Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon.1 Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from public health campaigns to totalitarian dreams of the perfectibility of humankind. In the past and the present, eugenics speaks to questions of race, class, gender and sex, evolution, governance, nationalism, disability, and the social implications of science. David Watt says Quakers need not, and should not, shy away from their connections with the eugenics movement.2 He is referring to the US but the same holds good for British Quakers, to whom this article is confined.

Eugenics originated in Britain as a biological way of thinking about social, economic, political, and cultural change. Bland and Hall say it gave scientific credibility to prejudices, anxieties and fears that were prevalent among the middle and upper classes.3 They also point to complex factors at play, some of which were ideological, some tactical, and some about personalities. Nils Roll-Hansen portrays eugenics as a science-based movement to combat threatening degeneration, initiated by idealistic scientists and inspired by a humanistic Enlightenment ideal of science as the servant of human welfare.4 Lyndsay Farrall identifies the English movement of eugenics as statistical and biometrical in nature in contrast to groups using other methodologies and assumptions.5 Farrall sees the British eugenics movement in the context of contemporary middle-class radicalism and concepts of national efficiency and social imperialism.

Francis Galton is considered the founder of eugenics. He was a birthright Quaker from the family of gun manufacturers linked to industrialisation and the expansion of the British empire.6 Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883.

It is on the basis of such remarks that Anne Hanley alleges ‘Galton was obsessed with measuring human differences, not for its own sake, but to legitimise and cement his and his contemporaries’ belief that they were racially superior to everybody else’.8

Especial notoriety attaches to Galton’s heir and the first holder of the Galton Chair of Eugenics at University College London (UCL), Karl Pearson. He was from a middle-class Quaker family but non-practising. His contribution to science was to develop innovative statistical methods to describe the distribution of trait-values in populations and to predict their change between generations. He was sceptical of environmentalism and of the Mendelian genetics of William Bateson of Cambridge University, environmentalism meaning in this context an emphasis on environmental conditions rather than inheritance in human development. Eric Hobsbawn anticipated the point about personalities from Bland and Hall by saying that the early years of genetics ‘were bedevilled by a persistent and embittered quarrel between the Mendelians, who were most influential in the USA and amongst experimentalists, and the so-called biometricians, who were stronger in Britain and among mathematically advanced statisticians, and of whom Pearson was the chief’.9 Pearson used Galton’s Quakerism to posit a biological theory about the effect of religious differentiation upon human types. The ‘doctrines of George Fox’, Pearson suggested,

From one point of view, Galton and Pearson contributed meaningfully to the nature-v.-nurture debate that continues to tax us.11 From another point of view, as Joe Cain says, Pearson promoted a racist, nativist, supremacist programme favouring his vision of ‘Anglo-Saxon stock’.12 He and his research assistant, Ethel Elderton, took advantage of their position within UCL to develop this programme and insulate it from external criticism. Pearson failed to carry much support in the UK eugenics community as a whole.13 In the 1930s, as a septuagenarian, he praised Hitler and Nazi race hygiene but the public scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who was on the staff of UCL from 1929, was scathing about German eugenics programmes and wrote and spoke widely on the matter.14

If Pearson had little political influence, the same was not true of the Eugenics Education Society, renamed the Eugenics Society in 1926, which was founded in London in 1907 by the social hygienist Sybil Gotto, later Sybil Neville-Rolfe, ‘with the purpose of promoting, to paraphrase Francis Galton, those agencies under social control which might improve the human race’.15 Gotto was particularly interested in positive eugenics, or promoting good human ‘stock’ rather than curtailing the bad. Positive eugenics overlapped with other political and meliorist programmes. We see this in Gotto’s case with her advocacy of early marriage and parenthood amongst those of the middle- and working-classes deemed efficient in terms of national strength. She called for measures which are progressive by modern standards, such as sex education, divorce law reform, making fathers of the illegitimate responsible for their off-spring, birth control, improved ante- and post-natal services, state-funded housing, a family allowance and a Ministry of Health.16 As we see below, the establishment of a Ministry of Health in 1919 had consequences for the Quaker George Newman, who became its chief medical officer.

