Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  When priests and politicians ask for unquestioning faith we know they are thinking first of themselves. Why should we with scientific training ALSO want the people we serve to remove their thinking apparatus and bow down before us? But patients will only stand up properly for doctors—doctors will only stand up properly for patients—when all know the common-sense daily foundations of the healing art.

  She wanted all children to be taught basic nursing in their primary schools (“where they can learn it as a game”) and basic medical training in secondary schools. In this way all would learn not only how and when doctors could help them, but how to live more healthily, how to care for each other better, and why they should not tolerate housing and working conditions which damaged the health of themselves, their children and community. Here are some typical reactions from the journals of the period:

  It would seem that Dr. Victoria McCandless proposes to turn every British school—yes, even the infant schools!—into training grounds for revolutionary socialists.

  The Times

  We hear that Dr. Victoria McCandless is a married woman with three sons. This is astonishing news—we can hardly believe it! From her writing alone we would have deduced that she was one of those sticklike, unwomanly women who would benefit from a course of “horizontalism”! Under the circumstances we can only offer her husband our hearty sympathies.

  The Daily Telegraph

  We do not doubt the adequacy of Victoria McCandless M.D.’s training, nor do we doubt the kindness of her heart. Her clinic is in a very poor part of Glasgow, and probably does more good than harm to the unfortunates who attend it. But that clinic is her hobby—she does not live by what it pays. We who earn our livings by the stethoscope and scalpel should smile tolerantly on her Utopian schemes, and return to our mundane task of healing the sick.

  The Lancet

  Dr. McCandless wants the world to stop being a battlefield and become a sanatorium where everybody takes a turn of being doctor and patient, as in a children’s game. It is surely obvious that in such a world the only thing to flourish would be—disease!

  The Scots Observer

  From 1900 onwards Dr. Vic (as the papers started calling her) was an active suffragette, and her work for the movement can be read in histories of it. The war of 1914 shocked her in a way from which she never recovered. She wanted working people and the soldiers to end it by going on strike, but her two youngest sons joined the army almost at once and were killed on the Somme soon after. She split with the Fabians because of what she called “their lukewarm tolerance of criminal carnage”, and appeared on platforms with Keir Hardie, Jimmy Maxton, John Maclean and other Clydeside Socialists (and advocates of Scottish home rule) who opposed the war. She quarrelled with Baxter, her eldest son, who supported the war effort from his desk in the Department of Imperial Statistics. In a letter to Patrick Geddes she wrote:

  Baxter performs miracles of falsification, proving that the huge number being killed and maimed in France is less horrifying than the publicity suggests, since it contains many thousands who would have been killed and maimed by accidents in peace time. This comforts the shareholders and profiteers who draw unearned incomes from our war industry. It means that millions of dead young soldiers will soon be as forgotten as those who die in factory and road accidents.

  It is ironical that Baxter McCandless died without issue in 1919 at the age of twenty-seven, knocked down by a Paris taxi-cab while attending Lloyd George to the Versailles peace conference.

  Like many at that time she thought long and hard about why the world’s richest nations—nations who had prided themselves on being the most civilized because the most industrialized—had just fought the biggest and cruellest war in history. What puzzled her was why millions of men who, taken singly were neither bloodthirsty or stupid (she was thinking of her sons) had obeyed governments which ordered them to kill and be killed to such a suicidal extent. She accepted Tolstoy’s view that human animals are prone to epidemics of insanity, like many thousands of Frenchmen going into Russia with Napoleon and dying there, when their country would have been no better off if they had conquered it. However, being a doctor she knew epidemics can be prevented if the causes are discovered. She knew that people who live and work in overcrowded quarters are as liable to epidemics of belligerence as any overcrowded creatures, but at least a quarter of those who fought and died in the Great War were prosperous with spacious homes, and to this class belonged nearly all who had ordered and officered the carnage. She decided that although the Great War had been started by the same national and commercial rivalries which had caused the British wars with France, Spain, Holland, France, the United States and France, she believed the men fighting and supporting it had succumbed to “an epidemic of suicidal obedience” because bad mothering and fathering had left most of them with a heartfelt belief that their lives were valueless:

