Secrets of my granny's quinine pessaries

Were they really the "Wife's Friend"?

Last week’s offering was Teddy Bear Eyes, about the bizarre odds and ends I found while clearing my late parents’ house – my childhood home.

It struck a chord. Daughters of hoarders* could be a new Substack category!

And as for those quinine pessaries, thanks for asking about them, Lauren Bravo and Jill Swenson, who said, “I can’t stop wondering about granny’s pessaries. Did they work?”

Exactly what I was wondering. Off down the contraceptive rabbit hole I went, so to speak.

“Wife’s Friend”

No mention of contraception on the box, you’ll notice. They are euphemistically called “Wife’s Friend”. And the instruction leaflet is laughably vague: “One should be placed as high as possible 5 to 10 minutes (or merely sufficient time for it to dissolve) before each occasion.”

No mention of where it’s to be placed as high as possible, or what the “occasion” might be. Given that they look like wrapped chocolates, it’s a wonder any woman knew where to put them!

Were they effective? Were they safe?

I consulted Claire L Jones, Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Kent. She is the author of The Business of Birth Control: Contraception and commerce in Britain before the sexual revolution (Manchester University Press, 2020). Her book¹ is a mine of information into the development, marketing and changing attitudes to contraception between the World Wars.

She tells me:

“I examined some letters from regular users of these pessaries from the interwar period and they testify that they found them effective, despite what scientific and medical authorities thought. The quinine was probably too low a dosage to be harmful, but it didn't stop rival companies from circulating the rumour, or from imitating the product (hence Rendell's offer of a reward).

“As I show in my book, the contraceptive industry in the interwar period was extremely competitive and companies routinely employed dirty tactics.”

Claire kindly sent me a link to her book.

W. J. Rendell was a chemist in Clerkenwell, London. He was concerned about population control. He invented his pessaries, a mix of quinine and cocoa butter, in 1880, thinking they would be helpful to his working class customers, burdened by large families. The quinine was thought to neutralise sperm motility.

During the inter-war years, they were on sale for 2s 6d per box of twelve, making them more affordable than, for example, ‘Durex’ latex condoms (introduced in 1932), which were 2s 6d for three. The pessaries could be used in conjunction with a rubber cap.

Yes, I found one of these alongside nana’s pessaries. I hope it was a bit softer back in the day, as it’s rock hard and just looking at it makes me wince.

Chemists referred to them as “Hygienic products”, rather than spell out what they were selling, to make purchasing them more respectable.

In Britain, between 1860 and 1940, the number of live births experienced by each married woman in the population fell from an average of nearly six in 1860 to an average of just over two in 1940.

Nana Ada and my grandad Tom married in 1922, when she was 29 and he 31, after a long engagement. During WW1 he was away fighting in France and Ada was working at Port Sunlight soap factory².

Why did Tom and Ada delay marriage once he returned from the war? I’m pretty sure it was down to economics and because Ada’s dad, Edwin, a fearsome born-again Christian, expected his dutiful daughters to live at home and look after him.

Between the ages of 30 and 41, Ada gave birth to four children, one of whom died in infancy. (My mum told me she was her brother’s “replacement”, being born 15 months after him, though she only found out she’d had a brother during her teens. It had been kept a secret from her.)

Ada and Tom certainly managed to space out their family, though I suspect my Aunty Jean, born in 1934, was a late accident. My nana suffered severe postnatal depression after Jean’s birth.

My other grandparents also spaced their children. There was eight years between my dad, born in 1927, and his older brother. (Perhaps there were losses between, but if so they were never spoken of.)

So presumably they were using some kind of contraception³. And this was Nana Ada’s.

I don’t know whether Ada would approve of me writing about it. She came from a “children should be seen but not heard” era.

But then, the pessaries are now nearly 100 years old and they’ve stored remarkably well. Perhaps if she didn’t want me to find them, she should have sorted out her handbags while she had the chance.

If my grandchildren find some old personal relic of mine lurking in a battered handbag in decades to come, like, I don’t know, a perished Mooncup or something, I hereby give them permission to find out what it is and tell the world about it!

