The Beginning of Toynbee Hall

By Canon and Mrs. S.A. Barnett 1909

Editor’s Note:  This entry is an excerpt from the book Towards Social Reform published by The Macmillan Company, New York, 1909, pp. 239-249.

THE BEGINNING OF TOYNBEE HALL: “How did the idea of a University Settlement  arise? ” ” What was the beginning? ” are questions  so often asked by Americans, Frenchmen, Belgians,  or the younger generation of earnest English people,  that it seems worth while to reply in print, and to  trundle one’s mind back to those early days of effort  and loneliness before so many bore the burden and  shared the anxiety. The fear is that in putting pen to paper on matters which are so closely bound up with our own lives, the sin of egotism will be committed, or that a social plant, which is still growing,  may be damaged, as even weeds are if their roots  are looked at. And yet in the tale which has to be told there is so much that is gladdening and  strengthening to those who are fighting apparently  forlorn causes that I venture to tell it in the belief  that to some our experiences will give hope.

In the year 1869, Mr. Edward Dennison took up  his abode in East London. He did not stay long nor accomplish much, but as he breathed the air of  the people he absorbed something of their sufferings,  saw things from their standpoint, and, as his letters  in his memoirs show, made frequent suggestions for  social remedies. He was the first settler, and was  followed by the late Mr. Edmund Hollond,to whom my husband and I owe our life in Whitechapel. He  was ever on the outlook for men and women who  cared for the people, and hearing that we wished to  come eastward, wrote to Dr. Jackson, then Bishop  of London, when the living of St. Jude’s fell vacant  in the autumn of 1872, and asked that it might be  offered to Mr. Barnett, who was at that time  working as curate at St. Mary’s Bryanston Square,  with Mr. Fremantle, now the Dean of Kipon. I  have the Bishop’s letter, wise, kind, and fatherly,  the letter of a general sending a young captain to a  difficult outpost. ” Do not hurry in your decision,”  he wrote; “it is the worst parish in my diocese,  inhabited mainly by a criminal population, and one  which has, I fear, been much corrupted by doles.”

How well I remember the day Mr. Barnett and I  first came to see it ! — a sulky sort of drizzle filled  the atmosphere; the streets, dirty and ill-kept, were  crowded with vicious and bedraggled people,  neglected children, and overdriven cattle. The  whole parish was a network of courts and alleys,  many houses being let out in single furnished rooms  for 8d. a night — a bad system, which lent itself to  every form of evil, to thriftless habits, to untidiness,  to loss of self-respect, to unruly living, to vicious  courses.

We did not ” hurry in our decision,” but just  before Christmas, 1872, Mr. Barnett became vicar.  A month later we were married, and took up our  lives’ work on the 6th of March, 1873, accompanied  by our friend Edward Leonard, who joined us “to  do what he could”; his “could” being ultimately  the establishment of the Whitechapel committee of  the Charity Organisation Society, and a change in  the lives and ideals of a large number of young  people, whom he gathered round him to hear of the Christ he worshipped.

It would sound like exaggeration if I told my  memories of those times. The previous vicar had  had a long and disabling illness, and all was out of  order. The church, unserved either by curate,  choir, or officials, was empty, dirty, unwarmed.  Once the platform of popular preachers, Mr. Hugh  Allen and Mr. (now Bishop) Thornton, it had had  huge galleries built to accommodate the crowds who came from all parts of London to hear them —  galleries which blocked the light, and made the  subsequent emptiness additionally oppressive. The  schools were closed, the school-rooms all but devoid  of furniture, the parish organisation nil; no mothers’  meeting, no Sunday School, no communicants’ class,  no library, no guilds, no music, no classes, nothing  alive. Around this barren, empty shell surged the  people, here to-day, gone to-morrow. Thieves and  worse, receivers of stolen goods, hawkers, casual  dock labourers, every sort of unskilled low-class  cadger congregated in the parish. There was an  Irish quarter and a Jews’ quarter, while whole streets  were given over to the hangers-on of a vicious  population, people whose conduct was brutal, whose  ideal was idleness, whose habits were disgusting,  and among whom goodness was laughed at, the  honest man and the right-living woman being  scorned as impracticable. Kobberies, assaults, and  fights in the streets were frequent; and to me, a  born coward, it grew into a matter of distress when  we became sufficiently well known in the parish for  our presence to stop, or at least to moderate, a fight; for then it seemed a duty to join the crowd,  and not to follow one’s nervous instincts and pass  by on the other side. I recall one breakfast being  disturbed by three fights outside the Vicarage. We  each went to one, and the third was hindered by a  hawker friend who had turned verger, and who  fetched the distant policeman, though he evidently  remained doubtful as to the value of interference.

We began our work very quietly and simply:  opened the church (the first congregation was made  up of six or seven old women, all expecting doles  for coming), restarted the schools, established relief  committees, organised parish machinery, and tried  to cauterise, if not to cure, the deep cancer of  dependence which was embedded in all our parishioners alike, lowering the best among them and  degrading the worst. At all hours, on all days, and  with every possible pretext, the people came and  begged. To them we were nothing but the source  from which to obtain tickets, money, or food; and  so confident were they that help would be forthcoming that they would allow themselves to get  into circumstances of suffering or distress easily  foreseen, and then send round to demand assistance.

I can still recall my emotions when summoned  to a sick woman in Castle Alley, an alley long since  pulled down, where the houses, three storeys high,  were hardly 6 feet apart; the sanitary accommodation, pits in the cellars ; and the whole place only  fit for the condemnation it got directly Cross’s Act  was passed. This alley, by the way, was in part  the cause of Cross’s Act, so great an impression did  it make on Lord Cross (then Mr. Cross) when Mr.  Barnett induced him to come down and see it.

In this stinking alley, in a tiny, dirty room, all  the windows broken and stuffed up, lay the woman  who had sent for me. There were no bed-clothes;  she lay on a sacking covered with rags. “I do not know you,” said I, “but I hear you  want to see me.”

” No, ma’am !” replied a fat, beer-sodden woman  by the side of the bed, producing a wee, new-born  baby; “we don’t know yer, but ‘ere’s the babby,  and in course she wants clothes and the mother  comforts like. So we jist sent round to the  church.”

This was a compliment to the organisation which  represented Christ, but one which showed how  sunken was the character which could not make even the simplest provision for an event which must have  been expected for months, and which even the  poorest among the respectable counts sacred.

The refusal of the demanded doles made the  people very angry. Once the Vicarage windows  were broken; once we were stoned by an angry  crowd, who also hurled curses at us as we walked  down a criminal-haunted street, and howled out, as a climax of their wrongs, “And it’s us as pays  ’em.” But we lived all this down, and as the years  went by reaped a harvest of love and gratitude  which is one of the gladdest possessions of our lives,  and is quite disproportionate to the service we have  rendered. But this is the end of the story, and I  must go back to the beginning.

In a parish which occupies only a few acres, and  was inhabited by 8,000 persons, we were confronted  by some of the hardest problems of city life. The  housing of the people, the superfluity of unskilled  labour, the enforcement of resented education, the  liberty of the criminal classes to congregate and  create a low public opinion, the administration of  the Poor Law, the amusement of the ignorant, the  hindrances to local government (in a neighbourhood  devoid of the leisured and cultured), the difficulty  of uniting the unskilled men and women in trade  unions, the necessity for stricter Factory Acts,  the joylessness of the masses, the hopelessness of  the young — all represented difficult problems, each  waiting for a solution and made more complicated  by the apathy of the poor, who were content with  an unrighteous contentment and patient with a  Godless patience. These were not the questions to  be replied to by doles, nor could the problems be  solved by kind acts to individuals nor by the healing  of the suffering, which was but the symptom of the  disease.

In those days these difficulties were being dealt  with mainly by good kind women, generally elderly;  few men, with the exception of the clergy and noted  philanthropists, as Lord Shaftesbury, were interested  in the welfare of the poor, and economists rarely  joined close experience with their theories.

“If men, cultivated, young, thinking men, could  only know of those things they would be altered,”  I used to say, with girlish faith in human goodwill — a faith which years has not shaken; and  in the spring of 1875 we went to Oxford, partly to tell about the poor, partly to enjoy “eights week ” with a group of young friends. Our party was  planned by Miss Toynbee, whom I had met when at school, and whose brother Arnold was then an  undergraduate at Balliol. Our days were filled by the hospitality with which Oxford still rejoices  its guests; but in the evenings we used to drop quietly down the river with two or three earnest men, or sit long and late in our lodgings in the Turl, and discuss the mighty problems of poverty and the people. How vividly Canon Barnett and  I can recall each and all of that first group of  “thinking men,” so ready to take up enthusiasms  in their boyish strength — Arnold Toynbee, Sidney  Ball, W. H. Forbes, Arthur Hoare, Leonard Montefiore, Alfred Milner, Philip Gell, John Falk, G. E. Underhill, Kalph Whitehead, Lewis Nettleship!  Some of these are still here and caring for our  people, but others have passed behind the veil, where  perhaps earth’s sufferings are explicable.

We used to ask each undergraduate as he  developed interest to come and stay in Whitechapel, and see for himself. And they came, some to  spend a few weeks, some for the Long Vacation, while  others, as they left the

University and began their  life’s work, took lodgings in East London, and felt  all the fascination of its strong pulse of life, hearing,  as those who listen always may, the hushed, unceasing moans underlying the cry which ever and anon  makes itself heard by an unheeding public.

From that visit to Oxford in the ” eights week” of 1875 date many visits to both the Universities.  Rarely a term passed without our going to Oxford, where the men who had been down to East London  introduced us to others who might do as they had  done. Sometimes we stayed with Dr. Jowett, the  immortal master of Balliol, sometimes we were the  guests of the undergraduates, who would get up  meetings in their rooms, and organise innumerable breakfasts, teas, river excursions, and other opportunities for introducing the subject of the duty of  the cultured to the poor and degraded.

No organisation was started, no committee, no  society, nor club founded. We met men, told them  of the needs of the out-of-sight poor; and many  came to see Whitechapel and stayed to help it.  And so eight years went by — our Oxford friends  laughingly terming my husband the “unpaid professor of social philosophy.”

In June, 1883, we were told by Mr. Moore Smith that some men at St. John’s College at Cambridge were wishful to do something for the poor, but  that they were not quite prepared to start an  ordinary College Mission. Mr. Barnett was asked  to suggest some other possible and more excellent  way. The letter came as we were leaving for Oxford, and was slipped with others in my husband’s  pocket. Soon something went wrong with the  engine and delayed the train so long that the  passengers were allowed to get out. We seated  ourselves on the railway bank, just then glorified  by masses of large ox-eyed daisies, and there he  wrote a letter suggesting that men might hire a house, where they could come for short or long  periods, and, living in an industrial quarter, learn  to ” sup sorrow with the poor.” The letter pointed  out that close personal knowledge of individuals  among the poor must precede wise legislation for  remedying their needs, and that as English local  government was based on the assumption of a  leisured, cultivated class, it was necessary to provide  it artificially in those regions where the line of  leisure was drawn just above sleeping hours, and  where the education ended at thirteen years of age  and with the three R’s.

That letter founded Toynbee Hall. Insomnia  had sapped my health for a long time, and later,  in the autumn of that year, we were sent to Eaux Bonnes to try a water-cure. During that period  the Cambridge letter was expanded into a paper,  which was read at a College meeting at St John’s  College, Oxford, in November of the same year.  Mr. Arthur Sidgwick was present, and it is largely  due to his practical vigour that the idea of University Settlements in the industrial working-class  quarters of large towns fell not only on sympathetic ears, but was guided until it came to fruition, and the  first meeting of undergraduates met in the room of  Mr. Cosmo Lang [now (1908) about to become Archbishop of York]. Soon after the meeting a small  but earnest committee was formed; later on the  committee grew in size and importance, money  was obtained on debenture bonds, and a head  sought who would turn the idea into a fact. Here  was the difficulty. Such men as had been pictured  in the paper which Mr. Knowles had published in  the Nineteenth Century Review of February, 1884,  are not met with every day; and no inquiries  seemed to discover the wanted man who would  be called upon to give all and expect nothing.

Mr. Barnett and I had spent eleven years of life and work in Whitechapel. We were weary. My health stores were limited and often exhausted, and family circumstances had given us larger means and opportunities for travel. We were therefore desirous to turn our backs on the strain, the pain, the passion, and the poverty of East London, at least for a year or two, and take repose after work which had both aged and weakened us. But no other man was to be found who would and could do the work; and, if this child-thought was not to die, it looked as if we must undertake to try and rear it.