London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And before we go any further, a word about these podcasts.
One way to picture them is to imagine a stone dropped into a still pool.
The splash.
Then the ripples spreading out.
I’m the splash.
Or, to be more honest, my curiosity is.
Every one of these podcasts begins the same way.
I stumble across something in London that catches my eye.
A person.
A place.
A building.
A story.
Sometimes it’s no more than a blue plaque.
Sometimes it’s just a doorway I’ve walked past a hundred times.
I find myself wondering, “What’s the story there?”
And once that question gets into my head, there’s no peace until I’ve found the answer.
That’s the first ripple.
The second ripple is for my walkers.
London is so extraordinarily rich that no two-hour walk can ever do it justice.
Not even close.
If I tried to tell every good story, stop at every fascinating house, explain every plaque, point out every delicious oddity, a two-hour walk would become a fourteen-hour death march.
So choices have to be made.
Wonderful things get left on the cutting-room floor.
We stroll past blue plaques without stopping.
We pass houses with extraordinary stories and don’t tell them.
Not because they aren’t worth telling.
Simply because there isn’t time.
The podcast lets me make amends.
A couple of hours after every walk I send everybody a follow-up for Further Study email. I usually call it the afterglow email. It includes, amongst other things, bits and pieces we simply couldn’t fit in.
It might say something like this:
“On Flask Walk we passed a black plaque marking the house of Marie Stopes. We didn’t stop. We didn’t even mention her. There just wasn’t time. But she’s far too interesting to give a miss to. So if you’d like the story, here’s a tasty podcast that fills in what the walk had to leave out.”
That’s the second ripple.
The third ripple is for everybody else.
For people who simply enjoy London.
Who like its history.
Its people.
Its glorious eccentricity.
Its habit of hiding astonishing stories in perfectly ordinary streets.
And, yes, on that note, we’re now going to circle back to Marie Stopes.
She’s on my Hampstead walk.
And she isn’t.
We walk straight past her house on Flask Walk.
There it is, complete with Hampstead’s distinctive black plaque.
And I say…
Nothing.
Not a word.
Time is a tyrant.
So here’s one of those stories that ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Let’s cut to the chase.
Marie Stopes taught a nation about sex because her own wedding night went so catastrophically wrong.
That’s the short version.
The longer version takes us to Hampstead, to Flask Walk, to a black-plaqued house, a failed marriage, a forbidden cupboard in the British Museum, and one of the strangest, most consequential private lives in modern London history.
You pass her house on Flask Walk and perhaps there’s a little flicker of recognition.
“Marie Stopes.”
Birth control pioneer.
Feminist.
Important person.
Onward.
But here’s the thing.
Marie Stopes was one of those Londoners who, the closer you look, the stranger she gets.
And stranger by the minute.
Before she became the woman who taught Britain how to talk about sex, she hardly knew what sex was.
That’s not a joke.
This wasn’t some crank with a bee in her bonnet.
She was one of the brightest young scientists in Britain.
A first-class degree in botany at University College London.
A gold medal.
A doctorate in Munich, the first woman ever to earn one there.
The youngest Doctor of Science in Britain.
She climbed down coal mines in search of fossil plants.
She travelled to Japan on pioneering research.
She published learned papers before most people her age had settled on a career.
She was already internationally known as a palaeobotanist
long before anyone associated her name with birth control.
And yet…
By her own account, when she married in 1911, at the age of thirty, she was astonishingly innocent.
Her husband was a Canadian botanist,
Reginald Ruggles Gates.
The marriage quickly turned into a catastrophe.
Or perhaps I should say, into a mystery.
Marie Stopes later persuaded a court to annul the marriage on the grounds that it had never been consummated.
Her husband would eventually tell a rather different story.
More than a century later, nobody can say with complete confidence exactly what happened behind the closed bedroom door.
But everybody agrees about one thing.
It was a desperately unhappy marriage.
How could a woman as brilliant as Marie Stopes know so little about the physical realities of married life?
Part of the answer lies in Edwardian Britain.
A world of euphemism.
A world of embarrassment.
A world where respectable young women were often expected to know next to nothing about sex.
Ignorance was mistaken for innocence.
Silence was mistaken for virtue.
Marie Stopes decided she was going to educate herself.
Which takes us to one of my favourite scenes in the whole story.
Picture the old British Museum Reading Room.
That magnificent blue-domed circle.
One of the great intellectual spaces in the world.
Karl Marx worked there.
Lenin worked there.
Mahatma Gandhi worked there.
Generations of scholars sat beneath that dome.
And somewhere in that great temple of learning was what Marie Stopes called “the Cupboard.”
A locked collection of books on sex.
Books respectable readers couldn’t simply take down from a shelf.
Books that had to be specially requested.
So there sits one of Britain’s most brilliant scientists, trying to discover something most married couples are simply expected to know instinctively.
It’s funny.
It’s poignant.
And it tells you everything about the world she inhabited.
That failed marriage lit the fuse.
Out of it came a book.
A book that changed lives.
Its title was Married Love.
It appeared in 1918.
The timing was extraordinary.
The First World War had just ended.
Millions of men were coming home.
Families were trying to rebuild their lives.
