Episode 29. Squires in the Slums: The University Settlements

SYNOPSIS

The publication in 1883 by a Congregationalist Minister, Andrew Mearns, of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (the most famous amongst several hard-hitting pamphlets about extreme poverty in industrial cities) disturbed the conscience of High-Victorian Britain. Forty years after Chartist unrest in England, a later generation of Christian Socialist and reform-minded individuals turned their attention to the social problems of the East-End of London. So a movement of settlements - colonies of idealistic middle-class men and women, who had been educated at the universities - sprang up in deprived working-class areas in little more than a decade.

The movement was spearheaded by the Barnetts, an Anglican vicar, Samuel and his upper-class and dynamic wife, Henrietta, who had courageously taken on the living of St Jude’s, Whitechapel, London, one of the poorest parishes in England.. The rallying call was given by Henry Scott Holland to the undergraduates of the time: ‘Come and be Squires of East London’. Initial recruitment began in Oxford: at Samuel’s former college, Balliol for Toynbee Hall, and at Keble College for Oxford House, both settlements opening in the East End in 1884. The movement spread to Cambridge University and then to non-conformist denominations, such as the Methodists and the Congregationalists, and then to women’s settlements.

GUEST

Dr Nigel Scotland’s Squires in the Slums was first published in 2007 and provides a much-needed introduction to an extremely significant phenomenon. A well-meaning and inevitably elitist idea, that of friendship between classes, provided educational opportunities, and a wide range of boy’s, men’s, social and cultural clubs. Free legal advice was given to working people, support for trades unions at the time of strikes, arrangements for a variety of savings and providential schemes, and lobbying for such things as the first state pensions. Prominent individuals in the development of the welfare state in the 1940s, Clement Attlee, William Beveridge and R.H.Tawney first encountered real poverty through volunteering at Toynbee Hall at the turn of the twentieth century. Nigel Scotland is the author of twenty books and for many years was a lecturer in theology and religious studies at the University of Gloucestershire

Nigel’s interview with Simon Machin was recorded online on 14 July 2023.