Songs of Innocence (14 page)

So the obsession with the degradation of the race, which had loomed so large in the public mind before the war, had not gone away. Indeed, it was gaining strength, thanks to the efforts of the
eugenics movement, and also in part to the work of an ambitious young psychologist named Cyril Burt. Shortly after his death in 1971, Burt would be exposed and pilloried for having falsified some
of his research data. He would come to be seen by the liberal classes of later years as a sort of neo-fascist hate figure whose work on intelligence and its determinist nature was racist and in
need of dismantling. But much of his early work must have seemed liberal, if not radical, at the time. Before and after World War One, Burt conducted research which would have a profound
effect.

In 1909, he had published a paper for which he had subjected a group of thirteen children at a prep school in Oxford to a series of tests. He then ran similar tests on a group of pupils at a
council school in London. The prep school boys having scored more highly, Burt had concluded that the effect was hereditary.
¹⁶
The prep school
boys were superior because their parents were superior, and their
parents before them. Burt felt this knowledge could be put to good use. In 1918, Burt, by now the school
psychologist for the London County Council, told an audience of social workers that it might be possible to develop a complete ‘psychogram’ of each child, which would help to determine
what kind of work he or she might be fitted for. Every school leaver might be given a special dossier which would be passed to a juvenile advisory committee. Everyone would thus be categorized,
indexed and correctly filed.

And while that never happened, the use of IQ testing became ever more widespread in British schools, and would later influence the ‘eleven plus’ exam on which entry to post-World War
Two grammar schools would depend. Yet despite the centrality of the hereditary principle to Burt’s thinking, he was also an early proponent of the idea that individual children had individual
needs. He was one of the first to propose ‘special’ schools for children with disabilities – or ‘defective children’, as they were known at the time. And his work on
young delinquents led to the opening of one of London’s first child guidance clinics.

Burt’s book,
The Young Delinquent
,
¹⁷
was published in 1925 and was a product of its time. Since the war had ended, the ongoing
debate on childhood had come back to one of its perennial themes – concern about levels of crime among the young. There had been a growing number of juveniles charged with offences, with the
total rising from 12,000 in 1910 to more than 29,000 in 1938.
¹⁸
Yet the focus, in this newly individualistic, child-focused world, was
surprisingly liberal. In keeping with the new-found emphasis on psychology, the state had begun to focus not on punishment but on treatment. Indeed, it is significant that a book such as
Burt’s, written as it was by an educational psychologist rather than by someone from the criminal justice system, should have proved so influential.

In one sense it is not at all surprising that the book should have proved a hit, though. Burt’s sense of drama and his ability to tell a
good tale were striking.
‘One sultry August afternoon, in a small and stuffy basement kitchen not far from King’s Cross Station, I was introduced to a sobbing little urchin with the quaint alliterative name of
Jeremiah Jones,’ the book began. ‘Jerry was a thief, a truant and a murderer. When first I saw him, he was just seven and a half years old, a scared and tattered bundle of grubbiness
and grief, with his name still on the roll of a school for infants. Yet at this tender age, besides a long list of lesser faults, he had already taken another boy’s life.’

Jerry, Burt confessed, was the only child murderer he had met during his researches. But he felt that in many ways his case, though extreme, could illustrate the common causes of child crime.
The little lad had been the product of a chance encounter between his mother, then a chambermaid, and ‘a quiet gentleman, well connected and seemingly well-to-do’, who had been passing
through and who had subsequently vanished without trace. Jerry’s Welsh mother was ‘in temperament somewhat dull and erratic’. She now worked as a packer in a warehouse and shared
the subterranean bedsit room with Jerry and with her own elderly mother, who doted on the boy.

A fatal interplay between defective nature and inadequate nurture had been Jerry’s undoing, Burt explained. Jerry was ‘a weak, backward and excitable boy – just the type of
youngster likely to dive into the first mischief that offered’. But he could only have come to commit such an appalling crime, he went on, because of the conditions in which he was placed
– a lax, foolish grandmother, a school too far away from home and the daily absence of his mother had all played their parts.

