Norman Haire

Norman Haire, born Norman Zions (21 January 1892, Sydney – 11 September 1952, London) was an Australian medical practitioner and sexologist. He has been called "the most prominent sexologist in Britain" between the wars.

Life

When Norman was born in 1892 his parents, Henry and Clara Zions, were living in Sydney at 255 Oxford Street, Paddington. He was their unplanned and unwanted, 11th and final child. He was a star debater at Fort Street High School but his plans to be an actor were thwarted when his parents made him study medicine. He was anxious about his sexuality as a teenager (i.e., he was homosexual), but his chance discovery of Havelock Ellis' ''Studies in the Psychology of Sex'' in Sydney's public library made him decide that he, like Ellis, would devote his life to saving people from sexual misery. He graduated in 1915 from the University of Sydney, and worked in several obstetric and mental health hospitals before his appointment as Medical Superintendent at Newcastle Hospital at the time of the influenza pandemic. When a patient died, Zions was unjustly held responsible and, shortly after, left his homeland for twenty years.

After arriving in London he changed his name to Norman Haire in December 1919 and, five years later, his status as a poor, Jewish outsider had changed to that of a celebrity with a flourishing gynaecological practice in Harley Street, a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a country house. He was a feeling, thinking and doing man, equal parts hedonist and humanist; a tall, fat and flamboyant rationalist who was secretly homosexual and said blunt things in a beautiful voice. He sought out Havelock Ellis who introduced him to key people in the fields of eugenics and sexual reform, including birth control pioneers Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes and Charles and Bessie Drysdale from the Malthusian League. In 1921 Haire became the chief honorary medical officer at their free birth-control clinic - the Walworth Women's Welfare Centre in East London. In 1923, with a letter of introduction from Ellis, Haire travelled to Berlin to meet Magnus Hirschfeld (a Jewish, openly gay, socialist sexologist) and visited his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research). In 1923 he became a fêted speaker at a Cambridge University prestigious society called The Heretics. Five years later Haire captivated the audience at Oxford University when he became the St John's Essay Society's most illustrious speaker. They were dazzled by Haire whose three-hour and comprehensive exposition received 'intensive and appreciative attention' from an audience that was the largest in the Society's records.

People flocked to Haire's lectures and eagerly bought his informative books about birth control and sexology. In 1922 he took a leading role in the world's first international conference on birth control which was held in London and he also starred in conferences in lecture tours in American and in Germany, France and Spain and he lectured fluently in German, French and Spanish. He was one of the first to provide the poor with birth control clinics and he convinced Britain's medical profession of the need to learn about contraception and provide it.

Haire managed to combine his medical and theatrical talents and played a small part when
Ivor Montagu directed a cast of his friends in a 1928 silent slapstick movie called Blue Bottles (British slang for police) which used innovative special effects. The stars were Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester and it was adapted from a story by H G Wells

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