Chapter II: 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.”