should be switched to devising anti-old-age measures of the humane kind … and all Social Service policy should be examined to ensure that, while keeping hardship to a minimum, we are not actively engaged in courses designed to prolong lives already over-long.”(4)

Nor was Harrod the only gerontophobe for earlier George Orwell had described as “frightening” the prospect that “in seventy years time” one half of the population of about eleven millions would be old age pensioners. He added “Since for complex reasons most people don’t want large families, the frightening facts exist somewhere or other in their consciousness, simultaneously known and not known.”(5)

Attacked by The Times for favouring the childless family, the first Labour budget, though defended by the Chancellor, Dr Hugh Dalton, was followed by the news that births had declined compared with the same period in 1944.(6)

This was like giving a bone to a bulldog as, now in opposition, Churchill could prophesy that the attempt to “turn Great Britain into a Socialist state would”, as it developed, “produce widespread political strife, misery and ruin at home.” “This island”, he growled, “will not be able to support above three quarters of the population which now inhabits it.” He even equated ‘labour’ policies with depopulation: “At least one quarter of all who are alive today will have to disappear in one way or another after enduring a lowering of standards of food and comfort, inconceivable in the last fifty years. Emigration, even if practised on a scale never before dreamed of, could not operate in time to prevent this melancholy decline.”(7)

No decline was visible to the Punjabi peddlers who padded from door to door all over the Midlands. Just before the war in 1938 they had founded the first Indian Workers’ Association (Hindustani Mazdoor Sabha) in Coventry.(8)

After the war the nearby Bishop of Birmingham publicly deplored what he called “the immigration of low grade Indians” and forecast that the country would see “the growth of Anglo-Indian centres of disorder in many of our large cities” which could “easily become plague spots from which moral contamination spreads.”(9)

Moreover the award of British citizenship in 1948 to members of the Commonwealth who had fought for the country during the war encouraged other members of the Commonwealth to come. PEP noted that as a result “a much greater number of people of high ability would be available in future”, and suggested that if it was not possible to develop their talents fully or make the best possible use of them in their native countries, “places must be found for them in Britain or elsewhere in the Commonwealth.”(10)

Though Eva Hubback agreed that immigration was “the obvious policy in the near future” she feared that “on a vast scale” it was “a counsel of despair … a sign” that we had “failed to maintain the vitality and spirit to keep our community alive.”(11) Nor could Richard Titmuss see the “coloured races of India” and the Colonies providing much needed “new substantial additions” to the British population. “Difficulties bulk so large at the present time”, he wrote, adding presciently, “although they may not do so in thirty years time.”(12)

Coloured immigrants also preoccupied the owner of the Liberal Daily News, Lawrence Cadbury, who indicated the case of South Africa as a warning of what had to be done to discourage intermarriage between different racial groups. The possibility of unions between Africans and Europeans was not so much a genetic as a social problem, for with inferior nurture and a built-in feeling of being rejected, a child would be as socially marred as if he had been misbegotten.(13) The moral was again underlined by Dr Maurice Newfield, who asked; “If innate advantages and handicaps are difficult to disentangle from those environmentally acquired by the English Registrar-General’s Classes V and VI, how much more difficult will they be to unravel in the product of socially reprehended racial crossings! Perhaps we need not wait for the results of anthropological and genetic research before discouraging, as a principle of policy, crossings between Africans and Europeans.”(14)

So perhaps Oliver, the husband of Ray Strachey, historian of the Women’s Movement, was really justifying the nickname given to his relatives and friends - “The Gloomsbury Group” - when he told Roy Harrod that “it does not matter if the British race dies out, since others will keep the human race alive on this planet.”(15)