The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  In Muriel’s story, the boy’s “old granny” took him to her home and “denied herself a good deal to feed and clothe him.” With Nellie’s support, this was precisely what Harriet Dowell had done for her grandson Willie. Nellie had made Willie and Harriet Dowell’s maintenance the highest priority of her laboring life in the match industry. Propaganda about the Allies’ “high ideals” in their fight against “coarse German militarism” and patriotic sermons from pulpits, Muriel explained, convinced the boy in her story that war “was being waged for the sake of the Kingdom of God.” “He went to the recruiting office,” Muriel noted without trace of condemnation, “gave in his name with a false age, and became a soldier.”165 This too is what Willie Dellar had done. A year shy of the legal age of enlistment, he went to Shaftesbury Street in Shoreditch on July 2, 1915 and joined the Army as a private.166 In Muriel’s vignette, the boy survives gassing but his militarist ideals do not. The recipient of a medal for his service, Willie Dellar returned to Bruce Road after the war and remained there long after his Aunt Nellie and grandmother Harriet died.167

  Willie’s enlistment came on the heels of the so-called Lusitania Riots of May 1915, one of the most traumatic episodes in Muriel, Nellie, and Kingsley Hall’s history. Kingsley Hall won few friends in Bromley-by-Bow when Nellie, Muriel, and Kingsley Hall’s Montessori teacher E. A. Hargrove interposed their bodies between angry mobs and German resident aliens during London’s anti-German rioting following the sinking of the Cunard’s luxury ocean liner, the Lusitania, on May 7, 1915. Almost twelve hundred perished off the southern coast of Ireland. Kingsley Hall had closely identified itself with Quakers and pacifists led by Stephen Hobhouse, who, in the name of English liberty, sought to defend the property, persons, and civil rights of resident German and Austrian “enemy aliens.”168 Most of the Lesters’ East London neighbors were in no mood to differentiate good Germans from bad. They were only too happy to lump together anyone whose name smacked of German ancestry, no matter how many decades a family had lived in and served the neighborhood.

  The First Year’s Report of Kingsley Hall (1915) included a harrowing account of the mob’s frenzied rage. (See fig. 5.9.) “The Anti-German Riots” was written by “E. A.”, presumably Kingsley Hall’s Montessori teacher Ethelburga A. Hargrove. The story deftly mingled the utter banality of everyday life—the arrival of fat letters in the afternoon post—with its violent extraordinary interruption. “The street seemed to hold its breath” as “ominous” tramping sounds of a “big body of determined men” drew neighbors out of their homes to witness vigilante justice. The men would show “their patriotism” and give the “Government a good example in the treatment of alien enemies.” The author of “Anti-German Riots” refused to blame the rioters for their behavior. She characterized the riot as a response to their own social and economic marginality as dehumanized cogs: “they were powerful individual personalities this afternoon—glorious change after having merely been a part of a machine since they left school at 14.”169 The national and local press also refused to condemn the rioters, but for quite different reasons. East Londoners were retaliating against the inhumanity and brutality of the enemy Hun. The caption for a Daily Sketch photograph of East London women absconding with a chair from a ransacked German home approvingly noted that it was “their only chance to show their hatred of German brutality.”170

  From the first German naval assaults on the southern coastal towns of Hartlepool and Scarborough in December 1914, Britons had grown accustomed to newspaper stories about scenes of devastation and destruction against civilians, especially women and children. Air raids in January 1915 prompted the Times to lament the “inhuman destruction of the weak and helpless” and condemn the “recrudescence of brutality such as the world has not witnessed for a thousand years.”171 The British state highlighted German attacks against blameless innocents as part of its ongoing campaign to muster recruits to its volunteer army.172 The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee’s Take Up the Sword of Justice (1915) depicted an unbowed martial Britannia who looks heavenward as she walks Christlike upon the water clutching her sword of justice. (See fig. 5.10.) In the background, the Lusitania remains afloat while its civilian victims sink to their deaths. Their outstretched hands in the turbulent waters echo J.M.W. Turner’s famous painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840) and beseech the viewer to rescue them from such wanton injustice. It is a measure of the malleability of the rhetoric of outrage that the press construed East Londoners’ assault on the English wife of a German-born baker as a justifiable response to German atrocities. In written and photographic press imagery of the Lusitania Riots, British women ceased to be victims of “Hun” brutality and became agents of justifiable revenge. They had taken up Britannia’s sword of justice.

