by Seth Koven
141. Wilfred Wellock, Off the Beaten Track, Adventures in the Art of Living (Tanjore, India, 1961), 22.
142. See The New Crusader, April 19, 1917, 3.
143. See The Council of Workers and Soldiers Delegates, What Happened at Leeds (London, 1917).
144. Rev. William Orchard debated this point with Hodgkin on March 23, 1915. See Coll. Misc. 456, FOR 1/1, BLPES.
145. Following Martin Ceadel’s nomenclature, “pacifists” referred only to absolutists who rejected all forms of war and violence. “Pacificists” comprised a much more general and looser group of opponents to war, some of whom accepted violence as an unavoidable part of conflict resolution. Lenin’s views were not well known in Britain. His critique of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism was not translated into French and German until 1920, though published in Russian in 1916. On May 15, 1920, Sylvia Pankhurst published Lenin’s banned “Appeal to the Toiling Masses” (first issued in English in 1918) in the Workers’ Dreadnought. Pankhurst’s publications regularly translated into English polemical tracts by Bolsheviks.
146. “Coup D’État in Petrograd,” The London Times, November 9, 1917, 7.
147. FoR members began to grasp the incompatibility of Bolshevism with their own views between February and April 1918. See “International Notes,” The Venturer (February 1915): 121. In March 1918 the Venturer commented “The Bolsheviks are visionaries who believe in the majesty of ideals; but woe betide the men or the people who come between them and the realization of the things they desire!” The writer disapproved of the Bolsheviks’ use of violence and coercion in Finland, Ukraine, and the Constituent Assembly in Petrograd. See “International Notes,” The Venturer 3:6 (March 1918): 150.
148. This was not only a product of their naïveté but also the skillful work of the Bolsheviks’ chief propagandist in Britain in 1917–1919, Maxim Litvinov. The radical son of Russian Jewish bankers, Litvinov married the daughter of a wealthy and prominent Anglo-Jewish family, Ivy Lowe, during one of his many long exiles from pre–Revolutionary Russia. He skillfully presented the Bolsheviks in a way calculated to appeal to British socialists and Labour leaders by stressing the “astonishingly mild” use of force by Bolsheviks. See Maxim Litvinoff, The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Rise and Meaning (London, 1919), 32.
149. See Minutes of Social Service Committee, Fellowship of Reconciliation, December 13, 1915, and January 17, 1916, Coll Misc. 456, FOR 5/7, BLPES.
150. Walke first joined the FoR some time in 1917 according to his autobiography. See Bernard Walke, Twenty Years at St. Hilary (London, 1935), 110.
151. For example, see “Nativity Play in Cornwall,” Western Morning News, December 24, 1929, 3. On the controversies that led to violence against the church, see “Choir Voices Drowned,” Western Morning News, November 28, 1932, 3.
152. See Bernard Walke, Twenty Years at St. Hilary (London, 1935), 147.
153. Bernard Walke to Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, n.d. (c.1918); see also “The Brethren of the Common Table,” four-page printed manifesto (n.d.), outlining principles and directions for forming chapters Box 1, Rosa Waugh Hobhouse Papers, Hadspen, Somerset.
154. See James Hinton, Protests & Visions: Peace Politics in 20th Century Britain (London, 1989), chap. 5.
155. On the riot and press coverage of it, see “Another Riot at the Brotherhood Church,” The Tribunal, October 11, 1917, 3.
156. A year after leaving Kingsley Hall, Rosa herself was briefly jailed under the terms of DORA for distributing pacifist literature in the English countryside and hindering recruitment efforts.
157. See “Revolution and Non-Resistance, an Appeal for an Unarmed Revolution,” supplement to the Tribunal, July 19, 1917. These statements were the result of a joint meeting of the Friends’ Service Committee, the No-Conscription Fellowship and the Fellowship of Reconciliation from July 14–16, 1917.
158. See Clifford Allen, “Our Point of View,” The Tribunal, March 8, 1916, 1. Allen here was referring specifically to how Tribunals treated conscientious objectors who came before them seeking exemption from military service.
159. Muriel Lester, “The Salt of the Earth,” Adventures in Fellowship, Being the Eight Annual Report of Kingsley Hall (London, 1923), 16.
