The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

When Mrs. Ward at last found time to put herself in the surgeons’ hands, the operation which ensued was clumsily performed, and left her with yet another burden to carry through all her later life. After it she lay for days in such pain as the doctors had neither foreseen nor prophesied, while the nervous shock of the operation itself was aggravated, one night, by the antics of a drunken nurse, who came into her room with a lighted lamp in her hand and deposited it, swaying and lurching, upon the floor. Fortunately help was at hand and the nurse removed, but the terror of the moment did not forward Mrs. Ward’s recovery. It was many weeks before sleep came back to her, many weeks before she could sit up with any comfort or move with ease. But the book must be finished, in spite of aches and pains, and finished it was within ten weeks of the operation (March 22, 1896). George Tressady’s death in the dark galleries of the mine “possessed” her as she had only been possessed by the tale of Bessie Costrell, and helped her no doubt to master the host of her physical ills. But when the strain was over she was fit for nothing but to be taken out to Italy, there to recover, if she could, under the stimulus of that magic light and air which appealed—so at least we used to imagine—to something in her own far-off southern blood. At Cadenabbia, on Lake Como, health began to return to her; at Padua she was “doing more walking than she had dreamed of for four years,” and with the revival of her strength she wrote home in sheer joy of spirit, “All Italy to me is enchanted ground!” But alas, it was too early to rejoice. She came again to the Lake of Como to have a fortnight’s complete rest before returning home—staying at the Villa Serbelloni, above Bellagio—and there unduly overtaxed her new-found powers. She must make her way to the ruined tower of San Giovanni that looks at you from its hill-top beyond the little town, and since the path was non-carrozzabile she would make the ascent on foot. The adventure was pure joy to her, the views of the lake all the more intoxicating for having been won by her own strength of limb. But the next day a violent attack of her old and still unexplained trouble declared itself. The journey homewards, via Lucerne, was performed under conditions of crisis which still leave a haunting memory, and though a clever Swiss doctor at Lucerne appeared to diagnose the disease more surely than any previous medicine-man, he could suggest no practicable remedy. Mrs. Ward continued to suffer from her obscure ailment to a greater or less degree for the rest of her life, as well as from the results of the operation; but on the whole the attacks became less frequent, or less severe, as the years went on. She developed an extraordinary skill in fighting them, by the aid of the thousand and one little drugs before-mentioned, and often derived a keen pleasure from the sense of having met and routed an old enemy. But the enemy was always there, lying in wait for her if she walked more, say, than half a mile at a time. It is well to remember that her life from 1892 onwards was conducted under that constant handicap.

Yet it was during the years in which her illness was most acute that she carried to a successful conclusion her labours for the foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement.

When Mr. Edwards, in May, 1894, offered to provide £4,000 towards the Building Fund of University Hall,[18] it was only the beginning of a long struggle towards the accomplishment of this design. The next step was to interest the Duke of Bedford—as the ground-landlord of that part of London—in the scheme. This Mrs. Ward succeeded in doing during the summer of 1894, thus laying the foundation of a co-operation that was to ripen into a strong mutual regard. The Duke took a keen personal interest in the finding of a suitable site for the new building, and when such a site became available in Tavistock Place, offered it to the Committee at less than its market value, and contributed £800 towards the building fund. Oddly enough, however, this site—for which the contract was actually signed in February, 1895—was not that on which the Settlement stands to-day, but lay on the opposite side of the street; the disadvantage to it being that there would have been a delay of two years in obtaining possession, owing to existing tenants’ rights. When, therefore, an equally good site actually fell vacant in the same street a few months later, the Duke willingly released the Committee from their contract and made over to them the ground on which the Settlement now stands on a 999 years’ lease. In the meantime Mr. Passmore Edwards had raised his original offer from £4,000 to £7,000, and then to £10,000; the total fund stood at over £12,000, and Mr. Norman Shaw agreed to preside over an architects’ competition and to judge between the various designs submitted. All connected with University Hall rejoiced greatly when the award fell to two young residents of the Hall, Messrs. Dunbar Smith and Cecil Brewer, whose simple yet beautiful design far surpassed those of the other competitors. But according to the instructions of the Committee itself the building was to cost up to £12,000, while the price of the site was £5,000, and a further sum would be required for furnishing. Mrs. Ward set herself to the task of raising further funds with her accustomed energy, but her illness during the winter of 1895-6 greatly hampered her, and the fund rose all too slowly for her eager spirit. Meanwhile the builders’ tenders soared in the opposite direction. When she returned from Italy and Lucerne in May, 1896, she found the situation critical; either fresh plans of a far less ambitious nature must be asked for, or a further sum of £3,500 must be raised at once. Mr. R. G. Tatton, already one of the most active members of the Council, and soon to be appointed Warden, believed that the only hope lay in Mr. Passmore Edwards, but told Mrs. Ward plainly that the benefactor had said he could do no more unless others showed a corresponding interest. Mr. Tatton boldly asked Mrs. Ward herself to lay down £1,000. This she did; a fortunate legacy of £500 came in at the same moment, and Mr. Edwards gave an additional £2,000 with the best grace in the world. Yet once more, on the night of the formal opening, nearly two years later, did he come forward with a similar donation, making £14,000 in all. He showed throughout a steadfast faith in the working ideals of the Settlement that triumphed over all minor difficulties; Mrs. Ward described him once as possessed by “the very passion of giving.” No wonder that the Committee decided, long before the new building was completed, to call it by his name.