  5.9. The local and national press ran extensive stories, accompanied by photographs, illustrating and defending popular violence toward so-called “enemy aliens” in Bow and Poplar during the riots after the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915. “Clear Out the Germans Say the People,” May 13, 1915, Daily Sketch, 1. (Courtesy of John Frost Newspapers/Mary Evans Picture Library.)

  5.10. Bernard Partridge, “Take up the sword of justice,” printed by David Allen & Sons Ltd., Harrow, Middlesex (London, 1915). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.)

  “Anti-German Riots” offers a bittersweet celebration of the value of the local knowledge earned by dint of sharing in neighbors’ lives. The local is not only a location, but a way of knowing predicated on a sense of affinity and sympathy. The author forestalls the rioters with her insider knowledge about the generosity and patriotism of the targeted Anglo-German victims, Mr. and Mrs. Paul, whose son is fighting on the Western Front. “They are splendid people who live here. Many’s the pound of tea they have given away; always ready to do anybody a good turn.” She contrasts the Pauls’ devotion to their community with the ignorance of the rioters as outsiders, who have come from another part of Poplar. “You don’t live here, do you? You see, all of us who live so close must know them best.” The day-to-day bonds of neighborhood and neighborliness—produced through countless unrecorded acts of mutual aid and friendship—eventually prove no match for the more fleeting but also much more powerful bonds of patriotic nationalism that crudely made “neighbours” into “aliens” and enemies. The rioters move next door to a butcher’s shop and loot its entire contents: “Soon wild shouts of triumph issued from the doors as, one by one, great strong women came running out carrying mattresses, pictures, chairs, sheets, and blankets.” The entire story unfolds under the passively watchful eyes of the local police, who sanction the violence by their refusal to prevent it.173 For Sylvia Pankhurst, the looting was sheer barbarism: cowardice masquerading as patriotism.174

  Muriel also narrated the Lusitania Riots in It Occurred to Me. She too did not blame her neighbors and instead pointed to the influence of a jingoistic newspaper that incited a “gang of roughs” led by a “stranger” to maraud through Bow and Poplar. A scene of terrifying atavism unfolds as a “welter of maddened people” tosses beds and wardrobes from upper story windows onto a storefront canvas awning and run off with fifty pound bags of flour.175

  Muriel left out one very important detail: Nellie never once left her side during this ordeal. In “The Salt of the Earth” (1923), Muriel told the story of the Lusitania Riots as a notable moment in the history of their loving friendship.

  In the anti-German riots, when the mob in Bow went mad over looting and some of us had to intervene to protect life, there was Nell, who had been standing pale as death beside me, suddenly flinging her arms round my waist to hold me back from facing the fury of the throng. Nell’s arms proved too weak to hold one, but her forethoughtful love was a protection by day and by night.176

  No doubt, Nellie clung to Muriel because she was terrified for her own safety and Muriel’s.

  In Muriel’s telling, the affective and the political press
up against one another, much like their two bodies.177 Muriel allows her readers to glimpse Nellie’s language of love for Muriel and for their shared project of enacting Christian revolution in Bromley-by-Bow. Nellie’s embodied gesture performs politics as love and love as politics. It would be hard to imagine a story that more fully illustrated Muriel’s most cherished ideas about love and Christian revolution as a lived enterprise.

  The unbounded nature of community at Kingsley Hall, which excluded none and welcomed all, the poetics of cross-class friendship, and the politics of possession and dispossession coalesce in “Stolen Goods,” a story printed in the Second Year’s Report for 1916. The author was “N.D.”—Nellie Dowell.178 Kingsley Hall’s annual reports are filled with similar essays written by the women and men of Bromley-by-Bow about their lives and experiences at the Hall. The Hall’s reports are multi-voiced texts whose individual contributions were sometimes signed, sometimes marked by the semi-anonymity of initials, and sometimes attributed simply to a “club member.” One contributor wittily remarked that the Lesters had found a clever way to have others bear the literary burden of writing their reports for them. The sisters’ commitment to making Kingsley Hall “common property” extended to its representations in print. Dispersed authorship enacted shared authority.179

  Zeppelin raids over East London in 1916–17 provide the backdrop to Nellie’s story, most notably the bombing of one of Bow’s main north-south thoroughfares and Kingsley Hall in the early morning of September 24, 1916. East Londoners had initially greeted zeppelins as curiosities to be gawked at. They had crowded the streets to see the immense humming flying machines filling the sky above them. They learned quickly enough to fear them and seek safety in air raid shelters in secure cellars. The raids gave Kingsley Hall opportunities to serve their neighbors. Muriel and Doris offered the local Watch Patrol free use of the Hall from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. every night. At the first indication of a raid, volunteers in the Kingsley Watch Patrol (KWP) fanned out across the streets and knocked on every door to warn residents to find shelter. Helpers at Kingsley Hall (Misses Archer, Butcher, and Ogden) organized evacuation drills as part of civilian defense preparation.180

  Nellie managed to find humor in every situation including the spectacle of watching fellow pacifists assume unaccustomed quasi-military roles. “I have thought of you these nights of danger,” she wrote to Muriel, safe at the Grange.

  we had such heavy fireing

  your sister said you did not have it

  much. The first night Miss Archer &

  Miss Ogden Mother Aunt & Miss Butcher

  you would have laughed Miss Butcher

  is a good sport I call her Corporel

  Jhonstone Miss Archer putting her

  through the drill & the rest joined

  Nellie took comfort—physical, spiritual, and psychological—holding tokens from Muriel of their partnership: a volume of Tolstoy they had studied together and small statues of St. Christopher, protector of travelers from dangers, and St. Timothy, hands clasped in prayer. “Last night was worse than all,” she confessed, “but I felt better and quite jolly with my face to the wall every time the gun went off.”

  & then I had a

  good look around. I took our a little

  blue bird of happiness* off the

  wall & put him in my chest & then

  I looked at my old friend in front

  of me Tolstoy, on the mantle shelf

  was our dear boy, & Christopher in

  the middle Aspiration [a short prayer] dear little

  Timothy, & those strong hands

  clasped in prayer. I said it to them

  jokeing after digging the cane in

  All that was trying to sleep181

  We glimpse Nellie’s increasing physical disablement. She now kept a cane close to her, though she apparently used it for comic effect rather than mobility during the raid.

  The zeppelin attack of September 24, 1916 seriously damaged Kingsley Hall and dramatically collapsed the distance separating home front from warfront. Recounted in several different essays published in the Second Year’s Report for 1916, the bombing raid laid bare the Hall’s interior. The “outside wall was blown across the street, windows shattered, and roof a wild medley of broken tiles,” reported one of Kingsley Hall’s helpers.182

  The global forces sustaining the war implicitly frame Nellie’s micro-narrative about the unfolding of small-scale events at Kingsley Hall in the raid’s aftermath. Her narration of “Stolen Goods” demonstrated acute awareness of the efficacy of “small gestures” as well as her skill in translating the lessons she had learned about techniques of “reconciliation” through reading and studying Tolstoy with Muriel.183 The story shows her working as an intermediary between the Hall and its neighbors—even as she occupies both positions simultaneously. While scouring her front steps, she contemplates the loss of several cherished gifts donated by Kingsley Lester and stolen by local boys in the confusion after the zeppelin raid. Can she restore these precious objects without casting blame upon—and thereby alienating—the thieves? This was the challenge she faced as a Christian revolutionary peacemaker.

  For much of the story, Nellie is literally at the threshold, neither inside nor quite outside. She engages various passersby and extracts information from them about the missing objects, including a dulcitone and several emblazoned school shields. Much like Nellie’s letters, “Stolen Goods” reproduces the easy flow of her thoughts. Nellie values the “stolen goods” because of the meanings and feelings they bear for her, for the Lesters, and their community. She narrates a history of the many benevolent uses to which the stolen “dulcetone piano” had been put to brighten the lives of her neighbors. “They take it round the courts and alleys every Christmas, singing carols, and also to the infirmary where they carry a Christmas tree, and give the little sick children toys,” Nellie wistfully recalled. “Now it is gone.”

