Letter from Birmingham Women’s Welfare Centre to the Bishop of Birmingham

Description:The Birmingham Women’s Welfare Centre was opened in 1927 to offer family planning advice and information to married women, with the aim of improving the health of mothers and children, and making married relationships happier. The committee consisted of some well known public figures in Birmingham, including Elizabeth Cadbury, and staff at the University of Birmingham including Hilda Shufflebotham, later Professor Hilda Lloyd, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, and Professor Humphrey Humphreys, who had studied dentistry at the university before the First World War, and later became Vice Chancellor. Birth control was increasingly and more consistently practised by married couples during the first half of the twentieth century, and families were getting smaller due to its wider availability. The provision of family planning clinics, together with books and leaflets on birth control, partly stemmed from concerns about the size and quality of the population. These concerns were expressed in the popular press as well as in academic literature, especially after the discovery of high levels of physical ill health amongst recruits for both the Boer War and First World War.^{<small>1</small>} This letter mentions a protest organised by the Welfare Centre against the decision of the Birmingham Maternity and Child Welfare Committee not to act on the 1930 Ministry of Health recommendation to offer contraceptive advice to married women who attended maternity and child welfare clinics for medical advice or treatment where further pregnancy would be damaging to their health.

Concerns about the physical and psychological condition of working-class children and youth, who were assumed by middle-class observers to be hereditarily inferior, and whose culture ‘symbolised the deterioration of the British race,’ were widespread during the first part of the twentieth century.^{<small>2</small>} Many campaigners for greater use of birth control, including Marie Stopes, supported the aims of the Eugenics movement, and by the 1930s the Eugenics Society had around 800 members, most of whom were from scientific, cultural and political backgrounds.^{<small>3</small>} Some members of the Birmingham clergy had opposed the establishment of the Birmingham Women’s Welfare Centre, but the Bishop of Birmingham, Ernest William Barnes, was a supporter, largely because of his support for eugenics. In a letter to a correspondent in 1927, the Bishop stated that he was anxious that ‘the alarming increase among the worse stocks should diminish’ but encouraged middle-class people to have more children.^{<small>4</small>} In reply to an invitation to attend the National Conference on Maternity and Child Welfare in 1934, he remarked that he supported the policy of spreading knowledge of birth control amongst the ‘social problem class’.^{<small>5</small>} To a greater or lesser extent, the efforts of Norman Chamberlain, some members of the Parks Committee and other benefactors in Birmingham, to provide organised and ‘healthy’ recreational activities for children and young people in parks and green spaces can be seen as a response to these fears.


<font color="#666633"><small>¹ Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918-1960 (Oxford, 2006), pp.28-9
² Steve Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working Class Childhood and Youth, 1889-1939 (Oxford, 1981), p.14
³ Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London, 2009), p.105
⁴ Letter from Bishop Barnes to William R. Darby, 13 June 1927, Papers of Bishop Barnes
[UBSC: EWB9/20/20]
⁵ Letter from Bishop Barnes to Dr Brodie, 5 June 1934, Papers of Bishop Barnes [UBSC: EWB9/20/40]</small></font>