The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

In addition to her novels and her two first War books, Mrs. Ward had been writing at intervals, ever since the summer of 1916, her Recollections, and brought them out at length in October 1918. They covered the period of her life down to the year 1900, giving a picture of things seen and heard, of friends loved and enjoyed and lost, of long-past Oxford days, of London, Rome, and the Alban Hills, such as only a woman of her manifold experience could offer to a tired generation. The reception given to the book touched her profoundly, for it showed her, beyond the possibility of doubt, that her long life’s work had earned her not only the admiration but the love of her fellow-countrymen. As an old friend, Mrs. Halsey, wrote to Dorothy, “I remember Mlle Souvestre saying more than thirty years ago, ‘Ah! the books I admire—but it’s the woman Mary Ward that I love.’” “Mrs. Ward’s Recollections are of priceless value,” said the Contemporary Review; “all the famous names are here, but that is nothing; the people themselves are here moving about and veritably alive—great men and women of whom posterity will long to hear.” And another reviewer dwelt on a different aspect: “She has lived to see the first social studies and efforts of her Oxford days grow into the Passmore Edwards Settlement, the Schools for the Physically Defective, the Play Centres and a great deal else in which she has reaped a harvest for the England of to-day or sown a seed for the England of to-morrow.” The reviews generally ended on a note of hope for a second volume, to complete the story—, but the story remained, and will always remain, uncompleted.

Perhaps part of the affectionate admiration with which her Recollections were received was due to the wider knowledge which the public at last possessed of all that she had been able to accomplish, through twenty years of toil, for the children of England. For it so happened that during the two years that preceded the appearance of her Recollections—years of war and difficulty of all kinds as they were—Mrs. Ward had seen her labours for the play-time of London’s children crowned by that State recognition towards which she had always worked, and her hopes for the extension of Special Schools for crippled children to the provinces as well as London very largely realised. After an immensely up-hill struggle to maintain the funds for her Play Centres during the first two years of the War, it was at length the War conditions themselves that convinced the authorities that all was not well with the child-population of our big cities and that such efforts as Mrs. Ward’s must be encouraged and assisted in the fullest possible way. “Juvenile crime”—that comprehensive phrase that covers everything from pilfering at street corners to the formation of “Black-Hand-Gangs” under some adventurous spirit of ten or eleven, gloriously devoted to terrorising the back streets after dark—was the portent that convinced Whitehall, that set the Home Office complaining to the Board of Education and the Board of Education consulting Mrs. Ward. The result of these consultations, carried on in the winter of 1916-17 between Mrs. Ward, Sir Amherst Selby-Bigge (the Permanent Secretary), Mr. Pease the outgoing and Mr. Fisher the incoming President of the Board, was that on Jan. 26, 1917, an official announcement appeared in The Times to the effect that “Grants from the Board of Education will shortly be available in aid of the cost of carrying on Play Centres.... Hitherto Centres have been established only by voluntary bodies, mostly in London, where the Local Education Authority has granted the free use of school buildings. It is hoped that the powers which education authorities already possess of establishing and aiding such centres will be more freely exercised in future.”

To which The Times added the following note:—“The announcement that the Treasury has approved the principle of play centres and will signify its approval in the usual manner, forms a fitting and characteristic climax to twenty years of voluntary effort on the part of Mrs. Humphry Ward and a devoted circle of workers.”

There was general rejoicing among the higher officials of the Board, who had watched Mrs. Ward’s work for so long, when the Treasury at length announced its consent to the Grant. Sir Amherst Selby-Bigge wrote to her in the following terms:

‘Allow me to congratulate you most heartily on having induced the State to take under its wing and aid the enterprise of which you have been the pioneer and which you have carried on unaided for so many years with such admirable results.

‘I do not think you are one of those who are nervous about State intervention or share the apprehension which is sometimes expressed that a free spirit of voluntary enterprise may be hampered or circumscribed by the existence of State aid. However this may be, I think you may feel sure that our grants and regulations will be administered in a sympathetic spirit and with full recognition that it is necessary to secure and retain the willing co-operation of people of all kinds who are anxious to devote their time and energy to public service. It is a source of great pleasure to me that I have been the humble instrument of furthering the enterprise of which you have been the guiding spirit.”

