making difference

The history of eugenics at UCL involves the establishment and merging of a number of different physical spaces, academic departments and centres for research with varying and sometimes overlapping staff. Much of the initial work was done under the stewardship of Professor Karl Pearson. A Eugenics Records Office was established at the University of London in 1904, with funding from Galton. In 1906, with the promise of further funding from Galton, Pearson became Director of the newly established Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. When Galton died in 1911, he left provision in his will to fund the Galton Laboratory permanently, along with establishing a professorial chair of Eugenics at UCL. Karl Pearson was the first of a long line of celebrated biologists, statisticians and geneticists to hold the post. As Professor of Eugenics, Pearson incorporated the Galton Laboratory, in combination with his Biometric Laboratory in the newly formed Department of Applied Statistics, all in the South Wing of UCL, where it remained in operation until 1920. The laboratory carried on under various changes of name and departmental affiliation until it was incorporated into the Department of Biology in 1996. Today, this department is known as UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment.

Flinders Petrie, who was the first Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at UCL from 1892-1933 (and the first university professor of Egyptian Archaeology in Britain), also played a significant role in perpetuating eugenicist ideas, grounding them in the study of the deep past. In 1887, Galton commissioned Petrie to undertake a project collecting anthropometric photographs of “racial types” in Egypt. Petrie also excavated, measured and returned significant numbers of skulls and other skeletal remains from his excavations to UCL to support the work being undertaken by Pearson and Galton (Challis 2016). Petrie’s hierarchical views of race and civilisation, combined with his beliefs in the superiority of Northern European people and cultures, strongly influenced his interpretation of archaeological evidence. For example, he argued that the cultures of Ancient Egypt derived from superior invading lighter-skinned cultures who effectively exterminated and “bred out” the inferior indigenous darker-skinned Egyptians. Despite his contemporaries disproving these theories, Petrie persisted with these ideas on account of his eugenicist beliefs (see further discussion in Challis 2013).

The objects below illustrate places, instruments and forms of material evidence which relate to the ordering and differencing practices of eugenics.