‘Then at the very end, to my sorrow, the chairman announced that Mrs. Humphry Ward was present, and had been asked to speak, but was not well enough to do so! Whereupon there were such groans from the audience, and I felt it so absurd to be sitting there pleading illness that I could only move up to the desk, wondering whether I could possibly make myself heard in such a place. Then they all rose, and such applause as you never heard! It was a good thing that a certain number of people had left to catch early trains, or it would have been still more overwhelming to me. I just managed to say half a dozen words, and I think I said them with sufficient ease, but whether they carried to the back of the hall I don’t know. It certainly must be very exciting to be able to speak easily to such a responsive multitude.”
At Leeds the same kind of experience awaited her, though on a smaller scale. “I should not have been mortal if I had not been deeply touched by their feeling towards me and towards the books,” she wrote. “And what a strong independent world of its own all this north-country Nonconformity is! I feel as though these experiences were invaluable to me as a novelist. One never dreamt of all this at Oxford.”
The improvement in health, which had enabled her to face the strain of this tour, was not of long duration. Many letters in the winter complain of the “dragging pain” in the right leg, which prevents her from walking more than fifty yards without being “brought up sharp till the pain and stiffness have gone off again—which they do with resting.” By the following June (1893) she was as ill as ever she had been in the preceding summer. The London doctor adopted the theory of the “shifting kidney,” but encouraged her to allow herself to be carried up and downstairs at Stocks, so as to lie in the summer garden. “I am afraid this tendency may mean times of pain for me in the future,” she writes, “but it is not dangerous, and need not prevent my working just as usual. I am so enjoying the sight of the flowers again, and this afternoon I shall somehow get to the lime on the lawn. It had given me quite a pang at my heart to think the lime-blossom would go and I not see it! One has fewer years to waste now.”
She was hard at work on the writing of Marcella throughout this year, but the fact that she could not sit up at a table without bringing on a “wild fit of pain,” as she described it once, meant that she had to cultivate the art of writing in bed or in her garden chair, a proceeding which was very apt to produce attacks of writer’s cramp. Elaborate erections of writing-boards had to be built up around her, so as to enable as many as possible of Dr. Wolff’s precepts to be carried out, but it was a weary business, and often the hand would drop lame for a while, in spite of the author’s longing to be “at” her characters. This joy of creation was, however, her principal stay during these months of pain and weakness.
To Mr. George Murray Smith.
September 8, 1893.
“I, alas! cannot get well, though I am no doubt somewhat better than when you were here. The horrid ailment, whatever it is, will not go away, and work is rather a struggle. Still it is also my great stand-by and consolation,—by the help of it I manage to avoid the depression which otherwise this long malaise and weakness must have brought with it. A walk to the kitchen-garden and back yesterday gave me a bad night and fresh pain to-day, and I cannot travel with any comfort. But I can get along, and soon we shall be in London and I must try some fresh doctoring. Meanwhile I have written nearly a volume since we came down, which is not so bad.”
All through the autumn of this year she grew more and more absorbed in her story, while her health improved slightly, though walking was still an unattainable joy. The life of the little village of Aldbury, half a mile from the house, which she wove into so many scenes of Marcella, had an immense fascination for her. She would drive down in her pony-carriage, whenever she could find time, to spend an hour with old Mrs. Swabey or Mrs. Bradsell, or with Johnny Dolt, the postmaster, gleaning from their old-world gossip the elemental life-story of the country-side, or hearing the echoes of the bloody tragedy which had convulsed the village just before we came to it, in December, 1891. For while the old lady of Stocks (Mrs. Bright) lay dying, a murderous affray had occurred in the wood, not a mile from the house, between the gamekeeper and his lad on the one side, and a band of poachers on the other. The keeper was shot dead, and the lad, who fled for his life into the open, down towards a spreading beech in the hollow below, was followed and beaten to death with the butt-end of a gun. No wonder that Mrs. Ward took the tale and made it the dominating theme of her story, weaving into it new threads that the sordid tragedy itself did not possess—of the poacher Hurd, the dying child, the piteous little wife. The village itself was somewhat agape, we used to think, over the proceedings of the new mistress of Stocks, who would have “grand folks” down from London to spend their Sundays with her, but who had also taken a cottage on purpose for the reception of tired people from the back streets, and who was constantly having parties down from “some place in London” to enjoy the garden and the shady trees. The place in question was Marchmont Hall, for whose cricket team we children preserved a private but invincible contempt; but the elderly Associates became real friends, and soon learnt to know Stocks and its environs with more than a passing knowledge. Sometimes they would come down just for a day’s outing, but more often they, or the club-girls, or some ailing mother and baby would stay for a fortnight at the Convalescent Cottage under the care of the loquacious Mrs. Dell, whose memory must still be green in many London hearts. A natural philosopher, reared on the Bible and her own shrewd observation of life, Mrs. Dell was the ideal matron for the London folk who were sent down to her; she took them all in under her large embrace, though her opinion of their “draggled” faces when they arrived was anything but complimentary. She was wont to express herself, in fact, with considerable freedom about London life. Once one of her guests—a working-man—had gone back to town for the week-end, feeling bored in the country. “And pray what can ‘e do in London?” she asked with magnificent scorn. “Nothin’ but titter-totter on the paves!”
