The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  For Sylvia’s mother, trapped by her own life circumstances, Kingsley Hall promised an escape route out of Bow and the working class altogether (“being like them”), not a means to transform their neighborhood into a heaven on earth for all to enjoy and share. “It was a cultured life [at Kingsley Hall],” Sylvia recalled. “It was a life of the spirit you might say, or of the mind whereas … Bromley-by-Bow was a pretty grotty place it was…. it was very slummy and sleazy and men, many of the men were very feckless and drank all their money and so forth, you know just what you think of as a slum dwelling, but Kingsley Hall was not like that.” Sylvia was only too aware that she, like her mother before her, reproduced high-Victorian bourgeois stereotypes about the depravity and degradation of “slum” life that Kingsley Hall’s founders so vigorously denounced. Sylvia and her sister did in fact leave Bow and the working class. With the guidance and inspiration of their parents, along with Kingsley Hall’s household and teachers, they earned places at an ancient endowed grammar school in Bow and eventually at university. For Sylvia, Kingsley Hall “wasn’t a Bow life at all.”18

  Idealistic working-class families like the Parrotts did not necessarily accept Muriel’s aspiration to create an inclusive community without borders free from social hierarchies. Muriel appealed to her neighbors’ dreams for a better life and a more just world, but for at least some, their participation in the Hall betokened their apartness from and superiority to the very community they helped to create. Kingsley Hall offered a path of upward social mobility into bourgeois domesticity, not the erasure of class difference. Sylvia Parrott and many others of her generation were inspired by the Lesters’ and Kingsley Hall’s ideals. Nonetheless, they chose not to set up the Kingdom of Heaven “here and now”—the original dream of members of the Bruce Road Adult School in 1914. For the Parrotts and so many working-class Britons, staying where they were in the slums was too high a price to pay—even for Heaven.

  Nor was there anything unusual about their desire to leave Bow and Poplar. For generations, it was what ambitious East Londoners like Henry Lester himself had done. A 1924 pamphlet, Poplarism: The Truth about the Poplar Scale of Relief and the Action of the Ministry of Health, succinctly declared, “Nobody stays in Poplar by choice.”19 Mrs. Parrott’s disparaging admonition about Woolworth counter girls recalls Nellie’s longing for a lady’s clean white hands. Both breathed new life into Victorian class and gender discourses drilled into them by their childhoods of material deprivation even as the Lesters helped them forge new social and political subjectivities.20 Nellie’s and Mrs. Parrott’s stories underscore how resistance and accommodation to bourgeois capitalist and consumer modernity overlapped and coexisted as each shaped the other.

  Muriel had her own reasons for questioning the viability of the Christian revolutionary project that she and Nellie had done so much to nurture. She grasped the irony of her longing for the material comforts and privacy of “home” within the “public household” she had labored so hard to create. From the 1930s onwards, she chose not to live permanently in the Hall or any of its satellites. When she was in Britain, she sought the privacy of either her sister’s modest cottage on Baldwin’s Hill abutting Epping Forest or a small flat a few blocks from Kingsley Hall. Muriel, like the Parrotts, did not stay in Bow to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to it. She increasingly spent most of her time far from East London. She made the world her home and used the tools of reconciliation and Christian revolution to battle nonviolently against colonial oppression and the exploitation of women and workers.21 In coming face-to-face with the psychic and affective impossibility of giving up entirely the “private” and “private life,” Muriel necessarily gestured toward the limits of revolutionary Christianity and her own pursuit of moral “perfectionism.”22

  Kingsley Hall promised salvation by small steps. Its rules sought to instruct residents in how to live with complete honesty and integrity with one another and in accordance with a prosaic ethics of daily life that people clean up the “sticky sediment” they left behind in encounters with one another and the world. But everyday life and its objects—“best china” and “gay kitchens”—proved to be one rock upon which its utopian project foundered. So too did Muriel’s insistence that nurturing the psychic and material well-being of the morally self-sufficient individual—the essential actor in the inherited liberalism she ostensibly rejected—ought not be sacrificed for the collective good. Perhaps Muriel’s recognition that the principled perfection she sought at Kingsley Hall could not—and should not—be achieved must be counted among the most redemptive and powerful lessons that she had learned.23

