The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

‘It was pointed out to the managers that a more liberal and varied dietary might have marked effects upon the children’s health. The experiment was tried. More hot meat, more eggs, milk, cream, vegetables and fruit were given. In consequence the children’s appetites largely increased, and the expenses naturally increased with them. The children’s pence in May amounted to £3 13s. 6d., and the cost of food was £4 7s. 2d.; in June, after the more liberal scale had been adopted, the children’s payments were still £3 13s. 10d., but the expenses had risen to £5 7s. 8d. Meanwhile, the physical and mental results of the increased expenditure are already unmistakable. Partially paralysed children have been recovering strength in hands and limbs with greater rapidity than before. A child who last year often could not walk at all, from rickets and extreme delicacy, and seemed to be fading away—who in May was still languid and feeble—is now racing about in the garden on his crutches; a boy who last year could only crawl on hands and feet is now steadily and rapidly learning to walk, and so on. The effect, indeed, is startling to those who have watched the experiment. Meanwhile the teachers have entered in the log-book of the school their testimony to the increased power of work that the children have been showing since the new feeding has been adopted. Hardly any child now wants to lie down during school time, whereas applications to lie down used to be common; and the children both learn and remember better.”

It may be added that while the minimum payment of 1-1/2d. for these dinners was still maintained at the Settlement School, payments of 2d. and even 3d. were asked from those who could afford it, and were in many cases willingly given, while there were always a few children who were excused all payment on the ground of poverty at home.

Another element that contributed largely to the success of the school from the very beginning was that of the “dinner-hour helpers”—a panel of ladies who took it in turns to wait on the children at dinner and to superintend their play-time afterwards. They came with remarkable regularity, and became deeply attached, many of them, to their frail little charges. When the School Board extended the Cripples’ Schools to other parts of London they were careful to copy this development of ours, by insisting that local committees of managers, half of whom should be women, must be attached to each school. Here, surely, in this simple but effective institution, may be seen the germ of the Care Committee of future days!

The success of the school in Tavistock Place—the roll of which soon increased to some forty children—naturally attracted a good deal of attention, and it had hardly been running a year before the pros and cons of setting up similar schools in other districts began to be debated within the London School Board. Some members inevitably shied at the prospect of the increasing expense to the rates, especially if the whole cost of premises, ambulance and nurse were to be borne by the public authority, and a definite movement arose, either for bringing the crippled children into the ordinary schools, with some provision in the way of special couches, etc., or for brigading the crippled and invalid children with the “Mentally Defectives” in the special centres which had already been opened for the latter. Much encouragement was given to this latter view by the official report of one of the Medical Officers of the School Board, who was instructed, in the spring of 1900, to examine and report upon all cases of crippled children not attending school, and submitted a report recommending that “those cases whom it is advisable to permit to attend school at all” should be sent to the Mentally Defective Centres, while neither nurse nor ambulance were, in the opinion of the writer, required.

Mrs. Ward and her friends on the School Board were obliged to fight very strenuously against these views, which, if they had prevailed, would have prevented the establishment of “Physically Defective Centres” as we know them to-day. It is perhaps unprofitable to go into the details of that long-past controversy, the echoes of which have so completely died away; suffice it to say that a Special Conference appointed by the Board to consider the Medical Officer’s Report recommended, in October, 1900, that “The Board do make provision for children who, by reason of physical defect, are incapable of receiving proper benefit from the instruction in the ordinary public elementary schools, but are not incapable by reason of such defect of receiving benefit from instruction in special classes or schools”; and “that children of normal intelligence be not taught with mentally defective children.” A little later it recommended the provision of both ambulance and nurse. These resolutions—which were accepted by the Board—cleared the way for the establishment of new centres for “Physically Defective” children, as they now began to be called; but in order to make her case invincible, and to accelerate the work of the School Board, Mrs. Ward undertook, all through the autumn and winter of 1900-1901, a complete investigation into the numbers and condition of the invalid children not attending school in some of the largest and poorest London boroughs. In consultation with the trained workers whom she employed for the purpose, she had special forms printed for use in the inquiry, and I remember well her eager comments as the statistics came in, and her consternation at the ever-increasing numbers of crippled children which the inquiry revealed. Finally this investigation extended to nine out of the ten School Board divisions of London, and embraced a total of some 1,800 children, of whom 1,000, in round numbers, were recommended by her as suitable for invalid schools. Of the rest, a substantial proportion were reported as fit for ordinary school with a little additional care on the part of teachers and managers; some were too ill for any school, and some were both mentally and physically defective, and therefore recommended for the “M.D.” Centres. Meanwhile, the Special Schools Sub-Committee of the School Board, under their Chairman, the Hon. Maude Lawrence, had been at work since February, 1901, in making inquiries into possible sites and buildings for the new schools, and by the middle of March the Board were able to inform Mrs. Ward that sites for four Centres had been agreed upon, while two more were to be located in Kennington and Battersea “on the constitution of your returns, which have now been marked on the map by the Divisional Superintendents.”

