Blue plaque for Hilda Cashmore

Described by the Bristol Civic Society as ‘a remarkable feminist and social reformer’, Hilda Cashmore helped found the ‘university settlement’, where the poor could access a range of services.

'She went with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee to France and Poland during world war one.' | Photo: Hilda Cashmore (1876-1943)

Bristol Friends have helped fund a blue plaque to remember a pioneering Quaker community worker.

Bristol Quaker Hilda Cashmore helped found the Wellspring Settlement, Barton Hill, Bristol in 1911, where the plaque was unveiled. Described by the Bristol Civic Society as ‘a remarkable feminist and social reformer’, Hilda Cashmore helped found the ‘university settlement’, where the poor could access a range of services: including healthcare, education, general advice, shelter and assistance.

At the unveiling on 8 March, Quaker Graham Davey gave a short talk about Hilda’s membership of Friars Preparative Meeting and Bristol and Frenchay Monthly Meeting (as they were called then). He told the Friend: ‘Her association with Mabel Tothill and Marian Pease [who set up the settlement with her] must have strengthened her commitment to Quakers though we know nothing as yet about the frequency of her attendance at Friars… She went with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee to France and Poland during world war one and was supported by the Friends Service Council for her work in India.’

Serving as the first warden at Wellspring Settlement from 1911 to 1926, Graham Davey said that she used ‘her exceptional organisational skills to cope with a prolonged strike by women workers in the local cotton factory; the suffering of families of world war one casualties; the flu epidemic of 1919; and the crisis of post-war unemployment’.

After 1926, Hilda fulfilled a life-long ambition to go to India where she hoped to bring Indian and British people together to support Gandhi’s nonviolent movement for independence. Graham Davey said: ‘She chose to set this up at Rasulia, a complex of dilapidated buildings in twenty-five acres of agricultural land near the town of Hoshangabad in Madhya Pradesh. The centre was owned by Quakers but had not been used for the previous thirty years so Hilda engaged over twenty workers to restore it… She also set up an ashram some ten miles away to serve the local Gond people who were outside the caste system and therefore designated as “untouchables”.’

Returning to Bristol in 1938, Hilda Cashmore then worked with the Women’s Voluntary Service. One of the last pictures of Hilda in the library of the Friars Meeting House is dealing with the problems of people made homeless by the Blitz.

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