by Seth Koven
Despite and because of her commitment to securing global justice for “the least among you,” Muriel increasingly found herself talking and writing to the greatest and most powerful in Britain and the empire. During the interwar years, she corresponded and met with viceroys, secretaries of state, prime ministers, famous humanitarians, and peace campaigners from Japan to South America. She preached before United States presidents and met privately with Eleanor Roosevelt. The new Kingsley Hall reflected the growing international stature of its charismatic leader while materializing the Christian revolutionary principles upon which it had been founded in 1915.
A.1. “Kingsley Hall, Bow,” Architect’s Journal, July 16, 1930, 79.
Designed by Charles Cowles Voysey in close consultation with Muriel, the Hall announced its founders’ reverence for simplicity, transparency, and God’s love.3 In light of Muriel’s exceptionally detailed rules of residents’ lives at Kingsley Hall (down to procedures for cleaning mahogany table surfaces), it should come as no surprise that she attended to every architectural feature of the new building. The flat rooftop boasted a garden donated by A. A. Milne along with austere monastic cells with tall doors and waist-high casement windows that offered minimal privacy and even less comfort for their occupants. Weather permitting, male and female residents were encouraged to sleep on cots on the sex-segregated rooftop loggias to gain the health benefits of fresh air and sunlight. Voysey had already tested out the design of rooftop sleeping at Children’s House, which he had built in 1923 to accommodate the Lesters’ child welfare activities in the same Bromley-by-Bow neighborhood.
The visibility of Kingsley Hall residents’ mundane daily activities was meant to reassure their East London neighbors that the Hall and its members had nothing to hide from them. A small “sanctuary” chamber, suited for “practicing the presence of God” through silent meditative prayer, greeted those who entered through the hall’s plain oak doors just to the right off the front vestibule. Most community members went straight into the spacious unadorned ground floor hall with its semicircular oak-paneled chancel punctuated by an echoing arched window in the center. (See fig. A.2.) Muriel made a point of noting that the honey-hued oak had been harvested from the forests of Britain’s erstwhile enemy, Austria. Here was yet another way to show the power of reconciliation to turn hatred into love and beauty. The circular vaults created the illusion of height despite the fact that the ceiling was flat and the ground floor hall bore the heavy burden of holding up the club rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, library, office, and sleeping spaces of the upper stories. Worship, Muriel explained, was the foundation upon which everything else depended. Unlike the first Kingsley Hall, no one donated physical labor to help build it. However, members and residents did keep it spotlessly clean. They prepared and served all the meals, washed the community’s linens and clothing through closely regulated, rotating housekeeping duties. While some residents shared the Lesters’ well-to-do socioeconomic backgrounds, others, like their unemployed neighbor Alf Butcher, were no strangers to the rigors of such manual labor.4
The dedication ceremony and its varied cast of participants reflected Muriel’s attempt to balance competing demands and ideals, to link the Hall’s past with its future. Determined to liberate herself from cash and commodities, Muriel necessarily courted and depended upon men and women of wealth to pay for and maintain the new building. This disturbed Rosa Hobhouse, who felt keenly that the institutional expansion of Kingsley Hall came at an ethically perilous cost.5 Perhaps this also explains why King Edward VII’s godson, Lord Knebworth, Edward Antony James Bulwer-Lytton, presided over the dramatic opening ceremony. A man wielding an impeccable Conservative aristocratic pedigree, he had absolutely no credentials to herald the latest phase of Muriel’s Christian revolutionary project.6 Bulwer-Lytton emphasized that Kingsley Hall supplied what skeptical Britons so badly needed: “big ideals.” Kingsley Hall and Muriel had done “magnificent” work putting their ideas into action, he observed. Tom McCarthy, a longtime Kingsley Hall Club member, carried the old Hall’s simple wooden cross as he led the people of Bow, eight hundred strong, into their new Hall. This cross, two sticks held together by string, had become the Hall’s symbol of protest against social injustice since Muriel carried it during her 1919 march from Bow to Westminster to demand an end to the allied blockade of Germany and Austria.
