by Abrams, Fran
The 1920s were a time of collective denial, of a sort of national attempt to find meaning, or at the very least joy, in a world that was badly soiled. This was an age in which survivors’ guilt touched every adult, particularly the men, and in which children experienced a dislocation – a feeling that they could never quite know, or understand, what ailed their parents. In many households, the psychological scars of war and its aftermath were unspoken but ever-present.
For the Llewellyn family, the tension that lay just under the surface of everyday life became increasingly hard to deny. Hermione, packed off to boarding school at the age of thirteen, was surviving quite well until her letters from home suddenly stopped: ‘As the weeks passed, I grew frightened . . . huge carbuncles appeared on my thighs and before long I could not walk or run normally. When one burst, it was so enormous and frightful that it hit the ceiling. Bunny [the school matron] insisted I tell her what I was thinking about. She said one’s mind can affect one’s body.’8
The matron phoned Hermione’s grandparents, and was informed that her parents had separated. No one knew where her father was, and her mother was seriously ill in an asylum in Bristol. She had descended into mental illness, from which she would never recover. The response – both from the matron at Hermione’s school and subsequently from the family – was indicative of a fundamental change which would ultimately come to alter the mindset of all Western societies. Somehow, humanity had begun to creep in. The work of Freud and his contemporaries, which had made little impact on the wider public when it had first appeared in the early years of the twentieth century, was now beginning to be absorbed into the fabric of human interaction. What was happening – perhaps little recognized at the time – was a portent of a huge, almost geological, shift. Until this point, judgements about human beings and their inherent flaws had tended to be made through a prism with a distinctly religious tint. As the Enlightenment debates about whether children were ultimately born good, needing protection from the corruption of the world, or evil, needing stern instruction to enable them to operate by a moral code, demonstrated, the world’s view of the child – indeed, of mankind itself – had up until now been largely biblical. Now, the notion of the child as an individual began to creep in. This philosophy was still nascent, of course, and the theories of human development which had begun to be accepted were largely driven by biological determinism – each child had to go through certain stages of development, and if those stages were not passed satisfactorily, then disaster could strike. If each hurdle were not, as it were, jumped, then the child’s development could be arrested.
That Hermione’s school matron had already absorbed the theory that physical ailments could have psychological causes is interesting. Perhaps the recognition of ‘shell shock’ after the war was helping the notion of the psychological to creep further into the public consciousness; perhaps she was a woman ahead of her time. But, certainly, there was a new awareness surrounding issues about mental health. Hermione’s father reappeared, and did his best to help his ailing wife towards a cure. The standard procedure among the wealthy classes at the time – and the one the Llewellyn family adopted – was to take the afflicted one to Switzerland for a cure. Hermione, now aged twelve, was removed from her boarding school to spend her days – and nights – helping to care for her seriously disturbed mother. But to no avail: ‘Our nights became terrible. When it grew dark she had hallucinations and thought dreadful creatures were crawling across the walls and ceiling of her bedroom. She dared not go to sleep lest they harm her . . . my father and I took turns to sit up all night in her bedroom to try and comfort and reassure her, but gradually we both grew exhausted from lack of sleep . . . eventually our kind and clever Swiss doctor persuaded our father that she should move to a nursing home at Nyon on Lake Geneva.’9
The importance of this growth in psychological understanding for the way humans saw – and still see – their children can hardly be overstated. It was the beginning of a profound change in attitudes to children and childhood which would gather pace throughout the rest of the twentieth century. And its profundity sprang from the new sense, ushered in by Freudian psychology, that a child was neither a blank slate upon which to be written nor a creature of biblical sin, but an individual. The notion that children had psychological needs, as well as physical needs, would bring deep and lasting change in the way they were reared. And indeed it was not long before these new ideas began, tentatively at first, to extend their roots into the world of parenting. In 1929, the Guardian reported that the Chelsea Babies’ Club was hosting a series of lectures on child psychology for mothers. The aim, the paper said, was to give middle-class women access to the sort of advice which those from poorer backgrounds were already receiving in state-aided welfare centres: ‘One of the chief duties of a mother is to teach her child to grow away from her and to become an individual,’ the article explained. ‘The child must learn to do without his mother as early as possible, though still regarding her as his best friend . . . one of the most important conditions of successful child development is that of absolute harmony between the parents, which will not easily be achieved unless both parents have lives of their own.’ Even more strikingly, the article also explained that a mother would not be a good mother – and indeed could suffer mental breakdown – if her own talents and desires were thwarted. A professional mother with a life outside the home was considered entirely a desirable thing.
Changing children
Why this new focus on children? Perhaps the shrinking of the family had led parents to begin to see their children’s individuality, just as the growing influence of Freudian psychology had led to a new, more child-focused approach to parenthood. It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that the experience of the average child changed overnight. Yet it did change, incrementally, over the following decades. Children, increasingly, were permitted to hold opinions, and even to express those opinions in public. During this period, the Guardian ran two long pieces of advice to parents from a fourteen-year-old girl named Catharine Alexander: ‘If your children are artists and you live in a large house, try to give them each a room to work in. If you live in a small house, don’t all cram into one hot, stuffy little room . . . The children become pasty and white and spotty and have bad complexions. The parents become consumptive and die off in the end,’ she advised.
