The Match Girl and the Heiress
Page 32
Kingsley Hall’s insistence that its residents and members perform their own housekeeping labors had several notable precedents among Nonconformist women’s “settlements” as well as communal experiments undertaken by sandal-wearing, socialist, vegetarian iconoclasts of the 1890s.43 A member of the Fellowship of the New Life, Edith Lees (Ellis) urged men and women to “join hands with all classes” and live “unluxurious” lives among workers, “not as patrons and philanthropists.”44 Badly underpaid and overworked, domestic servants were an “ethical litmus test” whose fair treatment was essential to democracy. However Ellis, unlike the Lesters, did not see the performance of menial tasks of physical labor as essential to the moral betterment of the individual.45
5.3. The Kingsley Hall Stewards’ invitation, March 1916. Lester Papers. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
Living as the poor lived, “doing their own ‘chores,’ even their own scrubbing,” was an essential part of daily life in the radical experiments in communal living championed by the astronomer-nurse-novelist Honnor Morten in East London and later at Tolstoi Settlement in the Sussex village of Rotherfield.46 Workers at Tolstoi Settlement (called “Sisters”) paid one guinea a week for the privilege of tending to the health needs of poor children sent from the London slums to recuperate. They reserved an hour each day for silent reflection or meditation. Dressed in very plain dresses, the nursing Sisters rotated through and performed the tasks essential to running the settlement: kitchen labor, including cooking; housekeeping and cleaning; and caring for the children. Taxing labor alternated with periods devoted to mandatory recreation and rest. The Rotherfield settlement’s strict discipline promised freedom to settlers exhausted by their pursuit of “pleasure or strenuous endeavour.” Its democratic domesticity ensured that all members rotated through each form of labor necessary to sustain the community.47
Morten’s settlement with its highly ordered schedule anticipated routines at Kingsley Hall. Quiet meditative prayer—three times each day—structured residents’ lives at Kingsley Hall. Each person undertook some form of manual labor at the Hall to contribute to its maintenance. After residents prepared, served, consumed, and cleaned up a simple communal breakfast, local children poured into the Hall for Montessori classes from 10–12:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Doris, the trained teachers, and the children put away the toys and pedagogical objects into cupboards to make way for the women workers who flocked to the Hall at midday for nutritious meals and sociability. Mid-afternoons were no less hectic. The Hall hosted a baby clinic run by doctors and nurses from the Royal College of St. Katharine’s. Muriel’s women’s meetings and various work groups dedicated to humanitarian causes filled in the rest of the afternoons. At dinner, residents ate either a vegetarian or meat dish, but never both. Nights and weekends, the Hall was jammed with neighbors. The Kingsley Hall Club for men and women offered an alcohol-free public house six nights a week for mixed-sex sociability and discussion of pressing industrial and political topics. From early morning until 10 p.m. on Sunday, Muriel led various groups in religious services, discussions, and lectures by outside speakers.48
Many social welfare centers—secular and religious alike—in London were just as busy as Kingsley Hall. What made all this into the Lesters’ homespun brand of revolutionary Christianity was how they arranged these activities and the way they distributed power and authority. Take, for example, the Kingsley Hall Club. At 7:50 p.m., club stewards, elected by their peers, stoked the furnace, set out games, leveled up billiard and bagatelle tables, prepared food for the bar, and opened the doors. Members decided that if roughs, atheists, or communists knocked on their door, they too would be welcomed. Some people came for games and refreshments; others, straight from factories, were eager to debate conditions of industrial life with their peers. “Our ‘intelligentsia,’ ” Ben Platten reported, engaged in a “heated controversy on the virtues and faults of Karl Marx and a much-abused social system.” With evident pleasure, Muriel noted “One little group of girls is now writing a chapter for a book on ‘Women and Factory Life,’ which is to be published by some Social Students later.” Still others studied the history of workers’ protest movements from John Ball to the present under the tutelage of Oxford-trained Miss Cicely Craven—later distinguished for her publications about the reform of the penal system.49 Each club night ended with the same rituals: joyful dancing for fifteen minutes followed by cleaning the space. Members then invited those who chose to remain, Muriel explained, to come together in prayer.
