The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  The march began inconspicuously enough at Barking Road in Canning Town with a small group of men and women bearing their slogans “nailed to broom sticks.” As they crossed into Poplar, Bromley, and Bow, the contingent from Kingsley Hall led by Muriel, Nellie, May Hughes, and Rosa Hobhouse joined them carrying a large black cross. These were well-chosen symbols. The marchers transformed tools of humble household labor—broomsticks—into instruments of protest while proclaiming the Christian basis for their demand to end the war. Men from Bow’s numerous pubs emptied onto the streets to enjoy the show and lightheartedly mock the demonstrators with sardonic shouts: “Three cheers for the Kaiser.” As the protestors, now swollen to nearly a thousand strong, approached the park and crossed Ducketts Canal, the mood changed. Frank Hancock, one of the marchers, recalled

  The throng pressed us closer; instead of four abreast, we got down to two, then single file, and then isolated individuals. Over heads I could see the banners falling into the hands of rough crowds…. Then the Cross went down, and still we staggered on. Then it was impossible to move forward or backward. There was a solid howling mass of ‘patriots.’ None of us reached the Park Gates—some of the demonstrators were roughly handled, men’s and women’s clothing torn, hats and caps thrown away….190

  Maude Royden’s compassion for the attackers—which included white dominion troops on leave and local roughs—did not diminish her revulsion at the naked bestiality of such intimate proximity to those “with the lust to hurt and destroy.”191

  The assault caught many of the peace marchers unawares. It came as no surprise to Muriel. “My precious dearest friend and neighbor, Nell Dowell, had scented trouble days before,” Muriel recalled. Nellie played St. Christopher and St. Timothy to Muriel—supporting and protecting her from harm on their Christian revolutionary travels. Anticipating arrest, Nellie had packed Muriel a little bag with “tooth brush, night things and some food.” Successive bouts of rheumatic fever had taken their toll on Nellie’s body and left her increasingly disabled in body, though undiminished in mental and spiritual vigor.

  I hated to see her labored breathing as she kept pace with our marching step. When the storm broke she called to me to keep still and let things take their course. There was nothing else to do. I can’t remember exactly what happened…. Little by little members of our party collected together. ‘Where’s Mary Hughes?’ asked someone anxiously. Another replied that Rosa Waugh Hobhouse was looking after that frail and stalwart saint.192

  5.11. “Peace Demonstration, Victoria Park,” New Crusader, April 19, 1917, 4. (Courtesy of Swarthmore College Peace Collection.)

  For Christian revolutionaries like Muriel and Nellie, such apparent defeats were always spiritual victories. This was the beauty of the Sermon on the Mount’s logic: struck by their enemies, Christians turned the other cheek. To give love for hatred was a precious chance to live by Jesus’s exalted beatitudes and show the world the power of God’s love. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the New Crusader published an ecstatic headline about the “peace demonstration”: “ ‘SMASHED UP’ BUT—TRIUMPHANT!” (See fig. 5.11.) While the New Crusader honored Sylvia Pankhurst for “scattering the seed of Christ’s Peace, Goodwill and Brotherhood,” she was not easily consoled. Embittered by East Londoners’ failure to protect her and the marchers, she warned them not to publicly “spurn and revile those who have comforted you, whom you respect and to whom you will turn again in time of anxiety and trouble.”193 The Lusitania Riots, the bombing of Kingsley Hall, and the violent disruption of the Victoria Park “Peace Demonstration” were personal triumphs of Christian revolutionary love for Nellie and Muriel, moments of acute sociopolitical crisis in which the “prickly barriers” separating love, activism, and politics collapsed.

  Muriel was a nobody when she first ventured to the London Society for Women’s Suffrage in December 1914. By 1918, she had fully recovered the vigorous health of mind, body, and spirit that sustained her grueling global ministry of peace until her partial retirement at age seventy-five. She had also become a somebody—a leader in her own right, a person to be reckoned with not only in Bromley-by-Bow and London but among Britain’s pacifist feminist community.

