The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  63. In the 1920s, Muriel worked closely with both of them as members of the Poplar Borough Council. Scurr even placed the brick of Labour at the foundation stone ceremony of Kingsley Hall’s Children House in 1921.

  64. See Patricia Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (New Haven, 1987), chap. 10.

  65. For a report on this meeting, see “Mr. Asquith Receives a Delegation,” Life and Labour: A Monthly Magazine 4 (1914): 255. For a detailed account, see E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London, 1931), 572–77.

  66. Gilbert Bartholomew, the managing director of giant matchmaker Bryant and May, led the Conservative opposition. This opposition, called the Municipal Alliance, had already campaigned for several years against Lansbury’s costly efforts to “humanize” poor relief. It remained eager to defeat him in 1912. See George Lansbury, My Life (London, 1928), 168.

  67. Sylvia Pankhurst attributed the ferocity and imprudence of Lansbury’s official stance to her sister Christabel’s influence over him. See E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London, 1931), 421.

  68. The literature on relations between Liberals and Labour in the early twentieth century is vast, but reliable starting points include Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978); see also Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London 1885–1914 (London, 1967); and Susan Pennybacker, A Vision for London 1889–1914: Labour, Everday Life and the LCC Experiment (London, 1995).

  69. On these tensions between local feminist and Labour organizers during Lansbury’s by-election in Bow, see John Shepherd, George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour (Oxford, 2002), chap. 7; see also George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, (New York, 1935), 187–88.

  70. See “Notes of the Week,” The New Age, A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature, and Art (December 5, 1912): 97.

  71. Daily Telegraph, November 22, 1912, as quoted in John Shepherd, George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour (Oxford, 2002), 124. For an extensive analysis of Lansbury’s relationship to feminism, see Jonathan Schneer, George Lansbury (Manchester, 1990), chap. 2.

  72. See Votes for Women, February 7, 1913, 273 as quoted by Brian Harrison, “Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, on-line, accessed June 20, 2013. This was a position that an earlier breakaway group from the WSPU had already adopted.

  73. Such a break seemed inconceivable to the Pethick-Lawrences given their quasiparental role with Christabel. For a detailed account of the split between the Pethick-Lawrences and the Pankhursts, see June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London, 2002), chap. 14. Their disagreement over the character of militancy was apparent, Purvis shows, from their first meeting in July upon their release from jail.

  74. See Punch, October 30, 1912, 349.

  75. It Occurred to Me offers only vague generalities about how Muriel and members of her Women’s Meeting on Bruce Road—to which Nellie was so devoted—came to see the necessity of women’s suffrage as they confronted “women’s” issues around food, housing, and education. 30.

  76. On their marriage, see Brian Harrison, “The politics of a marriage: Emmeline and Fred Pethick-Lawrence,”’ in Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars (Oxford, 1987), 242–72.

  77. See Israel Zangwill, “The Militant Suffragists,” in The War for the World (Baltimore, 1915, 1921), 305. Jacqueline DeVries’s work has called particular attention to the links between feminism, suffrage, and religion. See “Transforming the Pulpit: Preaching and Prophesying in the British Women’s Suffrage Movement,” in Beverly Kienzle and Pamela Walker, eds., Women Preachers and Prophets in Christian Traditions (Berkeley, 1998); and “ ‘Challenging Traditions’: Denominational Feminism in Britain, 1900–1920” in Billie Melman, ed., Borderlines: Gender Identities in Peace and War, (London, 1998).

  78. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, “What the Vote Means to Those Who are Fighting the Battles,” Votes for Women (January 1908): 49 as quoted in Kabi Hartman, “ ‘What Made me a Suffragette’: The New Woman and the New (?) Conversion Narrative,” Women’s History Review 12:1 (2003): 35.

  79. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, “Vote for Women,” The Speaker (May 5, 1906): 119. See Madeline Doty, Behind the Battle Line, Around the World in 1918 (New York, 1918), 187.

  80. The Women’s Freedom League broke with the Pankhursts over their disdain for democratic decision making in 1907. They used techniques such as tax resistance, championed by Nonconformists only a few years earlier. See Claire Eustance, “Meanings of Militancy: The Ideas and Practice of Political Resistance in the Women’s Freedom League, 1907–14,” in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis, eds., The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester, 1998), chap. 3. On the Women’s Freedom League’s ideas about gender and power, see Carol McPhee and Ann Fitzgerald, eds., The Non-Violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington-Greig (London, 1987).

