CHAPTER VII

CHILDREN AND ADULTS AT THE PASSMORE EDWARDS SETTLEMENT--THE FOUNDATION OF THE INVALID CHILDREN'S SCHOOL

1897-1899

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:

"We believe that many changes in the conditions of life and labour are needed, and are coming to pass; but we believe also that men, without any change except in themselves and in their feelings towards one another, might make this world a better and happier place.

"Therefore, with the same sympathies but different experiences of life, we meet to exchange ideas and to discuss social questions, in the hope that as we learn to know one another better, a feeling of fellowship may arise among us."

And though some of the younger candidates seemed to have joined the Settlement rather to dance at the Social Evenings than to "exchange ideas and to discuss social questions," let alone to attend the lectures and classes, still the leaven worked, so that at the end of three years the Warden could report that "an increasing number of Associates use the opportunities of the Settlement to the utmost, and are always to the front when service and help are needed. Such Associates, both men and women, are a chief source of whatever power for good the Settlement may exert."

And indeed, with what life and movement the whole building hummed on any evening of the week, in those first exciting years! Apart altogether from the children's work, the attendances of adults during the busy winter terms reached some 1,400 a week, and must surely have represented, when translated into terms of human aspiration or enjoyment, much lightening of the burdens and monotonies of life in the dull streets that surrounded the Settlement. Mrs. Ward herself, in an appeal in favour of the work issued in 1901, summed up in these words her feeling on the place that Settlements might fill in the life of London's workers:

"Stand in the street now and look back at the 'Community House'--the Settlement building and its surroundings. The high windows shine; in and out pass men and women, boys and girls, going to class, or concert, or drill, to play a game of chess or billiards, or merely to sit in a pleasant and quiet room, well lit and warmed, to read a book or listen to music. To your right stretches the densely peopled district of King's Cross and Gray's Inn Road, Clerkenwell. Behind the Settlement runs the busy Euston Road, and the wilderness of Somers Town. Immediately beside you, if you turn your head, you may see the opening of a narrow street and the outline of a large block of model dwellings, whence many frequenters of the Settlement have been drawn. Carry your minds into the rooms of these old tenement houses which fill the streets east of Marchmont Street, the streets, say, lying between you and Prospect Terrace Board School. No doubt the aspect of these rooms varies with the character of the occupants. But even at their best, how cramped they are, how lacking in space, air, beauty, judged by those standards which a richer class applies to its own dwellings as a matter of course! and though we may hope that a reforming legislation may yet do something for the dwellings of the London working-class in the essential matters of air and sanitation, it is not easy to foresee a time when the workman's house shall do more than supply him with the simplest necessaries--with shelter, with breathing-room, sleeping-room, food-room. Yet, as we fully realize, the self-respecting and industrious artisan has instincts towards the beauties and dignities of life. He likes spacious rooms, and soft colour, and pictures to look at, as much as anyone else; he wants society, art, music, a quiet chair after hard work, stimulus for the brain after manual labour, amusement after effort, just like his neighbour in Mayfair or Kensington. The young men and maidens want decent places other than the streets and the public-house in which to meet and dance and amuse each other. They need--as we all need--contact with higher education and gentler manners. They want--as we all ought to want--to set up a social standard independent of money or occupation, determined by manners in the best sense, by kindness, intelligence, mutual sympathy, work for the commonweal. They want surroundings for their children after school hours which, without loosening the home-tie, shall yet supplement their own narrow and much-taxed accommodation; which shall humanize, and soften, and discipline. They want more physical exercise, more access to the country, more organization of holidays. All these things are to be had in or through the House Beautiful--through the Settlement, the 'Community' or 'Combination' house of the future. The Socialist dreams of attaining them through the Collectivist organization of the State. But at any rate he will admit that his goal is far, far distant; probably he feels it more distant now than he and his fellows thought it thirty years ago. Let him, let all of us work meanwhile for something near our hands, for the deepening and extension of the Settlement movement, for the spread, that is, of knowledge of the higher pleasures, and of a true social power among the English working-class."

How instinct are these words with the idealisms of a bygone generation, a generation that knew not Communism or Proletarian Schools! No doubt, nowadays, we have gone beyond all that; we may not speak of the "self-respecting and industrious artisan"; class-war is the word of power instead of class-appeasement. So far on the onward road have we travelled since 1901!

