With central government examining the surge of emergency foodbanks and charities warning of an increase in poverty-related hunger, it’s clear food insecurity is on the rise. The horsemeat scandal may have raised a lot of questions about our supermarkets but more daunting questions are now being asked about how we protect the poorest from rising food prices. How can we make healthy food more accessible in the wake of the cuts? And can cities really feed themselves? Manchester International Festival and the Biospheric Foundation in Salford are working together to answer these very questions….

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The UK's first birth control clinic in London

In 1926, the second birth control clinic outside of London opened its doors to women seeking free family planning advice. Located in the impoverished Greengate area of Salford, the clinic provided birth control information to working class women who weren’t able to pay for private advice from a doctor. The controversial clinic faced opposition from the Catholic Church and the medical profession but fought on and continued to offer its services to women until birth control advice was widely and freely available in the 1970s.

Unlike the suffragettes’ attention-grabbing campaigns to secure women’s rights to vote, the local-level and grinding work of women who worked to improve women’s right to birth control in the 1920s and 30s has gone somewhat unnoticed. Whilst they never marched on parliament, they worked day-in, day-out, through blitz, blackouts and at personal risk, to provide women with the knowledge to exercise control over their own bodies. For many of the women, providing birth control was an important factor for the improvements in women’s health and also the emancipation of women who had previously relied on men to limit the size of their family.

At the turn of the 19th/20th century, birth control was a very controversial issue to discuss in public although in private, many middle/upper-class women had access to such family planning information through their doctors. As such, it was working class women who couldn’t afford to pay for a private doctor who were denied birth control information and who were at the centre of the campaigns for free birth control advice. As Dr Clare Debenham, who has written a thesis entitled ‘Grassroots feminism: a study of the campaign of the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics, 1924-1938′ which forms the basis of this article, points out, many middle class women felt guilty about this inequality and went on to argue that all women should enjoy control over their own bodies no matter their place in society.

Contraception as Emancipation

The birth controller saw contraception as a form of emancipation for women and the clinics therefore focused on empowering the women by giving them the information, rather than men which was the normal practice at the time. “The clinics were really into female contraception and wanted to give the control to the women rather than having to rely on the men,” explains Clare Debenham. The shocking rate of maternal death also focused women’s minds on the more sinister aspects of withholding birth control information. Between 1911 and 1930, maternal death was second only to tuberculosis as a major cause of death amongst married women, and based on the death rate it was argued giving birth was more dangerous than working in the mines.

In 1924, the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics (SPBCC) was established to campaign for municipal birth control clinics that were free and easily accessible to working class women. In the mean time, voluntary clinics were set up across the country to bridge the gap until their goals were realised. Although the SPBCC and many birth controllers have been overshadowed in the history books by the flamboyant Marie Stopes of Married Love fame, the society was able to set up clinics across the country and provide women with birth control advice.

The SPBCC was also more autonomous and a lot less autocratic and confrontational when compared with Marie Stopes’ clinics. “A lot of the women involved in the birth control clinics, unlike say Marie Stopes, just worked hard with little drama. There was no dramatics,” says Debenham. “If someone had got thrown into jail than maybe we’d know more about it but it was all very low key.”

Manchester & Salford Mothers’ Clinic Opens in 1926

In 1926, the Manchester & Salford Mother Clinic located in Greengate opened and was run by Mary Stocks, Charis Frankenburg and Flora Blumberg. Mary Stocks was a Fabian who saw birth control as strongly linked to a women’s right to self-determination and she also campaigned for the removal of the marriage bar for female teachers in Manchester. Charis Frankenburg, a former midwife, was a Jewish Conservative whose respectable family ran a factory in the area. Flora Blumberg was also a Conservative, which was unusual as most of the support for birth control came from Labour supporters. Even so, motherhood was an inevitable aspect of many women’s experiences at the time so it was an important issue which united many women across political and class divisions.

As Debenham points out, “It was quite odd that there was such Conservative support as most of the people at the clinics would have been Labour supporters but there was a lot of diverse people involved in the birth control issue. I mean Mary Stocks was a Liberal, Charis Frankenburg was a Conservative and the receptionist at the clinic was a Communist! Of course there were occasions when people disagreed but on the local level there really was a cross-section of people involved.”

