Desperate wives and the man known as Derek who fathered 500 children with women whose war hero husbands were too shell-shocked to make love

Helena Wright was a renowned doctor, campaigner and educator

She assisted women whose husbands were unable to father children

Many men returned from World War I unable to perform sexually



Helena Wright assisted hundreds of women whose husbands had returned from World War I unable to father children

These days there are sophisticated and scientific solutions to the dismal problem of childlessness — IVF, Viagra and well-established egg and sperm donor services. We think of these as recent advantages and give thanks for the modern age.



But what only very few people are aware of is that long before sperm donation was practically or ethically possible, in the early 20th century a secret sperm donation service existed for those women most in need.



Helena Wright was a renowned doctor, best-selling author, campaigner and educator who overcame the establishment to pioneer contraceptive medicine in England and throughout the world. Kind, intelligent, funny and attractive, Helena had a way with words and a devoted set of friends. She adored men and spent her life helping women.



She had a great hit in America and Europe with a book called The Sex Factor In Marriage, which financed her innovative medical practice. She opened two London clinics: one for very privileged women in Knightsbridge, one for the poor in Notting Hill.



And it was from these offices that she undertook perhaps her greatest work: to assist hundreds of women whose husbands had returned from World War I unable to father children.



Between 1914 and 1918, one million British troops were killed in France and Belgium. Thousands more were wounded, gassed or left shell-shocked. The appalling losses of the war left many women widowed and led to a shortage of potential husbands.



By 1921 Britain had a surplus of 1.7 million women. They were known as ‘the mateless multitude’.



Author Vera Brittain, who wrote about the war in her memoir Testament Of Youth, recalled a startling advert she saw in 1915: ‘Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the War.’



Among the men lucky enough to return home to wives after the war, many were unable to perform sexually, whether because of direct injury or shell-shock — what we’d call post-traumatic stress disorder.

Among the men lucky enough to return home to wives after the war, many were unable to perform sexually, whether because of direct injury or shell-shock

It was a delicate subject: witness D. H. Lawrence’s decision to make Clifford Chatterley — in Lady Chatterley’s Lover — ‘only half a man’, deprived of his virility by war; this aspect of the novel was considered to be the cruel breaking of a taboo.



No wonder, then, that by 1918 Helena Wright had many hundreds of women on her books who had confided to her that they needed help.



These women loved their husbands, but they also craved children. What they needed was a sperm donor, before such a thing existed. Helena Wright was not afraid to court controversy. She overcame the prejudices of the medical establishment and her family’s objections to qualify as a doctor in 1914.

Claiming ‘today’s cranks are tomorrow’s prophets’, she made her own morality and left the world to catch up. She was a pioneer of family planning and offered sex therapy long before the term was coined. But it was her secret fertility service that was most remarkable.



In 1919, Helena began to look for a very particular person — someone who could father children for the women on her books, without any emotional ties. She needed a man of certain stock: tall, handsome (with decent teeth), intelligent, well-bred, healthy — and reliably virile.



The answer turned out to be Derek. Derek was born in 1889 and, with his brother George, was raised in both England and what was then Ceylon, where his father had a partnership in a rubber and tea plantation.

Between 1914 and 1918, one million British troops were killed in France and Belgium. File picture shows party of Royal Irish Rifles in a communication trench on the first day of the Battle of the Somme

Like Helena Wright, Derek was at ease with what many of their contemporaries would have seen as an unconventional morality. His father Edward, having had Derek and four other children with his wife, came to admire the pretty daughter of a Sloane Square tobacconist.



Edward stopped by every morning to be served by this girl Eileen and on her 15th birthday struck a deal with her father. He would pay 15 gold sovereigns for Eileen, and set her up as his mistress in an apartment on Sloane Avenue. The pair went on to have two sons together.



Meanwhile, by the age of 19, Derek had grown to be a handsome and amusing young man. He was sent to Malaya to run another rubber plantation in 1909, when there was an insatiable demand for rubber to make tyres for the latest thing, motorcars.



'Like Helena Wright, Derek was at ease with what many of their contemporaries would have seen as an unconventional morality'

The teenage Derek cleared the jungle, hired a labour force and built a house of his own design.

He hired three girls to cook, launder and keep house for him.



A photograph Derek took at the time shows all three girls stretched out on the floor, facing the camera. Their eyes seem jet black, their hair short. Their skin glistens as though rubbed down by coconut oil. They are all nude. There is no doubt that they were his private harem.



