The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

I shall be very happy to dine with you on the 14th of June.

You once said that the P. Edwards Settlement would not be disdainful of subscriptions, and I had not anything to give at the time. I can now send you with pleasure a cheque for £100. I am sure you will find some good use for it.

Yours very truly,
NORTHBROOK.

The use found for Lord Northbrook’s gift was in tidying and beautifying the garden at the back of the Settlement—a piece of land, shaded by fine old plane trees, which the Duke kept in his own hands, but allowed the Settlement to use for a nominal fee. It was now laid down in grass, and became a vital element in the carrying out of Mrs. Ward’s further schemes for the welfare of her London children. It was there that she opened her first “Vacation School” in 1902 for children left to play and quarrel in the streets during the August holiday, and there too that she could see health returning to the faces of her cripples, after the opening of the “Invalid Children’s School” in February, 1899.

In looking back over the origin of Mrs. Ward’s interest in crippled and invalid children, the vision of our old house in Russell Square rises once more before me, with its gravelled garden at the rear running back to meet the Queen Square gardens to the east of us, for there, across those old plane-shaded spaces, rose the modest buildings of the “Alexandra Hospital for Diseases of the Hip”—or, as we used to call it for short, the “Hip Hospital.” What “Diseases of the Hip” exactly were was an obscure point to our childish minds, but we knew that our mother cared very much for the children lying there, that all our old toys went to amuse them, and that sometimes a lame boy or girl would appear at the cottage down the lane past Borough Farm, which was Mrs. Ward’s earliest attempt at a convalescent home for ailing Londoners. No doubt many another Bloomsbury family did just as much as we for these helpless little ones, but the sight of them kindled in her the spark of imagination, of creative force or what you will, that would not accept their condition passively, but after many years forged from time and circumstance the opportunity for a fundamental improvement of their lives.

The opportunity presented itself in the tempting emptiness of the Settlement rooms during the day-time. From five o’clock onwards they were used to the uttermost, but all the morning and early afternoon they stood tenantless, asking for occupation. Mrs. Ward had heard of a little class for crippled children carried on at the Women’s University Settlement, Southwark, by Miss Sparkes, and of another in Stepney organized by Mr. and Mrs. G. T. Pilcher, and before the new Settlement was a year old she was already making inquiries from her friends on the London School Board as to whether it might be possible to obtain the Board’s assistance in opening a small school for Crippled Children at the Passmore Edwards Settlement. Already London possessed a few Special Schools for the “mentally defective”; the Progressive party was in the ascendant on the School Board, and among its chiefs were certain old friends of Mrs. Ward’s—Mr. Lyulph Stanley (now Lord Sheffield) and Mr. Graham Wallas, who knew something of her powers and of the probability that anything to which she set her hand in earnest would be carried through. Mrs. Ward on her side believed that the number of crippled but educable children scattered through London was far greater than anyone supposed, and moreover that the policy of drafting them into the new schools for the mentally defective (as was being done in some cases) was fundamentally unsound. In the summer of 1898, therefore, she formed a sub-committee of the Settlement Council, which undertook to carry out a thorough inquiry in the neighbourhood of Tavistock Place into the numbers of invalid children living at home and not attending ordinary school, whose infirmities would yet permit them to attend a special centre of the type that she had in mind. The help of all the neighbouring hospitals was asked for and most ungrudgingly given, in the supplying of lists of suitable children, while the Invalid Children’s Aid Association actively helped in the work of visiting, and the School Board directed their Attendance Officers to assist Mrs. Ward by providing the names of children exempted on the ground of ill-health from attending school. Sad indeed were the secrets revealed by this inquiry—of helpless children left at home all day, perhaps with a little food within reach, while mother and father were out at work, with nothing on earth to do, and only the irregular and occasional visits of some kind-hearted neighbour to look forward to.

“I have a vivid recollection,” writes one of the most devoted workers of the I.C.A.A., Mrs. Townsend, “of being asked by a neighbour to visit two small boys in a particularly dirty and unsavoury street. I found the door open, felt my way along a pitch-dark passage, and found at the end of it a small dark room, very barely furnished: in one corner was a bed, on which lay a boy of ten with spinal trouble; in the other corner were two kitchen chairs, on one of which sat a boy of seven, with hip disease, his leg propped on the other. Between them stood a small table, and on it a tumbler of water and a plate with slices of bread and jam. The mother of these two was at work all day: at 6 a.m. she put their food for the day on the table and went off, leaving them all alone until she got home from work dead tired at 8 p.m. At least there were two of them, which made it a little less dreary for them than for another spinal case in the next street, who was left in the same way and was dependent on a kindly but very busy neighbour for any sight of human beings for fourteen hours of each day. I could quote case after case of these types—the children untaught and undisciplined, without hope or prospect in life, sometimes neglected because mother’s whole time was spent in trying to earn enough to support them, more often spoilt and petted just because they were cripples, with their disability continually before them, and made the excuse for averting all the ordinary troubles of life. The attempts to place such children when they grew up were despairing—they were unused to using their hands and brains, unused to looking after themselves, supremely conscious that they were different from other people. The days before Special Schools seem almost too bad to look back upon even!”

