Stop sniggering at the back! This isn’t smut, it’s a serious piece about social hygiene by our phwoar! missus! correspondent Angus Young.
Had he still been with us, I think spending an hour or two having a natter with Cyril Bibby would have been time well spent. Educator, biologist, author, poet and an authority on limericks, he is also now regarded as one of Britain’s first sexologists.
Born in 1914, he was brought up as part of a family of eight children in Liverpool before going to Cambridge University to study natural sciences. After graduating, he taught science and biology initially at a school in his home city before moving to a new teaching job at Chesterfield Grammar School which didn’t last long.
In a 1981 interview, he explained how he ended up joining the government’s British Social Hygiene Council in 1941. “This was an interesting situation. I was without a job. In fact I had been sacked from my job in a grammar school because of my political (Socialist) and anti-war activities and I was perusing papers for any job that would bring in something to keep the wolves from the door. There wasn’t a social security system in those days.
“I saw an advertisement for an education officer with a range of attributes; knowledge of biology – there were thousands of better biologists than me able to lecture fairly well but I knew but I knew I could; able to write simply -I think I could; persona grata with trade unions and labour organisations – which I was and I just thought: ‘My God, that’s me. I didn’t think I had the slightest chance but I wrote and applied.’”
The BSHC had been founded during the First World War to educate people about venereal diseases. Soon after Bibby joined, it was amalgamated with the Central Council for Health Education but he would continue his role in promoting better understanding of the biological elements of health education. He would recall later: “One of the earliest things I did was to manoeuvre the need to get the various existing pamphlets re-written because I didn’t think they were terribly good. Then there was giving talks in schools and factories.”
The Council oversaw a rapid roll-out of sex education across the country with officers like Bibby working with a regional network of medical officers, education officials, leaders of youth organisations and major employers.
Wartime allowed him to pursue a more radical agenda towards getting messages about sex, contraception and communicable diseases across to the masses. “Nobody wanted to waste manpower then and the degree of freedom one had to draw up plans was remarkable and was exhilarating.” he said.
His personal lightbulb moment came at a meeting where he was addressing a gathering of local biology teachers. “One said: ‘Well at our school, we deal with this matter perfectly satisfactorily. We tell all our children about the sexual organs of a rabbit and the breeding and so forth and then we tell them the organs in humans are the same.’ I can recall replying: ‘Well, that’s absolutely fine if your aim is to persuade children to grow up so that they behave sexually as rabbits do with the same promiscuity and the same breeding habits.’ At that, the meeting rather quivered for a moment. I happened to hold a very high view of sex, that it was important to build into the very fabric of sex education at every stage and understanding that homo sapiens is a rather different create from a rabbit, capable of much else and that therefore attitudes and sentiments and a feeling of responsibility and self-discipline were necessary too.”
Bibby’s message was simple: yes, sex is great when those natural urges start to kick in but it should also be a lifelong joy if you approach it right. During his work with the Council he wrote over 300 information pamphlets, delivered hundreds of lectures and even featured in regular radio broadcasts on the subject. He later wrote both academic and children’s books on sex education and the workings of the human body.
Many of these were written after he moved to Hull in 1959 (we were wondering when Hull would come into this – Ed.) to become principal of the city’s College of Education, later to become Hull College of Higher Education and now known simply as Hull College. He remained at the college until retiring in 1977.
His biography of Victorian biologist and anthropologist T.H. Huxley is still regarded as the definitive work on the English scientist who championed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution while he revealed another personal passion in 1978 in a book called The Art of the Limerick in which he examines the history of the five-line form of poetry. As well as featuring 750 limericks penned by others, he also adds 200 of his own. Reading the book, it’s fun to imagine Bibby sitting at his college principal’s desk conjuring up limericks while at the same time, in another academic institution in Hull, Philip Larkin pondering over the next line in a new poem currently under construction.
Bibby died in 1987 but his legacy lives on in Hull in a charitable trust he bequeathed along with his late wife Frances which offers grants to elderly disabled people living in the city.