CHAPTER I
LONDON SCENE
In the year nineteen hundred and eleven a small Nursery School had a room on the second floor of an eighteenth century terraced London house in a street off the Euston Road; this was Cartwright Gardens, in the Borough of St.Pancras. Number twenty-six is still there and the old crescent, although shabby and decayed, probably looks much as it did when the twelve small children first went there in the Autumn of that year: they were the nucleus of what was to become the Caldecott Community.
By the early nineteen-hundreds England's social conscience was stirring and it was becoming more and more obvious that great numbers of the citizens of the richest city in the world at that time were living in a state of penury and destitution.
The statistical investigator, Charles Booth, who was a ship-owner by profession and much involved with industry, had undertaken various inquiries into the state of the London poor: he reported in 1886 that thirty per cent of the population of London lived below the poverty line.
The close of the nineteenth century brought the death of the Queen, the end of an epoch and the beginning of perhaps the greatest social reform and change that the nation had ever known. The complacency and hypocrisy of the Victorian age was assailed; largely by the efforts of the imminent social reformers of the day: their influence among the intellectuals - artists, writers, men from the Church - was very great: chief among these reformers was, of course, the dynamic Beatrice Webb. It was becoming clearer each year that the climate of opinion among an ever-increasing number of the comfortably-off Middle Classes was undergoing an almost revolutionary change.
Two young women at this time had also seen and been struck by the contrasts of the social conditions in the great cities: one was Phyllis Potter; the other, Leila Rendel. Both came from well-to-do professionalLondon families. The former, born in 1886, was the daughter of a ship-owner, living in a large South Kensington house with his family of nine children.
At the age of twenty-one, Phyllis, who from all accounts was a strikingly handsome young woman, dark-haired and with a searching eye which missed little, went up to West Hill College, near Birmingham, to take a Teacher-Training course in Sunday School work.
West Hill was one of a group of the Selly Oak Colleges which were associated with the Quaker Cadburys. Phyllis was enrolled as one of the first students.
A Mr. Wainwright, now a man in his late eighties, has one of the first recollections of the young Miss Potter: he writes,
"In 1903 in the Tottenham Court Road there was still standing an ancient Chapel built in 1756;it was Non-conformist and was known as the Whitefields Tabernacle. It was taken over by a group known as the London Congregational Union who wished to rebuild it in 1903 and turn it into a modern institutional church: it was to be the spearhead of the militant Non-conformity of the time and with an emphasis on the social gospel and youth. By 1908 the Sunday School at Whitefields was ripe for reform. My father was asked to become superintendent of the school and help was asked from West Hill. So Miss Potter was sent to take charge of the work among the younger children."
It was here, at this Whitefields Tabernacle in 1908, that Phyllis Potter and Leila Rendel met.
Born nearly a century ago now, in 1882, Leila was the eldest daughter of William Rendel, a civil engineer of considerable standing. He married a daughter of the well known Victorian publisher, Kegan Paul. There were two other children of the marriage: Robin, who went onto the stage, and another daughter, Olive, who became a doctor.
The Rendels were a large clannish family who did not willingly admit outsiders. They lived in a large house in Lancaster Gate close to the Strachey family, of whom the most famous was to be Lytton. The two families had much to do with each other and in the course of time, intermarried.
Leila lived all her early life in London and was sent to school in Wimbledon run by the then well-known French woman Mlle. Souvestre. Here too was an American girl who became the wife of President Roosevelt: she was known as "Tottie" and was much disliked by the young Leila.
After leaving school, Leila Rendel trained as a Physical Training teacher and taught for a short time, but as Mary Stocks wrote,
"her teaching finally landed her with the Board of Education as an Inspector, by one of those side-doors through which in those days it was possible for women to become Civil Servants; but Nature had not intended Leila Rendel to be an athlete nor did inclination intend her for a Civil Servant. When in her spare time she joined Phyllis Potter in running a nursery class at Whitefields Tabernacle, Nature's intention became crystal clear."
Leila was by now living at her grandfather's house in Russell Square. He was Sir Alexander Rendel, and, like his son, was a civil engineer. He spent much time in India during the reign of the British Raj where he was responsible for the building of many roads, bridges and dams.
One of Sir Alexander's daughters, Edith Rendel, was a much loved aunt of Leila's and must have influenced her niece very greatly in the work that she later took up. Edith Rendel was another of the growing band of social reformers and pioneers of the time. She was a Poor Law Guardian of St. Pancras appointed by the Borough to administer the Poor Law in the provision of Relief for the needy and destitute. She would at intervals take various under-nourished and convalescent children from the St. Pancras area to the Rendels' large country house in Surrey: she herself had a small cottage in the grounds of this house and here the children were, as Mary Stocks writes - "cherished, washed, fed and when necessary, nursed".
It is certain that Leila would have come across the children when she was staying at the family country home and she would have undoubtedly helped her Aunt in looking after them.
