Good housing that pays /

“But, if you let one touch of terror dim your sight, and flinch before the most terrible upheaval of rampant force, or threat; if, for popular favor, or seat at board, or success on platform, you hesitate to speak what you know to be true, then shall your cowardice and your ambition be indeed answerable for consequences which you little dream of.”

Many a Browning Society has little to do with Browning, and many a reading circle takes Shakespeare’s name in vain: but in the case of the Octavia Hill Association there is so close a correspondence between the work and the practical idealism of the woman whose name it bears that a study of her career of service to humanity in England and thus throughout the world sheds light upon the organized and incorporated effort in Philadelphia.

Octavia Hill was the eighth daughter among eleven children of James Hill of Peterborough. Her mother was the third wife of Mr. Hill, who inherited his father’s successful business as corn-merchant and upon the proceeds came to grief as a banker. Altruist, reformer and book-lover, the financial panics of 1825 and 1840 were too much for him. Upon his mental and physical collapse, Octavia’s mother took her daughters to a cottage at Finchley, provided by her father, Dr. Southwood Smith, the noted sanitarian.

When Octavia was thirteen, her mother removed to London to become manager of a Guild for the employment of women. One of the workers at the Guild lent Octavia books and pamphlets on the life of the poor, which so greatly depressed her that “she began to think that all laughter or amusement was wicked.”

But she was cured of that delusion when she was given an active part in the work of the Guild, and found how necessary fun and frolic are to relieve the monotony of working lives.

The little Octavia was put in charge of a work-room in which girls of about her own age made toys. Since she was poor herself, she realized to the full their lives of drudgery and hardship, and she did all she could to make them happy. Some years later she wrote of this period: “We were so very, very poor, and home was like a little raft in a dark storm, where the wonder every day was whether we could live through it; and now the sea looks calm, even if there are waves; and we have leisure to look at the little boat in which we sail. I wonder if it will ever be painted with high colors.”

It was at about this time that Octavia asked Ruskin to teach her drawing; and his assent brought a new and a constraining influence to bear on all her life. “I would give years,” she wrote after the meeting, “if I could bring to Ruskin ‘the peace which passeth all understanding.’” Ruskin told her she was “far more accurate” than any of his college pupils. No wonder Ruskin, the artist and ameliorist at once, found her an apt pupil, taking fire from the gleam of his own restless inspiration.

An address by Kingsley, delivered before an association of women created to promote sanitary reform, helped Octavia, at twenty, to visualize her objective. Kingsley adverted to the fact that small houses were passing more and more into the possession of individuals, and declared that legislation must recognize the fact. “He was not going into the question here; it would have to be attended to, but it seemed a great way off. Therefore he hoped women would go, not only to the occupiers, but to the possessors of the house, and influence people of ‘our own class.’”

In this, her summary of the speaker’s somewhat vague and not over-optimistic conclusions with regard to the possibility of legislative action, Octavia seems to be feeling a challenge to the deepest in her nature, and to a maturing if not a finally fixed conviction.

At the end of 1860, just after Octavia’s twenty-second birthday, came an event of moment—one of the great crises in her life, her biographer styles it—in the removal to 14 Nottingham Place. She arranged to have poor women come to the house weekly to sew. One night a woman fainted, and Miss Hill’s sympathetic inquiry elicited the fact that she had not slept the previous night; she had been washing clothes and rocking the baby’s cradle at the same time with her foot.

Miss Hill called at the poor woman’s home next day, and found that it was a damp, unsanitary kitchen.

She then tried to find other and better quarters, but there was no place where they would take the children. She was given in her quest to realize that at her very door there were squalid, teeming homes like those from which the little toy-workers came; and she brooded upon the sorrowful fact.

Under the cloud she came to Ruskin to bring him some of her drawings. She found him in a pessimistic frame of mind.

“I paint, take my mother for a drive, dine with friends, or answer these correspondents,” he said, as he pulled out some letters from his pocket, “but one longs to be doing something more satisfying.”