And besides the Convalescent Cottage, there stood on the same steep slope of hill, just under the hanging wood, with its mixture of beech, ash and wild cherry, another little house, known simply as Stocks Cottage, which Mr. Ward acquired to round off the miniature estate early in 1895. It became a source of unmixed joy to Mrs. Ward, for she could lend or let it to many different friends, from Graham Wallas and Bernard Shaw, who came to it during one of her absences abroad, and thence roamed the downs with the daughter she had left behind, preaching collectivism and Jaeger clothes—to the Neville Lytteltons, who spent seven consecutive summers in the little place, from 1895 to 1901. The Cottage, indeed, became a very intimate part of Mrs. Ward’s life at Stocks, and its mistress, Mrs. Lyttelton, one of her closest friends.
Marcella was finished, after a long struggle against sleeplessness, headache and a bad bout of writer’s cramp, on January 31, 1894. A characteristic passage occurred between the author and her publisher immediately afterwards. Mr. Smith had sent her, according to promise, a considerable sum in advance of royalty, setting forth at the same time, with his habitual candour, the exact sum which his firm expected to make from the same number of copies. Mrs. Ward thought it not enough, and wrote at once to propose a decrease of royalty on the first 2,000 copies. “I hardly know what to say,” replied Mr. Smith. “It is not often that a publisher receives such a letter from an author.” But after mutual bargainings—all of an inverted character—they arrived at a satisfactory agreement.
Mrs. Ward fled to Italy with husband and daughter to escape the appearance of the book, and saw herself flaunted on the posters of the English papers in the Piazza di Spagna early in April. It was indeed an exhilarating time for her, for there were few harsh voices among the reviewers on this occasion, while the many letters from her friends were as kind as ever. A typical opinion was that of Sir Francis Jeune: “I was charmed with sentence after sentence of perfect finish and point, such as no other writer of fiction in the present day ever attempts and certainly could not sustain. They are a delight in themselves, and the care bestowed on them is the highest compliment to a reader. May I add that I think the dramatic force of some scenes—I single out the morning of Hurd’s execution, and the death of Hallin, but there are several more—is greatly in advance of anything even you have done, and touches a very high point in comparison with any scenes in English fiction. I think George Eliot never surpassed them.” In her Recollections Mrs. Ward describes the coming out of Marcella as “perhaps the happiest date in my literary life,” for it not only gave her unalloyed joy in itself, but it coincided also with a comparative return to health—though always with ups and downs. Yet the immense publicity which the success of the book brought her was also a grievous burden, and she gives vent to this feeling in a letter to Mr. Gladstone, written in reply to his own words of thanks for the gift of the book:
25, Grosvenor Place.
May 6, 1894.
My dear Mr. Gladstone,—
It was charming of you to write to me,—one of those kindnesses which, apart from all your greatness, win to you the hearts of so many. I am so glad that the eyes are better for a time, and that you have shaken off your influenza.
We have just come back from a delightful seven weeks in Italy, at Rome, Siena and Florence, and I am much rested, though still, I am vexed to say, very lame and something of an invalid. The success of Marcella, however, has been a most pleasant tonic, though I always find the first few weeks after the appearance of a book an agitating and trying time, however smoothly things go! The great publicity which our modern conditions involve seems to wear one’s nerves; and I suppose it is inevitable that women should feel such things more than men, who so often, through the training of school and college and public life, get used to them from their childhood.
Your phrase about “prospective work” gave me real delight. I have been enjoying and pondering over the translations of Horace in the Nineteenth Century. Horace is the one Latin poet whom I know fairly well, and often read, though this year, in Italy, I think I realized the spell of Virgil more than ever before. Will you go on, I wonder, from the love-poems to a gathering from the others? I wanted to claim of you three or four in particular, but as I turn over the pages I see in two or three minutes at least twenty that jostle each other to be named, so it is no good!
Believe me,
Yours most sincerely,
Mary A. Ward.