  81. See Krista Cowman, “ ‘A Party Between Revolution and Peaceful Persuasion’: A Fresh Look at the United Suffragists,” in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis, eds., The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester, 1998), chap. 5.

  82. Laura Mayhall usefully analyzes these tensions as competing ethical strategies and shows the rich diversity of perspectives within the militant suffrage movement. On resistance versus service paradigms and programs during World War I, see Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (Oxford, 2003), chaps. 6–7.

  83. Christabel Pankhurst linked pacifism, pro-Germanism, and the radical shop stewards movement in 1917. See Christabel Pankhurst, “Shop Stewards,” Britannia (December 7, 1917) as quoted in Angela K. Smith, Suffrage Discourse in Britain during the First World War (Aldershot, 2005), 30. On feminists’ “misgivings” and confusion about the war in the context of transatlantic alliances, see Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2007), chap. 8.

  84. The London Society, almost from the moment Britain entered the war, redefined itself as a women’s service organization in support of the war effort. It served as a clearinghouse to match women’s interests and skills with the needs of the war economy. Its provision of day nurseries and canteens for women workers probably first attracted Muriel’s attention. See Leaflet, “Women’s Service,” S and P, 1.2/27, Women at Work Collection, Imperial War Museum; accessed via Women, War and Society, 1914–1918, Gage Cengage. For a summary of NUWSS war work, see Mrs. Henry Fawcett, War Work of the National Union (Birmingham, 1916). On the NUWSS’s Women’s Patriotic Service Fund, see “A Practical Scheme to Help Professional Women,” Westminster Gazette, January 9, 1915.

  85. On the impact of feminist politics on gender and social policy in World War I Britain, see Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, 1993), chap. 2.

  86. This paragraph relies on Julia Bush’s vivid account of the impact of World War I on the daily lives and political attitudes of East Londoners. See Julia Bush, Behind the Lines: East London Labour 1914–1919 (London, 1984), chap. 2.

  87. See The Suffrage Annual and Women’s Who’s Who (London, 1913.

  88. See Barbara Caine, From Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford, 2005), chap. 11. In 1911, Pippa Strachey asked Mrs. Fawcett to “loan” her two or three “pit brow girls’” for a suffrage “At Home.” Presumably, Strachey had invited them as curiosities for lady guests to enjoy, not as sisters in the struggle for political and social justice for women. See Jo Vellacott’s excellent and detailed account of this internal wrangling in Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain During the First World War (Basingstoke, 2007), 13.

  89. See Jo Vellacott, From Liberal to Labour with Women’s Suffr
age: The Story of Catherine Marshall (Montreal, 1993) on Marshall’s political and intellectual development up to World War I. Marshall, like Muriel, was a graduate of St. Leonard’s and later served as chair of Kingsley Hall’s Trustees.

  90. On the backdrop to and proceedings of the conference, see Lela Costin, “Feminism, Pacifism, Internationalism and the 1915 International Congress of Women,” Women’s Studies International Forum 5 (1982): 301–15.

  91. Jo Vellacott, From Liberal to Labour with Women’s Suffrage, 92, 86.

  92. Had she known that the Society was unwilling to assume responsibility for the accounts, she informed Strachey, she would have sought out the services of Sir William Plender, one of Edwardian Britain’s most respected accounting wizards and husband of Nellie’s longtime friend, Lady Plender. See Muriel Lester to Miss Strachey, January 9, 1915, Kingsley Hall, East End Working Women’s Factory Club, 2LSW/E/06/01, London Society for Women’s Suffrage Wartime Correspondence, Women’s Library (now transferred to BLPES), hereafter referred to as Kingsley Hall Factory Women’s Club, Women’s Library. The entire correspondence is in a single folder.

  93. Unsigned letter to Muriel Lester, January 7, 1915, Kingsley Hall Factory Women’s Club, Women’s Library.

  94. Muriel Lester to Miss Strachey, December 31, 1914, Kingsley Hall Factory Women’s Club, Women’s Library.

  95. This is presumably the draft of Winifred Foulkes’s letter to Muriel Lester, no date (early January 1915), Kingsley Hall Factory Women’s Club, Women’s Library.

