On Tuesday January 28th 2025, I was in Coventry for the unveiling of a blue plaque which commemorates and honours Alice Arnold. It was a moving ceremony in which union officials and Coventry’s Lord Mayor paid tribute to Alice’s lifelong determination to make life better for the people of her city. This year Coventry’s Lord Mayor is a woman and, as Alice was in 1937, Councillor Mal Mutton is supported in her duties by a Lady Mayoress, her sister, Margaret. Alice devoted her life to trade unionism and to those she served as a city councillor and alderman (between 1919 and 1955) and so it is entirely fitting that the plaque was secured thanks to the efforts of Unite the Union and Coventry City Council.
The plaque is situated in Short Street where Alice lived when she became Coventry’s first woman mayor in 1937 and is just a short walk away from the Council House on Earl Street. The siting of the plaque, however, has further significance. The houses on Short Street are some of the earliest council housing built by Coventry City Council in the opening years of the twentieth century. Alice, who as a young woman had experienced the impact of poor, insecure housing, campaigned for better living conditions for all. There is yet more. Today, Unite the Union has its Coventry District Office on Short Street and, through a series of mergers and name changes, Unite is a direct descendant of the Workers’ Union for which Alice was a member, a shop steward and a paid organiser.
How wonderful that the Unite Community Branch, which holds its meetings in Short Street is now named after Alice Arnold. Alice was involved in initiatives in the 1930s to expand the work of trade unions beyond the workplace and to emphasise the importance of the union in the life of the community.
For anyone who would like to read more, I have written about Alice Arnold before on this website here and also here. The short biography below is reproduced (with permission kindly granted) from a leaflet I prepared for the Coventry Unite Community branch which includes an overview of Alice’s life.
Alice was born in Coventry over a hundred years ago but she remains an inspiration not just in the trade union world but in the city in which she lived and worked. A worker, a trade unionist and a community activist, Alice cared deeply about the lives of working-class men, women and children who faced daily challenges which she understood only too well herself. She spoke up for people with no voice and she stood shoulder to shoulder with Coventry citizens in the fight for fairer pay and better living conditions.
Alice was born in Coventry Workhouse at the top of Gulson Road on January 19th 1881. Workhouses were places of last resort for those who had nowhere else to turn. They provided shelter but little in the way of compassion, understanding or comfort for those in need. Alice spent the first year of her life there with her mother and siblings and even when they were able to leave, the family continued to experience hardship, living in areas of poor, overcrowded and insanitary housing. Alice’s parents were both in low paid work and, as was the case for many poor families, it is likely that their children went out to work from the earliest possible age – combining schooling with part time factory work – to help make ends meet.
As a young woman in the years before the First World War, Alice found employment in one of Coventry’s cycle factories. Bosses got away with paying women workers very low wages and this led to unease amongst men who feared that their wages were being undercut. What was needed was a strong trade union movement to ensure fair pay for all. Alice became a member of the Coventry branch of the Workers’ Union, which campaigned hard to recruit men and women working in the city’s factories. During these early years of the 20th century, Coventry, like many other working-class towns and cities, was an exciting place to be involved in labour politics, with outdoor meetings at factory gates and street corners and frequent speakers to inspire men and women to get involved in making life better for ordinary folk.
During the First World War (1914-18), many of Coventry’s factories converted to the production of military equipment and armaments and it found itself at the very centre of the nation’s war effort. With so many men away in the Army, the country relied heavily on women to produce munitions. Thousands of women came to Coventry to carry out this work and trade unions like the Workers’ Union recognised the importance of representing and protecting women in this vital but dangerous employment. Alice Arnold was herself a war worker; the cycle factory where she worked before the War now produced fuses, shells and ammunition. Alice became such a reliable and effective shop steward for the Workers’ Union that in 1917, she was taken on as a full time union organiser with responsibility for women workers. It is testimony to her dedication that she was still remembered over half a century later by women who had worked during the War, who recalled not just her organising skills but her straightforward manner and her compassion. Not only did she champion women, she helped them to fight for what was rightfully theirs. This was essential because employers often made it as difficult as possible for women to obtain the rate of pay they were entitled to. One woman remembered Alice as ‘a wonderful person for working women…it was her really, she fought for the rate’. Another woman recalled Alice’s ‘really down to earth speeches’ at the factory gate, spoken as a worker and as a citizen who understood the daily struggle of women’s lives. She was one of them, she knew their struggles because they were also her struggles.
During the War the number of women trade unionists in Britain increased significantly but there were tough challenges to face after the War and women still had a long road to travel down towards full acceptance in the industrial workplace – and an even longer path towards equal pay. Coventry workers faced many challenges during the 1920s and with the Workers’ Union, Alice continued to support families dealing with unemployment, lay-offs and low pay. Trade union membership fell considerably during these difficult years and in 1931, Alice’s employment with the Workers’ Union came to an end as the union merged with the Transport and General Workers’ Union. This came as a bitter blow to a woman who once said that her heart and soul were with the labour movement. Her work in the city, however, was by no means done.
In 1919 Alice had become a Coventry City councillor. She and Ellen Hughes were the first women to be elected to the Council and they joined the Labour bench, working tirelessly towards the city’s first Labour administration. When this was achieved in 1937, Coventry’s first woman mayor was Alice Arnold. This was a fitting tribute to a woman who had devoted so many years to looking after the city’s workers and their families. In the years following the First World War, there was a great need to focus on the next generation, to make sure women had good maternity care and that there was decent housing for families so that children could thrive. Alice served on the Council for over 30 years and her continued determination to speak up for social justice ensured that she became a well-known and popular figure in the city.
The Labour bench on Coventry City Council in 1919. Alice Arnold is on the left of the photo and Ellen Hughes on the right. Alice and Ellen were the first women to be elected to the City Council and Ellen served as Alice’s Lady Mayoress during her mayoral year.
Alice Arnold died in Coventry in 1955. She spent her whole life campaigning for others. Those who knew her were struck by her many acts of kindness within the community. Her popularity was evident in 1931 when she lost her union job. Friends and colleagues rallied to find her work that would allow her to continue with her Council duties and they helped her to open a small greengrocer’s shop in Lower Ford Street, Hillfields. Later, she was employed by the Co-operative Society.
Alice Arnold fought for better wages and conditions for workers. She stood up for women war workers. She spoke on behalf of Coventry citizens for decent housing, good public health and excellent education and her life reminds us of what can be achieved if we work together for equality, fairness and justice for all.
Earlier in this blog, I wrote that Alice continues to inspire and I hope that the blue plaque will encourage many more people to learn about her life and work. I would like to end by explaining how Alice has inspired me.
I first heard of her when I was working as a tutor to the Coventry Women’s Research Group (WRG). This incredible group of women researched and wrote a book entitled Redressing the Balance, examining the lives of women, past and present, who lived and worked in Coventry. I contributed a chapter on Alice Arnold and, some years later, for another WRG book, a second piece which looked at Alice’s union work during the First World War. My fascination with Alice grew into a PhD study on women in trade unionism and municipal politics in the interwar years which in turn led to many more years of research on women Labour activists in early 20th century British trade unionism. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t been so impressed by the story of Alice Arnold and by the battles that she fought.
As I stood looking at the blue plaque, in the quiet moments after the unveiling, I recalled another Short Street incident. In the late 1990s I interviewed a woman who remembered living in Short Street as a child. Her father had TB and Alice Arnold used to come down from her upstairs flat to bring ‘best’ butter and eggs for the patient. She also brought oranges, apples and nuts for the children’s Christmas stockings. When the family of seven moved to a larger home, Alice offered to look after the youngest child on moving day. Small acts of kindness remembered for over half a century. This plaque stands not just for pioneering and politics but for humanity.
Alice Arnold 1881-1955
If anyone wishes to read the booklet I wrote about Alice Arnold for the Coventry Historical Association (2008), I believe the Coventry Society and the Coventry History Centre both have some copies available.
A few years ago, I was given a messy envelope of papers that had belonged to my grandfather (1898-1970). Amongst them is a set of documents relating to his involvement in the early 1930s in a scheme intended to help the unemployed and to alleviate unemployment in the municipal borough of Richmond, Surrey. In 1932, with the support of the Richmond mayor, the Council of Social Services, of which my grandfather, Francis Christopher Gibbons, was the honorary secretary, set out its aims to ’unite all engaged in social service and to bring together those who need help and those who can bring help’. It opened a room which unemployed people could use in any ways that might further their chances of getting work and a canteen supplying cheap refreshments each morning. In 1933 it initiated a Scheme for Employment with the intention of generating employment, largely for local tradesmen. The idea was that residents who could afford to, would pledge promises of work, using their money to stimulate local trade rather than sitting on their savings.
As someone who never ceases to feel the excitement of looking at archival material, I was excited to find myself the custodian of such a collection of material. At the same time, I wasn’t quite sure how – or even if – to tell its story. The unemployment of the inter war years, heightened for so many by the financial ‘crash’ of 1929 and its aftermath, was a tragedy for thousands of families. National averages for unemployment rates, rising to over 20 per cent in the early 1930s, meant nothing in regions where dependence on Britain’s traditional heavy industries – coal, steel and shipbuilding, for example – sometimes saw localized unemployment at 70 per cent. The hardship experienced by these areas has become one of the dominant narratives of 1930s Britain. There were government attempts to encourage regeneration in the worst affected regions – South Wales, Scotland and the Northeast, for example. We read also of the affluent Southeast and the Midlands, where ’new’ industries, including the production of cars, electrical equipment and consumer goods such as radios and telephones, were big employers, paying relatively decent wages and contributing to rising living standards.
Such a small, localized initiative in a leafy, conservative borough in Southeast England seems almost unworthy of attention compared to the devastation inflicted in the worst affected industrial areas where thousands of lives were blighted by unemployment. With its focus on self-help rather than political agitation for change, it was a far cry from the demonstrations and campaigns of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (and which is more akin to research into labour and trade union history I usually engage in).What on earth can we learn about the Depression years from the efforts of a group of well-wishers in Richmond, Surrey, where the unemployment rate in early 1933 was around two per cent? As it turns out – quite a lot, actually. What the Richmond scheme reminds us – and others which were similar, operating around the country – is that the effects of the Depression were widely felt. Unemployment in Richmond, as in many small non-industrialised towns, was not due to the impact of depression on one industry but was spread, as the Mayor explained, over occupation, trade and profession, ‘a creeping paralysis of all trade and commerce’.[1] Unemployed workers who lived in places associated with affluence can too easily disappear into a polarized narrative in which life in the depressed regions was bad and life in the south was good. Unemployment hurts whether you are surrounded by others who are also out of work or if you are living in a community where most people have jobs.
And the documents themselves deserve to be shown. I am guessing that this was work that my grandfather was proud of, given the prominence of these amongst the papers I received.
In early 1932 the Prince of Wales spoke about the need for communities to do whatever they could to help those in need during the economic crisis. As patron of the National Council of Social Service, promoting the spirit of public service, the Prince delivered the speech at the Royal Albert Hall to an audience of 10,000 which included many invited young people and representatives of organisations delivering social service. The BBC broadcast the event and it was heard by many more people across the country who gathered at venues to hear – and to heed, it would seem – the message to ‘the rising generation’ to play its part in time of crisis.[2] Richmond was one of many areas to embark on projects intended to offer support and increase opportunities for employment and my grandfather, known as Frank (and as Christopher in business) stepped forward to do what he could.
A word first about Frank (who used his middle name, Christopher for business purposes). In 1932 he was 34 and married with two children. Family folklore, combined with what I found amongst his papers, suggests that his fortunes were badly affected by the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Certainly, a shirt and pyjama manufacturing business in Dalston in which he had been a joint partner since 1928 was in serious trouble in late 1930, when a creditors’ meeting was held and arrangements made for the two owners to pay their debtors in instalments. What happened to the business after that is unclear, but I suspect that Frank’s part in it at least did not last much longer. I know that he had an outfitters’ shop in Richmond for some years but this appears to have been over by the mid-30s when he and his family moved back in with his mother in her rented house in Chelsea.
So, as honorary secretary of the Richmond Council for Social Service and then secretary of the Mayor’s Scheme for Employment in the town, Frank was able to get involved in the challenge laid down by the Prince of Wales. He was either unemployed or business was so slack that he had spare time to give. Also, as a small business owner, he had everything to gain from an initiative designed to generate employment. The first efforts went into the establishment of the ‘recreation’ centre, with further plans to include boot and shoe repairing facilities and physical training for young men. Then came the Employment Scheme, launched with the support and approval of the Mayor and Town Council.
Letter from a Richmond citizen offering to help the Council of Social Service
Spend to Employ
Distinct from money set aside by the Borough Council for public works, those involved in setting up the new scheme were at pains to stress that the venture was not funded by rate payers but was wholly dependent on private expenditure. Richmond citizens were asked to fill out pledge cards, promising to spend money during February, March and April – recognised as the slackest months of the year – of 1933 which would lead to chances of work for local unemployed workers. Rather than saving for a rainy day, those with available money were asked to spend it locally and provide work for tradesmen and businesses, by committing to having work done that was beyond the strictly essential. Leaflets, promises cards and appeal letters were distributed to all Richmond households by an army of volunteers, all supplied with specially designed armbands.
The literature included lots of ways to help, including having work done on the home (decorating, distempering, new shelves and cupboards, reupholstery), garden (rockery, garden seats and summer houses) and car (loose covers for seats, carpets, new paintwork), buying new household goods and tools (buckets, brushes and hardware, ordering new suits, shirts and underwear, repairing old ones, having a telephone and a wireless with aerial fitted. Alternatively, donations were welcomed, as were all offers of help at the headquarters – open for long hours each day – lent by the Borough Council, from which the Scheme was run ‘with military precision’.[3]
The pledge card sent to every household
The plan was not to provide odd jobs for the unemployed (apart from anything else, this had implications for those in receipt of unemployment benefit) but to ensure that orders went to local businesses who could then retain men who would otherwise have been laid off through lack of orders. The advantages were emphasized in the press; tradesmen kept and used their skills and self-respect and in addition increased consumer power worked to the advantage of shopkeepers who were able to pay off their debts and improve business.
It is fair to say that talk of the tragedy of unemployment was assumed to relate to men, despite heavy unemployment among both men and women nationally. It does seem that in Richmond (which was no exception to the general rule) solutions were directed almost entirely at male unemployment. It is men who are specifically mentioned as attendees at the recreation room and I reckon it would have been a brave woman who turned up for a cup of tea with bread and dripping. The 1930s was a tough time for a woman to be looking for work – and thousands were. If she was single, it was assumed either that someone would provide for her or if not, that domestic work was her natural sphere. Such work was no more popular than it had been after the First World when it was widely seen to be the answer to women’s unemployment and no end of training programmes to give it the illusion of either vocation or professionalism ever changed women’s minds. So, it is no real surprise to hear the Mayor of Richmond, at the Employment Scheme launch, mention women just once and suggest domestic service as ‘ideal work’ for them.
The model chosen by Richmond was the so-called Bristol Scheme, established by the Bristol Rotary Club in 1932 to encourage citizens to ‘spend that others may earn’. This – or variants of it – was established – or at least tried – in the spring of 1933 in over a hundred locations across Britain, from large cities including Edinburgh, Sheffield and Birmingham to towns such as Stockport and Winchester and several London boroughs. In Richmond the intention was to obtain £30,000 worth of promises and by April, the local newspaper reported that it had succeeded in bringing in pledges and donations totalling £40,000. How much work was found is unknown, but a scheme run in nearby Barnes and Mortlake, claimed, at the conclusion of its scheme, to have secured full time employment for 150 men and additionally some obtained casual work. It was no cure for unemployment and across the country only small successes were claimed but those who championed it believed that one of its biggest advantages was the encouragement given to local people to come face to face with the problems of unemployment and think seriously and deeply about its causes and effects.
The premises lent by the Borough Council for the purposes of the Scheme, at 23 Hill Rise, Richmond
This is the same shop on Hill Rise as above. My grandfather is standing (hatless) in the doorway at the back) Photo from Richmond Herald, March 11 1933
In a letter to the local press in March 1933, Frank was at pains to allay suspicions that by improving their homes, the Borough Council would then consider their value increased and re-rate their properties. This, he wrote, was only the case if structural alterations, such as extensions, were made., whereas keeping property in good order was never used to increase its gross rental value.[4] He also praised the ‘extremely generous help from Richmond tradesmen and wholehearted co-operation from all sides’.[5] In April he resigned as Organising Secretary of the Employment Scheme, the reply he received from the Mayor thanking him for his service and noting with pleasure that the reason he could not continue in post was due to business engagements. As I don’t know yet when Frank’s shop (which was on Paradise Road in Richmond) opened, it is hard to know if those engagements were the result of improved business or a brand-new venture. Either way, it was a temporary reprieve and when the shop closed (or was sold), Frank eventually – back in Chelsea – went into the Civil Service, where he remained for the rest of his working life.
So far, this role of woven tags is the only evidence I have of my grandfather’s shop in Paradise Road
It’s not hard to see why the Scheme appealed to my grandfather, Frank. Public spirited he may have been but ultimately, he needed an upturn in business. It is no wonder that local businessmen might get involved to bolster their own fortunes. Its advocates were at pains to show that the Scheme was non-political but there is little doubt that it had considerable Conservative appeal, making no demands on the rates and boosting trades and businesses in which many local councillors were involved.[6] The local Labour Party, whilst wishing the Council for Social Service every success, warned it not to imagine that the people of the country were satisfied with the Government’s action in ‘shelving its responsibility and putting it on the shoulders of a charitable organisation’. Labour also criticized the paltry amount given by the Borough Council (just over £4000) for relief works for unemployed men.[7] I think probably that the self-help philosophy underpinning this endeavour is the reason it has taken me so long to write about it – no matter how hard I look, there are absolutely no elements of either socialism or cooperation apparent in these papers! Yet still they provide a remarkable insight into the efforts of individuals to do something, however small or even ultimately ineffectual about the social and economic crisis that blighted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people during the Depression in Britain.
Postscript
I think that the documents ought to be preserved in the area to which they relate. I intend to offer them to Richmond Archives.
[6] Forgive my early research on this. The makeup of the Borough Council is hard to determine at this time when so many councillors referred to themselves as Independent. The determination by many of them to keep party politics out of local elections was a determination to keep out the socialists.
Ten years ago, I was busy turning years of research into a book about the National Federation of Women Workers (the NFWW), that unique experiment into all female trade unionism, from 1906 to 1921. Since its publication in 2014, I have also written a biography of its leader, Mary Macarthur (2019) as well as curating an exhibition for the TUC to commemorate the 100th year since her death. These were of course never intended to be the end of the story and I am always hopeful that new material will turn up to develop it further.
I am so excited, then, to report that 2022 has been a year of discoveries which have led me to a richer understanding of both the NFWW and of its leader. In February I posted here about my excitement when I first saw the handwritten minute book of the Newcastle upon Tyne branch of the NFWW, covering the years just before the First World War.
And then, during the summer, I had an email from the great grandson of a man who worked for the NFWW from 1914 to 1921. His great grandfather, Fred Kershaw, wrote an (unpublished) memoir during the 1950s, by which time he had become Baron Kershaw of Prestwich. His name was put forward by the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee and the title bestowed in the New Year’s Honours’ List of 1947. Fred Kershaw recalls in his account the press surprise at the inclusion in the List of this ‘back-room boy’, with the Daily Express asking ‘Who is he?’.[1] It was precisely for his ’back-room’ work that Kershaw was brought to Attlee’s attention and at least part of the value of the memoir is that it shines light on behind-the-scenes, supporting work that is too often uncharted and unrecognized for its worth. In Kershaw’s case this included detailed research into social issues. This kind of work is seldom front-page news because those people in more high-profile positions, use and incorporate it into the decisions that then shape policy and make an impact on people’s lives. When there is a chance, such as I have been given, it is important to put those who so often remain faceless and nameless fairly and squarely into the written record. In this piece I have the opportunity to share – and therefore honour – the memory of one of those unsung, dedicated ‘back roomers’ who spent his life making things more comfortable and more secure for thousands of workers.
Fred Kershaw, 1881-1961. Thanks to the Kershaw family for the use of this photograph of Fred at 80
There are several other reasons why I am drawn to Fred Kershaw’s story. As a historian of the NFWW, my ears prick up every time a new piece of information is turned up. Excitement is greatest when this involves people. When writing the history of the NFWWW, it was often difficult to uncover information about those who worked for the union. With the exception of Mary Macarthur and some of the more high-profile organisers with whom she worked closely – Margaret Bondfield and Susan Lawrence, for example, who both went on to become Labour MPs – it was seldom possible to piece together the life histories of the NFWW’s organisers, activists, members and officials. There are snatches of detail – for example, a strike which led to a factory worker becoming an activist or a paid member of union staff – but to be able to go further back into earlier lives and glimpse how events influenced later decisions is rare. In his memoir, Fred Kershaw describes in moving and intimate detail aspects of his youth and the link between these and the decisions he went on to make is evident.
I was sent this memoir because of my work on Mary Macarthur and the NFWW. In my research, Kershaw had a walk-on part only, because he features very little in the records. He is in fact incorrectly named in my book’s appendices. Referenced as the Assistant Chief Secretary of the NFWW (so far so good), he is listed as George and not Fred Kershaw. Whilst it is never a good day for a historian (understatement) when they find something that contradicts their published work, I am delighted to be now able to correct this inaccuracy. More than this, I am so pleased to be able to do more to place Fred Kershaw within the NFWW’s history. Despite his low profile (at least compared with those whose union work attracted press attention through strikes, work disputes and social campaigns) Kershaw’s work, making sure that the benefits due to members were paid out, was one of the most important jobs within a trade union.
Fred Kershaw’s memoir does not just add to what is known, it reveals a great deal about the times in which he lived. it is a piece of social history which may not change the historical record but certainly makes it more accessible, shining a spotlight on some of the most pressing social problems of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I am privileged to have seen it and I want to use this blog to chart one man’s journey into social work and public service. Thank you to his family for granting me permission to share it here. I mean no disrespect by referring to him from now on as Fred rather than Kershaw. I do so in the hope that this makes him more personable – a real person, not just a name.
Fred was born on November 6th, 1881, in Prestwich, which was then a village just north of Manchester. He was one of 13 children whose father John’s working life was disrupted and ultimately ruined by drink. He was, according to Fred, a very well-respected skilled man. Apparently, an early venture in Salford as a mill owner had ended because of his gambling and drinking. At the time of Fred’s birth, John was employed in a Prestwich mill which manufactured cotton tapes, webbings, bindings and ribbons. During these years, he had periods of continuous drinking which would result in frequent and long absences from work. The work here lasted until around 1896, by which time Fred describes John as a broken man who never worked regularly again. To provide for his family, however, he did rent a property close by and turned it into a grocery and provisions shop. This required Fred, aged about 16, to leave his own job and manage the shop on behalf of his father. The business was not a success, partly because it was not in the best location for passing trade and partly because it was weakened by John, who ‘meddled and interfered without ever taking a practical and real part in the work’.
Anxiety and insecurity seem to have been constants within the family as John’s drinking impacted heavily on his wife and children. Fred describes one occasion when his father turned his mother out of the house and she sought refuge at her mother’s nearby. Four-year-old Fred stayed on at home, entirely reliant on the kindness of neighbours, until, after some days, he was able to join his mother and sleep in a cot in his grandmother’s room. There must have been some sort of reconciliation and they returned home, and more children were born in the years that followed.
Fred recalled one incident which unsurprisingly ‘seared itself’ on his memory. When he was around 16, he came home from work one afternoon to find his mother nursing her young child whose illness was causing convulsions. To try to stop these, the baby was placed in a mustard bath, which was a much-tried remedy for reducing fever in the late 19th century. The frantic mother’s anxiety and desperation was heightened when John did not arrive home from work at his usual time. The family knew only too well what this meant – that he would not now appear until pub closing time. That he would be drunk they both knew with certainty but worse, there was no predicting what sort of mood he would be in. The fight for the infant’s life went on all evening and the worry and fear (of his uncertain temper) over Father’s impending return intensified. At around 11pm, his key was heard in the lock. He came into the room, took in the scene around the zinc bath at the fireside, stared, ‘as only drunken men stare’, closed the door and retreated silently upstairs to bed. The baby died during the night. That the tragedy and the trauma of losing the baby were worsened by the father’s unpredictability hardly needs stating. What further saddened me as I read this was that Fred could see that although drunk, his father did still recognise the gravity of the situation but decided to withdraw, rather than cause a scene, unable or not prepared to help in the struggle to save his infant child.
About 20 years later, Fred, when working with the NFWW, recounted this deeply painful event to Mary Macarthur. She was standing as the Labour Party candidate in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, in the General Election which took place at the end of the First World War. Mary was apparently frustrated by the questions she was facing from temperance activists in the audience. Despite the wartime introduction of some government control in the drinks trade, including the restriction of pub opening hours, the watering down of beer and making it illegal to buy rounds of drinks, temperance societies were not in favour of permanent state control or any measures which they believed normalized or made alcohol more respectable. In contrast, Mary’s views were those of the Labour Party, which advocated taking the production and retailing of alcohol out of the hands of all those who profited by encouraging excessive consumption and instead ensuring that local areas could set their own controls relating to the sale and consumption of drink. Mary recognised that excessive drinking was a social evil but she was more concerned to get to ‘the root of the matter’, convinced as she was that the solution was ‘bound up with the removal of bad social conditions generally’. [2]
On hearing Mary Macarthur’s impatience on temperance (quite probably because in such a crucial post war election, there were so many more social and economic issues to be tackled; her 14 electoral points ranged from the need for lasting peace, a restoration of freedom, to the necessity of a living wage, new homes and education for all), Fred told her of the death of his young sibling and how alcoholism had made things so much worse. Many contemporary accounts refer to Mary Macarthur’s tendency to wear her heart on her sleeve, with one colleague recalling that ‘emotional outbursts were common […] indeed they were part of her stock-in-trade’.[3] It comes as little surprise to me that she wept on hearing Fred’s story and ‘never again had a word to say against total abstainers’.