Marcella, like her two predecessors, first appeared in three-volume form, but Mrs. Ward’s quarrel with the big libraries for starving their subscribers, which had been simmering ever since David Grieve, became far more acute over the new book. She reported to George Smith on May 24 that “Sir Henry Cunningham told us last night that he had made a tremendous protest to Mudie’s against their behaviour in the matter of Marcella—which he seems to have told them he regarded as a fraud on the public, or rather on their subscribers, whom they were bound to supply with new books!” This feud, together with the desire of the American Century Magazine to publish her next novel in serial form, provided it were only half the length of Marcella, induced her to consider seriously the question of writing shorter books. “It would be difficult for me, with my tendency to interminableness,” she admitted to George Smith, “to promise to keep within such limits. However, it might be good for me!” Soon afterwards the decision was made, and with it the knell of the three-volume novel sounded, for other novelists soon followed Mrs. Ward’s example. The resulting brevity of modern novels (always excepting Mr. William de Morgan and Mr. Conrad) is thus largely due to the flaming up of an old quarrel between librarians on the one side and publishers and authors on the other, as it occurred in the case of Mrs. Ward’s Marcella.
The summer of 1894 was a period of comparative physical ease, during which Mrs. Ward found that although she was still unable to walk more than a very little, she could ride an old pony we possessed with much profit and pleasure, of course at a foot pace. Thus she was enabled to explore some of the woods and hill-sides around Stocks which she had never yet visited, a pastime which gave her exquisite delight. But by the following winter both her persistent plagues had reappeared in aggravated form. “My hand is extremely troublesome, alas!” she wrote to her father, “and the internal worry has been worse again lately. It is so trying week after week never to feel well, or like other people! One lives one’s life, but it makes it all more of a struggle. And as there is this organic cause for it, one can only look forward to being sometimes better and less conscious of it than at others, but never to being quite well. However, one needn’t grumble, for I manage to enjoy my life greatly in spite of it, and to fill the days pretty full.” And to her husband, who was away on a lecturing-tour in America, she wrote in February, 1895: “Alas! for my hand. It is more seriously disabled than it has been for months and months, and I really ought to give it a month’s complete rest. If it were not for the Century I would!”
This unusual disablement was due no doubt to the extraordinary concentration of effort which she had just put forth in the writing of her village tale of Bessie Costrell—a tale based on an actual occurrence in the village of Aldbury, the tragic details of which absorbed her so much as to amount almost to possession. She finished it in fifteen days, and gave it to George Smith, who always cherished a special affection for this “grimy little tale,” as Mrs. Ward called it.
When he had brought it out, the world devoured it with enthusiasm—so much so that her true friend and mentor, Henry James, whose opinion she valued more highly than any other, thought fit to address a friendly admonition to her:
‘May 8, 1895. I think the tale very straight-forward and powerful—very direct and vivid, full of the real and the juste. I like your unalembicated rustics—they are a tremendous rest after Hardy’s—and the infallibility of your feeling for village life. Likewise I heartily hope you will labour in this field and farm again. But I won’t pretend to agree with one or two declarations that have been wafted to me to the effect that this little tale is “the best thing you’ve done.” It has even been murmured to me that you think so. This I don’t believe, and at any rate I find, for myself, your best in your dealings with data less simple, on a plan less simple. This means, however, mainly, that I hope you won’t abandon anything that you have shewn you can do, but only go on with this and that—and the other—especially the other!
Yours, dear Mrs. Ward,
most truly,
HENRY JAMES.”
Meanwhile, in spite of the drawback of her continued ill-health, she derived throughout these years an ever-increasing pleasure from the friendships with which she was surrounded. Both in the London house, which they had acquired early in 1891 (25 Grosvenor Place), and at Stocks, she loved to gather many friends about her, though the effort of entertaining them was often a sore tax upon her slender strength. Her Sunday parties at Stocks brought together men and women from many different worlds—political, literary and philanthropic—with whom the talk ranged over all the questions and persons of the day from breakfast till lunch, from lunch till tea, and from tea till dinner; but after dinner, in sheer exhaustion, the party would usually take refuge in what were known, derisively, as “intellectual games.” Mrs. Ward herself was not particularly good at these diversions, but she loved to watch the efforts of others, and they did give a rest, after all, from the endless talk! On one such occasion the game selected was the variety known as “riddle game,” in which a name and a thing are written down at random by different players, and the next tries to give a reason why the person should be like the thing. Lord Acton, who had that day devoured ten books of Biblical criticism that Mrs. Ward had placed in his room, and would infinitely have preferred to go on talking about them, found himself confronted by the question: “Why is Lord Rothschild like a poker?” For a long time he sat contemplating the paper, then scribbled down in desperation: “Because he is upright,” and retired impenetrably behind an eleventh book. But Mr. Asquith made up for all deficiencies by his ingenuity in this form of nonsense. “Why is Irving like a wheelbarrow?” demanded one of the little papers that came round to him, and while the rest of us floundered in heavy jokes Mr. Asquith found the exact answer: “Because he serves to fill up the pit and carry away the boxes.”
