by Seth Koven
Cressall and Scurr, unlike Nellie, were schooled in a robustly anti-deferential style of political protest and direct action. Each married a prominent leader in prewar Labour politics in Bow and Poplar: Cressall’s husband was George Lansbury’s political agent and Scurr’s husband a leader of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union. For them, marriage was a conduit to socialist and feminist politics. Motherhood gave them authority to speak about the pressing economic hardships women faced as they tried to feed and clothe their families. Scurr helped organize a delegation of unemployed women who met with Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour in 1905 to demand steady jobs and wages. In June 1914, she lectured Liberal prime minister Asquith about the “murderous” effects of “modern industrialism” on poor families and the way women experienced poverty more acutely than men at work and home. When Asquith pushed Scurr to renounce militant tactics, she refused to back down. She tartly reminded him that men used “all sort of methods” to achieve their aims, so why shouldn’t women?65
Nellie clearly chose not to follow these powerful and outspoken Cockney women into feminist politics after her return to Bow from New Zealand in 1903. When she did enter political life at several critical junctures after May 1915, it was always, literally, by Muriel’s side in public demonstrations on behalf of peace. For all Muriel’s zeal to empower the poor, not one of her close circle of working-class women friends at Kingsley Hall, including Nellie, ever emerged as an independent political leader in her own right like Scurr and Cressall.
In light of Bromley-by-Bow’s hospitality to socialism and feminism, it’s no surprise that in 1910 George Lansbury was elected to represent the district in Parliament. No man in pre–World War I Britain was more closely identified with socialist politics and women’s suffrage than Lansbury. He was also the Lesters’ chief mentor and friend in local politics. Not long after the Lesters and the Dowells moved next door to one another on Bruce Road in 1912, Lansbury shocked his rank-and-file Labour Party supporters in Bow and Poplar by vacating his seat in Parliament to seek reelection under the banner of women’s suffrage. His aim was to force the hand of his own party and the Liberals to enfranchise women.
At a time when Labour MPs of all stripes—socialist and trade unionist—numbered only forty-two, Lansbury’s decision was a high-stakes gamble. It infuriated Labour Party leaders, who saw no reason for Lansbury to jeopardize his own—and the party’s—control of an important seat in Parliament. It electrified his Conservative opponents who saw Lansbury’s single-issue focus on women’s suffrage as an opportunity to push him out of Parliament.66 Lansbury insisted that Labour vote “constantly and relentlessly” against all measures put forward by Asquith’s Liberal ministry until they had either “driven” Liberals from office or “compelled them to introduce and carry a proposal to give votes to women on equal terms with men.”67
Lansbury’s extreme position pleased almost no one. It asked Labour leaders to oppose government measures in support of their Irish nationalist brethren who had entered into a parliamentary alliance with the ruling Liberals in pursuit of Irish Home Rule. It compromised prosuffrage Liberals’ efforts to work with their own party’s leadership. It badly divided the Labour Party, many of whom had supported the Liberal government’s social welfare initiatives such as Lloyd George’s scheme for unemployment insurance.68 Nor did Lansbury succeed in uniting feminists and Labour Party activists in Bow, who failed miserably to coordinate their efforts and resources in registering and transporting voters to polling places in Bow and Bromley. Militant suffragettes, embarking on the most violent phase of their sex war against male domination in public and private life, simply would not take orders from Lansbury’s male political agents in Bow.69 In short, Lansbury’s reelection campaign was a fiasco that mirrored only too well the confusion into which he had thrown his feminist and Labour supporters. The Guild Socialist periodical, The New Age, snidely editorialized that “little as Mr. Lansbury knew himself what were the motives of his adventure, the public and his own constituency knew less.”70
The national and metropolitan press recognized a good story when they saw it. They joined the hordes of socialists, Conservatives, feminists and anti-feminists who turned Bow and Bromley’s drab roads into colorful street theaters and vivid print copy in November 1912. “The purple, green and white of the Women’s Social and Political Union and the green, yellow and white of the Women’s Freedom League” floated from “motor-cars and vans all over Bow and Bromley” in an attempt to rally voters to Lansbury’s cause.71 The election made Lansbury into the lion of feminism. Nonetheless, when the final vote was tallied in late November, he had lost by 731. The 1912 parliamentary election in Bow and Bromley marked a flamboyant convergence of local and national politics in Muriel and Nellie’s neighborhood. It was also part of their political education.