‘Time, please!’ calls the Steward, and most of the members flock out; after the sweeping all the lights are turned out but one, and in the semi-darkness those who are working and longing for the new day, those who feel a bond of unity drawing men together, and breaking down the barriers of sex, class and race, gather in a circle for silent prayer. A mighty force seems to bind us together, radiating from the centre of the group.
Enacting their solidarity with one another and welcoming God’s inclusive love, members concluded the evening by singing Anglican theologian Edwin Hatch’s hymn, “Breathe on us, breath of God: Fill us with life anew, That we may love what Thou dost love, and do what Thou wouldst do.”50
Most of the initial leaders of the Kingsley Hall Club had been members of Muriel’s Bruce Road Men’s Adult School. Muriel always traced the origins of Kingsley Hall not to daring experiments in social service and democratic communitarianism pioneered by women like Honnor Morten and Edith Lees Ellis but to laboring men in her Adult School. As brass finisher Jack Rollason explained, the Men’s Adult School “was the first Kingsley Hall Club” and the precursor to Kingsley Hall itself.51 The hallmark of Adult Schools since their inception in Nottingham in 1843 was informality, brotherliness, scripture study, and open debate. They attracted “the independent minds of our artizans,” who refused to be patronized by their social superiors while also welcoming the ragged and the illiterate. All members had votes in the management of the social club attached to each school.52 They demanded no profession of conversion, no test of temperance.53
When Muriel established the Men’s Adult School in the early summer of 1914, she was exhilarated to engage directly with men. They were, she believed, less prone to petty squabbles and backstabbing than all-female groups.54 After a dozen years of independent work in the slums, Muriel, at thirty-one, finally felt prepared for the challenge of being the lone woman—and leader—among working men. The scarcity of men in wartime Britain more than a commitment to single-sex communities of women explains why residents of Kingsley Hall were overwhelmingly female during its first years.
With members of the Men’s Adult School, Muriel first tested out several of her most significant ideas about community, neighborhood, and politics. In her own account of the origins of Kingsley Hall, she figured the Men’s Adult School as a laboratory for and a prototype of Kingsley Hall. (See fig. 5.4.) She invited her harshest critics to scrutinize the Adult School’s activities from the inside. The Minute Book for the first meeting on June 21, 1914, laid out its principles. “The Basis of an Adult School is the practical teaching of JESUS CHRIST;—therefore it follows that there are no limits to its power. Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Atheists are equally welcome…. In an Adult School we recognize that Life and Religion are one. Try how we may, we cannot separate ourselves from the love of God, for He is our Father, and all men are brothers.”55
5.4. Henry and Rachel Lester regularly entertained their daughters’ Bow friends, including members of Muriel’s Bruce Road Men’s Adult School. They are pictured in the garden of their Loughton home, the Grange. Muriel is third from front on the right; the family’s servants stand behind a seated Rachel Lester. Source: First Year’s Report, Kingsley Hall (London, 1916), 5. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
God’s love implied radical inclusivity. It joined all in universal brotherhood, even Atheists who wanted no part in it. Respect jostles with superiority in Lester’s practical theology as God makes room in His
capacious imperium for those who deny His very existence. For Muriel, inclusion within God’s beloved community was compulsory. Outside no longer defined inside because she would not imagine—or allow—an outside. Muriel, a master of oppositional politics, knew how to use her status as troublesome “outsider” to draw attention to her critique of militarist and bourgeois capitalist values. Her refusal to allow atheists to be outside of God’s love mirrored her determination to love those who called themselves her enemies. Love was a potent weapon in Muriel’s peacemaking arsenal.
From the initial meeting, Muriel pushed Adult School men to imagine great things for themselves and their community.56 She envisioned their collective future.
There was a beautiful castle floating in the air this morning a dream of taking 2 shops in St. Leonard’s [a major north-south thoroughfare in Bow just to the east of Bruce Road] and turning them into a Public House, which should excel all others in its cleanliness, & cheerfulness, where billiard tables should be good, where clubs could be held, & concerts take place, where Friendly Societies could hire rooms for their Meetings; a Public House which was not ‘tied,’ out of which no brewer could make a farthing, which needed no license, a P.H. without beer, a great jolly well Club, whose doors should never be shut till the very last licensed House had closed for the night.
With a combination of idealistic naïveté and hardheaded practicality, Adult School members leapt from discussing the best way to construct bed frames by recycling metal poles to defining Heaven. Was Heaven a place in the future or a state of mind to enjoy in the present? They resolved that each of them needed to set up the Kingdom of Heaven “here and now” because “Jesus is in our midst today, strengthening us just as really as he ever was.” They blithely collapsed the distances separating them from the biblical past. God was not only within them but He and they were agents of change in the world.57
The Lesters drew upon many sources—and resources—when they accepted Henry Lester’s gift and opened Kingsley Hall. With Nellie’s help, they mobilized networks of human capital and bonds of friendship among their neighbors upon whose labors Kingsley Hall relied and for whom it existed. The founding of Kingsley Hall makes visible both deep continuities as well as significant shifts in the history of benevolence and social welfare from the 1880s until 1915. Comparing Kingsley Hall in 1915 to Toynbee Hall in 1884 highlights radical changes in the philosophy and practice of philanthropy. No Toynbee Hall man cleaned soot from his own fire grate or established an intimate working friendship with a member of the local community anything like Muriel and Nellie’s partnership. However, such a comparison obscures the extent to which in the intervening decades Edith Lees, Honnor Morten, and others had undertaken innovative experiments that paved the way for the Lesters’ utopian project to connect the gritty quotidian realities of life in Bow with their vision of Christian revolution.
In Muriel’s oft-told tale of Kingsley Hall’s founding, it was always—and only—to Bruce Road Men’s Adult School that she first turned for help. This was, in fact, not true. She also sought support from another much better known organization. In mid-December 1914, Muriel paid a visit to the London Society for Women’s Suffrage near Victoria Station in Westminster. Muriel never wrote about her own and Kingsley Hall’s entanglement with the organized suffrage movement in late 1914 and early 1915. Nor did she preserve any archival traces of this fiasco. Thankfully, the London Society did.
FEMINISMS AT WAR
Muriel was a lifelong feminist and supporter of women’s suffrage. Throughout her six-decade career as a global humanitarian, she remained keenly attuned to the relationship of gender (she called it “sex”) to forms of oppression rooted in race, class, religion, and nation.58 Nonetheless, references to women’s suffrage and feminism were conspicuously absent from the speeches delivered at Kingsley Hall’s opening ceremony. Muriel was the sole woman to address the crowd. She publicly acknowledged the crucial contributions of Bruce Road Men’s Adult School. She said nothing about the support she got from Doris, Nellie, and members of their Women’s Meeting.
Muriel’s silences are all the more puzzling because the period from December 1914 to April 1915 was the first and only time that she put feminist politics and organizations at the center of her life. In December 1914, she agreed to serve as founding Secretary for the Bow Branch of the highly regarded London Society for Women’s Suffrage in exchange for allying Kingsley Hall with it. On the very day Kingsley Hall opened in mid-February, the East London Observer ran a short notice that made it seem as if Kingsley Hall were the London Society’s newest branch.59
Behind the scenes, an altogether different story unfolded. Muriel was mired in debilitating negotiations with leaders of the increasingly prowar London Society, in particular the formidable Philippa (“Pippa”) Strachey, about the nature and future of Kingsley Hall. Two years later, Muriel and Nellie publically allied themselves with the London Society’s archrivals and political enemies within the feminist movement. They joined Britain and Bow’s leading pacifist feminists—Maude Royden, Sylvia Pankhurst, Charlotte Despard, Julia Scurr, and Nellie Cressall—in an ill-fated march across East London to demand a negotiated peace settlement. What initially led Muriel to the London Society? Why did she erase this episode from the early history of Kingsley Hall? What did Nellie think about women’s rights? How did both women find their way to feminist pacifist activism in wartime Britain?
