Ada Salter. Photo: Photo courtesy of the Southwark Library and Archive.
A Quaker of the people
Graham Taylor writes about the inspiring life and work of Ada Salter
Though renowned for her social work in the slums and for her pacifism, Ada Salter’s life was also a spiritual journey. In the 1920s she and her husband, Alfred, created not just a model of municipal socialism but also a Quaker republic. The Salters’ socialism was not Marxist or Labourite, driven by central planners or party machines, but was ‘ethical socialism’, based on cooperatives, workers’ representatives and care for the environment. They merely translated, they said, the words of Christ into social and political practice.
Social Christianity
Ada was born in 1866 to a Methodist family in Northamptonshire but she never fitted the mould. Though her family were pillars of the church, she never liked the ritual of church services. Though they were strong Gladstone Liberals, she always preferred the pacifism of the Quaker radical MP, John Bright.
One strand of Methodism, however, she could whole-heartedly support. This was the ‘Social Christianity’ of Hugh Price Hughes, who had dedicated himself to helping the poor of the cities. His wife, Katherine, had organised ‘Sisters of the People’ to enter the London slums and help working-class women on the edges of despair.
Ada was, at first, tied by conventional restrictions on middle-class women but in 1896 she made her break. She left home for London and enlisted as a Sister of the People in the grim and stinking slums of Soho and King’s Cross. There she braved diseases, criminals, pimps and drunken husbands to visit half-starved women and children in vermin-infested tenements.
It was not Katherine Hughes, however, but Scott Lidgett who brought out the best in Ada. Lidgett had organised Sisters of the People at his settlement in Bermondsey and Ada soon transferred there. She had a genius for running social clubs, especially for working-class teenagers few others could handle. She was not only able to win the attention, but the affection, of her charges. Ada was long remembered, said the Friend of 1942, ‘for the clubs she ran for girls of the rougher type’. What was her secret? Quaker MP, James Hudson, was to reveal in High Road and Country Lane: Ada Salter of Bermondsey that Ada’s secret was a Quaker one. I found ‘God in them all’, she told Hudson. To her, the girls ‘looked and were as good as duchesses’.
Alfred Salter
In 1898 Ada fatefully encountered Alfred Salter, a brilliant doctor at Guy’s Hospital. He was also a militant atheist and quasi-Marxist. For six months they battled with each other, before deciding to get married. Alfred abandoned his atheism and joined Ada’s Liberal Party but in religion they found only Quakerism was acceptable to them both. As she could not yet break her Methodist links, given her work and family, she became an attender, and he a member, of Deptford Quaker Meeting.
Scott Lidgett wanted Alfred to be a future Liberal MP but Ada found herself in difficulties. She could not support the Boer war, could not support the Liberal prevarication about welfare (for example, free school meals) and in 1906 could not accept it when the Liberals, after promising women’s suffrage before the election, went back on their word once in power. For Ada, since there was ‘God in everybody’, it must be morally wrong to kill other human beings in war or to treat others as less than equal. What you do to them, said Christ, you do to me. For Ada this was the heart of the Quaker ethic. She left the Liberals and joined the pacifist, egalitarian Independent Labour Party (ILP) of Keir Hardie.
Equality for working women
In 1909, standing as an ILP candidate, Ada was elected the first woman councillor in Bermondsey and the first Labour woman councillor in London. As there were very few women councillors elected anywhere else, this result was sensational. At the same time Ada pursued equality for working women in the local factories by trying to recruit them to unions. In 1911 this, too, had a sensational consequence. Fifteen thousand Bermondsey women came out on strike. Ada organised relief for the penniless families all along the river.
The Friends Quarterly Examiner later wrote that Ada had: ‘pioneered the first women’s membership of trade unions among the biscuit makers of Bermondsey.’ Ada was honoured by the labour movement for this work and in 1914 was elected president of the Women’s Labour League.
At this point Ada became a Quaker member. When the Liberals decided in 1914 to take Britain into world war, Methodists supported the war. The report on Ada’s admission to Quaker membership is still extant. Ada told her Peckham interviewer, Ellen Crawshaw, she was strongly pacifist and so, because of the war, ‘could no longer remain a member of any other religious body except the Quakers’.
Opposing conscription
During the war Ada was a leader of the pacifist Women’s International League (WIL). They sought a negotiated truce and opposed conscription. She joined the No-Conscription Fellowship and was in charge of supplying maintenance to conscientious objectors (COs) and their families. A consortium of wealthy Quakers bought an estate in Kent, Fairby Grange, where Ada could nurse back to health COs broken by mistreatment and torture. With foresight Ada secured Quaker agreement that, after the war, Fairby would be used to care for sick children and the maternity care of women.
The Quaker ethic was well illustrated by the delegation the WIL sent to Versailles in 1919. This urged the politicians to be non-punitive against Germany in the peace treaty, in order to prevent a second world war, and to include in the treaty a Women’s Charter containing the four demands of the women’s movement (equal votes, equal pay, equal opportunities and financial support for mothers).
First Labour woman mayor
In 1922 the ILP won power in Bermondsey. Alfred was elected MP and Ada the first woman mayor of any party in London. She was the first Labour woman mayor to be elected in Britain. In the famed ‘Bermondsey Revolution’, the Salters now put their Quakerism into practice. The Friend of 1922 was as amazed as the rest of the press by Ada’s first decisions, though all were based on the Quaker commitment to simplicity, equality and peace.
Ada announced she would not be wearing the mayoral chain or robes; the customary prayers before council meetings, led by an Anglican chaplain, were abolished; and, in future, before every council meeting, a ten-minute Quaker silence would be held in the mayor’s parlour. Royal jubilees and birthdays were not to be celebrated. Money saved was distributed to the needy. Ada also took down the union jack from the town hall and flew instead a red flag with local symbols, the badge of municipal socialism.
Health and slum clearance
In 1910 the Salters’ only child, Joyce, had died of a virulent scarlet fever, one of the diseases that flourished in the slums. Health and slum clearance became their top priorities. Alfred transformed health in Bermondsey, with innovative technology supplied free to the poor, prefiguring the National Health Service.
Ada, a garden-city expert, transformed housing and the environment. Her ‘Beautification Committee’ became famous all over Europe. This committee aimed at trees lining every street, window-boxes for every house, playgrounds in every ward and sport or music in every open space or park. She planted 9,000 trees in the slums. Ada believed those who lived in her model council houses (cottages with gardens) or walked along tree-lined streets had more chance of moral betterment than those living in tenements or high-rise flats.
When, in 1934, Labour took control of London, Ada could transfer her housing and beautification ideas to the whole of the city. When elected president of the National Gardens Guild, she was able to promote beautification all over Britain. Her final victory was in 1937 when the ‘Green Belt’ round London, for which she had advocated for two decades, received legislative backing.
Ada died in Balham in 1942. Her funeral was at Peckham Meeting, where she was an elder. Was she an ‘ethical socialist’ or a ‘social Quaker’? She herself saw no difference. Hudson put it like this: ‘Her socialism was no mere body of doctrine, but translated itself into loving acts of solicitude for the people with whom she lived.’
A statue of Ada has now been sculpted. In London there are only fourteen public statues of women, so Ada’s will be the fifteenth. Since Elizabeth Fry’s stands inside the Old Bailey, Ada’s will be the only outdoor public statue of a Quaker woman in London.
Graham is the author of the forthcoming book, Ada Salter and the Sisters of the People, which will be published in summer 2014, close to the time the statues are unveiled.
For further information: www.salterstatues.co.uk