Politics were of absorbing interest to Mrs. Ward, and though her own views remained decidedly Unionist on the Irish question, in home affairs they were sufficiently mixed to make free discussion not only possible, but delightful to her. She still retained her old friendship for Mr. Morley, and probably the majority of her Parliamentary friends at this time were of the Liberal persuasion. 1895 was the year of the “cordite division” and the fall of Lord Rosebery’s Government, involving many of these friends in the catastrophe. Mr. Morley was defeated at Newcastle and went to recover his serenity in the Highlands, whither Mrs. Ward sent him a copy of Bessie Costrell, provoking the following letter from her old friend and master:
August 6, 1895.
My dear Mrs. Ward,—
It was most pleasant to me to receive the little volume, in its pretty dress, and with the friendly dedication. It will take its place among my personal treasures, and I am truly grateful to you for thinking of me.
The story is full of interest to me, and in the vein of a true realism, humanising instead of brutalising. The “severity” of the poor dead woman’s look, and the whole of that page, redeems with a note of just pity all the sordid elements.... We are quartered in one of the most glorious of highland glens, five and twenty miles from a railway, and nearly as many hours from London. Now and then my thoughts wander to Westminster, passing round by way of Newcastle, but I quickly cast Satan behind me—and try to cultivate a steady-eyed equanimity, which shall not be a stupid insensibility to either one’s personal catastrophe or to the detriment which the commonwealth has just suffered. If life were not so short—I sometimes think it is far too long—I should see some compensations in the deluge that has come upon the Liberal party. It will do them good to be sent to adjust their compasses. The steering had been very blind in these latter days. Perhaps some will tell you that my own bit of steering was the very blindest of all. I know that you are disposed to agree with such folk, and I know that Irish character (for which English government, by the way, is wholly responsible), is difficult stuff to work with. But the policy was right, and I beg you not to think—as I once told the H. of C.—that the Irish sphinx is going to gather up her rags, and depart from your gates in meekness.
During these months another Liberal friend, Mr. Sydney Buxton, was taking infinite pains to pilot Mrs. Ward through the intricacies of the Parliamentary situation required for the book she was now writing, Sir George Tressady—drawing her a coloured plan of the House and the division-lobbies for the scene of Tressady’s “ratting,” and generally supervising the details of Marcella Maxwell’s Factory Bill. “I am sure it is owing to you,” wrote Mrs. Ward to him afterwards, “that the political framework has not at any rate stood in the way of the book’s success, as I feared at one time it might.” She herself had regularly put herself to school to learn every detail of the system of sweated homework prevalent in the East End of London at that time; wading through piles of Blue-books, visiting the actual scenes under the care of a Factory Inspector, or of Lord Rothschild’s Jewish secretary; learning much from her Fabian friends, Mrs. Sidney Webb and Mr. Graham Wallas.
“As to Maxwell’s Bill itself,” she wrote to Mr. Buxton, “after my talk with you and Mr. Gerald Balfour, I took the final idea of it from some evidence of Sidney Webb’s before the Royal Commission. There he says that he can perfectly well imagine, and would like to see tried, a special Factory Act for East London, and I find the same thing foreshadowed in various other things on Factory Law I have been reading. And some weeks ago I talked over the idea with Mr. Haldane, who thought it quite conceivable, and added that ‘London would bear quietly what would make Nottingham or Leeds revolt.’ If such a Bill is possible or plausible, that I think is all a novelist wants. For of course one cannot describe the real, and yet one wants something which is not merely fanciful, but might be, under certain circumstances. The whole situation lies as it were some ten years ahead, and I have made use of a remark of Gerald Balfour’s to me on the Terrace, when we had been talking over the new Factory Bill. ‘There is not much difference between Parties,’ he said, agreeing with you—‘but I should not wonder if, within the next few years, we saw some reaction in these matters,’ by which I suppose he meant if the Home Office power were over-driven, or the Acts administered too vexatiously.
“Do you see that they have lately been repealing some Factory legislation concerning women’s labour in France? We are not France, but we might conceivably, don’t you think, have a period of discontent?”
When the book at length appeared, in September, 1896, Mrs. Ward was afraid that it would hardly float under the weight of its politics, but this was not so, for it sold 15,000 copies within a week, and never, perhaps, were the reviews more cordial. The relation between the two women, Letty and Marcella, was universally felt to be one of the best things she had ever attempted, while the greater compression of the book was accepted with a sigh of relief.
“Mrs. Ward is wisely content,” said the Leeds Mercury, “to take more for granted, and with true artistic instinct to leave room for the play of her readers’ imagination; we are saved, consequently, tedious details, and that over-elaboration of incident, if not of plot, which was one of the most conspicuous blemishes in her previous works. She is beginning also to believe that brevity is the soul of art, as well as of wit, and therefore, without any sacrifice of the essential points in her narrative, she has found it possible—by discarding padding—to state all that she has to tell about ‘Sir George Tressady’ in considerably less than six hundred pages, instead of making her old, unconscionable demand for at least a thousand. It would not be true to say that Mrs. Ward has lost all her literary mannerisms, or even affectations, but they are falling rapidly into the background—one proof amongst many, that she is mastering at length the secret of that blended strength and simplicity of style which all writers envy, but to which few attain.”
