The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

Strangers coming from afar with some claim upon her kindness found always a ready welcome at her house. In addition to her French and Italian friends, who would find their way to her door as soon as they arrived in London, she had many warm friendships with Americans, beginning with her much-loved cousin, Frederick W. Whitridge, who had married Matthew Arnold’s daughter Lucy, and had got Mr. Ward to build a comely house for her within half a mile of Stocks. “Cousin Fred,” with his charming blue eyes and white moustache and beard, had been a truly Olympian figure to us children even in the days of Russell Square, for had he not deposited on our plates at breakfast, one golden morning, a sovereign each for the two elders and half a sovereign for the youngest? And as the years passed on, and he became the intimate friend of Roosevelt and a recognized leader of the New York Bar, the friendship between him and Mrs. Ward grew ever deeper, so that his shrewd wisdom and inimitable humour, as well as his habit of spoiling the people he was fond of, came to be looked for each summer as one of the true pleasures of the year. His son was one of the first Americans to join the British Army in 1914, but he himself, like Henry James, was not to see the day for which both he and Roosevelt had toiled so hard. He died in December, 1916, four months before America “came in.” Mr. Lowell, the American Ambassador during the ’eighties, had been a frequent visitor at Russell Square, while his successors, Hay, Bayard and Choate, were all on friendly terms with Mrs. Ward. Comrades in her own trade whom it always pleased her to see were Mr. Gilder, editor of the Century Magazine, welcome whether he came as publisher or friend; Mr. Godkin, of the Evening Post, the most intellectual among American journalists; Mr. S. S. McClure, who had first tracked down Mrs. Ward at Borough Farm, and remained ever afterwards on cordial, not to say familiar, terms with her; Charles Dudley Warner, Mrs. Wharton, the William James’s, and many more. But the most intimate of all were certain women: that inseparable and delightful pair, Mrs. Fields and Miss Sarah Orne Jewett (the writer of New England stories), who twice found their way to Stocks, and many times to Grosvenor Place, and lastly that other Bostonian, Miss Sara Norton, whose friendship for Dorothy made her almost as another daughter during her visits to Stocks, to Levens, or to the Villa Bonaventura.

But it was not by any means only for the “distinguished,” whether from home or abroad, that Grosvenor Place laid itself out. One of its principal functions was that of making the head-quarters in London for all the younger members of Mrs. Ward’s own family, as well as for the grandchildren who began about this time to find their way to her knee. For to all such young people she was mother, fairy godmother and friend rolled into one. Settlement workers and Associates, teachers and many “dim” people of various professions would find her as accessible as her strenuous hours of labour would allow. All she asked of those who came to her house was that they should have something real to contribute—and if possible that they should contribute it without egotism. Certainly she did not suffer bores gladly; an ordinary bore was bad enough, but an egotistic bore would produce a peculiar kind of nervous irritation in her which we who watched could always detect, however manfully she strove to conceal it. Nor could she ever bring herself to observe the strict rules of London etiquette, so that to “go calling” was an unknown occupation in her calendar, and in spite of two daughters and a secretary her social lapses and forgetfulnesses sometimes plunged her in black despair. When she had hopelessly missed Mrs. So-and-So’s party, to which she had fully meant to go, she would sorrowfully declare that the motto of the Ward family ought to be: “Never went and never wrote.”

It is needless to point out how exhausting this London life became to one who pressed so much into it as Mrs. Ward. For although she could rarely write her books in London, being far too distracted by the demands of the hungry world upon her time, it was mainly at Grosvenor Place that she hammered out her schemes for the welfare of London’s children, talking them over with members of the School Board or the County Council, driving about to some of the poorest districts to see with her own eyes the conditions under which they lived, and planning out the details in mornings of hard work with Miss Churcher. The development of the Cripples’ Schools, both in London and the Provinces, was very much on her shoulders at this time, for she felt the imperative need for extending them to other parts of the country, and undertook many arduous missionary journeys on their behalf during the few years that followed their establishment in London. There, as the schools grew and spread under the fostering care of the L.C.C., it was the auxiliary services of after-care, feeding and training that claimed the principal share of her attention. But she had a very efficient committee to assist her in these matters, under the chairmanship of Miss Maude Lawrence, so that gradually her responsibility for the London cripples grew less heavy, and she was able to turn to other schemes that now began to simmer in her mind for the welfare of the whole as well as the halt among London’s children.