Muriel Lester and Feminist Politics
Lansbury’s by-election campaign coincided with several momentous developments in the history of women’s suffrage. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and her husband Frederick, notable figures in the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), joined their leader Emmeline Pankhurst in jail in the spring of 1912. All three were convicted for conspiring to incite felony. Upon her release, Mrs. Pankhurst dedicated herself to all-out sex war and escalating levels of violence against property, including arson. After their release, the Pethick-Lawrences migrated toward “militancy without violence.”72 This independent stance Mrs. Pankhurst would not tolerate and, by Ocotober, the Pethick-Lawrences left the WSPU.73 To the delight of Punch, feminists were now forced to ask themselves, “are you a Peth or a Pank?”74 (See fig. 5.6.) According to Doris, Muriel declared herself a “Peth.” This is the only extant clue about Muriel’s position in the tangled web of feminist and suffrage politics on the eve of World War I.75 But it is an important one.
What did it mean to be a “Peth” and why did Muriel become one? Like Muriel, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence came to feminism through her long apprenticeship serving the poor, first as a “sister” at the Methodist West London Mission and later as founder of a girls’ club and social settlement. In 1901, she married an equally high-minded and idealistic fellow social worker, Frederick Lawrence. Together, they embarked on their life partnership as the Pethick-Lawrences.76 “Self-consecrated from girlhood to social service,” Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence mingled feminist politics with Christian faith to produce a distinctively spiritual idiom of protest.77 “The Woman’s Movement means a new religion,” she informed readers in the January 1908 number of Votes for Women, the periodical that she and her husband financed and co-edited for the Women’s Social and Political Union.78 She linked suffrage to the spontaneous and vital “awakening at last” of working women whom she urged to join her “army of the spirit.”79 For “Peths,” militancy meant a willingness to endure violent assaults on their bodies such as force feeding in prison in the name of their great cause. Crucially for Muriel, Peths refused to mirror state violence by perpetrating their own.
5.6. “The Split: Are you a Peth or a Pank?” Punch, October 30, 1912, 349.
Peths were hard to differentiate from members of the Women’s Freedom League, led by the venerable Charlotte Despard since 1907. Freedom League members engaged in nonviolent militancy such as tax resistance and boycotting the 1911 census.80 By 1914, many former members of the WSPU including the Pethick-Lawrences, Julia and John Scurr, Charlotte Despard, and George Lansbury joined forces to found yet another organization, the United Suffragists.81 The bewildering proliferation of organizations, each with its own acronym, demanding women’s suffrage on the eve of World War I points to growing tensions within an unruly movement divided over tactics and goals.82 The onset of war in August 1914 only deepened these divisions. The best-known leaders of the suffrage movement, Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Millicent Fawcett, set aside their differences and mobilized women to serve the warfare needs of the state. For them, opposition to the war was a species of pro-Germanism.83
What was the position of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage in these debates and what initially made Muriel ally herself and Kingsley Hall with it? The London Society proudly traced its roots to the earliest days of the organized campaign for the parliamentary suffrage of the 1860s. It was the largest constituent branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), whose president was the Constitutional Suffragist Millicent Fawcett. Key leaders of the London Society in 1915, in particular members of the powerful Anglo-Indian Strachey clan (Oliver, his sister Pippa, his wife Ray, and their mother Lady Strachey) were red-hot for war. In December 1914, the Stracheys had not yet engineered the expulsion of their antiwar and pacifist rivals in the London Society and the National Union. But they made no secret of their disdain for pacifists. If Muriel did not know this when she first joined forces with the London Society, she quickly came to regret her misalliance with it.
Through its “Women’s Service,” the London Society poured its energies and resources into a clearing house for women workers, volunteer and paid, as well as women’s social clubs across London.84 As soon as Britain declared war, male breadwinners flocked to the armed services and left their wives and children to fend for themselves. Payments from the War Office to military families began more slowly.85 This gap tipped precarious working-class family budgets into crisis exacerbated by devastating increases in the cost of everyday staples. From August 4 to August 15, the price of white sugar tripled and rice doubled in local shops in Nellie and Muriel’s neighborhood. Wives endured long humiliating waits to receive paltry doles from underfunded and ill-prepared charities like the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Wives Fund.86 Clubs like those run by the London Society alleviated distress by providing essential goods and services for poor women. In joining forces with the London Society, Muriel presumably wished to draw on its experience running women’s clubs. The London Society must have seen Muriel as a godsend. She combined deep local knowledge of Bow with apparent eagerness to manage and pay for their East London branch.
Muriel left her December 1914 meeting with the London Society with the mistaken conviction that it had agreed to take on all of Kingsley Hall’s bookkeeping functions including the receipt of donations and the disbursement of funds. She was only too happy to leave this sort of business work, so far outside her own and Doris’s competence, in able experienced hands. Muriel was a completely unknown East London social welfare worker with few connections in the suffrage movement and even fewer among the great and good of the metropolis. Her sphere of influence had heretofore been confined mostly to the axis connecting Loughton’s wealthy Nonconformists with religious philanthropic networks in Bow. She may have been a grand lady in Nellie’s eyes, but for prominent people like the Stracheys she remained indistinguishable from hundreds of other do-gooders in East London. Muriel may well have been flattered by Pippa Strachey’s enthusiasm to enlist her services and dazzled by the cachet of the London Society’s list of supporters. Its vice-presidents on the eve of World War I included leading married “ladies” in women’s suffrage, philanthropy, and education such as Mrs. S. A. Barnett, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, and Mrs. Henry Fawcett.87
The months during which Muriel worked most closely with the London Society and its secretary Pippa Strachey were among the most acrimonious in the Society’s history. Profoundly undemocratic in their vision of Britain and its empire, the Stracheys liked power and knew how to wield it. For several years, they had battled against those seeking to democratize the suffrage movement by broadening its geographic and class basis.88 The Stracheys were determined to purge the London Society and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies of antiwar and pacifist leaders, most notably Catherine Marshall and Kate Courtney. Marshall and Courtney threw all their political and intellectual weight behind an effort to convince the National Union and the London Society to send official delegates to the Women’s Peace Conference in The Hague in April 1915.89
Organizers of the Hague Conference originally had hoped to harness the optimism of pre–war women’s pacifist internationalism to prevent the outbreak of hostilities. Events, of course, had overtaken their plans. Instead of preventing war, the Conference hoped to lobby for its peaceful and speedy resolution.90 In February 1915, The National Union (NUWSS) Executive voted against sending representatives to The Hague. To do so, the victorious majority within the National Union believed, would be tantamount to consorting with the enemy, not affirming global sisterhood. Marshall and Courtney’s defeat was the Stracheys’ triumph. It left antiwar feminists and their supporters no choice but to resign en masse from leadership within the London Society and National Union.
With undisguised glee, Pippa Strachey reported that she had been kept busy in the spring of 1915 “sweeping away pacifists” out of the London Society and the National Union. A few weeks earlier, her sister-in-law Ray confessed that she had enjoyed being “swallowed up … in the effort to beat the pacifists out of the suffrage society.” The pacifists’ “vague and visionary propaganda” on behalf of a “just” settlement after the war threatened to be the “ruin of [women’s] suffrage.”91 Muriel may not have followed closely these bitter internal struggles within the London Society and National Union, but she was well aware of the broader public debate about the appropriateness of British feminists’ participation in peace talks with women from belligerent and neutral nations. Among the British delegates whom the government blocked from attending The Hague Women’s Peace Conference that spring was one of Kingsley Hall’s first two residents, Rosa Waugh.
