A guest post by London Historians Member Jane McChrystal.
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This bronze sculpture portrays Ada Salter, philanthropist, pacifist and environmental champion. Erected on Bermondsey Wall East, it makes a fitting permanent tribute to a woman who did so much to improve the health and well-being of the residents of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe in the late 19th and early 20th century. Until fairly recently, she was better known as the helpmeet of her more famous husband, “poor doctor”, Alfred Salter, but there was far more to her than that.
Her story began in Raunds, Northamptonshire in 1866. Raised in the Methodist faith, she was inspired to dedicate her life to the poorest members of the local population. She was soon made aware however, that her calling was not seen as appropriate for a young woman of her class, whose highest aspiration should have been making a suitable marriage.
And so when the opportunity arose to work in the slums of St Pancras with the Sisters of The People, she seized it and moved to London. Later she transferred to the Bermondsey Settlement in South East London, where she soon became known for a talent to engage with the roughest of the girls there; many previous genteel female volunteers had been greeted with jeers and contempt in their efforts to reach out to them.
A member of the Liberal Party at this point, she was eager to enter local politics in a landscape where radical groups constantly vied with one another for pole position and their members swapped sides at the drop of a hat. Ada herself eventually found her home with the Women’s Labour League and became its president in 1914. But wherever her political allegiances lay, certain convictions remained at the core of her activism.
Most notably, she believed that the lives of those who were forced to inhabit dirty, industrial locations, such as Bermondsey, would be transformed by the process of Beautification. In practice, this meant filling their neighbourhoods with trees, plants and flowers and opening up green spaces there for them to enjoy, when they had the time to rest from their labours.
Ada was no Marxist materialist. As an Ethical Socialist she was convinced that being surrounded by nature’s beauty was a source of moral and spiritual uplift, essential to the wellbeing of every individual. As a natural corollary to this belief, she was determined to see the demolition of Bermondsey’s slums and their replacement with decent housing for all.
Ada met Alfred through their work at the Settlement. Their courtship was characterised by vigorous political and religious debate. Each had the ability to argue from opposing positions without damaging their growing relationship.
Alfred, an agnostic socialist at the time, was well on the way to becoming a specialist physician, destined for great things in the medical profession. While he had the bearing and voice of a lion, Ada was quiet and watchful. However, it was Ada who steered him towards general practice to become a poor doctor on the Jamaica Road. He also joined the Society of Friends under the influence of her Quaker sympathies.
In 1902 Ada took a break to care for her new-born baby, Ada Joyce, known as Joyce to avoid confusion. Joyce was to be their only and much cherished child, but there were terrible risks attendant upon bringing up children from any social background in Bermondsey. Joyce died of scarlet fever, aged just eight. This loss proved a turning point in the couple’s lives. Alfred seems to have never really recovered. Ada, however, poured her grief into ever greater efforts on behalf of the people of Bermondsey and entered the most productive period of her life.
Before Joyce’s death, Ada had already been elected to Bermondsey as an Independent Labour Party councillor in 1909 and become more active in the Women’s Labour League, which she had co-founded in 1906. Following her bereavement, she threw herself into campaigning for slum demolition, the construction of model council housing and the creation of a green belt around London, something eventually sanctioned by the London County Council in 1938. In 1922 she became Mayor of Bermondsey and was elected to the LCC for Hackney South in 1925.
In the course of her political career, she was lauded by the WLL, ILP and the labour movement for galvanising 14,000 of Bermondsey’s women workers to walk out of their factories in protest against their appalling working conditions in 1911, and setting up food banks for dockers and their families during the 1912 strike.
During WW1, she put her pacifist convictions into action. She became a founder member of The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1915, as the representative of the ILP, she made it to Bern and attended the International Socialist Conference which organised opposition to the war. On the home front, Ada and Alfred became active in the No Conscription Fellowship in 1916.
Ada remained politically active for the rest of her life and died, aged 76, after being bombed out of her Bermondsey home in 1942. Her passing was marked by a funeral service at the Quaker Meeting House in Peckham and a memorial service in St James Church, Bermondsey.
Aside from the well-recognised political achievements, Ada had endowed Bermondsey with major improvements to its environment. First, there were the housing developments built along garden city lines, where residents benefited from clean, sanitary conditions surrounded by plants and trees.
Today you may see an example of one of these developments on Wilson Grove and Janeway Street (below).
In 1920 she formed the Beautification Committee which planted 9000 trees and 60,000 plants by 1930 in Bermondsey’s open spaces, such as Southwark Park.
Why then, was her legacy virtually obscured in the decades following World War Two? Well, first there was her pacifism, an unpopular form of activism during a century when a generation of grieving widows and fatherless children were left behind after WW1 by men who volunteered to give up their lives for their country. Then in 1939 the government mobilised the British people to accept a state of total war, the death and destruction which ensued, and the ruin of the economy, which lasted years into the 1950s. Remaining steadfast to her principles must have demanded enormous moral courage, but her stance would have been deemed highly unpatriotic.
Secondly, Bermondsey suffered such terrible bombing during the war, that many of the material manifestations of her achievement were obliterated.
Finally, and rather ironically, her vocation, hyper-local activism, which contributed so much to the post-war triumph of the Labour Party, was swept aside by the arrival of the technocrats with their grands projets, for London and the rest of the nation.
But something has changed. In 2022 Bermondsey celebrated the Salter Centenary under the aegis of the Salter Centenary Steering Committee. A lasting tribute to Ada’s work was made in the form of a Blue Plaque mounted on the wall at 149 Lower Road, one of her homes in Bermondsey.
The presence of Dame Judi Dench added extra lustre to its unveiling,
in her capacity as a staunch member of the Quaker community.
The celebrations were marked with many events, walks and performances, too many to list here, but the following particularly struck me: the planting of 20,000 tulips all over Bermondsey and Rotherhithe; the addition of a module about Ada to the curriculum of the Compass School Southwark and these wonderful portraits by Nigel Moyce, displayed in the municipal offices on Tooley Street SE1.
To end on a personal note, Ada Salter’s lifetime coincided with a period of history I constantly return to in my writing and research. It was an era of unprecedented optimism for all those who sought to build a better life for women and the labouring poor. I’m pretty sure we shall never see its like again. As we head towards a general election in July 2024, it is dispiriting, to say the least, to consider the limited potential for social and political reform during the next five years, whoever becomes our next Prime Minister.
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The image of Wilson Grove appears here with the kind permission for its use granted by David Boardman, Manchester Architectural Historian and tour guide (manchesterhistory.net/manchester/ManMenu.html).
My chief source of reference for this piece is Graham Taylor’s “Ada Salter: Pioneer of Ethical Socialism”, published by Lawrence and Wishart in 2016. If the post has made you want to know more, you’ll be richly rewarded by reading this fine biography.
The image of Nigel Moyce’s portraits was provided by Salter Centenary Coordinator, Sheila Taylor, whose website displays the extraordinary range of community events organised in 2022 to celebrate the life and work of the Salters. See: https://saltercentenary.org.uk/
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