The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward Part 13

It is perhaps interesting to speculate what might have been the development of Mrs. Ward's powers if her intellect had never been captured by the dramatic spell, and if other sides of that "wide-flas.h.i.+ng" mind had been allowed to work themselves out unchecked.

For in the lull that followed the completion of _Eleanor_ she had conceived the writing of a "Life of Christ" based on such a re-interpretation of the Gospel story as she believed had been made possible by the research of the last half-century. She brooded much over this theme and even discussed it with her publishers. But whether it was that her continued ill-health made her shrink from the heavy toil involved by such a task--the re-reading and collating of all her Germans, the study of an infinite amount of fresh material, and probably a journey to Palestine--or whether the practical side of Christianity had by now absorbed too large a share of her time and her powers, the project never came to fruition, though it never ceased to attract her.

And indeed, Mrs. Ward's practical adventures in well-doing during these years would have been enough to fill the lives of any three ordinary individuals, without any such diversions as the writing of novels or the hammering out of plays. The affairs of the Settlement were always on her shoulders, not only as regards the financial burden of its maintenance, but in all the personal questions that inevitably arose in such a busy hive of humanity. If the nurse of the Invalid School had words with the porter, the case was sure to come up to her for judgment, while any misdemeanour among the young people themselves who frequented the building would cause her the most anxious searchings of heart. But "it does not do to start things and then let them drift," as she wrote in these days to one of us, and she continued to cherish the Settlement, to support the Warden (Mr. Tatton) in his difficulties and to beg for money, with an extraordinary vitality as well as an extraordinary patience. Yet in spite of all, the Settlement was far more of joy to her than of burden, and on its children's side it never ceased to be pure joy from the beginning. For was it not always possible to devise new ways of making the children happy, as well as to continue the old? The princ.i.p.al way in which Mrs. Ward's work extended itself at this time was in the opening of the "Vacation School," designed to bring in from the streets in large numbers the children left stranded during the August holiday,--and if anyone will take the trouble to wander through the back streets during that happy season, and to note what he sees, there will be little doubt in his mind that such a school must be a real deliverance. Mrs. Ward had taken the idea from an account by Mr. Henry Curtis in _Harper's Magazine_ (early in 1902) of the first schools of the kind started in New York, and her mind had at once grasped the possibilities of such a scheme. There stood the Settlement with its fine shady garden in the rear, empty and dumb through the holidays: surely it would be a sin not to use it!

She collected a special fund from a few old friends of the Settlement, appointed an admirable director in the person of Mr. E. G. Holland, an a.s.sistant master at the Highgate Secondary School, enlisted the help of all the schools around to send us such children only as had no chance of a country holiday, and then issued invitations to some 750, divided into two batches, morning and afternoon. The result was an orderly and delighted crowd which, owing to Miss Churcher's and Mr. Holland's faultless organization, moved from cla.s.s to cla.s.s and from garden to building without the smallest hitch, played and dug in the "waste ground" beyond the garden, specially thrown open to the school by the Duke of Bedford, and when rain came marched into the building and filled its bas.e.m.e.nt rooms and the pleasant library and cla.s.s-rooms without any confusion or squabbling. The occupations were much the same as those already in use for the "Recreation School," and never failed to attract and then to keep the children; while the spirit of good fellows.h.i.+p that the atmosphere of the school engendered had a marked effect on their manners as the four weeks of the school pa.s.sed away. Here is Mrs. Ward's own account of the contrast presented by the children as they were in the Vacation School and as they could not help being in a mean street only half a mile away:[25]

"Last week a lady interested in the school was pa.s.sing through one of the slum streets to the west of Tottenham Court Road. Much good work has been done there by many agencies. But in August most of the workers are away. Dirty, ragged, fighting or querulous children covered the pavement, or seemed to be bursting out of the grimy houses. The street was filthy, the clothes of the children to match. There was no occupation; the little souls were given up to 'the weight of chance desires'; and whatever happiness there was must have been of rather a perilous sort. The same spectator pa.s.sed on, and half a mile eastward entered the settlement building in Tavistock Place. Here were nearly 300 children (the children of the Evening Session), divided between house and garden, many of them from quarters quite as poor as those she had just traversed. But all was order, friendliness and enjoyment. Every child was clean and neat, though the clothes might be poor; if a boy brushed past the visitor, it would be with a pleasant 'Excuse me, Miss'; in the manual training-room boys looked up from the benches with glee to show the models they had made; the drawing-room of the settlement was full of little ones busy with the unfamiliar delights of brush or pencil; in the library boys were sitting hunched up over _Masterman Ready_, or the ever-adored _Robinson Crusoe_; girls were deep in _Anderson's Fairy Tales_ or _The Cuckoo Clock_, the little ones were reading Mr. Stead's _Books for the Bairns_ or looking at pictures; outside in the garden under the trees clay modelling and kindergarten games were going on, while the sand-pit was crowded with children enjoying themselves heartily without either shouting or fighting. Meanwhile in the big hall parents were thronging in to see the musical drill, the dancing or the acting, or to listen to the singing; the fathers as proud as the mothers that Willie was 'in the Shakespeare,' or Nellie 'in the Gavotte.' The visitor had only to watch to see that the teachers were obeyed at a word, at a glance, and that the children loved to obey. Everywhere was discipline, good temper, pleasure. And next day the school broke up with the joining of 600 voices in the old hymn 'O G.o.d, our help in ages past.' Surely no contrast could be more complete."

