Barbara Wootton and the Legacy of a Pioneering Public Criminologist

Philip Bean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000212747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book offers an assessment of Barbara Wootton's legacy as a pioneering public criminologist. Barbara Wootton (1897-1988) was a leading British social scientist, magistrate, academic and public servant. She was also a life peer (Baroness Wootton of Abinger) and the first woman to sit on the Woolsack in the House of Lords as Deputy Speaker. One of the Royal Commissions on which she served was on the Penal System, (1964) and two of the Departmental Committees were on the Business of the Criminal Courts (1958) and Criminal Statistics (1963). Of her written work perhaps the most famous is `Social Science and Social Pathology` (published in 1959) which was an attempt to discover what the social sciences had to say about criminality, its causes and its social effects.

This book examines her career in historical context, and her contribution to thinking and scholarship on a range of topics. These topics range from the courts and the penal system and her report on the Community Service Order, to crime and criminal law and her analysis of the notions of mens rea, to her work on psychiatry and criminal justice. It explores her contribution as a utilitarian critic in Criminology, within the British empiricist tradition.

Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, criminal justice, law and all those interested in learning more about Barbara's life and times.

Chapter 1

Barbara Wootton: her life and times

Barbara Wootton (1897–1988) was a leading British social scientist, magistrate, academic and public servant. She was also a life peer (Baroness Wootton of Abinger) and the first woman to sit on the Woolsack in the House of Lords as Deputy Speaker. She was inter alia a member of four Royal Commissions and four Departmental Committees, a BBC Governor and a Companion of Honour.¹ She was the author of 15 books in economics and social science, and of countless published articles, with many others unpublished, the latter largely derived from her public lectures. In 1971, Barbara Wootton was hailed by the London Illustrated News as a sociologist who was ‘a legend in her own lifetime’, and in 1984 the BBC named her as one of ‘the six women of the century’.

This is but a short summary of her many awards and achievements. And when set within the social climate in which she lived, they are additionally impressive. That is to say, she came to prominence at a time when few women reached such professional heights, and she excelled in academic subjects in which there were few shoulders on which to climb, female or otherwise. In almost every way, she broke new ground. Yet when asked as a child what she intended to do with her adult life, she answered that she would be ‘an organising female with a brief case’² – an ambition more than achieved.

Barbara Wootton was a social scientist and a polymath. She moved easily between the various disciplines: economics, law, criminology, psychiatry, social policy and sociology. She says in her Autobiography³ that one of her academic colleagues defined social science as ‘not as much a discipline as a licence to trespass’. She approved of this definition, for trespass Barbara Wootton certainly did. She did so in such a way as to leave her own footprint, which was, to quote a distinguished professor of law, such that she made others ‘think furiously about matters which they had previously taken for granted.’⁴

Barbara Wootton was very much a public social scientist. That is to say, she was someone who made her findings publicly available and someone who sought to engage the public in dialogue. She was also someone who sought to engage the experts, or specialists, in that same dialogue, but did not stay within the specialist community. She saw the task in front of her as increasing the sum total of human happiness in a strict Utilitarian sense. She did not use the term ‘happiness’, but she did talk of ‘public good’, which she saw as much the same. She expected the public good would be achieved through human intelligence and the application of scientific methods. She saw the advances made by science in the natural world and believed similar advances could be made by the application of scientific methods in the social sciences. She never faltered in this belief, although in later life she was less than hopeful about the future.

Barbara Wootton’s life was dominated by two world wars, each in their different ways changing the existing social order; the first changing the certainty of Victorian values, the second changing the place of the state in public affairs. She was a committed social egalitarian; her biographer describes her as having a passion for equality.⁵ Her philosophy was to place the value of human life at the centre of everything. She broadcast this message often, literally, as she appeared frequently on radio and television, and in a manner which made her a household name in Britain and elsewhere. It was a life dedicated to public service. Her interest in criminology was a logical extension of that belief.

She was born Barbara Adam, into an upper middle-class family in Cambridge in Victorian England. She had two older brothers, Neil, the eldest, and Arthur. Her parents were classical scholars, and Barbara was brought up in what she called an intellectual household. Her father, James Adam, was a Fellow and Senior Tutor at Emmanuel College, a post which he held until his premature death, aged 47. He was the only son of an Aberdeen farm worker and made his way by scholarship to Cambridge. Barbara describes him as neither remote nor austere, although very absorbed in his work. She says he was especially warm-hearted towards his students, even if sometimes merciless in his criticism of their work. Throughout his life he was troubled by fits of depression. He was said to be a brilliant teacher, so much so that Barbara believes any success she may have enjoyed as a speaker and lecturer must be largely due to qualities inherited from him.

Her mother, Adela Marion Kensington, as she was called before her marriage, was described by Barbara as an extremely intellectual woman with a strong character. Besides being a first-rate scholar, she had a good knowledge of at least three other modern languages. She was a considerable musician, being a distinguished pianist, and also sang in the Cambridge University Musical Society. Her standards were high, so much so that she found it difficult to appreciate that not everybody operated at her level or shared the same tastes and values. In politics and religion, she was conservative and conventional. Barbara describes how almost every change filled her with foreboding, and how her mother walked restlessly from room to room in anguish at the prospect that the first Old Age Pensions Act would allow old people without other means to receive a pension of as much as 5s a week.⁶ Nonetheless, she was an energetic advocate of woman suffrage, though no supporter of any means involving violence and lawbreaking, as she thought these served only to postpone the day when women would get the vote.

