The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  These are powerful arguments against regarding Muriel and Nellie’s project as revolutionary. They were too cogent for Muriel to sweep aside. They remain too cogent for me to ignore. However, rather than starting from the premise that Christian revolutionaries were the unwitting dupes of bourgeois capitalism, I take seriously—and on their own terms—both the idea of Christian revolution and their attempts to enact it. Muriel’s “God is Love” theology, especially her interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, inspired her understanding of Christian revolution, which in turn produced her social politics. Transformations of mind, heart, and soul, Muriel believed, went hand in hand with the fundamental restructuring of the economy and politics. The individual self and the social self were indivisible in her understanding of Christian revolution. Disciplined governance of the embodied self could not be separated from the practices of participatory self-government at the heart of democratic citizenship in the modern world.

  The precise mechanisms by which a purifying worldwide Christian revolution would unfold Muriel never specified. Paradoxically, the Great War that she so vehemently condemned did a great deal of cleansing work for her. Even as she decried war’s destructive violence as contrary to God’s love, it refined and radicalized her ideas and practices. In its devastating wake, the war made millions in Britain and Europe eager to find peaceable alternatives to resolving conflicts between states.17 Kingsley Hall and Muriel came of age amid the tidal wave of revolutionary energies unleashed by war and its immediate aftermath—that “Indian summer of nineteenth century radical visions.”18 These visions galvanized men and women across Europe to undertake intense socioeconomic, cultural, and political experiments, ranging from small-scale Simple Life communes to soviets predicated on worker control over industrial shop floors. Muriel shared the Canon of Hereford’s optimism that “we have good reason to be confident that God intends to build up a better Europe, a New Jerusalem on the ruins of the old” just as He had sent Jesus to proclaim His healing gospel at a much earlier period of “World-crisis.”19

  For the likes of Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and John Maynard Keynes, interwar Britain may well have been a “morbid age” on the verge of a catastrophic implosion.20 It was full of promise and possibilities for the Lesters, Nellie, and their band of fellow workers at Kingsley Hall. They devoted themselves to the joyful exacting labor of building the New Jerusalem, soul by soul, in their corner of Bromley-by-Bow. They developed ideas and practices about the dynamics of power in interpersonal, social, and national life that continue to inform the aspirational endeavors of global humanitarians and advocates of restorative justice. Muriel believed deeply that Kingsley Hall was one place where Christian revolution could and would begin. My analysis of Muriel and Nellie’s pacifist Christian revolutionary partnership also begins there with its founding and evolution during an epoch of unprecedented violence and revolution in Europe.

  HENRY LESTER’S GIFT

  Muriel never tired of telling the story about the precise moment that Kingsley Hall was born. It went like this. Soon after their brother’s death on September 14, 1914, Doris and Muriel used the money that Kingsley had left for them to expand their small slum dwelling at 60 Bruce Road. With their Bow friends, they knocked down the second-story wall between their home and Nellie’s next door at number 58. (Nellie’s family occupied the first floor.) This created an upstairs space big enough to hold their clubs and classes. They called it Kingsley Rooms. But the sisters were not content. They kept criticizing “established things” and talking about how much they wanted an even larger space to match their ambitions. Henry Lester had heard enough of this talk. Then and there, he offered to purchase and renovate a suitable property for them. Henry pressed them to answer. Would they accept his challenge? Muriel hesitated. “ ‘It struck me dumb’ … I was appalled, terrified.”21 A few days later, members of Muriel’s Bruce Road Men’s Adult School found just the right place, a disused Strict and Particular Zion Baptist chapel, one block west and one block north of 60 Bruce Road at the corner of Eagling and Botolph Road.22 Where once Hell’s fires had scorched sinners’ souls, God’s healing love would now envelop all who entered Kingsley Hall, regardless of class, race, religion, and nation. Unlike tales that Bloomsbury “moderns” told about their rebellion against their Victorian forbears, Muriel gives pride of place to eighty-year-old Henry Lester. He is the prime mover and benevolent Victorian paterfamilias, nothing like one of Lytton Strachey’s neurotic “eminent” Victorians.23 Henry boldly pushes his daughters to turn disaffection into joyful action.