A negative concern of the Eugenics Education Society was ‘feeble-mindedness’, a term that is no longer acceptable but in its day was a catch-all for people deemed to lack mental capacity and moral judgment. Pressure from campaigners Mary Dendy and Ellen Pinsent led to the setting up in 1904 of a Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded. The Commission’s report, published in 1908, proposed that the care and control already available for children deemed to be mentally deficient should be extended to the over-16s to remove their presence from prisons and lunatic asylums. Four years later, a Feeble-Minded Control Bill was put forward by a private member, Gershom Stewart. It made it a punishable misdemeanour to marry or attempt to marry a ‘mental defective’ or to solemnise, procure or connive at such a marriage. In addition, it gave the Home Secretary the power to commit persons who fell outside the definition of feeble-mindedness but whose circumstances appeared to warrant their inclusion. Lastly, it provided for certification and segregation. The provisions relating to marriage and to the Home Secretary’s powers were dropped from the government’s own Mental Deficiency Bill of 1912 but the basic plan of registration and segregation was retained when in 1913 the measure passed its final reading in the House of Commons with only three votes against.

The Mental Deficiency Act was, according to Philippa Levine, a signal victory for the eugenicists.17 This judgment may be modified to the extent that practical considerations concerning the care of vulnerable women rather than theoretical eugenics were uppermost in the minds of the MPs debating the measure.18 It can also be pointed out that the Act omitted the extremely authoritarian measures in the private member’s Bill. Be that as it may, the legislation did not prosper even by the standard of its supporters. Institutions were overcrowded, under-resourced and poorly managed.19 There is no data on how successful the Act was in its aim of preventing the presence in prisons and lunatic asylums of those determined as mentally deficient. We cannot be sure whether the vulnerable persons controlled under the legislation were thereby protected from abuse or further exposed to it. We can be more confident, however, that the regime was unpopular with the public, which thought it class-discriminatory, and that later literature has seen it as a great scandal, people detained under the Act being discovered in institutions as late as the 1970s.20

Although the organized eugenics movement remained small and elitist throughout its history, eugenic assumptions pervaded the middle and upper reaches of British society at least until the Second World War.21 However, the eugenicists were unpopular in the country at large and came under pressure from witty left-leaning polymaths, particularly Lancelot Hogben, who was a Quaker, and the non-Quaker J. B. S. Haldane. Both of these two agreed with eugenic policies such as birth control and voluntary sterilisation but rejected the claim that conditions such as feeble-mindedness or alcoholism were inheritable, which they saw as class prejudice. In 1924 pressure from the eugenicists caused the Quaker George Newman in his capacity as the chief medical officer of the Board of Education to set up an interdepartmental committee under A. H. Wood to consider the problems presented by the mentally defective child. A year later the committee extended its remit to include adult defectives.22 Wood reported in January 1929 recommending that mentally deficient children should not be isolated from mainstream education, a move against the principle of segregation. On the other hand, he warned that the incidence of ‘mental deficiency’ was increasing. This warning formed the background to a private member’s measure, the Sterilisation Bill, that was put before Parliament in 1931. In his introductory speech Archibald Church, a Labour MP and organising secretary of the Eugenics Society, made clear that voluntary sterilisation would be a preliminary to compulsion. The opposing speaker, the physician and socialist H. B. W. Morgan, was scathing about the measure’s aim of reducing the incidence of ‘mental deficiency’. In words probably drafted by Hogben, Morgan said of the Bill,

The Bill was rejected by 167 votes to 89 thanks to opposition from Catholics and from other Labour MPs. Among those voting in favour was the feminist and social reformer Eleanor Rathbone, who from 1937 was to be the partner MP to the Quaker T. Edmund Harvey for the double-member constituency of the Combined English Universities.24

The eugenicists were encouraged by the Wood report and not disheartened by the failure of the Sterilisation Bill in 1931. Nevertheless, the remainder of the 1930s saw the decline of their movement, largely because of internal contradictions but also because of the taint of Nazi eugenics. In 1931 C. P. Blacker, the secretary of the Eugenics Society, established a Social Problem Group that, he hoped, would offer a scientific solution for the country’s social problems.25 In parallel, the government set up a departmental committee on sterilisation under Laurence Brock, who reported in 1934. He concluded not only that it was desirable to encourage the sterilising of mentally defective and mentally disordered patients but that the scope of sterilisation should be extended to people with physical disabilities. The report was vague about who would be considered for sterilisation or how consent would be obtained. It acknowledged the considerable ignorance and uncertainty surrounding the biological origins of ‘mental deficiency’, and observed that ‘the more closely individual records are examined the more difficult it becomes to fix on one cause to the exclusion of others, or to say with certainty that the genetic endowment of any individual is such that it must produce a given result’.26 It was this lack of confidence in the science that prompted the undertaking of large-scale surveys, notably by the Quaker Lionel Penrose, who studied the inmates of an institution in Colchester 1931–38. In 1937 Blacker produced a volume by his Social Problem Group with papers on such topics as the mentally retarded child, mental disorder, inebriety and one by Sybil Neville-Rolfe on biological aspects of prostitution. The book showed that members of the Eugenics Society remained committed to studying what they called morbid inheritance but that they were unable to muster reliable supporting data or to provide convincing explanations for such inheritance.