“Most of us feel like that at times,” ventured the devoted pupil.

“Well, what would you like to be doing?” was Ruskin’s reply.

“Something to provide better homes for the poor,” was the girl’s answer.

Ruskin wheeled sharply about in his chair.

“Have you a business plan?” was his challenge.

Then and there Octavia Hill’s life-work was born.

Ruskin told her he had no time to attend to the details of management as landlord, but he said he would buy a tenement house if she would run it for him.

He wanted five per cent. on his investment. He didn’t care for the money, he said, but he thought others would be far more likely to follow the example set if the enterprise were put on a business basis from the start.

“Who will ever hear of what I do?” exclaimed Octavia.

But she entered whole-heartedly into the fulfilment of the suggestion, and said she would do her best to make the scheme pay.

Then began the long, long search for a house, with a garden, where she might create modest and wholesome apartments for the poor. Landlords and agents as soon as they learned what she was after interposed all manner of objections.

In answer to one of these heartless rebuffs Octavia exclaimed: “Where, then, are the poor to live?”

“I don’t know,” said the agent. “I only know they’ve got to keep away from the St. John’s Wood Estate.”

In the spring of 1865, she was able to announce triumphantly that Ruskin had bought for her, for a term of fifty-six years, three houses in a court close by. The tenants came with the houses. She had schemes for the recreation of the children, and she meant to secure a playground for them. “The plan promises to pay; but of this I say very little; so very much depends on management, and the possibility of avoiding bad debts.” To Mrs. Shaen, wife of the lawyer who negotiated the sale, she wrote presently: “The money part is very regular and simple, just so much paid into Ruskin’s bank each quarter; but to me the work is of engrossing interest. We have three houses, each with six rooms; and we have managed gradually to get the people to take two rooms, in many cases.” The garden had come with Ruskin’s enthusiastic purchase of six more houses; and the cup of the busy landlady’s satisfaction is filled to overflowing. “The children seem to have so few joys, and they spring to meet any suggestion of employment with such eagerness, instead of fighting and sitting in the gutter, with dirty faces and listless, vacant expression. I found an eager little crowd threading beads last time I was in the playground. We hope to get some tiny gardens there; and Ruskin has promised some seats. I hope to teach them to draw a little; singing we have already introduced. On the whole, I am so thankful, so glad, so hopeful in it all; and, when I remember the old days when I seemed so powerless, I am almost awed.”

Here we see in embryo several present day social movements of wide outreach, all at once:—the suggestion and direction of children’s games; the cultivation of home and school gardens; community singing.

The new owner found the houses occupied—to quote her own words—“by a desperate and forlorn set of people; wild, dirty, violent, ignorant as ever I have seen.”

“I worked on quite alone about it,” she tells us, “preferring power and responsibility and work, to committees, and their slow, dull movements.”

But as soon as she let her friends know what she was doing, they rallied in force to her assistance.

Presently in the crowding multiplicity of detail her life became, she tells us, “a fight for mere existence. References, notices, rents, repairs, the dry necessary matters of business, take up almost all time and thought; only”—and here comes the saving clause—“as, after all, we are human beings, and not machines, people round, and all we see and hear, leave a kind of mark on us; an impression of awe, or pity and wonder, or sometimes love.”

“Here I am,” she writes in another letter of about the same date, “head and ears deep in notices about dustmen, requests for lawyers to send accounts, etc., etc.... I’ve just come in from a round of visits to the nine houses; and somehow it’s been a day of small worries about all sorts of repairs, and things of that kind. It is only when the detail is really managed on as great principles as the whole plan, that a work becomes really good.” That last sentence holds the vital germ of Octavia Hill’s own philosophy, living on in the work of the Association that bears her name.

Instead of giving alms she gave herself. The student of her work cannot fail to note how sedulously she refrained from handing out money when that would have been the easiest thing to do. In 1869 she had read a paper before the Social Science Association on “The Importance of Aiding the Poor Without Alms-giving,” and on this point she was obdurate. Even her strong champion Ruskin was unwilling to go all the way with her in this policy, and he shrank from contact with the ugliness that she met to give it battle day after day.

The Artisans’ Dwelling Act in 1875 was a great parliamentary victory for housing reform, and it was in large part Miss Hill’s victory. Moreover, the Committee which investigated the operation of the Act five years later owed much to Miss Hill’s continued cooperation. This is the period of the specialized effort of Miss Hill in behalf of Open Spaces. When the bill for the artisans’ houses came up for its second reading in the House Miss Hill was present, tremulously eager of course to behold its reception and to know its fate. Suddenly, to her intense gratification, a speaker brought forward an article she had written for Macmillan’s Magazine.

“Instead of quoting dry facts and figures, he read aloud from it the description of the wonderful delight it gave me to see the courts laid open to the light and air.”

It may be remarked that no compilation of facts and figures will ever convey a fair idea of the work of Miss Hill or the work of the Octavia Hill Association.

By 1877 Miss Hill’s work had grown till it concerned the welfare of 3,500 tenants and the prudent husbandry of some $200,000 in trust funds. Lord Pembroke gave Miss Hill $30,000 to buy houses, and paid a worker. Then she had to go away to rest, and the years from 1878 to 1880 were spent chiefly in travel, that took her to the Levant, though she kept in contact with her ruling passion by intimate and affectionate correspondence.

Upon her final return she was asked by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to undertake the management of much of their property in Southwark. She accepted the charge. She began the successful movement which lasted six years, from 1883 to 1889, to add Parliament Hill, and a tract adjoining, to Hampstead Heath. This achievement must stand among her greatest benefactions to humanity. It meant obtaining $1,500,000 by private gift and municipal appropriation, and not merely saving a great playground of the poor but doubling its area.

She took charge of forty-eight houses in Deptford, in South London, in 1884, and in 1885 accepted the responsibility for seventy-eight more in the same region. In 1887 the number of tenants had increased to 5,000. The Red Cross Cottages and Garden in Southwark opened in June of this year are salient examples of Miss Hill’s magic wand in ousting ugliness and creating graciousness and beauty in its place. The hall, designed for music and other neighborhood entertainment, has unusual decorations by Walter Crane, representing just such actions of peaceful heroism as any one of us, at any time, might be called on to perform. The first picture was that of Alice Ayres, a servant girl, who saved children from a fire in Southwark. Since the heroine came from their own walk in life, and was known to some of them, the tenants felt a living link of interest with the painting.

The burden of the Deptford Cottages was progressively taken over by an enlarging number of assistants. Though many of these were volunteers, since Miss Hill never surrendered her belief in the system that brought women of refinement and leisure into contact with those whose lot was toiling poverty, the desirability of the service of professional supervisors was recognized, and over each group of houses as served by the volunteer assistants there was set a paid worker to direct the collection of the rents and all the diversified effort for the welfare of the tenants.

After a time these head women and their charges, while they never ceased to look to Miss Hill for guidance and inspiration, became more and more independent of her actual oversight, and as they gained confidence and knowledge the work became progressively decentralized.

Miss Hill was one of the pillars of the Kyrle Society, created by her sister Miranda, which sought to bring beauty into the lives of the poor, to secure open spaces, and to convert city burial grounds in congested areas to the uses of the living. She was a prime mover in the Charity Organization Society, earnestly striving to keep before that body the paramount importance of personality in charity, and the influence of enthusiastic and warmhearted individual effort for individuals. She was a member of the Women’s University Settlement in Blackfriars’ Road. She was one of the founders of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. She was a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws. She saved land along the banks of the River Wandle from desecration, for the perennial joy of the poor. After her “Homes of the London Poor” had been translated into German by Princess Alice, the Octavia Hill Verein was formed in Berlin. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee took counsel with her, and installed her methods in groups of houses municipally controlled. The housing system in Amsterdam was influenced by her work, and traces of it are to be found in Sweden. Students of her methods came from near and far to be instructed. The effort of such women as Ellen Collins and Josephine Shaw Lowell in New York gladly acknowledged the impress of Miss Hill’s ideals.

Aside from her personal correspondence, the record of beneficent activity is to be found in her two volumes, “Homes of the London Poor,” and “Our Common Land,” and in the series of annual “Letters to My Fellow-workers,” privately circulated, which began in 1873 and continued until December, 1911.

“The main tone of action,” she affirms, in “Homes of the London Poor,” “must be severe. There is much of rebuke and repression needed, although a deep and silent under-current of sympathy and pity may flow beneath. If the rent is not ready, notice to quit must be served.”

An all-important factor is the “friendly rent-collector” who, while firm in her insistence upon prompt payment of the rent, forms a living link of sympathy and perception between the landlord or landlady and the tenant, and among the tenants themselves. The thorough training of this collector is essential, and for this training Miss Hill left minute prescriptions.

In her Letter for 1879, Miss Hill says,—and she repeats the passage in the Letter for 1896,—“All the smoky chimneys, broken water-pipes, tiresome neighbors, drunken husbands, death, disease, poverty, sin, call not only for your sympathy but for your action.”

“You cannot deal with the people and their houses separately. The principle on which the whole work rests, is that the inhabitants and their surroundings must be improved together,” she writes in “Homes of the London Poor.”

Miss Hill wanted trees planted and vines trained against the houses, and gardens wherever possible. She cites with approval the example of children who thrust flowers in a crevice in the wall, to make it, as they said, “like it was the day we had the May-pole.” “A bunch of flowers brought on purpose,” is mentioned among the gifts that are not destructive of independence, and that assist what she beautifully calls the “return to the old fellowship between rich and poor.” “She takes them flowers” is part of her commendation of one of her friends who went tactfully among her people. In a touching Letter she speaks of widows who came home from a country outing with wild flowers to surprise the children when they woke in the morning.

She pleads for organized, directed play, in behalf of children “wholly ignorant of games,” who “have hardly self-control enough to play at any which have an object or require effort.” She holds that there must be play supervisors for a playground she has started, and “these I hope to find more and more.”

In one of the Letters she asks for public music definitely planned and schooled. “I hope that we may have a more organized body of singers, led by a conductor whom they know, and ready to sing in out-of-the-way places.” In another Letter she refers to the value of uplifting music on Sundays, and of a violin class.

Of a cadet corps for the boys she heartily approved. “There is no organization which I have found influence so powerfully for good the boys in such a neighborhood.” The Boy Scouts of today would have been to her a cause for devout thanksgiving.

In the Letter for 1907 she gives it as her belief that the work of agency in the management of properties for others is destined to expand significantly. This, of course, has become a most important part of the work of the Octavia Hill Association.

With each of the Letters there appears a financial balancesheet reduced to simplest terms of receipts and expenditure. Behind these items, she declares, are “trembling hopes and fears about each individual.”

The book “Our Common Land” sets forth chiefly Miss Hill’s views on the vital issue of open spaces,—“open air sitting-rooms” she called them. She yearns to bring the people at large into the air and the light of day. The two great wants in the life of the poor are the want of space and the want of beauty. She has much to say of the mortmain of the city graveyard that keeps the living out of an available breathing space.

The last decade of Miss Hill’s life saw the fruition of the years of anxiety and uncertainty, but there was no cessation of labor. “Up to within three days of her death,” writes her biographer, “she continued to see her friends and fellow-workers, using to the utmost her failing strength, and endeavoring to arrange for the efficient carrying on of the many works in which she took such a keen interest.” When they told her that the end must be, she said, thinking only of her work, “I might have given it a few more touches, but I think it is nearly all planned now, very well.” On the night of August 13, 1912, in the words of her beloved Chaucer, her “spirit changed house.”