Episode 56. Maude Royden and the Guildhouse
SYNOPSIS
A November 2024 symposium at the American Academy of Religion has brought back into focus the remarkable life of Maude Royden (1876-1956), preacher, suffragist, pacifist and public intellectual. This renewed interest coincides with the 50th anniversary of the first women ordinands in the Episcopal Church and the 30th anniversary of the ordination of women in the Church of England.
Maude Royden was the daughter of a Liverpool shipping owner and Member of Parliament. Educated at the elite Cheltenham Ladies College, she belonged to the generation of self-confident women who started to question and counter the male domination of the British Establishment in politics, the church and public life in the years leading up to the First World War and in the Twenties and Thirties.
This episode looks at how the worldview of Maude Royden was formed, starting from settlement work in the poor districts of Liverpool to a close friendship with Rev George Hudson Shaw and his wife Effie, with whom Maude lived for many years in a complicated yet companionable love triangle. Recognizing ‘her scholarship and her power to hold an audience,’ Hudson Shaw helped Maude to break into the male circle of Oxford University Extension Lecturing. A growing reputation as a magnetic speaker led, with the support of liberally-minded Anglicans such as Percy Dearmer, to the establishment of the Guildhouse from 1920 to 1936 which convened on Sunday afternoons in a converted chapel in Eccleston Square, London, where Royden preached and led worship services that had a particular appeal to working women.
GUESTS
Revd Canon Dr Alison Falby is a Canadian priest and former academic historian. She has a long-standing interest in Maude Royden and the intellectual life of pre- and post-First World War Britain, where the role of women and conflicting attitudes towards the British Empire and German rearmament were major talking points.
Simon’s interview with Alison Falby was recorded online on 1 December 2024.