Some scholars include as a figure of English eugenics the educational psychologist Cyril Burt, who is a controversial figure in his own right because of allegations about his research methods. He believed intelligence was predominantly an inherited characteristic and he successfully advocated the use of Intelligence Quotient tests for selecting pupils for grammar school education, as introduced by the Education Act 1944.27 Joe Cain says Burt institutionalised Galton’s eugenic philosophy into the British education system.28 The counter argument is that selection tests are not eugenic but a means of allocating the scarce resource of state-funded secondary education and that IQ is a good predictor of school and work performance, at least in industrialised societies.29

The weakness of eugenic science, the difficulties and unpopularity of the mental deficiency regime, the horrors of Nazi eugenics and the coming of an egalitarian National Health Service in 1948 led to the disappearance of English eugenics as a movement. However, as Alison Bashford says, eugenics transmogrified continues to form the background to such concerns as transhumanism, genetic counselling, sterility and infertility research, and human and medical genetics.30 Another aspect of eugenics transmogrified is how from 2020 there has developed a scholar-activist movement against eugenics. The movement is, as Marius Turda explains, dedicated to showing how eugenics ‘continue to affect the world in ways both obvious and hidden.’31 Unlike Mazumdar he emphasises race rather than class as the central component in the eugenic imagination.32 The movement’s Anti-Eugenics Project,

An inquiry into the history of eugenics at UCL led in June 2020 to the College announcing the denaming of the spaces and buildings called after Galton and Pearson. In January 2021 UCL issued a public apology for its history and legacy of eugenics as part of a range of actions to acknowledge and address its historical links with the eugenics movement.34 A similar case is that of Ronald Fisher, the second Galton Professor at UCL and the originator of quantitative genetics. A window in his honour at his old Cambridge college was removed in 2020 because of his alleged racism. Eugenics has thus become a subject of cultural contestation.35

In the light of mainstream and activist scholarship we turn to those Quakers who were influenced by eugenic discourses, or were varyingly involved with the movement or with the Mental Deficiency Act, to see what blame, if any, may be attached to them for what are now seen as the reprehensible features of eugenics. They are arranged in chronological order of date of birth from Edward Fry (1827) to Cedric A. B. Smith (1917).

Sir Edward Fry, Quaker dynast, judge, zoologist and campaigner for the suppression of the opium trade, was a prominent supporter of the Mental Deficiency Act. He loftily ‘commended the feeble-minded as objects of charity whose numbers would not be increased by generosity to them.’36 He signed a letter to The Times newspaper when the passage of the Mental Deficiency Bill through Parliament was at risk from a small group of opponents led by Josiah C. Wedgwood. The letter cited the existing controls on children to defend the measure against the objection that it would breach the rights of adults.

As we have seen, despite Fry’s assurances the safeguards proved insufficient to prevent abuse. Another Quaker dynast, the philanthropist Elizabeth Taylor Cadbury, was a member of the Birmingham Heredity Society but her attitudes and career of service were shaped not by eugenics but by religious faith and a belief in women’s maternal expertise.38 She took no interest in the mental deficiency regime, unlike her local contemporary, Ellen Pinsent, who dominated Birmingham’s municipal committees, winning resources for the cause of special education but earning adverse later comment.39