And in conclusion Mrs. Ward made her characteristic appeal:

"Shall we not enter seriously on the movement and call on our public authorities to take it up? Who can doubt the need of it, even when all allowance is made for country holidays of all sorts?

Extend and develop country holidays as you will, London in the summer vacation month will never be without its hundreds of thousands of children for whom these Vacation Schools, properly managed, would be almost a boon of fairyland."

The Vacation School had indeed been watched with much interest by the London School Board, which had also co-operated by the lending of furniture and "stock," but the transference of its powers to the London County Council made a bad atmosphere, just at this time, for the adoption of new experiments, and the new "London Education Authority"

which arose in 1903 was only too glad to leave the carrying-on of the Settlement Vacation School to Mrs. Ward. Every year it seemed to increase in popularity. Mr. Holland remained director for thirteen consecutive Augusts (1902-1914); the numbers of the school rose to 1,000 per day in later years, when an additional building became available, and Mrs. Ward could have no greater pleasure, when the pressure of her literary work permitted, than to come up from Stocks for a day to watch her holiday children. But in spite of the universally recognized success of her experiment, this and the "Holiday School" organized by the Browning Settlement from 1904 onwards remained practically the only efforts of the kind carried on in London, until at length, in 1910, the L.C.C. followed suit by opening six Vacation Schools in different parts of the metropolis, housed in the ordinary school buildings and playgrounds. They were an enormous boon to the children of those districts, but the Council did not persist in its good deeds, for after two years these Holiday Schools were allowed to drop, and have never, unfortunately, been revived. Indeed, in June, 1921, a resolution was pa.s.sed, prohibiting any expenditure on Holiday Schools or Organized Playgrounds. So does the London child pay its share of the War Debt.

But the Vacation School at the Settlement has never lapsed, since the first day that Mrs. Ward opened it in August, 1902, although in these times of forced economy the numbers are less than of old. But there, under the great plane-trees in the garden, the trestle-tables are still set up and the children still congregate, bearing their laughing testimony to the memory of one who knew their little hearts, and who, seeing them shepherdless in the hot streets, could not rest until they were gathered in.

CHAPTER X

LONDON LIFE--THE BEGINNINGS AND GROWTH OF THE CHILDREN'S PLAY CENTRES

1904-1917

Both _Lady Rose's Daughter_ and _The Marriage of William Ashe_, which appeared in 1903 and 1905 respectively, are novels of London life, reflecting in their minor characters, their talk and the incidents that accompany the tale, that intimate aquaintance with the world of London which Mrs. Ward had acquired during the many years that she had spent in observing it, in working with it, and in sharing some of the rarer forms of the rewards which it has to give. The central theme in each case is a broadly human one, but the setting and the savour are those of London--that all-devouring London which she loved so well, but from which, after a few weeks of its turmoil, she was always so thankful to escape. It was now twenty years and more since she and Mr. Ward had come to live in the pretty old house in Russell Square where they had first gathered their friends around them, and where her Thursdays had first become an inst.i.tution; but time had not dimmed her zest for friends.h.i.+p and for talk, so that the Thursdays and the frequent dinner-parties continued at Grosvenor Place through all the years that followed. She would never have claimed that they amounted to a _salon_, for, in spite of _Lady Rose's Daughter_, her belief was that a _salon_, properly so-called, was not in the English tradition, and could hardly survive outside Paris; yet I think that if one had taken the opinion of those who frequented them they would have said that Mrs. Ward's afternoons or evenings made a remarkable English equivalent. She herself did not disguise the fact that she regarded good talk as an art, and enjoyed nothing more than the play of mind on mind and the quick thrust and parry that occasionally sweeps across a dinner-table; but she had no illusions as to the natural inapt.i.tude of the English for the art, and would often quote the exasperated remark of her great friend in Rome, Contessa Maria Pasolini, after an evening spent in entertaining English visitors: "You English, you need so much winding up! Now, if I were merely to tear up a piece of paper and throw it down among my French friends, they would talk about it delightfully all the evening!" Hence her injunctions to her children, when they began to take wing and go forth to "social junketings" of their own, not to be stuck-up or blase, and above all "not to sit like a stuck pig when you get there!" To exert one's wits to make a party go was part of one's social duty, just as much as handing the tea-cake or opening the door, and she herself, in spite of a natural absence of small talk which made her formidable sometimes to new acquaintances, would faithfully follow her own precepts. But with her the effort was second nature, for it sprang from her inborn desire to place herself in sympathetic relations with her neighbour, to draw out the best in him, to set him going. And so the talk that was heard at Grosvenor Place, whether at her small luncheon-parties, her Thursdays, or her dinners, always took from her first and foremost the quality of reality; people talked--or made her talk--of the things they knew or cared about, and since her range was so wide, and there was always, as an old friend expressed it, "so much tinder about" among her guests, the result was a certain vividness and vitality that left their mark, and have been long remembered. And, as one of those who knew her best said once on a public occasion,[26] she had the secret of making you feel, as you left her house, that you were a much finer fellow than you thought when you went in; she made you believe in yourself, for she had, by some subtle magic--or perhaps by the simplest of all--brought out gifts or powers in you which you hardly knew that you possessed.