The clinic was ideally located above a pie-shop which provided an ideal cover for women who wanted to be discreet about their visit to the centre. The clinic was part of the Society for the Promotion of Birth Control and was rather successful – Charis Frankenburg calculated that in their first eight years they had seen over three thousand two hundred patients. In fact, gynaecologist Sir John Peel calculated that by the end of 1927 nine SPBCC birth control clinics had collectively seen 23,000 patients.

Local feminist councillors such as Shena Simon (Liberal) and Cllr Annie Lee (Labour) supported the clinic and there was significant support from the Women’s Co-op Guild, which was made up of a lot of working class women. For example, Mrs Hescott who was the secretary of the Manchester branch of the Women’s Co-op Guild was also a founding member of the clinic. In fact, the WCG overwhelmingly passed a resolution during the 1923 Annual Congress supporting the dissemination of birth control information, making it the first women’s organisation and the first working class organisation to formally support birth control.

“Cursed, Distrusted and Despised”

The clinic in Salford did, however, attract some opposition. As Clare Debenham has written, according to Mary Stocks, the birth controllers were “cursed by the Roman Catholic Church, distrusted by the Church of England and ignored by the medical profession.” In Salford, the clinic faced opposition from the local Catholic church which saw the clinic as a direct challenge to its authority. Dr Henshaw who was enthroned as Bishop in 1925 was quick to denounce the clinic and its methods in the Catholic press: “Horrible things, strange filthy things… The powers of evil have refined their methods and unsavoury subjects are clothed with scientific names… one of these centres had been opened up not far from the Cathedral.” (Article reproduced in the Manchester Guardian (22.3.1926) from the Catholic Federalist cited in Debenham, 2010, p125).

The following month Henshaw was quoted using equally colourful language about the clinic’s methods: ‘Birth control, an abomination in Catholic eyes is infinitely worse than the unnatural vices of Sodom and Gomorrah. Filthy knowledge is not less filthy because it is imparted in a “clinic”, or “centre” (Evening Chronicle (10.4.1926) cited in Debenham, 2010, p125).’

Furthermore, despite the initial support of the Women’s Guild after 1923, “the Guild leadership took no significant initiative on family endowment, birth control, or any other issues of concern to working class women that did not have prior approval of the Labour Party.” (cited in Debenham, 2010, p170). Some feminists were also opposed the birth control campaigns which they saw as a distraction to their cause and felt that talk about such matter involving sexual relations was not respectable.

The backing from the Labour party which the movement had expected or thought it would get also didn’t materialise. “Because it was a controversial topic, many regarded it as a vote loser and so didn’t they didn’t really give it any public support,” explains Debenham. “A lot of the Labour MPs relied on Catholic voters and so they were worried that showing support for birth control would lose them the Catholic vote.”

Legislation and the Future of Birth Control

Legislation was passed in 1930 in the form of a memorandum 153/MCW which allowed birth control advice to be transmitted to women via municipal clinics on the grounds of health. However, the birth controllers quickly realised that this memorandum was quite restrictive (and wasn’t mandatory) and so many continued to keep open their practices to serve women who were not accounted for under the new legislation.

Very few local authorities were willing to take on board the new legislation and by 1931, only 36 authorities had taken advantage of the provisions of the Memorandum. As Debenham states: “If the municipal clinics in 1930 were made compulsory than it would haven been job done for the birth controllers but the fact was that there were only voluntary and a lot of councils didn’t do a single thing to improve birth control after the bill was passed.”

By 1939, only 84 local authorities had taken any action to establish municipal birth control clinics – in other words, two thirds of all local authorities had taken no action at all. In contrast by 1939, the number of voluntary clinics had grown to 66 and so to some extent they were making up for the lack of progress by the local authorities. For example, the success of the Salford clinic meant that in 1933 it had to move to larger premises in Manchester. “I initially thought that after the legislation was passed that it would be the end of the birth control clinic but in fact many carried on and it wasn’t really until 1972 that the work of the clinics was taken on by the department. So until that time it was up to the voluntary sector to provide the service to the women…” remarked Debenham.