  96. Muriel Lester to Miss Strachey, January 24, 1915, Kingsley Hall Factory Women’s Club, Women’s Library.

  97. A glowing account of the cost-price restaurant and club appeared in the August 21, 1915 number of the East London Observer. It made no mention of the Lester sisters and noted that the club was run under the auspices of the London Society at Kingsley Hall. May Hughes donated the bulk of the funds to run it.

  98. Kingsley Hall, Report for Second Year (London, 1916).

  99. See Woman’s Dreadnought, August 12, 1916, 530. Muriel sponsored an essay prize through the pages of Woman’s Dreadnought on the topic, “Who Suffers Most by the War?” The winner, E. L. Osmund, argued that mothers suffer the most. See Woman’s Dreadnought, September 2, 1916, 539 and October 28, 1916. By the early 1930s, a Canadian visitor felt that Muriel had abandoned democratic principles to protect her religious commitments from “Communists.” See Mildred Osterhout, “In Which the Heroine Arrives in Bow,” University of British Columbia Graduate Chronicle (May 1932): 19–21.

  100. Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (London, 2004), 116.

  101. See Muriel Lester, manuscript autobiographical notes about Kingsley Hall’s founding, Lester 2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  102. The indispensable guide to the history of pacifism and its entwining with religion remains Martin Ceadel’s Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford, 1980). See also Ceadel’s Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford, 1987) and Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford, 2000).

  103. Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me, 52.

  104. Muriel Lester, Kill or Cure (Nashville, 1937), 34.

  105. John Kenworthy and the Brotherhood Church in Croydon (discussed in chapter 3) founded the Brotherhood Publishing Company to publish work that aimed to “fully and directly apply the principles of The Sermon on the Mount to individual and social life.” See Leo Tolstoy, The Four Gospels Harmonised and Translated (London, 1896), 377.

  106. In his autobiography, Ruskin claimed that he knew by heart the Sermon on the Mount. Praeterita, vol. 1 (New York, 1894), 222. See John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3, pt. 4, pars. 33–34 in E. T. Cook and Wedderburn, eds., Collected Works of John Ruskin, vol. 5 (London, 1903–12), 378–79.

  107. G. K. Chesterton, Twelves Types (London, 1902), 152; Muriel Lester, Kill or Cure, 43.

  108. See Charles Gore, The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Exposition (London, 1896; reprinted in 1904), 26. Gore had sketched some of his ideas in “The Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount,” Economic Review 2 (April 1892): 145–60.

  109. Charles William Stubbs, Christ and Economics in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount (London, 1894), 71.

  110. Ibid., p. 64.

  111. See Minutes, October 11–12, 1915, Education Subcommittee, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Coll. Misc. 456, FOR 5/4, Fellowship of Reconciliation (England), Papers, BLPES; see also Council Minutes, October 11–12, 1915, Coll. Misc 456, FOR 1/2, hereafter cited as FOR Papers, BLPES.

  112. See Minutes of General Committee, November 12 and 13, 1917, Coll Misc. 456, FOR 1/2, FOR Papers, BLPES. From 1920 to 1924, Muriel chaired the London Fellowship of Reconciliation. See April 15, 1924, Minutes of General Committee, The London Union of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, “Report of Annual Meeting.” In April 1917, Kingsley Hall hosted the FoR’s study school. See Minutes of General Committee, April 16–17, 1917, CollMisc. 456, FOR 1/2, FOR Papers, BLPES.

  113. For meeting held at Kingsley Hall, see October 16, 1922, Minutes of General Committee, London Union, Coll. Misc.456, FOR 1/2, FOR Papers, BLPES.

  114. Vera Brittain, The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers (London, 1964)

  115. By 1917, it had approximately 7,000 members nationwide.

  116. Jill Wallis recounts this story in Valiant for Peace: A History of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1914–1989 (London, 1991), 3–4. See Herbert George Wood, Henry T. Hodgkin, A Memoir (London, 1937), 145–46; see also Vera Brittain, The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers (London, 1964), 30. From its first meetings, the FoR cemented alliances with Indian and Chinese students in London. Hodgkin spent many years in China under the Friends Foreign Mission Association, so this was a logical connection for the group. See Record of Second Committee Meeting, January 21, 1915, Coll. Misc.456, FOR 1/1, FOR Papers, BLPES.

  117. This is taken from printed pamphlet glued into the opening pages of the first FOR Minute Book. Coll. Misc.456, FOR/1/1, BLPES.

