L Margery Spring Rice UCY LUCY POLLARD Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early P Twentieth Century OLLARD LUCY POLLARD This book vividly presents the story of Margery Spring Rice, an instrumental fi gure in the movements of women’s health and family planning in the fi rst half of the twen� eth century. Margery Spring Rice, née Garre� , was born into a family of formidable female trailblazers — niece of physician and suff ragist Elizabeth Garre� Anderson, and of Millicent Fawce� , a leading suff ragist and campaigner for equal rights for women. Margery Spring Rice con� nued this legacy with her co-founding of the North Kensington birth control clinic in 1924, three years a� er Marie Stopes founded the fi rst clinic in Britain. Engaging and accessible, this biography weaves together Spring Rice’s personal and professional lives, adop� ng a chronological approach which highlights how the one impacted the other. Her life unfolds against the M turbulent backdrop of the early twen� eth century — a period which sees ARGERY the entry of women into higher educa� on, and the upheaval and societal upshots of two world wars. Within this context, Spring Rice emerges as a dynamic fi gure who dedicated her life to social causes, and whose ac� ons � me and again bear out her habitual belief that, contrary to the S Shakespearian dictum, ‘valour is the be� er part of discre� on’. PRING This is the fi rst biography of Margery Spring Rice, drawing extensively on le� ers, diaries and other archival material, and equipping the text with family trees and photographs. It will be of great interest to a range of R social historians, especially those researching the birth control movement; ICE female friendships, female philanthropists, and feminist ac� vism in the twen� eth century; and the history of medicine and public health. As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www. openbookpublishers.com Cover Image: Margery pushing a young friend along the Crag Path in Aldeburgh, New Year, 1968. Drawing by Christopher Ellis (1968). Photograph by: Lucy Pollard (2020). Cover Design: Anna Gat book Margery Spring Rice eebook and OA edi� ons also available Pioneer of Women’s Health in the OBP Early Twentieth Century To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: htps://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1132 Open Book Publishers is a non-proft independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. MARGERY SPRING RICE Margery Spring Rice Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century Lucy Pollard https://www.openbookpublishers.com/ © Lucy Pollard This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Some of the material in this book has been reproduced according to the fair use principle which allows use of copyrighted material for scholarly purposes. Attribution should include the following information: © Lucy Pollard, Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0215 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0215#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Any digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0215#resources Every efort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notifcation is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-881-5 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-882-2 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-883-9 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-884-6 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-885-3 ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-886-0 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0215 Cover image: Margery pushing a young friend along the Crag Path in Aldeburgh, New Year, 1968. Drawing by Christopher Ellis (1968). Photograph: the author (2020). Cover design by Anna Gatti. Contents Preface and Acknowledgements xi Note on Sources xiii Family Trees xv 1. Cherished daughter (1887–1907) 1 2. Independence (1907–1912) 25 3. Loss (1912–1916) 45 4. False Starts (1916–1924) 63 5. Finding a Cause (1924–1931) 77 6. A Single Woman (1931–1936) 101 7. War Again (1936–1945) 115 8. Matriarch (1945–1956) 145 9. Running down (1956–1970) 163 Bibliography 179 List of Illustrations 185 Index 187 For Caitlin and Malcolm ‘I thought it possible that your habitual opinion that valour is the better part of discretion might seize upon you…’ Eileen Power, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 18 August 1910 Preface and Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the collections of family letters and papers preserved by Anna Mercer, Sam Garrett- Jones, Camilla Garrett-Jones, Robert Robertson, Sebastian Garrett and Stephen Robertson. I am immensely grateful to them for keeping so much, for all the family knowledge they have so generously shared, for the suggestions they have made and the mistakes they have corrected. Many of the photographs have been provided by Sam Garrett-Jones and Robert Robertson. I am also particularly grateful to Margaret Young for sharing her huge knowledge of the Garrett family. Many other people have helped me with this project: I want to thank Jane Abraham, Brian Boulton, John Charlton, Jane Darke, Marlene Baldwin Davis, Sylvia Dunkley, Emma Ellis, Rachel Forbes, Constantine Gras, Jeremy Greenwood, Heather Holden-Brown, Barney Hopkinson, Matt Jolly, Ben Johnston, Pamela King, Nina Lambert, Sonia Lambert, Stephen Mael, Marcos Magariños, Julian Minns, Dominick Robertson, Matthew Robertson, Stephen Robertson, Thomas Robertson, Catherine Sandbrook, Sally Schweitzer, Sarah Slinn, Charlie Spring Rice, Tom Stevens, Hew Stevenson, Alison Stuart-Klein, Karen Taylor, the late Michael Wheeler-Booth, Joane Whitmore and Richard Wilson. The librarians and archivists of the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Girton College Cambridge, the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, the Sufolk Record Ofce, the Britten-Pears Library, the Wellcome Collection, the Church of England Children’s Society, Leeds University Brotherton Library, the Law Society Library, Pembroke College Cambridge, King’s College Cambridge, the Imperial War Museum and the Royal Voluntary Service have been unfailingly helpful. I am also enormously indebted to my editors at Open Book Publishers for their friendly professionalism. xii Margery Spring Rice I am extremely grateful to the Old Girtonians Fund for their fnancial support for the publication of this book I would also like to thank my husband; my sons and their partners; and other members of my family for their support and encouragement, and for reading and commenting on sections of the book at various stages. The family trees (which are simplifed) were made by Stephen Robertson. The battle area map was made by Brian Boulton. I have to confess a personal interest: I am one of Spring Rice’s grandchildren. Writing this book has taken me on a sometimes- uncomfortable journey from child’s-eye view to biographer’s view. It is a journey that began, I think, over sixty years ago — long before I ever thought of writing about it. When I was eleven, my grandmother wanted to take me to a big society wedding at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields Church in London, followed by a reception in the House of Commons. She also suggested a shopping trip on the morning of the wedding. My mother tried, without being at all specifc, to persuade me to forego the shopping, but I was adamant that I wanted to spend the whole day with my grandmother. It was only the experience of my grandmother complaining about every item she looked at, to my great embarrassment, that made me realise what my mother’s unspoken message had been: how difcult my grandmother could sometimes be. On the other hand, I cannot imagine a more wonderful grandmother. Despite all her failings, in her public life she was, as one of her North Kensington clinic colleagues said, ‘far in advance of the rest of us & far in advance of [her own] time’.1 As her biographer, I have tried both to be dispassionate and to do justice to her great strengths; but in the end, leaving aside my faults and hers, what I am left with is still my childhood love and admiration for her — love and admiration that are, in Seamus Heaney’s words, ‘something else the tide won’t wash away’.2 Any mistakes are my own. Lucy Pollard Sufolk, 2020 1 Phyllis Bowen, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 15 June 1958. 2 Seamus Heaney, ‘The Strand’, in The Spirit Level (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 62. Note on Sources The principal sources for Margery Spring Rice’s personal life are the letters and papers preserved by members of her family. These include hundreds of letters, unevenly distributed in terms of date, but nevertheless extending over the whole course of her life.