GLIMPSES OF CHILDHOOD.
Marie Carmichael Stopes, the first child of Henry Stopes and Charlotte
Carmichael, his wife, was born in Edinburgh, the town of her mother’s
birth and upbringing, but her father was pure English, and at the age
of six weeks the baby girl became a Londoner, which, in essence, she
has remained ever since.
Henry Stopes was by profession an architect, but since early childhood
had a passion for fossils and the stone tools left by prehistoric
man. Indeed, at the age of eight years he was whipped soundly for
insisting on taking his stones to bed with him, and through life his
passion for archæological research furnished him with a second career,
which undoubtedly greatly influenced the home surroundings of his
children and, in the case of his elder daughter, largely directed
the line of her development. Long before his death Henry Stopes had
accumulated the largest private collection in the world of prehistoric
stone implements, and their constant care and classification, as
well as collection, was a great feature in his elder daughter’s life
from her earliest childhood. Henry Stopes’s interests were profound
in many directions and very human; in addition to these two main
interests he was a noted agricultural expert, writing regularly under
a _nom-de-plume_ for agricultural papers, and being Chairman of the
British Judges of Barley; being indeed a pioneer in the critical
judging of grain. He accumulated statistics on the effects of different
rotations of crops in connection with prize-winning strains and so
on, which meant a great deal of statistical work from the records of
numerous entrants for the annual barley competitions, in which his
little girl, before she was twelve years old, used to help him, or
was led to believe that she was helping him, while undoubtedly he was
training her in arithmetic and in a scientific attitude of mind towards
life in general.
Marie Stopes sometimes calls herself a “British Association Baby,” for
Henry Stopes and Miss Carmichael were first introduced at a meeting
of the British Association; and Marie was taken, from childhood, to
almost every meeting of the Association during her school days, only
missing those meetings which were held overseas.
Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, her mother, was one of the pioneers of
women’s University education, having been the first woman to take the
University Certificate in Literature, Philosophy, and a number of other
subjects at Edinburgh University when they were given by the Professors
privately for the ladies, who were afterwards examined with the same
examination papers as the men, but from whom degrees were withheld.
Charlotte Carmichael headed many a list in the early days when Miss
Jex Blake was studying medicine. After marriage Miss Carmichael
came to live in London, and took up the study of Shakespearean
contemporary history, becoming an expert in reading early records
and ferreting out many of the facts time had rendered obscure about
Shakespeare’s life history. She is the author, among other works, of
“The Bacon-Shakespeare Question Answered,” “Shakespeare’s Warwickshire
Contemporaries,” “The Life of the Earl of Southampton,” and a large
number of serious original contributions published by the learned and
periodical press.
Thus on both sides the baby Marie inherited a variety of intellectual
interests. One of her maternal great grandfathers was Brown, the Royal
Architect, in Edinburgh, who not only repaired Holyrood Palace but
designed and built many of the finest streets and squares in the West
End of Edinburgh which still delight the town-planners of to-day.
Another maternal great grandfather was William Carmichael, Writer to
the Signet, assistant and then successor to Sir Walter Scott. The Scott
family were intimate with the Carmichaels, and Lady Scott personally
embroidered a beautiful Christening robe for one member of the family,
which descended to Marie, was used for her own Christening, and is now
handed on to her son.
On her father’s side, behind an immediate Quaker connection, there was
a long line of Anglican clergy.
Inherited also was a great liking, indeed almost a passion, for
travel. After the journey at six weeks from Edinburgh to London, the
nine-months-old baby was taken to the seaside and plunged into the sea,
and thereafter never less than twice a year, and often more frequently,
she made a journey to some part of England or Scotland, becoming later
on a world-wide traveller.
After a few years little Marie had a sister, called Winifred, and these
two were the only children of their parents, no boys being wished for.
This fact, and the attitude of generous appreciation towards women
that was characteristic of her father, undoubtedly had a favourable
influence on her character and achievements through life, for she was
brought up from her earliest consciousness not only to feel that her
birth had been desired, but that she, as a girl, had been wished for
and that no boy would have satisfied her parents as she did. For an
eldest child who has the misfortune to be a girl when a boy is desired,
a very different home and outlook must develop. Whilst still a tiny
child, when asked by enquirers if, besides her sister there was no
brother, she would gravely announce that pussy was her brother, and
she thinks she was probably 8 or 9 years old before she realised
that pussy was not a brother. Her father being particularly fond of
cats, and having an almost magical power of training them, the family
pussy had its own dinner-service and used to sit up at table with the
children, eating off its own plate on the table from a high chair just
like Marie’s little sister.