Meanwhile in the London of nineteen hundred and eight Beatrice Webb was working unremittingly and increasingly on her investigations into the workings of the Poor Law - "into destitution, sweated labour, the workhouses and the whole state of the London Poor". A Royal Commission had previously been set up by the then Conservative Government of 1905 to inquire into Pauperism and what was known as Poor Relief. Beatrice Webb was a member of this Commission and she worked endlessly collecting evidence.
By nineteen hundred and ten the National Committee for the break-up of the Poor Laws was brought into existence, Beatrice Webb being really the prime mover and creator of this Society. The Dean of Norwich was its first Chairman and there was an impressive array of celebrities among its members. "Literature" was represented by such as G.K.Chesterton, Hugh de Selincourt, John Masefield, Maurice Hewlitt. From academic circles came Sir Oliver Lodge, G.Lowes Dickenson, Professor Gilbert Murray and from "Drama" there were Beerbohm Tree, Forbes Robertson, Granville Barker. The Deans of Durham and Worcester joined with other prominent Churchmen of all denominations: every Trade Union was represented and many M.Ps. from all the Political Parties.
The organisation was to be strictly non-party and by January of nineteen hundred and eleven the registered membership was over 20,000, all of whom had pledged to work towards the changing of the Poor Laws, and so the reformation of the existing social order.
To this organisation, which had a central office at first housed in Clements Inn and later on a much larger scale in Norfolk Street, off the Strand, came Leila Rendel, aged now twenty-nine, to help with the other eager volunteers to fold and address circulars and write endless envelopes.
But by now she was launched on another interest, an entirely new project.
Mr. Wainwright writes again,
"It has always been a pleasant memory of mine as a young man of twenty in the Autumn of 1911, being on duty at one of the doors at Whitefields where there was a demonstration of Sunday School work, the proceeds of which were to be given for the new work at Cartwright Gardens".
This new work was the Nursery School which was to be started by Phyllis Potter and Leila Rendel.
Now, the Social Investigator, if such he can be called, Charles Booth, when the phrase "the conditions of the People" was widely used, would retort "Who are they? Who are the people of England? How do they live? What are they like?" To these questions Phyllis Potter and Leila Rendel must have added "What are their children like? How do they live?" And to anyone walking down the streets of the Euston Road then, the answer must have been obvious and to the sensitive and conscience-stricken philanthropist of the time, depressing, to say the least.
But these two, still young women, were reformers and pioneers too: both strong in mind and body; ardent, idealistic, resourceful, imaginative and unafraid of difficulties, and with these qualities they were able to inspire others of like mind and to "carry them forward" with a tremendous drive of will.
Now Leila's Aunt, Edith Rendel, was at this time running a Working Girls' Club in St.Pancras. It had recently moved into new larger premises in Cartwright Gardens. But the Club only functioned in the evening after working hours. During the day the house stood empty so it seemed the obvious place for the Day Nursery, whose children would go home probably in the early evening when their mothers had finished work. A Nursery was urgently needed in that area as so many of the women went out to work and were away from their homes all day. Many worked for small wages and long hours at the local Match Factory.
It is very probable that Edith Rendel suggested to her niece that she should start such a nursery, and Leila's grandfather had shown much sympathy towards her work among the children at Whitefields and her desire to do yet more, and he expressed his sympathy in a financial endowment which was enough to set her free for any unpaid work she chose to do - so the St. Pancras Day Nursery came into being.
It was generously supported by contributions from the Potter and Rendel families and their extensive circle of philanthropic friends.
Now Mary Stocks would certainly have known of this venture, as she knew Edith Rendel and undoubtedly would have visited the Nursery: she writes
"To begin with, its babies lay in cots; but soon it became obvious that the day nursery contained toddlers - and unoccupied toddlers for whose development the creche regime was clearly inadequate”.
Here then was Leila Rendel's starting point. In partnership with Phyllis Potter she took over the care of the day nursery toddlers. It was clearly the beginning of a more extensive assignment because the toddlers, like the cot babies, were destined to grow up and indeed had a long interval of social neglect ahead of them before the L.C.C. elementary school was prepared to absorb them.
Phyllis Potter and Leila Rendel then acted decisively and (from a financial point of view) dangerously. They took the next door house.
This of course enabled them to enrol more children and there would be space too for those who were beyond the nursery stage and needing some sort of education, however slight.
The first Annual Report of this small institution was published towards the end of 1911 in a little brown paper-backed edition of seven pages. Its first paragraph stated that the Caldecott Nursery School had opened with twelve children and that after a year thirty-one children were on the Register. The second paragraph read:-
"The School was started partly in the hope that it would help to form the much needed link between the care bestowed upon the babies of the neighbourhood and the teaching and supervision given to the older children in the Council Schools, but chiefly perhaps in the hope that the children might enjoy the instruction which is usually absorbed by the children of the wealthy in their own nurseries and by virtue of their happier surroundings. The teachers have ever before them the desire to awaken in the children that independence of spirit and joyousness of life which alone will give them the power of realising to the fullest extent the possibilities of development within their reach."
