The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  Mothers’ meetings gave members a break from domestic duties albeit to make them better homemakers through friendly chats on health, nutrition, mothercraft, housekeeping, and hygiene. Some even hired an elderly widow to mind the children during meetings. All offered cake and abundant cups of hot tea, a chance to socialize with neighbors, and the “friendship” of “lady” managers like Muriel. Those run by chapels and churches included Bible study or short services and prayer.95 Satirists found them an irresistible target. Violet Myers lampooned the formality of printed invitations, stilted conversations, and sentimental songs about married love. In Myers’s witty sketch, a poor widow wonders why husbands in these songs never grow old, get drunk, and lose their jobs like her own unlamented late spouse. The well-meaning befuddled ladies sing off-key, run out of stale cake, and serve tea that’s “no better nor ditchwater.” Norman Maclean’s illustrations mock the vague gospel of brotherly love meant to ennoble the proceedings. A framed banner declaring “Love One Another” tilts precariously behind two earthbound mothers who complain about the tea while appearing indifferent to the child sitting on the floor at their feet.96 In another satirical illustration, even the other philanthropic ladies can hardly stifle their yawns as one of them feebly attempts to give the bored mothers a dose of musical uplift. (See fig. 3.8.)

  By her own account, Muriel took this quintessentially Victorian institution of feminine noblesse oblige—the Mothers’ Meeting—and turned it into a distinctly modern Women’s Meeting. Inept at most household tasks, Muriel readily acknowledged that she was unqualified to instruct Bow’s matrons in how to sew, cook, clean, and take care of their babies and children. Instead, she invited speakers to teach them about industrial laws designed to protect workers from occupational hazards; they enjoyed “good music” and joined the thriving women’s suffrage movement in Bow. They held window-garden competitions and used religion and prayer to make sense of their day-to-day lives.97 At a time when women had few opportunities to preach, the mothers’ meeting at Bruce Road Congregational Church gave Muriel a space in which to develop her skills as public speaker on social, civic, and religious topics. More importantly, Muriel’s relationships with the women of Bruce Road grew into lifelong friendships with their entire families. By 1912, the Lesters and the Dowells had moved there and made it the hub of their community-based activities.

  Before settling into the small terraced house at Sixty Bruce Road, the Lester sisters rented rooms in several different parts of Bow for several years. Doris, not Muriel, inaugurated this new phase in their relationship with the local community and one another. She convinced her parents to allow her to stay behind while they, accompanied by Muriel, vacationed in Italy amid “mimosa and orange groves.”98 Doris boarded with two elderly spinster parishioners of the Rector of Bow, Reverend Kitcat.

  3.8. Norman Maclean’s cartoons and satirical captions, “Call this tea?” (top) and “In the music-room” (bottom) captured Cockney mothers’ skeptical reception of the watered-down tea and boring entertainment on offer at philanthropic mothers’ meetings. Violet Myers, “A ‘Mothers’ Meeting’ in the East End,” The Idler 17 (July 1900): 569–74.

  “Why,” I asked, “need the house [the Grange] be kept going just for me? Why can’t I spend my nights as well as days in Bow?” This was indeed in those days a revolutionary suggestion! However, I persisted in pressing the point….

  Basking in her independence, Doris, with Nellie’s help, “carr[ied] on Muriel’s jobs as well as my own” at the Factory Girls’ Club on Albert Terrace and Mothers’ Meetings at Bruce Road Congregational Church. In one draft of her unpublished autobiography, she confessed that she “felt quite heartbroken at the thought of giving up my independence and my room in Bow.”99