From her uneventful childhood, a few points stand out in her memory
as being of great importance in the development of her character. One
of these was a nurse who was for many years their devoted attendant,
and after whom the favourite doll was called “Little Annie.” Nurse
Annie, one day, looking at the doll’s dress which the child was sewing,
remarked that it was very good “for a lady,” and Marie, at that time
not more than six or seven years of age, blazed with indignation that
it should not be very good in itself. In some queer childish way she
resented the fact that a lady should be considered incapable of doing
things as well as other people, and determined that she would sew, at
any rate, as well as a servant. This she did, but unfortunately the
nurse said nothing about knitting like a lady; so that when she was
twelve years old and went first to school, she immediately took first
place in the sewing class and bottom place in the knitting class.
A rather absurd introduction to her later well-known birth control
ideas also may be traced to the nursery. Her mother one day, when the
nurse told her that new boots were needed, laughingly remarked, “Oh,
what should I do if I had a dozen children?” Little Marie gravely
remarked: “You would drown all the others, and keep Winnie and me.”
In London the Stopes family lived beside the Crystal Palace in a house
in Cintra Park, overlooking private grounds on one side and with
ground behind the three central gardens of the neighbouring circle of
houses, which went uphill and downhill, so that the children had much
space in which to play. Mr. Stopes built a wing on to the house that
they took and, having very enlightened architectural ideas for those
days, had an open verandah connecting the back parts of the house,
for the convenience of the maids and to make an open-air playground
for the children in wet weather. In the garden an old quince tree
was a favourite resort of the children, because they could lie on
its branches and overlook the stableyard, and watch the horses being
groomed. It was under this quince tree, too, that Marie Stopes says
she first got the idea, as a very small child, which finds expression
in her pamphlet “Mother, how was I born?”--for it was just by that
quince tree that, as a prattling child of four or five, she was talking
about babies and where her little sister had come from, and she felt,
rather than saw, that people were laughing while telling her the
gooseberry-bush fiction, and she then felt, with a flush of insight
and indignation, that they were lying to her. The matter however did
not actually interest her, but the vivid impression of that moment
has painted on her memory every leaf, and the exact arrangement of
the grass and of the border walks, so that it is the most vividly
remembered scene of the whole of that home.
The children were taken regularly once or twice a year to some seaside
place, and for many years they went to different seaside resorts in the
South of Scotland. At about the age of nine, North Berwick was the
choice, and Marie’s inherited passion for fossils had full vent in the
collection of crinoids which were washed up thickly on the seashore.
There too Marie Stopes tells me that she has a very vivid memory of
lying on her back in the garden at North Berwick and really, for the
first time in her life, noticing the clouds; noticing them, that is to
say, in such a way that to this day she can remember their shapes and
patterns and the thrilling sense of portentous glory their mounting
and swiftly riding god-like forms created in her mind. She thinks
this was connected in some way with the reading of a book, “Tales of
Ancient Greece,” which had been given to her not long before; but she
says it felt as though she had suddenly looked through a glass-door
into the whole Universe, peopled with mysterious beings she had never
seen before and never ceased to see thereafter. A little later, indeed
she thinks that very summer, a sense of personal shame and inferiority
developed in her, which she did not get over for many years, and
at that time almost her only consolation was the story of the Ugly
Duckling in Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. The first sense of personal
shame resulted from her mothers’ advanced, and as we moderns would
think very sensible, ideas. Little Marie had been given a knitted
dress to wear, when no one else, at any rate in that seaside place,
was advanced enough to be wearing knitted dresses; and instead of
feeling happy and distinctive in it she felt utterly ashamed to appear
different from other children; a feeling that was accentuated by the
fact that a young cousin laughed at her. About this same time, owing
to the curious inaccuracy and incompleteness of a child’s ideas, this
feeling was emphasised and increased by the following incident. The
Stopes family and three or four other families in the district combined
to employ the services of a private dance-mistress, who came in turn
to each of the four houses, where the class was held in rotation.
Mrs. Stopes, when her turn came, gave the children a nice tea of
wholesome cakes without currants, and to make them attractive used to
send to town for cakes with coloured icings and various fancy things
she thought the children would like. One of the other households,
however, gave only rock buns and milk. Poor little Marie thought that
rock buns, as they contained currants, which she was never allowed to
have at home, were something much grander and more expensive, and was
always ashamed of the fact that they were not rich enough to have rock
buns for tea. As usual with her however no external sign of this deep
shame was ever shown, but for years she felt crushed and humiliated by
the fact that to her a halfpenny rock bun was far grander than an iced
gateau. At this time and all through her earlier childhood her father
was very well-to-do--but he had great financial losses when she was
about eleven, which left them permanently impoverished in comparison
with the earlier expectations.