When World War I broke out, Derek had been ordered — to his frustration — to remain at his post developing rubber for the war effort, while his younger brother, George, joined up.



George was only 18, and a 2nd Lieutenant in the Middlesex Regiment. On July 1, 1916, George led his men toward the German lines at The Somme. He was cut down by a hail of German machine-gun fire, dying in what became the worst slaughter of the war.



George’s signet ring was recovered by an Army chaplain and Derek wore it for the rest of his life.

In 1918, at the conclusion of an armistice between Germany, France and Britain, Derek returned to England. There, he looked for any small way to mitigate George’s loss. He bought a Rolls-Royce, and exhilarated his mother with 100mph drives around the banked speedway at Brooklands Race Track in Surrey.

British Troops going over the top to support an attack by XIV Corps on Morval during the Battle of the Somme in September 1916

Salvation came when he met a young nurse, Suzanne, who would become his wife. In 1919, Suzanne introduced him to Dr Helena Wright. It was a momentous meeting. As their friendship developed, Helena confided in Derek, explaining she had a list of 1,000 women whose husbands could not father children as a result of the war. Derek was inspired by the thought that he could help.



In turn, Derek confided to Helena his fiancée Suzanne’s fears that he was over-sexed, and the profound guilt and need to be useful that had sprung from his brother’s death.



So the secret service was born. Each would-be mother signed a pledge to stay silent, and paid £10 to a trust fund which allowed Helena to administer the service and covered prenatal care in her clinics.

It was determined there would be no prior meetings between Derek and the women — minimising the risk of nerves or second thoughts.

D. H. Lawrence's (pictured) decision to make Clifford Chatterley - in Lady Chatterley's Lover - 'only half a man', deprived of his virility by war was considered to be the cruel breaking of a taboo

Each woman would send Helena a telegram with their optimal dates for conceiving. The husbands would have the option of meeting Derek or going away (most went away) — and a date for the visit would be set.



Ahead of the chosen date, Helena would send a telegram to Derek. On the night, he would dress in a dark suit, white shirt and polka-dot bow tie, take his Homburg hat and a black leather Gladstone bag containing a nightshirt and a bottle of brandy. His good manners, smile and enthusiasm did the trick.



Some of the women, deprived of marital sex, must have longed for a repeat visit, but the point of Helena’s secret service was to uphold the couple’s marriage through the gift of a child. Derek and Helena were committed to minimising any disturbance of a couple’s peace.



As for Derek’s wife, the medically minded Suzanne, she seems to have been remarkably accommodating and understanding.



Derek visited close to 500 women in the years that followed. Many conceived and he never went back a second time. Each time a child was born of a Secret Service liaison, Helena would send Derek a telegram. Derek and Helena’s collaboration was a success for which neither could ever take credit, but they were doing good: providing longed-for children where there would have been none.



In the course of her long career, Helena attracted considerable controversy and legal charges. She made no secret of the fact that in the Forties she had arranged then illegal abortions, and in the Fifties ‘third-party adoptions’ (bringing together women who had unwanted pregnancies with childless couples).



Eventually, she was prosecuted for breaches of the Adoption Act and, in 1968, she pleaded guilty in court, but was given an absolute discharge.



Her personal life was as progressive as her professional one. Back in May 1916, while working at Bethnal Green Hospital in London, she had met Captain Peter Wright, a Royal Army Medical Corps surgeon. They married a year later, and had four sons. The couple had an ‘open’ relationship. Each had numerous affairs and indeed, in her medical practice, Helena encouraged patients in their own extra-marital affairs.



She had an affair with the architect and garden designer Oliver Hill and a long relationship with Bruce McFarlane, a family friend and a medieval historian at Oxford University. Friends and family were aware of Helena and Peter’s unconventional arrangements.



She continued to work and travel until the age of 93.



Derek fathered 496 children between 1917 and 1950. He had three sons by his only marriage, and two further sons by his father’s mistress — the tobacconist’s daughter — whom he took as his own after his father’s death. Then there were four more sons left behind in Malaya. The rest were conceived to patients of Helena Wright’s Knightsbridge and Notting Hill clinics.



After falling ill he resisted, with characteristic savvy and wit, all attempts to admit him to hospital. He died, in 1974, on a mattress that had been moved next to his Aga cooker for warmth.



Within a year of his death, an advert had appeared in Private Eye: ‘£50 for temporary relationship resulting in pregnancy.’ No longer were such services conducted in secret, but they were publicly advertised. One more delicate social taboo had been lifted.