  Unlike Muriel, Nellie had to stay in Bromley-by-Bow. Poverty and later ill health combined to keep her close to Bruce Road and its microworld of front steps, side streets, and acrid odors. When she did escape Bow to be with Muriel, she experienced acutely the psychological strains and physical disorientation of travelling across borders. On July 1, 1912, she thanked Muriel for taking her on holiday. “When I got to Paddington [rail station], I wished I was going back instead of going home, it seemed so close & stuffy everywhere I went.” Her trip made her look “much better,” but it had also deeply unsettled her. “I am afraid going away like that makes me feel dissatisfied at home….” This was—and was not—what Muriel had hoped to achieve. Muriel intended to stir up discontent with unjust social and economic relations as a way to prod her neighbors to make and demand better lives for themselves. Dissatisfaction with home life was never part of Muriel’s plan. Bow’s “close & stuffy” atmosphere proved an even more intractable problem. It ensured a steady migration, usually farther east, of many Bow residents to less crowded, more salubrious suburbs.

  Doris, like Nellie, kept Bromley-by-Bow, Kingsley Hall, and Children’s House at the center of her everyday life. Unlike Nellie, this was entirely her choice. After her return to India and Gandhi in 1933–34, Muriel could no longer sustain the fiction that she was still head of Kingsley Hall. She sent Doris a short cable announcing her resignation, followed by a long letter that was by turns exuberant, plaintive, apologetic, disarmingly manipulative, and sincerely self-effacing. It captured Muriel at a painfully vulnerable moment, in which she seemed unable to claim any part in Kingsley Hall’s success. “Please tell Sonie [a fellow worker at Kingsley Hall] she is right. I have been very poor in my behaviour at K.H. with awful muddles I have left for her and you! I knew I was no organizer and I’ve created havoc…. But I daresay we’ve done some good too…. But of course we have—you have—anyhow. (Even Gandhi’s Ashrams are rotten shows in lots of ways. lots and lots of ways.)” Having diminished her own accomplishments, she then immediately reasserted her position as Doris’s wiser older sister and advised her “precious child” to work with the trustees to “get hold of a man to take on and run the place.”24

  Doris’s reply has not survived. In her unpublished autobiography, she reflected on this unwelcome, but not unexpected, sequence of events. “As there was no possible successor in the offing, and as everybody realized that whoever took over after her would have an unenviably thankless job, the Trustees asked me to hold the fort temporarily until a successor could be found. It was obviously impossible for me to refuse….”25 To her American friends, Alan and Elizabeth Hunter, Muriel rationalized the burden she had thrust upon Doris and her resignation. “I’ve written her [Doris] and the other trustees,” she explained, “that they must not count on me, and had better look round for a man, a minister, who would come in and take on the flock I have neglected. And the more I thought of it, the more I saw how urgent was Bow’s need. I am always dashing away and leaving them bereft. And the work suffers, tho’ of course they are lovely in letting me go.”

  No one had let Muriel go. She had. Her insistence that a male minister replace her could not have bolstered Doris’s confidence. Nor did Muriel explain why she believed that only a man ought to succeed her. There were plenty of women in interwar Britain, well trained in schools of social work, lay preaching
, and local politics, to take on such a leadership role. Perhaps Muriel wanted to counterbalance the all-female staff of Children’s House. She may also have believed that a male head would find it easier to recruit male residents to the Hall.

  Muriel made no effort to contain her joy at releasing herself from the burden of Kingsley Hall and constant negotiations with Doris. “It’s like a new relationship thinking of you, with no Bow bones of contention. I am so thrilled.” Then, as a guilty afterthought, she asked Doris, “D’you mind? You could come out to me? Could you, darling? Will it stop you going to Berlin. I hope not.”26 In light of the tremendous increase in work and responsibility Muriel had just heaped on Doris, Muriel must have known that Doris could neither “come out” to India to see her nor go to Berlin to attend her conference on teaching methods. Muriel came close to acknowledging Doris’s role in subsidizing her newfound freedom. “So I’ve been feeling a bit oppressed about my beloved Bow,” she told the Hunters, “knowing God would look after them but feeling every now and then that I was putting too heavy a load on Doris.” She concluded her letter with the postscript urging the Hunters to “write to Doris as naturally as you would to me—we are as alike as 2 peas.”27