  When Muriel returned from Italy, the sisters worked out a new arrangement that allowed each the independence she craved from the luxurious life at the Grange. “The idea was that Muriel and I should fulfil [sic] our functions as Box and Cox, when one was in Bow the other would be home at Loughton! So our new and adventurous life began.”100 This arrangement ensured that Rachel and Henry Lester always had one of their unmarried daughters tending to them at home. It also gave Doris a chance to get out from under Muriel’s shadow since they were rarely in Bow or Loughton at the same time. It was a neat and sometimes precarious balancing act. They simultaneously fulfilled traditional daughterly obligations in Loughton while enjoying the freedoms of New Women in Bow. As pacifist feminist Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence recalled, drawing on her own experiences of living among the people, “the very idea that women should leave their homes and live in the comparative freedom of a community, in order to carry out rather subversive principles of social sharing, was a bombshell to the large mass of conservative low-church and Nonconformist opinion.”101

  Because of and despite its noise, dirt and deprivation, Bow brought Doris and Muriel “a serenity and selflessness almost beyond imagination.”102 They described themselves as inhabiting “two worlds.” Sometimes the distances between these worlds uncomfortably collapsed. At a party in Loughton, Muriel carelessly chatted about work-related grievances that one of her factory girl friends had shared with her in confidence. She was unnerved when her story traveled to the ears of the factory manager, who pressed Muriel to reveal her informant’s name.103 For all that Muriel imagined Bow and Loughton as two separate worlds, they were also always connected for her. That was, after all, her self-chosen task.

  GOD’S EMPIRE

  Did God love Britain’s empire? In 1900, Muriel and the vast majority of Britons across the political spectrum were absolutely sure that He did. By 1910, revelations of horrific cruelty in the Congo perpetrated by King Leopold of Belgium under cover of Christian humanitarianism had severely tested confidence in this alliance. The first place that Muriel and Doris rented in Bow sometime around 1910 put them close to the domestic epicenter of debates over Britain’s and evangelical Christianity’s culpability for the carnage in the Congo. Only the year before, Muriel had publicly joined the campaign to bring some measure of justice to the Congo. Her involvement in this movement, the Congo Reform Association, marked a crucial turning point in her emerging global consciousness and her growing antipathy to colonialism and imperialism. As is so often the case, Muriel was not an entirely reliable guide to her life story. Tales of Protestant missionary endeavors in the Congo had been part of her religious upbringing in Leytonstone and Loughton as well as her work in Bow from the turn of the century.

  An attic room in Doric Lodge (founded in 1884), the women’s residence of a training college for home and overseas missionaries, was Muriel and Doris’s first shared residence in Bow.104 In their writings, the sisters made very little of Doric Lodge and the larger organization of which it was a part. Muriel called it a “severe-looking appendage of a missionary-training college.” Doris dismissed it as a relic from a bygone era.105 In this judgment, they were badly mistaken or willfully disingenuous. Doric Lodge was part of the East London Training Institute for Home and Foreign Missions, one of Britain’s most ambitious—and modern—global evangelical ventures.106 Henry and Fanny Grattan Guinness, Anglo-Irish evangelicals and relatives of the brewery moguls, founded the mission in Bromley-by-Bow in 1873 in partnership with Dr. Thomas John Barnardo. The entire missionary complex was renamed the Regions Beyond Missionary Union (RBMU) in 1899—and, to add to confusion, was better known as the Regions Beyond Inland Mission.

  3.9. Saving souls and global benevolence was a family business for Dr. Harry Grattan Guinness, his wife Fanny Grattan Guinness, their children and grandchildren. Dr. Harry Guinness, Not Unto Us, A Record of 21 Years Missionary Service (London, 1908), frontispiece.

  RBMU’s headquarters in Bow included Harley House for men and Doric Lodge for women. The enterprise was nondenominational, red-hot premillenarian, and global in its reach.107 In the 1860s, Henry (“Harry”) Grattan Guinness was among Britain’s best known revivalist preachers before he turned his gaze south and east to save heat
hen souls in Congo, Peru, India, and China. (See fig. 3.9.) This was urgent business as he and Fanny prepared for the Second Coming. His eschatology, with its elaborate charts of the relationship between Biblical prophecy and “soli-lunar” cycles, was as abstruse and hermetic as anything Madame Blavatsky ever penned.108 Christians needed God’s punishing judgment, he insisted. He devoted an entire book to refuting the dangerous heresy of fellow Baptist Revivalist G. O. Barnes, who dared to preach “God is Love and nothing else.” For Barnes, love was God’s domain, punishment the devil’s.109 Not for Grattan Guinness.