Marie’s education was exceptional in many ways. Her mother having been
brought up in the good old Scottish school, started the little girl of
about five on Greek and Latin roots, so as to give her a fundamental
knowledge of the structure of the English language. But Marie proved
so stupid that this was dropped and, beyond being taught to read and
write, she had indeed almost no education until, a few days before
she was twelve, she was sent to school. This statement should however
be qualified by mention of something that, again, greatly influenced
her mental attitude towards the Universe. A large atlas was solemnly
brought out every morning, and on its title-page this atlas had a
circle in which part of the world was drawn with clouds around it. Her
first memory of any lesson at all was pointing with a stubby little
baby finger at this circle, representing a sphere, and repeating “The
world is round and rolls in space.” This formula, which was repeated
daily for years, so impressed itself on her that she was always trying
to feel the world rolling in space and even, as a very small child,
used to wonder which way up she was standing at any given moment.
Marie and her sister Winifred were sent to St. George’s School in
Edinburgh for their first schooling, and then the unusual nature of her
preliminary training, pitted against the ordinary school curriculum,
left her woefully behind her age in attainments, so that she was
put with a class of girls much younger than herself. In half a term
however she began to find her feet, but not before her backwardness had
emphasised the feeling of shame and humiliation at her inferiority,
which indeed throughout her schooldays was strongly characteristic of
her, and which she tried to hide by making the most of any attainments
that she thought she had; and she undoubtedly had some that were
unusual in a child of her age. For instance, she had been entrusted
by her father with a small collection of flint implements he was
presenting to the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries in Edinburgh,
and when she was taken down with them to Dr. Anderson, the learned
Director of the Museum, without any hesitation or embarrassment she
gave him what amounted to a lecture on their nature and uses, and told
him what to write on the labels for the exhibition cases. So amused
were her elders by her expert knowledge of these implements, that her
head mistress asked her to lecture to the assembled school on the
subject. This she did, her audience consisting of the entire school
including the teachers. Having never been brought up to an acute
personal consciousness or any personal conceit, she did not realise
then that there was anything unusual or surprising in facing such an
audience. A diary which Dr. Stopes kept as a child for some weeks still
exists, and begins with an entry concerning her first day at school:
“Oct. Tuesday 4. I went to school at 10 o’clock and did not like it
at all. I went to bed very cross.” Three days later comes an entry
relating to what subsequently became one of her chief studies. “Friday,
7th. Went to school. It was so nice we had an object lesson on coal
mines and coal.”
While in Edinburgh she had the immense advantage of the kindly personal
friendship of Miss S. E. S. Mair, her mother’s friend, one of the
originators of the St. George’s Girls’ School, the best school in
Edinburgh, and a leader of social life and advanced thought in that
city. Miss Mair used to give famous parties for little girls, at which,
after a sumptuous tea, each child was asked to make a clever remark to
entertain the whole company. Marie’s remarks, though presumably not
clever, were extremely embarrassing to her and kept her petrified with
fear throughout the whole tea, so that she used to feel that it was a
great pity the remarks were not asked for before tea, because then her
appetite would have been so much better for the tea itself--a feeling
that no doubt many after-dinner speakers have shared. In Edinburgh also
the horizon of the two little girls was enlarged by the kindly care and
interest of Miss Menzies, who had a great interest in Iceland and read
many Icelandic and Northern sagas aloud to them. Miss Menzies too had
a comfortable elderly cook who took Marie’s domestic education in hand
and on Saturdays taught her home cooking and the making of real Scotch
scones and shortbreads, interesting her in cooking, and sowing the
seeds of an accomplishment which later in life proved of great value
when she was out camping, or living under unusual conditions, as she
often did.