Thus Mrs. Ward could have the happiness, during the years 1896 and 1897, of seeing the beautiful building for which she had toiled so hard rise and take bodily shape before her eyes. She became fast friends with the two young architects, who had so decisively won the competition, and who now devoted themselves indefatigably to the supervision of the work. She formed, early in 1897, a General Committee for the new Settlement, the wide and representative character of which showed how warm was the sympathy entertained for the new venture not only in London, but also in Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester. And she devoted herself to the formation of a Lectureship Committee, named after Benjamin Jowett, which was to carry on, within the new organization, the religious ideals of University Hall. The Settlement itself rested on a purely secular basis, but the Council fully agreed to the inclusion of the following clause as one of the “Objects” in the Memorandum of Association: “To promote the study of the Bible and of the history of religion in the light of the best available results of criticism and research.” The Jowett Lectureship Committee was established in order to carry out this clause, and a sum of £100 per annum was placed at its disposal from the general revenue of the Settlement—a small result, it may be argued, of all the missionary effort put forth in the founding of University Hall seven years before. But the Settlement itself stood there as the result of that effort, and as Mrs. Ward looked down, on October 10, 1897, on the packed audience that assembled in the new hall to hear her opening address, she might well feel that her dreams had come to a more solid fruition than she could ever have dared to hope. But even then she did not know the whole. There sat the mothers and the fathers, with faces eager and expectant, ready to throw themselves into this big experiment that was opening out before them. Mrs. Ward welcomed them with her whole heart; yet this was not all: the children were at the gates.

CHAPTER VII
CHILDREN AND ADULTS AT THE PASSMORE EDWARDS SETTLEMENT—THE FOUNDATION OF THE INVALID CHILDREN’S SCHOOL
1897-1899

FOR some two or three years before the opening of the new Settlement, a Saturday morning “playroom” for children had been held at Marchmont Hall, mainly under the direction of Miss Mary Neal, who, as the founder of the Esperance Club for factory girls, and one of the “Sisters” working under Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, had already made her name beloved in the slums of St. Pancras. In that shabby little room she had taught them Old English games and dances, till even the street outside grew merry with the sound of their music, and many were the groups of children seen playing “Old Roger is dead” or “Looby Loo” at street corners during the other days of the week. Mrs. Ward had been much attracted by the experiment, which was hampered, like everything else at Marchmont Hall, by lack of space; and now that the fine new buildings were available she was eager to transplant it and to carry it further. My diary for Saturday, October 16, 1897, duly records that “D. and Miss Churcher and I went to the Settlement at ten to superintend the children’s play-hour, which we are now going to have every Saturday in the big hall. It was a perfect pandemonium this time, as we hadn’t prepared any sort of organization, and there were at least 120 children to deal with. We also had to give each child a pair of list slippers to put on over its own boots, and this was a tremendous business and took over half an hour. Miss Neal made them a little speech before we began the games, and then we all formed rings and played Looby Loo and others of that stamp for nearly an hour more.”

From these unpromising beginnings sprang the whole of the “organized recreation” for children which gradually arose at the new Settlement, with the object of attracting the child population of the district away from the streets after school hours. Mrs. Ward guided and inspired the movement, though she left the actual carrying on of the classes to younger and more robust members of her group; but she formed a special committee (the Women’s Work Committee), of which she was chairman, to watch over it all, and generally supplied the motive force, the sense of its being worth while, which inspired the ever-growing band of our helpers. One class, too, she kept as her very own—a weekly reading aloud for boys between eleven and fourteen, in the course of which she read them a great deal of Stevenson and Kipling, or brought them photographs of her travels in Italy, or talked to them sometimes of the events of the day. About thirty boys came regularly to these readings, and always behaved well with her, while she on her side came to know them individually and felt a strong affection for many of them. Where are they now, those thirty boys? How many have left their bones in the mud of Flanders, or on the heights that look towards Troas, across the narrow sea? Mrs. Ward herself was often possessed with that thought through the years of the Great War, but never, so far as I know, heard any direct news of them. All were of that fatal age that Death reaped with the least pity.

