Soon after came:
DR. VIC’S BOLSHEVIK CHARITY!
The most sinister figures in the twentieth century are people with unearned incomes who, under the guise of socialism, use their money-bags to spread discontent and evil practices among the poor. The Express has discovered that for the last thirty years Victoria McCandless, the Bolshevik doctor, has been secretly teaching what she now openly preaches. At her so-called “charity” clinic in a Glasgow slum she has taught thousands of poor women to defy nature, the Christian faith and the law of the land: we refer to something graver than her ridiculous “sex through a sheet” idea. We mean abortion. That is what her “Loving Economy” comes to in the end.
The Express reporters had no proof that Dr. Victoria performed abortions. They did, however, produce two former employees of the clinic who swore she had trained women to perform abortions on each other, and this resulted in a public prosecution. The prosecution failed (or did not completely succeed) because it was proved that the two employees had been to some extent bribed by the Daily Express, and were also mentally retarded. Campbell Hogg, the procurator fiscal, tried to make something of this last point during his cross-examination, and very nearly succeeded:
CAMPBELL HOGG: Doctor McCandless! Have you trained many mentally retarded women to assist you?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: As many as I could.
CAMPBELL HOGG: Why?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: For reasons of economy.
CAMPBELL HOGG: Oho! You got them cheaper?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: No. The accounts of the clinic show they were paid as much as cleverer nurses. I was not talking about financial economy but social economy — loving economy. Many people with damaged brains are far more affectionate, if given the chance, than many we classify as “normal”. They can often be taught to perform the most essential nursing tasks more efficiently than cleverer people — people who want to be doing more ambitious things.
CAMPBELL HOGG: Things like writing books on Loving Economy?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: No. Things like acting the buffoon in a court drama set up for the amusement of the gutter press.
(Laughter in court. The sheriff warns the accused that she is in danger of being held in contempt of court.)
CAMPBELL HOGG (forcibly): I suggest that you deliberately choose cretins for your helpers because sane people are unlikely to believe what these say about your clinic!
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: You are wrong.
CAMPBELL HOGG: Doctor McCandless, have you never (think hard before you answer) have you never given your patients instruction which would help them abort an unwanted baby?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: I have never given instructions which could hurt their mind or body.
CAMPBELL HOGG: The answer I want is “yes” or “no”.
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: You will get no more answers from me, young man. Go and teach another older person their job. Try an unemployed engineer — one who fought in the war.
(The sheriff warns accused that she must answer the procurator, but can choose her own words.)
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: I see. Then I repeat that I have taught nothing which can hurt mind or body.
Since the trial was in Scotland the jury was able to bring in a verdict of not proven, and did. Dr. Vic was not struck off the British medical register, but not declared guiltless.
When Victoria and Archibald opened the Natal Clinic in 1890 they put all Baxter’s money into the fund supporting it. The managing committee contained Sir Patrick Geddes and Principal John Caird of Glasgow University. By 1920 these had been replaced by weaker people who now bowed before the storm of unfriendly publicity. They sacked Victoria and gave the clinic to Oakbank Hospital as an out-patients department. Dr. Victoria had spent her savings printing, distributing and advertising A Loving Economy, so her only remaining property was 18 Park Circus. All Baxter’s old servants were dead by now. She let the upper rooms to university students and withdrew to the basement where she continued what she still called The Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic on a much smaller scale.
From then until 1923 she was chiefly noticed for her support of John Maclean. In a letter to C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) she wrote:
I cannot like the orthodox communists. They have one simple answer to every question and believe (like the fascists) that they can forcibly simplify what they do not understand. In any discussion with one I feel I am facing a bad school teacher who wants to shut me up. Maclean is a good school teacher.
When Maclean did not join the newly formed British Communist Party but founded the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party she offered him her home as a meeting place. When he died of overwork and pneumonia in 1923 she made a short speech by his graveside. His daughter, Nan Milton, recorded it in a letter, and Archie Hind quotes it at the end of his play about Maclean, Shoulder to Shoulder.
John was not a Zapata, galloping on horseback over the corn-fields. He was of the peasantry who fed Zapata. He was not a Lenin, working to move his office into the Kremlin. He was of the Kronstadt sailors whose mutiny gave Lenin the chance. John was not the sort who lead revolutions. He was the sort who make them.
The Daily Express put another reporter onto her two years later, perhaps hoping to find more conclusive evidence of illegal abortions, but the article which came out of this was a short character sketch, probably because nearly everyone who now remembered “Dr. Vic” thought she was dead. The reporter learned that children of the area called her The Dog Lady, because she walked around the West End Park accompanied by dogs of many sizes, some of them bandaged. The clinic was entered from the back lane, and the ground on each side of the path was overgrown with rhubarb plants. The waiting-room was crammed with heavy mid-Victorian seating, particularly a huge horse-hair-covered sofa. The only wall decorations were old posters for the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party. There was also a heavy padlocked box with a slit in the lid and a notice pinned to the side saying Put what you can afford in here — it will not be wasted. If you are hungry please do not steal this but speak to me in the surgery — hunger is curable. Half the people waiting looked very poor and old. The rest seemed to be children with animals, mostly dogs. There was only one pregnant woman.
When the reporter was admitted to the surgery he found it was a huge gas-lit kitchen with a pot of soup simmering on the fire range, various animals reclining in corners, and a tall, straight-backed woman sitting at a kitchen table laden with books, papers and medical instruments. She wore a white apron which covered her body from neck to ankles, with white celluloid cuffs attached to the black sleeves of her dress. Her strangely unlined face could have been any age between forty and eighty. When the journalist sat down facing her she said at once, “You look like a newspaper reporter. Is it the Daily Express?”