As to the persons who came and went in that pretty room, looking out on the garden of Buckingham Palace, how is it possible to number or name them, or to recall the flavour of their long-vanished conversation?

Many have, like their hostess, pa.s.sed into the unknown: figures like Leslie Stephen, who wrote to her often, especially after his wife's death, and came at intervals to Grosvenor Place for a long _tete-a-tete_, sitting on the sofa beside Mrs. Ward, his ear-trumpet between them; or like the much-loved Burne-Jones, who came at an earlier stage and too soon ceased to come, for he died in 1898, leaving her only a little bundle of letters which she affectionately treasured; or again, like Lady Wemyss, the deep-voiced, queerly-dressed _grande dame_, whom Mrs. Ward loved for her heart's sake, and of whom she has recorded a suggestion, perhaps, in the Lady Winterbourne of _Marcella_; and ah! how many more, of whom it would be unprofitable for the after-born to write.

Mrs. Ward has left in her novels the mirror of the world in which she lived and moved, and in her _Recollections_ a more intimate picture of her friends. To try to add to these records would be but to tempt the G.o.ds.

But at what a cost in fatigue of body and mind even her entertaining was carried on, those who pa.s.sed their days with Mrs. Ward may at least tell. It was always the same story. She put so much of herself into whatever she was doing that the effort produced exhaustion. And so, after her Thursdays, or perhaps after some gathering of Settlement workers to whom she had been talking individually, she would collapse upon the sofa, white and speechless, only fit to be "stroked" and left to gather her forces again as best she might. There was one Thursday in the month when, after her own "At Home," she was obliged to attend the Settlement Council meeting at eight o'clock. This meant that there was no time for recuperation between the two, but only for a hurried meal, filled with hasty consultations as to the evening's notes, letters and telephonings that must be done during her absence; then she would go off, and some time towards eleven would return, worn out and crumpled, though perhaps with the light of battle still in her eye over some point well raised or some victory won. At the Settlement she would have given no hint of any disability, and would have been the life and soul of the meeting. Perhaps only her friend the Warden knew what a struggle against physical pain and weakness her presence there had implied. We used to chaff her sometimes about the physical ailments of her heroines, who, according to our robust ideas, were too fond of turning white or of letting their lips tremble, but this trick of her novels expressed only too deep an experience of her own, since never, in all the years that she was writing, did she know what it was to have a day of ordinary physical strength. On many and many of her guests she made the illusion of being a strong woman, but could they have seen her when the talk and the excitement were over, they would have known that it was only her spirit that had carried her through. The body was always dragged after, a more or less protesting slave.

Her way of life at Grosvenor Place was naturally one which involved a good deal of expenditure. Sometimes she would have searchings of heart over this, or even momentary spasms of economy, but it sprang in reality from two fundamental causes--one her delight in beautiful things, inherited even in her starved childhood from her mother, and shared to the full in later years with her husband; the other this constant ill-health, which made her incapable of "roughing it," and rendered a certain amount of luxury indispensable if she was to get through her daily task. Good pictures and the right kind of furniture gave her a definite joy for their own sakes, while the arrangement of the chairs and tables in the manner best calculated to encourage talk was always a fascinating problem. Clothes, too, were not to be despised, and though she liked to sit and work in some old rag that had seen better days, it amused her also to go and plan some beautiful thing with her dressmaker, Mrs. Kerr, and it amused her to wear the "creation" when it was finished. Her faithful maid, Lizzie, who had been with us since the early days of Russell Square, and who was often more nurse than maid to her, cut and altered and renovated in her little workroom upstairs, while every now and then Mrs. Ward would issue forth and make a raid upon the shops, coming home either triumphant to face the criticism of her family, or very low because she knew she had been beguiled into buying something which she now positively hated. She was extremely particular, too, about her daughters' clothes, nor could she make up her mind, when they came out, to give them a dress allowance, being far too much interested herself in the problem of how they looked; but even when she was fully responsible for some luckless garment of theirs she would often break out, on its first appearance, with the fatal words, "Go upstairs, take that off, and let me _never_ see it again until it's completely re-made!"--usually uttered amid helpless giggles, for this had become, by long use, a stock phrase in our family.

Strangers coming from afar with some claim upon her kindness found always a ready welcome at her house. In addition to her French and Italian friends, who would find their way to her door as soon as they arrived in London, she had many warm friends.h.i.+ps with Americans, beginning with her much-loved cousin, Frederick W. Whitridge, who had married Matthew Arnold's daughter Lucy, and had got Mr. Ward to build a comely house for her within half a mile of Stocks. "Cousin Fred," with his charming blue eyes and white moustache and beard, had been a truly Olympian figure to us children even in the days of Russell Square, for had he not deposited on our plates at breakfast, one golden morning, a sovereign each for the two elders and half a sovereign for the youngest?

