First they came for the statues, now stained glass windows. Yet one woman’s vile history is overlooked

FIRST they came for the statues; then they came for the stained glass windows. Yes, the fashion (at least among undergraduates) for trashing commemorative edifices is developing new forms.

And in one particular case, the targeted memorial is barely 30 years old.

This is the Sir ronald Fisher memorial, a stained glass window in the dining hall of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge University to honour the work of its former member, described as ‘a genius who almost single- handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science’. Sir ronald, in fact, was knighted by the Queen in 1952.

But last week, the college said that it would remove the Sir ronald Fisher memorial because it was ‘now aware of [his] views and actions … in a way that was not fully appreciated in 1989’.

Unshaken

The dons were too delicate to mention that the university outpost of Extinction rebellion, supposedly in sympathy with Black Lives Matter, had spray-painted ‘Eugenics is genocide — Fisher must fall’ on the college’s Gate of Honour.

Sir ronald had been the founding chairman of the university’s eugenics society: he was devoted to stamping out breeding by those he deemed ‘feebleminded high-grade defectives ... comprising a tenth of the total population’.

This was high fashion on the Left of British politics in the early 20th century and advocated enthusiastically in their favourite newspaper and weekly magazine (then, as now, the Guardian and the New Statesman).

It was actually Adolf Hitler who put their ideas into practice, though more radically than they had proposed: Hitler enacted a policy of euthanasia for those we would nowadays term learning disabled, pioneering the gassing methods the Nazis later applied to an entire race.

Fisher’s belief in eugenic methods was (unlike in the British political class) unshaken by those events. He wrote subsequently that the Nazi party ‘sincerely wished to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the elimination of manifest defectives’.

Fisher is not the only dead British eugenicist whose name is being effaced from academia. Earlier this month, University College London retitled two lecture theatres that had hitherto carried the names of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson (Galton invented the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883, and Pearson was the country’s first professor of eugenics, financed by a bequest from Galton).

The Galton lecture theatre has now been renamed lecture theatre 115, and the Pearson lecture theatre is now to be called lecture theatre G22. There’s safety in numbers.

Though eugenics was — is — a pernicious and inhumane doctrine, I wonder what any of this is going to achieve other than to ease the nerves of university governing councils worried at being on the wrong side of Extinction rebellion, or of any other bunch of students threatening to wreak physical damage on a statue or a stained glass window.

Outside their intensely narrow environment — otherwise known as ivory towers — what difference will it make to anyone’s lives?

Oddly, though, there is one British eugenicist whose name is widely known outside the academic world. That person’s name is advertised in magazines and on hoardings, and it pulls in many millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money every year.

I refer to Marie Stopes. The organisation bearing her name, Marie Stopes International, is perhaps the world’s biggest abortion provider. Not only are its operations in this country largely paid for by us as an adjunct to the NHS, its overseas work is given huge sums by the Department for International Development. But what motivated Stopes (1880-1958) was not money: it was an intense eugenic passion — to weed out those she deemed of inferior genetic stock.

Originally a brilliant plant palaeontologist, she became obsessed with human breeding, so fixated on this that she disinherited her son Harry for marrying a short-sighted woman (Mary Barnes Wallis, the daughter of the inventor of the ‘bouncing bomb’).

Stopes wrote: ‘ She has an inherited disease of the eyes which not only makes her wear hideous glasses so that it is horrid to look at her . . . I have the horror of our line being so contaminated . . . Mary and Harry are quite callous about the wrong to my family and the eugenic crime.’

As the historian Geoffrey Alderman records: ‘ This obsession led to her becoming a very proud public supporter of Nazism . . . she even sent Herr Hitler a collection of love poems.

Honour

‘In a poem she wrote in 1942, she declared: “Catholics and Prussians, the Jews and the russians, All are a curse, Or something worse.” ’

Yet this is the woman who, in 2008, was accorded the signal honour of having her portrait on a postage stamp. And only a few years ago there was a campaign to put up a statue of Stopes in Manchester.

Given that part of her clinic’s original slogan was ‘A Sure Light in our racial Darkness’, one wonders if it would now have required pulling down, almost as soon as it had been put up.

And now the Archbishop of Canterbury has joined in the circus: Justin Welby said last Friday that there would be a ‘review’ of statues and monuments, including in Canterbury Cathedral, and that ‘some will have to come down’.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the rest of the country is just trying to cope with the biggest health and economic disruption of our lifetimes.