From the reports on such cases which Mrs. Ward received from her helpers throughout the summer of 1898 she formed the opinion that no school could be successful unless it maintained a nurse to look after the children’s ailments, and an ambulance to convey them to and from their homes. But she felt confident of being able to raise the money (£200-£220 a year) for these purposes, if the School Board would provide furniture and pay a teacher. Accordingly, by October, 1898, her committee forwarded to the School Board a carefully-sifted schedule of twenty-five names, together with a formal application that the Board should take up the proposed class, provide it with a teacher, and supply suitable furniture for the class-rooms, while the Settlement undertook to provide rooms free of charge, to pay a nurse-superintendent, and to maintain a special ambulance for the use of the school. Some correspondence followed with the School Management Committee, of which Mr. Graham Wallas was Chairman, and which was besieged at the same time by those who thought such schools totally unnecessary, since all invalid children whom it was possible to educate at all could attend the Infants’ (i.e. ground floor) departments of ordinary schools, where the teachers would look after them. But Mrs. Ward collected much evidence to show that this course could not possibly be pursued with any but the slighter cases. “We have heard very pitiful things of the risks run by these spinal and hip-disease cases in the ordinary schools,” she wrote to Mr. Stanley, “and of such children’s terror of the hustling and bustling of the playgrounds,” and early in December she summed up the arguments on this head in another memorandum to the Board. The atmosphere was favourable, and indeed Mrs. Ward had marshalled her evidence and put the case for the school so convincingly that no serious opposition was possible. The School Board gave its consent early in January, 1899; the approval of the Board of Education followed promptly, and nothing remained but to provide the ambulance, and the set of special furniture which was to fill the two rooms set aside for the children at the Settlement.

The ambulance was presented by no less a well-wisher than Sir Thomas Barlow, the great physician, while Mrs. Burgwin, the Board’s Superintendent of Special Schools, and Miss McKee, a member of the Board, busied themselves in procuring and ordering a set of ingenious invalid furniture—little cane arm-chairs with sliding foot-rests, couches for the spinal cases, a go-cart for the play-ground, and so forth—such as no Public Education Authority had ever occupied itself with before. Preparations were made at the Settlement for serving the daily dinner, which was to be an integral part of the arrangements, and which, in those happy days, was to cost the children no more than three-halfpence a head. At last, on February 28, 1899, all was ready—save indeed the ambulance, for which an omnibus with an improvised couch had to be substituted during the first few weeks. The nurse, too, had been taken ill, so that on this first day the children were fetched and safely delivered at the Settlement by Mrs. Ward’s secretary, Miss Churcher. It was pitiful to see their excitement and delight at the new adventure, their joy in the “ride” and their wonder at the pretty, unfamiliar rooms, each with its open fire, its flowers from Stocks, and its set of Caldecott pictures on the walls, which greeted them at the end of their journey. Mrs. Ward was, of course, among the small group of those who welcomed them. Two medical officers from the Board were there to admit them officially, and after this ceremony they were handed over to the care of Miss Milligan, their teacher—a woman whose special gifts in the handling of these delicate children were to be devoted to the service of this school for nearly twenty years. It is to be feared that little in the way of direct instruction was imparted to them on that first day. But there they now were, safe within the benevolent shelter of that most human of institutions, the London School Board, and in a fair way to become—though few of us realized it fully then—useful members of a community from which they had received little till then but capricious petting or heart-rending neglect.

The arrangements for the children’s dinners and for the hour of play-time afterwards were a subject of constant interest and delight to Mrs. Ward. The housekeeper at the Settlement put all her ingenuity into making the children’s pence go as far as they could possibly be stretched in covering the cost of a wholesome meal, and for a long time the sum of 3s. 6d. a day was sufficient to pay for dinners of meat, potatoes and pudding for twenty-five to thirty children. Their health visibly improved, and the gratitude of their parents was touching to see and hear. Nevertheless, Mrs. Ward was not satisfied. Some of the children were very capricious in their appetites, and although most of them did learn to eat milk puddings (at least when washed down with treacle!), there were some who could hardly manage the plain wholesome food, and others who could have eaten more than we had to give. It was tempting to try the experiment of a larger and more varied dietary upon them, and in days when the C.O.S. still reigned supreme, and the policy of “free meals for necessitous children” was hardly breathed by the most advanced, Mrs. Ward had the courage to carry it out. She described the results in a letter to The Times, in September, 1901: