Ruth Frances Darwin CBE (20 August 1883 – 15 October 1972)[1] was Commissioner of the Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency[2] and an advocate of eugenics.
Darwin was appointed to the Board of Control, as an unpaid member, in 1921, replacing Ellen Pinsent.
[4] In 1929, with money from the estate of her father who had died in 1928, she founded the Darwin Trust[5] to foster research into "mental defect, disease or disorder".
Her younger sister Nora, later became Lady Barlow after marrying Sir Alan Barlow, 2nd Baronet, while her elder brother Erasmus was killed during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.
[9] In 1948, she married the Welsh psychiatrist William Rees-Thomas, who was a colleague of hers on the Board of Control.