Historians do have to be careful about how they make use of anecdotal material and personal recollection and here I am mindful of the fact that Fred’s memoir was written over 40 years after the 1918 incident in Stourbridge. If, however, we are ever going to understand more about the character of someone whom we never met, then surely the only way to do so is to examine evidence in all forms to get as close to that person as possible. We can never know for certain but, armed with other recorded observations of Mary Macarthur’s reactions, perhaps we can legitimately reflect on the impact that Fred’s words might have had on her. About 15 months later, she gave an interview in which she expressed her views on the drink question. As a member of the Labour Campaign for the Public Ownership and Control of the Liquor Trade, she held its position on freedom to choose as opposed to prohibition (which had recently been imposed in the United States) and believed that what was important was that alcohol should be obtainable in ‘reasonable quantities and under decent conditions’. Mary put the woman’s point of view. She stressed that it was ‘woman in the home – she and her children – who suffer most from excessive drinking’ and that it was women, armed with the vote, who needed to influence public opinion, and encourage ‘wise solutions…vital to their freedom and happiness’. It was a thoughtful, nuanced interview, calling for understanding, empathy and recognition that the drink question would not be resolved until poverty was ended and education accessible to all. [4]
Let’s return now to Fred and find out how he came to work alongside Mary Macarthur within the trade union movement. He left school aged 13, denied the chance to stay on any longer because his father insisted that he should go out to work. His earnings were needed and therefore sitting the scholarship for a free grammar school place, suggested by his teacher, was not an option. Fred did not, however, have a job to go to; instead this young lad walked into Manchester and set about looking out for ‘boy wanted’ notices, before finding a position at a weekly paper called The British Fancier. We read often enough of the early age at which so many boys and girls started employment, working long hours for wages that were needed by their families. Arguably we do still need accounts that provide us with a glimpse of what life was like for such young workers. Going to work was not the end of childhood and the strains on young lives were immeasurable. All of Fred’s wages went to his parents, apart from two pence a day given to him for a midday meal. As the cheapest of these was fourpence a day (for beef and potatoes), he often went without to save for a meal another day, or he would walk into the market to buy some apples or a penny’s worth of soup and half a loaf (which took care of the other penny). His working day was extended by walking there and back, a total of eight miles a day. His youth is apparent in the sweet story he tells of his mum and brothers and sisters coming to meet him from the office one evening to take him to the pantomime, with a basket of apples and oranges to eat in the theatre.
After about a year, Fred moved on to a new job as a ‘flour boy’ at the Prestwich Cooperative Society, earning five shillings a week. Here he stayed until leaving to manage the shop taken on by his father. But John was drinking heavily again and one day, in a violent rage, he ordered Fred out of the house. It was a turning point; Fred could not risk losing both his home and his livelihood. He approached a firm from which he had bought goods for the shop and was offered a job as a traveller in provisions. This kept him in steady employment and made it possible for him to get married, aged 21 and start a family.
At some point during these years, Fred became actively involved in the temperance movement, joining the Prestwich branch of the Sons of Temperance Friendly Society. The Sons of Temperance mission was to encourage abstinence for the benefit and well-being of the community. Friendly societies had a long tradition in Britain, providing sickness benefits and savings schemes to those workers who were able to save and contribute. Fred spent time teaching children and gaining experience in delivering talks. He was, by his own admission, a young man who took life very seriously and he clearly thought deeply about the work that he did. By 1913 he had become President of the Salford Grand Division of the Order (of the Sons of Temperance). Looking back, he discovered notes he made to support his first speech in May 1904. Under no illusions that drink alone was responsible for the many social ills that confronted people in the early 20th century, he demanded the abolition of the dreaded Poor Laws. Those in the direst straits might (after severe grilling from the Poor Law Guardians) be offered ‘parish relief’, either in the form of payment or a spell in the workhouse, designed not for comfort but as a deterrent. For the sick and elderly with nowhere to go and no one to care for them (and with no old age pensions until 1908), the workhouse or its infirmary provided some sort of care and shelter. Everyone knew how hard it was to recover from encounters with a system intended not to prevent poverty but merely to provide assistance to the desperate which came with a heavy – and all too often permanent – sting in its tail. Fred was lecturing on this ahead of the creation of a Royal Commission of the Poor Law in 1905, finally set up to review the system of poor relief. There was little doubt amongst those who had experience of it that the Poor Laws were cruel and inadequate, but the Commission came to little. A majority report offered no substantial change and despite a minority report compiled by some high-profile social campaigners (including Beatrice Webb) calling for its abolition, the Poor Law dragged on until 1948. By this time Fred was in the House of Lords and voted for the legislation which finally marked the end of a hateful system of ‘help’ which had so embedded itself into the psyche that ‘ending up in the workhouse’ remained a visceral fear for thousands of people long after its eventual demise.
In 1906 a Liberal government was elected in Britain and was responsible for a series of enormously important social and welfare reforms which brought benefit to the lives of hundreds of thousands. The introduction of the Old Age Pension in 1908 was one such vital measure and the National Insurance Act of 1911 another. The latter introduced the first state unemployment benefit for certain categories of workers but by far the largest part of the Act was the introduction of health insurance, entitling workers to sickness benefit and medical assistance. The costs of this state insurance were born by the worker and the employer, with further contribution from the government and it came into effect in the summer of 1912.
David LLoyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Liberal Government which introduced the Old Age Pension and the National Insurance Act. Wikimedia Commons
In preparation, lecturers were employed by the National Health Insurance Commissioners to explain not just the costs and the benefits but also how the Act was to be administered. Because of his experience as a speaker, Fred was recommended by the Sons of Temperance as a Commission lecturer. He was invited to London in the spring of 1912 and after an interview, was offered a temporary job. For Fred, such a move was impossible. He understood only too well the risks of casual or short-term contracts and as a married man with three children, ‘the horrors of unemployment were too vivid’. None of the excitement of London which Fred experienced on that trip could come before the stability he sought for his young family and so he agreed only that he would lecture for the Commission on a voluntary basis and return to his life and employment in Northwest England.
He appears to have been very good at lecturing, knowledgeable but also clear and direct in message. Although he had been drawn to his own friendly society by the temperance teaching, Fred’s expertise on National Insurance was now in great demand. It was valuable work and he saw how the administration of the new Act could help government and organisations understand more about the overall health of the nation. It was not long before he accepted a job as a manager for the State Section of the London Grand Division of the (Sons of Temperance) Order and the move south to London was then made. He was well qualified, with experience of friendly societies as well as his sound knowledge of the implementation and workings of the National Insurance Act.
Fred Kershaw and the National Federation of Women Workers
Before I explain Fred’s move to the NFWW, I want to explain how his work with the Sons of Temperance took him into the British labour movement. In response to growing concern among friendly societies and trade unions that the new National Insurance scheme would damage their own, long established benefit schemes, the government agreed that they, along with commercial insurance companies and the Post Office could become ‘Approved Societies’. These were to be able to administer their existing plans alongside those of the State. An article in the Rochdale Times in June 1912 confirms the impression I get from Fred’s account that he was both cautious and thorough in his research and his methods. He was at a meeting of a small sickness and burial club in Rochdale, called to discuss the adjustments it was required to make to accommodate National Insurance. Possibly there at the behest of the Rochdale Union of Friendly Societies, Fred comes across as the (quite likely unwelcome) voice of reason, reminding those who were still there (several members had walked out amid what sounded like a long and bad-tempered discussion about government interference) of the need for societies to be actuarily sound to be accepted as approved societies. He was promptly shut down by the Chairman when he asked if this society was sound, and the meeting ended after what seems to have been a rather painful two and a half hours for all concerned. [5]
This one incident gives us some idea of the amount of work – and understanding – that was required by small organisations to comply with government rules and – as importantly – to ensure their own survival. The transition period was a difficult one and needed the patient expertise of people like Fred to get the job done. The challenge to those trade unions whose membership included workers on very low pay was considerable. They worried that members who already struggled to pay their union dues, might decide, when faced with the new compulsory state payments to be taken from their wages, to stop paying their union dues. It was tough enough to endure one deduction but two could stretch budgets too thin. In the case of the NFWW founded just five years before the NI Act, the worries were considerable. Its small membership, numbering just a few thousand in 1911, was comprised of some of the very worst paid women workers in Britain, drawn from industries including garment, box, jam and sweet making and metal work. Fred recalled that one of his earliest talks for the Sons of Temperance had referred to the women chain makers of Cradley Heath in the Black Country. These women, whose wages were scandalously low, worked excessively long hours in small forges at the back of their homes. Their struggles would become famous during a 1910 ten-week ‘lock out’, which, led by Mary Macarthur and her NFWW, resulted in victory for the women workers and the securing of Britain’s first minimum wage. The chain makers were by no means alone. The Federation was aware of thousands of women working either in their own homes or in small workshops, isolated and so hidden from the public gaze that employers could get away with paying the very lowest of wages.
Mary Macarthur supporting the women chain makers of Cradley Heath in 1910. Wikimedia Commons
Fred’s work and research in London brought him, in 1914, to the attention of Mary Macarthur. Since 1912, her union had thrown every available resource into the drive to get women to join its Approved Society. Organisers and officials were told in no uncertain terms that ‘every other thing must be put aside. You must think of nothing else, do nothing else, give yourself to the work heart and soul’.[6] Touring the country, talking to women workers, the NFWW’s message was simple. Join its Approved Society if that was all you could afford but remember also that the union is on your side. Whatever employers say (and some were pressing workers to join insurance societies and ‘sick clubs’ which they had set up themselves), the union has your interests at heart.
The task of expanding the union amongst women who were often not yet very familiar with the importance of trade unions was never easy. Dealing also with the new state administration made things even harder. Nevertheless, the NFWW’s Approved Society grew sufficiently to require additional office space and an expanded team of administrative staff research. Fred was appointed by Mary Macarthur as Chief Assistant Secretary of the NFWW, specifically to manage the Approved Society. It was a move which ‘completely transformed [his] life’, placing him within what he referred to as ‘the councils of the great trade union and Labour movements’.
The banner of the National Federation of Women Workers
It was, however, never plain sailing. When he first arrived at the offices in Mecklenburgh Square, in Bloomsbury, he found the Approved Society in ‘a shocking state of disorder’. It was not just the NFWW that struggled; Fred recognised that not even the largest organisations had understood just how much extra work National Insurance would involve. Mary Macarthur concluded that administering National Insurance had strained the energies of friendly societies and trade unions ‘to breaking point’, diverting staff away from their ‘true aims’. The NFWW had spent an enormous amount of time looking for ways to ensure that the 1911 Act did not drain its resources and so it was clearly an enormous advantage to be able to entrust the NFWW’s Approved Society to someone with solid experience of such an important but often neglected (due to lack of staff and time) part of the union.
Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, London. The buildings which housed the National Federation of Women Workers are no longer in existence. Wikimedia Commons
Fred had already carried out some research into the sickness claims of married women and it was his knowledge of this aspect of the new insurance work which first brought him to Mary Macarthur’s attention when she read a report he had produced on the subject for his own organisation. It was an issue she cared deeply about. When questions began to be asked in government over why sickness claims among women were higher than expected, the answer was entirely obvious to Mary. It was the direct result of poverty, the type of work that women did, the long hours, often standing up, lack of fresh air, long periods without nourishment and low wages, resulting in insufficient and improper food. Even among the Cradley Heath chain makers, with their minimum wage, it was found that the sad reality was that women remained ‘overstrained by their arduous work, underfed in consequence of their meagre wage and [living] on the borderlands of chronic ailment’.[7] They frequently worked up to the last minute before their babies were born and returned too soon, resulting in a high incidence of sickness among married women.
As the NFWW faced the realities of the First World War, its team of staff expanded to deal with unprecedented challenges. Fred’s role grew to cover the administration of the whole union. At the start of the War there was high unemployment amongst women workers who were laid off by firms waiting to see what the War would mean for business. Then, as thousands of women moved into munitions work from 1915, the NFWW membership began to expand significantly. Women munitions workers not only undertook dangerous work with toxic materials, they also worked long hours which were regularly extended by compulsory overtime. Married women, particularly those with menfolk away at the Front, juggled shift work with childcare, and, despite generally higher wartime wages, a cost-of-living crisis meant there was constant anxiety over budgeting and feeding the family. Women bore the brunt of life on the home front and the women’s unions worked tirelessly to defend their rights and protect their welfare.
Mary Macarthur
As leader of the NFWW and, increasingly, as a national spokesperson for women’s employment and welfare rights, Mary Macarthur had an exhausting war. She relied heavily on a small band of NFWW advisers and supporters and Fred was trusted with the day to day running of her beloved union’s administration. She lived and worked in Mecklenburgh Square and Fred, coming daily to the Square to work, came to know her well. Some of the most well respected and influential people in the labour movement came to gatherings at the home she shared with her husband, the socialist and trade unionist, William Anderson, before and during the war years. Fred recalled that on Friday evenings Mary would host symposiums, which he likened to ‘our modern cocktail parties’, to which ‘a few of the outstanding figures of the day’ would be invited. It is easy to imagine these events, full of earnest talk and lively debate, crowded with people wanting to be close to those whom it appeared would have a hand in shaping the post war world.
Mary Macarthur in Trafalgar Square in 1908.Image copyright TUC Library Collections
It was not all work, but it was certainly not all play. The impact of the First World War was enormous, reaching into every aspect of life but it is not until we read individual stories that we remember that things continued to happen to families regardless of the disruptions of war. Days before the outbreak of war, the Kershaws’ six-year-old son, Freddie, died suddenly, quite probably from undiagnosed diphtheria (a doctor had treated the little boy for tonsillitis). Fred’s account of the agonies suffered by his wife is hard to read and it is not surprising then that for this couple, the coming of war was muted by the poignancy of their personal grief. Fred went to Mecklenburgh Square to tell Mary Macarthur and her reaction clearly stayed with him. She was, he wrote, naturally sympathetic but at the same time she was overwhelmed by the prospect of war, drawing nearer. ‘It is the end of everything’ she said to Fred, who although wrapped in his grief, thought that she was too pessimistic. His memoir concludes, however, that ‘neither Miss Macarthur nor I realised what was to follow’ and they certainly had no concept of the scale of the tragedy that lay ahead for the world.
Mary Macarthur, despite being distraught at the idea of war (she was prominent at a big peace rally in Trafalgar Square the day after her meeting with Fred) had experienced a personal tragedy the previous year, when her first born child was still born. Comfort did come to both families; in 1915 Fred’s wife had a son and Mary Macarthur gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
Further tragedy lay ahead for Mary Macarthur. Her husband, Will Anderson (a Labour MP in Sheffield until 1918 and reckoned by many to be a future leader of the Labour Party), died in February 1919, during the Spanish flu pandemic. A year later, Mary was diagnosed with cancer that proved to be terminal. Fred recalled the afternoon in 1920 when they sat together at tea and she told him that she had just a few months to live. She urged him to work to help push through the planned amalgamation of the NFWW with the larger, mixed sex National Union of General Workers (NUGW). Fred’s account confirms others which stress Mary’s devotion to her work right up until the very end of her life and her deep affection for the union she had founded and nurtured since 1906. It was always her intention to ensure that the men and women of the labour movement worked together side by side. She viewed the NFWW as a training ground, for which there would be no further need once women had sound union experience and confidence and when men recognised women as trusted and competent allies in the fight for better working conditions. Mary Macarthur died on January 1st, 1921, the very day that the merger with the NUGW took place. She was just 40 years old and in Fred’s words, ‘there passed a woman who, had she lived, would have been the foremost woman in Labour’s political and industrial movement’.
Although Fred worked for the NUGW for a brief spell, his future lay beyond it. He used his considerable experience of social insurance and his financial expertise to work for the wider trade union movement, helping members obtain compensation in accident claims and advising unions on the investment of any accumulated funds. Additionally, he maintained a close interest and connection with matters relating to the health aspect of National Insurance, recalling his shock at maternal mortality figures which remained unchanged by advances in medicine and health services. He was deeply respected by many within the labour movement and his detailed work (often behind the scenes) on reports into social problems was highly regarded. Fred draws attention to his deep and lasting friendship with Margaret Bondfield (who he had worked with at the NFWW and was to become one of the first women Labour MPs in 1923 and Britain’s first woman cabinet minister in 1929); in her autobiography, she refers to Fred as her friend, helper and supporter and notes the importance of his statistical work on unemployment insurance claims in the 1920s.[8]
Margaret Bondfield. Image copyright of TUC Library Collection
Fred’s pride in entering the House of Lords is evident (‘what a day! The ex-milk boy and flour boy was to become a peer of the United Kingdom’) and he took the bestowed Honour ‘very, very seriously’. What mattered most to him was how his experience in social insurance could, in this new capacity, continue to be of value to the nation. Just ahead of the 1950 General Election, Lord Kershaw spoke in support of the Labour candidate at a meeting in Mortlake, near where he lived in Richmond. He spoke of his humble start as a flour boy and how he felt that the spirit of service must always supersede the spirit of capitalism. He talked also of how he had been mocked in the House of Lords for not having an Oxford accent and how this was assumed to mean a lack of wisdom. He was having none of it. ‘We may drop our aitches’, he said, ‘but we don’t drop the standard of living of our people’. He drew attention to the advances that had been made by Labour; people were, he said, never so free as they were now – free to preserve their self-respect even if unemployment came their way, now that the hated Means Test had been removed. Maternal mortality had been reduced and ‘those with eyes to see could not help marvel at the wonderfully healthy children of today. Healthy and bonny children did not happen by accident; they happened through the concerted planning of the government of the day’.[9]
Fred, who served as a JP, as a Board member at Westminster Hospital, as chairperson of the Marie Curie Foundation, devoted his public life to that spirit of service of which he spoke in 1950. His social conscience was formed early on and drew him to the sort of work to which he knew he could make a real difference. He did not become a household name or even a prominent name within the Labour movement and it is one of the reasons why it is so important to show the lasting value of the ‘backroom’ boys and girls.
This post can also be found on the TUC Library‘s Collection Blog pages. Thanks to Jeff Howarth for allowing me to reproduce it here. Given the many hours of my life spent at the TUC Library, it feels good to be able to share this here and to contribute something in this, the Library’s centenary year.
Winding down for the weekend and scrolling through Twitter last Friday afternoon, my attention was suddenly grabbed by a tweet from the TUC Library. It announced a brand-new acquisition to its Collections and was accompanied by two images which stopped me in my tracks. These were the opening pages of a hand-written minute book belonging to the pre-First World War Newcastle on Tyne branch of the National Federation of Women Workers. My heart skipped a beat, flipped over entirely and neither it nor my mind settled down until I had seen the document for myself a few days later.
I learned that the book was found by a daughter who was clearing her mother’s house after her death. I understand all too well what that this entails, having just finished sorting and emptying my own mum’s house. It seems likely that the book belonged to her grandmother. My thoughts and emotions are, then, not just ones of excitement but also of empathy and gratitude that this has now been passed to the TUC Library. Such finds are the very stuff of the history of working people’s lives and they are priceless.
I know there are hundreds of historians who long for such discoveries. It is rare occasions such as these that make searching for them so worthwhile, especially as there are inevitably so many garden paths to go up as well. I have been researching and writing about the extraordinary trade union that was the National Federation of Women Workers (Federation) for well over a decade. In 2014 Palgrave Macmillan published my history of the Federation, founded in 1906 by the charismatic Mary Macarthur (1880-1921). The research for the book was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and provided me with the funds to work with national collections and to travel (there were a lot of train journeys, a lot of meal deals in hotel rooms and a lot of soreness in my arms, back and neck from lugging laptop and books all over the place) to local archives and local studies’ libraries.
This small all-female trade union, which nonetheless punched well above its weight, existed for just 15 years, between 1906 and 1921, before merging with the larger and mixed gender National Union of General Workers. Thanks in large part to the endeavours of Gertrude Tuckwell of the Women’s Trade Union League, under whose guidance and protection the Federation operated, an extensive and valuable collection of annual reports, newspaper cuttings, pamphlets and notices relating to the union (and more broadly on women and work) is available for consultation at the TUC Library in London. What was harder to find – and of course what I then wanted so much to find – was detailed information about just how the union operated at the grassroots level. This I tried to knit together, albeit with many frustrating gaps, by looking at newspapers and at the records of other organisations, such as local Trades Councils, which supported the Federation in its attempts to protect women industrial workers and improve their often appalling pay and conditions.
How I longed to find more than a brief branch report submitted to and published by the Federation’s newspaper, Woman Worker, or included within its Annual Reports. At the end of my book, I included a substantial appendix giving brief outlines of all the branches I had managed to identify. My frustration at its almost certain incompleteness is there for all to see in the note I added at the start indicating that ‘this is not a comprehensive list but is included here to encourage and facilitate further research’ (my fervent hope). Here I included, where they emerged, the names of branch secretaries, treasurers and presidents and of the industries in which women in the different regions of Britain were employed. The book chapters also pay attention to the establishment of branches, the disputes that drew in members, the triumphs when disputes ended in improved conditions and the despair when at times organisation had little lasting success. There is detail but it is not always enough to tell stories in their entirety. When piecing together – often very small – snippets of information from a myriad sources, I was acutely aware of how much more there was out there, undiscovered and also of how difficult it can be to capture the grassroots history of a national union that existed over a hundred years ago.
And then, a decade after I started to write the book (and 8 years after its publication) came this amazing discovery of the first branch minute book of the Federation that I have ever seen. It is only a few pages long, from the inaugural meeting of the Newcastle upon Tyne branch on August 14th 1912, when 18 people were present, until July 1913 when just seven turned up. From the election of the branch officials (fabulous lists of names with which a local and/or family history researcher can do so much), including the secretary, E Howson, the formation of a social or dance committee, through to concerns over falling membership and pleas for members to stick together and to turn up to meetings, these few pages are of the utmost importance. They reveal the campaigning efforts of local activists, including Mrs Harrison Bell of the Women’s Labour League, in helping to form and sustain the branch which held its meetings in the Northern Independent Labour Party Club Room, at 18 Clayton Street. Laid out before me is evidence of so many challenges faced by local branches. Here is concern about paying the rent for the meeting room when attendance was so low (in early 1913 there were two consecutive months when numbers were too low for the meeting to go ahead). There is cheerful optimism at a two-shilling profit after the enjoyable and successful Christmas dance and appeals for an organiser to be sent from the Federation’s London HQ. There were always too few organisers and demand for their help was high because their presence was so helpful with campaigning and giving encouragement to new and fragile branches.
In the earliest meetings there is encouragement given to join and stay united within the union and discussion about the importance of combination. Resolutions passed included the need for women to be present on the newly established National Insurance Courts of Referees and for ‘intelligent working women’ to be involved in the planning and arrangement of workmen’s dwellings in Newcastle. There are summaries read out of the minutes of the Federation’s National Council.
There are just a few specific references to conditions at local firms; a mention, for example of improvements which would ‘add to the comfort of the girls’ at Messrs Armstrong & Whitworth. There is frustration at the branch members at Messrs Gleaves who ‘seemed to have forsaken the Union altogether’ (this is possibly the business of Henry Gleave, whose drapery sold underclothing, baby linen and fancy drapery made in his factory).
Having been to many such meetings at the end of my own working day, tired and wanting to put my feet up, I can’t help wondering if there was enough here (despite the enormous efforts of the branch officials) to keep members engaged and ready to come back each month. There were -and are – so many calls on women workers’ time and in addition, there was the hugely important issue of feeling secure and safe enough to attend a union meeting. In Newcastle, as in many other towns and cities where women worked across a broad range of industries, it was often too risky to openly form a works branch and instead – as in this case – one branch would seek to pull in workers from across the city to meet in a club room or hall. Men – employed in larger numbers – might hold their union meetings in the pub or union club, thus combining leisure time with union business. It was all so much trickier for women. There were a hundred and one domestic things to be done at home in the evening. On top of that, there was the ever-present risk of intimidation or victimization – would the boss find out about the meeting? Would he sack you? And then there was the cost of membership, out of an already low wage.
Being a branch official was hard and often dispiriting work. I am not in the least surprised to read that on a stormy night in January 1913, only the Secretary and one other woman attended and that the meeting did not go ahead. It was not a question of members’ commitment to the union but simply one of getting by – and of keeping warm (hopefully) and dry at home. Social events were often the glue that held a branch together, although even here it does not seem that the December dance in 1912 (despite being hailed as a decided success with its two-shilling profit) was able to do this.
The book ends with a meeting in July 1913. It is not clear if there were more meetings, although clearly membership was falling and the Federation’s Annual Report for 1914 reveals organisers’ frustration, asking why the women of Tyneside don’t ‘wake up to the fact that they will never get decent wages till they organise’. There were so many reasons why organisation was so difficult for women workers. I am (by complete and happy chance) currently writing an article for the North-East Labour History Society about the work of the Federation in the North-East of England, in which I explain just how hard it was for small branches to keep going, in the early years of the union. It was not until the First World War that membership soared, particularly in munitions centres like Newcastle. By early 1917, the Federation claimed it had nearly 9000 members in that city alone. This short minute book adds detail, intimacy and vibrancy to research like mine into women’s work and trade union membership. I am delighted to know that it has survived and that it is there to refer to in the forthcoming article and much more besides. It is a tremendous addition to the Library’s collections.
I hope my excitement at the emergence of this new acquisition to the TUC Library is evident. If you want to know more about the National Federation of Women Workers, here is a link to an exhibition I worked on with the TUC Library to commemorate the 100th year of the death of Mary Macarthur:
By late November, the Harris’s house looked just as Lucy had pictured it. It was modern, bright and homely. The coal shed was full, the lavatory next to it as neat as could be, despite doubling as a garage for George’s bicycle and a handful of gardening tools. Thomas’s pram had to stay permanently parked in the narrow hallway by the front door, where everyone was always colliding with it but there was no room for it out the back. The very thought of the precious pram being wedged in next to the WC filled Lucy with horror and besides, it was too much for her, at five months pregnant, to ease it down the passage at the end of the run of houses and around to the back gate.
As yet, there had been little time to attend to the garden but George and Lucy were full of plans. The garden was bordered on both sides by low walls and a brick path had been laid, running from the back gate up to the house. The two feet between one of the walls and the path made a natural border for growing flowers but the rest of the garden was a blank canvas. A small area behind the WC and the coal shed and leading to the back door was bricked but apart from this, the garden was a mixture of bare earth and builders’ rubble. The couple read the ‘Gardening Notes’ column in the Coventry Herald, saving any cuttings that gave them ideas, growing tips and seasonal advice. The plan was to have a small lawn for the children to play on, flowers in the two long borders and fruit bushes and vegetables at the end of the garden furthest from the house. One sunny August afternoon in 1909, weeks before the move, the couple had walked out to the Allesley and Coundon Horticultural Society’s summer show, with Thomas in the pram, where they admired the displays of potted and cut flowers, particularly the sweet peas, stocks and dahlias. They loved the roses and George made a mental note to put up some trellising so that they could have a climbing variety or two, such as Crimson or Tea Rambler. The afternoon was a welcome respite from all the anxieties surrounding the impending move and they treated themselves to a pot of tea and a slice of cake while they listened to the Bedworth Town Band and watched a display of Morris dancing. As they came away to go home to feed Thomas, Lucy rather envied the young people staying on for an evening’s dancing, the girls in their pastel-coloured frocks resembling the shades of the sweet peas she so loved. But with a baby and in the first stage of her second pregnancy, she felt with a pang that her dancing days were over.
I used this image (courtesy of Albert Smith) in my book, Women’s Lives in Coventry. Taken in 1910 it shows a Coventry family all dressed up in a garden with some of the trellising that George sought in 1909. It’s a lovely photo in which the pride being taken in the garden is clear to see
Lucy’s pregnancy with Thomas had been straightforward and easy. The only time she had needed to see the midwife was at delivery and she had not seen a doctor at all. Lucy’s mum made sure that her daughter stayed in bed for two weeks after the birth so that she could rest and make sure that her milk became established. She was so well looked after that her sisters were mightily relieved when she finally made an appearance downstairs and started to pick up some of the many duties that had fallen to them at the end of their working days, including boiling nappies and washing linens. And so when Lucy realized that she was expecting again (admittedly a little sooner than she’d hoped), everyone assumed that things would go as smoothly the second time around. This time, however, Lucy was tired right from the start, she was sick for weeks, her back hurt and her feet swelled. Her mother worried that she was not gaining enough weight and asked her neighbour, Mrs Jackson, to come in and take a look at her daughter. Mary Jackson was the midwife who had delivered Thomas, and before him, Lucy and her sisters. She was widely respected within the community and trusted as a very safe pair of hands by local doctors. She had never received any formal training but when the Central Midwives’ Board was established as a result of the Midwives’ Act of 1902, Mrs Jackson’s registration as a Coventry midwife was accepted and approved as a result of her years of bona fide practice and because of her reputation for wisdom and efficiency. She was used to seeing the effects of successive pregnancies on women and when she came to visit Lucy, she saw a young wife and mother worn out by constant sickness and the anxieties of trying to be a perfect housewife in her new home. In December, much to Lucy’s initial dismay, Mrs Jackson ordered her home to her mother’s house in Spon End for the remainder of the pregnancy.