A.2. Circular Chancel with Gandhi bust, Kingsley Hall Bow. (Photograph by author.)
Muriel began her speech by recalling a handful of “absent friends” whose labors had made this great day possible. Nellie, dead for five and a half years, was among them. This was the last recorded time that Muriel spoke or wrote explicitly about Nellie Dowell.7 For the next forty years, Nellie simply disappeared from Muriel’s public and print utterances. Muriel could not have forgotten her. Nellie’s mother, Harriet Dowell, and her nephew Willie Dellar and his family continued to live at 58 Bruce Road for at least another decade and remained involved with Kingsley Hall.8 And she must have reread Nellie’s letters sometime in old age when she put them into a wrinkled manila envelope and wrote “Nell” on it. (See fig. A.3.)
In 1937, Muriel decided to publish her first autobiography, It Occurred to Me. By then, she had become a global celebrity with a knack for publicity. “Publicity is the only thing some people fear,” she explained and “telling the truth is perhaps the pacifist’s only weapon.”9 She had successfully negotiated for her friend Mohandas Gandhi to stay at Kingsley Hall in the autumn of 1931 during the Second Round Table Conference in London to discuss constitutional reform in India. Reporters the world over flocked to the Hall and interviewed its saintly founder, the woman who had rejected an inheritance to serve the poor. Doris, it seems, stuck ever more closely to her work for children and escaped their notice altogether. To the delight of journalists, Muriel helped to broker the famous meeting of the great-souled Mahatma with the world’s most beloved champion of the underdog, Charlie Chaplin.10 In 1934, she marched with Gandhi in earthquake-devastated Bihar. By 1937, Nazi Germany was mobilizing to exact what it saw as justifiable retribution for the victorious allies’ vindictive treatment of the Fatherland after World War I. Even absolutist pacifists and conscientious objectors during World War I began to countenance the use of military force to stop Hitler. Now, more than ever, Muriel believed that the world needed stories like hers about the lives of peacemakers.
A.3. Muriel collected and put Nellie’s letters into this envelope at some point in old age, probably in the last few years of her life. Envelope for Nellie Dowell Letters, Lester Papers ML/4, Kingsley Hall, Dagenham.
Muriel told that story on the pages of It Occurred to Me. It teems with persons and personalities of East Londoners. Muriel mentioned by name the starch factory worker Beattie and her mother Mrs. Pryke, her first hostess in Bromley-by-Bow. They had invited the naïve society girl to join them for a cup of hot cocoa before traveling home to Loughton after Muriel’s unforgettable night at the factory girls’ club on Albert Terrace in 1902. She recalled Edith, the lovely single mother whose early death meant tragedy for her three orphaned children. But no Nellie Dowell. There is one passage in Muriel’s entire published autobiographical oeuvre that unambiguously but anonymously alludes to Nellie as “our ex-factory girl helper.” It concerns Muriel’s sense of responsibility during World War I for running three kitchens: her parents’ in Loughton, the Dinner Club for factory girls at Kingsley Hall, and the one at No. 60 Bruce Road. At Bruce Road,
our ex-factory-girl helper could always be depended on to work miracles. We became so accustomed to her genius that, I’m afraid, we took it for granted. How mean and poor-spirited an attitude that is! And how one longs to rectify it when the benefactor is gone beyond reach!11
This admiring passage makes painful reading for me. It seems so paltry compared to Muriel’s heartfelt published appreciation in “The Salt of the Earth” (1923) and in one of her early undated typescript histories of Kingsley Hall that elaborated Nellie’s crucial part
in their public work at moments of crisis. Nellie’s letters do make clear that she enjoyed preparing good meals for her family and the Lester sisters despite wartime food shortages. No doubt, as Nellie’s disabilities restricted her physical mobility, she made herself useful by taking on more household duties at 58–60 Bruce Road. Muriel’s phrase “ex-factory-girl helper,” however, seems such an inadequate way to characterize Nellie and their tender partnership, so intimate yet so demanding. It erases Nellie’s contributions to the political and religious dimensions of their Christian revolutionary project and consigns her to a wholly class-based female domestic sphere. Why did Muriel decide not to name Nellie if the impulse behind her writing this compensatory homage was to properly acknowledge her “genius” in a way that Muriel had failed to do while she was alive?
I can’t definitively answer these questions, though I will return to them. They compel me to reconsider the document that figured so crucially at the outset of my research, Nellie’s death certificate. (See fig. A.4.) It was the first document that I found that gave me the basic “facts” about her: her proper name, Eleanor, along with her age and date of death. This information led me to so many other archival discoveries about Nellie. As Nellie was dying, her younger sister Rose Dowell Endersbee was with her. Muriel’s terse description of Nellie’s death in “The Salt of the Earth” makes clear that she too sat up with Nellie and comforted her in her mortal pain. Rose must have filled in the bureaucratic forms for Nellie’s death certificate as the official “informant.” The sisters had remained close although Rose, like so many others East Londoners, had been upwardly and eastwardly mobile. She had long since left Bromley-by-Bow. In 1923, she lived in the eastern suburb of Barking with her children and her husband, Harry, who worked in the insurance industry. What startled and disturbed me was Nellie’s listed occupation: “spinster domestic housekeeper.” The designation “spinster” had a very long life in official record keeping, many decades after the term itself had fallen into disfavor. Spinster seemed to me discordant with the languages and categories by which Muriel and Nellie had composed their independent adventurous lives, but at least it was not hard to explain. But “housekeeper?” In light of Muriel’s and Kingsley Hall’s radical critique of domestic service as incompatible with Christian revolutionary democracy, this struck me as a cruel irony, an injustice.
A.4. Copy of Nellie Dowell’s death certificate. (Copy in author’s possession.)
How and why had this happened? Was this Rose’s misperception—or perception—of her sister? A local registrar may have asked Rose what Nellie did and interpreted Rose’s words in this conventional way. Or was it just possible that this was how Nellie saw herself? Perhaps Nellie, a woman so committed to and good at hard work, needed and liked this perfectly honorable category, “domestic housekeeper,” to justify why Muriel still “kept” her. If Nellie and Muriel’s friendship had instantiated their Christian revolution, Nellie had also—always—asserted her right to place limits upon it. It was Nellie who reminded Muriel that she loved her partly because Muriel was “different.” “You of course are different” she had written matter-of-factly to Muriel. It was Nellie who always sought to protect Muriel from the dirty dangers of slum life. It was Nellie—and all the poor men and women who joined forces with the Lester sisters—who paradoxically may have had just as much to lose as to gain in imagining a radically egalitarian world, without distinctions of class and caste and free from private property. Perhaps it was asking too much of those who had next to nothing to give up their dreams of having something.
A year before Nellie’s death, Muriel held political office for the first and only time as a socialist feminist member of the Poplar Borough Council from 1922 to 1926. Her new responsibilities meant that she had less time for Kingsley Hall, Nellie and their neighbors on Bruce Road. Poplar Borough council, however, did provide an ideal platform from which to extend woman-centered values of love and care into the arena of public policy and local politics. As chair of Poplar’s Maternity and Child Welfare Committee, she combined Christian revolutionary principles with maternalist politics.12 In August 1923 the Ministry of Health summoned her to Whitehall for failing to follow its orders to cut spending for child welfare services in Poplar. In uncompromising terms, Muriel chastised the officials she met for their outrageous request, which could only harm Poplar’s children. To reduce the children’s allotment of milk by even one half pint contradicted Christian conscience and the laws of health; she would have none of it. “We women enjoyed the struggle,” she gleefully recalled.13 Her tactics in Poplar politics were a continuation of Victorian domestic ideology, with its injunction for proper ladies to bring moral values out of their homes into their local communities. These were also the years during which Muriel earnestly strove to diminish the realm of private life and her own attachment to things and private property. She intentionally structured “home” life at Kingsley Hall to unmake Victorian domesticity and critique its class and gender bases. In place of privacy, she strove to live transparently and communally. In place of private property, she embraced voluntary poverty. In place of separate spheres, she expected men and women to share equally in Kingsley Hall’s domestic routines and duties. Evacuating private life altogether was the logical, albeit unsustainable, end point of Muriel’s effort to reimagine domesticity and invent a new kind of “public house.”
Muriel’s discontent with her own Christian revolutionary critique of private life simmered for several years before she finally expressed her feelings in words. “Living in Kingsley Hall,” she admitted, “was like living in public. We were never free from inspection and interruption.”14 Even the space within the Hall that was supposed to be private—what Muriel tellingly called “the home of the household”—was overrun with other people. Kingsley Hall was permanently in a state of “open house.” “Neighbours known and unknown, friends new and old, strangers from abroad and from the next street, know that our door is never shut and they take full advantage of the fact.”15 Sylvia Parrott Bishopp, who lived across the street from the Lesters on Bruce Road in the 1920s and ’30s, fondly remembered that she and others came and went as they pleased “into the household part of the hall.” Yet the hall’s poor neighbors did not emulate its erasure of private life and property. Muriel, worn out by the rigors of living transparently at Kingsley Hall for so many years, noticed that the laboring poor of Bow increasingly invited the residents of Kingsley Hall to have tea in their private homes, in their “tiny gay kitchens,” on their “best China” (my emphasis). “There was a good deal to say,” she concluded, for “ ‘living private,’ though we were supremely proud of Kingsley Hall.”16
Muriel’s observation repays careful analysis, both for what it suggests about the utopian aims of Christian revolution at Kingsley Hall as well as the needs and aspirations of some working-class men and women in post–World War I Britain. Economic depression hit East Londoners particularly hard by the spring of 1921. At the same time, some were able to take advantage of interwar Britain’s consumer revolution that enabled them to purchase more household goods and labor saving devices. Expansion in London County Council housing in the 1920s also brought domestic amenities—private kitchens, toilets, and bathrooms—within reach of more working-class households. Members of Kingsley Hall’s household tried to liberate themselves from private homes and “best” China. These were precisely the things that most people in Bow wanted.
Moreover, the local men and women who joined the “people’s house” sometimes did so as a means of separating themselves from their slum neighbors’ lives, not immersing themselves in their sordid realities. Kingsley Hall and Children’s House were beacons of peace, beauty, and refinement in a part of London that “stank to high heaven” of boiling bones from the nearby Cook’s soap factory, Nellie’s last factory employers. As Grace Neary (born in 1918) recalled, she always washed her hands and said a little prayer upon entering Kingsley Hall—a sacramental gesture mingling personal hygiene and s
pirituality, which separated the unclean, dirty life outside Kingsley Hall from the purer, higher one within its walls.17
Opening the doors of Kingsley Hall to all never meant that everyone chose to walk through them. The testimonies of working people who loved the Hall illustrate how their desires sometimes did not harmonize with the inclusive ideals of the Hall’s founders. They needed and wanted the Hall to be an oasis in Bow even as they wove their engagement with it into their daily lives. Sylvia Parrott and her sister literally grew up at Kingsley Hall and Children’s House. Their mother kept them apart from other children in Bromley-by-Bow and sent them to the People’s House to “live more like Kingsley Hall precepts,” including vegetarianism. For poor people like Nellie Dowell and the Parrotts, Kingsley Hall offered an alternative to some of the prevailing cultural norms of working-class life in Bow. With a tinge of embarrassment and regret, Parrott admitted that “we were brought up to be quite snobs…. I think my mother was probably wrong to keep us so, so far apart, but the biggest threat she could ever give to us was ‘You don’t want to be like them. You don’t want to work behind the counter in Woolworth’s, do you?’ ”