For the remarkable success of the Children’s Recreation School at the Settlement, which by the year 1904 had attendances of some 1,700 children a week (all, of course, wholly voluntary), led Mrs. Ward to feel that some effort might be made to carry the civilizing effect of such centres of play into the remoter and still more squalid regions of the East and South. Already the Children’s Happy Evenings’ Association held weekly or fortnightly “Evenings” in some eighty or ninety schools, giving much pleasure to the children wherever they went, but Mrs. Ward’s plan was for something on a more intensive scale than this, something that might exert a continuous influence over the lives of large numbers of children in any given district, as the occupations and delights of the “Passmore” did over the children of St. Pancras. She founded a small committee, in October, 1904, to go into the matter and to lay proposals before the Education Committee of the London County Council: proposals to the effect that the “Play Centres Committee” should be allowed the free use of certain schools after school hours on five evenings a week, from 5.30 to 7.30, and also on Saturday mornings, for the purpose of providing games, physical exercises and handwork occupations for the children of that district. The Council readily gave its consent, and Mrs. Ward applied herself to the task of raising sufficient funds for the maintenance of eight “Evening Play Centres” in certain school buildings, to be carried on for a year as an experiment. She obtained promises amounting to nearly £800, largely from the same friends as had watched her work at the Settlement, and with this she felt that she could go forward. After careful inquiry, four schools in the East End were selected, with one in Somers Town and two in Lambeth and Walworth respectively, while Canon Barnett offered Toynbee Hall itself as the scene of an eighth Centre. Mrs. Ward devoted special pains to the selection of the eight Superintendents who were to have charge of these Play Centres, for she rightly felt that on their wisdom and skill in handling the large numbers of children who would pass through their hands would largely depend the success of the adventure. Gymnastic instructors, handwork teachers and many voluntary helpers were also secured and assigned to the various Centres, so that the staff in each case consisted of a cadre of paid and professional workers, assisted by as many volunteers as possible. Mrs. Ward’s long experience at the Settlement had convinced her that this nucleus of paid workers was essential to the smooth and continuous working of any such scheme, since although the best volunteers were invaluable in supplying an element of initiative and originality in the working out of new ideas, still there was also an element of irregularity in their attendance which detracted much from their usefulness! And in proportion as the Centres succeeded in their object of attracting the children from the streets, so much the more disastrous would it be if large numbers of them were left shepherdless on foggy evenings because Miss So-and-So had a bad cold. Mrs. Ward was much criticized in certain quarters for bringing the “professional element” into her Play Centres, but she knew better than her critics how far the voluntary element might safely be trusted, and how far it must be supplemented by the professional. She was playing all the time for a big thing, with possibilities of expansion not only in London but in the great industrial towns as well, besides which she always hotly resented the suggestion that the paid worker must be inferior in quality to the volunteer. On the contrary, it interested her immensely to see how the professional teachers, both men and women, would often reveal new and unsuspected qualities in the freer atmosphere of the Play Centre, while the greater intimacy that they acquired with their children was—as they often acknowledged—of the greatest value to them in their day-school work.

The first eight Play Centres opened their doors to the children on the first Monday in February, 1905, and it may be imagined with what anxiety and delight Mrs. Ward watched their development during these first weeks. The children had been secured in the first instance by invitations distributed through the Head Teachers to those who, in their opinion, stood most in need of shelter and occupation after school hours, i.e. principally to those whose parents were both out at work till 7 or 8 o’clock; but after the ice was broken, Alf would bring ‘Arry and Edie would bring Maud, till the utmost capacity of the classes was reached, and Mrs. Ward’s heart was both gladdened and saddened by the tale that her staff had as many children as they could possibly cope with, and that many had of necessity been turned away. By the end of the year the weekly attendance at the eight Centres amounted to nearly 6,000, and a year later, with ten Centres instead of eight, they had risen to over 10,000. This meant that Mrs. Ward had struck upon a real need of the wandering, loafing child-population of our greatest city—a need that will in fact be perennial so long as the housing of the miles upon miles of bricks and mortar that we call the working-class districts remains what it is. “It all grows steadily beyond my hopes,” wrote Mrs. Ward to Mrs. Creighton in October, 1906, “and I believe that in three or four years we shall see it developing into an ordinary part of education, in the true sense. There is no difficulty about money—the difficulty is to find the time and nerve-strength to carry it on, even with such help as Bessie Churcher’s.”

But the burden of raising the increasing sums required was, in truth, very great, so that Mrs. Ward, with her belief in the future of the movement, was already at work to get the Play Centre principle recognized and embodied in an Act of Parliament. The opportunity arose on Mr. Birrell’s ill-fated Bill of 1906, but although Mrs. Ward’s clause, enabling any Local Education Authority “to provide for children attending a public elementary school, Vacation Schools, Play Centres, or means of recreation during their holidays or at such other times as the Local Education Authority may prescribe,” was accepted by the Government, and passed the House of Lords in December, 1906, the Bill itself was dropped soon afterwards, having been wrecked on the usual rocks of sectarian passion. Fortunately, however, Mr. McKenna, who succeeded Mr. Birrell at the Board of Education, was able to carry a smaller measure, known as the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, in the summer of the next year (1907). This Act duly contained the Play Centres clause, as well as the provisions for the medical inspection and treatment of school-children which have since borne such beneficent fruit. Already in the previous summer, when the clause was first before the House of Commons, Mr. Sydney Buxton had said at the opening of the Settlement Vacation School that he felt sure it would go down to history as the “Mary Ward Clause.”

But this victory had not been won except at the cost of considerable friction with the only other body that attempted to cater in any systematic fashion for the needs of London’s children in the evening hours—I mean the Children’s Happy Evenings’ Association. The Association, which embodied the “voluntary principle” in its purest form, could not tolerate the idea that the Public Education Authority might in the future come to encroach upon a field which they regarded as their own—even though their “Evenings” were avowedly held only once a week, sometimes only once a fortnight, and could not touch more than the barest fringe of the child population of each district. They disliked the professional worker, and they abhorred the bare idea that public money might eventually be spent upon the recreation of the children—ignoring the experience of America, where the public authority was doing more each year for the playtime of its children, and forgetting, perhaps, that at the “preparatory schools” to which their own little boys were sent, almost more time and thought were spent upon their games than upon their “education” proper. And so they sent a deputation to Mr. Birrell to oppose Mrs. Ward’s clause, and their workers attacked Mrs. Ward and her precious Play Centres in other ways and on other occasions as well; but they found that she was a shrewd fighter, for even though during the summer of 1906 she was laid low by that most disabling complaint, a terrible attack of eczema, she compelled herself to write from her bed a trenchant letter to The Times in defence of the professional worker, and also a very conciliatory letter to her friend Lady Jersey, the President of the Happy Evenings’ Association.

“It is most unwelcome to me,” she wrote, “this dispute over a public cause—especially when I see or dream what could be done by co-operation. What I wish is that you would join the Evening Play Centres Committee, and see for yourself what it means. There is nothing in our movement which is necessarily antagonistic to yours, but I think we may claim that ours is more in sympathy with the general ideas on the subject that are stirring people’s minds than yours.”

The affair ended in the acceptance by the Government of an amendment to Mrs. Ward’s clause, authorizing the Local Education Authorities to “encourage and assist the continuance or establishment of Voluntary Agencies” in any exercise of powers under the new Act. The two associations—the Happy Evenings and the Play Centres—continued to exist side by side until the inevitable march of events led, under the stress of war, to the issue of Mr. Fisher’s authoritative Memorandum (January, 1917), admitting the obligation of the State in the matter of the children’s recreation, and announcing that in future the Board would undertake half the “approved expenditure” of Evening Play Centre committees. The Children’s Happy Evenings’ committee thereupon decided, in dignified fashion, that their work was ended, and dissolved their Association. Peace be to its ashes! It had given joy, much joy, to many thousands of London children, as Mrs. Ward always most fully recognized, and if in the end it stood in the way of the new and younger power which was capable of giving an almost indefinite extension to the children’s pleasure, could it but have a free field, the reluctance of the Association to cede any ground was only, after all, a very natural affair.

But once the new Act was passed, Mrs. Ward was to be disappointed in her hopes that the London Education Authority would take advantage of the powers conferred upon it in order to assist the movement financially. Certain members of the Council elected in 1907 (in which the majority was overwhelmingly Moderate) urged her to present an appeal to the Education Committee, asking that the cost of the Handwork, Drill and Gymnastic classes held at the Play Centres might be defrayed by the Council; this she did in a statement which she drew up and presented in October, 1907, weaving into it with all the practised skill that she knew so well how to throw into such documents firstly a picture of the child-life of such districts as Hoxton, Walworth and Notting Dale in the winter evenings, when the children were too often “turned out after tea into the streets and told not to come home till bedtime”; then a brief account of the small beginnings and immense growth of the Children’s Recreation School at the Passmore Edwards Settlement, with its offshoots, the ten Play Centres held in the London schools, and finally a striking list of individual cases, showing how the Centres had already attracted to themselves scores of boys and girls whose conditions of life were leading them into idling and vagabondage of all sorts, through the mere lack of anything to do in the dark hours.