Robert Forder

05/23/2011 15:23
RForder40
I received a very interesting e-mail this weekend from Robert Forder, the great-grandson of Robert Forder, Secretary of the National Secular Society when Charles Bradlaugh was President, freethought publisher, and ultimately the owner of the Freethought Publishing Company at 28 Stonecutter St., London. Forder came from a humble background, but became a central figure in the British freethought and birth control movements. But unlike Charles Bradlaugh and some of his more notorious associates like Annie Besant and Edward Aveling, Forder is one of the many members of the movement who are neither well remembered nor honored for their decades of work.

Mr. Forder has written a brief account of his ancestor’s activities in the NSS and as a freethought publisher, which can be viewed by clicking here. He claims, “the importance of the Stonecutter Street address in disseminating contraceptive advice and knowledge has been grossly underestimated by the secondary sources published in recent years. In fact, the address was the main source of advice in those pioneering days when even the Malthusian League stopped short of publishing this type of material. As a very conservative estimate well over 500,000 Stonecutter Street birth control tracks were published and sold and the figure is probably nearer 1 million or more.” I completely agree. We need a much more thorough history of the contributions made by people like Robert Forder to both freethought and population control–and of how these two movements overlapped each other.