160. For a brilliant and vivid account of such divided families, including the Despards and the Hobhouses, see Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (Boston, 2011). See also Charlotte Despard to Muriel Lester, n.d. [March 1918?], Lester/2/3/4, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. Despard consoled Muriel about her “hard times” in Bow and sent her best wishes for Kingsley Hall.
161. I cannot identify the precise date that Caroline moved to Bruce Road. Voting records indicate that she lived at 64 Bruce Road immediately after the war.
162. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, February 14, 1912, Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
163. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. (c.1916), Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
164. I have reconstructed William Joseph Dellar’s movements using census data and voting registration, and army enlistment records. Apparently, Dellar’s skills were sufficiently important that he was able to leave Forest Gate workhouse and enlist in the army himself in April 1915. After the war, he was reunited with Nellie’s sister Florence. They lived not far from Bruce Road on Donald Road.
165. Lester, Kill or Cure, 25–26.
166. Age seems to have been a flexible concept for many laboring people. His birth certificate indicates that he was born in April 1898. However, for purposes of enrolling him in the infants’ room at Marner Street School in October 1901, his parents Florence and William told school officials that he had been born in September 1897. See Admissions Log Book, Marner Street School, London Metropolitan Archives; Birth and census data all accessed via Ancestry.com.
167. Electoral registers indicate that he lived at 60 Bruce Road well into the 1930s.
168. See Anna Braithwaite Thomas, St. Stephens House: Friends Emergency Work in England 1914–1920 (London, 1920).
169. “The Anti-German Riots,” First Year’s Report, Kingsley Hall, Bow (London, n.d.), 22.
170. The press described East Londoners’ violence as “fierce reprisals” and “righteous anger” against “German atrocities.” See “The German Atrocities,” East End News, May 14, 1915.
171. “The Air Raid in Norfolk,” The London Times, January 21, 1915, as quoted in Susan Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge, 2012), 26.
172. “Take Up the Sword of Justice,” Sir Bernard Partridge, 1861–1945, Harrow: David Allen & Sons, Ltd., June 1915, 39 3/4 x 24 1/2, Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, London, Reference: Hardie & Sabin, 2. Library of Congress.
173. Nicoletta Gullace argues “in Britain during the great War notions of fictive kinship, based on an imagined community of blood ties and racial stock, began to undercut the living bonds of neighbourliness, familial affection…. In this process a liberal notion of inclusion, based on law and individual rights, came under pressure from more popular and emotive concepts of belonging.” See “Friends, Aliens and Enemies: Fictive Communities and the Lusitania Riots of 1915,” Journal of Social History 39 (Winter 2005): 345–46. On anti-German rioting in relation to xenophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant attitudes, see Panikos Panayi, “Anti-German Riots in London during the First World War,” German History 7:2 (April 1989): 184–203, and his edited volume Germans in Britain since 1500 (London, 1996), chap. 7. My formulation of the local as a way of knowing is indebted to Shannon Jackson’s Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000).
174. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Let Us Not Be Cowards,” Woman’s Dreadnought, May 15, 1915, 246.
175. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 68.
176. “The Salt of the Earth,” 17. Somewhat surprisingly, Sylvia Pankhurst claimed that Doris Lester, not Muriel, was hurt during the Lusitania Riots. I suspect that she m
ixed up the two sisters since no other evidence places Doris in Bow during the riots. See Pankhurst, Home Front (London, 1932), 171.
177. Here, I follow Ann Stoler on the relationship between affective and political registers. See Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Los Angeles, 2002).
178. A Club Member.-N[ellie].D[owell].“Stolen Goods” Second Year’s Report (London, 1917), 24–26. In “The Salt of the Earth,” Muriel explicitly alludes to Nellie’s part in recovering the “stolen goods.”
179. Captain Arthur St. John to Muriel Lester, January 2, 1916, printed in First Year’s Report, Kingsley Hall (London, 1916), 44.
180. Muriel Florie Archer remained a lifelong friend of Muriel’s and supporter of Kingsley Hall. Daughter of a Baptist minister in Yorkshire, Archer was born in 1897, thus a very young woman at the time of the Lusitania riots.
181. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. (1916–7), Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
182. See Gabrielle Bell, “The Raid,” Second Year’s Report (London, 1917), 12.
183. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. [1916], Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate. In this letter, Nellie explains how she teaches “true fellowship” even to those she does not like. Leela Gandhi eloquently theorizes such “small gestures” as “countercultural revolutionary practices for which I claim the name ‘politics of friendship.’ ” See Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC, 2006), 9.
184. A Club Member.-N[ellie].D[owell].“Stolen Goods” Second Year’s Report (London, 1917), 25.
185. Ibid., 26.
186. See Keith Robbins, The Abolition of War: The “Peace Movement” in Britain, 1914–1919 (Cardiff, 1976), chap. 7. Robbins offers a balanced assessment of those who abhorred Lansdowne’s letter as well as his supporters. See also Lord Newton, Lord Lansdowne, A Biography (London, 1929), chap. 20.
187. Lord Lansdowne, Daily Telegraph, November 29, 1916 as quoted in Newton, Lord Lansdowne, 467.
188. Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War (London, 1919), 192.
189. Vera Brittain, Rebel Passion, 42.
190. Frank Hancock, Reconciliation, A Monthly Review of the Things of Peace (January 1962): 9–10
191. Maude Royden, “Bid Me Discourse,” chapter 8, 7/AMR, Box 224, Agnes Maude Royden Papers, Women’s Library (transferred to BLPES).
192. Muriel Lester, Typescript History of Kingsley Hall, “Remembered Moments on Receipt of a Radiogram,” Lester/2/3, pp. 11–12, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. There is a later corrected single-spaced typescript version of this early history as well in the same file.
193. Sylvia Pankhurst, April 21, 1917, Woman’s Dreadnought as quoted in Julia Bush, Behind the Lines (London, 1984), 73.
194. See Stephen Hobhouse, The Autobiography of Stephen Hobhouse: Reformer, Pacifist, Christian (Boston, 1952), 165.
195. Muriel Lester, “An East-End Problem. ‘Ought One to Speak the Truth?’ ” Christian World (August 22, 1918).
196. Muriel Lester to “Dear Comrades of Number Sixty,” n.d., internal evidence suggests 1923, Lester/2/2, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
197. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. (c.1916), Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate. Internal evidence suggests it was written in the last months of 1915, after Nellie’s nephew Willie Dellar, who lived with her and Muriel at 60 Bruce Road, enlisted in the army in July 1915.
198. The phrase “prickly barriers” comes from Muriel Lester’s speech at the opening of Kingsley Hall. “Report of the Kingsley Hall Opening,” Lester/2/2, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
199. See Muriel Lester, typescript notes on Kingsley Hall, Lester/2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
200. Arthur Ransome published his firsthand account of events in Russia including the Third International of March 1919 in June 1919 under the title, Six Weeks in Russia (London, 1919). On the shop stewards, see James Hinton’s The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London, 1973).
201. See Muriel Lester, “An Indictment,” The New Crusader, January 23, 1920, 11. The original letter appeared in Kingsley Hall’s periodical The Gleam.
202. For a grim description of the economic and social mood in Britain in spring 1921, see “SCENE SETTING: LONDON 1921,” Pearson’s Magazine 46 (May 1921): 403–4.
203. On the British public’s starkly divided responses to the Amritsar massacre, see Derek Sayer, “British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920,” Past and Present 131 (1991): 130–64. On the “dirty war” against Irish nationalists, see Peter Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford, 1998).
204. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 82.
205. See Linda Mahood, Feminism and Voluntary Action: Eglantyne Jebb and Save the Children, 1876–1928 (London, 2009); Clare Mulley, The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, Founder of Save the Children (Oxford, 2009).
206. On Marie, see Doris Lester, Typescript autobiography, “Our First Refugee,” Lester/3/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
207. See Andrew Rigby, A Life in Peace: A Biography of Wilfrid [sic] Wellock (Bridport, Dorset, 1988), 49–51.
208. Jon Lawrence, “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain,” Journal of Modern History 75 (September 2003): 558. See also Adrian Gregory, “Peculiarities of the English? War, Violence and Politics: 1900–1939,” Journal of Modern European History 1:1 (March 2003): 44–59.