  The day before the Hall’s opening, rubbish still littered the refurbished former chapel. The Lesters had belatedly discovered that rats had gnawed through parts of the foundation, compelling them to replace the rotten wood with sturdy new beams. With their band of working-class friends from Loughton and Bow, they toiled through the night cleaning up the mess. Illness prevented Henry Lester from making the journey from Loughton to Bow for the opening ceremony, so his letter of welcome was read out loud. Few Essex men-made-good were more forthright about their Cockney roots than Henry Lester. The labors of the people of Bow and Poplar, among whom Henry had been born in the 1830s, had allowed his shipbuilding business to prosper. Kingsley Hall was his gift of thanks to the people of Bow. The pastor of Bloomsbury Chapel for whom Kingsley Lester had last worked, Reverend Thomas Phillips, spoke fondly of their dead brother’s altruism and likened Muriel to Jane Addams of Chicago.24 George Lansbury beseeched everyone to demand better lives for themselves. God loved saint and sinner, virtuous and vicious, rich and poor, so why should men harshly judge anyone in need? (See fig. 5.2.) He traced Kingsley Hall’s origins to the Christian socialists of the 1840s and the famous university settlement, Toynbee Hall, founded by the Barnetts in Whitechapel in 1884. This was a lineage that Muriel later came to disavow.25 But that winter evening in early 1915, she was content to bask in George Lansbury’s praise. He urged his listeners to “rally round Miss Lester and her work, not to leave it all for her to do” but to “take hold of the place and manage it and organize it themselves.” Then “Miss Lester” herself spoke. Kingsley Hall would “rub the sharp corners” off everyone, she hoped, and “break down the prickly barriers” separating people, nations, and churches.26

  Two laboring men from the Bruce Road Adult School gave the last short speeches, proof that they did not need Lansbury to tell them to make the work their own. They already had. This was essential to Muriel’s ideas about participatory democratic citizenship, which depended upon working-class men, women, and children making decisions and speaking for themselves. George Mortimer, a worker at Spratt’s dog biscuit factory along the Limehouse Cut, invited the men in the audience to come around on Sunday mornings and join the lively debates at the Men’s Adult School.27

  5.2. George Lansbury helped celebrate all of Kingsley Hall’s landmark events. He is photographed, with a smiling Muriel wearing a hat behind him, at a tree-planting ceremony. “George Lansbury planting tree at Kingsley Hall, Bow, November 1929,” Lester/6/10, Lester Papers. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)

  Mortimer was an obvious choice to speak for Bromley-by-Bow’s workingmen. He, his wife, and daughters had long been attached to the Lester sisters and Nellie. His daughter Lily, a dog biscuit packer at Spratt’s, was an early member of Muriel’s Sunday Bible class at Bruce Road Congregational Church and a special favorite of Nellie’s. After Kingsley Lester spoke to Muriel’s Bible class in November 1910, Lily had impressed Nellie by “giving right out” in front of all the other girls that she hoped to be “ready to meet God.” This was, Nellie thought, “very plucky of Lilly [sic] for it wants doing among her work girls.” As a former work girl herself, Nellie knew from firsthand experience that such public declarations of Christian convictions in an institutional setting—a Bible class—pushed against rather than conformed to prevailing norms in Bromley-by-Bow. Poor women in London like Nellie were more often than not “conduits of belief in working-class families
,” but these beliefs tended to mix “religious sentiment” with popular folk wisdom disconnected from church teachings and formal structures.28

  Long-term friendships with families like the Mortimers and the Dowells allowed the Lesters to cross generations and sexes in building up dense networks of fellow workers and followers. These men, women, and children constituted the core of what Muriel called “Kingsley Hall people.” Without them, Kingsley Hall might never have opened, much less flourished. They filled the hall on its inaugural evening and joined its clubs and classes. Doris and Muriel had cultivated these friendships since their arrival in Bow at the turn of the century. After the sisters moved into 60 Bruce Road in 1912, Doris announced that they would systematically survey their neighborhood. “Doris decided,” Muriel recalled, that “every house in the nieghbourhood [sic] had to be visited by her or me. Accompanied by one of our local friends it was a serious job. Doris made me do it, but I enjoyed it as much as she did once we had got started.”