And as the years pa.s.sed on, and he became the intimate friend of Roosevelt and a recognized leader of the New York Bar, the friends.h.i.+p between him and Mrs. Ward grew ever deeper, so that his shrewd wisdom and inimitable humour, as well as his habit of spoiling the people he was fond of, came to be looked for each summer as one of the true pleasures of the year. His son was one of the first Americans to join the British Army in 1914, but he himself, like Henry James, was not to see the day for which both he and Roosevelt had toiled so hard. He died in December, 1916, four months before America "came in." Mr. Lowell, the American Amba.s.sador during the 'eighties, had been a frequent visitor at Russell Square, while his successors, Hay, Bayard and Choate, were all on friendly terms with Mrs. Ward. Comrades in her own trade whom it always pleased her to see were Mr. Gilder, editor of the _Century Magazine_, welcome whether he came as publisher or friend; Mr. G.o.dkin, of the _Evening Post_, the most intellectual among American journalists; Mr. S. S. McClure, who had first tracked down Mrs. Ward at Borough Farm, and remained ever afterwards on cordial, not to say familiar, terms with her; Charles Dudley Warner, Mrs. Wharton, the William James's, and many more. But the most intimate of all were certain women: that inseparable and delightful pair, Mrs. Fields and Miss Sarah Orne Jewett (the writer of New England stories), who twice found their way to Stocks, and many times to Grosvenor Place, and lastly that other Bostonian, Miss Sara Norton, whose friends.h.i.+p for Dorothy made her almost as another daughter during her visits to Stocks, to Levens, or to the Villa Bonaventura.

But it was not by any means only for the "distinguished," whether from home or abroad, that Grosvenor Place laid itself out. One of its princ.i.p.al functions was that of making the head-quarters in London for all the younger members of Mrs. Ward's own family, as well as for the grandchildren who began about this time to find their way to her knee.

For to all such young people she was mother, fairy G.o.dmother and friend rolled into one. Settlement workers and a.s.sociates, teachers and many "dim" people of various professions would find her as accessible as her strenuous hours of labour would allow. All she asked of those who came to her house was that they should have something real to contribute--and if possible that they should contribute it without egotism. Certainly she did not suffer bores gladly; an ordinary bore was bad enough, but an egotistic bore would produce a peculiar kind of nervous irritation in her which we who watched could always detect, however manfully she strove to conceal it. Nor could she ever bring herself to observe the strict rules of London etiquette, so that to "go calling" was an unknown occupation in her calendar, and in spite of two daughters and a secretary her social lapses and forgetfulnesses sometimes plunged her in black despair. When she had hopelessly missed Mrs. So-and-So's party, to which she had fully meant to go, she would sorrowfully declare that the motto of the Ward family ought to be: "Never went and never wrote."

It is needless to point out how exhausting this London life became to one who pressed so much into it as Mrs. Ward. For although she could rarely write her books in London, being far too distracted by the demands of the hungry world upon her time, it was mainly at Grosvenor Place that she hammered out her schemes for the welfare of London's children, talking them over with members of the School Board or the County Council, driving about to some of the poorest districts to see with her own eyes the conditions under which they lived, and planning out the details in mornings of hard work with Miss Churcher. The development of the Cripples' Schools, both in London and the Provinces, was very much on her shoulders at this time, for she felt the imperative need for extending them to other parts of the country, and undertook many arduous missionary journeys on their behalf during the few years that followed their establishment in London. There, as the schools grew and spread under the fostering care of the L.C.C., it was the auxiliary services of after-care, feeding and training that claimed the princ.i.p.al share of her attention. But she had a very efficient committee to a.s.sist her in these matters, under the chairmans.h.i.+p of Miss Maude Lawrence, so that gradually her responsibility for the London cripples grew less heavy, and she was able to turn to other schemes that now began to simmer in her mind for the welfare of the whole as well as the halt among London's children.

For the remarkable success of the Children's Recreation School at the Settlement, which by the year 1904 had attendances of some 1,700 children a week (all, of course, wholly voluntary), led Mrs. Ward to feel that some effort might be made to carry the civilizing effect of such centres of play into the remoter and still more squalid regions of the East and South. Already the Children's Happy Evenings' a.s.sociation held weekly or fortnightly "Evenings" in some eighty or ninety schools, giving much pleasure to the children wherever they went, but Mrs. Ward's plan was for something on a more intensive scale than this, something that might exert a continuous influence over the lives of large numbers of children in any given district, as the occupations and delights of the "Pa.s.smore" did over the children of St. Pancras. She founded a small committee, in October, 1904, to go into the matter and to lay proposals before the Education Committee of the London County Council: proposals to the effect that the "Play Centres Committee" should be allowed the free use of certain schools after school hours on five evenings a week, from 5.30 to 7.30, and also on Sat.u.r.day mornings, for the purpose of providing games, physical exercises and handwork occupations for the children of that district. The Council readily gave its consent, and Mrs. Ward applied herself to the task of raising sufficient funds for the maintenance of eight "Evening Play Centres" in certain school buildings, to be carried on for a year as an experiment. She obtained promises amounting to nearly 800, largely from the same friends as had watched her work at the Settlement, and with this she felt that she could go forward. After careful inquiry, four schools in the East End were selected, with one in Somers Town and two in Lambeth and Walworth respectively, while Canon Barnett offered Toynbee Hall itself as the scene of an eighth Centre. Mrs. Ward devoted special pains to the selection of the eight Superintendents who were to have charge of these Play Centres, for she rightly felt that on their wisdom and skill in handling the large numbers of children who would pa.s.s through their hands would largely depend the success of the adventure. Gymnastic instructors, handwork teachers and many voluntary helpers were also secured and a.s.signed to the various Centres, so that the staff in each case consisted of a _cadre_ of paid and professional workers, a.s.sisted by as many volunteers as possible. Mrs. Ward's long experience at the Settlement had convinced her that this nucleus of paid workers was essential to the smooth and continuous working of any such scheme, since although the best volunteers were invaluable in supplying an element of initiative and originality in the working out of new ideas, still there was also an element of irregularity in their attendance which detracted much from their usefulness! And in proportion as the Centres succeeded in their object of attracting the children from the streets, so much the more disastrous would it be if large numbers of them were left shepherdless on foggy evenings because Miss So-and-So had a bad cold.