  118. First Annual Report of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (London, 1916), 4.

  119. For concise and excellent critical summaries of these arguments, see Wolfgang Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism (New York, 1980).

  120. Henry T. Hodgkin, The Christian Revolution (Shanghai, 1922), 23, 67–68.

  121. See chapter 4.

  122. Muriel Lester, My Host the Hindu (London, 1931), 120.

  123. Muriel Lester, typescript Indian circular, letters, Letter 8, c.1926, Lester 2/7, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  124. Henry Hodgkin, Lay Religion (New York, 1919), 138–40; and Hodgkin, The Christian Revolution, 10.

  125. See Richard Roberts, “How the Fellowship Began,” The Friend 9:1 (January 1943): 5. On Roberts, see Bert den Boggende, “Richard Roberts’ Vision and the Founding of the Fellowship of Reconciliation,” Albion (Winter 2004): 608–35. Roberts focused less on the Sermon on the Mount than on the atonement and 2 Corinthians 5:17–19 with Christ’s “reconciling the world unto Himself” and with God.

  126. See Minute Book for the General Committee, January 21–22, 1918, Coll. Misc. 456, FOR 1/1, BLPES.

  127. Record of Seventh Committee Meeting, March 11, 1915 Coll. Misc. 456, FOR 1/1, BLPES.

  128. Stanley James, The Adventures of a Spiritual Tramp (London, 1925), 108.

  129. Hodgkin, The Lay Religion, 153, 160.

  130. See Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford, 1980). See also, Thomas C. Kennedy, The Hound of Conscience: The History of the No-Conscription Fellowship, 1914–1919 (Arkansas, 1981)

  131. Stanley James, The Adventures of a Spiritual Tramp (London, 1925); he published prolifically under a variety of “radical” pen names including Piers Plowman and the Tramp.

  132. See Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945, 50.

  133. Wilfred Wellock, Off the Beaten Track: Adventur
es in the Art of Living (Tanjore, India, 1961), 60–61. Muriel later introduced Wellock to Gandhi during his stay at Kingsley Hall in 1931. On Wellock’s life based on his published writings, see Andrew Rigby, A Life in Peace: A Biography of Wilfrid [sic] Wellock (Bridport, Dorset, 1988). Rigby lists Muriel Lester as among the eight members of the informal “Crusader” group on p. 25.

  134. Wilfred Wellock: “The Next Phase: World Citizenship,” The New Crusader, December 12, 1919, 8.

  135. Wilson joined the FOR’s General Committee on February 17, 1915. Stanley James, who edited the Crusader for Wilson and worked closely with Muriel, admired Wilson’s “high spirits, big-heartedness and sheer anarchism.” See Stanley James, The Adventures of a Spiritual Tramp (London, 1925), 114.

  136. She signed Kingsley Hall’s Visitors’ Book on February 25, 1917. See Visitors Book, Kingsley Hall, Lester/1/1/4, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. Wilson, author of numerous children’s books, also financed and edited an offshoot pacifist journal for boys and girls called The Venturer. The first number appeared in April 1917 as a supplement to the New Crusader.

  137. See Roger Smalley, “Theodora Wilson Wilson, Westmoreland’s Forgotten Rebel,” CeNtre WoRdS, Centre for Northwest Regional Studies 9 (2010): 30–40.

  138. See “The Shareholders’ Statement,” The New Crusader, November 7, 1919, 8. There were precedents for Wilson’s campaigns. From the mid-1880s onwards, Mrs. G. S. Reaney owned shares in the London Bus and Tramway Companies and used semiannual meetings to plead for fair wages and hours of labor. She described her tactics as “peaceful agitation.” See Mrs. [Isabel] G. S. Reaney, “Slave Driving by Public Companies,” Contemporary Review (November 1889): 649–658

  139. Wilfred Wellock, “The Only Way,” The New Crusader, August 5, 1916, 2–3.

  140. Maude Royden, The Great Adventure—The Way to Peace (London, 1915) as reprinted in Messenger of Peace (June 1923), 90. Bertrand Russell famously rejected absolutist pacifism and the complete disavowal of the threat of force as a hindrance to achieving revolution. Some hint of his position was already evident in one of his early responses to the Russian Revolution in which he said he “hoped” revolution could be achieved with passive resistance alone. See Bertrand Russell, “A Pacifist Revolution?” The Tribunal, July 19, 1917, 2.