  What men who respected their bodies could bear to queue naked in rows and have their genitals examined by another clothed man? What man who respected his mind could bear to make money by doing such a thing? Yet the medical inspection was nothing but baptism into the religion of man-killing, in which the best soldier was he who regarded his own body as the least sensitive machine—not even his own machine, but a machine steered by remote controllers. My two youngest sons willingly became such machines and let their beautiful bodies be mangled and crushed into mud. My oldest made his mind, not his body part of the war machine. I now think him as much a victim of self-disrespect as his brothers. Yet for the first ten years of their lives these three young men lived in a clean spacious home and were shaped by the care and example of loving, educated and adventurous parents. I was (as I am) a radical Socialist. My husband was a Liberal. Our boys were all preparing to be peaceful professional Scottish public servants, using the most humane modern ideas to tackle what we knew to be the great task of the twentieth century—to make a Britain where everyone has a good clean home and is well paid for useful work. Yet when war was declared my three boys AT ONCE behaved like sons of an English fox-hunting Tory. They knew I thought this was wicked behaviour. Why did they feel it was right? I refuse to seek the answer in the inherent depravity of human nature or the human male. Nor can I blame the militaristic histories they were taught at school, because that was certainly counteracted by the reading and teaching they got at home. I am forced to seek the reason in myself. For the first six or seven years of their lives I had total power over these boys, for I had plenty of money and a loving husband. Yet I did not give them the self-respect to resist that epidemic of self-abasement which was the 14–18 war. How did I fail? If I cannot find the root of the illness in myself I am no use to others. But I have found it. Please read on.

  The previous passage summarizes and quotes from the introduction to a booklet she published in 1920 at her own expense: A Loving Economy—A Mother’s Recipe for the End of All National and Class Warfare. On the title-page is also printed: The Godwin Baxter Peace Press, Volume I. There never was a second volume. It received no serious attention although she posted copies to the leaders and secretaries of all the British trade union branches, in envelopes with and your Wife written after the names of the men, with and your Husband after the few women. She sent it to every doctor, clergyman, soldier, writer, civil servant and member of parliament in Who’s Who. She also posted two thousand copies to equivalent people in North America, but they were seized and burned by the United States customs. In a letter to George Bernard Shaw, who was then on holiday in Italy, Beatrice Webb wrote:

  When you come home you will find Dr. Vic’s latest pamphlet awaiting you. It is an insane blend of ideas culled from Malthus, D. H. Lawrence and Marie Stopes. She blames herself for the Great War because she bore too many sons and did not cuddle them enough. She asks working-class parents to reduce future armies by having only one child. She wants them to make it feel infinitely precious by having it share their bed where it will learn all about love-making and birth control by
practical example. In this way (she thinks) it will grow up free of the Oedipus complex, penis envy and other diseases discovered or invented by Doctor Freud, and instead of fighting with siblings will play husband-and-wife with a neighbour’s child. She is now quite sex-mad—an erotomaniac, to use the older term—and tries to hide it under prim language which shows she is still, at heart, a subject of Queen Victoria. Cuddles is her word for love-making, she calls fornication wedding. Yet she once had an excellent mind. I wish her poor little husband had not died. I think he kept her stable between her embarrassing affairs with Wells and Ford Madox Hueffer. And of course the loss of her sons hit her hard. The last six years have damaged all but the strongest minds.

  The Clydeside Independent Labour Party socialists also disliked A Loving Economy. Tom Johnston, reviewing it in Forward, said:

  Victoria McCandless M.D. wants working-class parents to increase the value of their children’s labour by going on a limited form of birth strike. In this year of lock-outs and reduced wages—a year when working-class movements everywhere are pressing the government to abolish unemployment by work rationing—such a demand from a good comrade is a frivolous distraction. Hunger and homelessness must be tackled now, not postponed to a future generation.

  Clergymen of every Christian church denounced the book for the birth control proposals, but it annoyed advocates of birth control by saying commercial contraceptives were unhealthy. Said Dr. Victoria:

  They fix the minds of the users upon the genitals, so distract them from cuddling. Cuddling is like milk. It can, and should, nourish our health from birth to death. Wedding is the cream of cuddling, the main delight of our middle years (if we are lucky) but it is not different from cuddling. Yet all our teaching—alas, even the teaching of the good Marie Stopes—makes it different by separating it and advertising it as a rare commodity. That is why uncuddled men fear sexual love or treat it as a smash-and-grab business.

  So although Victoria McCandless placed advertisements for A Loving Economy in the major British newspapers it had only two favourable notices: one by Guy Aldred in an anarchist periodical, one in The New Age by the stone-carver and typographer, Eric Gill. Beaverbrook took a hint from the churches and enlarged the circulation of the Daily Express by a successful campaign to deprive Victoria McCandless of her clinic. Here is an extract from an article headed LADY DOCTOR ORDERS INCEST:

  We all know what a mother’s boy is—an effeminate little pansy who wants everyone to admire him yet is too cowardly to strike a blow in his own defence. If Dr. Vic has her way all British boys from now onward will be turned into exactly that sort of whining cissy, but before she corrupts our children she must corrupt their parents. This is exactly what she is trying to do.

  Two days later this appeared:

  DOCTOR VICTORIA PRESCRIBES NATIONAL SUICIDE

  If the Dr. Vic’s “sex through a sheet” method becomes popular (and it may—she has spent a fortune advertising it) in a few years every British male of military age will be outnumbered by the Catholic Irish. If it becomes fashionable throughout the civilized world we will be overwhelmed by the Bolsheviks, the Chinese and the Negroes. It cannot be coincidence that she is a close friend of John Maclean, the Bolshevik Consul General in Britain. It cannot be coincidence that she was one of the “pacifist” harpies who would have been awarded an Iron Cross by Kaiser Wilhelm if his hordes had succeeded in placing him on the British throne.

  Soon after came:

  DR. VIC’S BOLSHEVIK CHARITY!

  The most sinister figures in the twentieth century are people with unearned incomes who, under the guise of socialism, use their money-bags to spread discontent and evil practices among the poor. The Express has discovered that for the last thirty years Victoria McCandless, the Bolshevik doctor, has been secretly teaching what she now openly preaches. At her so-called “charity” clinic in a Glasgow slum she has taught thousands of poor women to defy nature, the Christian faith and the law of the land: we refer to something graver than her ridiculous “sex through a sheet” idea. We mean abortion. That is what her “Loving Economy” comes to in the end.

  The Express reporters had no proof that Dr. Victoria performed abortions. They did, however, produce two former employees of the clinic who swore she had trained women to perform abortions on each other, and this resulted in a public prosecution. The prosecution failed (or did not completely succeed) because it was proved that the two employees had been to some extent bribed by the Daily Express, and were also mentally retarded. Campbell Hogg, the procurator fiscal, tried to make something of this last point during his cross-examination, and very nearly succeeded:

  CAMPBELL HOGG: Doctor McCandless! Have you trained many mentally retarded women to assist you?

  VICTORIA McCANDLESS: As many as I could.

  CAMPBELL HOGG: Why?

  VICTORIA McCANDLESS: For reasons of economy.

  CAMPBELL HOGG: Oho! You got them cheaper?

  VICTORIA McCANDLESS: No. The accounts of the clinic show they were paid as much as cleverer nurses. I was not talking about financial economy but social economy—loving economy. Many people with damaged brains are far more affectionate, if given the chance, than many we classify as “normal”. They can often be taught to perform the most essential nursing tasks more efficiently than cleverer people—people who want to be doing more ambitious things.