  I was cleaning the front door step and thinking so much about the piano and the shields being carried about the streets by people who did not think what it meant to the two sisters, and how unhappy they were about them; I was hurrying to get done, to get them back somehow, when a woman passed; I gave her a cheery word, and said, “Hello! what’s up with you?” Then she started telling me all her troubles; she had her little boy with her—one of the lads of the rough brigade. ‘Now, Dicky,’ I said, ‘you know who has got the piano and shields, tell me; they belong to friends that have been very kind to you’ (meaning the mother).184

  As a Cockney insider, Nellie knows exactly how to get her neighbors to tell her where the “stolen goods” are. They, in turn, can rely on her to use the information in a way that will not violate the community’s norms and stir up conflict. Nellie is only too happy to comply with the poor boy’s request, “don’t split on me.” Rather than accusing anyone of stealing the objects, Nellie writes a letter to the mother of “our rough boys, poor but tricky” who had made off with them. Her pronoun choice “our” shuts down the space between an imagined virtuous “us” and a criminal “them.” She opens by assuming that the mother is the benevolent custodian of the objects rather than an accomplice to petty theft. She circumvents conflict and creates common ground between them by insisting that the woman, like Nellie, wishes to help out and make happy the “Miss Lesters.”

  I hear you have got the shields, taking care of them for Miss Lester. Will you let me have them? I am sure you will, they belong to her. I have known the Miss Lesters for years and their brother. They leave their home and do all they can to help people and make them happy. I want to make her happy … to-morrow by having the shields here.

  Here is Tolstoyan “reconciliation,” not as an abstraction, but as a lived social process that itself cannot be divorced from Nellie’s affective investment in Muriel’s happiness. Nellie’s version of the story ends well for everyone, a too tidy moral fable, perhaps. The mother returns the objects “with pleasure.” Nellie pleases herself by pleas
ing the Lesters. And the boys, “quite happy and chatty now,” return to their club at Kingsley Hall where Nellie rewards them with a good book and a warm fire.185

  The bombing raid, much like the anti-German riots a year earlier, marked a turning point in Kingsley Hall’s history. Both events brought the violence of global war home to Bromley-by-Bow. Both underscored Nellie’s affective and political labor in loving Muriel and sustaining Kingsley Hall. The effects of these two events on the Hall’s relationships with local people differed quite dramatically. In the eyes of their neighbors, the bombing proved that Kingsley Hall people were neither the Kaiser’s spies nor his allies. The Hall’s supporters now claimed the moral authority of innocent victims. Over and over, they demonstrated their hatred of the war and their solicitude for its foot soldiers. Kingsley Hall proudly displayed an Honor Roll near its front entrance that listed each local man serving the nation in the armed forces.

  Two months later, in November 1916, Muriel, Nellie and fellow pacifists received encouragement from a most unlikely quarter, the Fifth Marquess of Lansdowne—former Viceroy of India, Secretary of State for War, and Foreign Secretary under Lord Balfour’s conservative government.186 A cabinet minister without portfolio in 1916, Lansdowne circulated a memorandum suggesting that the time had come for a negotiated settlement. A few weeks later, he reiterated his stance in a letter to the Daily Telegraph that stunned and disgusted the patriotic public. Prolongation of the war, he argued, “will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it….”187 Mr. Punch ridiculed Lord Lansdowne’s “grievous disservice to his country” as an old man’s inexcusable lapse in judgment undertaken in a “fit of war-weariness.”188 The government did its best to hush up the matter. In April 1917 Sylvia Pankhurst decided to reinvigorate debate about the Landsdowne letter. She mobilized the FoR, the Independent Labour Party, her own East London Suffragettes, and various other feminist pacifists, including Charlotte Despard and Maude Royden, to march across East London from Canning Town to Victoria Park via Poplar and Bow to stage a large demonstration in support of a swift negotiated peace settlement.189