Two opinions, expressed by such opposite critics as Mrs. Sidney Webb and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, may be of interest to this day:
“The story is very touching,” wrote Mrs. Webb, “and you have an indescribable power of making your readers sympathize with all your characters, even with Letty and her unlovely mother-in-law. Of course, as a strict utilitarian, I am inclined to estimate the book more in its character of treatise than as a novel. From this point of view it is the most useful bit of work that has been done for many a long day. You have managed to give the arguments for and against factory legislation and a fixed standard of life with admirable lucidity and picturesqueness—in a way that will make them comprehensible to the ordinary person without any technical knowledge. I especially admire your real intellectual impartiality and capacity to give the best arguments on both sides, though naturally I am glad to see that your sympathy is on the whole with us on those questions.
“Pray accept my thanks from a public as well as a personal point of view for the gift of the book to the world and to myself.”
And Mr. Kipling wrote:
“DEAR MRS. WARD,—
I am delighted to have Sir George Tressady from your hand. I have followed him from month to month with the liveliest wonder as to how the inevitable smash in his affairs was to fall, and now that I have read the tale as a whole I see that of course there was but one way. Like all human books it has the unpleasant power of making you think and bother as one only bothers over real folk: but how splendidly you have done the lighter relief-work! ‘Fifteen out of a possible twelve’ has already been adopted as a household word by us, who have two babies.
“It will always be one of the darkest mysteries to me that any human being can make a beginning, end and middle to a really truly long story. I can think them by scores, but I have not the hand to work out the full frieze. It is just the difference between the deep-sea steamer with twelve hundred people aboard, besides the poor beggars sweating and scorching in the stoke-hold, and the coastwise boat with a mixed cargo of ‘notions.’ And so, when the liner sees fit to salute the coaster in passing, that small boat is mightily encouraged.”
But the writing of Sir George Tressady had been carried out against greater handicaps of physical suffering and nervous strain than perhaps any of Mrs. Ward’s previous books. She had agreed to let the Century Magazine publish it serially from November 1, 1895, and had fully intended to have it finished, at any rate in provisional form, by that date. But ill-health and her absorption in the affairs of University Hall retarded its progress, so that when November came there were still eight or nine chapters to write, and those the most difficult and critical of the book. The Century cabled for more copy, but at the same time Mrs. Ward fell a victim to “a new ailment,” as she wrote to her father, “and what with that and the perpetual struggle with the hand, which will not let me write lying down, I hardly know how to get through sometimes.” She was advised to have what the surgeons assured her would be a “slight” operation, but put it off until after a Christmas month at Stocks, during which she devoted herself, crippled as she was, to the writing of Tressady. Hardly would she have “got through” these weeks at all—for by now the demands on her time, the letters and requests to speak were endless—had she not discovered during this winter a secretary, Miss Bessie Churcher, whose wonderful qualities made her not only Mrs. Ward’s closest helper and friend during the whole remainder of her life, but have impressed themselves for good, through many years’ devotion, on the public work of London.
When Mrs. Ward at last found time to put herself in the surgeons’ hands, the operation which ensued was clumsily performed, and left her with yet another burden to carry through all her later life. After it she lay for days in such pain as the doctors had neither foreseen nor prophesied, while the nervous shock of the operation itself was aggravated, one night, by the antics of a drunken nurse, who came into her room with a lighted lamp in her hand and deposited it, swaying and lurching, upon the floor. Fortunately help was at hand and the nurse removed, but the terror of the moment did not forward Mrs. Ward’s recovery. It was many weeks before sleep came back to her, many weeks before she could sit up with any comfort or move with ease. But the book must be finished, in spite of aches and pains, and finished it was within ten weeks of the operation (March 22, 1896). George Tressady’s death in the dark galleries of the mine “possessed” her as she had only been possessed by the tale of Bessie Costrell, and helped her no doubt to master the host of her physical ills. But when the strain was over she was fit for nothing but to be taken out to Italy, there to recover, if she could, under the stimulus of that magic light and air which appealed—so at least we used to imagine—to something in her own far-off southern blood. At Cadenabbia, on Lake Como, health began to return to her; at Padua she was “doing more walking than she had dreamed of for four years,” and with the revival of her strength she wrote home in sheer joy of spirit, “All Italy to me is enchanted ground!” But alas, it was too early to rejoice. She came again to the Lake of Como to have a fortnight’s complete rest before returning home—staying at the Villa Serbelloni, above Bellagio—and there unduly overtaxed her new-found powers. She must make her way to the ruined tower of San Giovanni that looks at you from its hill-top beyond the little town, and since the path was non-carrozzabile she would make the ascent on foot. The adventure was pure joy to her, the views of the lake all the more intoxicating for having been won by her own strength of limb. But the next day a violent attack of her old and still unexplained trouble declared itself. The journey homewards, via Lucerne, was performed under conditions of crisis which still leave a haunting memory, and though a clever Swiss doctor at Lucerne appeared to diagnose the disease more surely than any previous medicine-man, he could suggest no practicable remedy. Mrs. Ward continued to suffer from her obscure ailment to a greater or less degree for the rest of her life, as well as from the results of the operation; but on the whole the attacks became less frequent, or less severe, as the years went on. She developed an extraordinary skill in fighting them, by the aid of the thousand and one little drugs before-mentioned, and often derived a keen pleasure from the sense of having met and routed an old enemy. But the enemy was always there, lying in wait for her if she walked more, say, than half a mile at a time. It is well to remember that her life from 1892 onwards was conducted under that constant handicap.
Yet it was during the years in which her illness was most acute that she carried to a successful conclusion her labours for the foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement.
When Mr. Edwards, in May, 1894, offered to provide £4,000 towards the Building Fund of University Hall,[18] it was only the beginning of a long struggle towards the accomplishment of this design. The next step was to interest the Duke of Bedford—as the ground-landlord of that part of London—in the scheme. This Mrs. Ward succeeded in doing during the summer of 1894, thus laying the foundation of a co-operation that was to ripen into a strong mutual regard. The Duke took a keen personal interest in the finding of a suitable site for the new building, and when such a site became available in Tavistock Place, offered it to the Committee at less than its market value, and contributed £800 towards the building fund. Oddly enough, however, this site—for which the contract was actually signed in February, 1895—was not that on which the Settlement stands to-day, but lay on the opposite side of the street; the disadvantage to it being that there would have been a delay of two years in obtaining possession, owing to existing tenants’ rights. When, therefore, an equally good site actually fell vacant in the same street a few months later, the Duke willingly released the Committee from their contract and made over to them the ground on which the Settlement now stands on a 999 years’ lease. In the meantime Mr. Passmore Edwards had raised his original offer from £4,000 to £7,000, and then to £10,000; the total fund stood at over £12,000, and Mr. Norman Shaw agreed to preside over an architects’ competition and to judge between the various designs submitted. All connected with University Hall rejoiced greatly when the award fell to two young residents of the Hall, Messrs. Dunbar Smith and Cecil Brewer, whose simple yet beautiful design far surpassed those of the other competitors. But according to the instructions of the Committee itself the building was to cost up to £12,000, while the price of the site was £5,000, and a further sum would be required for furnishing. Mrs. Ward set herself to the task of raising further funds with her accustomed energy, but her illness during the winter of 1895-6 greatly hampered her, and the fund rose all too slowly for her eager spirit. Meanwhile the builders’ tenders soared in the opposite direction. When she returned from Italy and Lucerne in May, 1896, she found the situation critical; either fresh plans of a far less ambitious nature must be asked for, or a further sum of £3,500 must be raised at once. Mr. R. G. Tatton, already one of the most active members of the Council, and soon to be appointed Warden, believed that the only hope lay in Mr. Passmore Edwards, but told Mrs. Ward plainly that the benefactor had said he could do no more unless others showed a corresponding interest. Mr. Tatton boldly asked Mrs. Ward herself to lay down £1,000. This she did; a fortunate legacy of £500 came in at the same moment, and Mr. Edwards gave an additional £2,000 with the best grace in the world. Yet once more, on the night of the formal opening, nearly two years later, did he come forward with a similar donation, making £14,000 in all. He showed throughout a steadfast faith in the working ideals of the Settlement that triumphed over all minor difficulties; Mrs. Ward described him once as possessed by “the very passion of giving.” No wonder that the Committee decided, long before the new building was completed, to call it by his name.
Thus Mrs. Ward could have the happiness, during the years 1896 and 1897, of seeing the beautiful building for which she had toiled so hard rise and take bodily shape before her eyes. She became fast friends with the two young architects, who had so decisively won the competition, and who now devoted themselves indefatigably to the supervision of the work. She formed, early in 1897, a General Committee for the new Settlement, the wide and representative character of which showed how warm was the sympathy entertained for the new venture not only in London, but also in Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester. And she devoted herself to the formation of a Lectureship Committee, named after Benjamin Jowett, which was to carry on, within the new organization, the religious ideals of University Hall. The Settlement itself rested on a purely secular basis, but the Council fully agreed to the inclusion of the following clause as one of the “Objects” in the Memorandum of Association: “To promote the study of the Bible and of the history of religion in the light of the best available results of criticism and research.” The Jowett Lectureship Committee was established in order to carry out this clause, and a sum of £100 per annum was placed at its disposal from the general revenue of the Settlement—a small result, it may be argued, of all the missionary effort put forth in the founding of University Hall seven years before. But the Settlement itself stood there as the result of that effort, and as Mrs. Ward looked down, on October 10, 1897, on the packed audience that assembled in the new hall to hear her opening address, she might well feel that her dreams had come to a more solid fruition than she could ever have dared to hope. But even then she did not know the whole. There sat the mothers and the fathers, with faces eager and expectant, ready to throw themselves into this big experiment that was opening out before them. Mrs. Ward welcomed them with her whole heart; yet this was not all: the children were at the gates.
FOR some two or three years before the opening of the new Settlement, a Saturday morning “playroom” for children had been held at Marchmont Hall, mainly under the direction of Miss Mary Neal, who, as the founder of the Esperance Club for factory girls, and one of the “Sisters” working under Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, had already made her name beloved in the slums of St. Pancras. In that shabby little room she had taught them Old English games and dances, till even the street outside grew merry with the sound of their music, and many were the groups of children seen playing “Old Roger is dead” or “Looby Loo” at street corners during the other days of the week. Mrs. Ward had been much attracted by the experiment, which was hampered, like everything else at Marchmont Hall, by lack of space; and now that the fine new buildings were available she was eager to transplant it and to carry it further. My diary for Saturday, October 16, 1897, duly records that “D. and Miss Churcher and I went to the Settlement at ten to superintend the children’s play-hour, which we are now going to have every Saturday in the big hall. It was a perfect pandemonium this time, as we hadn’t prepared any sort of organization, and there were at least 120 children to deal with. We also had to give each child a pair of list slippers to put on over its own boots, and this was a tremendous business and took over half an hour. Miss Neal made them a little speech before we began the games, and then we all formed rings and played Looby Loo and others of that stamp for nearly an hour more.”
From these unpromising beginnings sprang the whole of the “organized recreation” for children which gradually arose at the new Settlement, with the object of attracting the child population of the district away from the streets after school hours. Mrs. Ward guided and inspired the movement, though she left the actual carrying on of the classes to younger and more robust members of her group; but she formed a special committee (the Women’s Work Committee), of which she was chairman, to watch over it all, and generally supplied the motive force, the sense of its being worth while, which inspired the ever-growing band of our helpers. One class, too, she kept as her very own—a weekly reading aloud for boys between eleven and fourteen, in the course of which she read them a great deal of Stevenson and Kipling, or brought them photographs of her travels in Italy, or talked to them sometimes of the events of the day. About thirty boys came regularly to these readings, and always behaved well with her, while she on her side came to know them individually and felt a strong affection for many of them. Where are they now, those thirty boys? How many have left their bones in the mud of Flanders, or on the heights that look towards Troas, across the narrow sea? Mrs. Ward herself was often possessed with that thought through the years of the Great War, but never, so far as I know, heard any direct news of them. All were of that fatal age that Death reaped with the least pity.
After the Saturday morning play-rooms—which fortunately improved in discipline after that first “pandemonium,” and increased so much in popularity that we had to divide them into two, taking in close upon 400 children in a morning—we launched out into musical drill-classes for bigger and smaller children, story-telling for the little ones, gymnastic classes for girls and boys, a children’s hour in the library, dancing and acting classes, and finally history lectures with lantern slides, designed to supplement the very meagre teaching of history that the children received in the elementary schools around. How much one learnt by hard experience, in the course of it all, of the art of keeping the children’s attention—whether in teaching them a new singing-game on Saturdays, or in the story-telling to the “under elevens,” or in the exciting task of going over Oliver’s battles with the young ladies and gentlemen of the fifth to seventh standards! For even these, if one lost their attention for a moment, were not above calling out “Ole Krujer!” at a somewhat forbidding slide of Sir Thomas Fairfax, while the “under elevens” would often be swept by gusts of coughing and talk that fairly drowned the voice of the story-teller, if she suffered them to lose the thread of the Princess’s adventures by too gorgeous a description of the dragon. But usually they were as good as gold, sitting there packed tight on the rows of chairs (136 children on seventy-six chairs was one of our records), while the “little mothers” hugged their babies and no sound was to be heard save the sucking of toffee or liquorice-sticks.
All these occupations took place in the late afternoon, from 5.30 to 7, during the hours when the children of London, discharged from school and tea, drift aimlessly about the streets, often actually locked out from home (in those days at least) owing to the long hours worked by mother as well as father at “charing” or at the local factory. The instant response made by the child-population of St. Pancras to Mrs. Ward’s piping showed that she had, as it were, stumbled upon a real and vital need of our great cities, and as a larger and larger band of helpers was drawn into our circle and more and more of the cheerful Settlement rooms came into use, the attendances of the children went up by leaps and bounds. One year after the opening they had grown to some 650 per week; by October, 1899, to 900, and in the next three or four years they touched the utmost capacity of the building by reaching 1,200. The schools in the immediate neighbourhood co-operated eagerly in the new effort, though the selection of children for our special classes often involved extra labour for the teachers; but they rose to it with enthusiasm, and would sometimes steal in to watch their children enjoying the story-telling or the library, removed from the restraint of day-school discipline, and yet “giving no trouble,” as they wonderingly recognized. Mrs. Ward made friends with many of these teachers, especially with those from Manchester Street and Prospect Terrace Schools, for it was her way to establish natural human relations with every one with whom she came in contact, and the hard-working London teacher always appealed to her in a peculiar way. An incident that gave her special pleasure was the passing of a vote of thanks to the Settlement by a neighbouring Board of Managers, “for the work done among the children of this school.” How she was loved and looked up to by every one concerned—by helpers, teachers and, more dimly, by the children themselves—is not, perhaps, for me to say; but this was the note that underlay all the busy hum of the Settlement building in the children’s hour, as indeed in all the other hours of its day.