After two years in Edinburgh the children were brought back to
London and were sent to the North London Collegiate School, whose
head mistress was Dr. Sophie Bryant, the successor of Miss Buss, the
original founder of the School. Although two years of Edinburgh
schooling had made Marie rather better able to meet girls of her own
age on an equality, she was still far behind her years in many of
the routine school subjects; and when she finally passed the London
matriculation, second-class, her Latin mistress said to her: “I do
not know how you did it, you had no business to get through,” and she
replied: “I did it by writing very clearly everything I knew and saying
nothing about the things I did not know; for I thought it would save
the Examiners’ time”--a remark which showed much penetration, for in
later years, when Dr. Marie Stopes herself became an examiner, she
learnt how examiners are worried by illegible handwriting and screeds
of mazy reading which do not make it clear to them what the candidates
know and what they do not know. At the North London Collegiate School
the two girls were still educated in a rather unusual way. They were
not permitted to go to afternoon school, and only lived in London from
Monday mornings till Friday middays, going home to a country house
in the then beautiful village of Swanscombe. The house there was
an old Elizabethan oak-panelled house which Marie was old enough to
appreciate, and the charm of which, and the mysterious beauty of some
of its rooms, fascinated her in her early adolescence. At the age of
about fourteen she often got up at four or five in the morning in order
to be alone in the old rooms, one or two of which she sketched very
industriously though with little talent. These pictures however are
still precious to her as recalling the house she has ever loved. It had
a very high stone wall along the tiny village street on one side, and
opened into cherry orchards leading to woodlands on the other, and it
was in these woods and flowery lanes that Marie first really saw the
beauty of flowers. She says:
“At the age of fifteen I remember observing the faces of flowers as
passionately as I had at the age of about nine observed the sky. I
escaped by myself one day into the woods and spent several hours
lying motionless, gazing into the faces of the violets. That too was
the opening of a door into another universe. Of course, I suppose I
must have seen flowers before, but till then I had never felt the
sight of them.”
This home in Swanscombe had been taken because of Henry Stopes’s
great interest in the brick-earths and gravels of the surrounding
neighbourhood, which teemed with relics of prehistoric man in the shape
of both palæoliths and neoliths, and there Marie, and to a less extent
her sister Winifred, spent nearly all their holiday time and almost the
whole of every Saturday and Sunday, collecting specimens with their
father in the quarries and on the fields, washing them, labelling them,
and cataloguing them, with him. To this house also came many visitors
of interest to the growing children.
“One of my schoolgirl memories of Swanscombe is the famous editor,
Mr. Norman Maccoll, the editor of the then thunderer, the _Athenæum_.
He was always very charming to us children, but disapproved of
our going into the woodlands without gloves, as he said we were
to be young ladies in the future and should have white hands. So
on the days that he came to lunch we used to put on gloves to go
round the woodlands with him, but never on other occasions. He was
a very stout, elderly gentleman with long beard and a benign,
fatherly face, though his literary criticisms were the terror of
many a serious author. We did not look upon him with such awe as we
undoubtedly should have done, and I remember once luring him to sit
on a very firm bush, through which he promptly went, leaving only his
head and his feet sticking up, and from which the united strength of
my little sister and myself were insufficient to extricate him, red
and indignant, and very much less pompously impressive than usual.
I remember another occasion when, to avoid climbing a high fence,
we children stepped through, and he, miscalculating the width of
the bar, followed us but stuck midway. No pushing or pulling could
get him either in or out. He became purple in the face, and we were
all frantic. My mother, as one of his reviewers and an author whose
reputation could be made or marred by his paper, was almost in
tears, and my father at last was so genuinely concerned that he ran
home for a saw. I also remember Seton Karr, the famous lion hunter,
lunching with us and being escorted across the cherry orchard by my
sister and myself, wherein we encountered two or three cows from
whom Seton Karr fled with teeth chattering, while my sister and I
remained a protective bodyguard between him and the cows. We were
firmly convinced at the time that he was in real fear of them, and I
remember preaching to myself a moral lesson on the vanity of courage.
Now, however, I begin to wonder whether he was not an adept in the
art of pleasing children. A man who also made a great impression
on my early childhood was the very lovable late Dr. Furnivall, the
famous Shakespearean, who often came to lunch with us in his pink
shirt and with his pink bald head, and went with us through the woods
in a state of childlike glee. He first among all my acquaintances
showed me the delight of lying flat on one’s back in the baking
sunshine, and I well remember his refusal to proceed round the
woodland with my mother and the rest of the party, and insisting on
lying where he was on the violet-decked slope in the sun for an hour
at a time, while the rest took the decorous walk round the crest
and picked him up on their return. I remember also there Professor
Sayce, the famous Assyriologist, whose life has just been published,
and who was much interested in my father’s implements; and also Mr.
Mabson, the owner and editor of the _Statist_, a journal for which my
father sometimes wrote.
“As a young girl I met so many of my parents’ friends, mostly
people who were doing something in the world of thought, that it is
difficult to say who influenced me and who did not; but I clearly
remember an outstanding influence from one talk with Sir Francis
Galton and also from Mrs. Alec Tweedie, whose house I was sometimes
taken to visit. Once at a party at Robert Mond’s country house she
introduced me to him as ‘a girl who is going to do great things.’
I felt it was incumbent upon me to try to live up to such an
introduction!”
With the exception of one annual day for their chief school friends,
the children had almost no young companionship, but listened to the
talk of scientific or literary experts at their parents’ table, and
found their chief amusement in the constant companionship of their
father. When the elder girl was about fifteen however the parents
thought it wise to come nearer to their school, and the family moved
to Hampstead, by chance to the house next door to Professor Bonney,
the geologist. Professor Bonney had not grasped who his new neighbour
was, and when hundreds of butter boxes were piled in the garden, he
gave out a groan round the neighbourhood, that his new neighbour was
a wretched grocer. Professor Bonney, who was more a geologist than an
archæologist, showed only a polite interest in the boxes when he found
out that the contents were museum specimens of stone implements and not
the remains of a grocery business.
The continuous unconscious education which companionship with her
father gave Marie was supplemented, whilst settling into this house, by
really expert lessons in carpentry. Her father, always anxious that she
should not do things in a “ladylike” way, taught the girl when and how
to use screws instead of nails, and how to mitre a corner, in making
cabinets or shelves, and both girls helped their father to put up many
shelves and make arrangements for his specimens. This resulted in a
passion to do things for herself, and a small room was allotted as a
study for the girls, which Marie distempered with a stencilled design
of her own make, and for which she constructed a good deal of the
furniture. In this room she pursued her school studies in an erratic
way, hurrying through the official homework and, as she grew older,
reading many books it would probably have surprised her elders to
know that she read. “Between the ages of sixteen and seventeen I read
most of Kant and Swedenborg, a great deal of comparative theology, as
well as a large number of out-of-the-way novels, and, of course, many
scientific books, such as ‘The Origin of Species’ and others then new
to me, which it would have shocked my mother very much to know that I
was taking seriously.”
In her later school years Marie had more or less caught up to the
standard for her age, but until she reached the Sixth Form and was a
Prefect, she never felt really sure among her school contemporaries.
Even though in many classes she headed the list, she always came down
in some other subject. She was seldom indisputably top of the class,
but when she was nearly seventeen the chemistry mistress, Miss Aitken,
developed scarlet fever, and for the next morning’s work there was
no teacher. Marie, without hesitation, went to the headmistress and
said that as she had been spending some hours in the laboratory she
knew just what Miss Aitken had intended to give to those classes, and
that she could show where the apparatus was ready prepared. Dr. Sophie
Bryant, the headmistress, in view of the crisis, and also possibly
to test the quality of a girl in whom she felt some interest, asked
Marie if she could take the classes, which she did; and then for six
weeks, directed only by correspondence from Miss Aitken, Marie took the
chemistry for the whole school, including the class of which she was
herself a member. She was very proud when she received a present of £5
for having done this, and much humiliated when having sent a receipt
without a stamp on it, this was returned for her to rectify the error.
Nevertheless she went through the school leaving a general impression
on most, if not all, the mistresses, except Miss Aitken and Dr. Sophie
Bryant herself, that she was a stupid girl whose plodding perseverance
alone saved her from disgracing herself in the examinations. Among
her school-mates she made a few lasting friendships. Her great school
friend, and the only one whose life has remained in close contact
with her own, is Olga Kapteyn, a girl of Dutch descent, niece of
Professor Kapteyn, the famous astronomer. These two girls, who both
had a passion for colour, including a love of gold and orange tone for
silk (which was then almost unattainable), came together over their
intense appreciation of their teacher, Miss Aitken. Of Miss Aitken,
Marie Stopes says: “She was, undoubtedly, the greatest influence in my
school career. She opened to me the door that led to all the exquisite
beauty of Italian art and of the school of artists represented by
Watts, Rossetti, and their contemporaries. She taught me chemistry
so well that I was doing work of honours degree standard in physical
chemistry before I left school, and she strengthened and hardened my
character by her mingled austerity and beauty. I had undoubtedly the
usual schoolgirl’s ‘Schwärmerei’ for other teachers whom I thought I
loved more at the time. But Miss Aitken and Dr. Sophie Bryant are the
two mistresses who understood me and influenced me, and to whom I owe
a lasting debt of gratitude.”
On leaving school Marie Stopes was given a leaving Scholarship in
Science, and under the influence of Miss Aitken she went to University
College, London, rather than to a Woman’s College which had been
suggested for her. Miss Aitken wisely said: “If you are going to do
science at all, do it under the biggest men of the day.”