  Two things distinguish the Lesters’ “visits” from those undertaken by generations of Ladies Bountiful before them: the presence of a “local friend” and Muriel’s growing awareness that neither wealth nor good intentions gave her the right to intrude on her neighbors’ privacy.29 In one typescript account of the origins of Kingsley Hall, Muriel recalled the impact of a “visit” on her understanding of how to break down “prickly barriers” dividing rich and poor. A master of self-critical autobiographical reflection, she berated herself for knocking on her neighbor’s door on washing day in Bromley-by-Bow. Only someone like her who never had to wash her own clothes would be so insensitive, she confessed.30 This gaffe taught Muriel that friendship and mutual aid, not surveillance and superiority, opened doors and hearts in Bromley-by-Bow. Muriel’s vignette shows her transforming the meaning and purpose of Victorian charitable visiting to serve her emerging Christian revolutionary program at Kingsley Hall. Visiting exposes for critical scrutiny, rather than reproduces, class privilege.

  Who was the Lesters’ unnamed “friend” and what part did she play in the “serious job” of visiting? Was she their partner or their Cockney Sherpa whose local knowledge smoothed the sisters’ way? Nellie’s letters strongly suggest that she was this “local friend,” who guided the Lesters and was their partner. As early as 1910, she reported to Muriel that “I have been trying all the week to do some visiting but my mother is still very poorly so I have to do everything but I have managed Monday’s for Miss Doris & I think we all get along splendid together but I do miss you….” Reminding them to remain loyal to their beloved Miss Lester, Nellie regularly visited members of the Women’s Meeting when Muriel was away from Bow.

  they say Oh no

  they have not left Miss Lester

  meeting they mean to come

  so we are hoping to get a good

  number by the time you come

  home

  Nellie’s use of the pronoun “we” indicates the depth of her investment in this enterprise. It was hers as well as Muriel’s.31

  Doris, Kingsley, and Muriel opened the doors of their home at No. 60 to the neighbors they had so recently “visited” in 1912. Doris fondly recalled that “Nella” (her nickname for Nellie) brought along several friends to the housewarming party, who had been terrified and then delighted by Kingsley’s elaborate masquerade as a ghost.32 The sum total of these visits had helped to produce the bonds of friendship and trust between the Lesters and their Bromley-by-Bow neighbors that emboldened them to accept their father’s challenge and open Kingsley Hall in 1915.

  George Lansbury brought Kingsley Hall’s opening celebration to a rousing conclusion singing “God Save the People” by the Corn Law rhymer Ebenezer Elliott.33 Elliott’s stirring words were beloved by the working poor: “the people,” “not thrones and crowns but men,” were God’s children, on whom “man’s clouded sun shall brightly rise, and songs be heard instead of sighs.” Elliott’s “People’s Anthem” may have originated in early Victorian political and economic debates about People’s Charters and Corn Laws of the 1830s and ’40s, but it accrued new meanings as a song of protest and hope in early twentieth-century transatlantic struggles for social justice. For Lansbury and the Lesters, Elliott’s refrain “God save the people” was a call to action, not passive consolation in the face of earthly suffering. Muriel insisted that Kingsley Hall was a tool for the people of Bow to use in working out their own salvation.34 My hunch is that this finishing touch was Lansbury’s impromptu flourish, not Muriel’s.35

  Doris did not speak that evening. Nor had anyone mentioned her, at least in the surviving transcripts and press reports of speeches.36 Did it rankle her to hear Lansbury implore the audience not to leave Muriel—“Miss Lester”—to do all the work alone? Perhaps not, for Doris shunned attention. Unlike Muriel, she seemed indifferent to public acclaim and adulation. Lansbury must not have known that Muriel had convalesced in posh Devon health resorts for much of January. This left Doris, Nellie, George Bowtle, Ben Platten, the Mortimers, and many others to carry on the work without her.