As a matter of fact, the Board’s regulations were largely drawn up by Mrs. Ward herself, and her relations with both officials and President continued close and cordial—nay, almost affectionate!—down to the last day of her life. Nor was the London County Council left long behindhand. The Treasury Grant amounted to 50 per cent. of the “approved expenditure” of any voluntary committee or Education Authority which carried on Play Centres according to the Board’s regulations, so that it was not long before some fifty great towns all over England were opening Play Centres of their own, under the Act of 1907, and London was in danger of being left behind. In the summer of 1919, however, Mrs. Ward’s edifice was crowned by the Council’s deciding to take over another quarter of the cost of her Centres, so that she was left with only one quarter to raise in voluntary funds. The whole of the organisation, however—which had long been perfected by the contriving brain of Miss Churcher—was left in Mrs. Ward’s hands, subject only to inspection by the Council, for the Education Committee knew better than to disturb the result of so many years of specialised care and study. The additional funds available made it possible for Mrs. Ward, in the last three years of her life, to add ten new Centres in London to the twenty-two that she was maintaining before the advent of the Grant. It may be imagined what joy this gave to her, and how, in the winter of 1917-18, in spite of the cruelly-darkened streets and the danger of air-raids, she managed to make her way to many of these new Centres, lingering there in complete content to watch her singing children. The last phase of the Play Centre movement, as far as Mrs. Ward was concerned, was the publication by her daughter, in February 1920, of a little book describing their origin and growth,[37] with a preface written by Mrs. Ward herself. This she sent to Mr. Fisher, and received from him, a month before her death, a letter which deserves to be quoted here as a fitting epitaph on her work. Mr. Fisher and she had recently visited Oxford together, to speak at the opening of the “Arlosh Hall” at Manchester College.

“Albert Dicey spoke to us, as you will remember,” wrote Mr. Fisher, “of the abolition of religious tests in the Universities as belonging to that small category of reforms to which no discernible disadvantages attach and I am convinced that the same high and unusual compliment may be paid without a suspicion of extravagance to the Evening Play Centres. Here there are no drawbacks, nothing but positive and far-reaching good.”

In the same way Mrs. Ward succeeded, in the spring of 1918, in persuading the House of Commons to add a clause to Mr. Fisher’s great Education Bill, making it compulsory for Education Authorities throughout the country to “make arrangements” for the education of their physically defective children. She used for this purpose the machinery of the “Joint Parliamentary Advisory Council” which she had founded in 1913,[38] but the bulk of the work—involving as it did the sending out of circular letters to ninety-five Education Authorities, the sifting and printing of the replies and the forwarding of these to every Member of Parliament—was carried out from Stocks, causing a heavy strain—long remembered!—on the secretarial resources of the house. It may be noted too, that all this took place during those agonising weeks when the British Armies were being hurled back in France and Flanders, and when Mrs. Ward, of all people, realised only too clearly the peril we were in. But the task was accomplished and the clause added to the Bill, so that a new charter was thus provided for the 30,000 or so of crippled and invalid children who still remained throughout the country uneducated and uncared for.[39] A little later, the movement initiated by Sir Robert Jones and the Central Committee for the Care of Cripples, for converting some of the War Hospitals into Homes for the scientific treatment of crippled children received Mrs. Ward’s warm support, her special contribution to the movement being a successful campaign for the provision of educational facilities for the children lying for many months within the hospital walls. The beautiful War-hospital at Calgarth on Lake Windermere (the Ethel Hedley Hospital) was converted to this use in the spring of 1920, and one of the last pleasures which Mrs. Ward enjoyed was her correspondence with the Governors of the hospital, who described to her their plan for the conversion and invoked her blessing upon it. Mrs. Ward was never able to visit Calgarth, but the love she bore to the fells and waters of the North which surrounded it have linked her memory very specially with this delightful place, where children who, even ten years before, would have been deemed hopeless cases, recover straightness and strength. Her connection with this enterprise made a gentle ending to her long labour for these waifs of our educational system.

Who that lived through the year 1918 will ever lose the memory of its gigantic vicissitudes? Mrs. Ward, with her actual knowledge of so much of the ground over which the battles of March and April raged, was certainly not among those who could shut their eyes to the national danger they involved. She tried to maintain her characteristic optimism throughout the blackest times, and was in the end justified. But I remember one afternoon at Grosvenor Place when a friend who thought that he was much “in the know” informed us confidentially that we were “out of Ypres—been out for the last two days, but they don’t want to tell us,” and hope sank very low. When the battle rolled up to the foot of her own Scherpenberg Hill she longed, I believe, to be there with a pike, but victory was ours that day and she felt a special lifting of the heart at the news. As the terrible pageant of the year unrolled itself, her heart went out to France in her losing struggle north of the Marne; to Italy in those anxious days of June, when after a first recoil she swept the Austrians permanently back over the Piave; to France again in the first great return towards Soissons and the Aisne. Was it the real turn of the tide? Hardly could we dare to believe it, but in the light of later events it became evident that the Italian stand on the Piave had indeed marked the turn for the whole Allied front. Mrs. Ward always thought of this with peculiar satisfaction, for she was kept in constant touch with the situation out there by her son-in-law, George Trevelyan, who was in command of a British Red Cross Unit on the Italian front, and the disaster of Caporetto had very sadly affected her. Now all was well once more and Mrs. Ward, who had been no fair-weather friend to Italy, rejoiced with all her heart. There was much talk during the summer of a possible visit of hers, that autumn, to the Italian front, but events were destined to move too fast, and Mrs. Ward never again beheld the Lombard Plain.