And into that moment stepped Marie Stopes with an argument that seems perfectly reasonable today but sounded positively revolutionary then.
She insisted that sex in marriage should not be mere duty.
It should be joyful.
Tender.
Mutual.
And fulfilling.
Not just for husbands.
For wives as well.
That was the explosive part.
She wrote openly about female desire.
About compatibility.
About intimacy.
About happiness within marriage.
You can almost hear Edwardian monocles plopping into the consommé.
The book became an astonishing success.
It sold in huge numbers.
It was discussed everywhere.
Praised.
Condemned.
Hidden in bedside drawers.
Passed secretly from friend to friend.
For thousands upon thousands of women, it said things nobody had ever said to them before.
And Marie Stopes, almost overnight, became a household name.
And she was only just getting started.
In 1921 she opened Britain’s first birth control clinic in Holloway.
Just stop for a moment and think about that.
A birth control clinic.
Today it scarcely raises an eyebrow.
A hundred years ago it was dynamite.
She chose Holloway deliberately.
This wasn’t Mayfair.
This wasn’t Kensington.
This was a working-class part of London, where women often spent much of their adult lives pregnant, recovering from pregnancy or worrying about the next pregnancy.
Women queued for advice.
For information.
For hope.
For the chance, perhaps for the first time in their lives, to decide when they would become mothers.
Marie Stopes believed knowledge was liberating.
And for countless women, it was.
That’s the Marie Stopes most people remember.
The campaigner.
The reformer.
The woman who dragged one of life’s most intimate subjects out of the shadows and into the daylight.
But…
History has a habit of refusing to leave us with simple heroes.
There was another Marie Stopes.
One who could be exasperating.
Dogmatic.
Deeply eccentric.
And, on some subjects, profoundly wrong.
She believed she’d received a direct message from God while standing beneath a yew tree.
The Almighty, she said, had instructed her to tell the bishops of the Church of England that sex within marriage was not intended solely for producing children.
The bishops listened…
In silence.
One imagines a certain amount of embarrassed shuffling of feet.
Then there were the coal baths.
Remember that brilliant scientist who spent years studying coal?
Well, she eventually convinced herself that coal fires gave off beneficial rays.
So she’d sit naked in front of them, taking what she called “coal baths.”
It’s wonderfully Hampstead, isn’t it?
Half laboratory.
Half séance.
She was capable of immense kindness.
She answered mountains of letters from ordinary women who had nowhere else to turn.
Women poured out their fears, their anxieties, their private griefs.
Marie Stopes read them.
Annotated them.
Added handwritten postscripts.
Tried to help.
But alongside that compassion sat an altogether darker conviction.
She became an enthusiastic believer in eugenics.
Now that’s a word that makes us recoil today.
Quite rightly.
In the early decades of the twentieth century it attracted a surprising number of scientists, doctors and intellectuals.
Marie Stopes embraced it with alarming enthusiasm.
She believed some people should have children.
She believed others should not.
It sits very uneasily beside the compassion she showed so many individual women.
Human beings, after all, are untidy.
They rarely arrange themselves into neat moral categories.
Marie Stopes certainly didn’t.
And then there was her family.
Or, more particularly, her only son, Harry.
This is the part of the story I find genuinely sad.
Harry fell in love.
The young woman he wanted to marry was Mary Wallis.
Her father was the great engineer Barnes Wallis, the man who devised the famous bouncing bomb.
You might think Marie Stopes would have been delighted.
She wasn’t.
Mary wore spectacles.
She was short-sighted.
Marie Stopes believed defective eyesight might be inherited.
That was enough.
She objected fiercely to the marriage.
She refused to attend the wedding.
She effectively disowned her son.
Just imagine that.
The woman who had spent her life trying to make other people’s marriages happier…
Destroyed her own relationship with her only child because she couldn’t accept the woman he’d chosen.
It’s almost unbearably ironic.
And perhaps that’s the key to understanding Marie Stopes.
She wasn’t a saint.
She wasn’t a monster.
She wasn’t a plaster-cast heroine standing on a pedestal.
She was a human being.
Brilliant.
Brave.
Visionary.
Compassionate.
Difficult.
Controlling.
Sometimes inspiring.
Sometimes infuriating.
Sometimes all of those things before breakfast.
That’s why I like the house on Flask Walk.
Not because it’s especially grand.
Not because of the plaque.
But because it reminds me what London does better than any city I know.
It hides astonishing lives behind perfectly ordinary front doors.
We hurry past.
We glance at a plaque.
We think we’ve understood.
We haven’t.
Not remotely.
Scratch the surface and an entire world comes pouring out.
That’s certainly true of Marie Stopes.
On my Hampstead walk we pass her house in a matter of seconds.
There simply isn’t time.
Time, as I said earlier, is a tyrant.
A two-hour walk is a two-hour walk.
You have to keep moving.
You have to leave wonderful stories standing patiently on the pavement, hoping that one day somebody will come back for them.
Well…
Today we came back for Marie Stopes.
And I rather think she was worth the detour.
She’s one of those Londoners who reminds us that history is never tidy.
Never simple.
Never black and white.
It’s gloriously, maddeningly, endlessly human.
And that’s London.
Thanks for listening.
See you tomorrow.