  Muriel was blessed with charismatic charm and a rare talent for inspiring others; but it was Doris and Nellie who often found themselves thrown together to keep things going at Kingsley Hall. Acting as Muriel’s surrogate, Nellie gushed

  You [Muriel] ought to have seen

  your little sister go out to

  the wedding she looked

  beautiful I was proud to

  walk beside her to the

  Station & now tonight she

  is far happier with her

  Demonstration [a task performed for graded Sunday school teaching] & then Nell

  is going to see her safe for

  the night I know she will

  be tired

  Nellie’s letter allows us to glimpse her own warm and independent friendship with Doris. Helping and looking after Doris gave Nellie another way to claim Muriel’s gratitude.

  What is most striking about the opening ceremony in February 1915 is not the speakers’ or Muriel’s enunciation of a revolutionary program, but their respectful invocation of the past. There were many models upon which the Lesters could draw as they consolidated their activities in Bow—Doris’s Montessori nursery school and graded Sunday school and Muriel’s Men’s Adult School, Women’s meeting, Factory girls’ club and Sunday Bible class—into a single institution under their own control. From the Barnetts’ university settlement, Toynbee Hall, the Lesters adopted cross-class hospitality, bringing together all sorts and conditions of people. With its Elizabethan revival architecture, sculptures, and carpeted public rooms, Toynbee Hall was an elegant place, especially compared to the cramped simplicity of Kingsley Rooms and the first Kingsley Hall. The poor invited to attend Toynbee Hall’s teas and “at-homes” were not meant to emulate the domestic arrangements enjoyed by their benevolent betters. Contact with cultured minds and tasteful interiors would fill their “emptier” minds with elevating ideals and thoughts.37 Recent graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, Toynbee men lived in well-appointed rooms with Delft-tile fireplaces. The only laboring people admitted to their inner sanctums were the female servants whom Henrietta Barnett recruited from among the fourteen-year-old Poor Law girls leaving Nellie’s orphanage at Forest Gate. Their invisible labors carrying, washing, scrubbing, and sweeping subsidized elite male settlers experiments in cross-class fraternal sociability.38

  These trappings of bourgeois ease were what the Lesters emphatically did not want. Nor would the first two residents of Kingsley Hall, Mary (May) Hughes and Rosa Waugh (Hobhouse), tolerate a servant tidying up after them. Each woman had already started on a journey of renunciation of worldly comforts as she sought to achieve what Rosa called identification with the oppressed. Rosa’s work at an East London Summer Vacation Play Centre in 1913 had opened her eyes to the “intolerable cruelties” of poverty, including the endless barrage of nosy questions that social workers smugly inflicted on the poor.39 It diminished the humanity
of the poor, she insisted, to think of them “exclusively in relation to their hardships.”40 Rosa’s principled repudiation of bourgeois values challenged Muriel intellectually and provided excellent copy for journalists. With photographers in tow, they reported that the daughter of the revered Benjamin Waugh and daughter-in-law of a former cabinet member, the Right Honorable Henry Hobhouse, insisted on doing her own heavy work scrubbing stairs and windows in her slum flat. Hughes called herself “Comrade” to express her solidarity with the people. It took convincing to get her to use the modest bathroom at Kingsley Hall since it was an amenity that very few in East London enjoyed. On its door, she posted a note explaining “This luxury was not necessary but due to the great kindness of Mr. H. E. Lester who gave this Hall to the people of Bow.”41 From the outset, the Lesters connected their faith in God’s illimitable love to their everyday ethics: the commandment that people take full personal responsibility for cleaning up their own dirt.

  Self-disciplined acceptance of responsibility for managing dirt was a corollary of their understanding of self-government. The Lesters expected members of Kingsley Hall’s mixed-sex social club to elect stewards to manage the club and keep it spotless. It was the stewards, not the Lesters, who issued the handsome invitations to community members to join them for the first anniversary gala celebration of their club. (See fig. 5.3.) At the same time, club regulations reflected Muriel’s priorities. Members dusted chairs every Thursday and Sunday. They sprinkled that “magical disinfectant”—Sanitas sawdust—and swept it up at the end of each club night.42 Muriel’s sincere desire to inspire her neighbors to make decisions for themselves ran up against her profound aversion to untidiness—physical, interpersonal, social, and psychological. The elaboration and imposition of rules about cleanliness diminished the risk that those she empowered would mess things up. She elevated hygienic household management to a first principle of citizenship and Christian communitarianism.