For the rest, Mrs. Ward's main task during these early years was to use her gifts of understanding, of patience and of human sympathy in keeping all the workers at the Settlement together, in straightening out the differences that would arise among so varied a crew of energetic people, and in pushing forward the work in ever new directions. All difficulties were referred to her by Residents, by Associates, by Warden and Treasurer. On her also rested the responsibility for raising the necessary money. Much helped by the Duke of Bedford, who remitted the ground-rent, and also gave a considerable subscription, she prospered beyond all rational probability in the latter task. Her many friends were touched by her infectious enthusiasm, and gladly helped her to the best of their ability, so that the deficits on each year's working turned out to be far less than the prudent had expected. Such a letter as the following was not uncommon--though the amount enclosed did not always reach so round a figure:--

_May 25, 1898._

DEAR MRS. HUMPHRY WARD,--

I shall be very happy to dine with you on the 14th of June.

You once said that the P. Edwards Settlement would not be disdainful of subscriptions, and I had not anything to give at the time. I can now send you with pleasure a cheque for £100. I am sure you will find some good use for it.

Yours very truly, NORTHBROOK.

The use found for Lord Northbrook's gift was in tidying and beautifying the garden at the back of the Settlement--a piece of land, shaded by fine old plane trees, which the Duke kept in his own hands, but allowed the Settlement to use for a nominal fee. It was now laid down in grass, and became a vital element in the carrying out of Mrs. Ward's further schemes for the welfare of her London children. It was there that she opened her first "Vacation School" in 1902 for children left to play and quarrel in the streets during the August holiday, and there too that she could see health returning to the faces of her cripples, after the opening of the "Invalid Children's School" in February, 1899.

* * * * *

In looking back over the origin of Mrs. Ward's interest in crippled and invalid children, the vision of our old house in Russell Square rises once more before me, with its gravelled garden at the rear running back to meet the Queen Square gardens to the east of us, for there, across those old plane-shaded spaces, rose the modest buildings of the "Alexandra Hospital for Diseases of the Hip"--or, as we used to call it for short, the "Hip Hospital." What "Diseases of the Hip" exactly were was an obscure point to our childish minds, but we knew that our mother cared very much for the children lying there, that all our old toys went to amuse them, and that sometimes a lame boy or girl would appear at the cottage down the lane past Borough Farm, which was Mrs. Ward's earliest attempt at a convalescent home for ailing Londoners. No doubt many another Bloomsbury family did just as much as we for these helpless little ones, but the sight of them kindled in her the spark of imagination, of creative force or what you will, that would not accept their condition passively, but after many years forged from time and circumstance the opportunity for a fundamental improvement of their lives.

The opportunity presented itself in the tempting emptiness of the Settlement rooms during the day-time. From five o'clock onwards they were used to the uttermost, but all the morning and early afternoon they stood tenantless, asking for occupation. Mrs. Ward had heard of a little class for crippled children carried on at the Women's University Settlement, Southwark, by Miss Sparkes, and of another in Stepney organized by Mr. and Mrs. G. T. Pilcher, and before the new Settlement was a year old she was already making inquiries from her friends on the London School Board as to whether it might be possible to obtain the Board's assistance in opening a small school for Crippled Children at the Passmore Edwards Settlement. Already London possessed a few Special Schools for the "mentally defective"; the Progressive party was in the ascendant on the School Board, and among its chiefs were certain old friends of Mrs. Ward's--Mr. Lyulph Stanley (now Lord Sheffield) and Mr. Graham Wallas, who knew something of her powers and of the probability that anything to which she set her hand in earnest would be carried through. Mrs. Ward on her side believed that the number of crippled but educable children scattered through London was far greater than anyone supposed, and moreover that the policy of drafting them into the new schools for the mentally defective (as was being done in some cases) was fundamentally unsound. In the summer of 1898, therefore, she formed a sub-committee of the Settlement Council, which undertook to carry out a thorough inquiry in the neighbourhood of Tavistock Place into the numbers of invalid children living at home and not attending ordinary school, whose infirmities would yet permit them to attend a special centre of the type that she had in mind. The help of all the neighbouring hospitals was asked for and most ungrudgingly given, in the supplying of lists of suitable children, while the Invalid Children's Aid Association actively helped in the work of visiting, and the School Board directed their Attendance Officers to assist Mrs. Ward by providing the names of children exempted on the ground of ill-health from attending school. Sad indeed were the secrets revealed by this inquiry--of helpless children left at home all day, perhaps with a little food within reach, while mother and father were out at work, with _nothing on earth to do_, and only the irregular and occasional visits of some kind-hearted neighbour to look forward to.