Mrs. Ward was much criticized in certain quarters for bringing the "professional element" into her Play Centres, but she knew better than her critics how far the voluntary element might safely be trusted, and how far it must be supplemented by the professional. She was playing all the time for a _big thing_, with possibilities of expansion not only in London but in the great industrial towns as well, besides which she always hotly resented the suggestion that the paid worker must be inferior in quality to the volunteer. On the contrary, it interested her immensely to see how the professional teachers, both men and women, would often reveal new and unsuspected qualities in the freer atmosphere of the Play Centre, while the greater intimacy that they acquired with their children was--as they often acknowledged--of the greatest value to them in their day-school work.

The first eight Play Centres opened their doors to the children on the first Monday in February, 1905, and it may be imagined with what anxiety and delight Mrs. Ward watched their development during these first weeks. The children had been secured in the first instance by invitations distributed through the Head Teachers to those who, in their opinion, stood most in need of shelter and occupation after school hours, i.e. princ.i.p.ally to those whose parents were both out at work till 7 or 8 o'clock; but after the ice was broken, Alf would bring 'Arry and Edie would bring Maud, till the utmost capacity of the cla.s.ses was reached, and Mrs. Ward's heart was both gladdened and saddened by the tale that her staff had as many children as they could possibly cope with, and that many had of necessity been turned away. By the end of the year the weekly attendance at the eight Centres amounted to nearly 6,000, and a year later, with ten Centres instead of eight, they had risen to over 10,000. This meant that Mrs. Ward had struck upon a real need of the wandering, loafing child-population of our greatest city--a need that will in fact be perennial so long as the housing of the miles upon miles of bricks and mortar that we call the working-cla.s.s districts remains what it is. "It all grows steadily beyond my hopes," wrote Mrs.

Ward to Mrs. Creighton in October, 1906, "and I believe that in three or four years we shall see it developing into an ordinary part of education, in the true sense. There is no difficulty about money--the difficulty is to find the time and nerve-strength to carry it on, even with such help as Bessie Churcher's."

But the burden of raising the increasing sums required was, in truth, very great, so that Mrs. Ward, with her belief in the future of the movement, was already at work to get the Play Centre principle recognized and embodied in an Act of Parliament. The opportunity arose on Mr. Birrell's ill-fated Bill of 1906, but although Mrs. Ward's clause, enabling any Local Education Authority "to provide for children attending a public elementary school, Vacation Schools, Play Centres, or means of recreation during their holidays or at such other times as the Local Education Authority may prescribe," was accepted by the Government, and pa.s.sed the House of Lords in December, 1906, the Bill itself was dropped soon afterwards, having been wrecked on the usual rocks of sectarian pa.s.sion. Fortunately, however, Mr. McKenna, who succeeded Mr. Birrell at the Board of Education, was able to carry a smaller measure, known as the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, in the summer of the next year (1907). This Act duly contained the Play Centres clause, as well as the provisions for the medical inspection and treatment of school-children which have since borne such beneficent fruit. Already in the previous summer, when the clause was first before the House of Commons, Mr. Sydney Buxton had said at the opening of the Settlement Vacation School that he felt sure it would go down to history as the "Mary Ward Clause."

But this victory had not been won except at the cost of considerable friction with the only other body that attempted to cater in any systematic fas.h.i.+on for the needs of London's children in the evening hours--I mean the Children's Happy Evenings' a.s.sociation. The a.s.sociation, which embodied the "voluntary principle" in its purest form, could not tolerate the idea that the Public Education Authority might in the future come to encroach upon a field which they regarded as their own--even though their "Evenings" were avowedly held only once a week, sometimes only once a fortnight, and could not touch more than the barest fringe of the child population of each district. They disliked the professional worker, and they abhorred the bare idea that public money might eventually be spent upon the recreation of the children--ignoring the experience of America, where the public authority was doing more each year for the playtime of its children, and forgetting, perhaps, that at the "preparatory schools" to which their own little boys were sent, almost more time and thought were spent upon their games than upon their "education" proper. And so they sent a deputation to Mr. Birrell to oppose Mrs. Ward's clause, and their workers attacked Mrs. Ward and her precious Play Centres in other ways and on other occasions as well; but they found that she was a shrewd fighter, for even though during the summer of 1906 she was laid low by that most disabling complaint, a terrible attack of eczema, she compelled herself to write from her bed a trenchant letter to _The Times_ in defence of the professional worker, and also a very conciliatory letter to her friend Lady Jersey, the President of the Happy Evenings' a.s.sociation.

"It is most unwelcome to me," she wrote, "this dispute over a public cause--especially when I see or dream what could be done by co-operation. What I _wish_ is that you would join the Evening Play Centres Committee, and see for yourself what it means. There is nothing in our movement which is necessarily antagonistic to yours, but I think we may claim that ours is more in sympathy with the general ideas on the subject that are stirring people's minds than yours."

The affair ended in the acceptance by the Government of an amendment to Mrs. Ward's clause, authorizing the Local Education Authorities to "encourage and a.s.sist the continuance or establishment of Voluntary Agencies" in any exercise of powers under the new Act. The two a.s.sociations--the Happy Evenings and the Play Centres--continued to exist side by side until the inevitable march of events led, under the stress of war, to the issue of Mr. Fisher's authoritative Memorandum (January, 1917), admitting the obligation of the State in the matter of the children's recreation, and announcing that in future the Board would undertake half the "approved expenditure" of Evening Play Centre committees. The Children's Happy Evenings' committee thereupon decided, in dignified fas.h.i.+on, that their work was ended, and dissolved their a.s.sociation. Peace be to its ashes! It had given joy, much joy, to many thousands of London children, as Mrs. Ward always most fully recognized, and if in the end it stood in the way of the new and younger power which was capable of giving an almost indefinite extension to the children's pleasure, could it but have a free field, the reluctance of the a.s.sociation to cede any ground was only, after all, a very natural affair.

But once the new Act was pa.s.sed, Mrs. Ward was to be disappointed in her hopes that the London Education Authority would take advantage of the powers conferred upon it in order to a.s.sist the movement financially.

Certain members of the Council elected in 1907 (in which the majority was overwhelmingly Moderate) urged her to present an appeal to the Education Committee, asking that the cost of the Handwork, Drill and Gymnastic cla.s.ses held at the Play Centres might be defrayed by the Council; this she did in a statement which she drew up and presented in October, 1907, weaving into it with all the practised skill that she knew so well how to throw into such doc.u.ments firstly a picture of the child-life of such districts as Hoxton, Walworth and Notting Dale in the winter evenings, when the children were too often "turned out after tea into the streets and told not to come home till bedtime"; then a brief account of the small beginnings and immense growth of the Children's Recreation School at the Pa.s.smore Edwards Settlement, with its offshoots, the ten Play Centres held in the London schools, and finally a striking list of individual cases, showing how the Centres had already attracted to themselves scores of boys and girls whose conditions of life were leading them into idling and vagabondage of all sorts, through the mere lack of anything to do in the dark hours.

"Perhaps the most striking revelation of the whole work," wrote Mrs. Ward, "has been the positive hunger for hand-occupation which exists among the older children. The attendances at the handwork cla.s.ses drop off a little when June begins, and from June to October they are better discontinued in favour of cricket, swimming and outdoor games in general. But from October onwards through the whole winter and up to the end of May, the demand for handwork never slackens. Two or three times the number of children who are now being taught would eagerly come to cla.s.ses if they were opened.

Basket-work, wood-work and cobbling are unfailing delights, and it is here that we ask most earnestly for the help of the County Council. Rough boys, who would soon, if left to themselves, become on leaving school a nuisance to the community and to the police, can be got hold of through handwork, and in no other way. And when once the taste has been acquired, there remains the strong probability that after school is over they will be drawn into the net of Evening Cla.s.ses and Polytechnics, and so rescued for an honest life."

But the Education Committee, burdened as it was in that year with the first arrangements for medical inspection and treatment, as well as with the demand for the feeding of necessitous children, did not feel able to undertake this further responsibility, although its reception of Mrs.

Ward's memorandum was extremely sympathetic. All that the Council would do at this stage was to remit the charges previously made for cleaning and caretaking of the schools during Play Centre hours, a concession which amounted to a grant of about 20 a year per Centre.

Mrs. Ward was therefore thrown back upon her own resources for the financing of her great experiment. No thought of reduction or even of standing still could be admitted, for with the growing fame of the Centres, appeals began to come in from Care Committees, from School Managers, from Clergy, and from hard-worked Magistrates, begging that Centres might be opened in their districts, while the owner of a jam factory in South London offered to pay part of the cost of a Centre if it could be opened near his works, _because the children used to come down to the factory gates in the evenings and cry till their mothers came out_. Mr. Samuel's Children's Act of 1908 created the post of Probation Officer for the supervision of "first offenders"; the first two or three of these were appointed, on Mrs. Ward's recommendation, from among her Play Centre Superintendents, since the intimate knowledge they possessed of the children's lives gave them special qualifications for their task. It soon became the practice of all Probation Officers to refer their lawless little charges (often aged only nine or ten!) to the nearest Play Centre as "every-night children," there to forget their wild or thieving ways in the fascinations of cobbling, or wood-work, or games, or military drill. But in order to respond to these growing appeals Mrs. Ward had to undertake an ever-increasing burden of financial responsibility, as well as of organization. In 1905 the first eight Centres had cost a little over 900; in 1908, with twelve Centres and total attendances of 620,000, the bill had risen to 3,000; in 1911, with seventeen Centres and attendances of 1,170,000, it was 4,500; in 1913, with twenty Centres and attendances of 1,500,000, it was 5,700.

How she succeeded in raising these large sums in addition to her efforts for the Settlement; how she found time, on the top of her literary work and her many semi-political interests, for the close attention that she gave, week in, week out, to the progress of each individual Centre and the peculiarities of every Superintendent, will always remain a mystery.

Her unconquerable optimism, which became a more and more marked trait of her character as the years went on, helped her through every crisis, while her joy in the children's happiness acted both as a tonic and a spur. Every winter she would issue her eloquent Report, sending it out with irresistible personal letters to a large number of subscribers; many a London landlord was made to stand and deliver for the children of meaner streets than those which paid him rent; many a factory owner was persuaded to follow the example of the jam-manufacturer above-mentioned.

Yet when all was done there would usually remain a deficit of several hundred pounds, which must be wiped out in order to avert a bankers'

strike; then Mrs. Ward would gather up all the outstanding facts of the year's work and present them in one of those remarkable letters to _The Times_ of which she possessed the secret, charming the cheques for very shame out of the pockets of the kind-hearted. And thus, with incredible toil and with many moments of despair, the organization was kept going and the indispensable funds supplied; but it was a labour of Hercules, and her letters throughout these years bear witness to the exhausting nature of the task.

Once more, in 1913, Mrs. Ward hoped that the recognition of her long effort was not far off, for both Government and County Council expressed themselves, through the mouths of two distinguished leaders, as very warmly in sympathy with it. She had organized an exhibition of Play Centre hand-work at the Settlement--toy models of all sorts, baskets, dolls, needlework, cobbled boots and shoes--and invited her old friend Lord Haldane, then Lord Chancellor, and Mr. Cyril Cobb, Chairman of the Education Committee, L.C.C., to speak at the opening ceremony. Both speakers emphasized the fact that Mrs. Ward had now proved her case, and that, as Lord Haldane said, the Play Centre movement had "reached a stage in which it must be recognized as one, at least, of the elements in a national system of education, as one of the things that must come within the scope and observance of the Board of Education. Such a movement must begin by voluntary effort. It has already reached a stage in which I hope it is going to attract a great deal of official attention." Such words could not but encourage Mrs. Ward to hope that help was near, for by that time the Board of Education had already inaugurated the system of giving aid to voluntary societies, if their aims and methods were approved, by a proportional grant on their expenditure. Yet 1913 pa.s.sed away and nothing came of it. One may perhaps shrewdly suspect, in looking back, that the authorities knew well enough when a thing was a "going concern" and needed no effort of theirs to help it up the hill. Mrs. Ward was their willing horse; they continued, with the instinct of _laissez-faire_ which has so often preserved the British Const.i.tution, to let her pull her own load. But a time was at hand when _laissez-faire_ and all other comfortable doctrines were to be swept away in the shock that set the whole fabric of our society reeling. The outbreak of war, which seemed at first to threaten the very existence of such things as Play Centres, was in fact to reveal and establish their necessity. After two more years of heroic effort to keep them going amid the flood of war appeals, Mrs. Ward had her reward at last in Mr. Fisher's Memorandum of January, 1917. The State had recognized the principle that in the children lay the best hope of England, and Mrs. Ward had her way. Thence-forward the Board of Education undertook to pay half the "approved expenditure" of the Evening Play Centres committee.

But the establishment and growth of the London Play Centres, heavy and exacting as was the toil that it involved, did not by any means exhaust Mrs. Ward's efforts to improve the lot of London's children during these years. In 1908 she opened two additional Vacation Schools in the East End; one in a school with a "roof-playground" in Bow, the other in an ordinary school in Hoxton.

"On Friday I had a field-day at the Bow Vacation School," she wrote to J.P.T. in August, 1908. "The air on the roof-playground was like Margate, and the children's happiness and good-temper delightful to see. There were flowers all about, and sunny views over East London to distant country, and round games, and little ones happy with toys, and all sorts of nice things. Downstairs a splendid game of hand-ball in the playground, and a cool hall full of boys playing games and reading. As for the Settlement, it has never been so enchanting. There are 1,150 children daily, and all the teachers say it is better than ever. The Duke's sand-heap and the new drinking-fountain are great additions. Hoxton goes to my heart! It is _too_ crowded, and there is nothing but asphalt playgrounds, with no shade till late. Yet the children swarm, and when you see them sitting listlessly, doing absolutely nothing, in the broiling dirty streets outside you can't wonder. I am having the playground shelter scrubbed out with carbolic daily, lined with some flowers in pots, and filled with small tables and chairs for the little ones. They have 800 children, and we have been obliged to give extra help."