  CAMPBELL HOGG: Things like writing books on Loving Economy?

  VICTORIA McCANDLESS: No. Things like acting the buffoon in a court drama set up for the amusement of the gutter press.

  (Laughter in court. The sheriff warns the accused that she is in danger of being held in contempt of court.)

  CAMPBELL HOGG (forcibly): I suggest that you deliberately choose cretins for your helpers because sane people are unlikely to believe what these say about your clinic!

  VICTORIA McCANDLESS: You are wrong.

  CAMPBELL HOGG: Doctor McCandless, have you never (think hard before you answer) have you never given your patients instruction which would help them abort an unwanted baby?

  VICTORIA McCANDLESS: I have never given instructions which could hurt their mind or body.

  CAMPBELL HOGG: The answer I want is “yes” or “no”.

  VICTORIA McCANDLESS: You will get no more answers from me, young man. Go and teach another older person their job. Try an unemployed engineer—one who fought in the war.

  (The sheriff warns accused that she must answer the procurator, but can choose her own words.)

  VICTORIA McCANDLESS: I see. Then I repeat that I have taught nothing which can hurt mind or body.

  Since the trial was in Scotland the jury was able to bring in a verdict of not proven, and did. Dr. Vic was not struck off the British medical register, but not declared guiltless.

  When Victoria and Archibald opened the Natal Clinic in 1890 they put all Baxter’s money into the fund supporting it. The managing committee contained Sir Patrick Geddes and Principal John Caird of Glasgow University. By 1920 these had been replaced by weaker people who now bowed before the storm of unfriendly publicity. They sacked Victoria and gave the clinic to Oakbank Hospital as an out-patients department. Dr. Victoria had spent her savings printing, distributing and advertising A Loving Economy, so her only remaining property was 18 Park Circus. All Baxter’s old servants were dead by now. She let the upper rooms to university students and withdrew to the basement where she continued what she still called The Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic on a much smaller scale.

  From then until 1923 she was chiefly noticed for her support of John Maclean. In a letter to C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) she wrote:

  I cannot like the orthodox communists. They have one simple answer to every question and believe (like the fascists) that they can forcibly simplify what they do not understand. In any discussion with one I feel I am facing a bad school teacher who wants to shut me up. Maclean is a good school teacher.

  When Maclean did not join the newly formed British Communist Party but founded the
Scottish Workers’ Republican Party she offered him her home as a meeting place. When he died of overwork and pneumonia in 1923 she made a short speech by his graveside. His daughter, Nan Milton, recorded it in a letter, and Archie Hind quotes it at the end of his play about Maclean, Shoulder to Shoulder.

  John was not a Zapata, galloping on horseback over the corn-fields. He was of the peasantry who fed Zapata. He was not a Lenin, working to move his office into the Kremlin. He was of the Kronstadt sailors whose mutiny gave Lenin the chance. John was not the sort who lead revolutions. He was the sort who make them.

  The Daily Express put another reporter onto her two years later, perhaps hoping to find more conclusive evidence of illegal abortions, but the article which came out of this was a short character sketch, probably because nearly everyone who now remembered “Dr. Vic” thought she was dead. The reporter learned that children of the area called her The Dog Lady, because she walked around the West End Park accompanied by dogs of many sizes, some of them bandaged. The clinic was entered from the back lane, and the ground on each side of the path was overgrown with rhubarb plants. The waiting-room was crammed with heavy mid-Victorian seating, particularly a huge horse-hair-covered sofa. The only wall decorations were old posters for the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party. There was also a heavy padlocked box with a slit in the lid and a notice pinned to the side saying Put what you can afford in here—it will not be wasted. If you are hungry please do not steal this but speak to me in the surgery—hunger is curable. Half the people waiting looked very poor and old. The rest seemed to be children with animals, mostly dogs. There was only one pregnant woman.