At six, Jerry had fractured his skull while climbing on to a moving lorry. After a long spell away from school, first in hospital and later in a convalescent home, he had failed to settle, and
had begun truanting – hanging around the station, which was near his home, as well as the nearby Regent’s Canal. And it was during one of these
illicit fishing
trips that he had committed his crime. On a summer evening, he had been at the canal with two other little truants, one of whom had a little toy aeroplane. Jerry, coveting the toy, demanded he be
given it. The other boy refused.

‘Jerry, still cool and self-contained, announced that unless he “had that airyplane” he would “drahnd” the owner. The owner merely scoffed and pulled a face. So
Jerry carried out his threat,’ Burt reported. ‘With a little skilful footwork, he threw the other off his balance; tipped him backwards into the water, well knowing (so he said) that
“the water would choke him”; kicked away the child’s fingers as he clutched the bank; and then watched him, with jibes and taunts, while his body went under.’

The crime initially went undetected. At the inquest, Jerry – still apparently emotionless in the face of his friend’s death – maintained that the boy had fallen backwards into
the canal. Indeed, he was congratulated by the coroner on his ultimately vain efforts to save his friend. Yet afterwards, his crime began to find him out: his behaviour became increasingly erratic
– the sign, Burt suggested, of a guilty conscience. ‘There were wild outbursts of inexplicable passion, half terror and half temper, such as in an adult would have been called hysteria
or mild mania.’ Burt was called in, and quickly obtained a full confession. Jerry had a longstanding resentment of the other boy, and had more than once threatened to ‘take him to the
cut and shove him in’.

The causes of Jerry’s crime, Burt concluded, were as much social as they were congenital: ‘Jerry, dimly conscious of a shadow on his birth, slowly framing to himself a notion of some
social grievance, had grown fiercely resentful of the slurs that the neighbours cast upon his parentage. The very play-fellow, whose life he took, was wont to taunt him with an ugly name. This
longstanding provocation, more than any passing whim for a twopenny toy, was the ulterior motive, though doubtless a half-unconscious motive, for his
sudden violence.’
Psychoanalysis, Burt thought, would have unearthed a deeper instinctive cause of Jerry’s violent reaction to these slurs, and would also have cast light on how the boy’s natural
development had been twisted by his unfortunate circumstances.

The psychologist having detected the crime, the forces of the law might have been expected to take over. But what happened next was, to the modern eye, one of the most striking parts of the
story. Burt made no mention at all of any police involvement in the case. His solution was not punishment, but treatment: ‘The new device of mental testing, and particularly the measurement
of intelligence, have entirely revolutionised the old methods of studying the criminal,’ he wrote. Indeed, had the father of the dead boy not learned the truth and begun threatening both
Jerry and his mother, he might have remained in the tenement basement where he had spent his early years. Even then, nothing seems to have happened, except that with Burt’s help Jerry was
removed to ‘another home’ outside London, presumably in the hope that immersion in a more desirable social setting would effect a cure for his criminal nature.

When the book was published in 1925, Burt wrote in its introductory section that Jerry had now been in three such ‘homes’, and that ‘there evidently remains a great deal more
that has yet to be learnt about his capabilities for good and evil’. It seems extraordinary, looking at this case now, that a child murderer should have gone unpunished in this way.
Extraordinary, indeed, not just in the light of modern sensibilities but also in the light of the fact that the Victorians seemingly made little distinction between a child in the dock and an adult
in the dock – in the late nineteenth century, the newspapers had often reported that a child had been punished for some minor offence by imprisonment or deportation.

Could Burt have made the whole story up? If it were true, then certainly it never made the papers. They did report several cases of drowning in the Regent’s Canal in the early 1920s
– indeed, at one
point there was such a spate that the coroner issued a warning that it was dangerous for children to play near the water. Yet none quite fitted the
tale the psychologist told. And, of course, Burt was later accused of fabricating research evidence. So it is indeed possible that the tale of little ‘Jerry’ was a fiction, or a
half-truth.