  TELLING THE TRUTH, BECOMING AN HEIRESS

  Muriel’s experiences with her Bow neighbors during these years of wartime trauma and Christian witness opened her eyes to the everyday ethical dilemmas of being poor. They pushed her to ask new questions about the relationship between Christianity, truth telling, and poverty. In a probing essay she published in the Christian World in August 1918, Muriel asked herself and her readers whether it was possible to reconcile “East End life and Christianity.” “Ought One to Speak the Truth?” she wondered.

  This should not have been a hard question. The “deceit and untruth” of war accentuated pacifists’ absolute commitment to truth as a precondition for the pursuit of reconciliation.194 As she confronted the material and economic facts of her neighbors’ lives, such certainty seemed to be yet another privilege that the poor could ill afford. Jesus’s precept in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:8), “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” was a cruel mockery under conditions in which husbands and wives had no choice but to share the same room, sometimes the same bed, with their children. “As a result of overcrowding,” she explained, “the children’s minds are often saturated with such sordid and degrading ideas … you will be haunted ever afterwards by the lewd and stunted ugliness of their conversation.” Even when the working poor had the money to move their families into less cramped apartments, landlords routinely rejected tenants with large families and those coming from unrespectable streets. This troubled a member of the Kingsley Hall Club, who asked Muriel whether he should truthfully fill out the landlord’s questionnaire. Muriel advised him to be a Christian, tell the truth, and risk rejection. Later that evening, she reflected on her answer. “I became disturbingly aware that preaching from a clean and pleasant house had no dire effect on myself, but only on my hearers.” How could she spark a Christian revolution if she remained trapped in the “foolish innocence which is engendered by comfort and money?”195 The obvious answer was to eschew comfort and seek poverty. Muriel did just that. To do so most effectively with maximum publicity, she decided that she also had to become an heiress.

  The literal collapse of one of the Hall’s outer walls in the 1916 zeppelin raid suggested a strategy that Kingsley Hall’s residents and helpers took to heart: the value of making all that they did completely transparent to those around them. Determined to conceal nothing from their neighbors, Kingsley Hall’s residents at the Hall and Bruce Road in practice reserved no space for their exclusive use—although at the outset, the living room was meant to be their own. If the front door to No. 60 was closed, neighbors went through Nellie’s house at No. 58 and entered through the back garden. In an undated letter Muriel wrote to residents of 60 Bruce Road sometime after Nellie’s death in 1923, she explained that “we have hostile and friendly eyes on us all the time as well as those which are neutral at present but watching, reserving their opinion, weighing up the pros and cons of our lives before they decide whether to copy us or to show us up.” Nellie had always intervened on their behalf with their neighbors, deploying her diplomatic gifts, humor, and common sense to solve every problem they created for themselves. Without Nellie, they were now on their own, she explained. They would have to figure out how to live openly beyond their neighbors’ reproach.196

  Residents’ lives remained on display—blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. Privacy, private life, and private property seemed at odds with their vision of a community bound by the desire not to possess but to share. In a letter to Muriel, Nellie playfully captured the joyful openness of Kingsley Hall, which she contrasted with the stiff “only fit for Sunday clothes” formality of the Lester family home in Loughton. Kingsley Hall beckoned all who passed to “come in don’t go home & change, come & be happy (nice cup of
tea a) Dough Nut or a cocanut bar….”197

  Daily life at Kingsley Hall and its nearby satellites was never just “cocanut” bars and “nice cups of tea.” In their imaginations, the Lesters and the residents of Kingsley Hall broke down the walls separating peoples, races, churches, nations, and sexes.198 But quotidian practices constantly reminded them of their ongoing struggle to eradicate the class privileges and blinkered assumptions so deeply engrained within many of them. Muriel gently chided Tom Smith, a fine craftsman who mended furniture at Kingsley Hall, for not sharing his thoughts at meetings. She was abashed when his wife pulled her aside and explained that he was silent because he could not afford dentures and was too embarrassed to reveal his empty gums. Muriel’s story refuses readerly sympathy for Tom Smith’s toothlessness. His silence is a measure of laudable self-pride and stoic independence, not quiet suffering that entreats Lady Bountiful to rescue yet another victim through her benevolent offices. Muriel dramatized the blind spots produced by her own bourgeois background that insulated and distanced her from the day-to-day realities of her neighbors’ lives.199

  Some of the Lesters’ neighbors subjected them to cruel criticism, which they accepted and publicized in their quest for personal transparency. In January 1920, Muriel published a scathing letter by a self-proclaimed communist and “friendly comrade” in Bow that blasted her soft white hands and accused her of being a “rich middle class woman ‘preaching platitudes to Eastenders, while living myself on a bloody stew composed of the blood, bones, and sweat of the workers.’ ” His hard-hitting rhetoric reflected workers’ increasingly strident demands for the overthrow of capitalism fueled by militant socialists from Red Clydeside in Glasgow to the Third International in Moscow.200 Muriel’s genteel hands become bodily proof of her complicity with capitalist exploitation. Rather than rebut her “comrade’s” factual errors or take offense at his familiar charge of the humanitarian-as-hypocrite, she “intensified and broadened [his criticisms]” and entreated workers “to work harder still for the overthrow of the present system.”201 Precisely what form this would take, Muriel never explained. No doubt Lester infuriated her “comrade” by making his criticisms her own. Her self-critical performance magnified her virtue.

  Workers did not need Muriel to remind them of the failures of the “present system” as they confronted a severe economic slump in the early spring of 1921.202 Many came to see the immense financial and social costs of winning the war. For socialist-pacifists like the Lesters, the years between Armistice in November 1918 and the spring of 1921 were scarred by the naked brutality of the British state in Ireland and India, which merely extended the industrial capitalist, militarist, and imperialist logic of the war itself. While some Britons defended the massacre of peaceful Indian protesters at Amritsar and the “dirty war” against Sinn Fein in Ireland, many did not.203 Muriel and Kingsley Hall hosted Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, whose martyred pacifist husband was an innocent victim of the British military suppression of the Irish “Rising” during Easter 1916.204 Humanitarian organizations including Save the Children Fund bombarded the British public with graphic images of Austria’s starving children in ways that made only too evident the human devastation and immorality of the continued Allied blockade of central Europe after the Armistice on November 11, 1918.205 The Kingsley Hall community adopted an Austrian war orphan, Marie, who lived with Nellie and Muriel’s friends, the Mortimers, and went to school at the Hall’s Montessori kindergarten. Marie embodied the renewal of internationalism that was such a marked feature of interwar British political culture, which subsidized the creation of the League of Nations. Drawing on a long political tradition linking women with the politics of hunger, a black-clad Muriel led a march of East London mothers from Bow to Westminster to demand immediate relief for Europe’s innocent postwar victims.206

  Such factors—economic failure, humanitarian crises, and violent reprisals against nationalist movements in the Empire—encouraged Britons to rethink their views about the war and its opponents. This rapid shift in public opinion in the three years following the war enabled Kingsley Hall’s supporters such as George Lansbury to reenter Parliament in 1922. Even New Crusader Wilfred Wellock managed to gain a seat in Parliament in a 1927 by-election and once again in the 1929 general election.207 By 1921, the keenest proponents of war and the militarization of civil society “had been banished to the margins of political life” as Britons reinvented themselves as defenders of a “peaceable kingdom.”208 In the postwar battle to determine the future of Britain and save the soul of Europe from its own self-destructive barbarism, Kingsley Hall’s ethics and politics of reconciliation increasingly seemed like a legitimate political and economic strategy, not the contemptible idealism of an eccentric pacifist fringe.

  The original residents of Kingsley Hall—Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, May Hughes, and Muriel, along with Muriel’s FoR colleague Stanley James—seized this moment to renounce their wealth altogether in their widely circulated manifesto of March 15, 1921 inviting the British public to join them in “voluntary poverty.” All four were founding members of Bow’s chapter of the Brethren of the Common Table.209 The manifesto affirmed their Christian obligation to meet “the needs of others, whether in our country or abroad” as a way to share God’s love through the “sacrament of fellowship.” They sought the blessing “derived from intimate contact with the sorrows of the oppressed.” The Bow Brethren’s meetings began with silent prayer, followed by welcoming the Presence of God, “then we become severely practical, and individually declare our incomes, earnings and doles.” “It isn’t enough to give away money,” Muriel explained, “we feel we have no right to possess it.”210

  The manifesto made clear just how far Muriel was willing to go to unmake the Victorian philanthropic gift economy. By her reckoning, the Brethren could not give away wealth that they never rightfully possessed. Members placed food, clothing, and excess earnings on the table for others to take freely. They short-circuited the mutual obligations binding the giver and recipient of a gift by refusing to offer or accept thanks. The Brethren repudiated all tests of financial worthiness and moral judgments about what constituted need. Need was left entirely to the conscience of each person. Nor did they care if rascals and scoundrels took advantage of them because this permitted the Brethren to show them God’s love.

  What made the voluntary poverty story so compelling was who the signatories were and what, at least in the public’s imagination, several of them had personally sacrificed on behalf of their noble Christian revolutionary principles. Newspaper coverage of the manifesto in Britain and the English-speaking world was extensive and suggests a well-orchestrated public relations campaign. The Evening Standard declared that the Brethren consisted of “an heiress or two, a curate, a writer, a teacher, a dog biscuit packer, an out of work carpenter, a dock labourer, a young widow on relief and a journeymen printer.”211 The headline of Salt Lake City’s Deseret News on July 1, 1921 screamed in large-font letters, “Millionaires And Paupers Join in Self Denial.” The story, widely reprinted, included a photograph of Rosa ironing her wash in her dreary Hoxton tenement along with a portrait of a smiling, distinctly modern Muriel.

  The reporter, Hayden Church, had expected to interview Muriel at Kingsley Hall in Bow, but she had been called to the Grange to care for Henry Lester. Church made the most of the contrast between Muriel’s apparently sincere embrace of austere poverty and the splendor of her life at the Grange, “a perfect gem of a country mansion, surrounded by velvety lawns, flower gardens a riot with color, a tennis court.” “I look rather a hypocrite, don’t I,” Muriel confessed, before explaining that her Bow neighbors, frequent guests at the Grange, had “more right to it [the Grange] than we have.”212 Daughterly duty, she insists, not a desire for ease compelled her to live part of each week at the Grange. Such stories gave the distinct but not strictly accurate impression that Muriel was herself among the Brethren’s “heiress or two.”

  Rosa Hobhouse underscored t
he profound difference between choosing voluntary poverty—a willing desired renunciation—and being poor: “it was impossible to claim that our sharing in their outward circumstances even approached the inner reality of our neighbors’ experience.” The poor, she argued, endured immoral and unjust “compulsory want”; “voluntary poverty” was itself a privilege. She knew only too well that she retained her cultural capital and resources of wealthy friends and family members.213 The manifesto signatories’ self-dispossession was part of their ongoing effort to free themselves from the burdens of private property and achieve complete transparency in relation to their neighbors.

  All four signatories, in quite different ways, never entirely reshaped their lives to conform fully to their vow of poverty. Doris had conspicuously not entered voluntary poverty and Muriel often relied on her for financial support after Rachel and Henry Lester’s death. While Stephen Hobhouse had renounced his claims to his family’s Somerset estate, he and Rosa had consented to the creation of a Hobhouse family trust upon which they drew to pay for costly treatments for Stephen’s debilitating physical and psychological ailments. (Both Muriel and Rosa made public these financial safety nets that insulated them from the full burden of their vows.)214 The most self-denying of the four was May Hughes. She also retained the most direct control over her inheritance, which included several substantial properties in the lovely Berkshire village of Longcot. She converted one building into a sanctuary for rough lads from Whitechapel and another into a home for fallen women. She agonized for almost a decade over the sale of a third property, fancifully called Bareppa, to the family of her uncle’s devoted groom. In the end, she finally agreed to the sale on the condition that the purchasers promised to be beacons of Christian revolutionary light and love in their small village. For May Hughes, voluntary poverty went hand in hand with her own brand of benevolent paternalism.215