It was, however, not fundamental principles about democracy, war, and peace so much as concerns about administration, finance, and leadership that first came between Muriel and the London Society. A storm of protest from the London Society greeted Muriel’s first modest promotional pamphlet of December 1914 announcing the creation of Kingsley Hall with its East End Working Women’s Club. The rub was Muriel’s request that donations for Kingsley Hall and the Working Women’s Club be sent to the London Society’s treasurer, serving as Kingsley Hall’s Honorary Treasurer. For Muriel, this arrangement guaranteed the bona fides of her fledgling scheme at Kingsley Hall.92 The London Society informed Muriel that she had acted under “a misapprehension”: the Society never took responsibility for the finances of any “outside undertaking.”93 Only the East End Working Women’s Club was attached to the London Society. The rest of Kingsley Hall’s financial affairs did not concern them. This placed Muriel in a very difficult position. She could hardly withdraw the two hundred copies of the pamphlet already circulating among prospective supporters, she explained to Miss Strachey.94
To make matters worse, it was clear that the London Society arrogated to itself—and not Muriel or Doris—the right to dictate what services Kingsley Hall’s Women’s Club would and would not provide the people of Bow. The Executive Committee had seen no reason to invite Muriel and Doris to explain their vision for Kingsley Hall. Hiding behind the passive voice of collective corporate authority, the London Society organizer informed Muriel that the Executive Committee already had made major decisions about Kingsley Hall’s future. “It was decided at the last Committee that the idea of opening a Day Nursery and Training Home at Bow should be postponed indefinitely.”95 The Lesters could not “postpone” a program that already existed. Doris had been running a flourishing day nursery along Montessori-inspired lines on Bruce Road since 1913. She had every intention of bringing it to Kingsley Hall. Educating Bow’s youngest to become able and energetic decision-making citizens was essential to the Lesters’ Christian revolutionary program.
Muriel evidently knew very little about the London Society and the Society next to nothing about Muriel. Why else would Pippa Strachey, busy inoculating the London Society and the National Union from the pestilence of pacifism, have been so eager to enlist Muriel as head of its Women’s Service in Bow? And why would Muriel, committed to advancing democracy across the class divide, ally herself with a group of pro-war elite women w
ho had done their best to keep power tightly within their own grasp? It is a sign of Muriel’s political ineptitude and naïveté that she proudly told Strachey about the impressive lineup of pacifist feminists—Charlotte Despard, Maude Royden and George Lansbury—whom she had enlisted as Kingsley Hall’s Sunday evening speakers for 1915.96 Miss Strachey could not have been pleased.
Muriel’s unfortunate entanglement of Kingsley Hall with the London Society came to an end, more or less, by April 1915. Without ever mentioning the Christian revolutionary principles on which Kingsley Hall had been founded, Muriel wrote to Strachey that the daily demands of work made it impossible for her to chair the London Society’s Bow branch. A London Society member in Bow and wife of the pioneering leader of the Methodist Forward movement in East London, Rosalie Thompson, fretted that the Women’s Service scheme at Kingsley Hall would soon collapse for lack of adequate funds. This is where the archival trail of the London Society’s relationship with Muriel and Kingsley Hall ends.97 Kingsley Hall’s Report for the Second Year makes no mention of the London Society. Muriel and the London Society had gone their separate ways. A heavy financial liability for the Lesters, the cost-price restaurant and club at Kingsley Hall continued to enjoy the enthusiastic support of the women workers who dined there.98
Muriel’s original promotional pamphlet for Kingsley Hall that had so alarmed Strachey and the London Society reveals just how inchoate her ideas were about Kingsley Hall. The top of the pamphlet was dominated by the heading “SUPPORTED BY,” which listed thirteen of the London Society’s most prominent members including Mrs. Henry Fawcett, Lady Frances Balfour, Viscountess Gladstone, Lady Strachey, and the Marchioness of Salisbury. Muriel assured prospective donors that a “lady” would always be present at the Hall to oversee its work. This was not the best way to launch a democratic, bottom-up “people’s house” for enacting Christian revolution along socialist lines. Muriel’s connection to the London Society and bourgeois women’s philanthropy may well have made Sylvia Pankhurst wary of Kingsley Hall and the doings of its leading “lady.” Notices about speeches and events at Kingsley Hall did not begin to appear regularly in Pankhurst’s paper the Woman’s Dreadnought until August 1916, nearly a year and a half after its founding.99 By that time, Nellie, Doris and Muriel had more than proved their willingness to suffer opprobrium for bearing public witness to their radical Christian pacifism and socialism.