In August 1952, at the Annual Conference of the Rationalist Press Association in Leicester, Marie Stopes bumped into an old acquaintance, Avro Manhattan. The focus of the conference that year was ‘The Menace of Roman Catholicism’; a topic which both Avro and Marie were already well acquainted. This was not the first meeting of these two figures— they had met briefly before the war and were both part of a literary circle in the UK that encompassed writers like H.G Wells, George Bernard Shaw etc—but it was this encounter that sparked the close friendship that would quickly form a love affair.
Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was a scientist and birth control campaigner. She famously wrote the controversial sex manual, Married Love (1918) and set up the first birth control clinic in the UK. The promotion of contraception provoked conflict with the Roman Catholic Church throughout her career. After many unsuccessful attempts to disseminate her work on the BBC, she felt utterly censored and concluded that Catholics had infiltrated the BBC and the film industry in the UK and sought to destroy her work. Her fight with the Roman Catholic Church was also legal; in the 1920s she lost a high-profile libel case and various subsequent appeals against a Roman Catholic doctor who had accused her of using the poor as an experiment in birth control. By the 1950s, this conflict with the Catholic Church in its various forms entirely consumed her; believing that Catholics had their ungodly tentacles into every aspect of political, social, and cultural life of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the USA.
Marie Stopes, (1918)
Baron Avro Manhattan (1914-1990) was an Italian aristocrat, writer, poet, and artist who had been exiled during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and resided in the UK permanently after 1945. During the Second World War, Avro ran a clandestine freedom radio, broadcasting to Italian and French partisans over the BBC. As mentioned, he was also a writer, and his chosen interest was the global danger of the Roman Catholic Church. His book, The Catholic Church Against the Twentieth Century (1947) argued that the Catholic Church sought the spiritual and political domination over modern society throughout the world (p. 450). His work, The Vatican in World Politics (1949) was a bestseller. In 1952, Avro was handsome, accomplished, and shared many of the same opinions as Stopes on religion, eugenics, and, most importantly, the Roman Catholic Church.
Avro Manhattan (1957)
The meeting of Avro Manhattan and Marie Stopes in Leicester in 1952 was cut prematurely short. Avro had come down with a bad case of tonsillitis and left the conference early, much to the displeasure of Marie. Just days after the conference, Marie sent a letter enquiring after his health and seeking further information about Japan and Roman Catholicism—the topic of their conversation that had so enthused Marie. Unsatisfied with his response, Marie went out and bought his most recent work, Catholic Imperialism and World Freedom (1952), and read it immediately. She declared this work to be ‘a monumental and quite terrifying presentation of the urgent problem these devilish R.C.’s have concocted!’[1] In the book, Avro had built upon his earlier work concerning Roman Catholicism in the twentieth century, arguing this time that the Catholic Church sought ‘world domination… not only as a spiritual, but also as a political power, buttressed by the unshakeable conviction that it is her destiny to conquer the planet’ (page ix). Marie echoed this same argument at an Oxford Union debate in 1955, explaining that ‘the Roman Catholic Church was determined, by its very constitution, to become the only religion, and to destroy every other religion’.[2]
Avro Manhattan and Marie Stopes, (1957)
Very quickly Marie fell hopelessly in love with Avro Manhattan. She was not fazed by the 34-year age gap, although Avro believed that it was ‘the greatest regret of her life that she was not thirty years younger, or I, thirty years older’ (Ruth Hall, 1978, p. 320). Marie had fallen out with her son, Harry, a few years prior, due to his ‘betrayal’ of her eugenic ideals in marrying a short-sighted woman. It could have been that Marie attempted to pour her feelings into another young man when it felt her son had abandoned her. Regardless, Marie was delighted with Avro’s character and artistic work—she loved Avro’s paintings, and was overjoyed to discover an author who mistrusted Roman Catholics as much as she did. The letters between Avro and Marie demonstrate the affection between them: between invitations for social visits and intellectual discussion were endearments such as ‘twin soul’, ‘dearest’, and ‘muse’ as well as expressions of ‘deep love’. Marie promoted Avro’s work on the Roman Catholic Church thoroughly, recommending other writers, such as Paul Blanshard, read his books, and even corresponded with his publisher, congratulating them on their bravery for taking such a stand against Catholicism. Yet it should be mentioned that Avro was perhaps a little less interested in Marie than she was in him. She railed at him for not visiting her as often as she hoped in 1957, and even at one point sought to marry him, not so much for the sake of marriage itself, but to prevent him from marrying another.
It is unclear where this love story would have ended, as it was interrupted by Marie’s death in 1958, only a few days before her seventy-eighth birthday. Her ashes were scattered by her only son and Avro Manhattan at Portland Bill, as per her wishes. Avro Manhattan would continue to wave the flag of anti-Catholicism well into the second half of the twentieth century, publishing various books concerned with Catholic Power (1967), Catholic Terror (1969), Religious Terror in Ireland (1974) etc. By 1970, Avro had formed a working alliance with Ian Paisley, and his books became must-read titles for the Protestant groups across the UK.[3] Anti-Catholicism had provided the basis for a meeting of minds, a romantic liaison, and fuelled a literary endeavour that would span decades.
[1] Letter from Stopes to Manhattan, 16 Nov 1952, MS 58734
[2] ‘Oxford Union Debates Power of R.C. Church’, Belfast Telegraph, 28 Jan 1955.
[3] Brian Sheppard, ‘A Raucous Voice Crying in the Wilderness’, The Scotsman, 22 Jan 1969, p. 7.