John William Graham was a mathematician by training who took an interest in eugenics as part of the intellectual zeitgeist of the day. He saw eugenics as politically important, saying ‘We are beginning to apply the tests of eugenics to every public issue’.40 He admired the work of the American evolutionary theorist John Fiske, who like Pearson believed in the superiority of the so-called Anglo-Saxon race, but his admiration was for how Fiske denounced war and conquest as anti-evolutionary. Graham saw war as dysgenic since it is the finest and strongest young men who tend to get killed in battle leaving the weak or cowardly to propagate their kind. Another Quaker taking an interest in eugenics was Edward Vipont Brown, a physician and temperance campaigner. He used the Friends’ Quarterly Examiner to welcome the Mental Deficiency Act though he regretted it had been ‘somewhat spoiled by sentimental philanthropists’.41 He was a tough-minded social Darwinian yet saw altruism not competition as the key survival factor. Like John William Graham he saw war as dysgenic: ‘Militarism is like an awful ogre that robs the human race of all that is divine.’ He argued for a degree of environmentalism, saying that some diseases could be eradicated and were not hereditary. As an example he gave alcoholism. He believed that the birth-rate amongst the ‘obviously unfit’ was unnaturally large and hoped that the mental deficiency legislation would ‘remedy an appalling state of things by providing for the permanent care of those feeble-minded persons whose relatives were unable or unwilling to make proper provision for them’. Thus he may be seen as a socio-medical authoritarian.

Dr Sir George Newman is an important figure in the history of Quakers and eugenics. He promoted euthenics and exercised administrative power to weaken authoritarian measures. Euthenics is the study of the improvement of human functioning and well-being by the improvement of living conditions.42 The term was prevalent in the US but not in Britain and was not one that Newman himself used but the basic idea may be seen in his career as a public health official and the government’s chief medical officer 1907–35. In 1900 he became medical officer to the Borough of Finsbury in inner London and the rural county of Bedfordshire. His experiences in these posts led him to his classic on infant mortality.43 As medical adviser to the Board of Education from 1907, he worked with his minister, the Quaker Joseph Albert Pease, to expand the school medical service, in that capacity giving advice to Elizabeth Taylor Cadbury about the service in Birmingham. In 1919 he acquired the additional appointment of chief medical officer at the newly created Ministry of Health and held both posts until retiring in 1935. He was a devout and active Quaker, editing the Friends’ Quarterly Examiner 1899–1939 and writing regular leaders anonymously from ‘The House of the Four Winds’, a term from Dan. 7:2. He was an environmentalist, sceptical about eugenics as to both its medical science and its authoritarian social programmes. He saw the segregation and institutionalisation in the Mental Deficiency Act as unnecessary and wasteful. He complained to Pease about the burden that the Act would throw on school medical officers from advising on the certification of the mentally defective.44 Sheard and Donaldson say that while at the Board of Education before 1919 he was energetic, setting up a comprehensive tuberculosis service and founding the Medical Research Council, but that after securing the post at the Ministry of Health he lost impetus.45 This is a misapprehension. In fact, as the government’s chief medical officer between the wars he quietly suppressed the eugenicists’ agenda while building up his own of preventive medicine and public health services. He denied funds to institutions for the mentally deficient, pointing out that the cost per bed exceeded the per capita cost of much needed working-class housing.46 He handled the Wood report of 1929 with skill. It recommended de-segregating education, which he must have welcomed. On the other hand the report warned of the rising numbers of ‘mental deficients’, which meant continuing pressure from the eugenicists for sterilisation. Newman succumbed to this pressure but only to the extent of setting up the committee under Brock, not only as an information-gathering exercise but also as a delaying tactic. Given that by this and other means Newman undermined the eugenicists, it might be thought that he can be excused all connection with their philosophy. Yet the establishment of a Ministry of Health and the enhanced power of public health experts like himself were amongst the euthenic measures for social reconstruction after the First World War that, as we have seen, were proposed by Sybil Gotto. Newman was an opponent of negative eugenics but his power and position was one of the outcomes of the eugenics project.

Two Quaker brothers took different positions over the Mental Deficiency Act 1913. The Quaker MP for York, Arnold Stephenson Rowntree, abstained from voting in the parliamentary debates in July 1912 and May 1913. Rowntree was friendly with Josiah C. Wedgwood and shared his libertarian objections.47 In contrast was his brother-in-law, T. Edmund Harvey, who supported the 1913 Act not from eugenicist considerations but from a concern for the presence of the vulnerable in prisons and workhouses. As the Liberal MP for West Leeds and a parliamentary private secretary he served on the committee for the passage of the legislation. He commended the Act in a preface he wrote for a legal manual by two Leeds constituents, father and son John and Samuel Wormald.48 Harvey praised the Act as one that ‘marks an important stage in the growth of the responsibility of the community for its weakest and most backward members’. He drew attention to the inadequacy of the existing arrangements, which were based on the out-dated Lunacy Laws and Poor Laws.