Yet the fact that an eminent psychologist could report such an occurrence without attracting comment was surely indicative of something significant about attitudes at the time. If Burt did make
it up, he was at least confident that he would not be discovered. No one, in any of the numerous reviews of the book – most of which recounted the story of Jerry’s crime – raised
the question. Who was Jerry? Why had the grieving family of his dead friend not had justice? And why had the boy not been punished?

The
Spectator
commented in its review of the book that it was hard, in these more liberal times, to imagine the way child criminals had been treated in the past: ‘It is difficult to
realise that less than a century ago children were liable to death or transportation for petty offences, and that there is, for instance, a case on record of a boy of eight who was convicted of
arson “with malice, revenge, craft and cunning” . . . and duly hanged. Yet until the Childrens Act of 1908 [which established juvenile courts], several thousand children under the age
of sixteen were annually consigned to prison.’ Conversely, the
Daily News
did reflect that the ‘common sense school’ might have had Jerry flogged. But ‘in the case of
Jerry the psychologists won. He has been sent to three homes . . . and the experiences he has been through and the ways he has met them have been helpful both in forming his character and in
shedding new light on his inner mental needs. It is hoped that in the end he may be trusted to go back to his own mother and behave like a normal schoolboy.’

Whatever the truth about Jerry, Burt certainly was in the habit of sending young ‘delinquents’ out of London – rather like the Swiss rest cure, to places where the air was more
pure – to live with families
which, he hoped, might be able to cure them. In his personal papers,
¹⁹
there was a
letter from a woman in Melton Mowbray who had taken some of them in, apparently with little success: ‘I am sorry to say that the boys have been behaving most disgracefully what with smashing
doors, windows, crockery etc. We don’t know what to do about it.’

There is, too, a sense that Burt was keeping a wary eye on the religious angle to this debate. ‘The psychologist, the teacher, the harassed parent, know too well that moral perfection is
no innate gift, but a hard and difficult acquirement,’ he wrote. Darwin’s notions of heredity were still very controversial, and the idea of ‘original sin’ had certainly not
been completely banished. Burt strived, it seems, to tread a fine line between the belief that criminality could be innate and the conflicting notion that it could be learned, and unlearned.

The mobile child

Not every unwanted child was a bad child, of course. There was concern, too, about whether the children growing up in Britain were fit for purpose. And so in this age of fear
about the future of the Empire, a neat solution came to mind. If Britain wanted quality children, and the Empire wanted just about any children it could get, why not export the quantity, and hang
on to the quality?

The growth of child migration between the wars was not quite so simply conceived, of course. But the movement to send parentless or abandoned children to grow up in the colonies did mark the
advent of an era in which children would become increasingly geographically mobile, for various reasons. In the 1930s, children would arrive unaccompanied from Spain, fleeing the civil war, and
from Germany and central Europe – some of them via the Kindertransport. During the early part of World War Two, they would be shipped across the
Atlantic, parentless,
to safety in Canada and the United States, as well as to New Zealand.

The transportation of children to Canada and the United States had actually begun in the 1870s, driven by the energies of two women called Maria Rye and Annie Macpherson. Maria Rye, having
visited Canada in 1868, had concluded that its inhabitants were desperately short of farm labour and domestic servants. Meanwhile, the slums of Liverpool, Manchester and London were overflowing
with what she described as ‘gutter children’. She set up two houses, one at Niagara and one in Peckham, south London. Under her command, children would be shipped from one to the other,
then farmed out to families on their arrival.
²⁰
Rye’s efforts were soon supplemented by those of Annie Macpherson, a Scottish evangelist
who had opened a ‘Home of Industry’ in the East End of London, and who began taking parties of children to Canada in 1870. By the outbreak of World War One, the numbers being sent had
reached around 80,000 a year. Thomas Barnardo also became involved, and sponsored the migration of 20,000 children to Canada by 1930.