"I have a vivid recollection," writes one of the most devoted workers of the I.C.A.A., Mrs. Townsend, "of being asked by a neighbour to visit two small boys in a particularly dirty and unsavoury street. I found the door open, felt my way along a pitch-dark passage, and found at the end of it a small dark room, very barely furnished: in one corner was a bed, on which lay a boy of ten with spinal trouble; in the other corner were two kitchen chairs, on one of which sat a boy of seven, with hip disease, his leg propped on the other. Between them stood a small table, and on it a tumbler of water and a plate with slices of bread and jam. The mother of these two was at work all day: at 6 a.m. she put their food for the day on the table and went off, leaving them all alone until she got home from work dead tired at 8 p.m. At least there were two of them, which made it a little less dreary for them than for another spinal case in the next street, who was left in the same way and was dependent on a kindly but very busy neighbour for any sight of human beings for fourteen hours of each day. I could quote case after case of these types--the children untaught and undisciplined, without hope or prospect in life, sometimes neglected because mother's whole time was spent in trying to earn enough to support them, more often spoilt and petted just because they were cripples, with their disability continually before them, and made the excuse for averting all the ordinary troubles of life. The attempts to place such children when they grew up were despairing--they were unused to using their hands and brains, unused to looking after themselves, supremely conscious that they were different from other people. The days before Special Schools seem almost too bad to look back upon even!"

From the reports on such cases which Mrs. Ward received from her helpers throughout the summer of 1898 she formed the opinion that no school could be successful unless it maintained a nurse to look after the children's ailments, and an ambulance to convey them to and from their homes. But she felt confident of being able to raise the money (£200-£220 a year) for these purposes, if the School Board would provide furniture and pay a teacher. Accordingly, by October, 1898, her committee forwarded to the School Board a carefully-sifted schedule of twenty-five names, together with a formal application that the Board should take up the proposed class, provide it with a teacher, and supply suitable furniture for the class-rooms, while the Settlement undertook to provide rooms free of charge, to pay a nurse-superintendent, and to maintain a special ambulance for the use of the school. Some correspondence followed with the School Management Committee, of which Mr. Graham Wallas was Chairman, and which was besieged at the same time by those who thought such schools totally unnecessary, since all invalid children whom it was possible to educate at all could attend the Infants' (i.e. ground floor) departments of ordinary schools, where the teachers would look after them. But Mrs. Ward collected much evidence to show that this course could not possibly be pursued with any but the slighter cases. "We have heard very pitiful things of the risks run by these spinal and hip-disease cases in the ordinary schools," she wrote to Mr. Stanley, "and of such children's terror of the hustling and bustling of the playgrounds," and early in December she summed up the arguments on this head in another memorandum to the Board. The atmosphere was favourable, and indeed Mrs. Ward had marshalled her evidence and put the case for the school so convincingly that no serious opposition was possible. The School Board gave its consent early in January, 1899; the approval of the Board of Education followed promptly, and nothing remained but to provide the ambulance, and the set of special furniture which was to fill the two rooms set aside for the children at the Settlement.

