JOHN Boyd Orr was once a household name in Scotland. He is described by his alma mater, the University of Glasgow, as having been a “visionary researcher, decorated war veteran, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and political activist”.
Garlanded with honours during his long career, Boyd Orr was knighted in 1935 and created a life peer as Lord Boyd Orr in 1949.
A tall, distinctive man with “penetrating blue eyes” and “astonishing” bushy eyebrows and who smoked a pipe, his family affectionately referred to him as “Popeye”.
Unsurprisingly, much has been written about Boyd Orr. Yet few of these narratives make mention of the driving ideological force behind his endeavours: humanism.
While readers might associate humanism with celebrants who conduct wedding, funeral and naming ceremonies for the non-religious, it is, and has been, a considerably more expansive moral, ethical and rational life stance.
Historian Callum Brown reassesses this aspect of Boyd Orr’s career in his forthcoming book, Ninety Humanists And The Ethical Transition Of Britain.
For Brown, Boyd Orr was: “A humanist scientist whose ethical commitment drew upon humanitarianism, the autonomy of the human being and internationalism. He was devoted to a simple cause – ending hunger as a means to ending war.”
Humanism and Humanitarianism
BOYD Orr was born in Kilmaurs, Ayrshire, in 1880. His hostility to organised religion, Brown writes, was “shaped in his youth and crafted an adherence to rationalist science and humanist ethics”.
Boyd Orr’s family home was “strictly religious”. His Free Church father, “enveloped the family in a regime of nightly prayers, puritan morality and Sabbath observance”.
As Boyd Orr recalled in his memoir, “promiscuous dancing” was considered abhorrent, and he did not dance until he was nearly 30. After this, he rarely missed a ceilidh.
He discarded the faith of his family, although, rather confusingly, not before he had published a book on theological debate. He eschewed church, apart from a visit to a Quaker Meeting House, where he approved of the lack of ornamentation, doctrines and freedom of conscience.
Reading the work of Charles Darwin led Boyd Orr, Brown argues, to break from the hold of biblical interpretation. In Glasgow, he was much affected by the deprivation he witnessed in the city’s slums, then among the worst in western Europe.
His experience, which included several years as a teacher in the east end, gave him an “intense hatred of unnecessary hunger and poverty”.
After a complex career of study, in which he came to specialise in nutrition, Boyd Orr graduated as a medical doctor in 1913, joining a new research centre in Aberdeen, the Rowett Institute.
Following the outbreak of the First World War, Boyd Orr served as a senior medic in the Royal Army Medical Corps, rescuing the wounded at the Battle of the Somme, for which he was awarded the Military Cross. He also used his knowledge to improve the diet of soldiers.
Nutrition
BROWN demonstrates that Boyd Orr’s humanitarian drive to understand and counter the malnourishment of the poor, and children in particular, was a constant driver in his research.
Convinced of the nutritional benefits of milk, Boyd Orr was appalled it was wasted when poor families could not afford it, and that his proposals for a government scheme to supply free milk to schools were ignored. He conducted large-scale experiments in the mid-1930s
which conclusively showed the benefits of milk consumption among Scottish children and was reported widely in the press as having shown that around one-third of children in Britain and Northern Ireland were malnourished.
By the 1950s and 60s, the free milk in schools scheme was the eventual result of such campaigning. It was, according to Brown, the simplest and most effective mass system to improve physical health ever devised.
Boyd Orr was at the forefront of an ethical movement for dietary improvement, which drew the admiration of humanists such as Julian Huxley and fellow Scot Naomi Mitchison.
Throughout the 1930s and 40s, he persistently lobbied government to improve the diet of the population, advocating that food supply be subject to state intervention.
In 1943, he appeared in a documentary, World Of Plenty, which presented in simple terms his argument that the world was shifting from food scarcity to plenty. The same year, he was elected to Parliament as an independent MP representing the Scottish universities.
World Government
BOYD Orr’s ethical ambitions were greater still. In the years following the Second World War, his mission was to achieve world peace by transforming the supply of food across the globe.
In 1946, acclaimed by fellow nutritionists the world over, he was appointed the first director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Three years later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Receiving the award, he stated there would be: “No peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lacks the necessities of life and believes that a change in the political and economic system will make them available. World peace must be based on world plenty.”
Humanists such as HG Wells had long dreamed of utopian schemes which would create international institutions to ensure prosperity and to prevent conflict.
With Boyd Orr appointed to the United Nations, such dreams seemed upon the cusp of becoming reality. Yet his plans for a World Food Bank, and a huge international project to boost agricultural productivity, lacked political support.
“Boyd Orr,” Brown argues, “proclaimed the power of science to transform the world, to quell racism, to feed the millions and thereby to end war, travelling the world telling this story to intellectuals, medics and scientists.”
On Boyd Orr’s death in 1971, aged 90, an extensive obituary lauded him as “one of the truly outstanding Scotsmen of the age”.
Charlie Lynch thanks Callum Brown for providing him with a preview of his forthcoming book, Ninety Humanists And The Ethical Transition Of Britain: The Open Conspiracy 1930-80, which will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in November