  But in so many respects Doris and Muriel were not “as alike as 2 peas.” Their pronounced differences in thought, temper, and interests generated the creative tensions that nourished and strained their relationship. In the weeks after Doris assumed leadership of Kingsley Hall, Muriel self-servingly wrote to “Dorrie” that she “must be a saint now.” “Your letters have the veritable unconscious glow. Shall I ever be able to live up to you?”28 No discernible saintly glow illuminated Doris description of the drastic changes in her life following Muriel’s resignation. The next twelve months, she wrote in her unpublished autobiography, were “the most devastatingly difficult and thankless unproductive of my life.” Not for the first time, Doris found herself cleaning up Muriel’s messes. In the midst of describing her “good experiences” at Kingsley Hall—the all-night-long candle lit “peace” vigils, meetings with people interested in the idea of “community,” conferences of graded schoolteachers—Doris cut short her story. “However, the doings of Kingsley Hall are mainly chronicled elsewhere*, so of them I will write no more.” The asterisk took her readers to the bottom of the page: “*It Occurred to Me by Muriel Lester.” This is where her extant manuscript autobiography abruptly ends—as if Muriel’s published autobiography made it unnecessary for her to write anything more about her story and theirs.29

  The two sisters’ archives have had afterlives as complex as their own relationship. My work in their rich, extensive, and deep collection of papers happily coincided with a period of intense community interest in them. The Heritage Lottery Fund awarded a grant to preserve and conserve the archive and “make [Muriel Lester’s] legacy more widely known.”30 Preserving and reorganizing an archive necessarily changes it. Few things seemed more important to me than coming across the well-worn envelope in which Muriel had placed Nellie Dowell’s letters. It told me something significant about the high value of Nellie’s letters to Muriel. In the process of being re-archived several times since I began this project, this envelope appears to have been lost or destroyed. It is nowhere to be found at Bishopsgate Institute, the gateway between the City and East London, where the entire collection of Kingsley Hall and Lester papers moved in the spring of 2013. The envelope had already gone missing the last time I looked for it at Kingsley Hall’s branch in Dagenham. The letters are now separated from Muriel’s container for them, divorced from one element that signaled their significance and endowed them with meaning for me. I don’t fault the able and dedicated team of workers on this preservation project. Their labors have ensured that many others can and will read Nellie’s letters to Muriel and so much else about Kingsley Hall and Christian revolution in early-twentieth-century Britain. They created a brilliant new archive of oral history interviews of friends, workers and neighbors of Kingsley Hall from the 1920s onwards whose stories powerfully enriched and challenged my thinking. But archives do change just as what we see and find in them changes as we ask new questions of them and of ourselves.

  There is one more afterlife to consider: the landscape of memory in Bromley-by-Bow. The Blitz, slum clearance, and urban planning transformed the area and most of East London during Muriel’s lifetime. German bombs destroyed the south side of Bruce Road while sparing the entire north side, including Kingsley Rooms, the Lesters’ and the Dowells’ houses at 58–60. Five-story concrete-frame, brick-veneered council flats with external hallways now loom over most of Bruce Road, whose west end culminates in a tall concrete tower block. On the southeast end of Bruce Road near the Bruce Road United Reformed Church is a much less imposing set of three-story yellow brick flats. The small sign on these flats reads “Lester Court,” inconspicuously linking the sisters with the place and community that they had served so ardently.

  The same cannot be said of the actual buildings and institutions that they themselves had founded: Children’s House and Kingsley Hall. Children’s House remains a center of early childhood education but it has long since been absorbed into London’s public school system. A sturdy brick wall topped by a high chain-link fence protects and separates the school, its grounds, and its pupils, from its surroundings. The London County Council blue plaque on its façade commemorates the one day H. G. Wells stopped by to open the building. It says nothing about Doris’s lifelong visionary leadership of it. In 1954, the London County Council agreed to acknowledge Kingsley Hall’s historical significance with its own blue plaque. (In 1973, the structure received recognition as a Grade II-listed building.) The plaque harkened back to the moment when the world’s gaze had turned to Bromley-by-Bow and its most famous visitor had walked its streets in the half darkness of the pre–dawn hour. The plaque reads quite simply: “Mahatma Gandhi, 1869–1948 stayed here in 1931.” (See fig. A.5.) No paperwork survives documenting who submitted the necessary nomination forms. My strong hunch is that Muriel engineered the plaque’s erection and wording.31

  Gandhi’s stay at Kingsley Hall in 1931 was a coup for Muriel. It secured for her and the Hall an enduring afterlife in the footnotes of the Mahatma’s world-historical struggle. It also made her an accessory to her own disappearance from the commemorative landscape of Bromley-by-Bow. A newspaper called Kingsley Hall’s plaque “a memorial to the hall’s past.”32 It would be more apt to say that the plaque subsumed and erased Muriel, Doris, Nellie, and all the rest of Kingsley Hall’s history into an episode that satisfied the press’s craving for dramatic headlines and Muriel’s desire to support Gandhi while publicizing Kingsley Hall. In a letter to the left-wing publisher of affordable good books as engines of democracy, Victor Gollancz, Muriel offered her own assessment of the blue plaque’s significance. The work at Kingsley Hall “seems nothing much at present [June 1963],” she confessed without bitterness, “but the LCC plaque reminds passers-by that Gandhiji spent 10 weeks here during the Round Table Conference. His fellow Indians in Delhi are eager for us to keep his room on the roof as an open Memorial to his stay.” Would Gollancz consent, she wondered, to replace the tree in front of the Hall, planted by Gandhi in 1931, and long since destroyed by Hitler’s bombs?33

  Blue plaques leave little room for nuance in narrating the afterlives of the people and events they memorialize. Muriel’s interpretation of Kingsley Hall’s plaque shows her at peace with retirement while still enacting Christian revolutionary ideals. The tree-planting ceremony that November had all the hallmarks of one of Muriel’s carefully choreographed symbol-laden performances. Invited speakers, she insisted, should not expect to be “segregated” from the people of Bow. She sought out representatives of the world’s faiths—Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews—to join together in a gesture affirming global brotherhood and sisterhood.

  A.5. Muriel succeeded in so closely identifying Gandhi with Kingsley Hall that she participated in her own and Doris’s erasure from the land
scape of public memory in Bromley-by-Bow. (Top) “Mr. Gandhi at Kingsley Hall, Becontree,” Grays and Tilbury Gazette, November 28, 1931, (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.) (Bottom) Photograph of blue plaque, Kingsley Hall Bow. (Photograph by author.)

  The idea to invite Gollancz had not been Muriel’s, but Alice Whipps’ (1911–93). Alice, who kept her hair short clipped and preferred to go by the masculine nickname Al, had first mentioned Gollancz to Muriel. Like Nellie, Al was a poor girl from Bromley-by-Bow who had turned up at Kingsley Hall’s Youth Club. In 1933, Al moved into Kingsley Hall as a resident.34 (See fig. A.6.) At some point, Muriel drafted a short pen portrait of Al entitled “Our Al”—nothing as detailed and extensive as “From Birth to Death,” but full of warm appreciation for Al’s many gifts.35 Even during Nellie’s lifetime, there had always been other Cockney women and girls like Al who laid claim to Muriel’s friendship. Try as she did, Nellie never succeeded in monopolizing Muriel’s affections. Muriel was constantly creating and renewing what she called her “synthetic family” of beloved unmarried female friends, who like Nellie and Al, she integrated into her vast network of kin. Al, Doris, and Muriel’s ménage in the cottage on Baldwin’s Hill was the last of many such households that Muriel had formed since her first at 58–60 Bruce Road in Bromley-by-Bow.

  Muriel and Doris had changed Al’s life altogether. They had opened up for her new vistas of possibility. Al and so many working-class children of her generation had opportunities that Nellie never did. After a successful career as a trained nurse while tending to her own parents, the unmarried Al had decided to devote herself to Doris and Muriel as they faced the infirmities of old age. So great was her love for them that she refused to take days off. Nor would she accept anything like fair wages for her labors. She cleaned and cooked for Muriel and Doris and tended to their bodies. To call Al their “spinster domestic housekeeper” would not be altogether wrong. Except that it is not quite right. She was also their intellectual and social partner, a collaborator and comrade whose ideas mattered. Muriel must have told Gollancz that Al deserved all the credit for suggesting his name. Gollancz wrote Al to thank her. Her reply captures the mingling of thinking and feeling, of loving and caring that had also profoundly marked Muriel’s partnership with Nellie. “Your name,” Al told Gollancz, “and all you stand for and your books, have always given me great inspiration and pleasure.” “It is indeed a great priviledge [sic],” she continued, “to help Muriel Lester in the care of her sister Doris. Both these remarkable women did much for us Bow folk.”36