THE

tributes to Baroness Warnock, who has just died aged 94, associated her chiefly with her committee on human fertility and ethics, which she dealt with in the resulting Warnock Report. Mary’s own fertility, as the mother of five children, was never in any doubt. She once told an interviewer that she had been planning to have six children — but after five, she knew that her husband, Sir Geoffrey, would not care for the disruption of another baby. When an Oxford don friend of the Warnocks was told this, he responded: ‘Oh no, that’s not the reason at all. The fact is, Geoffrey has read that every sixth child in the world is Chinese.’ Boom boom!