Four ambulances had also been ordered, and it was decided to appoint nurses at each of the Centres at a salary of £75 a year. Kitchens were, of course, to be provided at all the Centres, so that the hot midday meal which had proved so successful at the Settlement might be supplied.

The first two Centres to be opened by the School Board—in Paddington and Bethnal Green—were ready by September, 1901, and both drew their children entirely from those on Mrs. Ward’s lists. It may be imagined with what intense satisfaction she had followed every step taken by the School Board towards this consummation. Finally she gathered up the whole story of the Settlement School and of the School Board’s adoption of responsibility for London’s crippled children in the letter to The Times mentioned above, pleading for the extension of the movement to other large towns, and describing certain efforts made at the Settlement School for the industrial and artistic training of the older children. Her final paragraph ran as follows:

‘The happiness of the new schools is one of their most delightful characteristics. Freed from the dread of being jostled on stairs or knocked down in the crowd of the playground, with hours, food and rest proportioned to their need, these maimed and fragile creatures begin to expand and unfold like leaves in the sun. And small wonder! They have either been battling with ordinary school on terribly unequal terms, or else, in the intervals of hospital and convalescent treatment, their not uncommon lot has been to be locked up at home alone, while the normal members of the family were at work. I can recall one case of a child, lame and constantly falling, with brain irritation to boot—the result of infant convulsions—locked up for hours alone while its mother was at work; and another, of a poor little lad, whose back had been injured by an accident, alone all day after his discharge from hospital, feebly dragging himself about his room, in cold weather, to find a few sticks for fire, with the tears running down his cheeks from pain. His father and sister were at work, and he had no mother. It could not be helped. But he has been gathered into one of the new schools, where he has become another being. Scores of children in as sore need as his will, I hope, be reached and comforted by this latest undertaking of the Board.

“And for some, all we shall be able to do, perhaps, will be to gladden a few months or years before the little life goes out. From them there will be no economic return, such as we may hope for in the great majority of cases. But even so, will it not be worth while?”

As the efforts of the School Board and—after 1903—of the Education Committee of the London County Council to spread the “Special Schools for Physically Defective Children” over London grew more and more effective, and the number of the new schools rose steadily, Mrs. Ward and her principal helpers concentrated their attention mainly upon the training of the children for suitable employment on their leaving school. As early as 1900 a little committee was formed for this purpose at the Settlement, which engaged special teachers of drawing and design for the boys and of art needlework for the girls—for these delicate children were often found to possess artistic aptitudes which made up to them in a certain degree for their other disabilities. Presently this committee developed into the “Crippled Children’s Training and Dinner Society,” presided over by Miss Maude Lawrence, of the London School Board, a Committee which did hard pioneer work in the organizing of careers for these crippled children, whose numbers stood revealed beyond all expectation as the Special Schools spread to every quarter of London. By the year 1906 the numbers of schools had risen to twenty-three, and of children on the rolls to 1,767; by 1909 the figures were thirty and 2,452 respectively. The dark-brown ambulances conveying their happy load of children to and from the schools became a familiar sight of the London streets. But, though Mrs. Ward’s experiment had grown in these ten years with such astonishing rapidity, it had not lost its original character. She had impressed it too deeply with her own broad and sane humanity for the Special Schools Department of the L.C.C. to become lost in red tape or officialdom, and under the wise reign of Mrs. Burgwin and Miss Collard (Superintendents of Special Schools under the Council) the traditions that had gathered round the first Invalid Children’s School were carried on and perpetuated. And to this day the Boards of Managers that watch over the “P.D.” Schools seem to be inspired by a tenderer and more personal feeling than any other of the multifarious committees that take thought for the children of the State. The secret, in fact, of Mrs. Ward’s success in this as in her other public undertakings lay in the fact that her action was founded on a real and urgent human need, and that she combined a power of presenting and urging that need in forcible manner with an unfailing tenderness for the individual child. As one of her colleagues expressed it once in homely phrase: “The fact is, she had the brain of a man and the heart of a woman.” Nor did the heart dissolve itself in “gush,” but showed its quality rather in a disinterestedness that cared not where the hudos went, so long as the thing itself were done—in an eager desire to bring others forward and to give them a full share of whatever credit were to be had.