That letter founded Toynbee Hall. Insomnia had sapped my health for a long time, and later, in the autumn of that year, we were sent to Eaux Bonnes to try a water-cure. During that period the Cambridge letter was expanded into a paper, which was read at a college meeting at St. John’s College, Oxford, in November of the same year. Mr. Arthur Sidgwick was present, and it is largely due to his practical vigour that the idea of University Settlements in the industrial working-class quarters of large towns fell not only on sympathetic ears, but was guided until it came to fruition. The first meeting of undergraduates met in the room of Mr. Cosmo Lang now (1908), about to become Archbishop of York. Soon after the meeting a small but earnest committee was formed; later on the committee grew in size and importance, money was obtained on debenture bonds, and a Head sought who would turn the idea into a fact. Here was the difficulty. Such men as had been pictured in the paper which Mr. Knowles had published in the “Nineteenth Century Review” of February, 1884, are not met with every-day; and no inquiries seemed to discover the wanted man who would be called upon to give all and expect nothing.
Mr. Barnett and I had spent eleven years of life and work in Whitechapel. We were weary. My health stores were limited and often exhausted, and family circumstances had given us larger means and opportunities for travel. We were therefore desirous to turn our backs on the strain, the pain, the passion and the poverty of East London, at least for a year or two, and take repose after work which had aged and weakened us. But no other man was to be found who would and could do the work; and, if this child-thought was not to die, it looked as if we must undertake to try and rear it.
We went to the Mediterranean to consider the matter, and solemnly, on a Sunday morning, made our decision. How well I recall the scene as we sat at the end of the quaint harbour-pier at Mentone, the blue waves dancing at our feet, everything around scintillating with light and movement in contrast to the dull and dulling squalor of the neighbourhood which had been our home for eleven years, and which our new decision would make our home for another indefinite spell of labour and effort. “God help us,” we said to each other; and then we wired home to obtain the refusal of the big Industrial School next to St. Jude’s Vicarage, which had recently been vacated, and which we thought to be a good site for the first Settlement, and returned to try and live up to the standard which we had unwittingly set for ourselves in describing in the article the unknown man who was wanted for Warden.
The rest of the story is soon told. The Committee did the work, bought the land, engaged the architect (Mr. Elijah Hoole), raised the money, and interested more and more men, who came for varying periods, either to live, to visit, or to see what was being done.
On 10 March, 1883, Arnold Toynbee had died. He had been our beloved and faithful friend, ever since, as a lad of eighteen, his own mind then being chiefly concerned with military interests and ideals, he had heard, with the close interest of one treading untrodden paths, facts about the toiling, ignorant multitude whose lives were stunted by labour, clouded by poverty, and degraded by ignorance. He had frequently been to see us at St. Jude’s, staying sometimes a few nights, oftener tempting us to go a day or two with him into the country; and ever wooing us with persistent hospitality to Oxford. Once in 1879 he had taken rooms over the Charity Organization Office in Commercial Road, hoping to spend part of the Long Vacation, learning of the people; but his health, often weakly, could not stand the noise of the traffic, the sullenness of the aspect, nor the pain which stands waiting at every corner; and at the end of some two or three weeks he gave up the plan and left East London, never to return except as our welcome guest. His share of the movement was at Oxford, where with a subtle force of personality he attracted original or earnest minds of all degrees, and turned their thoughts or faces towards the East End and its problems. Through him many men came to work with us, while others were stirred by the meetings held in Oxford, or by the pamphlet called the “Bitter Cry,” which, in spite of its exaggerations, aroused many to think of the poor; or by the stimulating teaching of Professor T. H. Green, and by the constant, kindly sympathy of the late Master of Balliol, who startled some of his hearers, who had not plumbed the depths of his wide, wise sympathy, by advising all young men, whatever their career, “to make some of their friends among the poor”.
The 10th of March, 1884, was a Sunday, and on the afternoon of that day Balliol Chapel was filled with a splendid body of men who had come together from all parts of England in loving memory of Arnold Toynbee, on the anniversary of his death. Dr. Jowett had asked my husband to preach to them, and they listened, separating almost silently at the chapel porch, filled, one could almost feel, by the aspiration to copy him in caring much, if not doing much, for those who had fallen by the way or were “vacant of our glorious gains”.
We had often chatted, those of us who were busy planning the new Settlement, as to what to call it. We did not mean the name to be descriptive; it should, we thought, be free from every possible savour of a Mission, and yet it should in itself be suggestive of a noble aim. As I sat on that Sunday afternoon in the chapel, one of the few women among the crowd of strong-brained, clean-living men assembled in reverent affection for one man, the thought flashed to me, “Let us call the Settlement Toynbee Hall”. To Mr. Bolton King, the honorary secretary of the committee, had come the same idea, and it, finding favour with the committee, was so decided, and our new Settlement received its name before a brick was laid or the plans concluded.
On the first day of July, 1884, the workmen began to pull down the old Industrial School, and to adapt such of it as was possible for the new uses; and on Christmas Eve, 1884, the first settlers, Mr. H. D. Leigh, of Corpus, and Mr. C. H. Grinling, of Hertford, slept in Toynbee Hall, quickly followed by thirteen residents, some of whom had been living in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel, some for a considerable length of time, either singly or in groups, one party inhabiting a small disused public-house, others in model dwellings or in lodgings, none of them being altogether suitable for their own good or the needs of those whom they would serve. Those men had become settlers before the Settlement scheme was conceived, and as such were conversant with the questions in the air. It was an advantage also, that they were of different ages, friends of more than one University generation, and linked together by a common friendship to us.
The present Dean of Ripon had for many years lent his house at No. 3, Ship Street, for our use, and so had enabled us to spend some consecutive weeks of each summer at Oxford; and during those years we had learnt to know the flower of the University, counting, as boy friends, some men who have since become world-widely known; some who have done the finest work and “scorned to blot it with a name”; and others who, as civil servants, lawyers, doctors, country gentlemen, business men, have in the more humdrum walks of life carried into practice the same spirit of thoughtful sympathy which first brought them to inquire concerning those less endowed and deprived of life’s joys, or those who, handicapped by birth, training, and environment, had fallen by the way.