It took a long time for attitudes towards contraception and birth control to move on from connotations of being associated with dirty magazines to something which all couples had to deal with and it wasn’t until 1972 that birth control provision became part of the NHS. The early birth control clinics of 1920s and 1930 no doubt played an important role in making birth control more respectable and also bringing the debate into the public sphere. As Debenham declares, “It was local action empowering local people – what the women working in those early birth control clinics did really does deserve a lot more recognition.”

Article by Arwa Aburawa

The original article was published at Manchester’s Radical History.

:: Image via Wellcome Library

On the November 1st 1933 Ellen Tooley made history by becoming the first woman councillor in Eccles. Although she wasn’t particularly fond of her new title as the first woman councillor in Eccles, she lived with it all her life and it no doubt it helped inspire many other women to play an active role in local politics.

Women in Eccles had been trying to get elected to the Eccles Town Hall without any success since 1919, yet in 1933 the town voted in two women councillors. Ellen Tooley was first to be announced as the winning candidate for the seat of Winton; literally minutes later, Mary Higgins was elected as the councillor for Barton. Veronica Trick, the granddaughter of Ellen Tooley, describes the night in an article titled The Power to get Things Changed! Ellen Tooley, Eccles’ First Woman Councillor….

Read the full piece here at Manchester’s Radical History.

Tell us a little about yourself and how the Salford Star started…
SK: Well, I’m not a trained journalist and I didn’t become a journalist till I was 28. For fifteen years I wrote for style and music magazines, in the Evening News, but you don’t get into journalism to interview Coronation Street stars and celebrities. That’s not why I got into it anyway. In the end, although I was getting very well paid to write for the national papers, I couldn’t get the real stories across which is housing, regeneration – things that mattered to people.

So I took a back step and started teaching journalism in the community and I did that for a few years, then I got offered the chance to help on a magazine called ‘Old Trafford News’ which is a community magazine which we revamped. So I did that and it was very successful. People saw the magazine that we were doing in Old Trafford and the community invited us to do one in Salford. But I said to them ‘hold on second, Salford is a city whereas Old Trafford is one square mile’. As Salford is a big city, we’ll need a big magazine to go with it! So Salford Star was born.

What was the initial reaction from locals. Was it positive or did they not really believe it was going to last?
SK: Well before we started, we went to a lot of public meetings and I went to one guy called Guy Griffiths who is notorious in Salford because he’s the only person to have been forcibly evicted from his house. I went to him with the idea for the magazine and I said ‘well, what do you think?’. He says ‘I don’t want anything to do with it. You budget journalists are all the same’ and this and that. But he did say ‘I’ll give you one bit of advice, if it looks anything like the council magazine everyone will put it in the bin.’ So I took that advice and ran with it.

The response to the first issue was phenomenal, I’ve never seen anything like it. What we first did was to take a copy to the town hall to Council Leader John Merry and within ten minutes he was on the phone screaming blue murder so we knew we’d got something right! The second call was from a women whose mother had a house about to be knocked down and needed some help. I mean the calls, the email that we got, I’ve not seen anything like it. Reactions were phenomenal and they are continuing to be. The only problem is that we only had the funds to print 15,000 copies but Salford has a population of around 300,000 people so there are people who have never heard of it. Out in Worsley, Walkden and Swinton they are not aware of it. What we do know is that each copy is read by about 100 people as it gets passed round.

With Salford Star now only being online it’s more complicated. We do get a lot of readers but we know that two thirds of those living in Salford don’t have the Internet so we’ve excluded a lot of people before we’ve even started. The advantage is that it is more accessible to those outside of Salford and we know that we get readers from all over like London and even Devon. The stories are getting out of Salford and that’s good – apart from when journalists nick my stories and then call them exclusives which I don’t like!

What have been some of the biggest campaigns that Salford Star has been involved in?
SK: There’s a lot. One of the first that we did was to take a group of normal kids from Salford to the Lowry Centre in their street gear. They said ‘no, we’ll be kicked out’ and we thought ‘get lost’. So we took them down there with hidden cameras and lo and behold two minutes later they were kicked out. It was shocking but what happened after that was that the Lowry realised that they weren’t reaching the local community and their policy changed, not a 100% percent but now they are aware. There were groups that wanted to use the space in the Lowry but they were charging eight thousands pounds. But after that people were getting in just by waving the Salford Star and saying ‘hey, come on’! They were giving it to them for nothing so that was a real benefit that we got.

In Langworthy, just opposite the Urban Splash development, people were being offered £52,000 for the houses whereas the ones on the other side of the street were going for £90,000. So we interviewed the leader of the council, John Merry, and we told him what was going on and he said that if it was true it would be illegal. And lo and behold they all got £90,000 so that was another result. Another one was keeping the Salford Film Festival going and also getting the Tree of Knowledge in Salford listed when it was due to be demolished. We don’t just write the stories like the Evening News or an Advertiser journalist, we jump in with two feet and give people in Salford the information to fight these battles.

Housing and regeneration have been huge problem areas in Salford, could you talk us through some of the major issues the Salford Star has been looking at?
SK: If you open your eyes and you walk round so-called ‘Langworthy Village,’ there are shutters on the newsagents. Another newsagents up the road shut down a few year ago- they couldn’t even sustain a corner shop. I mean when you consider that £88 million of private and public money (that was the last time we looked, it’s probably more now) has gone into this immediate area..Where’s it gone? There’s nothing here. A report has just come out from the Manchester Independent Economic Review and it say that nothing’s changed, so where has that money gone?

If you look at where the regeneration money is going, a hell of a lot of it – I’m not saying all of it by any stretch – is going into sweeteners for developers to keep their profits high and salaries for the regenerators who don’t even live here. I interviewed the chief executive for the URC which is the regeneration company responsible for Salford regeneration and I asked him how many in his office actually lived in Salford. There wasn’t one. They don’t have a stake in the plan, but we do and so do our readers and writers.

You have been quite dubious about the council magazine ‘LIFE in Salford’. Why is that?
It’s called accountability! At the end of the day, if you go through the Evening News and any other newspaper – I used to do that when I taught community journalism – and I can tell you that’s a press release, that’s another press release. It’s all press release journalism. The council or whoever will put out a press release and then people just cut and paste it and stick their name at the top, whereas I question it. Which is what you’re supposed to do as a journalist.

We’ve lost that community journalism. I mean there is virtually nothing in the country. There are things on-line and in print but a lot of things called community magazines are just shams. They just push the council line, or the housing association line because it brings advertising. I could water that [Salford Star] down tomorrow and say ‘isn’t it wonderful what Salix Homes are doing’, ‘isn’t Urban Splash great’ and they’d all advertise with us. They’ve millions of pounds in budgets and I could be a millionaire by now!

Talking of money and advertising, how do you fund the Salford Star?
SK: What happens is that the real community places in Salford like the Langworthy Cornerstone, The Angel and small community organisations that have a bit of money will advertise in it. Small businesses that can see the magazine flying out – I mean we get a thousand copies just on this road here in Langworthy- they know that the community is looking at it and they want to be a part of it. So we do get a bit of advertising but those organisations don’t have huge budgets and they can’t afford to take pages and pages out. But through those and donations we try to get half the printing costs covered and we think that we should get public funding for the other half to keep us going.

What’s in store for Salford Star and the future?
SK: Well, we want to get a printed issue before the next election but whether we’ll be able to do that I don’t know. We’re hoping to do that through donations but I guess we’ll see. My problem is that I don’t get paid to do any of this and it takes up so much time – my wife’s had enough! We keep putting in applications to all sorts of trust funds and grants but they get ripped up every time because people perceive us as being too controversial. Yet, I don’t see what’s controversial about asking where our money is going and we’re always professional, non-political and balanced.

We have no agenda whatsoever. What we do is also different to normal journalism, where they’d go to an area, dip their toe in, get the best story and then get out again. They’re not interested in the people. Well, we live in this community and we’re still talking to those people so it’s different. We’re not playing at this, we’re for real because at the end of the day it’s our community.

Article by Arwa Aburawa originally published in Manchester’s Radical History.