Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial: What happened next?

Dr Halliday Sutherland’s legal victory in the High Court was short-lived. Stopes appealed and the Court of Appeal reversed the decision of the High Court in July 1923. Dr Sutherland and his co-defendant, publisher Harding & More, sought leave to appeal to the House of Lords, then Britain’s highest court. In November 1924, they won conclusively when the Law Lords decided in his favour.

Despite the conclusion of the case, Stopes was not to be denied “my victory”. She wrote to the Lord Chancellor to appeal the House of Lords’ decision. Her long letter concluded:

“I realise that your lordships would not willingly do me an injustice: hence I desire to make the strongest protest in my power against the serious injury done to me by a conclusion founded on wrong premises; and therefore even if it be without precedent, and I pray your Lordship to open a reconsideration of the Appeal by the House of Lords itself so that legal subtleties based on misapprehensions may not rob me of my victory”

Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (2020) by Mark H. Sutherland and Neil Sutherland, page 276.

Notwithstanding the pompous tone, Stopes was essentially telling Britain’s legal establishment that they had got it wrong! As I wrote in Exterminating Poverty:

“The legal process is elegant and robust, imperfect and unpredictable. Overall, nine judges had been involved in the matter. Six of these had ruled in favour of the defendants, and three had ruled in favour of the plaintiff. Sutherland and Harding & More had won, and the costs for Stopes were vast, at around £12,000.”

Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (2020) by Mark H. Sutherland and Neil Sutherland, page 276.

Following the trial, Dr Sutherland continued to speak out against eugenics and the Malthusian agenda. In 1924 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.”

Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (2020) by Mark H. Sutherland and Neil Sutherland, page 278.

In his 1925 book, Birth Control Exposed, he wrote:

“If a wave of madness passed over our country, and this eugenic nightmare came true, we might very well ask what tribunal is to decide as to which of us is unfit. About you who are reading this book, I know nothing whatever, but I have a shrewd suspicion that the neo-malthusians have already decided about me. The point is that when these people discuss sterilization, they picture themselves sitting round a table and ordering other people to be sterilized. In the same way Communists, when they talk about the bloody revolution, always picture themselves knocking other people on the head, and indeed they become very angry when I tell them that the other people will retaliate. And thus do all enemies of freedom.”

Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (2020) by Mark H. Sutherland and Neil Sutherland, page 278.

These words are a jarring reminder that the eugenic question had not been resolved when Sutherland wrote them. They were written three years before the Eugenics Society drafted the Sterilization Bill, and six years before Archibald Church MP sought to introduce it into Parliament (FYI, in my next article, I will argue that the eugenic question still has not been resolved to this day).

For his part, Dr Sutherland was under no illusions as to what the “eugenic nightmare” would entail. In 1922 he wrote in the Westminster Gazette:

“Even if a Super-Eugenist, greatly daring, were to slay every consumptive in the land tonight, we should breed the disease afresh before tomorrow’s morn.”

Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (2020) by Mark H. Sutherland and Neil Sutherland, page 279.

He referred to the lethal chamber again in Birth Control Exposed (1925) and even featured one in his 1936 short story, The Perfect Eugenic State.

In 1933, Dr Sutherland achieved international success with his autobiographical book, Arches of the Years. It made the Publishers’ Weekly list of bestsellers for that year, and was translated into eight languages. Another autobiographical work, A Time to Keep, followed in 1934 which prompted this accolade from G.K. Chesterton:

“Dr. Halliday Sutherland is 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.”

Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (2020) by Mark H. Sutherland and Neil Sutherland, page 279.

One further autobiographical book, In My Path (1936), was followed by accounts of his travels: Lapland Journey (1938); Hebridean Journey (1939); Southward Journey (1942); Spanish Journey (1948) and Irish Journey (1956). He continued to write about moral issues in Laws of Life (1935) and Control of Life (1944).

Given the ready availability of contraceptive devices today and the efforts to educate people in their use, one might be forgiven for thinking that Dr Sutherland lost the historical argument. If he did, he at least had the consolation of being right when, in 1922, he predicted the outcome of Stopes’ experiment:

“Our declining birth-rate is a fact of the utmost gravity, and a more serious position has never confronted the British people. Here in the midst of a great nation, at the end of a victorious war, the law of decline is working, and by that law the greatest empires in the world have perished. In comparison with that single fact all other dangers, be they war, of politics, or of disease, are of little moment. Attempts have already been made to avert the consequences by partial endowment of motherhood and by saving infant life. Physiologists are now seeking the endocrinous glands and the vitamins for a substance to assist procreation. ‘Where are my children?’ was the question shouted yesterday from the cinemas. ‘Let us have children, children at any price,’ will be the cry of tomorrow.

“And all these thoughts were once in the mind of Augustus, Emperor of the world from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from Mount Atlas to the Danube and the Rhine. The Catholic Church has never taught that ‘an avalanche of children’ should be brought into the world regardless of consequences. God is not mocked; as men sow, so shall they reap, and against a law of nature both the transient amelioration wrought by philanthropists and the subtle expediences of scientific politicians are alike futile. If our civilisation is to survive we must abandon those ideals that lead to decline. There is only one civilisation immune from decay, and that civilisation endures on the practical eugenics once taught by a united Christendom and now expounded almost solely by the Catholic Church.”

Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (2020) by Mark H. Sutherland and Neil Sutherland, page 280.

And not just in relation to Britain:

“The cataclysm which may end the eighth known epoch in civilisation may be a lack of European children.”

Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (2020) by Mark H. Sutherland and Neil Sutherland, page 280.

Mark H. Sutherland
Curator, hallidaysutherland.com