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Abstract
This article focuses on two women educator activists based in Birmingham, UK, in the first decades of the twentieth century: Geraldine Southall Cadbury (1865–1941) and Margaret Ann Backhouse (1887–1977). Motivated by a common belief in education as a force for progressive social change Cadbury and Backhouse were both Quakers who shared similar social backgrounds and were active in a range of educational and humanitarian causes. This article presents two episodes from their broader lives of activism to explore how transnational exchanges in which they were involved were inscribed onto a local educational landscape, and the role that their faith, and their profound belief in the power of the personal, played in their agency. The article will conclude with brief reflections on how we might interpret and locate both women’s identities.
Notes
1 Birmingham Post, March 19, 1926, and Sunday School Chronicle and Christian Outlook, March 1926, both contained in records of Birmingham Sunday School Union, University of Birmingham Cadbury Research Library (CRL), LCEC 13.
2 Sunday School Chronicle and Christian Outlook, January 4, 1917, CRL, NCEC D69.
3 Minute book, 1907, CRL, Westhill Archive box 61A.
4 See for example Joyce Goodman, ‘Working for Change Across International Borders: The Association of Headmistresses and Education for International Citizenship’, Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 1 (2007): 165–80; Joyce Goodman, ‘Social Change and Secondary Schooling for Girls in the “Long 1920s”: European Engagements’, History of Education 36, nos 4–5 (2007): 497–513; Joyce Goodman, ‘Women and International Intellectual Co-operation’, Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 3 (2012): 357–68; Kay Whitehead, ‘Betwixt and Between Speeches: Lillian de Lissa and the Kindergarten Union Jubilee Celebrations of 1955’, History of Education Researcher 80 (2007): 113–21; Kay Whitehead, ‘Transnational connections in early twentieth-century women teachers’ work’, Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 3 (2012): 381–90.
5 Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds., Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2005), 10–11. See also Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott, eds., Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–11; Kimberley Jensen and Erika Kuhlman eds., Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters Publishing BV, 2010), 1–12; Patricia A. Schechter, Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary: Four Transnational Lives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–10.
6 This article was originally delivered as a plenary lecture at the History of Education Society Conference, November 30–December 2, 2012 at Winchester for which the theme was Rulers, Rebels and Reformers.
7 Geraldine Southall Cadbury, Young Offenders Yesterday and To-day (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), Foreword.
8 Ibid., 125–6.
9 Ibid., 107.
10 Ibid., 126–8.
11 Ibid., 135.
12 Anna addressed the ‘Grand Demonstration of Women’ in Birmingham in February 1881, see Elizabeth Crawford, ‘From Frederick Street to Winson Green’: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Birmingham 1866–1918 (London: Woman and Her Sphere, 2000), 6–7; Whitney, Geraldine S. Cadbury, 28–9.
13 Paul Strangman Cadbury, Geraldine S. Cadbury 1865–1941, reprinted from The Friends Quarterly Examiner, April 1941, Birmingham Archives & Heritage (BA&H), Birmingham History D/25/525355, 4.
14 Newspaper report, BA&H, MS 466A/169–70.
15 Peter Cunningham, ‘Innovators, Networks and Structures; Towards a Prosopography of Progressivism’, History of Education 30, no. 5 (2001): 433–51.
16 Cadbury, Young Offenders, 75–6; Testimony, Geraldine S. Cadbury, BA&H, MS 466A/512. The first juvenile court in the USA opened in Cook County, sitting in Chicago, with a volunteer from Jane Addams’ Hull House acting as voluntary probation officer. An associated ‘detention home’ opened as early as 1903 and a teacher was provided from public funds from 1906; see Cadbury, Young Offenders, 72.
17 Whitney, Geraldine S. Cadbury, 75–7; Cadbury, Young Offenders, 76.
18 Cadbury, Geraldine S. Cadbury 1865-1941, 5–6.
19 Anne Logan, ‘“A Suitable Person for Suitable Cases”: The Gendering of Juvenile Courts in England, c. 1910–39’, Twentieth Century British History 16, no. 2 (2005): 129–45; Whitney, Geraldine S. Cadbury, 114.
20 Anne Logan, Feminism and Criminal Justice: A Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), particularly chapter 2.
