Good housing that pays /

by Fullerton L. Waldo

Miss Hill was one of the pillars of the Kyrle Society, created by her sister Miranda, which sought to bring beauty into the lives of the poor, to secure open spaces, and to convert city burial grounds in congested areas to the uses of the living. She was a prime mover in the Charity Organization Society, earnestly striving to keep before that body the paramount importance of personality in charity, and the influence of enthusiastic and warmhearted individual effort for individuals. She was a member of the Women’s University Settlement in Blackfriars’ Road. She was one of the founders of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. She was a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws. She saved land along the banks of the River Wandle from desecration, for the perennial joy of the poor. After her “Homes of the London Poor” had been translated into German by Princess Alice, the Octavia Hill Verein was formed in Berlin. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee took counsel with her, and installed her methods in groups of houses municipally controlled. The housing system in Amsterdam was influenced by her work, and traces of it are to be found in Sweden. Students of her methods came from near and far to be instructed. The effort of such women as Ellen Collins and Josephine Shaw Lowell in New York gladly acknowledged the impress of Miss Hill’s ideals.

Aside from her personal correspondence, the record of beneficent activity is to be found in her two volumes, “Homes of the London Poor,” and “Our Common Land,” and in the series of annual “Letters to My Fellow-workers,” privately circulated, which began in 1873 and continued until December, 1911.

“The main tone of action,” she affirms, in “Homes of the London Poor,” “must be severe. There is much of rebuke and repression needed, although a deep and silent under-current of sympathy and pity may flow beneath. If the rent is not ready, notice to quit must be served.”

An all-important factor is the “friendly rent-collector” who, while firm in her insistence upon prompt payment of the rent, forms a living link of sympathy and perception between the landlord or landlady and the tenant, and among the tenants themselves. The thorough training of this collector is essential, and for this training Miss Hill left minute prescriptions.

In her Letter for 1879, Miss Hill says,—and she repeats the passage in the Letter for 1896,—“All the smoky chimneys, broken water-pipes, tiresome neighbors, drunken husbands, death, disease, poverty, sin, call not only for your sympathy but for your action.”

“You cannot deal with the people and their houses separately. The principle on which the whole work rests, is that the inhabitants and their surroundings must be improved together,” she writes in “Homes of the London Poor.”

Miss Hill wanted trees planted and vines trained against the houses, and gardens wherever possible. She cites with approval the example of children who thrust flowers in a crevice in the wall, to make it, as they said, “like it was the day we had the May-pole.” “A bunch of flowers brought on purpose,” is mentioned among the gifts that are not destructive of independence, and that assist what she beautifully calls the “return to the old fellowship between rich and poor.” “She takes them flowers” is part of her commendation of one of her friends who went tactfully among her people. In a touching Letter she speaks of widows who came home from a country outing with wild flowers to surprise the children when they woke in the morning.

She pleads for organized, directed play, in behalf of children “wholly ignorant of games,” who “have hardly self-control enough to play at any which have an object or require effort.” She holds that there must be play supervisors for a playground she has started, and “these I hope to find more and more.”

In one of the Letters she asks for public music definitely planned and schooled. “I hope that we may have a more organized body of singers, led by a conductor whom they know, and ready to sing in out-of-the-way places.” In another Letter she refers to the value of uplifting music on Sundays, and of a violin class.

Of a cadet corps for the boys she heartily approved. “There is no organization which I have found influence so powerfully for good the boys in such a neighborhood.” The Boy Scouts of today would have been to her a cause for devout thanksgiving.