Lucy was horrified. They had only just moved to Kensington Road, she had only just started to feel confident in her new surroundings, carefully packing up George’s lunch each day and making sure his meal was waiting for him each evening when he returned home from work. Lucy had pored over the ‘Home Hints’ and household columns in the local press, seeking to improve on her knowledge of even the most basic of tasks. Her mother laughed when Lucy, having read an article on how to make a good cuppa, set off to ask her local grocer which tea was best suited to the local water. ‘He’ll see you coming,’ she warned her daughter who, undaunted, learned off by heart the Coventry Herald’s advice, even though she’d been brewing tea since she was a girl:
The water should be fresh and freshly boiled. The tea pot should be washed out with boiling water. Then the tea should be put in. if China Tea is used there will be required about one tea-spoonful to each breakfast cup. If Indian tea half that quantity will suffice. Having covered the tea with the requisite quantity of water, it should be allowed to stand for three of four minutes for fine Assams, such as Pekoe and Broke Pekoe, about five minutes for Pekoe Souchong and Souchong. The tea should be poured off the leaves immediately the proper time has elapsed. In this way the flavour of the tea is all extracted, whilst the tannin is nearly all left behind in the leaves. A good method is to use an infuser, which will permit of the steeped leaves being withdrawn directly the tea is properly made. In India a silver ball, pierced with holes to permit of the percolation of the water, is largely used to hold the tea while the boiling water is acting upon it. If these precautions are carried out the resulting beverage will be of the most delicious character, and will contain nothing to harm the most delicate nerves.
Lucy wanted to do things her way. There was more amusement for her mother – an accomplished cook – when her daughter began to seek out products that she’d seen being advertised, in the hope that their use would guarantee the perfect results. Despite, however, buying ‘Paisley Flour – the sure raising powder’ her first attempts at scones ended in tears when they failed to rise. George ate them regardless, pronouncing them to be excellent. He was happy and proud to try any of his wife’s experiments as long as they were not too costly or – worst of all – wasteful. Both of them agreed that cooking with Bisto (named for its ability to Brown, Season & Thicken In One) – introduced in 1908 and advertised from 1910 – was a tasty addition to stews, turning the cheapest cuts of meat into hearty meals:
So when Lucy realized she would have to return home until her baby was born, she fretted over how George would manage without her. In fact, there turned out to be little to worry about. She and Thomas went back to Spon End, where she rested as much as she could. There was no more shopping, no more heavy laundry and minimal cooking. George ate in the factory canteen at lunchtimes and called in each evening to see his wife and child, sitting at the kitchen table with them to have a cheese or cold meat sandwich, a mug of tea and a piece of fruit cake. On Sundays he came round for lunch and then he and Lucy’s dad walked round to the Kensington Road house to work on any jobs that needed doing so that the house was perfect for Lucy’s return in the spring, with the new baby. They dug over the garden in readiness for grass seed and the fruit and vegetable patches and George enjoyed it so much he began to think that an allotment would be a good idea, not just to keep his family in fresh produce but to give him the chance for some healthy exercise and – if he was honest – some time to be on his own, away from the stresses of family life. There were several allotment associations in Coventry and at one, the Coventry mayor told those present how great an interest the Council took in these. All men needed a hobby, he said and surely gardening was a much better option than drinking beer. George rather wondered if he might combine the two, treating himself to the odd bottle at the end of a summer’s evening gardening. He put his name down at a meeting of the local association in The Royal Oak on Earlsdon Street.
Lucy relaxed in the presence of her mother and as the sickness eased, the tiredness lifted a little. Resting with her legs up each afternoon kept the puffiness down, having an afternoon nap at the same time as Thomas was better for her than her previous habit of using her son’s sleep time to race through her house, doing as much housework as she could. Her mind was eased by the fact that one of her sisters – with bad grace, it must be said – was sent up to the Kensington Road house twice a week after work to sweep the floors and dust away the incessant coal dust (while Lucy and Thomas were away, George only lit a fire for the kitchen range on the coldest of winter evenings. It was not the worst of winters; temperatures in Coventry were recorded as falling below freezing on roughly a third of days between January and March 1910. Even so, minus 1 degrees Celsius was the lowest temperature recorded that winter and for this George was grateful, allowing him to keep the coal house well stocked and save money for the coming winter, when there would be two babies to keep warm).
An image used in my book ‘Women’s Lives in Coventry’ of Coventry midwife, Sarah Reid, in 1912. Courtesy of David Fry
Florence Eliza Harris was born on March 16th 1910. The labour, straightforward and relatively quick, was attended by the trusty Mrs Jackson. This time the doctor was called in to examine Lucy and to check the baby who was smaller than Thomas had been at birth. Both were pronounced healthy although Lucy was prescribed a few more weeks rest before she could go home to Kensington Road and resume her life as a housewife. Florence was one of 2,674 Coventry births in 1910 and although there were as yet no baby clinics in the city, the Sanitary Committee had chosen at the start of that year to appoint a second health visitor. Amongst the duties of these women were visits to mothers and babies. During the course of 1910, they made 1750 visits, giving feeding and baby care advice. As both women were also qualified Sanitary Inspectors, they made sure that whenever they visited a new mother, they assessed the condition of her housing; were the walls and ceilings clean? Were the areas in which food was stored sufficiently ventilated? Was there evidence of damp? Was the accommodation overcrowded? There was little doubt that the little Spon End house, with Lucy, Thomas and the new baby living there, was bursting at the seams but nothing that she saw gave the health visitor any cause for concern. Not only was the house scrubbed and polished but it was clear that Lucy was in very good hands, benefiting from her mum’s experience and common sensical approach to all that life threw at her. And of course, there was a new and spacious house in Kensington Road waiting to welcome back the little family.
On her first visit, the health visitor gave Lucy a leaflet about feeding her baby. In the early twentieth century health officials advocated breast feeding as the safest and healthiest start for babies. Feeds every two hours during the day and every four hours at night were recommended for the first three months and then the intervals between feeds could be lengthened. The leaflet distributed to new mothers made it clear that routine was very important and that the baby should not be put on the breast purely for comfort or to keep her quiet. Six months of breast feeding was deemed to be best for baby but the advice was that after nine months, it should be stopped entirely. The milk was deemed to be of insufficient quality for baby by then and if continued might induce weakness in the mother, making her susceptible to illness.
Lucy understood the benefits of breast feeding. An old school friend had lost her baby to diarrhoea a few years previously, during a hot summer in which it was harder than usual to keep foodstuffs and baby milk cool and free from bacteria. Lucy wanted to feed Florence herself for as long as she could, as she had done with Thomas, but it wasn’t easy to ignore her mother, who was always telling her that breast feeding for more than just a few weeks would exhaust her and that she should aim to give the baby a bottle after the first three months. Against all the professional advice, Lucy’s mum believed – as her mum had done before her – that the natural way wasn’t necessarily the ‘nice’ way and she told her blushing daughter more than once that she was sure her husband would prefer it if she stopped feeding sooner rather than later. By the time Lucy was back home, in the early summer of 1910, Florence was being fed with cow’s milk. The suggested formula for a three-month old baby was three tablespoons of milk, three tablespoons of water, a half teaspoon of demerara sugar and one to two teaspoons of fresh cream. As the baby got older, the advice was to gradually lessen the quantity of water and increase the milk so that at six months, each feed consisted of nine tablespoons of milk. Lucy followed the hygiene advice on the feeding leaflet to the letter. As soon as the milk was bought (from the dairy and grocers on the corner of Kensington Road and Henley (now Beaudesert) Road, Lucy decanted it into a jug which she then placed in a pan of cold water, changing the water regularly throughout the day to keep the milk as cold as possible. The required amount of milk was then boiled ahead of each feed and placed in a boat shaped feeding bottle which had an opening at each end, onto which the rubber teat was placed.
After each feed, Lucy did as the health visitor advised and bathed the inside of Florence’s mouth with a small piece of clean linen rag dipped in warm water. She then washed the bottle in water to which she added a small amount of washing soda, making sure to put the rubber teat in a separate bowl of clear, clean water. It was a time-consuming regime but it gave Lucy peace of mind to know that she was doing everything that she could to keep her daughter safe. She was mightily relieved that the summer brought no prolonged periods of intense heat and she knew how fortunate she was to be able to keep food relatively cool and well covered in her kitchen cupboards.
Once Lucy was back home and settled into a routine with Thomas and the new baby, she was finally ready to take on the challenges of full time housewifery. For several months she still tended to walk to Spon End to the shops that she knew and – more importantly to her – where she was known to the shop keepers. She had heard too many tales of young wives being short-changed by shop owners who thought they could take advantage of inexperienced young wives, selling them damaged or poor quality goods, underweight measures and out of date food. By the winter, however, the prospect of yet another cold, wet walk down Hearsall Lane to Spon End, encouraged her first forays into Earlsdon to discover what it had to offer. By the spring of 1911 she was well into her stride.
In 1911 George was earning just over 32 shillings a week. This was a decent wage, only a few shillings lower than those being earned by the men who had served apprenticeships, and considerably more than those paid to unskilled general labourers. At the Humber, George had impressed with his technical ability to manage new machinery and he was typical of the many men who, although graded as semi-skilled workers, could turn their hands to almost anything in the fast paced and ever- changing vehicle industry. His weekly wage meant that Lucy could buy non-perishable foods (tea, sugar, flour, oats, dried fruit, jam, rice and pulses) laundry products and toiletries in weekly quantities, which was much cheaper than shopping daily for them and it also meant that for the rest of the week, the pram got loaded up only with those items that were harder to store and keep fresh, such as vegetables, pies, sausages, bacon, cheese and butter. The family was luckier than many but nonetheless money was tight, with prices rising faster than wages during their first years at Kensington Road (Board of Trade figures showed that in the 15 years before 1911, wages had risen by 12 per cent and food prices by 18 per cent).
Their budget looked broadly like this;
Wage: 32 shillings
Outgoings:
9 shillings to Mr Bird for house payment
8 pence a week to the Workers’ Union, George’s trade union subscription (this would, if needed, give strike pay, sickness and out of work benefits and a contribution towards funeral costs)
1 shilling to the Hospital Provident Fund to help with the costs of seeing a doctor and any medicines required (when Thomas had a series of chest infections later that year, the couple was very relieved to have this insurance)
3 shillings (where possible) into the Coventry Building Society to replenish the rainy day fund
2 shillings kept by George for the odd pint of beer, plus plants and seeds for the garden
This left around 19 shillings a week for food, fuel and clothing. Lucy’s mum thought it strange that Lucy knew exactly how much George earned each week, as her husband had always kept an undisclosed amount of his wage packet for himself and handed over the rest for housekeeping. George was only too happy to trust Lucy to feed and clothe the family and all he expected was that she would manage efficiently and learn to be a careful manager. She was determined to do precisely that.
By the time the Harris’s were well and truly settled, there were several shops in Kensington Road. The only ones that Lucy went to regularly were the dairy run by Mr Cleaver at number 102, (milk contamination was regularly reported in the local press and so Lucy would only buy milk from the trusted Mr Cleaver) the newsagent and tobacconist at the bottom of the road (13b, where, just once a week, George picked up a packet of ten Lambert & Butler Waverley cigarettes for 3d, the Coventry Herald every Friday for 1d and the Midland Daily Telegraph on his way home from work each evening for a halfpenny ), the Post Office (55) and Bales the Chemist at the junction with Albany Road. Mr Bale grew used to the sight of Lucy in his shop, visiting not just to buy soap and liquorice (which she swore by to keep the children ‘regular’) but to ask for advice about the children’s many minor ailments. His advice, as opposed to the doctor’s, was free, even if it did sometimes result in Lucy spending precious pennies on some rather questionable concoctions, such as Bales’ Blood Mixture, advertised as a ‘spring medicine’.
1911 Midland Daily Telegraph
On very rare occasions, Lucy bought sausages or a pie from the London Central Meat Company at 104 Kensington Road, a butcher’s with several shops in the city, but on the whole she favoured Coventry Market for meat. One of her favourite times of the week was going to the Market Hall on a Saturday evening when it stayed open until 11pm. Saturday was pay day for most people and a chance to go shopping with a full purse. Once the children were in bed, Lucy left George in charge and met her mum at the bottom of Albany Road where they walked to the market together. Both women kept a close eye on the prices of products in the local paper, noting what was in short supply (and therefore more expensive), what was plentiful and where the bargains might be. Lucy’s main purchases on her Saturday night excursions were butter (in 1912 this sold for around 1 shilling and 2 pence although Lucy, always with an eye for the new, was later converted to Lipton’s Margarine, ‘made with nuts and cream, equal to butter and half the price’), new-laid eggs at a shilling for nine, and – most important of all – the Sunday joint. At the butcher’s stall, she still stuck close to her mum, who knew exactly what she was looking for – the right amount of fat, the right colour, smell and general appearance of the meat. The later the visit to the stall, the better was the chance of a knock down price, although this was risky if all the best cuts had been sold. But it was worth paying a little more to trust the butcher and to know that the joint would be the basis for meals on Sunday (roast), Monday (cold cuts with potatoes), Tuesday (minced, using economical recipes found in magazines and newspapers), and the bones used for stock or soup. When prices were too high (such as in September 1911 when an outbreak of foot and mouth disease closed live markets and led to meat shortages), Lucy would choose chicken, which ranged in price from 2/6 to 4 shillings, depending on the size, but these were never big enough to last for as many meals as beef or lamb. Rabbit was another option but for this Lucy tended to visit Mr Fletcher’s butcher’s in Earlsdon Street as he very often had a fresh supply of rabbit hanging on hooks from the shop ceiling. The preparation of rabbit, bought unskinned for around a shilling, made Lucy feel queasy when she first started cooking, but after a while, her only thoughts were on the pie that she was making and which was a firm family favourite.
1912 Midland Daily Telegraph
1910 Midland Daily Telegraph
Lucy made her own bread and cakes but occasionally, she treated Thomas and Florence to a Chelsea bun (shared on the walk home) from Wright’s Model Bakery on Albany Road. If her parents were coming for Sunday tea, she would buy a slab of Wright’s Rich Sultana Cake (sold in slabs at sixpence a pound). Sometimes, on his cycle ride home from work, George would stop off at Atkinsons to pick up a pork pie; this was a treat for him and Lucy, when the children were asleep, eaten with pickles and raw onion. Fruit and vegetables came from various shops, including Crumps and also Moore’s, both on Earlsdon Street. As time went on and George cultivated much of the garden and then his allotment (which he got in 1912), there was a steady supply of seasonal produce, including leeks, parsnips and potatoes, peas and beans, raspberries and gooseberries. It was not long before Lucy added jam making to her ever growing list of skills. She collected recipes and added to them over the years. One of her earliest came from a women’s trade union newspaper she had once brought home from work, before she was married. Her father had been cross that she had brought what he regarded as subversive material into the house and so Lucy had showed him the pages of home hints, which calmed him down a little (though she never brought it home again and instead read it in the rest room at work).
This was the monthly journal of the National Federation of Women Workers, which Lucy first saw at work in 1907
‘Savoury Shape‘
Half-pound cold meat finely chopped, 3 ozs. Breadcrumbs, 2 ozs. Suet finely minced, little grated nutmeg, ¼ teaspoonful curry powder, ¼ teaspoonful herbs, a teaspoonfls browned breadcrumbs, 1 or 2 eggs, milk or stock, pepper and salt. Grease a basin with butter, cover surface with browned crumbs. Mix all other ingredients in order given above and cover with greased paper. Steam an hour. Serve with brown sauce.
Another favourite was ‘Savoury Pie‘, useful for the middle of the week when the joint had run out. Lucy always added a little bacon to it, fearing that George would complain if presented with a meal without some form of meat. A pound of tomatoes could be bought for between 6 and 8 pence a pound and Spanish onions for around 1 ½ d a pound. Lucy liked making this dish but was aware that these were expensive ingredients and she mostly made it in late summer when the tomatoes had ripened at the allotment.
Put 1 ½ ozs. Or dripping in saucepan and 1lb Spanish onions; let cook gently near fore but not near enough to burn, for 20 minutes. Then chop 1lb of tomatoes and lay on top and the 1lb of potatoes on top of the tomatoes. Put id on and let cook gently till the potatoes are cooked through.
The only commodity that the Harris’s had delivered was coal. The kitchen range ate a great amount of coal and the Harris’s tried to keep their coal shed stocked up, because it was much cheaper when bought in the largest quantities possible (Lucy saved a little every week for coal so that they could bulk buy). Deliveries were made by T and J Dewis, Coal Merchants on the Butts and Thomas looked forward to the delivery days when the cart arrived and the coal was shovelled into a wheelbarrow and trundled down the alley and in through the back gate. Lucy was never more thankful for the back gate and coal shed on coal delivery days, pitying those whose coal entered the house through a coal shute from which clouds of thick black coal dust would invariably rise and spread. It was bad enough keeping the range clean, with black lead polish, the worst job of the week (apart from laundry day).
That’s all from the Harris family for now. Maybe I will revisit them as their family grows, when Thomas and Florence starts school and to see how they deal with the tragedy of war.
A note from me
Firstly, thank you so much for reading. Researching and writing this short series on Kensington Road has been useful therapy for me following the death of my mum earlier this year. Mum was a big fan of my blog (that’s mums for you) and it always got us talking. One area of discussion would lead to even more unanswered questions and so the need for more research. And that curiosity – the need to find out more – is precisely why I write. For years I was so cautious about committing anything that I wrote to print, that much of it stayed on my computer until I deleted it out of frustration and annoyance at my lack of bravery. I am still learning that it doesn’t matter if I don’t know all the answers or if I get something wrong. The advantage of writing a blog is that it can be widely read and people can comment, make suggestions and fill in some of the blanks. Thank you to those who have got in touch already – I am extremely grateful for your input.
Thanks also to
British Newspaper Archive, largely Coventry Herald, Midland Daily Telegraph
David Fry and Albert Smith for photographs and also for their invaluable Earlsdon and Chapelfields Explored (see Part One of this blog)
The Woman Worker for recipes
Coventry Archives for Annual Reports of Medical Officer of Health; Trade Directories; Coventry Municipal Handbooks
Recommended reading for more on domestic life and motherhood in early 20th century Britain
Margaret Llewelyn Davies Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915, Virago edition 1978)
Maud Pember Reeves Round About A Pound A Week (1913, Virago edition 1999))
Robert Roberts The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (1971, Penguin)
To end, a photo of Kensington Road, taken in the last few weeks. I was struck by how much the view down the road will be altered by the addition of the student flats being built in Albany Road, on the site of the old Spencer Club
In the second part of my small study, I am going to introduce a fictional family to tell the continued story of one Coventry street and its residents. The family may not have existed but the details of their lives are based on historical research and it’s a way of taking as close a look at Kensington Road’s earliest years as possible. As with the first post, I welcome comments from readers so that the most accurate portrait of family life can be painted.
Image courtesy of David Fry and Albert Smith
George and Lucy Harris moved into Kensington Road in the autumn of 1909 when George was 27 and Lucy was 25. With them was their eight-month old son, Thomas, and a new arrival was expected in the spring. The couple was relieved to finally move out of Lucy’s parents’ house in Spon End where Lucy had grown up with her five siblings. Although this meant that she was used to the noise and chaos that filled each of its four rooms, starting her married life within those crowded walls had proved a strain on everyone. After the wedding in the summer of 1907, the couple lived there so that they could start saving in earnest for a home of their own. It was a tight squeeze. In order to free up a room for the newly-weds, Lucy’s parents slept downstairs in the living room and her three younger sisters shared the other bedroom. Her elder brother had already left home, for a room in a house near to the newly opened Ordnance Works in Red Lane where worked.
George was not a Coventry kid. He was born in Northampton, left school at 14 and started work on the railways. He was always vaguely restless and listened with interest to his fellow workers’ animated talk about the Coventry cycle factories that were beginning to diversify into motor car production. One Saturday morning, he asked a friend to cover for him for the last hour of work on the tracks near the station, boarded a train to Coventry and made his way to the Humber Works on Lower Ford Street. Dressed in his Sunday suit, George made a good impression on the work’s foreman who understood only too well his keenness to join the men who were part of this transport revolution. Looking beyond a lack of engineering experience, the foreman recognised a willingness to adapt and to learn and hired eighteen year old George on a trial basis.
It was a good decision for the Humber. George was hard working and although his job was initially in cycle production, he was quickly hooked on the excitement felt by the young workers as the company strengthened its development and output of motor vehicles. He found lodgings on the Holyhead Road and it was while cycling back from work, that he first saw Lucy Evans, leaving Williamson’s watch making factory where she worked. A courtship was followed by an engagement, which George insisted should continue until they had saved enough to set up home together. As they walked out together on Sunday afternoons, they noted the progress made to the new streets and houses being developed near Hearsall Common. As they strolled, they speculated about what their future might be like in one of these modest but elegant red brick houses. It took many walks but eventually Lucy persuaded George to set a date for the wedding, by telling him that if they could start their married life with her parents, the money George paid out in lodgings could be put aside. They would, Lucy was quite sure, only have to give a little extra to her mum to cover their contribution to food and fuel. The wedding was at St Thomas’s Anglican Church on The Butts, where Lucy had been baptized in 1884. From girlhood, Lucy had dreamt of a wedding dress of satin crepe -de-chine, trimmed with pearls, finished off with a satin train and tulle veil, with a tiara of orange blossom. She kept her dreams to herself, however, and opted for a simple cream dress with a grey serge coat. A future and a home were more important and the only frivolity Lucy allowed herself was a sheaf of white lilies which everyone agreed set off her outfit perfectly. There was a wedding breakfast of roasted ham, beef and wedding cake at her mum’s and just enough wine and beer to toast the young couple. For a year, the newly-weds saved every penny they could and, when, in the late summer of 1908, they realised that they were going to have a baby, it was clear that they would need to redouble their saving efforts ahead of Lucy leaving her job at Williamsons. Despite her many friends there, Lucy couldn’t wait to turn her back on the factory; she had expected, as did her employers, that she would leave as soon as she was married – as she had seen so many other women doing – but she had stayed in pursuit of achieving her dream of a good, solid home for her family.
Courtesy of David Fry
And then, there it was. In the early summer of 1909, a sign appeared in the window of a house still under construction at the top end of Kensington Road. The notice directed those interested in this or the houses to its immediate left and right to contact Mr Bird, the builder and developer. Lucy immediately loved everything that she could see from the road, from the downstairs bay window, to the tiny tiled porch and the intricate pattern of the line of decorative brickwork below the eaves. When they got back to the house in Spon End, she stood impatiently beside George as he wrote to express their interest in the house. The reply came two days later. Mr Bird asked them to meet his agent at the house that Saturday afternoon and so, leaving baby Thomas with Lucy’s mum, they knocked on the door at 3 o clock. It was love at first sight for Lucy; the house was nearing completion, the walls were plastered and the floorboards were laid. The Minton tiles in the hall were in the process of being laid and added a rich redness to the interior of the house. Compared to the little Spon End house where Lucy had grown up, it seemed palatial. There were two downstairs reception rooms and a kitchen with a generous sized pantry. The builders, said Mr Bird’s agent, were about to install a coal-fired range for cooking and a copper for boiling water. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, the smallest one still big enough, explained the agent, to partition and add a bathroom if they wished. If they wished! Neither Lucy nor George had even considered such luxury and nor did they now. Not only would this add to the weekly rent, it was far beyond their expectations and they dismissed the idea. To have their own outdoor WC and not to be sharing with five other people seemed luxurious enough for them.
The agent, who could see that the couple wanted this house very much, asked them if they had considered owning rather than renting it. George and Lucy’s initial reactions were the same – that such an arrangement could never be for the likes of them. They knew very little of banks and mortgages – this was not the world from which they had come – and so, as Mr Bird’s agent went into sales pitch overdrive, the Harris’s listened with incredulity and learned that with a £30 deposit, they could buy directly from the developer and then pay him nine shillings a week until the full balance of £235 was paid off. Minds reeling, they went back to Spon End to consider their options. They did have £30 in savings but not much more than this and, with the new baby on the way, they were acutely aware of the new expenses to come. Neither liked the idea of removing the only safety net that they had. But how wonderful it would be to own their home and not to be at the mercy of a landlord who might put up the rent without warning or even evict them in favour of a preferred tenant. George was earning a decent wage at the Humber. Work was generally steady; there had been a few periods of short time working and one or two layoffs when sales stalled or declined, depending on the season and the economy, but George had a good reputation with the firm which was expanding and had recently opened new works in Stoke. He was confident as he could be of his continued employment in Coventry. The couple took a deep breath and decided to enter into the agreement with Mr Bird.
The house was ready by early September and the keys were theirs. In the weeks before they moved in, George, Lucy’s father, and a friend from George’s days in lodgings, spent virtually every evening and Saturday afternoon papering the walls and painting the woodwork. Lucy arrived home one day with a pattern book she had picked up from a shop in Bishop Street. Her eye was drawn to a rich blue paper with a design of embossed daisies and tiny strawberries. How good this would look on the downstairs walls. For the nursery she liked a yellow paper covered with leaves and woodland creatures. She knew, however, that neither was in their price range and instead, she happily accepted the need to go instead to the Coventry Decorators’ Supply shop in Queen Victoria Road and pick out some of the cheaper rolls that were end of range. Although this meant that much of the house was decorated in rather plainer colours than she hoped, George surprised her by splashing out on a slightly more expensive cream paper with a textured rose pattern for the front room. For years afterwards, this room was used only when relatives came to visit and on Christmas Day.
Once the house was decorated, Lucy turned her full attention to the furniture and furnishings she wanted. She longed for elegant, brand new things but she knew that there wasn’t enough money to get everything at once. The couple had already acquired a few bits and pieces; wedding gifts, including a willow patterned tea service, had been carefully stored away until they had their own home. Lucy had been left tablecloths and a bedspread by her grandmother as well as an assortment of pots and pans and cutlery. Her father had made the baby’s crib and highchair and there was a bed from her parents’ house for Thomas, once the new baby came along. George’s grandparents in Northampton had left him an elegant dining table with six chairs which was being stored in a friend’s workshop. It was a start. Some more furniture came from an auction – an oak bedstead, a divan suite covered with brown velvet, a tiled washstand and two hearth rugs. Lucy was tempted by the ‘easy terms’ offered by the Coventry Furnishing Company in Fleet Street.