21 Logan, Feminism and Criminal Justice, 48.
22 Cadbury, Young Offenders, 74.
23 She was a member of the Home Office Advisory Committee on Probation from 1922; Home Office Committee to enquire into juvenile courts in the Metropolitan Police District, 1930–41; Home Office Juvenile Court Rules Committee, 1932; Home Office Conference re Girls 15–17 appearing before London Juvenile Courts, 1934; Probation Officers Training Board, 1937; Home Office Committee re Observation Centres, 1938. From 1935 she was also Vice-President of the International Association of Children’s Court Judges.
24 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Treatment of Young Offenders (London: HMSO, 1927), 44–5.
25 Enid Huws Jones, Margery Fry. The Essential Amateur (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 123, 160.
26 Mark D’Hoker, ‘Contribution de Maurice Rouvroy (1879–1954) aux soins en résidence de la jeunesse à problèmes psycho-sociaux pendant l’entre-deux-guerres’, Paedagogica Historica 26, no. 2 (1990): 211–22.
27 Cadbury, Young Offenders, 102, 105 (emphasis in the original). She also noted that by 1927 observation centres had also been established in 12 other European countries.
28 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Treatment of Young Offenders, 45.
29 Victor Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender 1914–48 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 85–90.
30 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Treatment of Young Offenders, 129. Birching had been abandoned in Birmingham in the early 1920s under her influence, Cadbury, Young Offenders, 120; Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship, 60–1.
31 Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship, 31.
32 Minute book, November 12, 1909, BA&H, BCC 10/BCH/12/1/1. Like the other buildings that the couple built and gave to the city she initially drew a sketch plan of what she wanted in considerable detail and this was then handed to an architect who converted the sketch into architectural drawings, Cadbury, Geraldine S. Cadbury 1865–1941, 12.
33 George Augusts Auden (1872–1957), father of the poet W.H. Auden, was a general practitioner who also lectured in public health at the University of Birmingham and was appointed as Birmingham’s first School Medical Officer of Health in 1908.
34 Joseph T. Jones, History of the Corporation of Birmingham, Vol. V, Part 1 (Birmingham: Birmingham City Council, 1940), 235.
35 Proceedings of Birmingham City Council, 6 January 1931, 103–5, BA&H; Whitney, Geraldine S. Cadbury, 119.
36 Geraldine was a member of its Social and Moral Welfare Committee alongside Mrs W.A. Potts, wife of Dr Potts, psychological adviser to the Children’s Court, and three other women magistrates, Dame Ethel Shakespeare, Mrs George Cadbury Jr, and Mrs Sidney Walker, Annual Report, 1930–31, BA&H, MS 841B/62, 11–12.
37 Education Committee minutes, 1911–27, BA&H, BCC 1/BH/1/1/1; Home Office Schools After-care Sub-committee, 1922–26, BCC 1/BH/14/2/1/1.
38 [Hobart] Mercury, February 1, 1930, 11 http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/29152413 (accessed January 24, 2013); Cadbury, Young Offenders, 84–5, 126.
39 Cadbury, Geraldine S. Cadbury 1865–1941, 13; Birmingham Gazette, July 18, 1928, BA&H, MS 466A/350; Birmingham Post, July 18, 1928, BA&H, MS 466A/351.
40 Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship, 149.
41 Ibid., 150–1.
42 Harold J. Black, History of the Corporation of Birmingham, Vol. 6, Part 1 (Birmingham: Birmingham City Council, 1957), 325. Following the Children’s Act of 1933 the Moseley Road Remand Home had come under the jurisdiction of the City Council’s Education Committee. From 1944 younger children returned to Moseley Road and it became the junior remand home for the city. Fircroft was one of the Selly Oak Colleges and founded by the Cadbury family for adult education.
43 Minutes Remand Home Sub-committee, March 31, 1941, BA&H, BCC 1/BH/14/7/1/1.
44 Minutes Remand Home Sub-committee, November 2, 1942, BA&H, BCC 1/BH/14/7/1/1; Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship, 151.
