Eugenics and Preston
Possibly the reader will not be familiar with eugenics - but will certainly be aware of
its practice in recent history. He or she might also question the relevance of
eugenics to the village of Preston. Read on.....
Eugenics is a movement which advocated practices to improve the genetic composition of a
population, usually a human population. Immediately, connotations of Germany, and its odious pursuit
of the Aryan ‘super-race’ ideal in the middle of the twentieth century, spring to mind. Two hundred
thousand disabled people were eliminated by the Nazis and 400,000 were forcibly sterilized.
Today, this mind-set seems foreign in view of the groundswell of opinion when the needs of the
disabled are highlighted - they even enjoy their own paralympics.
Eugenics was a by-product of evolution’s Survival of the Fittest teaching - indeed, its earliest fervent
promulgator was a cousin of Charles Darwin. The wisdom of caring for the disabled ‘weak’ was
questioned because of its drain on resources and because it allowed them to reproduce. Darwin
wrote, ‘We civilised men...do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the
imbecile, the maimed and the sick...Thus, the weak members of society propagate their kind’.
In Britain and America, there was a call for government to improve biological strains of humans
through selective parenthood. It was argued that as a result of the application of eugenics, crime,
vagrancy, alcoholism, prostitution and unemployment could be significantly reduced. Concern was
also felt that the talented and the intelligentsia should buck their trend of marrying late and having
fewer children.
Supporters of eugenics included H G Wells, the economist, Keynes and George Bernard Shaw who
proposed that the State should issue colour-coded ‘procreation tickets’ to prevent the gene pool from
being diluted by inferior beings. A Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded
was established in 1908 which equated the care taken in breeding animals and plants with human
pro-creation. In 1910, Winston Churchill advised, ‘The multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very
terrible danger to the race’.
But what has eugenics to do with a little village in the Hertfordshire countryside which had seen its
share of inter-family and first-cousin marriages over the years and which had its ration of feeble-
minded as noted by census regulators?
It has been noted elsewhere on this website that Lord of the Manor of Temple Dinsley (1901 - 1908),
James Barrington-White was among subscribers to a list to raise £15,000 for the Galton Laboritory for
National Eugenics in 1911.
Around the same time, the headmistress of Preston School, (Anna) Maud Mary Horsfield (pictured
below) gave an extraordinary interview to a newspaper reporter. Miss Horsfield was born at Hitchin in
early 1870. Her father, George Horsfield, was an insurance superintendent - in 1895, he was with the
Railway Passengers Assurance Company. The family (including Maud) was living at 16 Highbury
Road, Hitchin in 1911 and had Nellie Swain from Preston as a maid.
Maud taught at Preston School from January 1909 until May 1913. In 1918, aged 38 and evidently not
working, she married a soldier, Thomas James Davis (27) at Hampstead, London.
In October 1912, the Luton Times and Advertiser reported:
‘In an interview, the headmistress of Preston, Herts village schools where the subject of
eugenics is taught, said, ‘If you don’t teach children the facts of nature in a sensible
open way, they find out for themselves in a vulgar improper way. I believe in telling
children those essential facts concerning life which they must know sooner or later.
They ought to know; their ignorance is not a moral safeguard, it is the reverse; in fact,
sometimes our educational methods make me want to scream. Up ‘til fourteen, a child
is strictly cared for by the Government - even the temperature of the schoolroom has to
be regulated - but directly he is fourteen, he can straight to the Devil for all the
Government cares. With girls, it is far worse than with boys. So long as a girl keeps
straight, no-one bothers to help her at all. Let her go off the rail however and rescue
homes galore will take her in hand. It is like shutting the stable door after the horse has
been stolen. I think eugenics should be taught in every school in the kingdom’
Armed with this information, I went back over the Preston School logbook. Maud’s comments therein
were not noteworthy. When she started, she found the ‘children bright and intelligent’. Maud said that
she used the Archibald system of infant discipline. Twice the School Inspectors reported ‘The
discipline and tone are most praiseworthy’.
So, what influence did the teaching of eugenics have on the children of Preston? On a purely
personal note, my father was born in 1905 and attended the School throughout Maud’s tenure. I saw
no evidence that his thinking was touched by eugenics.