  Fanny and Harry Grattan Guinness’s theology could not have been farther from Muriel’s “God is Love” theology and Campbell’s religious “modernism”; but their understanding of the global flows of empire and their techniques for selling their godly labors to their well-healed supporters and to the heathen masses were distinctly modern. In the service of Christianity, they mastered new information and visual technologies of photography and magic lanterns. The RBMU was remarkably cosmopolitan in personnel and outlook.110 Students came from across Britain and over twenty different countries. Their curriculum included study of “world religions”: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, and Roman Catholicism. They engaged in sustained comparisons of each religion’s founders, revealed texts, and doctrines of God and man, albeit through their own evangelical Christocentric lens. Harley College and Doric Lodge gave its graduates a vastly deeper grasp of culture and religion around the world than the Lesters’ demanding curriculum at St. Leonard’s.111 Muriel and Doris would certainly have stood to learn a great deal from the other women they encountered at Doric Lodge as they climbed to their attic room.

  RBMU missionaries occupied the front lines of encounters between rich and poor in London as well as white Britons and people of color in Africa, Asia, and South America. They served apprenticeships in East London by succoring the poor in Nellie’s neighborhood before their overseas postings. They figured prominently on the lists of Christian “martyrs” slaughtered in the Boxer Rebellion in China during the bloody summer of 1900. Two of the slain missionaries, the Nathan sisters, were members of the Lesters’ Loughton Union Church; commemorating their deaths preoccupied the congregation at the time Doris and Muriel first assumed responsibilities and leadership there.112

  For their education, many students at Harley House and Doric Lodge paid no fees: the enterprise was funded entirely by donations from the faithful. Some of Doric Lodge’s students worked as trained nurses at Bromley House Institute on Brunswick Road across from Granny and Caroline Sloan, where they ran a modern maternity and child welfare clinic in an ancient Tudor manor house that still stands. Others served as staff at Berger Hall with its medical clinic, Evening Night School and Girls’ Evening Home for Factory Girls. Nellie and most of her family lived within a block or two of Berger Hall. I suspect it housed the Factory Girls’ Club and Night School where Nellie formed some of her most enduring friendships with various “lady” helpers including Lady Marion Plender (the daughter of a suburban Essex “upper division” customs officer). We know that Nellie turned to Berger Hall for medical services after 1910.113

  Henry Stanley’s 1877 best-selling account of his expedition into darkest Africa inspired evangelicals including the Grattan Guinnesses to take godly action. Harley College provided the first recruits for the Livingstone Inland Mission (1880) to bring Christian truths to the Belgian Congo. Nine years later, the mission sent its missionaries upriver to establish the Congo Balolo Mission. For the next twenty years, the Grattan Guinness family and students from their East London headquarters took pride in their leading role in civilizing and converting the Congo.

  All that changed around 1903 just as Doris and Muriel deepened their bonds to Bow. Dr. Henry Grattan Guinness, Fanny and Harry’s son, publicly acknowledged the cataclysmic deformation of the RBMU’s Christian labors in the Congo, where he himself had once served. King Leopold II of Belgium, masquerading as a benevolent Christian monarch, had imposed a regime of terror on the quasi-enslaved African population compelled to harvest rubber to satisfy the insatiable demand of bicycle-crazed Europeans and Americans. Leopold’s overseers executed or maimed the bodies of conscripted Congolese workers who failed to meet their rubber quotas. Overseers literally needed a severed human body part to account for each bullet they had discharged, lest they be punished for wasting precious ammunition in hunting for food.114 The death toll must be reckoned in tens of thousands. The dismembered bodies of survivors offered irrefutable “proof” of atrocity. The Regions Beyond monthly periodical published articles illustrated by graphic photographs of limbless men, women, and children taken by its own missionaries. Victims wrapped white clothes around their dark torsos, the better to highlight their gruesome injuries.115 (See fig. 3.10.) Skeptics wondered why the Grattan Guinness’s missionary empire had been so slow to bring their case to a broader public. After all, Henry Jr. had first received reports about such horrors as early as 1895 when he had importuned King Leopold to make changes. Had evangelicals like Grattan Guinness implicitly come to terms with Leopold’s murderous minions and entered into a “conspiracy of silence” in exchange for the right to extend their work of saving souls?116

  As the Lesters strengthened their ties to Bow at the turn of the century, Henry Jr. launched a determined public relations campaign to identify RBMU with the humanitarian response to the Congo catastrophe rather than with its origins in the 1880s and ’90s.117 Along with the radical journalist Edmund Morel and the British consul Roger Casement, Henry Grattan Guinness helped found the Congo Reform Association in 1904 to demand an end to the systematic violence and dissolve King Leopold’s personal rule over the Congo Free State. From 1906 to 1908, Regions Beyond missionaries including Guinness, acting on behalf of the Congo Reform Association, fanned out across England with their magic lantern slides to soften the hearts, awaken the consciences, and open the pocketbooks of Nonconformity. Savoring its stunning success in the 1906 parliamentary elections under the banner of the Liberal Party, Nonconformity—both its evangelical and progressive wings—flexed its muscles once again and pushed the Liberal government to demand an end to Leopold’s rule. In 1908, Leopold yielded to international pressure and reluctantly handed over his private fiefdom to the state of Belgium.118

  3.10. Photographs played a crucial role in the Congo Reform Association’s campaign to end King Leopold’s reign of terror. This frequently reproduced photograph of Impongi, a boy victim of Congo “misrule,” accentuated his atrocious mutilation as well as missionaries’ success at rehabilitating him. “Impongi,” from Dr. Harry Guinness, Not Unto Us, A Record of 21 Years Missionary Service (London, 1908).

  Critics of empire’s evils like the pro-Boers and supporters of the Congo Reform Association should not be equated with enemies of imperialism, although some were. Muriel reckoned with Leopold’s atrocities—and their implications for Europe’s relationship with Africa and the “white man’s burden—as part of a political-religious crusade waged by the forces of evangelical Nonconformity at the height of its early-twentieth-century power and influence. The Congo Reform Association’s most secular spokesman, Edmund Morel, sought to make empire virtuous, not condemn and dismantle it. Morel called for Africans to be granted the economic benefits of free labor and free trade while replacing an exploitative and murderous imperialist regime with a benevolent and paternalist one.119 These were radical demands to be sure, but still a far cry from the platform of the first Pan-African Conference that met in London in the summer of 1900. The cosmopolitan American sociologist of race, W.E.B. Du Bois helped craft the “Address to the Nations of the World” calling for African self-government as part of the worldwide struggle against racism.120

  In April 1909, Muriel was a founding member of the Women’s Branch of the Congo Reform Association.121 She was no stranger to Congo triumphs and troubles. Stories of missionary heartbreak and success were deeply interwoven in her childhood and young adulthood. Con
go missionaries from Harley College and Doric Lodge spoke frequently at the Loughton Union Church in the early 1900s.122 Muriel attributed her embrace of the Congo Reform Association to the heartfelt testimony of Berger Hall’s evangelical pastor in Bow, whose words haunted her. He had seen “a sackful of human hands” during his time in the Congo. This unnamed preacher could only have been Pastor Daniel Hayes. Trained at Harley College and sent as a missionary to the Congo, Hayes had returned to Regions Beyond’s headquarters in Bow to lead its Berger Hall branch. Hayes had “that ineradicable Congo fever in his blood.”123 Preacher and pastor, politician and philanthropist, he joined the Poplar Borough council. “Day and night,” Muriel could not get Hayes’s words out of her head.