45 Whitney, Geraldine S. Cadbury, 155–7.
46 Programme of Official Opening, BA&H, MS 466A/361.
47 Birmingham Mail, January 16, 1947, BA&H, MS 466A/360.
48 Report of presidential acceptance address, March 30, 1925, records of Birmingham Sunday School Union, CRL, LCEC 13.
49 Biographical portrait, records of Birmingham Sunday School Union, CRL, LCEC 13.
50 Minutes of the first meeting of the founders, January 1907, CRL, Westhill Archive box 61A.
51 George Hamilton Archibald (1858–1938) was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He arrived in England in 1902 and became an extension lecturer for the Sunday School Union. In Easter 1905 he was invited to lecture at a conference at Woodbrooke in Birmingham where George Cadbury challenged him to put his theories into practice by taking charge of the Sunday School associated with the Quaker Meeting at Bournville with his daughter Ethel; see George Hamilton Archibald: Crusader for Youth, 1858–1938, BA&H, Birmingham History D/31/625403; Ethel Archibald Johnston, George Hamilton Archibald: Crusader for Youth (Wallington: Religious Education Press, 1945). Ethel J. Archibald (1882–1955) was born in Newfoundland and came to England with her parents in 1902. She trained at the Froebel Institute and taught at Westhill for many years. Following her marriage to Andrew Johnston in 1922 the couple spent time at the Quaker Mission in Pemba, East Africa, where Ethel ran a school until she returned to Westhill.
52 Quoted in Constance M. Parker, Westhill: An Informal History of Seventy-Five Years (Birmingham: Westhill College, 1982), 5.
53 Biographical portrait, records of Birmingham Sunday School Union, CRL, LCEC 13.
54 Argus, May 27, 1912, 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11678726 (accessed January 24, 2013). See also Johnston, George Hamilton Archibald: Crusader for Youth, 113–22.
55 Ibid., 134; Jennifer Helgren, ‘“Homemaker’ can include the world”: Female Citizenship and Internationalism in the Postwar Camp Fire Girls’, in Jennifer Helgren and Colleen A. Vasconcellos, eds., Girlhood: A Global History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 304–22. See also Helen Buckler, Mary F. Fiedler and Martha F. Allen, Wo-He-Lo: The Story of the Camp Fire Girls, 1910–1960 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961).
56 Helgren, ‘“Homemaker’ can include the world”, 305–6.
57 Ibid., 317.
58 Johnston, George Hamilton Archibald: Crusader for Youth, 134. See also autobiographical notes, Margaret Backhouse Papers, Friends Library, Temp MSS 10868.
59 British Camp Fire Girls (London: Camp Fire Girls, 1933).
60 Ibid., 113–14.
61 Ibid., 38–9.
62 Ibid., 115, 117 includes images of examples.
63 Stephanie Spencer and Nancy Rosoff, ‘National, International or Transnational? Constructions of Femininity in the Chalet School Books, 1925–1952’, paper presented at ISCHE 34, Geneva, June 27–30, 2012; Elsie Oxenham, A School Camp Fire (London: W. & R. Chambers, 1917).
64 Mary Cadogan, ‘Dunkerley, Elsie Jeanette (1880–1960)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/55197 (accessed July 5, 2012). Oxenham was the prolific author of the Abbey series of girls’ stories and published a number of books which feature Camp Fire Girls.
65 Oxenham, A School Camp Fire, 94, 104.
66 Bournville Meeting minute book, November 1914, BA&H, FC Acc 2011/029. Bournville is the garden village built by the Cadbury family in association with their chocolate factory.
67 Adrian R. Bailey, Constructing a Model Community: Institutions, Paternalism and Social Identities in Bournville, 1879–1939 (PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2002), 210.
68 Bournville Meeting minute book, February 1914, BA&H, FC Acc 2011/029.
69 Bournville Meeting minute book, November 1913, BA&H, FC Acc 2011/029.
70 Minute book, October 23, 1913, CRL, Westhill Archive box 61A.
71 Bournville Meeting minute book, November 1915, January 23, 1918, BA&H, FC Acc 2011/029.
72 Bournville Meeting minute book, November 1915, BA&H, FC Acc 2011/029.
73 David Pomfret, ‘The City of Evil and the Great Outdoors: The Modern Health Movement and the Urban Young, 1918–40’, Urban History 28, no. 3 (2001): 405–27, 411.
74 Sunday School Chronicle and Christian Outlook, May 1, 1919, CRL, NCEC D71.
75 Mary was a student at Westhill in the Summer term 1911, Autumn term 1915 and Spring term 1916, CRL, Westhill Archive, box 35A, Vol. 1.
76 Sunday School Chronicle and Christian Outlook, June 7, 1917, CRL, NCEC D69.
77 Elsie Robins, ‘Camp Fire in the “Canny North”’, Sunday School Chronicle and Christian Outlook, October 27, 1921, CRL, NCEC D73.
