A great deal of the following content includes conversations and emails between Jonathan Wiesner and various half siblings and is an attempt to record a narrative of BPW’s life and work, much of the information coming from family records. Our gratitude to Jonathan is immense: he has been endlessly generous with his time and his willingness to share his father with so many others, later in his life.
From Wikipedia: “Bertold Paul Wiesner FRSE (1901–1972) was an Austrian Jewish physiologist noted firstly for coining the term 'Psi' to denote parapsychological phenomena; secondly for his contribution to research into human fertility and the diagnosis of pregnancy; and thirdly for being biological father to upwards of 600 offspring by anonymously donating sperm used by his wife, the obstetrician Mary Barton, to perform artificial insemination on women at her private practice in the Harley Street area of London.”
Eva Ibbotson, on her father: “He was violently generous but could be financially unreliable... he was funny but not malicious, and curious about the world almost to his dying day. You couldn't have picked a better father. I remember once when I was asking him about life - as one does - and he said: "There's usually a flash of colour at the beginning but it always ends badly". He was already very ill when he said this - but I think he had more than his fair share of colour at the start.” Who exactly was Bertold Paul Wiesner? Well, he was the son of Paula Kohorn and Heinrich Wiesner, who were both from Czech, Jewish, families. He was married firstly to Anna Gmeyner, and they had one daughter, Eva, before divorcing in 1934. He married Mary Barton in 1943 and they had a son, Jonathan, born in 1944. And as we know, he was also the biological father to an unknown number of people who were, and are, real people, with real lives and families, occupations, hopes and fears. He met none of them, and he knew nothing about them. Did he think about his numerous offspring? What did it feel like, knowing he was responsible for so many new lives, scattered around the country? I often wonder whether he thought about the consequences of his decision to “help” so many women conceive. The sheer number of estimated babies resulting from their fertility treatment at the Barton/Wiesner practice is breathtaking.
As far as we know, he started donating as early as 1942, as we know of at least one baby born in 1943 (Michael M.), and then, in 1944, Peter M. was born: the same year as Jonathan who was BPW’s “actual” and known growing up son. From then on, we know of at least two or three people born in each year who are his offspring: the last ones were born in 1967. And this does not take into account of all the unknown babies, born between 1943 and 1967, who have either not found out about their parentage (usually via direct to consumer DNA testing) or have chosen to keep the knowledge private.
Maybe starting with his family origins from will begin to illuminate the person he became, although it never seems to me that his Jewish background informed his decision to become – to be blunt – a prolific sperm donor. There will always be so many unanswered questions: for example, did he know what was happening to Jewish people during the war? It seems as if he was a secular Jew as he did not attend synagogue, and the family did not keep to Jewish customs at home although his sister Kitty and husband Oscar were observant.
Throughout the following pages, I will refer to Berthold as BPW, which is how his descendants now speak of him.