Britain’s brush with eugenics

In 1911 Karl Pearson became the first chair of eugenics at University College London. Eugenics held that humanity could be “improved” by encouraging those with desirable mental and physical attributes to reproduce, or by preventing those with “inferior” attributes from doing so. Pearson used numbers to imbue both approaches with scientific authority. In 1926, lecturing to teachers at the London County Council, he offered a statistical grounding for the increase in poor eyesight being observed in children. Through graphs he sought to illustrate how biological inheritance led to vision difficulties in the capital’s classrooms. In earlier centuries, he mused, many of these (predominantly working-class) children would not have survived. But now they not only survived but multiplied, embodying an “ever-present fear that the scientific mind recognises”: that “civilised man has largely destroyed crude Natural Selection”. Pearson proposed government intervention to manage this threat.

The career of eugenics in Britain is uneven. On the one hand the nation’s most celebrated scientific minds shaped its foundational principles. Charles Darwin opened the door by bringing together inherited characteristics and natural selection. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, then applied his relative’s evolutionary model to humanity, coining the term “eugenics” in 1883. Overseas scientists took inspiration from both men and established eugenics research institutes and lobbying organizations in their own countries. Eugenics was an influential British scientific export.

On the other hand, Britain did not go as far as some other countries in enacting eugenics legislation. Hitler deployed forced sterilization and the gas chamber to pursue a nightmarish vision of “racial hygiene”. It is less well known that the Nazis drew inspiration from the US. In 1907 Indiana became the first state to enact a compulsory sterilization programme. Thirty-one other states followed suit. In Britain, the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 constituted the most significant eugenics law, enabling parents to petition for a “defective” child under twenty-one to be incarcerated in a specialized “colony” or placed under strict “guardianship”. Parliament rejected sterilization policies in the 1930s.

At face value Britain appears to have taken a comparatively moderate path. However, Sarah Wise’s piercing social history of the Mental Deficiency Act, The Undesirables, takes a different view by revealing the damage wrought on this legislation’s victims, principally women and working-class Britons. By 1950 the state had detained approximately 50,000 people whom doctors judged to be “feeble-minded”, “idiots”, “imbeciles”, or “moral imbeciles”. Many had learning difficulties or a chronic illness. Others were simply unmarried mothers.

The national network of specialized colonies for the “defective” promised in 1913 did not materialize. Older asylums or workhouses filled the gaps. These institutions enforced harsh regimes of control. Meanwood Park Colony, near Leeds, restricted visits to just two hours a month and punished minor infringements with physical assault and solitary confinement. Given the concerns over heredity, wardens forbade inmates from mixing with the opposite sex. If caught, residents had to scrub floors in their underwear. By the end of the 1920s most of Britain’s “defective” population lived under “guardianship” in the community rather than in institutions. Wise shows that this alternative was not always an improvement, with forced labour and sexual abuse commonplace.

The Board of Control – a special body based in Whitehall – usually dispatched curt rejections to letters from parents asking for their child’s return. Many families seemingly regretted their earlier decision to commit relatives. Others, though, just wanted rid of a troublesome child and thought little of their plight.

The author could have done more to explain why people accepted eugenics as a science. She rightly lambasts “poorly evidenced hereditarian opinion” and praises the “extremely good environmental arguments” made in opposition. Some readers, though, might wonder why eugenics enjoyed any scientific credibility at all. In fact, as Pearson’s statistical examinations of children’s eyesight testify, eugenicists made sophisticated (if dangerously flawed) arguments based on empiricism and theory. His successor at UCL was R. A. Fisher, a titan of genetics who blended Mendelian inheritance, Darwinian natural selection and mathematics to advance eugenic proposals in his field-defining bookThe Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930). Although eugenicists always provoked criticism, paid insufficient attention to “environment” as an explanatory factor and became discredited, they drew authority from multiple strands of the modern life sciences and constitute an important part of its history.

Nevertheless, Sarah Wise demonstrates shrewdly how eugenic justifications for the Mental Deficiency Act faded and the law became a tool to regulate bad citizenship, “problem families” and unruly women after the 1940s. The Mental Health Act of 1959 repealed the 1913 legislation. The Undesirables does not present abolition as liberation, instead tracing the stories of people who continued to live in institutions or who struggled when released. The government has never offered an apology to the thousands detained. This powerful book might offer a step in that direction.

Andrew Seaton is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at University College London. He is the author of Our NHS: A history of Britain’s best-loved institution, 2023

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