Barbara’s relations with her mother were never easy. There was, said Barbara, ‘little sympathy between mother and daughter’. As with many similar childhoods, devotion to a nanny provided the emotional warmth lacking in the parental tie. It was a curious childhood, made more so by an equally curious education. Her two brothers were away at school in Winchester, both being awarded scholarships, but Barbara was educated at home, largely by her mother, until she was 13 years old. She describes her education as ‘doing lessons at home’ where she was expected to read a great deal for herself, chiefly English classics and English history, and later of course Greek and Roman history and literature. She also learned a lot of poetry by heart, including nearly the whole of ‘Paradise Lost’. She describes her approach to learning as ‘docile and industrious but not always genuinely interested’. Except for a little amateurish botany, science was totally lacking throughout her education.

At the age of 13, Barbara went as a day girl to the Perse High School in Cambridge. This was her first experience of school. Educationally, it was not very successful, largely because her precocity in certain subjects meant she was placed in a form a year or two above her age. But school did open up new horizons; for the first time, she played games and made real friends. She was close friends with two girls, one of whom she described as ‘exceptionally gifted and beautiful’ but who died at the age of 15. Barbara was then 14. It was not her first early experience of the death of someone close to her – her father had died when she was 10 – nor was it to be her last.

In 1914, plans were being made for her future. She was then aged 17. She describes herself as being intellectually precocious but undoubtedly very immature. It was decided she would leave school in the summer and spend two or three months in Germany living with a family and improving her German. But, as she said, ‘we reckoned without the Sarajevo murders and their consequences.’ So, she spent the next two years deciding what to do and in 1915 was accepted as an undergraduate at Girton College Cambridge to read economics, or rather a mixture of classics and economics, the compromise agreed to please her mother.

Her brother Arthur, a talented musician, was called up for military service immediately when war was declared. He was commissioned and reached the rank of Acting Captain. In September two years later, when he was aged 22, came the news that he was reported ‘wounded and missing’. Exactly what happened no one ever knew, and his death was eventually presumed.⁷

Neil, the elder brother, was engaged in scientific research on airships but in a civilian capacity. One of Neil’s friends was a certain Jack Wesley Wootton – the ‘Wesley’ showing the family’s strong links with Methodism. Jack was the youngest son in a family of three sons and three daughters of a Nottingham lace manufacturer. Described by Barbara as ‘tall, dark and handsome in a melancholy sort of way’, he had been awarded a research fellowship in Cambridge, which had there been no war would have kept him there for another year. As it was, he was commissioned. He first visited the Adam household in 1915, and in the next two years his visits began to acquire a special significance. Barbara and Jack became engaged and in September 1917 were married. Jack was 26; Barbara was 20. Both were said to be ‘very young for their ages’.

The wedding was planned for 5 September 1917 at the local parish church with a fortnight’s honeymoon to follow. However, on the 4th of September a telegram arrived ordering Jack to service overseas. What followed is described by Barbara in her Autobiography.

There was nothing to be done but cancel the honeymoon. One of Jack’s friends discovered a farm which would be willing to take us after the wedding the next day… . The next afternoon we took the train to London staying overnight at the Rubens hotel. Early the following morning, a day and a half after our marriage I saw him off from Victoria (station) along with a train load of other cannon fodder. Five weeks later the War Office ‘regretted to inform me’ that Capt. J.W. Wootton of the 11th Battalion Suffolk Regiment had died of wounds.⁸

She adds in her Autobiography that at 49 years’ distance, the emotions associated with these happenings are in the nature of things wholly spent. Not entirely, for she also says that if anyone suggests an appointment at the Rubens Hotel, she is disposed to think up an excuse for proposing an alternative meeting place.⁹ In beautifully phrased passages of her Autobiography, Barbara comments thus:

In ten years I had learned little about life much about death.

Thus before I had reached my 21st birthday I had experienced the deaths of my father, my brother, my favourite school friend and the husband to whom I had been married in theory for 5 weeks and in practice for something less than 48 hours.

My troubles were of course in no way unusual. What happened to me happened also in one form or another to thousands of my contemporaries; and that fact served at least to hold in check any temptation I might otherwise have had to dramatize my situation… . My upbringing too had left no room for self-pity; none of the adults in our family circle would ever have dreamed of using misfortune or unhappiness as an excuse for shortcomings. Whatever happened one was expected to go ahead and make the best of whatever the next job might be.

And by way of upbraiding contemporary attitudes, she says:

In this the attitude of our elders, though somewhat exacting was, I think, much to be preferred to the contemporary practice of encouraging the young to dwell upon any early misfortunes that may have befallen them and to use these as explanations of, if not excuses for their own subsequent deficiencies. To the young it...