Then in the next year, besides maintaining the roof-playground, she opened another experimental Holiday-school near by for a small number of delicate and ailing children whose names were on the "necessitous" list, and who were therefore eligible for free dinners. Mrs. Ward delighted in continuing and improving the free dinners for these little waifs during the holidays, as well as in providing suitable occupations for their fingers, and it was with real pride that she returned them to their regular school at the end of the holidays, thriving, and with a record of increased weight in almost every case. But the very success of these attempts, together with the ever-increasing size and attractiveness of the Settlement Vacation School, filled her with distress at the wasted opportunities presented by the empty playgrounds of the ordinary London schools during the August holiday, for she well knew from her own experience and from that of New York, which she had closely studied,[27]

that it only needed the presence of two or three active kindergarten teachers and a supply of toys and materials to attract to these open s.p.a.ces all the hot and weary children from the neighbouring streets and there to make them happy. Her fingers itched to do it, tired though they were with so many other labours. It was not, however, till the spring of 1911 that she was able to take this work in hand, but then she addressed herself to it with all her usual energy, presenting a scheme to the L.C.C. for the "organization" of both the boys' and the girls'

playgrounds at twenty-six London schools during the summer holiday. The Council met her once more with complete confidence, lending all the larger equipment required; Mrs. Ward raised a special fund of nearly 1,000, and devoted much attention to the engagement of the Superintendents for the girls' grounds and the Games Masters for the boys'. Then, just before the end of term, notices were distributed in the neighbouring schools announcing that such and such a playground would be opened for games and quiet occupations during the holidays, and the result was awaited with some quaking. Would there be a crowd or a desert? and if the former, would the Superintendents be able to keep order? The answer was not long in coming. "I let in 400 boys," wrote one of the Games Masters after his first session, "and the street outside was still black with them." But in spite of the eager crowds which everywhere made their appearance, order _was_ kept most successfully.

Mrs. Ward herself visited the playgrounds constantly, and at the end of the month wrote her joyous report to _The Times_:

"Inside one came always upon a cheerful scene. In the girls'

playgrounds, during those hottest August days, one saw crowds of girls and babies playing in the shade of the school buildings, or forming happy groups for reading or sewing, or filling the trestle tables under the shelters, where were picture-books to be looked at, beads to thread, paints and paper to draw with, or wool for knitting, or portable swings where the elder girls could swing the little ones in turn. Then, if you asked the schoolkeeper to pa.s.s you through a locked door, you were in the boys' playground, where b.a.l.l.s were whizzing, and the s.p.a.ce was divided up by a clever Superintendent between the cricket of the bigger boys--very near, often, to the real thing--and the first efforts, not a whit less energetic, of the younger ones. In one corner, also, there would be mats and jumping-stands; in another a group playing tennis with a chalked line instead of a net, while the shelters were full, as in the girl's ground, of all kinds of quiet occupations. Management was everything. It was wonderful what a Superintendent with a real turn for the thing could make of his ground, what a hold he got upon his boys, and how well, in such cases, the boys behaved. There was a real loyalty and _esprit de corps_ in these grounds; and when, in the last week, 'sports' and displays were organized for the benefit of the parents, it was really astonis.h.i.+ng to see with what ease a competent man or woman could handle a crowded playground, how eagerly the children obeyed, how courteous and happy they were."

The number of attendances had been prodigious--424,000 for the whole month, or 106,000 per week--and the grat.i.tude of the parents who had pressed in to see the final displays was touching to hear. In the next year Mrs. Ward persuaded the L.C.C. to share the experiment with her, the Council opening "organized playgrounds" in twenty schools and she herself in twenty more; this time the organization was in many points improved, and the results still more satisfactory. But although the Council gave her to understand that they would undertake to carry on the experiment in future, being convinced of its necessity, no further action was taken, and the playgrounds of London, in spite of Mrs. Ward's object-lesson, have been suffered to relapse into that condition of uselessness and sometimes of positive danger to the children's morals from which her efforts in 1911 and 1912 had sought to rescue them.

The story of Mrs. Ward's activities for the welfare of London's children has taken us far beyond the period of her life at which we had otherwise arrived. To return briefly to her literary work, it may be said, I think, that those two novels of London life, _Lady Rose's Daughter_ and _William Ashe_, had marked its highest point in sheer brilliance and success; after these the long autumn of her novel-writing began, which, like all mellow autumns, had its moments of more true and delicate beauty than the full summer had possessed. The first of these autumn novels, if I may use the term, was _Fenwick's Career_, which appeared in May, 1906; it was not a great popular success, like the previous two, but to those who read it in these after-times its sober excellence of workmans.h.i.+p, as shown especially in the scenes at Versailles and at the Westmorland cottage where husband and wife meet again after their long separation, are perhaps more attractive than all the brilliance of poor Kitty Bristol or of the s.h.i.+fting groups in Lady Henry's house in Bruton Street. Mrs. Ward had been criticized in the case of these three novels for having made use of the persons and incidents of the past without any definite acknowledgment, but she defended herself vigorously, in a short Preface to _Fenwick's Career_, in words that I cannot do better than reproduce: