Halliday Sutherland
"A born writer, especially a born story-teller. Dr. Sutherland, who is distinguished in medicine, is an amateur in the sense that he only writes when he has nothing better to do. But when he does, it could hardly be done better." G.K. Chesterton.
The Delingpod
I was honoured to be this week’s guest on James Delingpole’s Delingpod podcast. We discussed eugenics, tuberculosis and the Stopes v Sutherland libel trial of 1922-24. You can view or listen to the podcast by clicking the links.
In the podcast I made many assertions and promised to verify what I said. For this reason, I have set out the links that will verify what I was saying as well as to provide a rich source of sources for those interested in tuberculosis, Marie Stopes, Halliday Sutherland and eugenics.
| Time* | Transcript | Source |
| 05:05 | “what was happening in Victoria” | See Battleground Victoria by Topher Field. The film is an excellent record of Covid in in Victoria and it is worth watching the whole thing. The events depicted between 1:16:26 to 1:18:40 illustrate what I am referring to. BTW, Topher Field was a guest on the Delingpod (Episode 226 on 5 February 2022). |
| 05:25 | “directed energy weapons” | The device was the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) which A.C.T. police used during the Canberra demonstrations at the beginning of 2022. See: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-18/coronacheck-sonic-weapons-lrad-police-canberra-protests/100839612 The ABC is Australia’s equivalent to the BBC. There is controversy over the safety of the LRAD and some assert that at certain frequencies it produces a sensation of intense heat in the human target. |
| 09:35 | “for instance there was an article by a science writer” | See: https://www.smh.com.au/national/how-do-we-know-vaccines-won-t-have-long-term-safety-risks-20210803-p58fc7.html In the third paragraph, Liam Mannix’s wrote: “The first vaccine trials started about 16 months ago. Sure, we can be confident in their short-term safety … but how do we know in a decade or two we’re not going to start turning into horrifying lizard creatures?” In my opinion, ‘lizard creatures’ referred to one of the more extreme assertions of David Eyck. It confirmed that the article was not science but propaganda and the subtext was “if you don’t think that vaccines are safe in the long-term you’re aligning yourself with crazy conspiracy nut-jobs with the social exclusion and mockery that comes with that.” I read the article because I was not convinced that the Covid vaccines were “safe and effective” and wanted to see what I was missing. I didn’t intend any disrespect for the work of David Eyck, so much as to point out that, in the context of a reader of the Herald, Eyck’s ideas are well outside the Overton Window. I remain unconvinced by the propaganda of the MSM (I remarked to my wife several times that I have seen more convincing puppet shows) because it was deployed so extensively and consistently. Dr. Fauci himself who informed my approach to the Covid pandemic when, in a February 2020 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, he said: “If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.” |
| 10:34 | “there was a state premier” | The N.S.W. Premier was Bob Carr, interviewed by Peter Fitzsimons in the Sydney Morning Herald. In his Tweet Carr said: “Follow Singapore and legislate no medical or hospital expenses to be reimbursed to people who are not vaccinated without medical justification and then contract Covid. You ignored warnings and got the disease. You pay for your wilful stupidity, not the rest of us”. In this 2018 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Carr told the story of the death of his brother in 1983 from a heroin overdose at the age of 28. “He lingered for the better part of a year in a hospice, diminishing, because he was in a coma. My poor mother and father had to visit him in the hospice five days a week to sit by his side and imagine there might be some communication with him.” Given the well-publicised warnings about heroin, a person who dies of an overdose might be said to have “ignored the warnings”. Would it have been appropriate to label this tragedy as someone paying for their “wilful stupidity” and urging that the estate and/or family pay for the medical care required? Surely not! It would seem that Carr believed this because as Premier he opened a supervised drug injecting room in Sydney’s Kings Cross. I was very surprised by Carr’s comments. Carr tweeted on 9 November 2021 and it was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 12 December 2021. On 9 September 2021, the President of the United States was quoted as saying: “we’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin” and, on 5 January 2022, the President of France was quoted as saying… well, I won’t repeat it – this site has standards! Now you might (reasonably) say that these are only words, and repeat the adage “sticks and stones…” On the other hand, such statements made prominently and consistently can lead to a process of “othering” – the process by which people and groups are marked and identified as inferior by the dominant social group. There have been many episodes in history in which othering didn’t end well for both the perpetrators and the victims. |
| 13:18 | “quarantine camps they were building in Queensland” | I was referring to this facility. Any fears you might have would be allayed by the name “Wellcamp” and the fact that inmates were referred to as “guests”. For more information about the Queensland Regional Accommodation Centre go here, and here for a recent report that the camp will be “mothballed”. |
| 13:24 | “and in the Northern Territory” | For more information see the interview with Hayley Hodgson by Freddie Sayers on UnHerd. You can read the Northern Territory government’s side of the story here. |
| 15:40 | “Australia traditionally sees itself as that island fortress” | For more information about the North Head Quarantine Station, go here and here. If you visit Sydney, it is worth visiting, especially if you take a Sydney Harbour ferry (like taking the bus, but with beautiful water views of Sydney Harbour). |
| 16:24 | “in Victoria they passed a health act” | I am referring to the Public Health and Wellbeing Amendment (Pandemic Management) Act 2021. For more information go here. |
| 17:13 | “in the 2008 crash” | In 2008, the anti-terrorism laws were used to seize the assets of Icelanders. My point here is that when Britain passed anti-terrorism laws, I suspect that the activities of Icelanders was not contemplated and that, once a statute is on the books, politicians will use it for opportunistic purposes. |
| 20:40 | “working and living conditions” | For images see here. |
| 21:08 | “[Galton] came up with eugenics in its modern form which he defined as” | in 1904, Sir Francis Galton defined Eugenics as “… the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.” See: The American Journal of Sociology Volume X; July, 1904; Number 1. |
| 24:48 | “binding together” | Ann Farmer very kindly wrote an article on this website in which she said: “My family history contradicts feminist claims of ‘forced childbearing’, but also eugenicist assumptions: East End slum-dwellers during Stopes’s era, they were the sort of people she would have sterilised. My father’s family ended up in the workhouse, where his little sister died. My maternal grandmother suffered three stillbirths, and the eldest of her seven surviving children was killed on his first day at work (his 14th birthday); however, to the middle-class fertility controllers the fact that poor women saw such losses as a sorrow rather than a blessing was further proof of their ‘mental unfitness’, for what poor person ‘in their right mind’ would want children?” |
| 26:27 | “the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress” | In Exterminating Poverty I list some of the members: Sir James Barr (president of the BMA), Sir William Bayliss (the distinguished Professor of Physiology at University College London), Dame Clara Butt (the concert singer), Edward Carpenter (the philosopher and poet), John Maynard Keynes (the economist), Sir William Arbuthnot Lane (the physician and surgeon), Lady Constance Lytton (the suffragette), Aylmer Maude (the biographer and translator of Tolstoy), Bertrand Russell (the philosopher and mathematician), and H.G. Wells (the writer). My source was Rose, J. (1992). Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Page 153 and page 162. |
| 27:50 | “Galton machine” | The Galton machine is explained in this video. It is a good piece of kit to explain statistical variances. |
| 28:28 | “fingerprints” | Explained here. |
| 30:02 | “what he would do is look at a family” | How statistics were applied to a family unit is explained in my article “Vectors of Infection.” |
| 31:28 | “it’s their inferior heredity that has given then this disease” | In 1907, the Department of Applied Statistics at the Biometric Laboratory at University College London (under Pearson’s leadership) produced A First Study of the Statistics of Pulmonary Tuberculosis. The second followed in 1908 and, in total, seven studies into tuberculosis were published between 1907 and 1913 (see: Pearson, E. (1938). Karl Pearson: An Appreciation of Some Aspects of His Life and Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). On the first page of A First Study of the Statistics of Pulmonary Tuberculosis, Pearson indicated that he decided on the nature/nurture of TB before the research had been completed (emphasis added): “I have now been two years collecting family histories and at present have only reached between 200 and 300 fairly complete histories, where 2,000 or 3,000 at least are necessary. It is extremely hard to get co-operators who are willing, or if willing, able to give perfectly frank and full family details. Still the collection goes slowly forward, and one must hope that some day it may serve the purpose for which it was designed. Enough, however, of these histories have now been collected to convince me that heredity plays a large part in the effective sources of tuberculous disease. The discovery of the possibility of phthisical infection has led, I think, to underestimation of the hereditary factor. Probably few individuals who lead a moderately active life can escape an almost daily risk of infection under urban conditions ; but in the great bulk of cases, a predisposition, a phthisical diathesis, must exist, to render the risk a really great one. In this sense it is probably legitimate to speak of the inheritance of tuberculosis and even of the inheritance of zymotic diseases, meaning thereby the inheritance of a constitutional condition favourable to the development of such diseases should a risk be run, which cannot in the ordinary course of life be wholly avoided.” |