For four shillings a month she might be able to get the pair of walnut dressing tables she had seen in town, priced £4 and four shillings but she knew better than to ask George about it, knowing that he would never consent to buying goods on terms. His biggest worry was becoming ill or having an accident and not being able to work. He was in a trade union but its sickness benefit wouldn’t last long and, despite the advent of state sickness benefit some years later, George remained anxious about buying the house until the final payment was made years later. And nothing was ever bought on tick. Besides, matching bedroom furniture could wait; Lucy was particularly anxious to dress her windows as perfectly as possible, to let the neighbours know that she took pride in appearances, thereby demonstrating her family’s respectability. With material from the market, a friend of her mother’s made ‘lace’ curtains using white filet net with an elaborate border which gave Lucy the elaborate finish she was seeking. Even so, she aimed to replace these with Nottingham lace as soon as funds would allow.
Roller blinds were fitted to all of the bedroom windows and Venetian blinds prevented the prized living room wallpaper from becoming faded. The modern advice to housewives was to let as much natural daylight into the house as possible and Lucy, anxious for the health of her family as well as wanting to have a fashionable home, welcomed the move away from the heavy drapes that has been popular just a few years before.
The house was fitted with gas lighting brackets on each side of the chimney breasts in the main rooms. The only cost for the Harris’s was to choose globes to cover the mantles. There were so many styles but Lucy opted for a combination of plain and frosted glass. Gas was paid for by a penny-in-the-slot meter under the stairs and to keep costs low, the gas was only usually lit in the back downstairs room and the kitchen, with candles and night lights upstairs for years to come.
The next instalment of my study will look at life in Kensington Road for the young couple, with particular focus on Lucy as she grew as a mother and housewife, shopping, cooking and caring for her growing family. There was endless domestic advice given to women on the ‘home hints’ pages of newspapers and magazines. Times were changing but Victorian notions of the Angel of the Hearth were still very apparent, as this article in the Coventry Herald of 1909 makes clear;
Woman makes the atmosphere of a home, and it is for her to decide what the atmosphere shall be. Shame on the woman who does not make it an atmosphere of sunshine and love. Though she may be possessed of the wisdom of Minerva or the beauty of Venus, she is not a good no a worthy woman if she allows her moods and temper to ruin the home life of those dependent upon her for happiness. Woman are apt to excuse themselves, regarding their moods and their tempers by saying that they inherit these peculiarities or that they are the result of sickness or trouble. That is folly. There is no inheritance we cannot overcome if we set ourselves about it and some of the people who have suffered the greatest losses and the greatest trials in life have developed the sweetest characters. It is pure selfishness which permits a woman to indulge in these weaknesses.
Lucy certainly felt the pressure….
All advertisements are from the Coventry newspapers 1908-11 and are courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive.
In the middle of last summer, in a brief window after the end of the first lockdown and before the start of the tier system that we then became so familiar with, I went on a journey. I had an urgent need to walk in the footsteps of some strong women of the past and so I packed my bag and headed off to do the sort of research that I love best. I was entirely solitary. For four days I walked for miles every day; apart from a single visit to an archive, I spoke to almost no one other than to buy food. Each evening I retreated to my base to think without interruption about what I’d discovered during the day. With maps, photos and whilst sitting on my bed eating the boxed meals that the hotel served up during that extraordinary Covid year, I started to work out what I felt I needed to know.
I stayed at the Fulham end of Putney Bridge in south west London. It was the perfect location for my voyage of discovery into the lives of my four great grandmothers – Annie, Amy, Ellen and Elizabeth – who all lived in Putney, Fulham and Chelsea at the turn of the twentieth century. Armed with addresses gleaned from census material and family knowledge, a map and a phone, I looked for houses, workplaces, schools, shops, pubs and churches. The streets were quiet; I had never seen London like this and it made my walks easier than I’d expected without the normal rush of constant movement. Some scenes I remembered from childhood visits to the house in Putney where three generations of women lived together until the 1950s – my great grandmother, grandmother and my mother. Most of the time, however, I made new discoveries, thinking about how the women went about their everyday lives. All of it gave me a sense not just of the familiar but of my place in these women’s traditions. I wanted to know how their lives – like mine was for years – were dominated by thoughts of what they could cook for tea and of how much money was left until pay day. Was everyone ok? Was everything done that needed to be done? Might there be anything left over for a weekend treat for the family? Was there time or energy for an evening stroll or a Sunday trip to the park?
My great grandmothers were working class women; at certain points on my travels, the prosperity that is evident in these districts in the 21st century made it harder to picture the realities of their lives. The Sunlight Laundry in Fulham where Annie and one of her daughters worked has been converted into luxury apartments and is next door to a pub that I suspect is now rather different in feel and style to the one that my great grandfather – perhaps sometimes with Annie – visited, a few minutes’ walk from their house in Querrin Street.
Annie worked here, at what was then the Sunlight Laundry, Fulham
It takes imagination to picture the financial struggles of Ellen, mother of 11, landlady to four lodgers in an 8 roomed rented house in what is now a very upmarket street running between the Kings and Fulham Roads but with a different lens applied, the past does still surface. The spirit of those early 20th century streets and buildings remains – I feel it at least – and although it is easy to be blindsided by gentrification, to gawp at the price tags of London’s houses, it is as impossible to walk around today’s London as it was 100 years ago without realizing that for millions of people, the streets are not paved with gold. Affluence and struggle are present side by side right across the city. London is full of overpriced and done up houses but for the majority of people hardships remain and the anxieties that these induce were, I suspect, all too familiar to my great grandmothers.
Parkfields, Putney. Even when I spent childhood holidays here, there was no bathroom or indoor WC.
All four of my great grandmothers worked and mothered during the years that I wrote about when researching my book on the branches of the all-female trade union, the National Federation of Women Workers. All four could have been members of trade unions. Names of branch members have remained elusive throughout my research and so I have to accept that I will probably never be able to find out if they were union women. There are no family stories of radicalism or activism and to be honest, the odds were stacked against them being trade unionists. Hidden, low paid work such as theirs made it difficult to avoid the gaze of the boss, to find the necessary money for union subs, to find the time to attend branch meetings which were so important in keeping members united and supported and there were too many calls on their time. Annie had the best chance of being unionised when she worked in the industrial laundry and I do know that the Sunlight had a branch of the National Federation of Women Workers. Indoor domestic service, which at least three of them were engaged in before their marriages – placed women directly under the glare and influence of their mistresses and even those who went home at the end of each day, likely did so in a state of exhaustion, making it difficult to act on any chance encounter they might have with a trade union organiser.
At various times the women were laundry workers, domestic servants, shop workers and seamstresses. All of them were wives and mothers. Some of them worked outside the home after the arrival of their children, others found alternative ways to make the money that was needed to pay the rent, to feed and clothe their families. I know with certainty – and not because any one has told me – that all four were the lynchpins, relied upon by everyone, doing the shopping daily, making meals out of what was available and affordable, worrying when a pair of boots was nearing the end of its life, when a pair of trousers had been patched for the last time, when a child’s growth spurt meant saving for new clothes or material, if no hand me downs were forthcoming.
Amy lived here for years, running a fish shop
Modder Place, Putney, where Annie once lived
These are the things that women have done – and continue to do – across the generations. My life has been broadly similar. I don’t know how my great grandmothers felt about their lives or how they dealt with illness, deaths and the insecurities of a life with few – if any – safety nets. They left no written records, they talked to no one about their experiences. All I know is that they lived through it and got through it – somehow. I wasn’t expecting revelation or ghosts to accompany me on my walks around their neighbourhoods. I discovered a few new facts – how much rent they paid, what the rates were, the occupations of those in their streets – but nevertheless I left with a much stronger sense of these women’s lives. This in turn galvanized me at a time when I needed a helping hand. Knowing where my great grandmothers walked, the front doors they went through, the schools their children attended, the shops they visited, gave me a sense of their daily routines. I recalled them in times of trouble –their husbands and sons fighting in the First World War, rationing, soaring costs of living and the constant battle to keep all the plates spinning – but I realized something else when I was standing on their streets. I don’t know if they felt strong. There may have been times when they just wanted to give up, walk out of the door and disappear.
And so I stopped thinking of them as having something that I didn’t and instead simply thought about them as women who might have been just like me. In doing so, I began to understand something about myself that connected me to them in a way that I hadn’t previously seen. I was looking to them for inspiration because I admired their strength in overcoming difficulties and their courage in just getting on with whatever life chucked at them – which seemed to me to be quite a lot. I wasn’t expecting them to speak to me in any other way. But they did. They told me, as I stood by their front gates and outside their workplaces, that it was only right that, when looking at their past strengths, I also acknowledge my own. Events had left me feeling vulnerable and uncertain but I was still there. I was still getting on with it, just as my great grandmothers did before me. I am strong and capable too. One day my great grand daughters might come to see where I lived my life. Like me, they’ll find nothing spectacular but they might, when they need it most, see that it is enough just to get through tough times and enjoy the good ones.
Happy International Women’s Day, sisters.
If you want to find out a little more about the four never-ordinary- women who were my great grandmothers, their First World War stories are available on this site under Women’s Lives in the First World War. Women’s Lives in the First World War – Cathy Hunt historian
Copyright Fry and Smith. This is taken from the top of Kensington Road, looking down towards Albany Road
Here is Part One of a portrait of a Coventry street in the earliest years of its existence. Kensington Road, running between Albany Road and Earlsdon Avenue North, is a thoroughfare I thought I knew well, for it was in one of its 138 houses that I became, for the first time, an owner occupier, in a terraced property that was home to my family for almost ten years. I loved that house from the moment we moved in (our youngest son made his appearance into the world on moving day itself), which was just as well as we had no money to change or replace anything. Lucky for us then that the original window frames hung on long enough to serve us, even though the sash cords were largely useless and the single glazed glass panes defenceless against passionate garden football matches. It was years before we dared peep under the carpet in the narrow hall in case the Minton tiles we hoped would be there proved too badly damaged to expose. But there they were and although we were never able to have them professionally cleaned and restored, we were pleased they were back on show anyway (just visible under a sea of trainers), a proud feature of the original house. We never did risk removing the wood chip wallpaper that adorned the whole house, for fear it was all that was holding the plaster on the walls, yet even through its thick and uneven texture, we could just make out the pipes that served the gas lamps that once lit the front room.
The Minton floor tiles in the hall plus evidence that the growing Hunt family was perhaps in need of a bit more space, although with just five residents, we each had considerably more floor space than many families in 1911, some of whom shared with lodgers and extended family members.
Other parts of the house’s history revealed themselves to us bit by bit. A builder friend showed us how the force of bomb blast had shifted the top half of the house before it settled back into place but now ever so slightly out of kilter with the lower half of the building. Troublesome drains eventually led to an understanding of the extent of fractured sewage and water pipes running under the whole neighbourhood, a consequence of the pounding that Coventry took on the night of 14 November 1940, one of the most intense bombing raid on a British city outside London during the Second World War. Digging at the bottom of the garden one day, my husband’s spade went through the earth and kept on going down, revealing a shaft to ensure fresh air could reach the (long gone) air raid shelter that offered a safer space than the house did to its wartime occupants. I have always loved the story recounted by Ernie Newbold in Portrait of Coventry (1972) of King George Vl’s morale boosting visit to Coventry hours after the 1940 Blitz. Alderman Moseley, at that time Mayor of Coventry, lived at number 39 Kensington Road and, in the course of the King’s tour of the city, brought him to his home. The Mayoress, Moseley’s wife, was evidently taken by surprise, for she was at the back of the house dealing with fallen plaster and broken glass when there was a knock at the front door. She yelled out an instruction to come round the back because the door was off its hinges and then she saw who it was, ‘a tall spare figure in a military greatcoat’. I love the story not so much because of the thought of Mayoress Moseley yelling ‘ come round the back, it’s open’ to the King but because of what it says to me about women’s endless capacity for resourcefulness.
The air raid shelter at the bottom of the next door garden, still there when we moved in in the early 1990s
When we finally accepted that we had grown so much that we had run out of space and needed to move (albeit not far away), I cried when our Kensington Road front door closed behind us for the last time. Nearly two decades later, the Covid lockdowns of 2020/1 provided me with an unexpected opportunity to stay and work locally and to go for walks which took me on occasion back to this road which I held so much affection for. On some days, the traffic was so light that I could walk down the middle of what is normally a busy road and take photographs quite safely. It brought to mind a story I was told by Charles Evans, who came to live in Kensington Road not long after it was developed. As a boy, he and his siblings used to attach a very long rope to a garden gate on each side of the road. The rope, used for mammoth skipping games, needed untying only a few times in any one day, if a car or delivery vehicle needed to get past. A far cry then, from modern car ownership; when we lived there it was considered something of a triumph to be able even to park in the street.
Copyright Fry and Smith. This view is taken near the junction with Westwood Road and is looking up the road towards Earlsdon Avenue North
One of the results of those local walks this past year is this blog, produced with the help of what I already had to hand – census material, newspaper archives and a good collection of books on Coventry’s history. There is – I know – much more still to discover in building plans, regulations and rates books, all to be explored when life is back to normal with archives offices and libraries open once again. I have thought long and hard about whether to post this, as it is so clearly unfinished but after years, I am finally beginning to understand that if I don’t put things out there, they will remain on the hard drive of my computer and running around my head but of no use to anyone. So this is a brave effort on my part to share and it comes with a plea; if you have any information, plans, deeds or stories about the street and its residents, please do get in touch with me so that the story can be expanded and enriched. I make no claim that Kensington Road was a typical Coventry street; the characteristics of the city have always been too diverse for it to be that. It is just a story of everyday life in early twentieth century Coventry.
2021: The neat lines and edges of the photograph above are gone and instead cars are parked nose to tail
Development
The houses in Kensington Road were built between 1907 and 1910 on land sold by the Sir Thomas White Charity to the Newcombe Estates Company. This development company was responsible for the streets of terraced housing now variously referred to as Hearsall or North Earlsdon and situated between the mid 19th century districts of Earlsdon and Chapelfields. The best – and also the most visual – description and analysis of the development, which began in 1904 with the development of Newcombe Road, can be found in David Fry and Albert Smith’s Earlsdon and Chapelfields Explored (Simanda Press 2011). They explain how the land was sold in stages to the Company and how, from there, it was sold on again to individual builders who in turn bought plots large enough to build several houses. In April 1907, in a column called ‘Expanding Coventry’, the Coventry Herald announced plans for new buildings including 11 houses in Kensington Road for Mr W Higgins, 20 for Mr C.J. Smith, 13 for Mr C.F. Woodhall and 10 for Mr T.F. Bird. A first glance down the road seems to suggest uniformity but a slow walk along it shows precisely how it was shaped by the piecemeal development; here’s a run of houses with flat roofed bay windows, there’s another with small, pitched roofs over the bays and extending over the front door. Some houses are entirely flat fronted and a few more have bay windows on both levels.
Copyright Fry and Smith
With the exception of one or two larger houses built on corner plots, the houses were built with two reception rooms, kitchen and/or scullery and (on the whole) three bedrooms. Some had entrance halls, others opened straight into the living room. The original specification for the majority of the houses was an outside WC next to the coal shed and all the houses had back access, via a series of alleyways, with gates to each property. This ensured that coal could be delivered without the need for it to be tramped through or stored in the house. I know I would have been particularly pleased with that, given the dirt and the dust involved in bringing in the coal.
A view of the original outbuildings that were built at the rear of the houses
The outhouses in ‘our’ house had been replaced by a downstairs bathroom. Here you can see where the windows had been bricked up. in the left hand corner is the Belfast sink, rescued from the renovation of the house next door, plus the chimney pot removed from our roof
Using the 1911 Census of England and Wales, we can see which houses had six as opposed to five rooms. It’s important to note that in the room count for each entry, bathrooms and sculleries are excluded. This does make it more difficult to know which of the houses were originally fitted with bathrooms or added them subsequently. There is some useful evidence in the local press, such as the notice of a sale by auction of number 26 Kensington Road in 1912, after the death of the owner occupier. This house was described as having a forecourt, a good piece of garden ground at the rear with back approach, 3 bedrooms, a fitted bathroom and WC, front and back sitting rooms, kitchen, scullery, pantry, coalhouse and WC. The deceased owner was a 71 year old widow who lived alone in the property with a servant. Neither servants nor sole occupants living ‘on their own means’ were the norm on this working class street of workers, families and lodgers so perhaps the bathroom at number 26 was added as something of a luxury feature. When selling newly built houses, builders often made it clear that finishings could be added at the purchaser’s request, to suit their budget and tastes, rising from a basic price in the region of £270 in 1909. By the time we moved into our house in the early 1990s, a bathroom had been added to the back of the kitchen, where once the outside WC and coal shed had stood. Upstairs, the third (back) bedroom showed signs that it – or much more likely a divided section of it – had once been a bathroom, but without access to any documentation, I cannot be certain that the bathroom was an original feature (although I suspect that it was).
This advertisement shows that builders were willing to provide the finishings that buyers wanted
I recall another conversation with Charles – the young skipper – who moved into the road in 1912. According to the census of the previous year, his family’s house had five rooms; Charles told me that it had a scullery and I regret not having asked him what made him describe it as a scullery as opposed to a kitchen. On the whole, sculleries were for food preparation, washing dishes and doing laundry and were not big enough to count as living or even cooking space, thus distinguishing them from kitchens with a range and even a table around which family members gathered for meals and domestic jobs. I have not yet been able to go and see any plans of the houses but I have turned to Fry and Smith for some help. They include a floorplan for a substantial terraced house in Albany Road which had both kitchen and scullery marked out. There is also a plan for a small (and much older) cottage in Warwick Street, showing the architect’s plans for its extension in 1911. This adds space for a scullery and pantry but with no mention of kitchen. My Kensington Road kitchen originally had a fireplace along the back wall of the house and small though the room was, the six rooms recorded on the census suggests that this had always been regarded as the property’s kitchen, with a walk in pantry under the stairs.
Selling the Houses
This advertisement appeared in the local press in the autumn of 1909. There is no mention of a bathroom
Once the houses were nearing completion, builders used various methods to try to sell them. In the autumn of 1908, Mr Taylor of 65, Butts, put five houses on the market at a combined price of £1,100 (although they were also available singly), presumably hoping to sell to a landlord who would then let to tenants. T.F. Bird, a young builder and contractor (born in Dudley but by 1911 living with his wife in Earlsdon Street), who built extensively in Earlsdon and Hearsall, placed the following ad in the local paper in 1909:
“An Englishman’s Home” should be his own. Hundreds of our fellow townsmen realise this and instead of paying rent they buy their own houses and save the rent. Why not do likewise?
TF Bird seeks to make this possible for all. Call and see his houses in Kensington Road. They are designed for you. You can either buy them outright or by the payment of a deposit of £30 and the balance at eight shillings and four pence per week.
It’s interesting to see an advertisement from over 100 years ago playing on the British obsession with buying as opposed to renting, which is today as strong as ever. I presume that those who bought from the builder in 1909 remained leaseholders until they had paid off their debt, whereas those who had a more conventional mortgage were immediate freeholders. David Fry and Albert Smith note that owner occupiers lived in half of the road’s houses, a much higher percentage than some of the streets that surrounded it. I need to do more work to find out the average cost of weekly renting but I did see that a landlord with a house in nearby Newcombe Road was hoping to get seven shillings and six pence per week from tenants.
And now for those who lived in the street.
The Peopleand the Census
There was an urgent need for housing in Coventry by the early 20th century; the city’s population had risen from 46,563 in 1881 to 106,349 in 1911. The craft industries that had dominated Coventry’s economy in the nineteenth century – ribbon weaving and watch making – were both in decline. But new industries were changing the face of the city, providing employment for Coventry born folk and for those attracted in to the city by openings in bicycle and – increasingly – motor car manufacture. Both were predominately male occupations and by 1911, along with the associated industry of machine tool making, made up the largest category of employment for men in Coventry. Across the city some 13,000 men were employed in these industries out of a total of 37,222 working men.
The 1911 census reveals that in Kensington Road, the motor, cycle and machine tool industries accounted for around 40% of male heads of household, lodgers, sons and other male family members and this was the single largest category of male employment in the street. By contrast, only one young woman in the road – the daughter in a household – is expressly recorded as working in the cycle industry (across the city over 1000 women were employed in the cycle and motor industries). Of the Kensington Road men working in these new industries, over 60% had not been born in Coventry; some came expressly to take jobs in workshops and factories where wages were relatively high. In 1913 a strike and campaign initially at the Humber, Daimler and Ordnance factories, resulted in a minimum wage of 26 shillings and 6 pence for a 53-hour week. This was as much as five shillings higher than the average paid at that time to a general labourer. These were undoubtedly good wages for Coventry’s factory workers, generally classified as semiskilled, and the agreement set a basic rate that was higher than anywhere else in the country, and on a par with London rates. The skilled engineers (the craftsmen – those who had served apprenticeships) may well have been somewhat irked by the fact that overtime pay for these semiskilled workers was paid at the same rate as their own.
That these industries were attractive to relatively young men is evident in Kensington Road, where the average age of men thus employed was around 30. The majority of these were householders, many married with children, some of whom – the vast majority boys – also went into this work. This certainly fits with the findings of a study that found that in 1911 over 75% of those in the cycle and motor industries were under the age of 35, and over 5000 were under 25.
Although employment in the city’s engineering factories dominated, there was still quite a range of employment in Kensington Road. Among men the next largest category of work (although at around 12% it was considerably less than engineering) was that carried out by craft and tradesmen – builders, decorators, carpenters and gas fitters were, with all the house building going on in the city, generally in high demand. In addition, there were railway workers, shop workers, a few white collar workers – clerks and insurance agents – and a few professional workers, including an accountant and a very few teachers.
Kensington Road is full of patterns on brickwork
The crafts of old Coventry – watch making and ribbon weaving – were both represented but in small numbers. The once thriving watch industry, so prevalent in Earlsdon and Chapelfields, was clinging on but the average age of the men thus employed (for on this street no women were recorded as working in watch making) was, at about 42, more than a decade older than the average in engineering. There was just one apprentice to the industry and whereas one might expect this to be because of local connections to watch making, he was in fact a young man whose father worked as a nightwatchman in a machine tool factory, the family having moved to Coventry from the south west of England. The husband and father who lived in ‘our’ house was a watch dial painter, and at 35, he was a relatively young worker in the trade although, unlike the apprentice, he was a Coventry born man who came from a watchmaking family.
Ribbon weaving, once such a proud feature of the city, had suffered a devastating and irreparable blow in the 1860s and although it remained, it had, by 1911, come to be regarded more as women’s work than employment dominated by skilled male craftsmen. What did this mean? That the women employed in the industry (of which, across the city, there were far more than men) received low wages, a consequence of it now being a woman dominated industry which in turn acted as a deterrent to men because of the low wages. There is just one man on the street – a silk dyer – working in the silk trade and a 77 year old ribbon weaver (despite the fact that by 1911 the State had introduced old age pensions, this man is described as ‘unable to work’ rather than retired. The fear of destitution lingered long in people’s minds). We need to be wary of assuming that the work had become de-skilled; true, the days of master weavers working in their homes with the help of their families was long gone, but among the few young women in Kensington Road described on the 1911 census as working in the silk industry, there is evidence of specialist work, including silk blocking and pearling.
Of the houses in Kensington Road that are listed as having male heads, around 70 show that no occupation was recorded for their wives. There has sometimes been a temptation amongst commentators to conclude from such statistics that married women did not need to work because they were the wives of relatively well-paid male workers. This may have been the case for some families, particularly because of decent wages in the Coventry engineering industries. But if we look again, the census also reveals that of the households where women were not working outside the home, nearly half had lodgers, or accommodated one or more extended family member. Men of various occupations – including engineering – lived in houses with lodgers and there is little doubt that the work of ‘doing’ for the lodger would have fallen almost entirely on the women of the household. Having a lodger was certainly no easy way to make money. During these early years of the 20th century, the local press is full of columns advertising rooms, such as this from 1909:
Board-residence Vacancy for Gentleman Boarder 43 Kensington Road. Healthy situation. 16 minutes Broadgate. Penny tram and motor bus stage. Every comfort. No children. Moderate terms.
Another at number 8 Kensington Road offered sole occupancy of a bedroom, a shared sitting room and a bath. Prices were not generally advertised, as the terms of residence were for private negotiation; some lodgers requested an evening meal whereas others would eat at the works canteen and opt for a more self-contained arrangement (the provision of meals and services was what usually distinguished a boarder from a lodger), perhaps needing only to share the family kitchen to make tea or light suppers. Boarders and lodgers alike added considerably to the laundry load and to housework tasks and of course there was the loss of family privacy – a stranger at the table for Sunday dinner, perhaps. There was the inconvenience of another person using the WC and washing facilities, the need for more hot water and heat. Kensington Road boarders and lodgers were overwhelmingly male and in Kensington Road the very few women lodging included a dressmaker, a nurse, a piano teacher and an elementary school teacher (living in a household where the daughter was also a teacher). Suitable lodgings for women workers were difficult to find during these years and there were public meetings organised by concerned campaigners to establish all-female lodgings where women could feel safe and secure. This was put forward as a moral as well as a practical issue (it being declared a ‘disgrace’ that Coventry had nowhere where women could seek lodgings other than newspaper columns and shop noticeboards), for the need to preserve women’s modesty and privacy in mixed sex boarding houses or households troubled many who sought to improve the lives of young and single women workers. When young women could no longer live with their families or had left their home towns in search of work, what they needed was to see advertisements like this one, for ‘superior apartments for one or two young ladies: board optional. No other boarders kept’. They still of course had to take the meaning of ‘superior’ on trust.
In this short section of the street, it is possible to see three distinct styles of houses, as developed by those who bought up plots of land
Taking in lodgers or being recorded on the census as ‘helping’ with the family business (I will talk more in the next blog about this) are all signs that extra income was needed to help make ends meet, to pay the rent or mortgage and to feed growing families. There was always a need to be as resourceful as possible, where work outside the home was not possible, practical, desired or permitted (by husbands).
Amongst women who were heads of households, over half were widows, some of whom living with children who were working, one who was running a shop ( I will talk more about shop work in the next blog), another who had turned being a landlady into more of a formal arrangement and was letting out apartments. Of the single women heads of household, one acted as her sister’s housekeeper (the sister worked for a tailoring company) and two others were dressmakers, working at home. A couple of married women were recorded as housekeepers or carrying out domestic duties; I like to think that they insisted on these descriptions to show that their unpaid labour was of immense value but in reality it probably depended on who filled in the form or on how the given information was interpreted by the enumerator once it had been collected.
Most of the women listed as being in work were the daughters and female relations of heads of household. It is – because of the small numbers – much more difficult to try to analyse women’s occupations in Kensington Road in relation to the broad trends of Coventry employment in 1911 than it is for its men. It is just possible to see, however, that the majority of Kensington Road women did very broadly reflect the city wide trends, which identify domestic work of all kinds and work in the textile industry as the main categories for employed women. There was a handful of women working as servants or housekeepers in Kensington Road but with the exception of two (as far as I can see), they worked at home for their families. In addition, some women in the street were employed on different types of factory work, including cardboard box making and there were a few clerks and teachers.
If you’ve survived my riff on statistics and are still interested, do watch out for the next part of this blog when I’ll take a look at life on the street and offer some information on setting up home, buying and acquiring furniture and all the other things that make a house a home. I locate the street’s shops and think about food prices, meal preparation and lots more besides.
This appeared in the Coventry Herald in 1913
Huge thanks to David Fry and Albert Smith for allowing me to use their images of Kensington Road
Thanks also to the British Newspaper Archive
The study that I referred to when discussing the ages of Coventry’s new workers is by Brad Beaven and John Griffiths and is called Citizenship in the Industrial Boomtown: Narratives of work and leisure in Britain 1880-1914
Ernie Newbold’s Portrait of Coventry was published in 1972 by Robert Hale
I’m currently preparing a series of blogs about life in a working class Coventry street just over 100 years ago. I hope that the first of these articles will make its appearance in the next week or so. In the meantime, I am absorbed in – and far too distracted by – local press advertisements and references to the running of house and home. Today, feeling more than a little lockdown glum in the gloom of a wet mid February, I came across some delightful advice included on ‘The Women’s Page’ of the Coventry Herald 110 years ago. Entitled ‘How to Be Happy’, it grabbed my attention on a page full of subjects such as how tuberculosis is infectious (and how to render sputum harmless) and why you shouldn’t overheat your house (the heated air is detrimental to the mucous membrane of the nose). There are some cures for insomnia which range from taking a hot bath, using a hot-water bottle, reading a particularly dull book to the rather more specific suggestion of covering the eyes and ears with wadding. In a similar vein there is free medical advice provided to those writing in to the column. ‘Anxious M’ is told to ‘springe out the nostrils’ with a mixture of hot water and carbolic acid every morning, and sounding even more alarming than that is the advice given to ‘Concerned’ who is told that, ‘There is no connection between the discharge and the operation. Use a warm douche containing a little Condy’s fluid twice daily’. I think it’s best we don’t know what had been asked. I feel pretty sorry for the (presumed) infant of another Anxious who faced a cotton reel being strapped to his back using tapes passing round his waist to prevent him from lying on his back.
Also on the page are recipes for Crecy soup (a thoroughly boiled and sieved concoction of carrots, turnips, celery, onion, ham slices and beef broth), boiled mince roll (sewn into a cloth), mutton and macaroni (also boiled), Scotch eggs ( using up scraps of cold or sausage meat) and apple snow, served with redcurrant jelly and thin (boiled) custard. There is a pattern for a Spring skirt and a sketch for a an Easter bride’s dress.
To make this skirt for the spring, about 3 yards of material was needed
The adverts are well chosen for the page and include mangle rollers, chimney sweeping, ladies blouses and Allinson’s Wholemeal Bread, available from the city Health Food Stores. There is a children’s column offering mathematical surprises and stories from around the world about the moon (women readers of newspapers and journals were used to sharing ‘their’ section with children, making sure that the loftier matters of politics and sport were kept far apart from household cleaning, fashion, food – oh and the raising of children. At least ‘Concerned’ could be reasonably assured that her ailment wasn’t likely to be read out at breakfast time).
The Easter Bride
The humour in the jokes section is cheesy enough for groans; “Now Patsy, would it be proper to say, ‘You can’t learn me nothing’? ” Patsy, “Yes, ‘m “. Teacher, “Why?” Patsy, “Cause you can’t”.
And on that note, here are the words of wisdom given to the women of Coventry in 1911 not just on how to be happy but how to stay that way, in ten steps:
‘Keep cheerful. Hunting trouble ruins more nerves than trouble when it arrives
Keep alert. Mental ruts make more hypochondriacs than does overwrought imagination
Keep physically active. The alert woman who hates to move is usually the greatest growler about her health
Keep clean. The close connection between the pores of the skin and general health is not considered carefully enough
Keep interested. There is nothing like a fad or an object in life to put aches and pains into the background
Keep your feet warm. more cold is taken through the ankles than in any other way, so do not run in low shoes all winter
Keep away from drugs. Walk more and take medicine less
Keep a curb on your appetite. Over-eating is the menace of the age
Keep out of debt. There is nothing like money troubles to worry one to death. Care will kill the nine-lived cat and what gives more care than a budget of debts with no money to settle?
Keep smiling’.
Lucky those, then, who could settle their debts. In my forthcoming series, I will be looking at the people who lived in the street I have chosen for the study, examining their occupations, their wages and how they got by. In the early twentieth century Coventry’s population was growing, new industries were providing employment not just for the local workforce but for those from other towns and cities, attracted by the prospect of a decent wage and a secure future. I want to look inside the census statistics, curious to get as close as possible to the realities of daily life. That’s if, of course, I stop getting distracted by discoveries along the way….
The page is from the Coventry Herald, March 31 1911
I am delighted to share here the exhibition that I have curated for the TUC. Using images and materials from the TUC Library, it marks the centenary of the death of Macarthur, on 1 January 1921 and celebrates her work as an inspiring trade union leader. Please join me if you can on Friday 8th January at midday for the official launch of the exhibition and for my talk on the life and work of Macarthur. You can register for this free event here
I have always delighted in discovering a photograph of the person I am researching and when I do, I find myself reading all sorts of things into what I see. A look of determination, of apprehension, of confidence, I try to match the photograph to what I know of the person. That I do this came to me very forcefully the other day when I discovered a photograph of myself that I had never seen before. Taken in the early 1960s, when I was around 2, what first grabbed my attention was that the image captured three generations of the same family – the infant me, my mum and my grandma. As I am currently researching motherhood in the 20th century, looking at change and continuity in the lives of women within the same family, the photo was like gold dust to me. My mum is watchful, either appreciating the view or – more likely – keeping an eye on my older brother, then around 4. My grandma might be asleep or just able to be more relaxed than her daughter, no longer on constant duty and determined to get value out of her deck chair, hired by the hour (We only ever had deckchairs when my grandparents came down to visit us from London and they made me cross, I think because I knew that I’d be expected to stay nearby and lose the freedom that I so loved on the beach).
And then there is me. On the day that I looked at this photograph I saw a feisty little girl, strong, sturdy legged, hand on hip, standing independent of the two women. I couldn’t get this picture out of my head for the rest of the day and I wondered why. I eventually saw that depending on how I feel and what is going on in my life, I can look at a photo of myself in many different ways. Was the girl on the beach that day – or in that minute – more fractious than bold? Worried about something rather than seizing the day? And if I can guess so little about a moment in my own life, how can I ever be sure what is going on in the photos that I come across in my work? So, as a direct result of discovering the beach photo, this blog has two strands. It offers some observations about the use of photographs in historical research and then it takes one example – the girl on the beach -to illustrate the many values that thinking about a photograph can have, despite our uncertainties about what it may or may not depict.
I have written two biographies, one of the relatively well-known trade union leader Mary Macarthur (1880-1921) and one of Alice Arnold, lesser known trade union organiser and Coventry politician (1881-1955). For both women, photographs were in pretty short supply, so there was always excitement when I came across one that I hadn’t seen before. Immediately I started trying to read myriad scenarios into the circumstances of the fresh image. Sometimes this was relatively easy; there were official portraits taken of both women, their role at the time being key to the image, a formal look required. Then there were photographs that appeared in the press, taken at various public events or appearances. Sometimes the woman is looking directly into the camera, sometimes she is less aware that she is being photographed. When looking at these images, I am able to use my knowledge of the subject’s life to work out what else she had going on at the time, I speculate about what she was focusing on, the attention she was giving or the importance she was attaching to the event.
Let’s look at a few images:
Courtesy of TUC Library Collections
This one was taken when Mary Macarthur was just 23 years old. It shows her as a delegate at what might have been her first international conference – in Berlin – on behalf of the British Women’s Trade Union League. What I think I see is a determined, animated young woman off on a great adventure at the International Congress of Women. Mary, born in Scotland, had only been in London for a year where she had started her new work with the League, living independently, far away from her family and full of ambition and reforming zeal. She wanted to make a difference and, based on the impressive start she had made to her trade union career in Scotland, she believed that she could.
But do I really know that Mary was fizzing with excitement at the prospect of the conference? Of course not. I can only project what I think I know about her onto the image. Was she fully at ease in her new world? Was the bold look that I think I detect here actually one of defiance in the face of intimidation at the unfamiliarity of new circumstances? Mary attended the Congress with her older friend and colleague, Margaret Bondfield who recalled that the two of them felt quite uncomfortable at the sight of its grand dinners, ‘orchids by the hundred for table decoration, sprays for each guest, many courses and six glasses of wine, etc., beside each plate’. They listened to platform speeches, debates and discussions on education, women’s professions and industries, social aims and institutions and the legal position of women. Yet, according to Bondfield, the two friends, whilst very impressed with the fact that ‘nearly everyone who addressed the sections was a professor, or a Doctor of Law or Medicine or Science’, found it hard to find enough delegates who had their own practical experience of industrial working conditions, concluding that ‘salvation for the workers’ would not be delivered from the learned, but ‘must come from themselves’. So perhaps Mary’s look was after all one of youthful confidence, reflecting her belief that she had what it took to make the difference so badly needed.
Here is a very different image of Mary Macarthur, taken thirteen years later when she (far right) was on the platform of a Women’s Labour League conference in Bristol.
Courtesy TUC History Online
Unlike the previous image, I have never used this one when writing or talking about Macarthur, because it is so ambiguous (even if the banner in front of the stage makes us wonder – tongue in cheek – if the women speakers are all sozzled). But there is plenty to speculate about. 18 months into the First World War, are these socialist campaigners taking a breather between speeches from the relentless work needed to keep industrial women safe and on decent pay, to organise them into trade unions, to ensure that army allowances payable to wives and children were adequate, to support widows and carers, to help women make ends meet during a period of spiralling costs of living? Or is just hot in the room? The end of a long day, the start of another? When this was taken in early 1916, Mary Macarthur had a young baby – was she suffering from nights of interrupted sleep? On top of her usual heavy workload – now at least doubled by the pressures of war – she had travelled from London to attend this conference, which presumably involved either bringing her daughter with her or arranging childcare at home. In other words, once again, we can read into the photo what we want to see – and still be wide of the mark.
Courtesy Coventry Archives
In the case of my other subject, Coventry Labour councillor and trade unionist Alice Arnold, scarcely any photos survive, apart from the one taken when she became Coventry’s first woman mayor in 1937 and a few that appeared in the press during her term of office, at civic ceremonies or performing public duties as her city’s representative. Whilst there are a few portraits of Mary Macarthur as a child and a very young woman, Alice Arnold’s early years were dominated by acute poverty and it is unlikely that there was ever available money for a family trip to the photographer’s studio, such as this one taken of the Macarthur sisters.
The Macarthur sisters. Copyright of TUC Library Collections
Alice Arnold became well known not just for her radical politics and her outspokenness but for her aversion to wearing civic robes when she became a city councillor and for an apparent lack of interest in smart clothes. She believed that the official gowns and hats created a barrier between her and her constituents although she consented to wear the mayoral garb when she became the city’s first woman mayor in 1937.
What was she thinking when the mayoral photograph was taken? Was there awkwardness at sitting for the official civic portrait or resentment at the need to don the robe? One or two oral history accounts refer to Arnold’s deep pride at representing her city during this year, so perhaps it is a sense of duty and determination to get things right that we see here? Whatever her look may or may not tell us, the importance and significance of the image is that it shows the first woman to hold the office of mayor since Coventry received its royal charter in 1345.
This next image of Alice Arnold is unlike any other that I have found of her. She was 56 when she became mayor and almost all photos of her are from that year – 1937 – or later. This one, however, is of a younger woman.
Although it appeared in the papers when she was first elected to the Council in 1919, I wonder if it dates from the First World War, when Alice became a trade union organiser for the Workers’ Union. She later remarked that ‘her heart and soul were with the labour movement’ and her 14 year career with the Union, supporting and organising women workers gave her as much personal satisfaction as being able to represent Coventry people during over 30 years on the City Council. I don’t know but this photograph doesn’t suggest to me that this was a woman who did not care about her appearance. She looks professional, well-groomed and well dressed. Perhaps the references to her perceived lack of sartorial care were wide of the mark. Although Alice left behind the extreme poverty of her childhood, she lived much of her life in straitened circumstances, an unmarried working-class woman in poor health on a low income. There was little spare cash for a varied wardrobe, whether she would have liked one or not.
I will carry on using photographs in my research because whatever we don’t know can help us to try to understand better, add texture to our writing and help us to question all that goes on in women’s lives. if they help us to look more deeply at everything that was happening in the subject’s life when the photograph was taken, then that will surely make us better and bolder researchers and biographers.
And so I turn once more to the girl on the beach. I willed myself to see strength of mind and body in that little girl. I began to wonder what traces of her, seemingly wanting to do things her own way, were still there in the woman looking back at her forgotten young self. On the day that I found the photo, I didn’t think that there were all that many. I feared that the essence of that girl had been left behind, perhaps not on that south coast beach but somewhere along the way, her self-confidence chipped away at by a whole host of things that happened as she grew. By the time that girl was ten and still had sturdy legs, she was beginning to fret about them, wishing them to be smaller and pencil thin like those of some of her school friends. Sturdy and strong was not, at that time, a look she wanted the world to see. Small was how she wished to be.
Behaving like a girl was another lesson that had yet to be learned. This was not just about how she looked, dressed and carried herself but about her attitude. That feisty beach look (if it really was) became harder to detect as the years passed. I toned myself down, carried myself with care. There was a tension between speaking out and worrying about doing so. I became ever more circumspect in how I spoke and I watched what I said. I told myself that I should be quieter because (or in case) my opinions were uninformed and of less value than of those out there in the world.
It seems to me that all too often girls start off with confidence that is subsequently eroded, making them worry about being themselves – too bright, too loud, too big, too much – prompting them over time to tone down, hold back, agree more, become smaller or less. Boys too can lose their way, be unsure of who they are and make use of masks and constructed personas to give illusions of assurance. The pressures on men to behave in certain ways are immense but I think that the demands placed upon both men and women by society are often different, gender-based ones. Men are less likely than women to be told to be quieter, to keep their opinions to themselves, to take up less room.
Over the years, many events and situations have threatened my sense of who I am. But after looking at my beach photo, I think it is time for the girl on the beach to rediscover and reclaim her boldness. She does have something to say and she will say it. If she wants to be loud she can be and she will be. She has opinions and that is ok. Opinionated is not the dirty word she thought it was. She talks; she does not talk too much. People don’t need to listen to her if they don’t want to but she has the right to speak and to write. The things that she writes about have value, sometimes because they add to what is known and – just as important – because they offer a view of the world from a different – and unique – perspective. These things are ok. The photo of the little girl served as a reminder that I do not need permission to be myself. The girl on the beach is strong. And she’s going to be alright.
Here is a tale of an incident in the strange life of a historian whose study is always in a dreadful muddle. A simple (or completely weird) coincidence resulted in this short blog.
As I sat at my desk in the afternoon with a cup of tea, reading the news (there you go, I was already distracted from the work I was supposed to be doing) about potential strike action by GMB members at Burton’s Biscuits in Edinburgh, a piece of paper fell off my ‘filing’ pile and fluttered to the floor. Stooping to retrieve it, I saw that it was an appeal for funds to sustain 30 women employed by MacKenzie & MacKenzies’ Biscuit Makers in Edinburgh in 1908. Wondering by now what year I was actually in was enough to get me off my chair and start digging around in folders of research notes that go back years. This is the result.
First, the piece of paper that fell off the desk:
This is from the Gertrude Tuckwell Collection, TUC Library
The women, in the icing department (referred to – as female labour so often was – as girls by the press and by their union) were told on 15 January 1908 that new piece-work rates were to be introduced in their section. In effect, these amounted to a reduction of around 8 pence a day, which would bring some of the women’s pay down by as much as 30 per cent. The women alleged that they were given just a few minutes to digest the news, clearly in the expectation that they would agree it and carry on working. Deeply concerned, however, that if they accepted the new rates, more reductions would follow, the women walked out. This principled stand was a very bold move by a group of low paid workers, over half of whom appear at that point to have been either very new trade union members or not members at all. As such, those women were not yet entitled to union strike pay.
Quick to offer help was the Edinburgh branch of the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW). This all – female union, established for women who worked in some of the worst paid industries in the country – and considered by many in the labour movement to be too difficult to organise – was barely two years old but its fighting tactics had already begun to improve pay and conditions for women workers across Britain and its membership was on the rise. The Federation’s HQ was in London but its founder was the indefatigable Glasgow-born Mary Macarthur (1880-1921). She had cut her union teeth in Scotland when she was still a very young woman, before moving south in 1903 and becoming secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League. It was under the umbrella of this organisation, which aimed to strengthen women’s trade unionism nationally, that the NFWW was formed in 1906. Its very first branch had been, in fact, formed in Edinburgh during a dispute at a paper bag factory, which ended with the women returning to work on their own terms. The branch quickly came to the attention of the Edinburgh Trades Council whose members were ready and willing to give it much welcomed support when the MacKenzie & MacKenzies’ women walked out in early 1908.
The president of the Edinburgh Federation branch, Mrs Lamont, had been on hand to support the paper bag workers in 1906 and her reputation as a dedicated activist was recognised by Mary Macarthur, who entrusted her with the vice-presidency of the national NFWW. At the same time as repeated – and futile – attempts to negotiate with the management at MacKenzie & MacKenzies’ went on, the local labour movement helped not only to recruit new members into the Edinburgh NFWW branch but to help with the urgent need to provide them with strike funds. The Trades Council deplored what it claimed was just the latest reduction to be introduced by MacKenzie & MacKenzies in just three years. It feared that this latest proposed cut would reduce the wages of even the most expert workers, many of whom had been with the firm for between six and 11 years, to about nine shillings a week. Enough was collected from across the national labour movement and from well -wishers to ensure that all strikers received 5 shillings a week until they were eligible for strike benefit from the NFWW. For some of the women, this represented half of their usual weekly wage and so, although on its own, it was nowhere near enough to live on, it may have stopped some of them from having to seek help from the parish, from charity, family or from money lenders.
New union though the NFWW was, the tactics used by its leadership were effective right from the start. Mary Macarthur ensured that in every dispute her union was involved in, meticulous research was undertaken to make sure that all facts were fully investigated and that organisers understood the characteristics of the local economy. Once this was done, it was on to a campaign of naming and shaming in the hope of humiliating a firm into backing down. In the case of the biscuit makers, the union issued a circular to be sent out to 200 or so shareholders of MacKenzie & MacKenzies, highlighting the management’s continued refusal to settle the dispute and emphasising the implications of paying such low wages to its workforce. It also let it be known that MacKenzies’ was paying considerably less than two other local employers engaged in the same type of work.
The Federation set about attracting the support of some prominent names to appear on platforms at public meetings or to make known their sympathy with the cause, as did Lady Barbara Steel, the Scottish social and suffrage campaigner, who also contributed to the strike fund. Soon after the strike began, Thomas Richards, trade unionist and Labour MP for Wolverhampton, was in Edinburgh giving an impassioned speech on behalf of the strikers. Reported in The Scotsman, Richards expressed his outrage that MacKenzie & MacKenzies, supplying biscuits not just to the Royal Household but to the House of Commons, was in fact nothing more than a firm of sweaters. He told his audience that if girls sold their labour to any employer, they ought to be able to earn enough to keep them in comparative comfort, good clothing and have enough left over to put by for a rainy day. The failure to pay the women a living wage was, in his view, nothing short of un-Christian behaviour. His speech chimed perfectly with the NFWW’s ongoing national campaign to highlight the immorality of paying scandalously low wages to women workers and it proved a highly effective way of raising money to support strikers. By the time the NFWW embarked on perhaps its most famous strike – that of the women chain makers of Cradley Heath in 1910, fighting for the country’s first minimum wage – it had acquired a good few years of experience of these tactics. In Edinburgh in 1908 a total of £103 1 shilling and 4 pence was collected by the local labour movement for the biscuit icers. Of this amount just over a quarter came from the Federation.
The financial and moral support kept the women out on strike into the Spring. The Trades Council praised their spirit of comradeship and recorded with pride that despite its length, the strike had remained solid. Several attempts to negotiate with MacKenzie & MacKenzies were made but the firm remained adamant that its proposals would not mean wage reductions for its employees. Even threats to raise the question in Parliament or to kick up a national stink about the behaviour of the Royal biscuit making establishment did nothing to lead to a change of heart. By June, according to Edinburgh Trades Council, the fund was helping just four of the strikers because all others had found work elsewhere. There was at least pride in the fact that none of the women had returned to MacKenzie and MacKenzies. The NFWW’s Annual Report for 1908 recorded that year as a trying one for the Edinburgh branch (there was another – more successful – strike, this time at a paper bag factory) but nonetheless it had managed to increase its membership overall. In the next few years, with the help of some brilliant women activists and with the continued support of the Trades Council, the branch strengthened and grew. Such progress, however, could never be taken for granted. The NFWW did all that it could do protect its members from employers who intimidated, threatened or sacked those regarded as ringleaders and troublemakers. Its 1908 Annual Report shows that during that year three members of the Edinburgh branch received victimisation pay of £1 and 4 shillings each, presumably to compensate for loss of earnings.
The union conceded that not all workplace struggles for fairness ended in victory but it constantly reminded workers that a strong union branch and solidarity were of untold importance. Using her analogy of the union as a bundle of sticks, Mary Macarthur frequently reminded women that an employer could easily pick off a single twig but that he was powerless when faced with an unsnappable bunch.
Solidarity, in other words.
1911 delegates at the Scottish Trades Union Council. Edinburgh’s Mrs Lamont is second from the left, Mary Macarthur fourth from left. This image is from the National Library of Scotland and I thank them for allowing me to use it in my biography of Macarthur
One final note. The union in question in the 2020 dispute in Edinburgh is the GMB. 100 years ago this winter, Mary Macarthur’s National Federation of Women Workers merged with the National Union of General Workers which in turn – in the late 20th century – became part of the GMB. History is never just history. A piece of paper that falls off my desk changes nothing but it reminded me that the struggle for justice has been long and that it goes on.
And I took a good hard look at the biscuit with my tea today.
The notes that I referred to for this piece were largely gathered over the past decade or so from the TUC Library, the National Library of Scotland. A big thanks to the staff at both.
Lady Mabel Smith was born in 1870 into one of the wealthiest aristocratic families in England – the Fitzwilliams – but, defying the expectations and conventions of her class and sex, she became, among many other things, a Labour politician, a Justice of the Peace (magistrate) and a prominent campaigner for adult education and social justice. The contrast between her social background and her life’s work makes her story an unusual one; it is rather a surprise to discover a socialist within a family who obtained much of their wealth from land ownership and from coal. For me, however, the more interesting story lies not in that contrast so much as in the commitment shown by Lady Mabel Smith to public service. Whilst there has been an increase in published accounts of women’s contributions to local politics in the first half of the 20th century, many more are needed to demonstrate the range of work done, the barriers women faced in order to be allowed to become involved and the impact that their years of service had upon the districts they served. My hope is that this series of blog posts will provide a little more illustration of the importance and enormous value of women’s determination to improve the lives of those in their local communities.
Her name is familiar in South Yorkshire because after the Second World War, her ancestral home, an exceptionally grand house near Rotherham, was given new purpose, leased in 1948 by the West Riding County Council from Earl Fitzwilliam and turned into the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education. It was named in honour of Lady Mabel Smith’s decades of service for the Education Committee of the West Riding County Council and her commitment to the children who attended the schools managed by it. With the raising of the school leaving age in 1944 and an increased birth rate in the years after the Second World War, it was clear to the County Council that in the years to come there would be a need for more teachers and so it took the decision not just to create new teaching training colleges in Yorkshire but to focus on the specialisms of which the Education Committee was proud. Backed by the Ministry of Education, it was decided to open three colleges, one for the teaching of physical education, one for music and the other for what was then known as ‘housecraft’. In each case, rather than building new and expensive institutions, the Council made use of three former houses, two of which had been stately homes, the third a nineteenth century hydro hotel. The largest, Wentworth Woodhouse, belonged to the Fitzwilliams and it was where Lady Mabel Smith lived, for periods of her life, before her marriage.
Wentworth Woodhouse, my own image
The decision to convert much of Wentworth Woodhouse into a college was a major factor in the house’s survival, at a time when a great many under used stately homes were demolished. No longer a college, the house is now run by the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust and it was on a visit here four years ago to admire its ambitious restoration project that I first developed my interest in Lady Mabel Smith. This eighteenth century house, purported to have the longest façade of any country house in England, was one of the first places I visited on coming to live in South Yorkshire. I had first glimpsed the house some years earlier when staying in the area and had been bought a copy of Catherine Bailey’s Black Diamonds (2007, Penguin) which tells the story of the house and its family, from its splendour days in the early decades of the 20th century to the eventual sale of the property in 1989.
Most of the work I have been involved in over the years has been about working class and labour history. I have focused a great deal on women in the British labour movement, including those who built up the Labour Party from its grassroots, such as Poor Law Guardians and local councillors as well as women who led, organized and joined trade unions to improve pay and conditions for workers. Aristocratic history has – fairly obviously – had no place in these studies whatsoever and my interest in stately homes has been confined to a combination of wondering at splendours, admiring architecture and garden design and wandering in extensive parklands. I wanted, however, a project to get my teeth into in the area that was now my home and preferably one which would serve as an introduction to its local archives, libraries and special collections. When that project became the work of Lady Mabel Smith, it was not as surprising as it might at first appear. Like many of the Labour women I have researched and written about, Lady Mabel Smith was a supporter of equal rights, a campaigner for improved health care and facilities for mothers and their children and a firm believer in the transformative possibilities of lifelong education. She wanted to see the eradication of poverty and of class barriers and for this she worked tirelessly her entire adult life. Her extremely privileged background made her experiences of life very different from those working-class women who became local politicians and activists but she was not unique in this.
Lady Mabel was by no means the only person of aristocratic heritage to join the Labour Party in the interwar years. Perhaps the most well-known was the Countess of Warwick who was drawn to socialism in the 1890s, standing as a Labour parliamentary candidate in Warwick and Leamington in 1923 (the seat went to Anthony Eden, who became Prime Minister for the Conservative Party in 1955). Others included Countess de La Warr and Lady Clare Annesley, the latter unsuccessfully contesting parliamentary seats three times between 1928 and 1931. There were also many men and women who, though not coming from the most noble families in the land, were privileged in upbringing, education and income and whose work within the labour movement was respected.
Countess of Warwick in 1905. Photograph by Henry Joseph Whitlock, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Being selected and then elected to local government office was difficult enough for a woman of any social class, a hundred years ago. In Lady Mabel’s case, I do think that her connections with the Fitzwilliam family enabled her to bypass quite a few of the obstacles and prejudices faced by working class women but, nevertheless, women made up a very small percentage of elected members in English town halls. For example, Anne Baldwin’s study on the election of women councillors (see source list below) shows that between 1919 and 1938, there were just 309 women councillors elected on to English county councils (of an average of between 2700 and 3500 seats).
Lady Mabel Smith made contributions to the development of the Labour cause in innumerable ways. I am interested not just in the routes into public service that she took but in the nature of her work in the north of England, particularly in Yorkshire. I have divided the blog into eight sections, which highlight either particular periods of her life or aspects of her work and interests. I seem to have gathered a great deal of material and all I can aim to do here is to give a flavour of what I have discovered. I hope it gives an idea of what Lady Mabel Smith stood for. The many collections I have consulted (listed below) have enabled me to illustrate the breadth of her interests and commitments. The British Newspaper Archive has been of significant help in providing multiple examples of Lady Mabel’s political and social work; the press was at first keen to report on the work and the speeches of a member of such a prominent family. As time went on, however, and Lady Mabel became a popular and well known figure in her own right, she continued to be of interest to local newspapers and this has made my job considerably easier.
Although I provide some details of her early life, I do want to make it clear that this is not a biography but an account of the public work of Lady Mabel Smith. There is a short, interesting and personal account of Lady Mabel in Black Diamonds; in this, the author, Catherine Bailey spoke to two relations of Lady Mabel’s husband, who talked of the family’s views of her socialism and lifestyle. I have not sought to research Lady Mabel’s private life in any way other than what I have discovered in research in newspapers or in archival collections (those that I have used are listed below). I have, however, consulted The Personal Papers of Lady Mabel Smith, which are held at Rotherham Archives. These give a clear indication of her political and social interests; for my research, the most useful parts of this collection were the notes Lady Mabel wrote and used about a range of subjects upon which she spoke in public, including peace, Christian socialism, welfare, as well as matters relating to the judiciary and local government. There is a good deal more within this collection about Lady Mabel’s travels in the UK as well as the Mediterranean, northern Europe and India – postcards, booklets and photograph albums, some containing written notes.
I would like to say a big thank you to Helen Jackson for some wonderful conversations about Lady Mabel Smith and for her help and encouragement in this project.
Finally, two technical points. Firstly, until 1902, when the title of Lady was granted by the King to the new Earl’s sisters, the correct way to refer to Mabel was as the Honourable Mabel Wentworth Fitzwilliam (then Smith). I have used Lady Mabel Smith, often shortened to Lady Mabel, for two reasons. The first is for simplicity and clarity – it is by the title of Lady and the family name of Smith which she is known. Secondly, I have used the shortened Lady Mabel as often as I can. My intention in so doing is not to sound over familiar or disrespectful. In the many reports I have read, I have never seen her referred to as Lady Smith but always with the inclusion of her first name as well as her title. In an attempt not to make the writing too clunky or formal, I have chosen Lady Mabel. This was, after all, how she was fondly spoken of in an interview with someone who worked with her in the early 1930s (mentioned in Post number 6) and I hope that she would be happy with me doing likewise here when writing about a woman who was clearly popular and approachable.
Secondly, to ensure that the posts flow as smoothly as possible, I have avoided use of footnotes and individual references. I do of course have these references to hand if required. Please do get in touch via my website contact form.
The posts are divided as follows
2. The Early Years 1870-1899
3. From Philanthropy to Politics, 1899-1914
4. The Move into Public Office
5. Lady Mabel Smith, Socialist
6. The Sheffield and Manchester University Settlements
7. The First World War
8. Closing Thoughts
Thank you to all the archivists and librarians who have helped me to access research collections. These are as follows:
Rotherham Archives
The Personal Papers of Lady Mabel Smith 174-F
Records of Rotherham Poor Law Union; Minutes of Guardian Meetings 274-A-1
Doncaster Archives
Minutes of the West Riding Labour Group DS 36
Sheffield Archives
Wortley Poor Law Union CA527
Guardian Minute Books SY164
Medical Officer of Health Annual Reports X1009 1922-7
Register Of Guardians’ Attendances CA527
Sheffield University
Sheffield Educational Settlement Papers SEP
Manchester University
Manchester Settlement Archive MUS including Annual Reports 1929-38
Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester
Labour Women’s Conference
Labour Party Annual Reports
Labour Woman
West Yorkshire Archive, Wakefield
West Riding Education Committee Minutes 1916-39
Ten Years of Change, by Education Committee Chairman, WM Hyman
British Newspaper Archive
Newspapers consulted include:
Common Cause
Daily Herald
Daily Mirror
Eckington, Woodhouse & Staveley Express
Halifax Evening Courier
Huddersfield Daily Examiner
Landswoman
Leeds Mercury
Penistone, Stocksbridge & Hoyland Express
Rotherham Advertiser
Sheffield Independent
Sheffield Daily Telegraph
Sheffield Weekly Telegraph
South Yorkshire Times & Mexborough & Swinton Times
Anne Baldwin (2012) ‘Progress and Patterns in the Election of Women as Councillors 1918-38’, doctoral thesis, University of Huddersfield ABaldwin PhD final text
Bailey, Catherine (2007), Black Diamonds; The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty, Penguin, London
Barber BJ & Beresford MW (1979), The West Riding County Council 1889-1974, West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council, Wakefield
Cooper, Lettice (1950), Yorkshire West Riding, Northumberland Press, Gateshead
Gerard, Jessica (1994), Country House Life: Family and Servants 1815-1914, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford
Graves, Pamela (1994), Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics 1918-39, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Hollis, Patricia (1987), Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government 1865-1914, Oxford University Press, New York
Horn, Pamela (2012), Ladies of the Manor: How Wives and Daughters Really Lived in Country House Society over a Century Ago, Amberley-books, Fakenham
Jackson, Helen (2021) People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, Spokesman, Nottingham
Jones, Melvyn & Jones, Joan (2021), Wentworth Woodhouse: the House, the Estate and the Family, Pen & Sword, Barnsley
Reynolds, Keith & Laybourn, Keith (1987), Labour Heartland: A History of the Labour Party in West Yorkshire during the Inter-War Years, WS Maney & Sons, Leeds
Rose, Michael & Woods, Anne (1995), Everything Went On At the Round House: A Hundred Years of the Manchester University Settlement, University of Manchester, Manchester
Scott, Caroline (2017), The Women’s Land Army in the First World War, Pen & Sword, Barnsley
Stocks, Mary (1953), The Workers’ Educational Association: The First Fifty Years, George Allen & Unwin, London
Stocks, Mary D (1956), Fifty Years in Every Street: the Story of the Manchester University Settlement, Manchester University Press, Manchester
Mabel Florence Harriet Wentworth Fitzwilliam was born in London on July 14th 1870. She was the granddaughter of the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam, head of one of the richest aristocratic families in England, whose vast wealth was the cumulative result of inherited fortune, ownership of a great deal of land in England and Ireland, mineral rights, coal mines and the leasehold of ironworks. Mabel was the second born daughter of Viscount Milton, who, as the Earl’s eldest son, was in line to inherit the earldom and the family fortune. The Fitzwilliam ancestral home was the enormous Wentworth Woodhouse near Rotherham where, until she was 16, Mabel was a frequent visitor but not a permanent resident. At the time of the 1871 census, she and her sister, Laura, were residents in the Fitzwilliams’ London home, in the very fashionable Grosvenor Square, Westminster. The girls were in the company of a nurse, a nursemaid and several other servants, but their parents were absent. It was not unusual for upper-class children to be left in the care of paid staff although it seems that the whereabouts of Viscount and Lady Milton were often accounted for by periods of ill health rather than by pressing social engagements.
By the early 1870s, Viscount (Lord) Milton required regular withdrawals from public life and lengthy periods of convalescence. He had become a Liberal MP for the West Riding in 1864 but by 1871, it was reported that he had been entirely absent from the 270 Divisions (votes) of the last session of the House of Commons. Many of his official duties as an MP and others as the eldest son of the Fitzwilliams, were cancelled due to his illness as he sought rest in Europe or at the family seat of Coolattin in County Wicklow, Ireland. As his health deteriorated, he resigned his seat at Westminster and took his family to Canada, where his third child – a son and heir – was born in 1872.
It was a bold journey on which to embark but it was not the first time Milton had taken his family abroad; in the winter of 1870, when Mabel was still a baby, they set off for Egypt. By 1872, Milton’s health was worsening, his wife was not only pregnant but suffering herself with chronic illnesses, and their daughters were aged just two and three years old. But Milton was used to travelling and he already knew Canada. Ten years earlier, he had embarked on a journey of discovery across North America, to prove the viability of a North-West land (trade) route through the Rocky Mountains to British Colombia. After the birth of his son, the Miltons built a house and established a family home in Virginia in the United States of America. They were not to be there long. Viscount Milton died in France in 1877, aged 38 and his wife and children – another daughter, Theresa, was born around 1875 –returned to England. It is unlikely that there was ever an unbroken spell of residence in Virginia for Lady Milton and her children; the son (and heir) was brought back to Wentworth Woodhouse late in 1872 to be christened. A newspaper obituary of the Viscount states that mother and children had made the journey back to Yorkshire on more than one occasion. Many years later, Lady Mabel recalled travelling around England so extensively as a child that her mother improvised and used drawers padded with bedding rather than cots, presumably when visiting other households ( this story was told to demonstrate that mothers could do without expensive nursery equipment as long as they were practical and resourceful).
Evidence suggests that after Viscount Milton’s death, his wife and children came to live at Hoober Hall, on the Wentworth estate. They were not there when the 1881 census was taken, so it is not possible to see who made up their household. Instead, the family, along with some members of Viscountess Milton’s family, servants and a governess, was staying in Torquay. It may be that this was a visit intended to improve Lady Milton’s failing health; in 1886 there was a return to Torquay where she died, aged 37. From this point, it seems likely that the children went to live at Wentworth Woodhouse, under the care of their grandparents, the Earl and Countess Fitzwilliam.
During the 13 years or so that she was at Wentworth Woodhouse, Mabel appears to have lived the life expected of a young, aristocratic woman. She was 15 when her mother died and just three years later, she was presented at Court to the Queen by her grandmother, the Countess Fitzwilliam. The preparations for this event were considerable, involving the strictest of etiquette, both in dress and deportment. This was followed by the business of ‘coming out’ into Society and attending all manner of social functions during ‘the London season’, which was traditionally regarded as the way that young women of the social and political elite would find suitable husbands. For the Wentworth Fitzwilliam girls, the ‘seasons’ meant spending time at the Fitzwilliam’s London home in Grosvenor Square, meeting, greeting and visiting within their social circle.
A few weeks after her presentation at Court, Mabel was a guest at the Queen’s State Ball at Buckingham Palace which was attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales, a host of other princes, princesses and senior members of the military and noble families. The most prestigious families in the country depended upon each other for company, mixing in London, forming house parties in grand homes around the country. In the years that followed, there were innumerable ‘fashionable weddings’ (the press description of aristocratic or society weddings) to attend and as a young noble woman, Mabel was a regular guest or bridesmaid at many of these, often in London. Before her own marriage, Mabel was a bridesmaid for her sister Laura in 1889, her aunt in 1895 and for her brother in 1896. His wedding took place in St Paul’s Cathedral, a clear indicator of wealth and status, and notable because few marriage ceremonies took place there in that period.
The Fitzwilliams’ grandeur meant that encounters with royalty were in no way out of the ordinary. Wentworth Woodhouse was sufficiently large and grand to host members of the royal family and as the premier family in south Yorkshire, this was to be expected. One such occasion during Mabel’s young womanhood was the prestigious visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales who stayed in 1891. Mabel, aged 21, was in the elaborate carriage procession that accompanied the distinguished guests to the official opening of Clifton Park in Rotherham.
There is no way of knowing whether Mabel enjoyed the roles expected of her as a member of such an illustrious family or how she felt about the upper-class marriage market that she was expected to be part of in London. At least, however, one part of the upper-class countryside social calendar does seem to have held considerable appeal for her- and that was horse riding. Often described in the press as a fine sportswoman and a great horsewoman, Mabel regularly took part in hunt and race meetings in England and in Ireland, alongside members of her family and those admitted to the county hunting clan. One of these was William Mackenzie Smith, whom Mabel married in 1899. He too was described as an accomplished rider, following, it would seem, a family tradition. The Smiths were an established, well known Sheffield family and their connections with the Fitzwilliams went beyond a shared passion for equine sports; William Mackenzie Smith, who qualified as a solicitor in 1892, held a commission with the Yorkshire Dragoons, a voluntary cavalry force of whom in 1886 Earl Fitzwilliam became Honorary Colonel and Charles, his son, Lieutenant Colonel.
Colonel William Mackenzie Smith, who married the Honourable Mabel Fitzwilliam in 1899. This photo was taken between 1949-52 when Colonel Smith was Chairman of the charity, Sheffield Town Trust. I have not yet found one of him as a younger man. Ref u13951 http://www.picturesheffield.com
Members of the Grove Hunt, including Lady Mabel and Mr Mackenzie Smith, 1913, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 21 November 1913 British Newspaper Archive, http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
From her delight in riding and rural sports, perhaps came Lady Mabel’s keen interest in the land, which remained a significant feature of much of her life’s work, and which I shall explore further in subsequent posts. This post, however, concludes with Mabel’s wedding at St George’s Church in Hanover Square, Mayfair in London, where her parents had also married. Undoubtedly another ‘fashionable’ affair, the ceremony was officiated by Mackenzie Smith’s grandfather, the long-serving vicar of Ecclesfield, the Smith family’s parish. Accompanied by nine bridesmaids and two pages, Lady Mabel ‘looked exceedingly well in a wedding dress of rich duchesse satin and full court train, edged with chiffon and lace’ and the couple had a reception at the Grosvenor Square family residence, before leaving for the start of their honeymoon at Maltby Hall, a 15-room house in the village of Maltby (ten miles from Rotherham, 13 from Wentworth Woodhouse) owned or at least tenanted by Mackenzie Smith. This was to be their home for over a decade.
Maltby Hall, near Rotherham. Date unknown but the Hall is no longer in existence. Chronicle/Alamy ref 2RG9FCH Individual license purchased
It was during these years that Lady Mabel Smith established herself as a campaigner, an advocate of adult education and as a Poor Law Guardian. It did not happen overnight. Her public life may have started in a rather conventional manner befitting a woman of her class and status but a few years into her marriage, it became clear that she did not merely attend public events as a matter of form or duty but with a deepening interest and growing commitment.
In her early married life, she continued to fulfil the role expected of her as a member of such a prominent aristocratic family. In 1902 her grandfather died and her brother, William (affectionately known as Billy), became the seventh Earl Fitzwilliam. The London Gazette reported that it had been ordained and declared by the King that the Earl’s sisters were ‘to hold the same title, place, pre-eminences and precedence as if their late father had succeeded to the title’. Whilst the Mackenzie Smiths lived their own lives at Maltby Hall, the very title – Lady – granted by the King made it publicly clear that Lady Mabel’s bonds with her ancestral family remained. In addition, given Maltby’s close proximity to Wentworth Woodhouse, Lady Mabel was close at hand and therefore still able to play her part in the Fitzwilliams’ calendar of public engagements.
As granddaughter and then as sister of the Earl, she opened bazaars, attended Sales of Work for charities including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and the Girls’ Friendly Society (a Church of England endeavour to ‘protect’ working class girls and young women from the perceived dangers encountered in their working lives away from their families). There was nothing out of the ordinary in any of this; families of the nobility were expected to take an interest in and show support for charitable and philanthropic causes and projects, and in this the Fitzwilliams were no exception. As landowners, landlords and employers, the Earls had social responsibilities and duties towards their tenants, their employees and those in need in villages on or close to their estates. The Fitzwilliams had a good reputation for looking after people and as a result, they were well regarded and well liked locally. Lady Mabel had grown up observing the connections between the ‘big house’ and the villages surrounding it. She saw Fitzwilliams giving money to relief funds in times of acute hardship, her grandfather, for example, providing trucks of coal to the poor in harsh weather and inviting the inmates of the Rotherham Workhouse to an annual tea and entertainment at Wentworth Woodhouse.
Yet of course she also saw them hosting the King and Queen, holding summer and winter balls, hosting elaborate garden parties and dividing their time between their Yorkshire seat and their other properties and land. This was the world into which she was born and to which she showed allegiance by attending a great many official and civic events. Here I highlight just a few in which she took part in the early years of the 20th century. In 1905 she was among those of Yorkshire’s nobility to form part of a grand procession preceding the ceremonial opening of buildings at Sheffield’s newly established University. In the same year, she was part of another reception in Sheffield held for the Princesses Henry and Ena of Battenburg and Princess Beatrice of Saxe-Coburg, in the city for the unveiling of a statue of the late Queen Victoria. In 1902 she accompanied the Countess Fitzwilliam to the annual Sheffield Chrysanthemum Show at the Cutlers’ Hall as well as attending formal civic occasions at Sheffield Town Hall.
1905 visit of King Edward V11 and Queen Alexandra in Sheffield. Lady Mabel (not pictured) wore a dress in sapphire blue silk and white point lace and a black hat. Ladies Field, 22 July 1905, British Newspaper Archive http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
There were some occasions when Lady Mabel attended as both sister and wife; in 1907, for example, as the Lady Patroness of the Queens’ Own Yorkshire Dragoons, of which her husband and her brother were distinguished patrons, she was a guest at the Yeomanry Ball held at the Town Hall Assembly Rooms in Rotherham.
So far, so unremarkable and expected. But the evidence suggests that in this first decade of the 20th century, when Lady Mabel was in her 30s, she did not merely show up to fundraising events or lend her name as a patron. She worked hard behind the scenes to ensure their success. In 1906, a newspaper advertisement for a Grand Bazaar to be held at the Cutlers’ Hall in aid of the NSPCC stated that tickets for the event were available from Lady Mabel Smith of Maltby Hall, a pretty clear indication that her role was not just ceremonial. At the event, which raised over £2000 she was described by organisers as the ‘indefatigable honorary secretary’ who had personally written over a thousand letters, arranged for every stall present, made practical suggestions and arrangements and was, it was believed, largely responsible for the success of the bazaar. Even allowing for more than a touch of obsequiousness from those who presented her with a gift from the stallholders, it does appear that Lady Mabel took the secretary aspect of her role far more seriously than the honorary part.
1906 notice of a charity event for the NSPCC, with tickets available from Lady Mabel Smith. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, October 22 1906, British Newspaper Archive http://www.britishnewspaperarchive. co.uk
During these years, however, it is not just a capacity for hard work that is noticeable in Lady Mabel’s activities. From around 1909, it is apparent that she was not merely a fundraiser but a woman seeking to understand the causes of social injustice and work out where her support was most needed. To do so, she began to align herself with those who sought ways to effect change.
In the early years of the 20th century, there was considerable and increased political interest in the causes of poverty, for so long merely regarded as an inevitable and unavoidable part of an industrial economy. Socialist parties and organisations had been growing in Britain for at least two decades, and Yorkshire played a significant part, with the formation of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford in 1893. This was followed in 1900 by the foundation of the Labour Representation Society, bringing together socialists and trade unionists and changing its name to the Labour Party in 1906. In the same year, the new Liberal Government initiated a wide ranging programme of social reform, aimed at putting in place state measures to tackle some of the effects of poverty, unemployment and ill health. These included the first state old age pension, limited sickness and unemployment insurance and the introduction of National Insurance.
Plaque marking the site of the Labour Institute in Bradford where the inaugural conference of the Independent Labour Party was organised in 1893. My photograph
The controversy surrounding the funding of these reforms sparked a major political upheaval in Britain as the House of Lords refused to pass the Liberals’ Budget Bill which sought to impose a so-called ‘supertax’ on Britain’s richest families. The result was the Parliament Act of 1911, which limited the powers of the Lords to block legislation already approved by the House of Commons. In the circles in which Lady Mabel Smith still moved, the fury of the landed classes towards the Liberal Government’s intentions – her brother, was of course, in the House of Lords – was likely to have dominated many a conversation amongst the landed gentry but it was not this class view of the new legislation that was taking up Lady Mabel’s time or energies. Although she did not declare (or perhaps fully realise) her political sympathies at this time, the evidence suggests that she was reading, thinking and forming her own opinions.
In March 1910 Lady Mabel presided at a lecture at the Friends (Quakers) Meeting House in Sheffield. This was one of a series of talks about the Poor Law and this particular one was given by Dr Marion Phillips (who became a Labour MP in 1929), an investigator on the Poor Law Commission. This was set up by the Conservative Government in 1905 to examine all aspects of the current Poor Law system, which was by then over 70 years old. After some years of detailed investigations, the Commission ended up with two reports. The Majority Report did not favour the dismantling of the Poor Law, nor in fact did it approve of state intervention in the lives of the poor. In contrast, the Minority Report, written by Beatrice Webb, a Fabian Socialist, sought to end the current system which used the Workhouse as a deterrent. Dr Phillips agreed that the Poor Law was judgmental, inadequate and punished families who fell on hard times. She explained in her Sheffield lecture that the harshness of the present system meant that children were not receiving the care they needed to make their way in the world.
Lady Mabel, when introducing Dr Phillips, said that whilst everyone bore responsibility for the development of children’s lives, there was an extra duty to see the children of the Poor Law as ‘a special charge whose future was in the hands of the people’. Now whilst there is nothing specifically socialist in her words, it is perhaps significant that Lady Mabel was at this lecture at all, that she was willing to preside at a public event delivered by a woman who was not just a contributor to the Minority Report but a member of the Women’s Labour League, which had close ties with the Labour Party. Three years later, Lady Mabel became a Poor Law Guardian herself, in a system still unreformed and to which I will return to this in my next post. For the rest of this one, here are some further examples of Lady Mabel’s continued journey into a political and social awareness that I think marked a decided shift from any notions of noblesse oblige as she moved towards a life of activism and campaigning.
A few weeks after Marion Phillip’s lecture, Lady Mabel gave a talk in Masbrough (now part of Rotherham) at the annual conference of the South Yorkshire District of the Women’s Cooperative Guild. The Guild, which arose out of the Cooperative Movement, was an organization for working class women to meet in friendship and to gain confidence in political work. Lady Mabel paid tribute to the work of the Guild in providing educational opportunities for working women to befit them for public and civic responsibilities and to do so with confidence. This was of enormous importance at a time when public office was dominated by men who had had plenty of time to learn the rules of engagement and to assume that the main roles belonged to them and would continue to do so. In the early 20th century, women were seeking greater involvement in the public sphere than they had been permitted in the Victorian age. It was of the utmost importance to have access to a good education which would fit them for more than the traditional domestic roles for so long expected of them. Lady Mabel spoke of self-improvement ‘as the best and noblest sign of national life’ and how important it was not just in readiness for public life but in the home. She told the Guild that educated women made the best mothers because they were able to communicate and express their ideas to their children. The Guild later published (I think it was later but I have not yet discovered the date) the text of a speech given by Lady Mabel entitled Education and the Workers’ Right to Live (which is part of the collection of her Personal Papers in Rotherham Archives), in which she summed up the need for education in the broadest sense of the word, fitting people for living, not merely existing. Workers, she believed, needed sufficient leisure time to allow them to develop and enjoy their talents through access to art, music and literature.
The Workers’ Education Association (WEA) was founded in 1903 to promote adult education for working class men and women. In Lady Mabel it found an enthusiastic advocate. In Sheffield in 1912 she explained to an audience the WEA belief that it was not a privileged upbringing that should be the gateway to the nation’s universities but brains and character. Through adult classes offered to working people in partnership with universities, the opportunities that had been denied to those who had had to leave school too early, could now result in what the WEA called ‘an open highway for education’. Lady Mabel worked with the Yorkshire Branch of the WEA to encourage attendance at its classes and her belief in the advantages to be gained through education and through adequate leisure time underpinned much of her work in the decades which followed this speech.
The March 1910 talk to the Women’s Cooperative Guild in Sheffield (mentioned above) highlights several useful pieces of information about Lady Mabel. She began her talk by admitting that this was the first time she had addressed a meeting ‘of that kind’, asking her listeners not to be too critical of her as she would try to do the best she could. Her meaning about this being the first time is unclear – the first time talking to an organization of women or about education? She was also, however, apologetic about her inability to express herself in the manner she would have liked, blaming this on her own education which was not, she admitted, as good as she now felt the need of. It was this, she continued, that led her to appreciate the value of education. She referred to her inadequate education on more than one occasion in the years that followed and so it is worth pausing here to question what sort of education Lady Mabel might have received as a girl and young woman.
I do not know if Lady Mabel attended school at any point in her childhood but it was relatively unusual in the 19th century for the daughters of nobility to be educated away from the home. Governesses were appointed when girls were around five years old and the education they then received depended almost entirely on the skills, confidence and teaching experience of the woman employed, with perhaps an odd extra tutor brought in to teach different subjects, including music or drawing. Towards the end of the 19th century, girls’ schooling in England was coming under greater scrutiny than previously yet the gradual improvements in standards and the broadening of the curriculum did little to alter the education of aristocratic girls. For them, things went on pretty well as they had done for generations of daughters who were lucky if their education went further than being taught their place in society, along with the necessary accomplishments to make good marriages. When Lady Mabel’s mother was in Torquay in 1881 with her children, the census shows that there was a governess within the household (Catherine Bailey’s interview with Colonel Smith’s niece also indicates that Lady Mabel had a governess). Although William (Billy) was there with his three sisters, he was only eight years old and as this was roughly the age at which sons were sent away to school, perhaps he had not yet started or was home for the holidays (Easter in that year was just a fortnight after the census was taken). Noble sons were educated to ensure that they would be able to run the family estate, enter politics or take a commission in the Army. Billy, heir to the Fitzwilliam title, did all of this. He went to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge before obtaining his Army commission. He toured India, served in the Oxfordshire Light Infantry during the Boer Wars and was a Member of Parliament by the time he was 22, inheriting the earldom when he was 30.
William Charles de Meuron Wentworth-Fitzwilliam (1872-1943), 7th Earl Fitzwilliam and brother of Lady Mabel Smith Ref s08587 http://www.picturesheffield.com
Suffrage and Equal Rights
As well as highlighting her views on working women’s education (and giving a little insight into her own education), that 1910 address to the Women’s Cooperative Guild also provides clues to Lady Mabel’s views on women’s position in society. Within her talk, she makes direct reference to the women’s suffrage movement, which, by 1910, was grabbing a great many headlines throughout the country. Lady Mabel stated that although the women in the audience did not yet have the parliamentary vote, ‘they were the wise mothers of those who assisted in that work’, making it even more important that women should be interested in the working of the State and the British constitution.
The campaign for the vote, which had been gathering momentum in the last quarter of the 19th century had, during the Edwardian years, seen the emergence of a more militant wing, frustrated by the slow progress of peaceful and traditional means of protest such as petitions and appeals. In 1903 the Women’s Social and Political Union (the WSPU), whom the press nicknamed the suffragettes, was formed in Manchester under the leadership of Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst. From the start, the motto of the WSPU was Deeds not Words, encouraging women to take direct action to draw attention to their demands. Tactics included the disruption of political meetings and ‘rushing’ the House of Commons, which involved hundreds of women trying to force their way into the Palace of Westminster. Women began to be sent to prison for acts of civil disobedience and for defying (often brutal) police attempts to deter them.
In 1910 Lady Mabel pledged money to the WSPU. She also appeared on platforms at meetings with Adela Pankhurst (one of Emmeline’s daughters and the WSPU’s Yorkshire organizer, based in Sheffield), giving assurances that she would help with the Rotherham campaign for the vote, which was about to get underway.
After 1910 the WSPU advocated and encouraged more dramatic forms of protest. There was increasing frustration with the government’s intransigence on the question of women’s suffrage. Window smashing was widely adopted and there were incidents of arson and damage to public and private property. There is no evidence at all that Lady Mabel supported this shift towards more dramatic forms of protest. In fact, many previous or potential supporters were alienated by the more extreme forms of rebellion, seeking instead to support the law-abiding National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, led by Millicent Fawcett or one of the many other suffrage groups. Yet in 1910, when Lady Mabel donated money to the WSPU and appeared in public with Adela Pankhurst, she cannot have been completely unaware of some of the WSPU’s acts of rebellion, particularly those in Sheffield. In 1908, Adela Pankhurst had tried to gain entry to the very grand and prestigious Cutlers’ Feast, at Cutlers’ Hall, intending to make plain her objection to the presence there of Liberal politician, Reginald McKenna, First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1909, she had been charged with a breach of the peace outside the Sheffield Assembly Rooms, where Liberal MP, Herbert Samuel, was due to speak.
Campaigning at the Attercliffe by election, Sheffield, May 1909. WSPU policy was to oppose all Liberal candidates in protest at the continued denial of the vote by the Liberal Government. Ref s02944 http://www.picturesheffield.com
Clearly, for a deferential (and often anti-women’s suffrage) press, it was much easier to report on Lady Mabel’s interest in women’s role in society if it was assumed that she was not associated with the suffragettes. In 1912 she gave a talk about the importance of an education that included home and house management and recognition of a ‘higher ideal of the duties and responsibilities of the home maker’. The Evening News remarked on her thoughtful and sympathetic contribution to a discussion of women’s advancement, which was ‘in pleasant contrast to the methods of the Suffragettes with their parrot-cry of “Votes for Women”.
My feeling is that Lady Mabel was willing enough to show support at public meetings on an issue in which she felt much sympathy but that she did not get actively involved in campaigning. She kept her word to Adela Pankhurst and appeared in December 1910 at a meeting in Rotherham Town Hall at the start of the WSPU educational campaign in the town. The meeting’s speakers, however, were not all from the WSPU; there was a Labour councillor and a member of the non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies on the platform.
In 1913 at a public meeting at Goldthorpe Adult School, on the subject of ‘Can Physical Force be an Agency for Good?’, Lady Mabel made her views clear; she was not, she said, in favour of militant methods but she saw the benefits that women’s suffrage had brought to New Zealand (which women gained in 1894), namely an increase in women’s experience and a closer connection between their public and private lives. This matched her beliefs in the importance of women’s participation in public life and in the raising of their status in the eyes of the world as homemakers and mothers. She continued to show her support for women’s equal rights after (some) women were granted the right to vote in 1918. The fight was not over; it was 1928 before all women over the age of 21 were able to vote. In 1919 she wrote an article for The Common Cause, the newspaper of the NUWSS (now the National Union of Equal Citizenship), stating that,
If women are suitable to be entrusted with the care and nurture of infants, and the performance of all vital services to the child during the first years of its life, surely they are capable of helping to make and administer the laws that are framed for its future welfare and guidance.
This leads nicely into the next post and another important milestone in Lady Mabel’s career. In 1913 she was elected on to Rotherham Rural District Council as an independent member, a seat which also entitled her to sit on the Board of Guardians, the body which oversaw the administration of the Poor Laws. This move marked her formal introduction into public service and served as an education on matters of local government and, more crucially, into the realities of working-class lives in the area in which she lived. In this, her firm belief in the equality of the sexes was a constant feature of her work, frequently highlighted in her appeals to women to serve on public bodies and especially on Councils. Her views on women councillors, widely shared by Labour women across the country, was that women had controlled family finances for generations, that they were skilled in home management and that they could readily use those skills in Council work. They possessed such sound understanding of what made a good, practicable, family house that it was only right that they should be involved in the designing of good quality council housing. In 1926 Lady Mabel said that we ‘shall not get things right until we have women working side by side with men in every sort of public work in the country’.
In a press report of Lady Mabel’s election onto Rotherham Rural District Council in April 1913, the phrase ‘consents’ to stand’ was used, suggesting that she was invited to do so. Representing Maltby, she was the first woman to be elected to the Council (women were eligible for election on district councils from 1894 but not on County or Borough Councils until 1907). On rural district councils, being a councillor meant also being a Poor Law Guardian and in this part of the work, Lady Mabel joined several other women.
The duties and responsibilities of a Guardian dealing with the administering of relief to the poor were numerous and a conscientious Guardian could not do the job properly without learning a considerable amount about the lives of people living in permanent or temporary poverty. The Poor Law Relief Committee (of which Lady Mabel became a member) assessed individual applications to the Board for relief, deciding on whether money would be granted to individuals or families for a designated period. This ‘outdoor relief’ was given to allow applicants to remain in their homes rather than live in the workhouse (indoor relief’). The workhouse was regarded by people as the last resort, particularly for those with families. Not only was it was degrading to lose home, possessions and independence but, once back out of the workhouse, it was very hard to start again, from scratch. Relief cases were assessed individually and the amounts given out depended on the (perceived) needs of those applying. The cases were re-examined after a period of weeks and relief might be continued, increased or stopped. Sometimes warrants were sought to prosecute men who were believed to have deserted their wives and families, leaving them entirely dependent on Poor Law assistance.
There can be no doubt that the presence of women on Boards of Guardians – from the 1870s but in greater number from the 1890s when property qualifications necessary for election were lowered – had a significant impact on Poor Law administration. Arguably the women best placed to serve were working class women who more easily understood the challenges facing families in poverty and the practical necessities that could make the biggest difference to their lives. This included small comforts in the workhouse that had too often been ignored in the interests of economy. This was of course not always achieved; since their inception in 1834, there had been too many incidences of cruelty and injustice in the administration of the Poor Laws, increasing the deep-rooted fear of the workhouse in communities as a judgement and punishment. Unsympathetic treatment was often the result of ignorance and assumptions made by middle class Guardians who showed too little willingness to put aside their prejudices about the causes of poverty. But, as my earlier mention of the Poor Law Minority Report shows, attitudes were, by the end of the 19th century, slowly beginning to change as social reformers, such as Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb, sought to show that long established beliefs of the ‘undeserving poor’ were baseless in truth and ignored the realities faced by working class families living in poverty.
The roles of a Guardian were numerous. In addition to the assessment of relief, the Poor Law Guardians were responsible for looking after the welfare of the workhouse inmates. This meant monitoring the buying of food, fuel and clothing and dealing with the maintenance of the buildings. They oversaw the appointment of staff for both the workhouse and its infirmary; the Hospital Committee worked closely with the Medical Officer to make sure that those in ill health received the correct care and that nursing staff were adequately trained.
By 1913, when Lady Mabel was elected, many Poor Law Boards recognized how unsuitable it was for children to spend long periods of time in the workhouse. In 1913, Rotherham, like many other Unions, sought instead to place children either in small ‘scattered’ homes under the care of an appointed house mother or married couple, or to find foster parents so that children could be ‘boarded out’. Here, their lives were closely scrutinised; children whose behaviour was deemed unacceptable could be sent back to the workhouse. The Guardians sought suitable employment or training for those of school leaving age. For girls going into service, the Children’s Homes Committee recommended to the Guardians that they should be equipped with suitable and useful clothing, including dresses, nightdresses, under garments, boots, aprons and a trunk for belongings.
So where did Lady Mabel sit within this? On the one hand, as I have noted, she was well-known as a member of the Fitzwilliam family and the continued use of her title ensured that this could not be forgotten (and indeed suggested that she did not want it to be forgotten). As a Guardian, the newspapers noted that she was working in the tradition of her grandfather, who had been Chairman of the Rotherham Guardians. This was a link, certainly, but there was one very important distinction. The Earl’s position was an honorary one only; he (followed by his grandson, the 7th Earl) were certainly not expected or required to be ‘hands on’ in any way.
Her grandfather had issued invitations to the Rotherham workhouse inmates to come to tea at Wentworth Woodhouse, a tradition continued by the 7th Earl; in 1908 a ‘splendid tea’ was given in the Riding School, followed by a performance from the Elsecar Prize Brass Band in the pleasure gardens. Perhaps witnessing such patronage did encourage Lady Mabel to establish her own such traditions. A keen gardener, she donated plants to the workhouse. She provided ‘entertainment and a lecture’ to the children in the scattered homes. By the 1920s, now living at Barnes Hall near Sheffield, and an elected member of the Wortley Rural District Council and its Poor Law Board, she provided tea at her home for the inmates of Grenoside Workhouse and for boarded out children. In 1923 there were sports and prizes presented by Lady Mabel as well as gifts of tobacco and cigarettes to the men and sweets, chocolate and ice cream for the women and children. One Christmas, she and her husband went to the Poor Law Infirmary with supplies of cake, apples, oranges, sweets, tobacco, Christmas crackers, toys and trinkets. On another occasion, Lady Mabel gave a lantern lecture in the workhouse about her father’s adventurous journey across the Rockies in search of a north-west land passage.
The administration offices of Grenoside Workhouse and Rural District Council. My photo.
If this had been the extent of Lady Mabel’s role on the Board(s), it is quite likely that no one would have questioned it. Such benevolence was expected from the aristocracy. But Lady Mabel did not limit her role to patronage. She appears to have been a diligent and thoughtful member and a high level of involvement from her was anticipated in the district on her election. Even allowing for a certain amount of obsequiousness, it is striking that a local newspaper noted in 1913 how ‘refreshing’ it was to see members of the landed and leisured classes taking an interest in democratic movements. Perhaps, however, the article notes, ‘we do Lady Mabel Smith an injustice in including her among the leisured classes for she is probably one of the most strenuous social workers in South Yorkshire’, citing her involvement with the WEA and describing her as being ‘thoroughly democratic in aims and sympathies’. She had ‘done a great deal for working-class movements in the district and her election to Rotherham Rural District Council gives her the opportunity of doing a great deal more’. Although being a member of the Fitzwilliam family certainly ensured her local respect and admiration, I do wonder if her marriage to someone outside the nobility also gave her a very useful degree of independence that helped her in her work as a councillor and a Guardian.
The last meeting of the Wortley Poor Law Guardians before the disbanding of the Boards of Guardians, whose duties were transferred to local authorities. Sheffield Independent 29 March 1930, British Newspaper Archive, http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
Lady Mabel’s attendances at Poor Law Committee meetings compared well with those of her colleagues; in the year 1914-5, for example, she was at 24 of 26 Board meetings, 11 of 14 meetings of the Children’s Home Committees, 12 of 14 of the Hospital Committee’s and 23 of 26 of the Relief Committee’s. There can be little doubt that such close attention to the many issues dealt with by the committees – children’s education while in the care of the Board, maternity welfare in the workhouse, finding suitable foster parents, employing efficient medical staff, helping young people into training and employment, to name but a few – must have given Lady Mabel valuable insights into the lives of a class very different to her own. According to a discussion held at Mexborough Trades Council in May 1914, the Rotherham Board of Guardians gave more relief to the poor than any other Board in the country, with amounts up to one pound in cases where there were three or four children to be cared for within a family. For this, the Board had apparently been fined for overspending but had refused to pay the fine (surcharge) imposed. At this Trades Council meeting, there was a debate on a resolution calling on the government to provide pensions for widows with families (a measure that did not become law until 1925) and it was noted that Lady Mabel Smith had supported a similar resolution passed at the last meeting of the Rotherham Board of Guardians. This was of course a matter of great relevance to the Poor Law on whose assistance the widows of working-class men often depended. In the next blog in this series, I will talk about Lady Mabel’s ‘conversion’ to socialism but for now, it is interesting and possibly significant that her support for a resolution about social welfare is brought up at a meeting of trade union delegates, possibly indicating that she has already become known in her community as a supporter of the working classes. This may have been though her work with the WEA or she may already have become a Labour Party member. This too will be discussed in the next post.
For images and detail about Rotherham Workhouse I recommend the extensive research of Peter Higginbotham which can be found on his website The Workhouse: the story of an Institution and particularly relevant to this post is The Workhouse in Rotherham, Yorkshire, W. Riding
At some point just before or during the First World War, the Smiths (as I mentioned earlier) moved to Barnes Hall near Sheffield (which had been the Smith family ‘seat’ for many years) in the Ecclesfield Division of the West Riding (now part of Sheffield).
The move signified a geographical shift for much of Lady Mabel’s work; in 1918, she resigned her seat on Rotherham Rural District Council but was, as mentioned, elected to the Wortley Rural District Council and Board of Guardians in 1922, representing Ecclesfield. The biggest political shift, however, came in March 1919, when Lady Mabel Smith became the first woman to be elected to the West Riding County Council and she did so as a Labour member.
Barnes Hall near Grenoside, Sheffield, where Colonel and Lady Mabel Smith lived from before the First World War until the end of their lives Mick Knapton, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In March 1919 Lady Mabel Smith became the first woman to be elected to the West Riding County Council and she did so as a Labour member, representing the Division of Ecclesfield, (to the NW of Sheffield and at that time not part of the city). Barnes Hall, where she and her husband now lived – and remained for the rest of their lives – was within the ward and there they were well known and well regarded.
1919 marked the start of a long association with the Labour Party for Lady Mabel. She remained on the County Council until not long before she died in 1951, serving on many different Committees, including Education, Housing, Public Health, Finance and Agriculture. She became an alderman for the first time in 1927. In addition to her County Council work, she was an elected Labour member of Wortley Rural District Council from 1922 until 1934, serving also as a Poor Law Guardian. She was a well-known figure in the Labour Party at both regional and national levels and in 1930 she was voted on to the Party’s National Executive for the first time, a position she occupied again from 1932 to 1935.
More than once, it looked likely that Lady Mabel would stand for Parliament as a Labour candidate. In 1923 she was nominated by Ecclesfield Labour Party for the Penistone Division but was not selected. This was followed by press rumours that she was expected to become a candidate somewhere in the south of England, although this never happened. In 1927 Lady Mabel gave provisional consent to be nominated to be the candidate in Sowerby Division (in West Yorkshire), turning down an invitation from Richmond (North Yorkshire) to stand there. In the event, in 1928 she declared herself unable to accept the Sowerby nomination, publicly explaining that this was because she had recently taken charge of three fatherless children and therefore would not have time to commit to the work. Whilst I have not delved into this, I cannot think that it would have been a permanent arrangement, for her life in the early 1930s became even busier than usual (see Blog Post Six). There was no further talk of parliamentary seats after this.
Largely because of her position and her title, but also because of the relative novelty of women speaking in male dominated spaces, many of Lady Mabel’s attendances and speeches at Labour Party meetings and events were noted by the press. This ensures that there is a wealth of detail in newspapers on which to draw when seeking to determine the direction her work took.
Why Labour?
Lady Mabel was no stranger to the County Council, having been a co-opted (non-elected) member of the Education Committee since before the War but her decision to stand in 1919 as a Labour candidate seems, on the face of it, to be a new departure for her. It does, admittedly, seem an unlikely move for an aristocratic woman, whose brother was, until his move into the House of Lords in 1902, a Tory Member of Parliament and one of the biggest landowners in the country. Yet, when we take a closer look at Lady Mabel’s background, as well as her lifelong work, and the issues with which she was most deeply concerned, her decision appears perhaps less surprising.
In many ways, Lady Mabel’s membership of the Labour Party was a natural gravitation to a party that was rising at the same time as the Liberal Party was losing its position as Britain’s second largest party. Both her grandfather and her father had been Liberal MPs (many large aristocratic families were of Whig/Liberal tradition) and Lady Mabel spoke publicly of her family’s Liberalism. On one occasion, she explained that an ancestor was denied the privilege of serving as the Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire because he had chaired a meeting protesting at the savage treatment of people gathered in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester in 1819. They had gone there to hear speeches about democracy and parliamentary reform but after magistrates ordered the arrest of some of the speakers, the Yeomanry rode into the crowd, killing at least 18 and injuring hundreds of men, women and children.
Richard Carlile was due to speak at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester on 16 August 1819. He published this image shortly after the Massacre in which at least 18 people were killed and hundreds injured. This file is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
In a speech about the country’s deepening coal crisis in 1926, Lady Mabel highlighted what she called a once vital connection between Labour and Liberalism, although by now, she told her audience, the Liberals ‘had neither aim nor programme’. Despite her commitment to socialism, I think this is an acknowledgement of the Liberal Party’s radical past, including its once strong connection with the miners before the rise of the Labour Party.
When asked once why she had chosen to stand as a Labour councillor, she explained that the Labour Party’s policy and outlook coincided more nearly with her own than those of any other Party. A former chairman of the County Council implied as much when speaking of Lady Mabel upon her death in 1951. Sir Bernard Lomas described her as being of ‘socialist persuasion’, but largely, he thought, because she felt that there was so much to be done to improve the lives of women and children in the county. She was aware of adverse reactions to her political sympathies; in 1927 she told a meeting that ‘some people are surprised that I am in the Labour Party because it is not considered quite nice’ but she was, she explained, already a socialist when she joined the Party.
At another Labour gathering, she said that it was largely through reading Philip Snowden many years before that she had become a socialist. She did not know anyone, she said, who had such a grasp of figures and such a knowledge of finance as Snowden (Snowden became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Labour Government in 1924). As a Christian, she may also have admired Snowden for his early writings on the links between Christianity and socialism. Christian Socialists believed that Christ’s teachings were an ethical basis for equality and social justice, underpinning all socialist ideals. In preparation for a lecture, Lady Mabel wrote that ‘it is Socialism which seems to me to be the practical expression of our Christianity’ and certainly both faith and socialist ideology were at the heart of all of her work.
Lady Mabel had sufficient freedom, independence and wealth to enable her to pursue her own interests thoroughly. Just as her remarks about Snowden give the impression that she always made sure she was well informed, she determined to make sure that she understood the realities facing those she represented in her work. For example, in 1938, she spoke of her belief that an extra year at school was necessary to adequately prepare children for work in coal mines. She explained that she made a point of going down a coal mine every year, to see the conditions and to keep abreast of improvements. Whenever anybody talked to her about mines, she always asked them if they had been down one. If they replied no, ‘then I tell them they have no right to talk about what they have never experienced and I change the subject’. This was typical of Lady Mabel; she knew she did not have direct experience but believed that it was her duty to educate herself in order to offer as informed an opinion as possible.
Lady Mabel did not attempt to hide or deny her class difference. She shared much in common with Labour members committed to a more equitable society in which there would be good housing, health care and education accessible to all. Addressing a meeting in 1921, she said that she did not recognise class distinctions and ‘was concerned neither with leavening down nor raising up [and] concerned only with marching forward’.
She was also adamant that despite accepting Labour’s invitation to stand for the West Riding County Council, she knew she could not adequately represent working people because she had no personal experience of the conditions of their class. She was, she insisted, merely ‘holding the door open until there came along other people who could’. By this, she did not mean that there were insufficient working people capable of doing the job, but that they had not as yet been afforded too few opportunities to do so.
It was, I would argue, a mark of her strength of character that she was bold enough to stand up for what she believed was right, despite possible opposition from her family. It is, for example, well known locally that during the six-month long miners’ strike following the General Strike of May 1926, the Earl and Countess Fitzwilliam erected marquees in order to cook and provide meals for the children of the miners who worked in their pits. There is no doubt that, as we have already seen, the Fitzwilliams assumed significant responsibility for the welfare of the workers who dug their coal. Their help was of undeniable importance to the health and well-being of families who found themselves in dire need. But what Lady Mabel, the Labour Party and trade unions sought was an end to the entire system that depended on the individual paternalism of local coal owners. Miners did not want to feel grateful for handouts in times of crisis; they wanted a living wage and an industry that treated them with fairness and respect.
As the crisis in the coal industry loomed in 1926, Lady Mabel defended the miners, who were facing wage reductions and an increase in working hours. At a Labour Women’s meeting, held just days before the General Strike began (when the miners were locked out by the coal owners for refusing to accept more wage cuts), Lady Mabel said that miners and their families could not possibly live on wages any lower than those they now received. This was no exaggeration; miners’ wages were extremely low and falling. She wanted people to understand that low wages for miners meant low wages for all other workers in the country and unless they all stood with the miners in their hour of need, ‘your own turn will come quicker than you imagine or realise’. She went on to explain her support for nationalization, not just of the coal industry but of the land; minerals, she said,
…had formed in the earth without any help from the landowners. Without the work of the miner, it was, moreover, useless. Whoever heard of a royalty owner helping to bring coal to the surface?
Housing
The issues with which Lady Mabel was most involved – at least those about which most of her speeches were reported – were largely the ones that dominated so much of life in the inter war period and filled the political agenda. Recessions in the 1920s and the Great Depression of 1929-32 led to high unemployment, short time working and wage reductions, particularly in Britain’s traditional industries, tipping more and more families into poverty. In West Yorkshire, for example, the three major industries – coal, engineering and textiles – all experienced severe slumps in the 1920s and 30s. Adequate health care remained out of reach for too many working-class people and infant mortality was stubbornly high in many areas. Making life even harder for families was a severe housing shortage and the need for local authorities to provide good and affordable council housing remained of enormous importance throughout the interwar years. In 1921 Lady Mabel spoke of her belief that the housing situation ‘was the fundamental evil of the present time’, with insanitary conditions and overcrowding causing ill health. If housing was better, she said, the hospitals would be far less full.
Early on in her first term at the County Council, her passion and fury about poor housing landed her in hot water. Talking in the mining village of Denaby Main in 1920, she sought to explain to the community that it bore responsibility for any new housing built in the village, meaning that they should object to housing that was substandard and inadequate. She warned against housing like that built in the 19th century by the Denaby and Cadeby Colliery Company. Are you going to see, she asked the audience, streets, open courts and all the other horrors which there are here, perpetrated again? She went further;
It must be difficult, and nearly impossible, to bring up your children under proper moral conditions. I don’t think there is a tree within sight at Denaby. However you can bring up children at all in such surroundings surprises me.
Her speech caused not just surprise but deep annoyance in Denaby Main village, which had defended itself some 20 years earlier from a Christian newspaper which had declared it to be not just ‘The Worst Village in England’ but a ‘hell upon earth’. Although improvements had been made since, there were still houses relying on shared privies in courtyards which had no sewage pipes. This caused multiple threats to public health, particularly in summertime; Lady Mabel recalled the time she had seen a cart carrying refuse from the privies pass underneath a washing line, dirtying the clean clothes as it did so.
Denaby and Cadeby Colliery Company brought an action of slander against Lady Mabel, its lawyers arguing that she had deliberately sought to interfere with the company’s endeavours to attract more miners to come to Denaby Main. Lady Mabel was adamant that her intention had not been to criticize any one company but to emphasise the importance of collective action in a community to improve conditions for the future. She said that she had not wished to infer that Denaby was much worse than any other place or that it was ‘hopeless’. She was fined £5 and ordered to pay costs. This was a relatively small sum but sufficient to show that the judgement upheld the colliery company’s insistence that, as a well-known woman in the area, her views were likely to carry considerable weight and influence.
There is no way of knowing what impact, if any, the outcome of this case and the publicity surrounding it, had upon Lady Mabel. She was, however, supported in her action by the West Riding Labour Group so she knew that she was not entirely isolated. There were no further slander cases but she continued to speak her mind all her life even if it meant going against the zeitgeist. In 1950, aged 80, she announced her intention to serve on the reception committee of the Sheffield Peace Congress. This conference, to be held at Sheffield’s City Hall, was convened by the British Peace Committee, which was regarded by the Labour Government as communist-led. Labour announced that attendance was ‘incompatible with membership of the Labour Party’, but Lady Mabel, who had spoken many a time on the necessity of peace during the 1930s, was not willing to be told what to do on a matter so fundamental to her beliefs. Despite her long years in the Labour Party, she was threatened with expulsion, although in the end, her local party (Penistone) decided against taking any disciplinary action against her.
Peace
That international peace was of the utmost importance to Lady Mabel is evident from her Personal Papers, held at Rotherham Archives. She was a firm believer in the League of Nations, set up after the First World War to promote international peace and to improve the health and working lives of the world’s population. In a 1923 speech in Elsecar, she referred to peace and disarmament as ‘practical Christianity’ and more than a decade later, she was still defending the League, which was being undermined in the face of rising fascism. Her speech preparation and notes explore how peace is always undermined by fear and by threats. What most of us say, she wrote, is that we want peace but that other people won’t let us have it so we must prepare for war [whereas] surely preparing for peace means giving up war.
The specific role that women could play in international peace was stressed by many Labour women during the 1920s and Lady Mabel’s lecture notes refer to the importance of women’s work in international politics. Women of all nations, she wrote, ‘have the same needs, ideals, hopes and fears’. In the 1930s, her views were closely aligned to the Labour Party’s views on the need for continued co-operation with the League of Nations in pursuit of the notion of Collective Peace and the raising of living standards across the world.
Schools and Education
Lady Mabel is probably most associated with the work that she did on the Education Committee of the West Riding County Council. Its records show that she was a co-opted member from at least 1916, perhaps due to her known connection with the Workers’ Education Association. The County Council faced significant challenges in the years after the First World War, striving to make sure that there were enough secondary school places to cope with the impact of the raising to 14 of the school leaving age in 1918. It also sought ways to provide secondary education to those children whose parents could not afford to pay fees and it became the Education Committee’s policy to give scholarships to all pupils who scored 60 per cent or above in the county examination. By 1931 just over 70 per cent of those pupils attending secondary schools did so with scholarships.
The Committee’s agenda, however, was broader than just the provision of school places and included a commitment to opening new child welfare centres, to ensure that all children, from birth, received the best possible start in life. Lady Mabel firmly believed that putting the child before the system was essential. She said that in the past, the State, with all its emphasis on compulsory education, had paid too little regard to the early life of the child. Welfare clinics sought to promote good health and they offered practical training for parents in how to best care for their children. Speaking in 1927, Lady Mabel said that ‘what has been good enough for the past generation is not good enough for the present, as times have changed and the pace of life is very different’.
Most of the welfare centres were housed in existing accommodation such as village or church halls, but in 1937, Lady Mabel was at the opening of a new combined school and welfare centre in Sprotborough. This, Richmond Hill Council School and Child Welfare Centre was the West Riding’s first purpose-built centre, where the child’s well-being was considered from its first attendance, right through to the provision of green, open spaces surrounding the classrooms and playgrounds. This concept of child centred education may seem familiar and even obvious to us today, but the idea of planning schools with such holistic considerations for children’s welfare was fairly new in the interwar years. When, for example, a new elementary school was built in Rotherham in 1928 to accommodate rising population, it was done so with an asphalted playground, playing fields and with the school buildings on the ‘right side of the Colliery so that the prevailing winds would carry away the smoke and grime’. At its official opening, Lady Mabel quoted educationalist and nursery pioneer, Margaret McMillan, that a school ‘should be a place which the children never wanted to leave’.
Her involvement in education was, as in everything she did, thorough. When she died in 1951, it was noted how much she would be missed at Woodhouse Grammar School in Sheffield, at which she had been the Chair of Governors for nearly 30 years. At the school’s speech day in 1939, she summed up her definition of education (after again drawing attention to her own, much regretted, lack of education), which I have summarised as follows;
The official opening of High Green Council School in 1928. Penistone, Stocksbridge and Hoyland Express 29 September 1928, British Newspaper Archive, http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
Thinking for oneself and sticking to one’s views; training of character, body, mind and soul; fitting each child for the future best suited to them; learning how to use and enjoy leisure time. The real value of sport was to be able to compete in games whilst being the best of friends away from the playing field; learning to have faith and courage in one’s self.