He pointed to the exploitation of ‘those unhappy mothers who at present come to the Workhouse to give birth to child after child and are often incapable of fulfilling even the simplest maternal duties to their unhappy children’. He called for more institutions but was aware that this would be costly, so he drew attention to the Act’s provisions for boarding out, or fostering, which he viewed as an economical use of public funds and an opportunity for voluntary charitable service. One of the Wormalds, the son Samuel, was in charge of Meanwood Park, the mental deficiency colony in Leeds, from its opening in 1919 until his retirement in 1939. He became notorious for detaining adults who were not ill or dangerous but just socially difficult. Harvey supported the Act in the light of the balance of opinion of the time but neglected to attend to how it was implemented in practice.

Marie Stopes, a palaeobotanist and campaigner for women’s rights, had a Quaker father through whom as a child she met Francis Galton. She joined the Eugenics Education Society in 1912 and became a life fellow in 1921, the same year that she founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. Her biographer describes her as a ‘maverick eugenicist’ who was shunned by the Society’s inner circle of the Eugenics Education Society.49 It would be more accurate to say Stopes found her own way of directing maternal politics and the eugenics crusade towards respectability for birth control.50 Stopes is an example of the middle-class woman like Sybil Gotto, Mary Dendy, Ellen Pinsent and Eleanor Rathbone who brought the changing role of their sex to bear on questions of poverty, sickness, health and new reproductive technologies.51

Leonard Doncaster was a Mendelian geneticist who, like his colleague at Cambridge, William Bateson, rejected Pearson’s biometric approach. In 1910 he reviewed for Newman’s Friends Quarterly Examiner the book, The Family and the Nation: a study in natural inheritance and social responsibility, by husband and wife Cecil and Catherine Whetham. The Whethams were scientists of standing and convinced eugenicists fearful for the future of the British race. They contended that there were laws governing the superiority and inferiority of human ‘stock’ that acted as a single great force and, ‘ebbing and flowing throughout the ages’ could be seen ‘moulding the fate of nations’.52 Doncaster was sceptical:

This was a criticism of the biometrician’s predilection for correlation rather than causation. The Whethams, who were eugenicists of the most unequivocal kind, have escaped censure by anti-eugenics activists, William retaining unmolested a memorial brass in the chapel of his old Cambridge college.

Godfrey Thomson, an educational psychologist, told the Friends’ Guild of Teachers in January 1929 that science tended to suggest nature is more potent than nurture in the production of intelligence and achievement.54 Thomson, who was interested in helping gifted children receive special attention to reach their full potential, provides an example of how eugenics can be seen as colouring a wide range of meliorist scientific investigation. In so far as his work would assist gifted but under-privileged children, Thomson may be regarded as an egalitarian. Similarly involved in meliorist investigation was the scientist Lewis Fry Richardson. He was a practising Quaker and a long-term member of the Eugenics Education Society and its successor, the Eugenics Society. During the First World War Richardson served in the Friends Ambulance Unit, which led him to investigate how mathematics might illuminate the way that wars happen. In this work he became a pioneer of the use of mathematics to describe and possibly predict the behaviour of groups of people, using methods that are now commonplace in the social sciences. One of Lewis’ findings was that intermarriage between nations could have a pacifying effect on potential wars. He used an argument derived from a belief in the superiority of certain groups to suggest that managerial classes from different nations could intermarry without deterioration of the superior ‘stock’. While Richardson put his argument in language we would not use today, there need be no objection to the basic idea of diversity as enhancing social integration and political stability. In his honour in 1969 the Conflict Research Society created the Richardson Institute for Peace Studies, a research body that was subsequently assisted by Lancaster University and its Department of Politics.55 Another Quaker of note was Vernon Mottram, a physiologist and nutritionist who popularised the science of the day. According to the publisher’s notice, his book, The Physical Basis Of Personality, attempted to bridge the gap between the biological and the theological viewpoints regarding the reasons for the uniqueness of the individual.56 The book shows how a Quaker’s scientific and theological understanding had, by the middle of the twentieth century, moved beyond Galton’s and Pearson’s dehumanising positivism.

David Caradog Jones was sentenced to hard labour as a conscientious objector during the First World War and about this time became interested in the Society of Friends, which became a major influence in his life although he did not join the Society until he was in his 60’s.57 He was a social statistician who worked on the voluminous Social Survey of Merseyside that appeared in 1934, and on the Social Structure of England and Wales of 1937. Both of these surveys, especially the Merseyside one, dealt with the relationships of class, income and sub normality of various kinds. Both were extensively reported in the Eugenics Review, in terms that were perfectly in accord with the Eugenics Society’s point of view. Jones’ data showed that the basic feature that united so-called ‘problem families’ was the biological one of low intelligence.58

Lancelot Hogben was a socialist and populariser of science who attacked eugenics from the left. At Cambridge he was taken by a fellow student to a Quaker adult school led by Leonard Doncaster and at the end of his first year, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, he became a member.59 Hogben volunteered for non-combatant service in two Quaker organisations during his third year. With the War Victims contingent, he helped to build bungalows in the Marne for families made homeless by the war, and then he transferred to the Friends’ Ambulance Unit based on Dunkirk. When conscription was introduced in 1916, either of these activities could have secured exemption from military service, but in the eyes of Hogben and many of his companions’ voluntary service was one thing and conscripted service quite another. Resisting conscription, he was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs before being discharged after three months on grounds of ill health. Later, in the Second World War, he abandoned anti-militarism and served in the army medical statistics unit, holding the rank of colonel though he refused to wear uniform. Hogben was not a religious Quaker and liked to say ‘I’m an atheist, thank God”.60 Appointed Professor of Social Biology at the London School of Economics in 1930, Hogben criticised the eugenicists for their over-emphasis on genetics in the determination of human behaviour and for bringing the problem into the political arena, as he saw it, with the result that ‘social biology is full of terms that have no place in ethically neutral science’.61 Hogben was not against eugenics itself, that is, the principles of euthenics and the investigation of the science of inheritance. On the vexed question of intelligence, he believed like Caradog Jones in a general intelligence factor developed by a mixture of nature and nurture but discredited the use of IQ tests to compare whole nations and races, a point demonstrated experimentally by the Quaker-connected Canadian psychologist Otto Klineberg. Hogben’s basic position was that the existing methods of human genetics were unable to cope with the complexities of human biology and society and that the eugenicists had filled the gap between them with middle-class propaganda. He expressed his opinions vigorously but his differences with his scientific colleagues were less than they appeared, since all were concerned with the basic problem of where and how to strike the balance between nature and nurture. This may be linked with the observation by Bland, Hall and Hobsbawn that personalities were a factor in the history of eugenics.

Lionel Penrose was the third Galton Professor at UCL after Pearson and Fisher. He had a stern Quaker upbringing and held Quaker views in everything save theology.62 His criticism of eugenics, like Hogben’s, had something about it of the stance of the conscientious objector.63 He was never a member of the Eugenics Society and his renaming in 1963 of UCL’s Department of Eugenics as the Department of Genetics demonstrated his personal commitment to anti-eugenics, but it is primarily for his scientific work that he should be remembered as an opponent.64 By 1932 Penrose had produced the first of his papers on Down’s syndrome and maternal age. His prize-winning essay of 1933, entitled ‘The influence of heredity on disease’, expounded the whole spectrum of the new methods available to human geneticists. Penrose questioned the validity of sterilisation noting that many potentially hereditary causes for undesirable conditions could be carried by recessive genes, that is, gene variants that are only expressed when an individual inherits two copies, one from each parent. This meant, Penrose argued, ‘it would be impossible to identify and eradicate these conditions from the population at large through sterilisation’.65 Penrose’s 1938 survey of inmates of the Royal Eastern Counties Institution, Colchester, provided data and analysis to improve understanding of phenylketonuria (PKU) and Down’s syndrome. By such work Penrose transformed what Mazumdar calls the ‘eugenics problematic’, meaning the eugenicists’ class bias, onto an entirely different theoretical and evidential foundation. In addition, his reports informed the Mental Health Act 1959 that repealed the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 and provided for people with mental disorders to be treated in the community and not in large psychiatric institutions.

Connected with Penrose was his colleague and fellow-statistician Cedric A. B. Smith. He was a Quaker convert and pacifist who spent the Second World War on hospital duty.66 He invented some of the mathematical methods used to map human genes. He was a member of the Quaker Peace Studies Trust that established the chair of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. Smith was also a founder member and first chairperson of the Conflict Research Society, which began in 1963 at UCL.

This article ventures into dangerous territory in finding that on balance there is a good story to tell about British Quakers’ involvement with eugenics. The dark history of eugenics makes it tempting, in our hurry to distance ourselves from its shadow, to couple eugenics exclusively with attitudes that we find unacceptable today. However, dismissing eugenics as a pseudoscience and treating it as one of history’s dirty words, without accurately exploring the context in which the term came to be used or the variety of ideas that played a part in its career, debases the study of history.67 Scholars of Quaker studies must confront the challenge of contributing to the ‘long history’ of eugenics.68 In one way or another this challenge has animated debate amongst historians, bioethicists and disability-studies scholars who dispute the emergence of a new genetics in the late 20th century. On the one side of the debate are those who contend that eugenics is a relic of the past, an abomination born of a deadly mix of pseudoscientific hubris and a nationalistic zeal to improve the quality of the race. On the other side are those who contend that eugenicists were in fact quite diverse in their beliefs and their social backgrounds, that eugenics itself was considered legitimate though not uncontested science in the early 20th century and that we are still living with the legacies of that science in the 21st century.

Galton and Pearson, neither of whom were active Quakers, contributed positively and substantially to the mathematisation of the social and bio-sciences but used language of racialist and classist hauteur that is unacceptable today, Pearson’s support for the Nazi eugenics programme being especially abhorrent. It is understandable that UCL has denamed them. When it comes to Quakers generally, however, the historian hesitates to link them with the activist’s systems of exclusion. It would be easy to condemn John William Graham but an interest in eugenics is to be expected in an enquiring mind of his day. In any case, he understood the difference between eugenics and dysgenics and made a link to pacifism. Similarly Vipont Brown believed war was dysgenic. To be deprecated are his socio-medical authoritarianism and references to ‘sentimental philanthropists’ and the ‘obviously unfit’, but he correctly understood that exclusively biometric explanations of inheritance are flawed. This point was also made by the geneticist Leonard Doncaster, both men engaging with the vexed, perhaps eternal, question of the dual scientific aspects of inheritance.69 Edward Fry and T. Edmund Harvey supported the Mental Deficiency Act out of a patrician concern for the vulnerable but, hindsight suggests, were complaisant about the potential for abuse. The activist may look approvingly on Arnold Stephenson Rowntree, who abstained from voting on the Mental Deficiency Act for libertarian reasons, but less approvingly on Elizabeth Taylor Cadbury who was unengaged with the issue of mental deficiency but whose faith-based maternalistic philanthropy may be seen as patronising and classist. David Caradog Jones saw intelligence as a factor in ‘problem families’. He could have been guilty of the middle-class prejudice condemned by Hogben, have been stating a social statistician’s objective finding or plausibly manifesting a combination of the two. Yet Hogben had in common with eugenicists support for such measures as voluntary sterilisation, so the activist’s simplistic distinction between eugenicists as bad and anti-eugenicists as good does not bear the weight of the evidence.

The positive side of British Quakers’ involvement with eugenics can be stated in three points. Firstly, Dr George Newman is crucial. His career reflects his vision as a medical professional, his values as a Quaker and the overlap between public health provision on the one hand and euthenics or positive eugenics on the other. He used his administrative power to curtail the authoritarian mental deficiency regime and to establish a public health system based on the principle of prevention. He guided government away from segregation, institutionalisation and compulsion. Secondly, that the eugenicists’ power and influence weakened between the wars was due not only to Newman and the rise of working-class politics but also to expert opponents, two of whom, Hogben and Penrose, were Quakers. Hogben and Mottram popularised good science. Lionel Penrose is comparable in importance to Newman. He worked with the eugenicists’ problems but refused their methods and their fellowship. His contribution to genetic science put an end to Mazumdar’s ‘eugenics problematic’, symbolised by his renaming of the professorial chair at UCL. Moreover, his surveys helped do away with the policies and practices of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913. Thirdly, Quakers’ understanding of war as dysgenic and Lewis Fry Richardson’s mathematics of international relations are the background to Cedric Smith’s pioneering of conflict studies, in another instance of how eugenics, perhaps paradoxically, was made consistent with Quaker values.