The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

“Perhaps the most striking revelation of the whole work,” wrote Mrs. Ward, “has been the positive hunger for hand-occupation which exists among the older children. The attendances at the handwork classes drop off a little when June begins, and from June to October they are better discontinued in favour of cricket, swimming and outdoor games in general. But from October onwards through the whole winter and up to the end of May, the demand for handwork never slackens. Two or three times the number of children who are now being taught would eagerly come to classes if they were opened. Basket-work, wood-work and cobbling are unfailing delights, and it is here that we ask most earnestly for the help of the County Council. Rough boys, who would soon, if left to themselves, become on leaving school a nuisance to the community and to the police, can be got hold of through handwork, and in no other way. And when once the taste has been acquired, there remains the strong probability that after school is over they will be drawn into the net of Evening Classes and Polytechnics, and so rescued for an honest life.”

But the Education Committee, burdened as it was in that year with the first arrangements for medical inspection and treatment, as well as with the demand for the feeding of necessitous children, did not feel able to undertake this further responsibility, although its reception of Mrs. Ward’s memorandum was extremely sympathetic. All that the Council would do at this stage was to remit the charges previously made for cleaning and caretaking of the schools during Play Centre hours, a concession which amounted to a grant of about £20 a year per Centre.

Mrs. Ward was therefore thrown back upon her own resources for the financing of her great experiment. No thought of reduction or even of standing still could be admitted, for with the growing fame of the Centres, appeals began to come in from Care Committees, from School Managers, from Clergy, and from hard-worked Magistrates, begging that Centres might be opened in their districts, while the owner of a jam factory in South London offered to pay part of the cost of a Centre if it could be opened near his works, because the children used to come down to the factory gates in the evenings and cry till their mothers came out. Mr. Samuel’s Children’s Act of 1908 created the post of Probation Officer for the supervision of “first offenders”; the first two or three of these were appointed, on Mrs. Ward’s recommendation, from among her Play Centre Superintendents, since the intimate knowledge they possessed of the children’s lives gave them special qualifications for their task. It soon became the practice of all Probation Officers to refer their lawless little charges (often aged only nine or ten!) to the nearest Play Centre as “every-night children,” there to forget their wild or thieving ways in the fascinations of cobbling, or wood-work, or games, or military drill. But in order to respond to these growing appeals Mrs. Ward had to undertake an ever-increasing burden of financial responsibility, as well as of organization. In 1905 the first eight Centres had cost a little over £900; in 1908, with twelve Centres and total attendances of 620,000, the bill had risen to £3,000; in 1911, with seventeen Centres and attendances of 1,170,000, it was £4,500; in 1913, with twenty Centres and attendances of 1,500,000, it was £5,700. How she succeeded in raising these large sums in addition to her efforts for the Settlement; how she found time, on the top of her literary work and her many semi-political interests, for the close attention that she gave, week in, week out, to the progress of each individual Centre and the peculiarities of every Superintendent, will always remain a mystery. Her unconquerable optimism, which became a more and more marked trait of her character as the years went on, helped her through every crisis, while her joy in the children’s happiness acted both as a tonic and a spur. Every winter she would issue her eloquent Report, sending it out with irresistible personal letters to a large number of subscribers; many a London landlord was made to stand and deliver for the children of meaner streets than those which paid him rent; many a factory owner was persuaded to follow the example of the jam-manufacturer above-mentioned. Yet when all was done there would usually remain a deficit of several hundred pounds, which must be wiped out in order to avert a bankers’ strike; then Mrs. Ward would gather up all the outstanding facts of the year’s work and present them in one of those remarkable letters to The Times of which she possessed the secret, charming the cheques for very shame out of the pockets of the kind-hearted. And thus, with incredible toil and with many moments of despair, the organization was kept going and the indispensable funds supplied; but it was a labour of Hercules, and her letters throughout these years bear witness to the exhausting nature of the task.

Once more, in 1913, Mrs. Ward hoped that the recognition of her long effort was not far off, for both Government and County Council expressed themselves, through the mouths of two distinguished leaders, as very warmly in sympathy with it. She had organized an exhibition of Play Centre hand-work at the Settlement—toy models of all sorts, baskets, dolls, needlework, cobbled boots and shoes—and invited her old friend Lord Haldane, then Lord Chancellor, and Mr. Cyril Cobb, Chairman of the Education Committee, L.C.C., to speak at the opening ceremony. Both speakers emphasized the fact that Mrs. Ward had now proved her case, and that, as Lord Haldane said, the Play Centre movement had “reached a stage in which it must be recognized as one, at least, of the elements in a national system of education, as one of the things that must come within the scope and observance of the Board of Education. Such a movement must begin by voluntary effort. It has already reached a stage in which I hope it is going to attract a great deal of official attention.” Such words could not but encourage Mrs. Ward to hope that help was near, for by that time the Board of Education had already inaugurated the system of giving aid to voluntary societies, if their aims and methods were approved, by a proportional grant on their expenditure. Yet 1913 passed away and nothing came of it. One may perhaps shrewdly suspect, in looking back, that the authorities knew well enough when a thing was a “going concern” and needed no effort of theirs to help it up the hill. Mrs. Ward was their willing horse; they continued, with the instinct of laissez-faire which has so often preserved the British Constitution, to let her pull her own load. But a time was at hand when laissez-faire and all other comfortable doctrines were to be swept away in the shock that set the whole fabric of our society reeling. The outbreak of war, which seemed at first to threaten the very existence of such things as Play Centres, was in fact to reveal and establish their necessity. After two more years of heroic effort to keep them going amid the flood of war appeals, Mrs. Ward had her reward at last in Mr. Fisher’s Memorandum of January, 1917. The State had recognized the principle that in the children lay the best hope of England, and Mrs. Ward had her way. Thence-forward the Board of Education undertook to pay half the “approved expenditure” of the Evening Play Centres committee.

But the establishment and growth of the London Play Centres, heavy and exacting as was the toil that it involved, did not by any means exhaust Mrs. Ward’s efforts to improve the lot of London’s children during these years. In 1908 she opened two additional Vacation Schools in the East End; one in a school with a “roof-playground” in Bow, the other in an ordinary school in Hoxton.

“On Friday I had a field-day at the Bow Vacation School,” she wrote to J.P.T. in August, 1908. “The air on the roof-playground was like Margate, and the children’s happiness and good-temper delightful to see. There were flowers all about, and sunny views over East London to distant country, and round games, and little ones happy with toys, and all sorts of nice things. Downstairs a splendid game of hand-ball in the playground, and a cool hall full of boys playing games and reading. As for the Settlement, it has never been so enchanting. There are 1,150 children daily, and all the teachers say it is better than ever. The Duke’s sand-heap and the new drinking-fountain are great additions. Hoxton goes to my heart! It is too crowded, and there is nothing but asphalt playgrounds, with no shade till late. Yet the children swarm, and when you see them sitting listlessly, doing absolutely nothing, in the broiling dirty streets outside you can’t wonder. I am having the playground shelter scrubbed out with carbolic daily, lined with some flowers in pots, and filled with small tables and chairs for the little ones. They have 800 children, and we have been obliged to give extra help.”

Then in the next year, besides maintaining the roof-playground, she opened another experimental Holiday-school near by for a small number of delicate and ailing children whose names were on the “necessitous” list, and who were therefore eligible for free dinners. Mrs. Ward delighted in continuing and improving the free dinners for these little waifs during the holidays, as well as in providing suitable occupations for their fingers, and it was with real pride that she returned them to their regular school at the end of the holidays, thriving, and with a record of increased weight in almost every case. But the very success of these attempts, together with the ever-increasing size and attractiveness of the Settlement Vacation School, filled her with distress at the wasted opportunities presented by the empty playgrounds of the ordinary London schools during the August holiday, for she well knew from her own experience and from that of New York, which she had closely studied,[27] that it only needed the presence of two or three active kindergarten teachers and a supply of toys and materials to attract to these open spaces all the hot and weary children from the neighbouring streets and there to make them happy. Her fingers itched to do it, tired though they were with so many other labours. It was not, however, till the spring of 1911 that she was able to take this work in hand, but then she addressed herself to it with all her usual energy, presenting a scheme to the L.C.C. for the “organization” of both the boys’ and the girls’ playgrounds at twenty-six London schools during the summer holiday. The Council met her once more with complete confidence, lending all the larger equipment required; Mrs. Ward raised a special fund of nearly £1,000, and devoted much attention to the engagement of the Superintendents for the girls’ grounds and the Games Masters for the boys’. Then, just before the end of term, notices were distributed in the neighbouring schools announcing that such and such a playground would be opened for games and quiet occupations during the holidays, and the result was awaited with some quaking. Would there be a crowd or a desert? and if the former, would the Superintendents be able to keep order? The answer was not long in coming. “I let in 400 boys,” wrote one of the Games Masters after his first session, “and the street outside was still black with them.” But in spite of the eager crowds which everywhere made their appearance, order was kept most successfully. Mrs. Ward herself visited the playgrounds constantly, and at the end of the month wrote her joyous report to The Times:

‘Inside one came always upon a cheerful scene. In the girls’ playgrounds, during those hottest August days, one saw crowds of girls and babies playing in the shade of the school buildings, or forming happy groups for reading or sewing, or filling the trestle tables under the shelters, where were picture-books to be looked at, beads to thread, paints and paper to draw with, or wool for knitting, or portable swings where the elder girls could swing the little ones in turn. Then, if you asked the schoolkeeper to pass you through a locked door, you were in the boys’ playground, where balls were whizzing, and the space was divided up by a clever Superintendent between the cricket of the bigger boys—very near, often, to the real thing—and the first efforts, not a whit less energetic, of the younger ones. In one corner, also, there would be mats and jumping-stands; in another a group playing tennis with a chalked line instead of a net, while the shelters were full, as in the girl’s ground, of all kinds of quiet occupations. Management was everything. It was wonderful what a Superintendent with a real turn for the thing could make of his ground, what a hold he got upon his boys, and how well, in such cases, the boys behaved. There was a real loyalty and esprit de corps in these grounds; and when, in the last week, ‘sports’ and displays were organized for the benefit of the parents, it was really astonishing to see with what ease a competent man or woman could handle a crowded playground, how eagerly the children obeyed, how courteous and happy they were.”

The number of attendances had been prodigious—424,000 for the whole month, or 106,000 per week—and the gratitude of the parents who had pressed in to see the final displays was touching to hear. In the next year Mrs. Ward persuaded the L.C.C. to share the experiment with her, the Council opening “organized playgrounds” in twenty schools and she herself in twenty more; this time the organization was in many points improved, and the results still more satisfactory. But although the Council gave her to understand that they would undertake to carry on the experiment in future, being convinced of its necessity, no further action was taken, and the playgrounds of London, in spite of Mrs. Ward’s object-lesson, have been suffered to relapse into that condition of uselessness and sometimes of positive danger to the children’s morals from which her efforts in 1911 and 1912 had sought to rescue them.