If there were to be fewer children – and there were, thanks to the international birth control movement, pioneered by Marie Stopes – then they were going to be stout, uncomplicated children who breathed plenty of fresh air and developed healthy lungs and chunky calves: ‘Send them to school as soon as possible, where they will be punched and cuffed into shape, and sent back to you a happy, strong, healthy, ordinary child . . . I should let your children have fairly large appetites, for it keeps them strong and healthy,’ Catharine Alexander advised. And Sir Frederick Truby King, who was fast becoming the childcare guru of his day, had rather similar thoughts: ‘Ask any capable farmer what steps he takes to ensure the health and safety of the mothers of his flocks and herds, and he will tell you free range in the open air and daily exercise are the first essentials, and without these both mother and offspring suffer . . . Pure air and sunshine have almost as much effect on the health and strength of both mother and child as good food . . . Regulated sunbathing is highly beneficial.’10
The children’s literature of the period tended to reflect two ongoing trends: the continuing sense that the healthy, wholesome child was a country child; and the fear that the nation would soon be swamped again by war. So the Walker children of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons novels were allowed to rampage cheerfully across the Cumbrian countryside with little parental control; yet in the background lurked always a sense that this was an idyll that could be lost. Mr Walker was always away – or about to be called away – because he was a naval commander. In one notable episode, a telegram to his base in Malta about whether the children should be allowed to sail to an island on
Coniston Water brings the response: ‘BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN.’ Richmal Crompton’s William Brown, meanwhile, lived a rather more suburban life, his scrapes generally of a lesser order – the Walker children drift out into the North Sea in one memorable sailing episode in a later novel, and find themselves in Holland, while William’s most violent episodes are mere scraps with the Outlaws’ arch-enemies, the Hubert Lane-ites. But a key feature of both Ransome’s and Crompton’s works was the stable family life to which the children always returned. The Walker children always greeted the arrival of their father with unbridled joy, despite his long absences, while William’s family – aunts, siblings, placid mother and forbidding father, are treated with a sort of humorous acceptance. In an age of fear and uncertainty, the emphasis on the importance of family, of hearth and home, tends to grow. And that was certainly a feature of this particular era.
While the urban poor – or at least some of them – now had access to clinics and while the mothers of Chelsea could attend lectures on childcare, the mother who was bringing up her family in the rapidly expanding suburbs had Truby King by her side. His book contained a picture of a boy, aged four, ‘reared according to the principles advocated in this book’. He was blond, his hair combed to one side and shining, and he was wearing well-pressed shorts with a shirt and tie. Everything about him spelled healthfulness and wholesomeness.11
There were shades, in all this, of the political future of Europe in the coming decades. Marie Stopes and her birth control campaigners were not only about helping parents to bring wanted children into the world, but also about ensuring that the wrong kinds of children were eliminated. The birth control movement was connected to a growing interest in eugenics, and to the general fearfulness of the age.12 Its proponents were fired up by the Malthusian belief that population growth would always outstrip the supply of food and other resources, and would be counteracted by war or by disease. Stopes had joined the Malthusian League, whose motto was: ‘Non Quantitas sed Qualitas’, or ‘Not Quantity but Quality’, in 1917. Later, she left to form the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. She opened the first birth control clinic in London in 1921 – in Holloway, not far from where Sidney Day and his rumbunctious, impoverished family were eking out a living. Indeed, Day acknowledged that numerous babies were a fact of life in this district: ‘Me dad . . . loved his pint, they all did. That was all they had to do, let’s face it – drink and make babies . . . Me poor mum, what with all the washing, ironing and cooking, she was worn out before she died, poor old sod.’13
In May 1921, at a meeting in the Queen’s Hall, Stopes lectured her audience on the perils of allowing ‘wastrels’ to breed. Over the coming years, the pre-war fear that the quality of the population was inadequate to the task of maintaining an empire would again come to the fore. In 1931, a Sterilization Bill would be unsuccessfully introduced in the House of Commons, and during the 1930s a number of eminent people would promote the view that population must be regulated in order to ensure good stock. In 1934, an official committee would recommend the voluntary sterilization of people considered mentally or physically defective.14 Lloyd George had opined that it was impossible to run an A1 empire with a C3 population, and he was not alone. In 1935, the BBC would broadcast a debate involving G. K. Chesterton, Bertrand Russell and the psychologist Cyril Burt, on the motion that: ‘Parents are Unfitted by Nature to Bring up their own Children’. Burt explained that, in his opinion, many parents were unfit not merely to raise their children, but to have them in the first place.
These two enthusiasms, for psychoanalysis and for birth control, were combined in a series of lectures Stopes gave about sex education, and in particular about ‘cleanliness, disinfection and chastity in the home’. The idea that children should be taught about sex was now beginning to grow, and was spelt out in two slim volumes published by the British Hygiene Council: What Fathers Should Tell Their Sons, and What Mothers Must Tell Their Children.15 The first volume focused mainly on the risk of venereal disease: ‘Alcohol diminishes control over the lower nature, so that it may safely be said that it is a large factor in the causation of venereal disease. Alcohol is not needed by the young, and they are much better without it. The best moral school is a good home, where high ideals are inculcated by example.’ The second, illustrated with a reassuring line drawing of a mother reading to a well-groomed and clearly hygienic boy and girl, both with sensible knee-length socks and well-brushed, shiny hair, gave advice mainly on the evils of masturbation – for boys – and of sex outside marriage – for boys and girls: ‘If very unfortunately a boy or a girl has attempted to live a married life before marriage, that is to say if they have prematurely and wrongly used the sacred powers of their body, it is only too likely that such young people may have injured themselves.’
At this time, widely held beliefs about heredity and biological determinism – which had been growing in the public consciousness since Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859 – seemed to sit quite comfortably alongside the notion that a child could be formed, or its development distorted, by circumstance. Indeed, Freud had done a great deal to popularize the idea that the human personality was formed by an interaction between biology and nurture. And Truby King helped further in promoting the view that there could not only be good or bad nature, but also good or bad nurture. In 1909, he had given a lecture on ‘Parenthood and Race Culture’, part of which was reprinted in his classic baby-care book: ‘The decadence of nations is threatening many lands. France, with its declining birth rate, has already become a second-class power . . . the decay of Greece and Rome was not primarily due to a falling-off in the prowess of the phalanx and the legion, but to increasing luxury, lessened exertion, lessened contact with the open air, a growing cost in the standard of living, and an increasing selfishness, which expressed itself in a disinclination for the ties of marriage and parenthood . . . if we lack noble mothers we lack the first element of racial success and national greatness.’
So the obsession with the degradation of the race, which had loomed so large in the public mind before the war, had not gone away. Indeed, it was gaining strength, thanks to the efforts of the eugenics movement, and also in part to the work of an ambitious young psychologist named Cyril Burt. Shortly after his death in 1971, Burt would be exposed and pilloried for having falsified some of his research data. He would come to be seen by the liberal classes of later years as a sort of neo-fascist hate figure whose work on intelligence and its determinist nature was racist and in need of dismantling. But much of his early work must have seemed liberal, if not radical, at the time. Before and after World War One, Burt conducted research which would have a profound effect.
In 1909, he had published a paper for which he had subjected a group of thirteen children at a prep school in Oxford to a series of tests. He then ran similar tests on a group of pupils at a council school in London. The prep school boys having scored more highly, Burt had concluded that the effect was hereditary.16 The prep school boys were superior because their parents were superior, and their parents before them. Burt felt this knowledge could be put to good use. In 1918, Burt, by now the school psychologist for the London County Council, told an audience of social workers that it might be possible to develop a complete ‘psychogram’ of each child, which would help to determine what kind of work he or she might be fitted for. Every school leaver might be given a special dossier which would be passed to a juvenile advisory committee. Everyone would thus be categorized, indexed and correctly filed.
And while that never happened, the use of IQ testing became ever more widespread in British schools, and would later influence the ‘eleven plus’ exam on which entry to post-World War Two grammar schools would depend. Yet despite the centrality of the hereditary principle to Burt’s thinking, he was also an early proponent of the idea that individual children had individual needs. He was one of the first to propose ‘special’ schools for children with
disabilities – or ‘defective children’, as they were known at the time. And his work on young delinquents led to the opening of one of London’s first child guidance clinics.
Burt’s book, The Young Delinquent,17 was published in 1925 and was a product of its time. Since the war had ended, the ongoing debate on childhood had come back to one of its perennial themes – concern about levels of crime among the young. There had been a growing number of juveniles charged with offences, with the total rising from 12,000 in 1910 to more than 29,000 in 1938.18 Yet the focus, in this newly individualistic, child-focused world, was surprisingly liberal. In keeping with the new-found emphasis on psychology, the state had begun to focus not on punishment but on treatment. Indeed, it is significant that a book such as Burt’s, written as it was by an educational psychologist rather than by someone from the criminal justice system, should have proved so influential.
In one sense it is not at all surprising that the book should have proved a hit, though. Burt’s sense of drama and his ability to tell a good tale were striking. ‘One sultry August afternoon, in a small and stuffy basement kitchen not far from King’s Cross Station, I was introduced to a sobbing little urchin with the quaint alliterative name of Jeremiah Jones,’ the book began. ‘Jerry was a thief, a truant and a murderer. When first I saw him, he was just seven and a half years old, a scared and tattered bundle of grubbiness and grief, with his name still on the roll of a school for infants. Yet at this tender age, besides a long list of lesser faults, he had already taken another boy’s life.’