After the Saturday morning play-rooms—which fortunately improved in discipline after that first “pandemonium,” and increased so much in popularity that we had to divide them into two, taking in close upon 400 children in a morning—we launched out into musical drill-classes for bigger and smaller children, story-telling for the little ones, gymnastic classes for girls and boys, a children’s hour in the library, dancing and acting classes, and finally history lectures with lantern slides, designed to supplement the very meagre teaching of history that the children received in the elementary schools around. How much one learnt by hard experience, in the course of it all, of the art of keeping the children’s attention—whether in teaching them a new singing-game on Saturdays, or in the story-telling to the “under elevens,” or in the exciting task of going over Oliver’s battles with the young ladies and gentlemen of the fifth to seventh standards! For even these, if one lost their attention for a moment, were not above calling out “Ole Krujer!” at a somewhat forbidding slide of Sir Thomas Fairfax, while the “under elevens” would often be swept by gusts of coughing and talk that fairly drowned the voice of the story-teller, if she suffered them to lose the thread of the Princess’s adventures by too gorgeous a description of the dragon. But usually they were as good as gold, sitting there packed tight on the rows of chairs (136 children on seventy-six chairs was one of our records), while the “little mothers” hugged their babies and no sound was to be heard save the sucking of toffee or liquorice-sticks.

All these occupations took place in the late afternoon, from 5.30 to 7, during the hours when the children of London, discharged from school and tea, drift aimlessly about the streets, often actually locked out from home (in those days at least) owing to the long hours worked by mother as well as father at “charing” or at the local factory. The instant response made by the child-population of St. Pancras to Mrs. Ward’s piping showed that she had, as it were, stumbled upon a real and vital need of our great cities, and as a larger and larger band of helpers was drawn into our circle and more and more of the cheerful Settlement rooms came into use, the attendances of the children went up by leaps and bounds. One year after the opening they had grown to some 650 per week; by October, 1899, to 900, and in the next three or four years they touched the utmost capacity of the building by reaching 1,200. The schools in the immediate neighbourhood co-operated eagerly in the new effort, though the selection of children for our special classes often involved extra labour for the teachers; but they rose to it with enthusiasm, and would sometimes steal in to watch their children enjoying the story-telling or the library, removed from the restraint of day-school discipline, and yet “giving no trouble,” as they wonderingly recognized. Mrs. Ward made friends with many of these teachers, especially with those from Manchester Street and Prospect Terrace Schools, for it was her way to establish natural human relations with every one with whom she came in contact, and the hard-working London teacher always appealed to her in a peculiar way. An incident that gave her special pleasure was the passing of a vote of thanks to the Settlement by a neighbouring Board of Managers, “for the work done among the children of this school.” How she was loved and looked up to by every one concerned—by helpers, teachers and, more dimly, by the children themselves—is not, perhaps, for me to say; but this was the note that underlay all the busy hum of the Settlement building in the children’s hour, as indeed in all the other hours of its day.

Occasionally, however, some critic would observe, “Well, this is all very fine for the children, but what do the parents say about it? What becomes of home influence when you encourage the children to come out in this way at an hour when they ought to be at home?” The answer, of course, was that the parents themselves, and especially the more anxious and hard-working among them, were the foremost in blessing the Settlement (or the “Passmore,” as it was affectionately dubbed in the neighbourhood) for the good care that it took of Sidney or Alf or Elsie; that they knew, better than anyone else, how little they could do in the miserable rooms that served them for a home for the growing boys and girls, and yet that “the streets” were full of dangers from which they longed to preserve their little ones. One or two of them became voluntary helpers at the “Recreation School,” as it came to be called; many joined the “Parents’ Guild” that Mrs. Ward formed from among them, and that met periodically at the Settlement for music and rest, or for a quiet talk with her about the children’s doings; while all were to be seen at the summer and winter “Displays” in the big hall or in the garden, their tired faces beaming with pride at the performance of their offspring. Perhaps indeed it is the bitterest reproach of all against our civilization that in the homes of the poor, “where every process of life and death,” as Mrs. Ward once put it, “has to be carried on within the same few cubic feet of space,” there is no room for the growing children, who, as baby follows baby in the crowded tenement, get pushed out into the world almost before they can stand upon their feet. Mrs. Ward knew only too well the conditions of life in the mean streets of St. Pancras or the East End; her sister-in-law, Miss Gertrude Ward, who had become a District Nurse after the eight years of her life with us, had frequently taken her to certain typical dens where such “processes of life and death” were going on, and her own researches for Sir George Tressady had done the rest. Add to this her intense power of imagination and of realization acting like a fire within her, and the children’s work at the Passmore Edwards Settlement is all explained. She yearned to them and longed to make them happy: that was all.