Dirty little secrets and the right to write - Sam Bourne, 16 August 2012

Genomics Forum blogging team at the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2012
Blog by Christine Knight 

Thursday’s Book Festival session with Sam Bourne (aka Jonathan Freedland) was one I wish I could simply transcribe verbatim – a riveting conversation between Guardian colleagues Freedland and Claire Armitstead about Freedland’s fifth and latest novel. Pantheon tells the true story of a group of 125 children, the daughters and sons of Oxford academics, evacuated to Yale during the Second World War. It’s historical fiction that explores the likely possibility that the motivations for the evacuation were eugenicist – saving the children of Britain’s academic elite as part of ‘a plot to create a master race’ (to quote the Book Festival’s title for the session).

As Freedland eloquently described for Thursday’s audience, the British intellectual establishment of the 1930s and early 1940s was ‘in thrall’ to eugenics. This included well-known left-wing writers, politicians, and public figures, such as George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, and Marie Stopes, whose names in this context may come as a shock to some on the Left today. Freedland has written about this with his journalistic hat on, describing eugenics as ‘the dirty little secret of the British left’ in a piece for the Guardian in August 1997. Unfortunately (or fortunately), its publication date coincided with that of Princess Diana’s death, and Freedland’s exposé has languished in sufficient obscurity to allow for a fictionalised retelling by his alter ego, Sam Bourne, 15 years later.