Occasionally, however, some critic would observe, “Well, this is all very fine for the children, but what do the parents say about it? What becomes of home influence when you encourage the children to come out in this way at an hour when they ought to be at home?” The answer, of course, was that the parents themselves, and especially the more anxious and hard-working among them, were the foremost in blessing the Settlement (or the “Passmore,” as it was affectionately dubbed in the neighbourhood) for the good care that it took of Sidney or Alf or Elsie; that they knew, better than anyone else, how little they could do in the miserable rooms that served them for a home for the growing boys and girls, and yet that “the streets” were full of dangers from which they longed to preserve their little ones. One or two of them became voluntary helpers at the “Recreation School,” as it came to be called; many joined the “Parents’ Guild” that Mrs. Ward formed from among them, and that met periodically at the Settlement for music and rest, or for a quiet talk with her about the children’s doings; while all were to be seen at the summer and winter “Displays” in the big hall or in the garden, their tired faces beaming with pride at the performance of their offspring. Perhaps indeed it is the bitterest reproach of all against our civilization that in the homes of the poor, “where every process of life and death,” as Mrs. Ward once put it, “has to be carried on within the same few cubic feet of space,” there is no room for the growing children, who, as baby follows baby in the crowded tenement, get pushed out into the world almost before they can stand upon their feet. Mrs. Ward knew only too well the conditions of life in the mean streets of St. Pancras or the East End; her sister-in-law, Miss Gertrude Ward, who had become a District Nurse after the eight years of her life with us, had frequently taken her to certain typical dens where such “processes of life and death” were going on, and her own researches for Sir George Tressady had done the rest. Add to this her intense power of imagination and of realization acting like a fire within her, and the children’s work at the Passmore Edwards Settlement is all explained. She yearned to them and longed to make them happy: that was all.
Mr. Tatton, the Warden, would often say that the Recreation School was growing to be the most important side of the Settlement work, and himself, bachelor as he was, delighted to watch it; but Mrs. Ward would not willingly have admitted this, even if it were true, for the many developments of the normal work for adults were always immensely interesting to her. Whenever she was in London (and often from Stocks too!) she contrived, in spite of ill-health and the many claims upon her time, to be at the Settlement three or four times a week, attending Council meetings and committees, showing the building to friends, talking to “Associates,” old and new, or listening with delight to the wonderful concerts that took place in the big hall on Saturday evenings. For it had always been intended that music should play a very special part in the life of the Settlement, and the Council had been fortunate in securing as Musical Director Mr. Charles Williams, who, in partnership with Miss Audrey Chapman’s Ladies’ Orchestra, gave concerts of quite extraordinary merit there during the first year or two of the Settlement’s existence. He would take his audience into his confidence, explaining, before the music began, the part of each instrument in the whole symphony, and all with so happy a touch that even untrained listeners felt transported into a world where they understood—for the moment—what Beethoven or Mozart would be at. Those evenings remain in memory as occasions of pure joy, and did much to reconcile the older Associates of Marchmont Hall to the magnificence of the new building—a magnificence which otherwise weighed rather sadly upon their spirits! Some of them, amid the growing activity of the new life around them, confessed that they could not help regretting the old shabby days of pipe-sucking at Marchmont Hall, where the dingy premises were “a poor thing, but mine own.” Mrs. Ward was distressed by this feeling, and sought to draw them in in every way to the life and government of the place; but one of the unforeseen features of the work was that the new Associates who joined the Settlement in considerable numbers were for the most part young people, rather than the contemporaries and friends of the Marchmont Hall Associates. Shop assistants and clerks were also on the increase, desiring to take advantage of the many facilities, social and educational, offered by the new building; and though the new-comers were looked on with distrust by the older members, no definite rule could be laid down excluding them. Admission to the Associate body might be strictly reserved to “workmen and working women” from a definite area, but it was difficult to prove that a shopman or a clerk did not work. One thing, however, was insisted upon—that the new candidates should read over and digest the confession of faith which Mrs. Ward had drawn up in the early days of Marchmont Hall, a creed which put in simple form the aspirations of the Settlement: