Moya Woodside was a home visitor or health inspector for the Belfast Welfare Committee during the Second World War. Born Moira Neill on 21st December 1907, she was the daughter of Charles Neill, of the Belfast flour mills' family.
Moya was a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast. She married Cecil John Alexander “Cocky” Woodside. During the Second World War, he was an assistant surgeon at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. The couple lived on Elmwood Avenue in South Belfast. In 1938, she became the Honorary Secretary of the newly-established Belfast Branch of the Society for Constructive Birth Control.
Woodside was one of 5 people from Northern Ireland to contribute to the Government’s Mass Observation project. Established in 1937, Mass Observation consisted of diaries and journals kept throughout wartime. They included writings on all subjects including first-hand accounts of life during the Second World War. Woodside began writing her daily diaries in 1940 and they included vivid descriptions of the Belfast Blitz of April and May 1941. Alongside the detail of the Luftwaffe attacks on the city, Woodside wrote about rationing, the blackout, travel restrictions, and censorship. Her writings are forthright and often reject the wartime clichés played out in the local press.
Life after the Blitz
In 1942, Woodside trained as a Psychiatric Social Worker at the London School of Economics. Following the completion of her training, she became a research assistant investigating family planning within working-class marriages. She published several papers on the topic and was a co-author along with Dr. Eliot Slater of ‘Patterns of Marriage’ (Cassell and Co., London, 1951).
In 1946, she came to the attention of Dr. Clarence Gamble, Director of Proctor and Gamble U.S.A., who was gathering experts to provide publications for the Human Betterment League. He funded a post for Woodside at the Institute of Social Science, North Carolina to study the effectiveness of the 1933 Sterilisation Act. In 1950, Woodside returned to the United Kingdom, based in London, where she became a Fellow of the Eugenics Society supported by Dr. C.P. Blacker in 1951.
The University of Sussex contains the collection of notebooks, journals, and scraps of paper making up the Mass Observation records. These unique histories of life in the Second World War are in an air-conditioned room. A constant temperature of 13 degrees Celsius preserves the archives for future generations.