209. See “Voluntary Poverty, East End Invitation to the Wealthy West,” Daily News, March 15, 1921, reprinted in Muriel Lester, Entertaining Gandhi (London, 1932), 195–197; see also “Invitation to Life of Poverty. East End Call to the Wealthy West,” Star (March 15, 1921); “Disciples of St. Francis, A Voluntary Poverty Movement,” Christian World, March 24, 1921, and “Brethren of the Common Table. People Without Possessions and No Desire for Riches,” Evening Standard, April 2, 1921.
210. “Brethren of the Common Table. People Without Possessions and No Desire for Riches,” Evening Standard, April 2, 1921.
211. Ibid.
212. See Hayden Church, “Millionaires and Paupers Join in Self Denial,” Deseret News [Salt Lake City, Utah], July 2, 1921, sec. 3, 1.
213. See Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, Interplay of Life and Art (unpublished typescript autobiography, 1958–59), 138, 173, Library of the Society of Friends. Rosa had worked out the core concepts of voluntary poverty in 1914 in responses to George Lansbury’s campaign to teach workers to “hate their poverty” through articles in the Daily Mail in July 1914. See Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, “One Standard of Values,” typescript, 1914, Rosa Waugh Hobhouse Papers, RWH, Box 1, Hadspen.
214. See Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me, 88.
215. This story of May Hughes’ attempts to find ethical ways to dispose of her wealth while micromanaging the behavior of its recipients is detailed in the May Hughes Papers, in private hands, Longcot. My thanks to Robert Baker for granting me access to these papers.
216. See Tierl Thompson, ed., Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women 1897–1917 (London, 1987), 272, 304–5.
217. “Brethren of the Common Table. People Without Possessions and No Desire for Riches,” Evening Standard, April 2, 1921.
218. “HOW TO SPEND £400 A YEAR. Novel Suggestions at Women’s Meeting. REJECTED LEGACY,” Daily Chronicle, October 18, 1927. Lester’s use of her legacy invites comparison with Virginia Woolf’s much more famous—and self-centered—imagining of how best to use a legacy of £500 p.a. in A Room of One’s Own (1928). For a sensitive reading of Woolf set against a range of feminist aspirations in the 1920s, see Sally Alexander, “Room of One’s Own: 1920s Feminist Utopias,” Women: A Cultural Review 11:3 (2000): 273–288.
219. On Tawney’s moral and spiritual politics at this time, see Lawrence Goldman, The Life of R. H Tawney: Socialism and History (London, 2013), chaps. 6 and 7.
220. On the role of “home helps” in reducing
maternal and infant mortality in early twentieth-century London, see Lara Marks, Metropolitan Maternity (Amsterdam, 1996). This choice reflected Muriel’s priorities as chair of Poplar Borough Council’s Maternity and Child Welfare Committee.
221. “Refused £400 a year legacy and now scrubs floors.” Daily Chronicle, September 13, 1928.
222. Miscarriages of colonial justice such as the brutal assaults on Black Jamaicans during the so-called Morant Bay Mutiny in October 1865 prompted early attempts to use Restitution Funds as tools of humanitarian relief for victims. See Edinburgh Ladies’ Emancipation Society, Annual Report (1867), as reprinted in Esther Breitenbach, Linda Fleming, S. Karly Kehoe, and Lesley Orr, eds., Scottish Women: A Documentary History, 1780–1914 (Edinburgh, 2013), 316. See also “Restitution,” The Freed-Man, November 1, 1866, 45–47.
223. Alma Whitaker, “Poverty is Your Salvation,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1935, J7.
224. James Warnack, “The Greatest of These,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1936, A4.
225. Muriel Lester, “The Salt of the Earth,” 16.
226. Nellie Dowell letters, n.d., Bishopsgate Institute.
227. Muriel wrote this phrase next to the date of Nellie’s death beneath the title of her homage to her. See “The Salt of the Earth,” 14.
228. See admission entry, January 18, 1923, Dowell, Ellen, discharged, January 26, 1923, Creed Register, St. Andrews Hospital, Bow, SA/M/4/29. Royal London Hospital Archives.
229. See Richard Roberts, “The Task of the Church,” The Venturer, (November 1916): 35.
230. For a contemporary definition of this genre, see Thomas Frederick Crane, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry (London, 1890), xvii-xxi.
