Bloody Brilliant Women. Cathy Newman

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СКАЧАТЬ heaps, old timber, and rubbish of every description’:

      The houses were in a most deplorable condition – the plaster was dropping from the walls; on one staircase a pail was placed to catch the rain that fell through the roof. All the staircases were perfectly dark; the banisters were gone, having been burnt as firewood by tenants. The grates, with large holes in them, were falling forward into the rooms.61

      Most ‘model dwelling’ companies had rules and regulations designed to exclude tenants of ‘bad character’ and attract the respectable working classes. Octavia went one step further. She believed that if you enabled people to develop self-respect and self-reliance then they wouldn’t need charity. Any form of philanthropy which cultivated dependency was pointless and un-Christian. Reading one of her letters from 1890, I’m reminded of some of the twenty-first-century political rows over welfare reform:

      We have made many mistakes with our alms: eaten out the heart of the independent, bolstered up the drunkard in his indulgence, subsidised wages, discouraged thrift, assumed that many of the most ordinary wants of a working man’s family must be met by our wretched and intermittent doles.62

      Hill’s tenants were closely monitored by teams of lady volunteers who distributed forms in which they were expected to review their weekly conduct. Hill favoured cottages rather than the barrack-like blocks popular with other housing associations – ‘little houses’ where lower-class people could ‘get the individual feeling and notice which trains them in humanity’; though by the end of the century she was experimenting with maisonette-like ‘compound houses’, ‘two distinct cottages one on the top of the other’:

      People become brutal in large numbers who are gentle when they are in smaller groups and know one another, and the life in a block only becomes possible when there is a deliberate isolation of the family, and a sense of duty with respect to all that is in common.63

      Any profits from the scheme were spent on what Hill considered to be improvements – like playgrounds and gardens. By 1874 she ran fifteen housing schemes and had around three thousand tenants. Ten years later she began to manage properties for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.

      But housing wasn’t Hill’s only focus. She wanted her tenants to be immersed in culture, education and nature. So she campaigned for the opening up of closed-off public spaces and the preservation of areas such as Hampstead Heath. In 1876, she and her sister Miranda founded the Society for the Diffusion of Beauty, later rechristened the Kyrle Society. This mutated over time into a ‘holding trust’ in which the ownership of threatened land or buildings could be vested. Hill suggested it be called ‘The Commons and Gardens Trust’. But a colleague thought it should have a snappier title. What about ‘National Trust’? She agreed and the society was registered in 1895.

      Hill accomplished a good deal, but it didn’t come easily to her. A workaholic perfectionist who hated delegating, she had several breakdowns triggered by a combination of overwork and a turbulent emotional life. But while she gave the world a blueprint for philanthropic property management, she worked on a small scale, smaller than her reputation perhaps suggests, and the housing crisis of the early twentieth century needed more far-reaching reform than she was able to provide.

      Her influence on the debate about housing policy remains palpable. The historian and former MP Tristram Hunt writes that, as ministers ‘grapple with re-engineering the welfare state, it is not Keynes, Marx or Giddens who provide the inspiration, but Hill, the most versatile of late Victorian social entrepreneurs.’64

      Hill died of cancer in 1912, the year a woman cut from similar cloth, Maud Pember Reeves, published Round About a Pound a Week, compiled from tracts she had produced for the Fabian Society, distilling four years’ worth of research into working-class housing. Reeves had established the Fabian Women’s Group, working alongside Beatrice Webb, who was involved in the Royal Commission considering Poor Law reform. Through this she became interested in studying the lives of working-class families in Lambeth, focusing particularly on the women who held those families together.

      Despite living in well-to-do Kensington and being the wife of the New Zealand government’s Agent General, Reeves lacked Hill’s air of genteel condescension and compulsion to moralise. But her indignation was just as fierce. As she watched children playing on the streets, she was infuriated by the way the poorer ones had had their futures stolen from them. You can tell them apart, she wrote, by the way they are ‘comfortably dirty’ and have ‘the look of being small for their age’: ‘Had they been well housed, well fed, well clothed, and well tended, from birth, what kind of raw material would they have shown themselves to be?’65

      What’s astonishing about Round About a Pound a Week is how many of its suggested solutions came to pass: free school dinners, free health clinics, child benefit. Not since Rowntree’s Poverty in 1901 had a book punched through so effectively, showing the middle classes and policy makers how the other half lived. It came at a time of general panic about the physical state of British men after the Boer War – concerns that would be raised again in 1914. Many were weakened by rickets and other diseases caused by poor nutrition.

      Reeves and her helpers – including the anarchist Charlotte Wilson, who ran a Marxist debating society out of the Hampstead farmhouse she shared with her stockbroker husband – visited families trying to survive on a pound a week. She asked them to keep note of their outgoings and diaries detailing daily problems such as the struggle to heat their houses and keep vermin from disturbing children while they slept. Reeves was shocked by the way the families spent money they couldn’t afford on burial insurance to avoid the embarrassment of a pauper’s funeral for their children, few of whom lived to adulthood. The middle-class theory that the poor were ‘bad managers’ who squandered their money on drink was mostly not true. On the contrary, they did their best, living on bread with a scraping of dripping and sometimes potatoes. Once weaned, none of the children ever tasted milk again.

      It is shocking that the families featured were by no means the worst off. A pound a week was a low wage, but not disastrously so.

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      Keeping body and soul together was only half the battle. There was also the life of the mind to consider.

      Thanks to the 1870 Education Act, 92 per cent of the population of England and Wales were literate by 1910. But women were still not thought worth properly educating. The assumption was that they would – and would want to – stay at home raising children rather than go out to work.

      Helena Swanwick, an early feminist and suffrage campaigner, wrote of her childhood in the 1880s that she ‘could not help contrasting my condition with that of my three elder brothers, all at school and able to walk about freely in the daytime, while I was not allowed out alone and had to be content with some very poor piano lessons and a few desultory German lessons with two other girls who were quite beginners.’66

      Slowly, this changed. The Girls’ Public Day School Trust was founded in 1872. It was inspired by North London Collegiate, the first independent school for girls, which had been opened in 1850 by Frances Mary Buss with the goal of enabling girls to study subjects usually thought of as ‘male’, such as science and mathematics.

      Buss and her friend and associate Dorothea Beale, redoubtable members of the so-called Langham Place feminists, were the target of classic Victorian everyday sexism: ‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale/Cupid’s darts do not feel./How different from us,/Miss Beale and Miss Buss’, went one rhyme. Undeterred, they pressed on, and as schools opened, so did women’s colleges like Girton, founded in Hitchin in 1869 but relocated to Cambridge in 1873. By 1879 Oxford also had three women’s colleges: Lady Margaret Hall, Somerville and St Anne’s.

      Helena СКАЧАТЬ