Eugenics: Why family planning guru Marie Stopes plotted to ruin her son’s marriage

You can still read those letters today. At the Wellcome Trust in London there are boxes and boxes of these pleas for help. They came from the Home Counties and the Glasgow slums. They make heartrending reading, particularly those from poor mothers struggling with big families of small children, their slide into greater poverty accelerated by ’him not working’, or spending what little they have on drink.

There are letters from men, too. A senior officer in a Scottish regiment placed an order for ‘Married Love’. Overheard mess room conversations between his men had so appalled him that he wanted a copy to teach the lads a better way to treat the women in their lives.

Dr Stopes briskly answered all these pleas for help. A few words would be dictated to a secretary and a leaflet enclosed describing options for birth control with the addresses of the Mother’s Clinics. Aberdeen had one in Gerrard Street. Women could attend the clinic and be fitted with a discreet contraceptive cervical cap. Married women, obviously.

There was also a clinic in Glasgow, but Marie doesn't mention that. It was opened in 1925 by the formidable Mary Barbour. The two women didn’t get on. To be fair, Marie Stopes didn’t really get on with anyone for very long.

On the surface, Dr Stopes was a compassionate campaigner, but a closer look reveals some uncomfortable and less charitable motivations.

Sickly, working-class babies

Marie made no bones about it, the working classes should not be breeding in these numbers. The babies they were having were just not up to scratch. If a woman gives birth to child after child, sickly babies will be the inevitable result and of no use to the Empire or its armies, depleted after the First World War.

Eugenics. That was the way ahead. Controlling fertility meant that society could be free from what she and her Eugenics friends considered ‘sub-par’. Naturally, they were the ones to define who was and wasn't ‘suitable’, in appallingly egregious terms. It's safe to say that it was basically anyone who wasn’t white, fit and capable of either giving birth to strong children or serving on a frontline somewhere.

There’s a massive clue branded right across her famous contraceptive cap. It was called ‘Prorace’, a name that would cause a sharp intake of breath today, and not only when it was being fitted.

Daughter of a war hero

Despite some seriously questionable opinions, and writing a gushing letter to Adolf Hitler in 1939, Marie Stopes was a woman held in high regard. By her forties, Marie had just about everything she really wanted, including a son. Harry was, in his mother’s eyes, the ultimate perfect human. His father possibly thought so too, but his opinion didn’t really matter too much to Dr Stopes. She made her second husband live in another part of the house and he hardly saw his son at all.

They lived, naturally, in a leafy suburb, and had good neighbours. Barnes Wallis, the famous ‘Bouncing Bomb’ Dambusters engineer lived in a house behind hers, with his family, two sons and two daughters. One of those daughters was called Mary. As a child, she had helped her father measure the potential bounce of the bombs, using marbles, catapults and a tin bath. She had a degree in history from the University of London. She and Harry, the only son of Marie Stopes, fell in love.

Mary was bright, beautiful and the daughter of a war hero. You’d expect the crashing snob that was Marie Stopes to be thrilled by this match. You’d be very wrong.

Uninvited from Christmas party

Mary wore glasses. She was short-sighted. This was unthinkable to the eugenics types. Marie made her feelings known. She struck a line straight through the Barnes Wallis names on the guest list for her Christmas party. Curtly she informed Harry that they had been uninvited.

On the night of the party, Harry himself stood up before all the guests who’d managed to stay on the list, and welcomed them warmly to his mother’s house. He wished them a Happy Christmas, then smartly walked out the back door and through the garden to the home of the Barnes Wallis family, into the arms of the woman he loved.

Marie Stopes was incandescent with rage. She refused to attend the wedding. She became the mother-in-law from hell, ever on hand to snipe and criticise. She wasn’t perfect granny material either. Harry and Mary had four children, and she wasn’t shy of meting out endless ‘advice’.

Warm, loving man

Astonishingly, despite the fairly awful childhood Harry had endured at the hands of his controlling mother, Harry was a warm, loving and caring man who adored his children and his wife. In an interview in 2012, Mary talked about how he handled his mother. Harry drove his domineering mother mad by simply not taking her seriously. He’d laugh at her endless nit-picking, ignore her carping and smile at her attempts to bully the family into doing things her way.

Karma can indeed be a bitch. Marie Stopes developed breast cancer, and in her last days had to be cared for in Harry’s home, by the very daughter-in-law she despised. An interviewer asked if Dr Stopes mellowed with age. “Oh goodness me, no”, she replied, laughing “Got worse, if anything.”

She died in 1958. She probably thought she had the last laugh on Harry and Mary. She cut them out of her will, leaving her fortune to the Eugenics Society. Harry didn’t care. He had Mary. They were together for 66 years. Truly married love.