78 Mark Freeman, ‘Muscular Quakerism? The Society of Friends and Youth Organisations in Britain, c. 1900–1950’, English Historical Review 125, no. 514 (2010): 642–69.
79 Ibid., 643; Paul Wilkinson, ‘English Youth Movements, 1908–30’, Journal of Contemporary History 4, no. 2 (1969): 3–23. White Fox wrote an introduction to Ruth Clark (Minobi), Camp Fire Training for Girls (London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd., 1919).
80 Madeline Rooff, Youth and Leisure: A Survey of Girls’ Organisations in England and Wales (Edinburgh: National Council of Girls’ Clubs, 1935), 13–14.
81 ‘Camp Fire Girls’ Rally’, Observer, October 23, 1921, 3.
82 Westhill Annual Report, 1920–21 lists Norah Ackerley as a student. As a leaving student she is listed as taking up a post as Secretary, Camp Fire Girls of British Isles, Executive Committee minute book, 1919–20, CRL, Westhill Archive, box 47C, 5. Annual Report, 1927–28 lists Winifred Holland leaving to work as secretarial staff British Camp Fire Girls, CRL, Westhill Archive, box 61A.
83 The Westhill News Letter, Summer 1929, CRL, Westhill Archive, box 61A.
84 Helgren, ‘“Homemaker’ can include the world”, 312; Kempthorne moved to England in 1949 to work on CFG’s international programme.
85 Rooff, Youth and Leisure, 13–14. A.E. Morgan, Young Citizen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1943), 123–4, similarly described an organisation with a small membership which appealed ‘to the romantic and emotional tendencies of girls through an elaborate ritualism’.
86 Margaret’s autobiographical notes indicate that there were internal political reasons for her resignation within the institution, Margaret Backhouse Papers, Friends Library, Temp MSS 10868.
87 Kathleen Lonsdale, Quakers Visit Russia (London: East-West Relations Group, Friends Peace Committee, 1952); Paul S. Cadbury, A Personal Diary of the Quaker Mission to Russia (Birmingham: privately printed, 1951) BA&H, MS 466F/ 1/1.
88 See for example Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England 1760–1860 (London: Longman, 1998); Sandra Stanley Holton, Quaker Women: Personal Life, Memory and Radicalism in the Lives of Women Friends, 1780–1930 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); Clare Midgley, ‘Women, Religion and Reform’, in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800–1940, ed. Sue Morgan and Jacqueline de Vries (London: Routledge, 2010), 138–58.
89 Sunday School Chronicle and Christian Outlook, January 4, 1917, CRL, NCEC D69.
90 Cadbury, Young Offenders, 117.
91 Cadbury, Geraldine S. Cadbury 1865–1941, 5–8.
92 Margaret A. Backhouse, The International Service of the Society of Friends, Les Prix Nobel en 1947 (Stockholm: Kungl. Boktryckeriet P.A. Norstedt & Söner, 1949), 238–41.
93 Ibid., 236, 241.
94 Ibid., 242.
95 Quoted in Whitney, Geraldine S. Cadbury, frontispiece. One of the illustrations used in Young Offenders is of Fry visiting a child who is condemned to death in Newgate Prison, see Cadbury, Young Offenders, opposite 32.
96 Liz Stanley, ‘Biography as Microscope or Kaleidoscope? The Case of “Power” in Hannah Cullwick’s Relationship with Arthur Munby’, Women’s Studies International Forum 10, no. 1 (1987): 19–32, 30.
97 For the Birmingham context and some of the individuals involved see Ian Grosvenor, ‘Geographies of Risk: An Exploration of City Childhoods in Early Twentieth-century Britain’, Paedagogica Historica 45, nos 1 & 2 (2009): 215–33.
98 Whitney, Geraldine S. Cadbury, 162–3.
99 Ibid., 40, 68.
100 The training school was established by the Friends Relief Service in the Autumn of 1945, see Mark Mazower, ‘Children and the Aftermath of War’, History Today 6, no. 6 (1996): 6–8.
101 Sybil Oldfield, Women Humanitarians: A Biographical Dictionary of British Women Active between 1900 and 1950 (London: Continuum, 2001), 286–92. Geraldine and her daughter Dorothy had intended to attend the Hague Congress but were refused passports, see Towards Permanent Peace: A Record of the Women’s International Congress held at The Hague, April 28th–May 1st 1915 (London: WILPF, 1915) British Library, LD.31.b.3245.