The ambulance was presented by no less a well-wisher than Sir Thomas Barlow, the great physician, while Mrs. Burgwin, the Board's Superintendent of Special Schools, and Miss McKee, a member of the Board, busied themselves in procuring and ordering a set of ingenious invalid furniture--little cane arm-chairs with sliding foot-rests, couches for the spinal cases, a go-cart for the play-ground, and so forth--such as no Public Education Authority had ever occupied itself with before. Preparations were made at the Settlement for serving the daily dinner, which was to be an integral part of the arrangements, and which, in those happy days, was to cost the children no more than three-halfpence a head. At last, on February 28, 1899, all was ready--save indeed the ambulance, for which an omnibus with an improvised couch had to be substituted during the first few weeks. The nurse, too, had been taken ill, so that on this first day the children were fetched and safely delivered at the Settlement by Mrs. Ward's secretary, Miss Churcher. It was pitiful to see their excitement and delight at the new adventure, their joy in the "ride" and their wonder at the pretty, unfamiliar rooms, each with its open fire, its flowers from Stocks, and its set of Caldecott pictures on the walls, which greeted them at the end of their journey. Mrs. Ward was, of course, among the small group of those who welcomed them. Two medical officers from the Board were there to admit them officially, and after this ceremony they were handed over to the care of Miss Milligan, their teacher--a woman whose special gifts in the handling of these delicate children were to be devoted to the service of this school for nearly twenty years. It is to be feared that little in the way of direct instruction was imparted to them on that first day. But there they now were, safe within the benevolent shelter of that most human of institutions, the London School Board, and in a fair way to become--though few of us realized it fully then--useful members of a community from which they had received little till then but capricious petting or heart-rending neglect.

The arrangements for the children's dinners and for the hour of play-time afterwards were a subject of constant interest and delight to Mrs. Ward. The housekeeper at the Settlement put all her ingenuity into making the children's pence go as far as they could possibly be stretched in covering the cost of a wholesome meal, and for a long time the sum of 3_s._ 6_d._ a day was sufficient to pay for dinners of meat, potatoes and pudding for twenty-five to thirty children. Their health visibly improved, and the gratitude of their parents was touching to see and hear. Nevertheless, Mrs. Ward was not satisfied. Some of the children were very capricious in their appetites, and although most of them did learn to eat milk puddings (at least when washed down with treacle!), there were some who could hardly manage the plain wholesome food, and others who could have eaten more than we had to give. It was tempting to try the experiment of a larger and more varied dietary upon them, and in days when the C.O.S. still reigned supreme, and the policy of "free meals for necessitous children" was hardly breathed by the most advanced, Mrs. Ward had the courage to carry it out. She described the results in a letter to _The Times_, in September, 1901:

"It was pointed out to the managers that a more liberal and varied dietary might have marked effects upon the children's health. The experiment was tried. More hot meat, more eggs, milk, cream, vegetables and fruit were given. In consequence the children's appetites largely increased, and the expenses naturally increased with them. The children's pence in May amounted to £3 13_s._ 6_d._, and the cost of food was £4 7_s._ 2_d._; in June, after the more liberal scale had been adopted, the children's payments were still £3 13_s._ 10_d._, but the expenses had risen to £5 7_s._ 8_d._ Meanwhile, the physical and mental results of the increased expenditure are already unmistakable. Partially paralysed children have been recovering strength in hands and limbs with greater rapidity than before. A child who last year often could not walk at all, from rickets and extreme delicacy, and seemed to be fading away--who in May was still languid and feeble--is now racing about in the garden on his crutches; a boy who last year could only crawl on hands and feet is now steadily and rapidly learning to walk, and so on. The effect, indeed, is startling to those who have watched the experiment. Meanwhile the teachers have entered in the log-book of the school their testimony to the increased power of work that the children have been showing since the new feeding has been adopted. Hardly any child now wants to lie down during school time, whereas applications to lie down used to be common; and the children both learn and remember better."

It may be added that while the minimum payment of 1-1/2_d._ for these dinners was still maintained at the Settlement School, payments of 2_d._ and even 3_d._ were asked from those who could afford it, and were in many cases willingly given, while there were always a few children who were excused all payment on the ground of poverty at home.

Another element that contributed largely to the success of the school from the very beginning was that of the "dinner-hour helpers"--a panel of ladies who took it in turns to wait on the children at dinner and to superintend their play-time afterwards. They came with remarkable regularity, and became deeply attached, many of them, to their frail little charges. When the School Board extended the Cripples' Schools to other parts of London they were careful to copy this development of ours, by insisting that local committees of managers, half of whom should be women, must be attached to each school. Here, surely, in this simple but effective institution, may be seen the germ of the Care Committee of future days!