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Contraception, revisited

I was born in 1960, the year the Pill was launched. I tried so many types of contraception over the years. Always a drag. But needs must. Thank God it’s behind me.

The combined Pill

Microgynon 30, aged 17 and going out with my first “practice boyfriend”. Felt sluggish and nauseous on it. Hated it.

Condoms

As infrequently as possible. I count myself lucky that I became sexually active in a pre-Aids world, and that I’ve been with the same partner for 38 years.

IUDs

1/ Age 19, silver-service waitressing in a posh hotel in North Yorkshire for the summer, I rang up the family planning clinic from the phone booth in the residents’ lounge, to try to make an appointment.

Awful crackling line.

“What’s the nature of your enquiry?”

“I want to get an IUD fitted,” I whispered.

“I’m sorry, this is a very bad line. What did you say?”

“I want to get an IUD fitted,” I hissed.

“Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“I WANT TO GET AN IUD FITTED,” I bellowed.

When I emerged from the booth, a middle-aged couple had just taken their seats in the lounge to order a cream tea. They had heard every word.

I was dissuaded by the doctor from having the IUD due to the possible risk of infertility, so it was back to the Pill (Eugynon 30; marginally better than the Microgynon).

2/ Copper 7 (so named because it was shaped like the number 7).

This failed spectacularly in 1986 when I got pregnant with triplets. The doctor who managed to tug it back out when I was nine weeks pregnant was surprised to see the thread had wound itself around the device, distorting it and pulling it low down in my uterus.

It was discontinued soon after. I had nothing to do with that, but I’m not really surprised. The babies were fine.

Cap plus spermicide (occasional)

Not bad if you’re with a regular partner. Awkward on a hot date if you haven’t put it in beforehand.

Femidom female condom (launched 1992)

“Like inserting a sandwich bag,” I noted in my diary. Only remotely sexy if you know your partner very well already.

Morning after pill

Once, after a scare.

Persona (1990s, now discontinued)

A test-based form of the rhythm method, which allowed you to track your fertile time of the month. Problem was, I got tearful when we avoided sex around the time of ovulation. Who was that potential half-a-person?

Weirdly, I’ve never had the same wistfulness about sperm in the wild. I don’t picture 300 million little people every time I wash a sticky bedsheet.

Progesterone only Pill (Minipill) (2000s)

Suited me best. Felt relatively normal on it.

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* Thanks to everyone who read and engaged with my piece last week, Teddy Bear Eyes. Solidarity with all other daughters of hoarders.

Poet Cherry Coombe, responded with beautiful words based on her own experience:

My house, an archive of regret

stores the relics others’ homes shed

each aunt’s, each mother’s mother’s

left

needles still in wool; a photograph of kids at school; a father’s brother’s vest, undecorated yet;

my children’s photographs now filed under their own and mine beneath my mother’s frame.

Eliza Anderson writes about excavating her mother’s Soho loft, and tracking the clues to her artist parents’ history. This piece about unearthing her mother’s bed resonated.

Snapshot of My Mother’s Bed

Do please like, share, comment, if you feel minded. (Any thoughts on contraception, ancient or otherwise? Or anything else?) It’s lovely to know you’re reading my work. You’re welcome to subscribe, if you haven’t already.

Till next time.

© Wendy Varley 2024

1. The paperback version of Claire L Jones’s book comes out in September 2024.

2. Here’s another amazing discovery I made while clearing my childhood home: my Nana Ada played football! Factories had their own – very popular – women’s teams during WW1. But only until the chaps came home. In 1921, women’s football was banned in Britain for the next fifty years.

My Nana Ada, who played for the Port Sunlight soap factory women’s football team during WW1.

3. Update: Of course, the one form of contraception I’ve missed out in my potted history of the past 100 years since my nana used quinine pessaries is: withdrawal.

After publishing this piece, Claire L Jones told me that research shows it remained a popular method of birth control in the UK until the 1960s.

When I worked on women’s magazines in the 1980s we insisted that ‘pulling out’ couldn’t be relied on. But for couples in earlier decades it was a free, if not entirely reliable, option.

Hmm, might return to this topic at some point!