The Report continues -
"Miss P.M.Potter, to whose untiring efforts are due the entire credit and success of the School, has endeavoured to make the whole of her scheme of work subservient to this ideal and, judging by the complete freedom and spontaneity of all the children, we feel her aims are being realised".
This was surely a new conception of education. Certainly it would have been to the hard-pressed mothers of those nursery-school children - not for them that "carefree joyousness of life": but for their children, perhaps, it would come.
But first, Mary Stocks writes:
"Among the gifts recorded in the first Report.... is a significant item: special thanks for the gift of an entire set of Montessori Teaching Apparatus. The free development idea embodied in the Montessori system was certainly an early inspiration for the Nursery School. But it soon became clear that the degree of freedom suitable for Italian young was in the case of the young Londoners not incompatible with disorder, nor indeed wholly conducive to a sense of security on the part of the children themselves. At an early stage therefore, the school evolved on Rendel-Potter lines rather than on Montessori lines. But Mme Montessori must be given some credit for an initial inspiration".
Leila Rendel in later life was to refer to the "rather unfortunate experience we had with the Montessori system".
Together with the Potter and Rendel families, Mary Stocks, and her family too, who were closely related and connected with the Rendels, must have been at all times somewhat apprehensive about this nursery school started by her young relative, as she refers to it as this "financially precarious venture". The first year's receipts of the "venture" amounted to £69.11s.5d. of which £45.6s.lld. came from private contributions, £21.19s.2d. from an entertainment organised by Phyllis Potter, and £2.5s.4d. from the sale of milk. On the expenditure side wages only absorbed £4. But as yet no rent had been paid.
One item from the first Report "deserves special attention" writes Mary Stocks, "£6 for the decoration of the schoolroom". This must have covered the cost of turning the illustrations torn from the Randolph Caldecott children's books on which the Rendel family had been brought up into an attractive frieze. In so doing it gave the school not only an attractive living room, but a name which outlived the walls of 26 Cartwright Gardens".
So by the end of 1911, the Caldecott Nursery School was well and truly in being with an address of its own and a name of its own.
Mary Stocks writes further:
"Thus launched, the progressof the Caldecott Nursery School became rapid. By the eve of the first World War it had acquired a written constitution and an impressive list of Supporters. The Professor of Education in London University was its Chairman. Princess Louise was its President. Its receipts and expenditure had risen to nearly £500. Its subscriptions list showed that the Rendel and Potter families and their friends had been well mobilised. But a new and great development lay in store for it. Its children continued to grow up, and as they grew it was increasingly clear that home and street conditions in St. Pancras as a background to the rough and tumble of an urban elementary school were, to say the least of it, not conducive to the development of a healthy and happy childhood".
After the country had been at war for a year both Phyllis Potter and Leila Rendel and their band of devoted helpers must have realised that larger and still larger premises would, in time, be needed and that it would be more than desirable to be out of London; certainly now that the war was obviously not going to end as soon as many had expected and hoped.
But in the summer of 1915, before plans for a possible permanent move were made, the indomitable Leila Rendel took forty children away for the summer: they went to the Yorkshire home of the Rowntree family, Low Hall, near Selby. One of the Rowntrees' daughters was then helping at the school. A cook went with the party and shared the Rowntrees' kitchen with their Yorkshire cook; the one speaking broad Cockney, the other her native dialect.
Another daughter of the Rowntrees, who was a child there at the time, writes in connection with the visit that it "probably gave Miss Rendel a good deal of data about the reaction of London children to the country; so far as I was concerned I enjoyed that summer immensely. I was much the youngest of the family and alone at the time and I enjoyed the companionship: they taught me a great many old Cockney songs, some of which I still remember".
This country sojourn, had the organisers but known it, was certainly a foretaste of things to come, as "data" collected from future experience would be considerable.
Back again to London they all went at the end of the summer and another year was to be spent there before a house was found in the country. The search for a place in the country was the first of Leila Rendel's many treks and cross-country journeys to find new accommodation for the ever expanding Caldecott school.
It is not exactly clear why East Kent was chosen but in 1917, Charlton Court, a few miles from Sutton Valence, was leased and the Caldecott Nursery School moved there to become a "Boarding School for Working Men's children".
It is not clear when the decision was finally reached to change the word 'school' to 'community', but the idea must have been mooted and much talked over for some time: it is possible that after the first few months in Kent it was decided that in future it was to be a community rather than a School: it was to be run on a communal basis with as much in common as possible, all sharing in the work and so forth: so, finally, there came into being, and to stay - the Caldecott Community.