The success of the school in Tavistock Place--the roll of which soon increased to some forty children--naturally attracted a good deal of attention, and it had hardly been running a year before the pros and cons of setting up similar schools in other districts began to be debated within the London School Board. Some members inevitably shied at the prospect of the increasing expense to the rates, especially if the whole cost of premises, ambulance and nurse were to be borne by the public authority, and a definite movement arose, either for bringing the crippled children into the ordinary schools, with some provision in the way of special couches, etc., or for brigading the crippled and invalid children with the "Mentally Defectives" in the special centres which had already been opened for the latter. Much encouragement was given to this latter view by the official report of one of the Medical Officers of the School Board, who was instructed, in the spring of 1900, to examine and report upon all cases of crippled children not attending school, and submitted a report recommending that "those cases whom it is advisable to permit to attend school at all" should be sent to the Mentally Defective Centres, while neither nurse nor ambulance were, in the opinion of the writer, required.

Mrs. Ward and her friends on the School Board were obliged to fight very strenuously against these views, which, if they had prevailed, would have prevented the establishment of "Physically Defective Centres" as we know them to-day. It is perhaps unprofitable to go into the details of that long-past controversy, the echoes of which have so completely died away; suffice it to say that a Special Conference appointed by the Board to consider the Medical Officer's Report recommended, in October, 1900, that "The Board do make provision for children who, by reason of physical defect, are incapable of receiving proper benefit from the instruction in the ordinary public elementary schools, but are not incapable by reason of such defect of receiving benefit from instruction in special classes or schools"; and "that children of normal intelligence be not taught with mentally defective children." A little later it recommended the provision of both ambulance and nurse. These resolutions--which were accepted by the Board--cleared the way for the establishment of new centres for "Physically Defective" children, as they now began to be called; but in order to make her case invincible, and to accelerate the work of the School Board, Mrs. Ward undertook, all through the autumn and winter of 1900-1901, a complete investigation into the numbers and condition of the invalid children not attending school in some of the largest and poorest London boroughs. In consultation with the trained workers whom she employed for the purpose, she had special forms printed for use in the inquiry, and I remember well her eager comments as the statistics came in, and her consternation at the ever-increasing numbers of crippled children which the inquiry revealed. Finally this investigation extended to nine out of the ten School Board divisions of London, and embraced a total of some 1,800 children, of whom 1,000, in round numbers, were recommended by her as suitable for invalid schools. Of the rest, a substantial proportion were reported as fit for ordinary school with a little additional care on the part of teachers and managers; some were too ill for any school, and some were both mentally and physically defective, and therefore recommended for the "M.D." Centres. Meanwhile, the Special Schools Sub-Committee of the School Board, under their Chairman, the Hon. Maude Lawrence, had been at work since February, 1901, in making inquiries into possible sites and buildings for the new schools, and by the middle of March the Board were able to inform Mrs. Ward that sites for four Centres had been agreed upon, while two more were to be located in Kennington and Battersea "on the constitution of your returns, which have now been marked on the map by the Divisional Superintendents."

Four ambulances had also been ordered, and it was decided to appoint nurses at each of the Centres at a salary of £75 a year. Kitchens were, of course, to be provided at all the Centres, so that the hot midday meal which had proved so successful at the Settlement might be supplied.

The first two Centres to be opened by the School Board--in Paddington and Bethnal Green--were ready by September, 1901, and both drew their children entirely from those on Mrs. Ward's lists. It may be imagined with what intense satisfaction she had followed every step taken by the School Board towards this consummation. Finally she gathered up the whole story of the Settlement School and of the School Board's adoption of responsibility for London's crippled children in the letter to _The Times_ mentioned above, pleading for the extension of the movement to other large towns, and describing certain efforts made at the Settlement School for the industrial and artistic training of the older children. Her final paragraph ran as follows:

"The happiness of the new schools is one of their most delightful characteristics. Freed from the dread of being jostled on stairs or knocked down in the crowd of the playground, with hours, food and rest proportioned to their need, these maimed and fragile creatures begin to expand and unfold like leaves in the sun. And small wonder! They have either been battling with ordinary school on terribly unequal terms, or else, in the intervals of hospital and convalescent treatment, their not uncommon lot has been to be locked up at home alone, while the normal members of the family were at work. I can recall one case of a child, lame and constantly falling, with brain irritation to boot--the result of infant convulsions--locked up for hours alone while its mother was at work; and another, of a poor little lad, whose back had been injured by an accident, alone all day after his discharge from hospital, feebly dragging himself about his room, in cold weather, to find a few sticks for fire, with the tears running down his cheeks from pain. His father and sister were at work, and he had no mother. It could not be helped. But he has been gathered into one of the new schools, where he has become another being. Scores of children in as sore need as his will, I hope, be reached and comforted by this latest undertaking of the Board.

"And for some, all we shall be able to do, perhaps, will be to gladden a few months or years before the little life goes out. From them there will be no economic return, such as we may hope for in the great majority of cases. But even so, will it not be worth while?"

As the efforts of the School Board and--after 1903--of the Education Committee of the London County Council to spread the "Special Schools for Physically Defective Children" over London grew more and more effective, and the number of the new schools rose steadily, Mrs. Ward and her principal helpers concentrated their attention mainly upon the training of the children for suitable employment on their leaving school. As early as 1900 a little committee was formed for this purpose at the Settlement, which engaged special teachers of drawing and design for the boys and of art needlework for the girls--for these delicate children were often found to possess artistic aptitudes which made up to them in a certain degree for their other disabilities. Presently this committee developed into the "Crippled Children's Training and Dinner Society," presided over by Miss Maude Lawrence, of the London School Board, a Committee which did hard pioneer work in the organizing of careers for these crippled children, whose numbers stood revealed beyond all expectation as the Special Schools spread to every quarter of London. By the year 1906 the numbers of schools had risen to twenty-three, and of children on the rolls to 1,767; by 1909 the figures were thirty and 2,452 respectively. The dark-brown ambulances conveying their happy load of children to and from the schools became a familiar sight of the London streets. But, though Mrs. Ward's experiment had grown in these ten years with such astonishing rapidity, it had not lost its original character. She had impressed it too deeply with her own broad and sane humanity for the Special Schools Department of the L.C.C. to become lost in red tape or officialdom, and under the wise reign of Mrs. Burgwin and Miss Collard (Superintendents of Special Schools under the Council) the traditions that had gathered round the first Invalid Children's School were carried on and perpetuated. And to this day the Boards of Managers that watch over the "P.D." Schools seem to be inspired by a tenderer and more personal feeling than any other of the multifarious committees that take thought for the children of the State. The secret, in fact, of Mrs. Ward's success in this as in her other public undertakings lay in the fact that her action was founded on a real and urgent human need, and that she combined a power of presenting and urging that need in forcible manner with an unfailing tenderness for the individual child. As one of her colleagues expressed it once in homely phrase: "The fact is, she had the brain of a man and the heart of a woman." Nor did the heart dissolve itself in "gush," but showed its quality rather in a disinterestedness that cared not where the _hudos_ went, so long as the thing itself were done--in an eager desire to bring others forward and to give them a full share of whatever credit were to be had.

The view of the School Board authorities was summed up long afterwards in these sentences from the pen of Mr. Graham Wallas: "She brought to the task not only imagination and sympathy, but a steady and systematic industry, which is the most valuable of all qualities in public life. She was never disheartened, and never procrastinated."

What was felt of her spirit by those who worked with her more intimately, who saw her week by week in contact with the children themselves, is harder to put into words. Perhaps this little vision of her, recorded by the teacher of the school, Miss Milligan, comes nearest to saving what is, after all, an intangible essence, that once had form and being and is now vanished into air:

"But above and beyond all else Mrs. Ward was--what she was always called amongst us--'The Fairy Godmother.' In the early days before the school grew so big, every child knew this Fairy Godmother personally, and loved her, and we remember how on the occasion of one Christmas Party Mrs. Ward was unable to be present through illness, and the children were so sad that even the Christmas tree could hardly console them. When she had recovered and came again to see them, _they_ gave _her_ a delightful little tea-party, even the poorest children giving half-pence and farthings to buy a bunch of Parma violets, and a sponge-cake--having first ascertained what sort of cake she liked. It was a pretty sight to see them all clustering round her, and her kind, beautiful face whenever she was amongst the children will haunt one for years."