| 32:32 | “Karl Pearson in 1911 gave a talk Tuberculosis Heredity and Environment“ | In Tuberculosis, Heredity and Environment (1911) Pearson concluded: “The bulk of the tuberculous belong to stocks which we want ab initio to discourage. Everything which tends to check the multiplication of the unfit, to emphasize the at the fertility of the physically and mentally healthy, will pro tanto aid Nature’s method of reducing the phthisical death-rate.” |
| 32:38 | “the doctors who specialised in tuberculosis, one of whom was my grandfather” | Dr. Halliday Sutherland disagreed with the eugenic view on the heredity of tuberculosis in The Soil and the Seed in Tuberculosis (1912) in the British Medical Journal. He said that the reason that the children of a consumptive person become infected while the spouse would not was because the immune systems of the children was not sufficiently strong to resist constant exposure to disease. |
| 33:02 | “have we produced another James Watt” | See page 14 of Nature and nurture, the problem of the future (1910) in which Pearson said: “I would point out that we have had twenty to thirty years now of technical instruction, university and polytechnic engineering schools, we have had a population immensely larger than in 1800 to draw from. It is not the grindstone nor the oilstone which have been wanting recently. Yet has that system produced for us any four names which will stand out in the future like those of Arkwright, Watt, and the Stephensons? These men would have profited immensely by modern technical training. But will nurture alone produce such men ? If so, why is it that no Englishman of our period of technical education has been the discoverer of motor-car, submarine, or aeroplane?” It reflects the eugenic attitude that the improvement of the conditions of the poor was dysgenic because, whereas in previous generations they would have perished before they reproduced, social reforms were now keeping them alive. |
| 33:20 | “it’s quite obvious that the tuberculous belong to a certain class of people” | In Tuberculosis, Heredity and Environment (1911) Pearson said: “It is a counsel of despair to spend millions when you have no evidence of the efficiency of the expenditure, because you have nothing better to propose In the next place, why should we do something when we have nothing better to do? To practice the ineffectual as if it were a proven cure checks the road to better things. Admit it that there is no cure for phthisis and it incites men to find one, far more actively than to praise existing ‘cures.’ “But Eugenists have something better to propose. No one can study the pedigrees of pathological states, insanity, mental defect, albinism, &c., collected by our laboratory, without being struck by the large proportion of tuberculous members – occasionally the tuberculous man is a brilliant member of our race – but the bulk of the tuberculous belong to stocks which we want ab initio to discourage. Everything which tends to check the multiplication of the unfit, to emphasize that the fertility of the physically and mentally healthy, will pro tanto aid Nature’s method of reducing the phthisical death-rate. That is what the Eugenist proclaims as the “better thing to do”, and £1,500,000 spent in encouraging healthy parentage would do more than the establishment of a sanatorium in every township.” |
| 33:42 | “a chap called Dr Hayward” | OK, I’ll fess up – I got this wr… wro… wron… I’m having great difficulty typing that word, so I’ll type “misspoke” instead! The doctor’s name was John Berry Haycraft and in Darwinism and Race Progress under the heading “If we stamp out Infectious Diseases we perpetuate Poor Types,” he said “It is a hard saying, but none the less a true one, that the bacillus tuberculosis is a friend of the race, for it attacks no healthy man or woman, but only the feeble.” |
| 34:26 | “in 1912 was the president of the British Medical Association” | Sir James Barr’s presidential address at the 80th Meeting of the British Medical Association in 1912 was entitled: What are we? What are we Doing Here? Whence do we come and Whither do we go? The cross roads part is in the introductory paragraph. The part comparing Britain to a garden in which the weeds were being cultivated is on page 159: “If we could only abolish the tubercle bacillus in these islands we would get rid of tuberculous disease, but we should at the same time raise up a race peculiarly susceptible to this infection a race of hothouse plants which would not flourish in any other environment. We would thus increase at an even greater rate than we are doing at present, nervous instability, the numbers of insane and feeble-minded. Nature, on the other hand, weeds out those who have not got the innate power of recovery from disease, and by means of the tubercle bacillus and other pathogenic organisms she frequently does this before the reproductive age, so that a check is put on the multiplication of idiots and the feeble-minded. Nature’s methods are thus of advantage to the race rather than to the individual.” |
| 35:50 | “go forward to 1918 he gives a speech on The Future of the Medical Profession” | See The Future of the Medical Profession published in the British Medical Journal in September 1918 in which Barr said: “Dr. D. W. Hunter, whose name I deeply regretted to see in a recent casualty list, said: ‘The death-rate among idiots is about ten times that of the normal population at the same age. Further, of deaths of idiots about 80 per cent. are due to tuberculosis. Now an idiot has not even the resisting power necessary to die of phthisis; he dies of acute tuberculosis, death taking place in from three to six weeks from the onset of the illness. Surely here there is some inherited lowering of the soil. There are some 150,000 (estimated) of these defectives in England and Wales, and for every defective there are from six to a dozen of his relatives only a shade better than himself. Practically the same holds for insanity, yet we are asked to believe that a man cannot inherit a soil which will remain during his lifetime permanently below the average in resisting power. Until we have some restriction in the marriage of undesirables the elimination of the tubercle bacillus is not worth aiming at. It forms a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit. This world is not a hothouse; a race which owed its survival to the fact that the tubercle bacillus had ceased to exist would, on the whole, be a race hardly worth surviving. Personally, I am of opinion—and I think such opinion will be shared by most medical men who have been behind the scenes and have not allowed their sentiments to blind them—that if to-morrow the tubercle bacillus were non-existent, it would be nothing short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance.’” |
| 36:53 | “ten-thousand children are dying every year from tuberculous milk” | In Consumption: Its Cause and Cure an address delivered on September 4th 1917, Dr. Halliday Sutherland said: “Tubercule bacilli in the milk of tuberculous cattle cause half the cases where this disease attacks the bones, glands and joints of children. Tuberculous milk kills 10,000 children every year and creates an amount of child sickness, suffering and sorrow so widespread as to be incomprehensible to a finite mind, and no more natural than if their food had been poisoned with arsenic. Yet in London to-day, one out of even eleven churns of milk arriving at our railway termini contains this death-dealing virus.” |
| 37:53 | “their sterilization laws were quite close to what was passed in California at the time” | For instance, see https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/State-s-little-known-history-of-shameful-science-2663925.php |
| 38:08 | “a video of George Bernard Shaw talking” | You can see Shaw’s statement here. The accompanying text falsely states that Shaw was talking about capital punishment – he wasn’t. He was talking about appearing before a board to justify your existence. Shaw expressed similar views to a meeting of the Eugenics Education Society in 1910. |
| 39:02 | “publish a postcard from George Bernard Shaw to my grandfather” | You can read the postcard here. |
| 39:55 | “connected with the predator class” | My answer was correct, but what I could have added was the funding of the American Eugenics Society by the Rockefellers. In addition, after the interview it occurred to me that Dr. Halliday Sutherland hinted at sinister forces behind the push for birth control. In addition, Stopes’ was able to publish Married Love because of a loan from Humphrey Vedon-Roe, one of the founders of aircraft manufacturer AVRO (AVRO being the compression of his brother’s name Alliott Verdon Roe). Stopes later married Roe. In Dangers of Birth Control (Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 24 May 1924, page 7), he warned that the: “… campaign in favour of birth control was a national danger. They could not point to any nation in the whole history of the world who adopted this vice and did not perish. The advocates of artificial birth control were clever people, well organised, well financed, and by every art — pictured, screened, staged and spoken — they were deliberately making an appeal to the lowest qualities in a nation weakened by war… The wildest Communist on the Clyde had done less to sow the seeds of revolution than had these Hedonists.” In the Uxbridge and West Drayton Gazette (Friday 27th September 1929, page 21) Dr. Sutherland’s warning as to where this would end up was quoted: “The cataclysm which may end the eighth known epoch in civilisation may be a lack of European children.” |
| 42:20 | “that was a complete lie” | Lesley Hall is an acknowledged expert on Marie Stopes. In the book review of June Rose’s Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, Hall conceded that “Even her most famous personal myth—that she married Ruggles Gates in complete sexual ignorance and took years, and a course of study in the ‘Cupboard’ in the British Museum, to realise that the marriage was unconsummated—subjected to scrutiny is seen to lie at some angle to the truth.” See: https://www.lesleyahall.net/jrose.htm |
| 43:20 | “do we have any evidence of the funding they got” | See answer to 39:55 above. The Eugenics Society (as it became in 1926) received a large bequest from Australian grazier Henry Twitchin. |
| 45:59 | “exposing the poor to experiment” | You can view the libelous words on page 101 of Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine against the Neo-Malthusians. A facsimile copy of the book (used and annotated by the Lord Chief Justice during the court hearing) is published here. |
| 48:48 | “brand name is racial brand” | The Racial and Prorace cervical caps (and box). |
| 49:00 | “lantern with a mesh” |  Note that the mesh guard of the lantern is the words “Birth Control” repeated many times over. |
| 49:52 | “in 1873 Galton wrote” | The article was Hereditary Improvement in the January 1873 edition of Fraser’s Magazine (Volume 7, pages 116-30). The link offers a .pdf facsimile of the article. In it, Galton wrote: “Again, the ordinary struggle for existence under the bad sanitary conditions of our towns, seems to me to spoil, and not to improve our breed. It selects those who are able to withstand zymotic diseases and impure and insufficient food, but such are not necessarily foremost in the qualities which make a nation great. On the contrary, it is the classes of a coarser organisation who seem to be, on the whole, most favoured under this principle of selection, and who survive to become the parents of the next generation. Visitors to Ireland after the potato famine generally remarked that the Irish type of face seemed to have become more prognathous, that is, more like the negro in the protrusion of the lower jaw ; the interpretation of which was, that the men who survived the starvation and other deadly accidents of that horrible time, were more generally of a low and coarse organisation.” (Emphasis added). And for my benefit: https://www.howtopronounce.com/prognathous |
| 50:52 | “what was the contraception situation” | As I wrote in Exterminating Poverty: “The Mothers’ Clinic did not introduce contraceptives to Britain, nor did it make them widely available. People who wanted them — generally speaking middle and upper class women or prostitutes — knew where to get them, and, as historian John Peel pointed out there was “with the exception of the oral contraceptive… not a single birth control method in existence to-day which was not already available, and available in greater variety, in 1890.”[i] What the clinic did do was to provide access to information about conception and contraception to the group which had the least access to it: poor and working-class women.” [i] Peel, J. (1963, November). The Manufacture and Retailing of Contraceptives in England. Population Studies, 17(2), 113-125. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2172841. |
| 52:46 | “from talking to a social historian” | Ann Farmer’s article Alive and Killing: The old Malthusian and eugenic ideas that refuse to die (and why you should care) is published in another part of this website (https://hallidaysutherland.com/2022/03/01/alive-and-killing-by-ann-farmer/) reveals the assumptions that we make. Worth reading in full. |
| 55:06 | “he wrote a book called Birth Control“ | Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians. |
| 56:05 | “as Catholics against contraceptives” | This is the accepted view of the case and it is summarised in this BBC article. |
| 56:37 | “when he was working with the tuberculous poor” | You can read the first (1911) and fourth (1914) annual reports of the St Marylebone Dispensary for the Prevention of Consumption at archive.org. The photographs in these reports are particularly interesting. |
| 56:41 | “when he made Britain’s first public health cinema film” | The film was The Story of Jhttps://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-story-of-john-mneil-1911-onlineohn M’Neil (1911). You can view the film on the British Film Institute’s website free of charge. |
| 56:55 | “opened an open air school in a bandstand in Regent’s Park” |   The annual reports of the St Marylebone Dispensary for the Prevention of Consumption has reports from and photographs of the school (see the entry for 56:37 above). Dr. Sutherland reminisced about the bandstand school in his autobiography The Arches of the Years (1933). |
| [To be completed – this is a work in progress. Contact me through the “Contact” page if you have any questions]. |
*The time marks are based on the podcast recording at https://delingpole.podbean.com/e/mark-halliday-sutherland/ Different times will apply on other platforms. For instance, the recording on Oddysee is about 15 seconds ahead of Podbean.
Thank you, an excellent Podcast. My mother would loose her temper eveytime Stopes was mentioned in a conversation or on TV and would shout about Stopes being a eugenicist, and how powerful people between the wars were pushing for laws to be changed to wipe out groups of people. Unfortunately as stated in the podcast, the unpleasant truth of their motives is hidden.
That’s really interesting. Are you at liberty to say how your mother came to see what was at play in the first place?