Nellie and Muriel have left behind few clues about their stances on the urgent issues that divided women’s suffrage campaigners before and during World War I: the role of working women in the movement; the place of militant tactics and violence in politics; and the relationship of feminism to pacifism and the wartime state. In the years before the founding of Kingsley Hall, Nellie and Muriel had quite different experiences with women’s politics. Nellie had exercised full citizenship rights long before Muriel when she voted in national elections in Wellington, New Zealand at the turn of the century. However, no direct evidence survives indicating her thoughts about suffrage and feminism. Sketching the paths into politics available to poor laboring women like Nellie in early twentieth-century Bow makes it possible to elucidate some of her political choices.
To make sense of Muriel’s disastrous decision to ally herself with the London Society, I consider the particularities of suffrage politics in Bromley-by-Bow as well as internecine conflicts among national leaders of the suffrage campaign. Key figures in the national and metropolitan suffrage movement altered their views and shifted alliances as the broader political landscape in Britain changed in response to challenges ranging from Irish nationalism and Labour Party politics to the onset of world war.60 As the suffrage movement fractured, new organizations proliferated, some overlapping and others mutually antagonistic. The point to keep in mind is this: Muriel found herself caught in the crossfires of these battles and was fortunate to extricate herself from them relatively unscathed.
Nellie Dowell and Women’s Political Culture in Bow and Poplar
Only Battersea and West Ham rivaled Bow and Bromley as hotbeds of radical politics in the metropolis with a long history of support for the rights of women as workers, mothers, and citizens. The Matchgirls’ Strike at Bryant and May’s in 1888 thrust Bow’s “unskilled” women workers, many of them daughters of Irish immigrants, into the center of debates about women’s work and the New Unionism. By continuing to work for R. Bell and Company during the bitter strike of 1893–94, Nellie explicitly rejected this route into women’s trade unionism and socialist politics. Soon after the strike at Bryant and May’s, residents of Bow and Bromley chose Liberal women’s suffrage campaigner Jane Cobden (daughter of the leader of the Anti-Corn Law League Richard Cobden) to represent them in the first London County Council elections of January 1889.61
By the early twentieth century, a new generation of working-class feminists rose to prominence in Bow and Poplar. The erstwhile laundress and future Mayor of Poplar Nellie Cressall (1882–1973) and Poor Law Guardia
n Julia Scurr (1871–1927) championed working women’s rights as socialist members of the Labour Party. (See Fig. 5.5.) Both later worked closely with the Lesters, but in the decade before World War I, the sisters remained far too tame for fiery figures like Scurr and Cressall.62 They joined forces with oft-imprisoned militant suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst after she moved to Bow in 1912.63 For the next dozen years, Scurr and Cressall supported Sylvia Pankhurst’s various initiatives, including the East London Federation of Suffragettes and the Mother’s Arms, a former pub that served as headquarters for Pankhurst’s social welfare activities.64
5.5. Socialist feminist leaders in Bow like Councillor (and eventually Poplar Mayor) Nellie Cressall recognized that women’s concerns as housewives and mothers were political. “Mrs. Cressall At the Stove.” (Courtesy of the Press Association.)
Cressall’s and Scurr’s paths into and styles of working-class feminist politics throw into relief the very different choices that Nellie made as she dipped her toes into East London’s turbulent political waters just before and during World War I. Unmarried and apolitical, Nellie had put job security and the economic needs of her mother and kin before worker solidarity and female trade unionism during her two decades in the match industry. She served her apprenticeship in Bow’s social politics as a beneficiary of elite “ladies” religiously based philanthropy, not as a member of one of Bow’s thriving socialist organizations such as the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party.