This, I think, clearly shows Lady Mabel’s belief in and commitment to the children of the West Riding. At the same speech day, tribute was paid to the role she had played in ensuring that, no matter how poor their circumstances, they would still be able to attend secondary school.
Lady Mabel’s role in the opening of Ecclesfield Grammar School in 1931 for 330 pupils was acknowledged by those who attended its official opening ceremony, one commenting on how, ever since Lady Mabel had come to Ecclesfield, she had taken them all by storm by her solicitude for the welfare of her neighbours. She was of course not solely responsible for bringing the project to fruition (and had worked with a Conservative councillor to press the case for the school) but her commitment continued with her chairmanship of the school governors. In the opening speech, Lady Mabel quoted writer and philosopher Herbert Spencer, saying that ‘education is to fit us for complete living’. She told the audience that although the need for the school was first recognised in 1920, it had taken another five years before the land was purchased by the County Council (largely due to the constraints of post war austerity).
The Official Opening of Ecclesfield Grammar School in 1931, 3 October 1931, Penistone, Stocksbridge and Hoyland Express, British Newspaper Archive, http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
Her commitment to making sure that children received the best possible education was one of the reasons why, in 1933, she opposed an Education Committee report which declared that the employment of married women teachers was ‘unwise on educational grounds’. Despite the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, women had no entitlement to keep their teaching jobs once they were married. This ‘marriage bar’ was applied in many professions in the interwar years but was robustly challenged by women who, like Lady Mabel, believed in equality of opportunity. Surely, she argued, it was an education committee’s job to find the best teachers for schools; she had never yet had it proved to her that a woman became a worse teacher when she got married. Married women, she insisted, had the same right as all other citizens to do the work for which they were most fitted. Despite her opposition (and that of seven others), the Report was adopted by the County Council. The resolution was that the case of each married woman teacher would be reviewed on its merits but that, if in the opinion of the Council, no personal hardship was likely to be felt, the contract would be terminated. In the future, it was agreed that all married women teachers in the service of the County Council would be reviewed annually. Whilst it stopped short of the immediate sacking of all married women teachers, there were still councillors who did not think the measures went far enough. Similar arguments went on in town halls across the country, with Labour women doing all they could to defend married women teachers against the charge that they ought to step aside and let their jobs be taken by unemployed male teachers, particularly during the Depression years. In 1944 the Education Act ended the marriage bar in teaching, providing justice for women certainly, although the change was due in no small measure to a national shortage of teachers. And equal pay for teachers would take yet another decade to become law.
As we have seen, one of Lady Mabel’s central interests was adult education and in particular, the work of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) and the adult schools which were growing in popularity in the years before the First World War. At the start of 1931, despite her already considerable workload in the West Riding, she became joint warden of the Manchester University Settlement which was based in Ancoats, an industrial and heavily populated area to the northeast of Manchester’s centre . This was a residential job in which she remained until her resignation at Easter 1933. To explain her role and the possible reasons why she became involved in a project away from her home and her native Yorkshire, we first need to wind back a few years.
The principal idea behind the Settlement Movement, which began in London’s East End with the establishment of Toynbee Hall, was that middle class volunteers would live among their working-class neighbours in poor areas, helping to improve the quality of people’s lives. Men and women, often university students or graduates, lived in settlement houses (which were single sex) and helped to set up social clubs and educational classes as well as becoming involved in neighbourhood social work. The idea was to enhance and enrich the quality of life, bringing communities together and listening to ensure that what was set up was exactly what was needed, rather than what volunteers might have believed or assumed was needed.
During the First World War, Lady Mabel was involved with the Neighbour Guild Settlement in Sheffield. She became President of its Horticultural Society and worked with its Women’s Group to turn a plot of land next to the Settlement House in Oxford Street into an allotment. The soil was examined by a gentleman from Leeds University who advised on the best vegetables to grow, such as potatoes (although Lady Mabel noted the show of these was rather disappointing). Lady Mabel explained that just as important as the practical and educational value of growing vegetables, was the need for beauty in members’ lives. There was to be a flower border and the women experimented to see which plants would grow best in ‘the volumes of smoke rolling across the city’. Lady Mabel offered her own advice, saying that in the coal districts it was well known that auriculas, lilies of the valley and carnations thrived in soot and smoke. Her hope was that the wartime experiment would encourage the women to seek gardens of their own which in turn would have health benefits; ‘every house’, she said, ‘ought to have a little garden’ of its own.
Members of the Women’s Meeting of the Neighbour Guild Settlement, Sheffield, during the First World War. Sheffield Daily Telegraph 31 March 1917, British Newspaper Archive, http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
The Neighbour Guild Settlement was succeeded by the Sheffield Educational Settlement, based in Shipton Street in Upperthorpe. This was initially founded by the YMCA but from the early 1920s, the association between the two ceased and the Settlement, under the wardenship of Arnold Freeman, formed its own small Council, which included several influential people to direct its work and help to seek funds for its many activities. When Lady Mabel consented to join this Council in the early 1920s, she joined many people of local influence, including the Bishop of Sheffield and the Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University. The aim of the Settlement was ‘to help to establish in the city of Sheffield the Kingdom of God’, explaining that,
By the “Kingdom of God” we mean streets along which it is a pleasure to walk; workplaces in which people enjoy working; public houses that are centres of social and educational life; kinemas [sic] that show elevating films; schools that would win the approval of Plato; churches made up of men and women indifferent to their own salvation; an environment in which people “may have life and have it abundantly”.
By “Education” we mean everything by means of which people may become more spiritual; everything that enriches human beings with That Which described in three words is Beauty, Truth and Goodness, and described in one word is GOD.
It is easy to see why Lady Mabel, who had a strong Christian faith and a belief in the value of adult education, productive leisure time and the importance of beauty in people’s lives, was supportive of the aims of the Settlement. In 1919, in a letter of endorsement, she wrote of her admiration, adding that she considered its most valuable work to be the development of a spirit of comradeship between men and women of all sections of life. The Settlement had a Literary and Dramatic Circle, putting on performances in its own ‘Little Theatre’ in Shipton Street. In addition, there were lectures, a Homecraft Club, elocution lessons and musical events.
A performance of ‘Fanny’s First Play’ by GB Shaw, put on by the Sheffield Repertory Company at the Little Theatre, Shipton Street, Upperthorpe, Sheffield, September 1921 Ref t02910, http://www.picturesheffield.com
A hundred years on, it is perhaps a tricky concept for us to understand; the notion of seeking to ‘better’ working class people with guidance from middle class volunteers with their ideas of what was wholesome and educational is an uncomfortable one, particularly with the clear spiritual message set out by Freeman. In a public letter of support in 1923 (for the Settlement was always in great need of funds), Lady Mabel pointed out how much of people’s working lives was spent alone, particularly women’s, making it very important to spend recreation and education time in the company of others. She donated money and provided goods (usually eggs from Barnes Hall) to the fairs and bazaars that were held to raise money, although in 1923, she withdrew from the Council, explaining that her local and County Council work made involvement in Sheffield very difficult (she was by now a ‘twin hatted’ councillor, for the West Riding and for Wortley Rural District Council). She remained, however, a patron of the Settlement for the rest of her life.
Lady Mabel’s decision to accept the role of residential co-warden at the Manchester University Settlement (so called because of the support and educational links provided by Manchester University) is perplexing, despite her prior involvement with the two Sheffield Settlements. She was appointed to help ease the heavy workload of the Settlement’s Warden, who, from 1926 was Hilda Cashmore. Miss Cashmore supervised Manchester University social work students living at the Settlement and working on its projects. Funds here too were always in short supply and Miss Cashmore had not engaged a bursar, the implication from the Settlement’s Council minutes being that she did the extra work herself, to save the Settlement paying a £150 a year salary to a bursar. The Council, however, decided to try and find someone with sufficient time and practical experience to lift some of the work from the Warden’s shoulders. It appears that that person was Lady Mabel Smith.
It is hard, however, to see what spare time Lady Mabel had to devote to this new role. In addition to her political work in Yorkshire, she had been voted on to the National Executive of the Labour Party at its 1930 Party Conference. This meant attending at least 20 meetings in London each year. There was also a local change; the West Riding County Council Labour Group had introduced a policy by which Aldermen had to seek re-election every six years. In 1931 they had one less space on the aldermanic bench due to losing a recent election and it was Lady Mabel who resigned. I thought at first that this might have been a deliberate move to create time for the work in Manchester. It is unlikely, however, to have reduced her workload by much, if at all, because she was, in the same year, returned unopposed as a county councillor in Ecclesfield (she was restored to the aldermanic bench in 1933) and was as committed to her duties as ever.
She was appointed to the Settlement job in the autumn of 1930, to begin work in January 1931, initially on an eight-month agreement, although this was extended and in the end she worked there for just over two years. Plans were made to convert the Library in the Settlement House in Every Street, Ancoats, into a room for her. The wardens agreed to share the £300 salary between them to avoid incurring more costs. At first Lady Mabel worked for four days a week, although this was reduced to three after the first few months, at her request. She also asked for a month off in the autumn of 1931. I wonder if this was to coincide with the Labour Party Conference which that year was in Scarborough in early October (and was the occasion of the expulsion from the Party of Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden and JH Thomas for their perceived treachery in joining the coalition National Government formed to deal with the international financial crisis).
The Settlement’s Council Minutes indicate that the proposal to appoint Lady Mabel came from Hilda Cashmore, which suggests to me that the two women may have known each other, possibly through previous Settlement work or through campaigning work on adult education. By 1930 Hilda Cashmore’s work with the Settlement Movement was well known; she had founded Bristol’s Barton Hill Settlement in 1911 and became its first warden. In 1926 she became Chair of the British Association of Residential Settlements. Cashmore had also served on government advisory committees alongside some of the most prominent social reformers and thinkers in the country, such as Seebohm Rowntree and William Beveridge. In a history of the Manchester University Settlement, written in 1945, Mary Stocks, who worked in Manchester with both women, said of Lady Mabel that she was ‘ever ready to move swiftly and live strenuously’ and to divide her time between Manchester and her County Council work in the West Riding. This description certainly accords with the impression that I have of Lady Mabel as a woman who would not ask of others what she was not prepared to do herself. Without knowing anything of the circumstances, I do wonder if this attitude was also responsible for her decision in 1928 to take care of the children whose father had died. When action was needed, Lady Mabel took it, perhaps because she saw it as her duty to do so if no one else could help (I don’t know how long she looked after the children but as there are no further references to this in press articles, I suspect it was temporary, especially as she was in Manchester just a few years afterwards).
Her experience and skills were put to immediate good use in Manchester. Being a resident meant hands on involvement in all aspects of the work done within the district as well as constantly seeking funding for the many social projects undertaken. The Settlement’s work with children during the years of Lady Mabel’s residency included the running of a very popular play centre for the under tens, held most evenings and on Saturday mornings. Here, children could attend classes such as the ‘Natural Movement Dancing Class’ or they could make use of the Settlement’s children’s library. There were also holidays and camps organized during school vacations. Public donations funded these, along with trips to swimming baths and the cinema, as well as picnics and garden parties (there were offers from people in better off areas to use their gardens).
Manchester University Settlement, ‘the aptly named ‘Roundhouse’ in Every Street, Ancoats. Image courtesy of Manchester Libraries under Create Commons Attribution Inernational (CCBY 4.0) licence
Her time in Manchester coincided with years of extremely high unemployment and in 1932, the Settlement opened a club for unemployed men. According to the Warden’s Report for 1932-3, the average attendance at this ‘Pilgrim’s Club’ was around 70 men each day. It was made clear that this was not a charitable concern; these were the years of the Means Testing of income for the unemployed and every care had to be taken to ensure that the Club was not seen to be a relief centre. The men paid two pence a week to become members and appointed their own committee to take charge of the running of the club. During morning sessions, they took part in a range of occupations from woodwork to poultry-keeping and first aid. There were games and sports in the afternoons, such as football and gymnastics. An allotment section of the Club was established on land provided by the Corporation, at a cost of four pence week for each member. This was invaluable to many struggling families as well as providing exercise and opportunities to spend time outdoors away from the house. There was a similar club for unemployed boys offering training and instruction in various types of employment, including office work and carpentry. Approaches were made to local firms which agreed to give the boys a chance of work if any vacancies came up.
There were clubs like these opening up in many parts of the country as the Depression took hold (for more information on these you might like to look at this blog on my website Family discoveries: aspects of life in 1930s Britain – Cathy Hunt historian about the centre with which my grandfather was involved in establishing in Richmond, Surrey in the 1930s) and members of the Manchester Settlement’s club visited several northern counties to talk about its work to those interested in starting up a club in their own areas.
In a book written to commemorate the 100th year of the Manchester University Settlement (1995), people who had been associated with its work were asked for their recollections. One man remembered the beginning of the Pilgrim Club, saying that
Lady Mabel (Smith) knew dad [sic] because dad was church warden at St Edwards…and knew that he was used to welfare because he had been a shop steward. Lady Mabel said, “we do need a leader”, so he started to go then. Dad was just dedicated. I think he got paid 39 shillings a week for running the Pilgrim Club. It was full-time because unemployment was in such a state that the Lord Mayor set up clubs all over Manchester and the Pilgrim Club was twinned to one in Hulme.
I think this illustrates not just the importance of the work of the Settlement but the ease with which Lady Mabel communicated with local people, a vital skill to have in a project designed to bring people of all classes together. I rather suspect too that she was very good at persuading people to take on work for which she saw a great need.
In February 1933, Hilda Cashmore and Lady Mabel announced that they would resign at Easter. Miss Cashmore, who in 1932, had taken advantage of her lightened load to go on an investigative trip to India, decided that it was in that country that her future lay. Lady Mabel continued with her work in Yorkshire.
Lady Mabel Smith leading a procession to boost recruitment for the Women’s Land Army through the streets of Sheffield, May 1918, Sheffield Daily Telegraph 13 May 1918, British Newspaper Archive, http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
As might be anticipated by any reader who has read these blogs in the order in which they appear, Lady Mabel threw herself into war work in the same way that she approached everything else. In 1916 she asked for a chance to work as a road labourer in Wortley Rural District Council but was turned down on the basis that such work was not suitable for a woman. Unsurprisingly, this decision did not deter her and by the end of the First World War, she was Yorkshire’s Chief Organising Inspector for the Women’s Land Army.
With her husband serving in France from at least 1915, Lady Mabel embarked on a bold campaign of thrift, which she spoke about at a meeting at Sheffield Town Hall early in 1916. She confessed that before the War she had never saved a penny but now she had decided that her house and establishment were too big for one person, who could well look after herself. Another newspaper reported in 1919 that Lady Mabel had indeed closed up Barnes Hall and taken a small house in Sheffield for the duration of the War. She was, she said, learning the pleasure of doing without things. The car had been put away and she was instead getting about by tram. The extra walking took its toll on her boots and she found somewhere to get them re-soled and heeled for three shillings and sixpence. She confessed that her two temptations when looking in shop windows were flowers and books but that she had resisted even these in a quest to find out just what she could do without. She was also managing her husband’s finances while he was away and putting money into War Loan and Bonds (a patriotic investment scheme) which she would have pleasure in handing over to him later on, the hope being that they made a good return. I rather suspect that the habits acquired during the War stayed with her for the rest of her life. In an extract from a diary (in her Personal Papers) recording a visit in 1936 to Hadrian’s Wall, there are references to running out of spending money, finding a shopkeeper willing to take a book of postage stamps in exchange for fruit and biscuits and managing to have just enough money to get back to Carlisle for the return train home. The interview Catherine Bailey had with a relation of Colonel Smith’s also refers to the austerity of life at Barnes Hall.
Even before Lady Mabel became involved with the Women’s Land Army, which was established in January 1917, she recognised the need for and the value of women working on the land. She led by example, withdrawing for a few weeks from her work with Rotherham rural District Council in 1916 to undertake a nine-week stint as a farm worker in Sprotborough. Later that year, Lady Mabel wrote an article about the reasons why she took the work and outlining her experiences of life for a woman on the farm. In this piece it is possible to see how Lady Mabel’s passion for welfare and education and her belief in the expansion of women’s opportunities all came together in her efforts to support the Home Front.
Firstly, she explained that as she had already been asked to help to organize women on the land, she determined to get practical experience of how much work and what types of work women could do. In addition, she wanted to prove that educated women were as capable of manual labour (despite the views of many who were doubtful) as anyone else and that they would want to get involved if there were opportunities given. Finally, she was adamant that children who were not of school leaving age should not be taken from the classroom to work on farms and she wrote that in taking up the work herself, she hoped to take the place of one such child. This was a point upon which she remained adamant, in early 1918 objecting to the recommendations of the West Riding Education Committee that children over 12 could be employed on the land. Education, she said, was a child’s right and they should not be deprived of it. She was overruled. Again, during the Second World War, Lady Mabel strongly objected to an approved scheme for elementary school children aged between 12 and 14 to be temporarily released from school to help with the potato harvest. She believed that there were older boys who could do the work and not suffer so much from an educational standpoint as the younger ones.
Once registered at the Labour Exchange, Lady Mabel explained that it had taken time to find a farmer willing to employ her because her desire to work was not taken seriously. She was eventually taken on a trial basis and later discovered that the farmer had not expected her to stay beyond a week. She, however, was determined to show what she was capable of, getting up at 5am on her first day and getting stuck into wash day. Out on the land she began with potato riddling (the sorting and sieving of the crop), working alongside women who had worked all their lives as farm labourers. Lady Mabel said that she was at first treated with ‘kindly tolerance’ but that a ‘bond of union’ developed as they all had husbands, sons or brothers in the War. She also noted that ‘they obligingly moderated their language in my honour and I acquired an extended vocabulary of the finest Yorkshire’.
Other duties included growing mangolds (for animal feed), weeding and haymaking. At the end of her stint, she was more convinced than ever that much, ‘if not all’ farm work could be done by women because of their conscientious approach to work. Her stay at the farm ended due to the illness of a relative (the implication being that, like so many women, she was needed for personal care and nursing) although this was by no means the end of her association with women’s work on the land during the War.
By 1917 Lady Mabel was helping the Women’s War Agricultural Committee to recruit women to work on the land, looking for suitable accommodation for them and organizing training. In June 1917 it was reported in the press that Wentworth Woodhouse was set to become one such training centre, using a wing offered by the Earl and Countess Fitzwilliam. The idea was that women and girls would first spend three weeks at a designated training or ‘school’ farm and then come to Wentworth Woodhouse to complete their training and await positions of employment. It was suggested that the women might be able to stay on in the wing and use it as their living quarters once they had begun work. I would be very interested to know if either of these plans were put into action.
All opportunities to find women to work the land were taken; in the summer of that year an advertisement in the Shefield Daily Telegraph asked farmers seeking extra workers to contact Lady Mabel at Barnes Hall. The advert drew farmers attention to ‘a supply of School Teachers’ who were available in the summer holidays to help.
Lady Mabel’s efforts made it inevitable that, on the forming of the Women’s Land Army, she would work with that organization. By 1918 she was its Chief Organising Inspector for Yorkshire, touring the county, heading recruitment rallies in its towns and cities, in the full Land Army uniform of breeches, knee length tunic, boots and leggings (women were also given a mackintosh, jersey and a soft felt cloche hat). She talked to potential recruits about the work and gave information about wages, which at 18 shillings a week minimum (or the agreed district rate, whichever was highest) were lower than many other forms of women’s war work, such as munitions. Around 23,000 women worked full time for the Women’s Land Army during the First World War, compared with hundreds of thousands of women who worked in industry.
The description of the uniform and the statistics are from the research carried out by the Women’s Land Army website)
When the War was over, Lady Mabel served on the executive committee of the West Riding’s National Association of Landswomen. She continued to develop her interest in agriculture, speaking at Sheffield University in 1920 about the importance of townsfolk recognizing the value of farm labourers and trying to understand the way they worked instead of looking down their noses at them. She believed that agricultural workers were growing in strength and organization. In 1923 she went to Norfolk to support agricultural labourers who were on strike in protest at proposed cuts in their wages alongside increased working hours. Wages were already extremely low and there was a good deal of support for the thousands of strikers. Labour Leader Ramsay MacDonald became involved in the strike negotiations and after five weeks, the dispute ended with the farmers’ proposals abandoned.
In the years after the War, as well as her work on the West Riding County Council Agricultural Committee, Lady Mabel found time to work on the farm belonging to Barnes Hall. She had returned there after the War and her husband Colonel Mackenzie Smith, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1917, joined her when he was demobilized in the spring of 1919. Although my study of Lady Mabel is about her public work, I think it is relevant to mention here her personal involvement with farming, which was as committed as everything else that she did. In 1923, she was elected as the first president of the Sheffield Pig Breeders’ Association. Bertram’s Butchers in Chapeltown, Sheffield, was among establishments selling the prime pork, bred and fed by Lady Mabel Smith of Barnes Hall. When the Smiths sold the farm in 1924, there was considerable interest at auction in the pedigree pigs owned by Lady Mabel, one of which had won prizes at the Yorkshire and Penistone shows.
Butcher in Chapeltown, not far from Barnes Hall, selling prime pork bred by Lady Mabel Smith, Penistone, Stocksbridge & Hoyland Express, 22 December 1923
I do not know why the farm was sold – the Smiths continued to live at Barnes Hall after the sale of the farm – but the Conservative candidate for Penistone, Colonel Hodgkinson, attempted to make political capital out of it during the campaign preceding the 1924 election, by suggesting that Lady Mabel (who was in the audience) had given up farming because the Labour Government had failed to bring any benefits to the land and its workers. This argument failed to convince, however, and Labour won the seat in Penistone.
When Lady Mabel Smith died, aged 81, on September 26 1951, most obituaries pointed to her long and distinguished record of public service, but some also paid tribute to her as a person of integrity who was very well liked and respected. The South Yorkshire Times and Express called her a ‘gentlewoman in the truest sense of the word’, adding;
There has been no one quite like Lady Mabel and there will be none. Her contribution to the social history of the district was as unique as her personality.
Sir Bernard Lomas-Walker, former chairman of the West Riding County Council noted how much she would be missed by her fellow Yorkshire people, to whose welfare her life was devoted. And I think his sentiment was exactly right. Lady Mabel was a one off, who never pretended to be what she was not. She did not claim to share experiences with those whose causes she was championing but she did ensure that she was always very well informed. She was outspoken because she was determined to speak for those she represented.
As an aristocratic young woman, she could easily have taken a much easier path than the one she chose, worked far less for the public good and devoted much more of her time to farming and to the field sports she so enjoyed. The chances of her ever becoming a conventional lady of the manor seemed remote from the start; whilst she did employ servants, she was certainly on their side. As early as 1911, speaking at the Sheffield Servants’ Home, she said that if mistresses could not find or keep servants, might it be because they had not done all that they could to make life more agreeable for them? She went on to say that while so much was heard about the education and training of servants, surely there was something to be said for the better training of mistresses. I can’t see that going down particularly well among those women she had ‘come out’ with into society back in the summer of 1889. Instead, Lady Mabel went to work and if most of that work was unpaid, it was still all consuming. She took on multiple roles and immersed herself in all that she saw needed doing. As a magistrate, she used her experiences to better inform her work on Council committees. In 1923, for example, she spoke about the number of times she was called upon as a magistrate to certify for women to be sent to asylums. Her view was that most of the cases were due to women being confined within appalling housing conditions and that the provision of maternity homes was the most economical way to prevent suffering.
Occasionally the press was critical of her, one reporter alluding to a tendency to speak too fast when excited whilst another, when she was addressing the Norfolk agricultural workers in 1923, managed to show derision for both her sex and her class, by commenting that ‘like most women of her class who take up the cause of the discontented, she is inclined to be a bit of an extremist’. Even this journalist was, however, forced to admit that she possessed practical knowledge. Lady Mabel, as we have seen, only talked about what she understood.
The short reference in 1928 to her turning down the nomination to stand as parliamentary candidate for Sowerby Bridge to care for three children, points to a strong sense of duty, not just in her public roles but towards all those she knew and cared about. Although I am not qualified to talk about Lady Mabel’s relationships with her family, there is certainly evidence to suggest that she was always generous with her home, hosting Labour events for example, as well as teas and sports afternoons for children in the care of Wortley Poor Law. Her deep concern for the welfare of children is apparent across her work and in speeches where she urges parents and teachers to listen to children and the sense that they speak. Let them, she (unsuccessfully) urged Rotherham Poor Law Guardians in 1913, regarding children in the Workhouse Infirmary, choose their own Christmas presents, which she was sure would give them the greatest pleasure. She consistently showed faith in children’s ability to do the right thing. In 1928, at the opening of a new school, she said that, in her opinion, children were infinitely older than grown-ups and their outlook on life was much more serious. Rather than tell them what to do, adults ought merely to help them by pointing out broad principles and giving the necessary warnings.
I have written about Lady Mabel Smith not because I think her aristocratic status makes her more worthy or more important than any other woman who worked in local politics during the early to mid 20th century but because her contributions to her community were significant and deserve to be recorded. Those who dedicate themselves to local politics tend to be overlooked in the historical record which still focuses heavily on national leaders and national politics. Those who dedicated years of service to their communities deserve recognition whether they were born into nobility or into poverty. Some aspects of their journeys undoubtedly differed greatly but they also shared experiences, challenges, setbacks and achievements and above all, vision for a better future.
Headstone in the Churchyard of St Mary’s Church, Ecclesfield
Thank you for reading these posts. As I said at the very start, there is a great deal more to say. In addition to the elements of her work that I have highlighted, Lady Mabel was involved in a great deal more, including the Scout movement, a Board of Education Public Libraries Committee and the Miners’ Welfare Scholarship Scheme. I have said nothing about her foreign travels (for example, in 1927 an extensive trip to India, in 1929 a Mediterranean cruise) and the regular lectures and slide shows she gave about what she had seen and learned. I have to stop somewhere and hope that I have provided a broad outline of the various aspects of Lady Mabel’s public work.
If you have any questions or any information about this remarkable woman that you would like to share, I would be delighted to hear from you. You can use the contact form on this website or you can message me via @cathyhunt.bsky.social or Cathy Hunt Historian on Facebook.
In 1907 a branch of the National Federation of Women Workers was formed in Taunton after a strike by women and girls at a shirt and collar factory. The women had to pay for the cotton they used to make the firm’s garments and when the employers increased this charge, the women made their feelings plain and walked out. Their story bears similarities with the working conditions and experiences of thousands of underpaid women industrial workers in the early 20th century. This talk examines some of the challenges and struggles faced by women and highlights the extraordinary efforts, often against the odds, to organise them into an all-women trade union, led by the charismatic Mary Macarthur.
Join me at the Museum of Somerset Rural Life on Thursday March 5th 2026 at 7.30pm (also available on line) to find out more about what we learn about women’s lives from a closer look at their work, pay and determination to be treated fairly and with respect by their employers.
Cathy Hunt historian 
