Working towards the ‘welfare of the world’: Britishimperial networks of philanthropy in the nineteenth century

Abstract

This article examines philanthropic networks created and sustained by Florence and Rosamund Hill, Caroline Emily Clark, Henry Parkes, Mary Carpenter, Arthur Renwick, the Windeyer family, and others as they travelled across the British Empire, moving between England, Australia, and elsewhere, gathering research data and sharing their ideas and resources through formal organisations like the Social Science Association as well as through their informal networks. In line with recent scholarship produced by Shurlee Swain and Elizabeth Harvey, it suggests that welfare reform and philanthropists in the Antipodes have been neglected in accounts of imperial philanthropy on policy formation in different national contexts. Charity workers were not bound by national borders as they implemented reforms and they made claims to political and social power through their transnational philanthropic work.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Keywords:

• British Empire
• charity
• networks
• Philanthropy
• social policy

Caroline Emily Clark migrated from England to South Australia in 1850. She came from a resolute Unitarian family, passionate about social reform. She established the world’s first system for the boarding out (fostering) of children in Australia. Her method was copied across the Australian colonies and shared internationally via her family and philanthropic friends. Her family became close to the Windeyers during their global travels and they worked together on campaigns for philanthropic and political reform. Caroline wrote the following letter to Lady Mary Elizabeth Windeyer in December 1876, explaining the origins of her scheme:

It is very pleasant to have letters from friends as it keeps friendships from wasting … I hope you are stronger than when you wrote and that your baby gets on nicely. I am very fond of little babies while they can do nothing but smile and lie still and seem to answer to every look and touch … you ask me how we began boarding out. It was begun privately by myself as an experiment. By the permission of the Chief Secretary Mr Arthur Blyth I took out two children and found homes for them and then three or four other people did the same the Government allowing each child the cost of its maintenance in the Asylum which was then 9/- per week. I paid 6/- per week for board, 1/- for school and the remainder I had for clothing.¹

Friendships amongst male and female philanthropists, medics and welfare reformers, and familial relationships that reached across the globe were crucial to the formulation of social policy across the Empire. In this article I explore the ways in which the Antipodes made their mark on imperial networks of philanthropy in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, focusing on women’s roles in negotiating these networks. I will examine here the relationship between private and public lives, as detailed in the letter above, and show how these framed demands for political and philanthropic change. We need to examine philanthropists’ public and private lives to understand how and why they became the architects of social policy.

In a recent article, Shurlee Swain explored the legacy of the Hill sisters in Australia and Britain. Likewise, Elizabeth Harvey has used her comparative research on late nineteenth-century Birmingham and Sydney to trace what she labelled ‘layered networks’ of philanthropic exchange.² These scholars have argued that historiographies of philanthropy have been limited by their national contexts. I want to continue their work of showing the multiple links between different imperial sites, with a focus on the involvement of travelling philanthropists with the Social Science Association established in England in 1857. The SSA would have a long-lasting impact on the development of social policy across the world and its analysis reveals the ways in which colonial Australia interacted with Britain. These networks show how people’s private lives made a significant impact on their public campaigns and the central role that women played within them.

My key personalities include Henry Parkes, Mary Carpenter, Rosamund and Florence Hill, Arthur and Elizabeth Renwick and Lady Mary and William Windeyer and their daughter Margaret. Using a collective biographical approach I will look at some of the movements of these individuals across the British world and the ways in which they exchanged their ideas, research and resources – partly through the Social Science Association, and partly through their correspondence and via their involvement in various other international charities. I do this to argue for the so-far neglected significance of the Antipodes in these discussions on the nineteenth century and the ways in which global networks shaped professional and policy development. Australia and New Zealand became widely understood as the ‘social laboratory of the world’ in the early twentieth century but I want to rethink the dating (and the supposed simplicity) of this development.³ Conversations and philanthropic planning took place between Britain and Australia from the early colonial period and were fostered by the long-lasting, intergenerational and intimate relationships between key men and women.

Lawrence Goldman has revealed the fascinating history of the Social Science Association.⁴ This organisation was found in 1857 by Lord Brougham as a ‘forum for the discussion of social questions and the dissemination of knowledge about society’.⁵ Goldman shows that this organisation was ‘at the confluence of three mid-Victorian movements: for the reform of the law … for the reformation of juvenile and later adult offenders … and for the legal emancipation and protection of women’.⁶ A reporter in 1870 summarised their aims as nothing less than ‘the welfare of the world’.⁷ Annual congresses gathered thousands of delegates in cities across Britain, with speakers travelling from around the world to discuss the latest research on law reform, social and penal policy, education, training and public health. Goldman places this organisation at the heart of the formation of new social, party-political and ideological structures in the mid-Victorian period. He uses the SSA to demonstrate the ways in which Victorian political culture was becoming more inclusive. He suggests that the ‘Association brought “great men” to the provinces, and, in turn, it brought the provinces to the metropolis, to the very seat of power itself’.⁸ I want to suggest here that though Congresses were not held in the Antipodes, migrants and philanthropic power-brokers moved across the Empire sharing research and ideas through organisations like the SSA and the charities and campaigns they inspired.

In light of historians’ increasing awareness of the significance of the transnational movement of ideas and individuals, I argue that there was a more dynamic dialogue between philanthropists across the globe, and more awareness of the Antipodes and how experiments there could contribute to knowledge and reform elsewhere, than has been appreciated in past accounts of nineteenth-century philanthropy.⁹ Goldman traces how ideas for social reform were spread from city to regional centres via the SSA. The SSA brought high and low politics together, fusing national and local interests.¹⁰ I want to follow his communication network to imperial nodes and to show the ways in which the Antipodes made their mark on Victorian political cultures through pioneering philanthropic projects and individuals. I also show the particular ways in which Victorian women contributed to these philanthropic and political cultures.

There is no doubt that domestic topics made up the majority of papers published in the Transactions of the SSA, but papers on, and contributions from, Australia were carefully considered along with research undertaken in other imperial sites. These papers were then shared internationally. Papers on Australia published by the SSA included contributions from the Commissioner and the Registrar General of South Australia, a history of the colony of South Australia, sanitation in the colonies, the effects of the Gold Rush, on punishment and infanticide and refuges for mothers and their children.¹¹ The history and results of transportation, education and emigration in the colonies were also considered. There were, as well, papers on the colonies as ‘fields of experiment in government’ and on the health of the Anglo-Saxon Race in Australia. Florence Nightingale wrote and presented her report on the Aboriginal races in 1864.¹² These discussions, and the place of the colonies within them, were in turn reported widely in the Australian national and regional press.¹³

The Australian colonies, many of which were, of course, former penal colonies, were ripe for research and experiment on penal and legal reform as well as the management of poverty and the introduction of education and training schools for the ‘rising generation’. Nascent social researchers used Australia, as well as many other imperial sites, to gather data for proposed social reform throughout the British world. One latter-day Marxist critic of the SSA accused nineteenth-century individuals involved with the SSA of ‘native empiricism’. He argued that they were intellectually impoverished, preventing the development of sociology in Britain in contrast to the discipline’s success in the United States (US).¹⁴ Such a view neglects the ways in which the work of the SSA was focused on the policy arena and the process of empirical research, of ‘investigating and counting’ in order to justify demands for reform. Many hoped to use their ideas and experiments to make a positive ‘impact’ on the world in which they lived and they eschewed the theorisation of these demands.¹⁵ Many members of this transnational, mobile middle class had mixed motivations. They used philanthropy to facilitate their own social, political and cultural mobility as well as to create a better world for others. Far greater numbers of adult women, many of their contributions detailed below, became engaged in philanthropic practice from the 1870s, improving the lives of the less fortunate and making claims for women’s political power in the process.¹⁶

Michael Roberts, author of the award-winning Making English Morals, alerted me to the neglected value of the records of the SSA for Antipodean researchers.¹⁷ Oliver Ross McGregor, who began life as an economic historian, training at the London School of Economics to become a Professor of Social Institutions at Bedford College at the University of London, unearthed the history of this organisation in the 1950s. He described it as one of the most ‘remarkable sources on the social history of Victorian Britain’.¹⁸ He began the arduous task of ordering and annotating the Society’s transactions in the 1970s but his work remained incomplete at his death in 1997. In 2005 a team based at Oxford University, led by Lawrence Goldman, continued his work. The SSA published about 4,500 papers on ‘social, political, economic, educational, sanitary, legal and cultural issues between the 1850s and 1880s’ in the Society’s Transactions.¹⁹ About 2000 speakers delivered the papers orally to members of the SSA that were then published to share far and wide across the globe. The index reveals that some individuals were serial presenters. The catalogue has been made available through the UK Data Service (set up to encourage data sets to be analysed by multiple generations of scholars). This work has allowed me to search through the papers more easily to identify their content and links between people, subjects and ideas. Some, but not all, of these papers have been digitised.

Friendships amongst philanthropists

Henry Parkes was to become the ‘Father of Federation’, and the most ‘commanding figure in Australian politics’, but he struggled to escape poverty from his early life in Birmingham to his end in Australia.²⁰ Debt haunted him at almost every turn and he migrated from England to Australia as a young man in order to seek a better life. For the most part he found it, but he left much misery in his wake. In 1836 he married Clarinda Varney in Edgbaston, a suburb of Birmingham.²¹ Unable to find security there, or even when they moved to London, Parkes opted to sail for New South Wales in 1839. Working first as a labourer, then as a journalist, and editor-proprietor of the Empire, he moved his way into politics and became passionate about political as well as social reform as he made his way to the peak of Australian politics. Historians have identified his devotion to public education as a route out of poverty. Parkes became a famous writer, despite his limited education, and used some of his political power to increase the life chances and opportunities of the poor.²²

I am not concerned here with Parkes’ rapid political rise but, rather, his friendships with contemporary philanthropists and welfare campaigners who also migrated from Britain to seek their fortune and to contribute to the ‘welfare of the world’. Parkes’ writings reveal how he networked with many philanthropists on his international travels, discussing their plans for reform across the globe. He travelled to England in 1861 in order to ‘sell’ the colony to British migrants, to encourage them to move to, and settle in, Australia so that they could populate and work its vast land. At the time he was deeply in debt and the trip offered a brief respite from his economic malaise with the promise of a £1000 annual salary. Meanwhile, his paper, the Empire, filed for bankruptcy in NSW, and he left Clarinda and his five children to cope with few resources in Werrington. He had other matters on his mind. In order to speak to potential migrants across England ‘I held meetings, about sixty altogether, in such large centres as Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, and Greenock, and in many small country towns in the agricultural districts; and everywhere I had crowded audiences’.²³

Many English campaigners were keen to support his needs and to learn about Australia’s potential for migrants. Mrs Nassau Senior, Florence Hill and others met with him frequently, assisting him in his duties and helping him to network. Mrs Senior organised an important meeting in Battersea between him and a group of navvies he hoped to persuade to move to the colony.²⁴ Through these encounters in England Parkes was made keenly aware of the efforts of prominent English feminists, including Bessie Raynor Parkes and Maria Rye, who were determined to improve the economic opportunities of single women in England but were also seeking opportunities for women in imperial outposts.²⁵ Historian Marion Diamond has described how these ‘strong-minded women’ whom Parkes met, and their communities of knowledge, enabled Maria Rye, especially, to develop female emigration to Australia.²⁶ Parkes was captivated by the work of feminists and their efforts to encourage female economic independence and education.

While based in the United Kingdom (UK), Parkes also attended the annual conference of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences in London, which had a significant impact on his future plans for the colony. This was also where he shared knowledge of Australia’s circumstances and social experiments with numerous British-based social researchers. While Parkes was not impressed with Lord Brougham’s public speaking skills at the conference, he very much enjoyed papers by ‘Miss Carpenter, Miss Faithful, Miss Bessie Parkes, Miss Rye, Miss Florence Hill, and others … The meetings were followed by a dinner at the Crystal Palace, and by excursions to the prisons and Chatham, and the well-known reformatory at Redhill’.²⁷ After his visit to England, Parkes kept up his correspondence with Florence Hill. She continued to write to Parkes proffering her evidence and opinion on female emigration to Australia as well as social reform.²⁸ Caroline Emily Clark, whose letter to Mrs Windeyer opened this article, also contributed to his knowledge and campaign to spread the word of the opportunities to be gained in Australia.²⁹ These private letters had an important impact on policy making.

On his return to Australia, Parkes became preoccupied with the care of the sick and insane in the colony and the industrial reform ship the Vernon, where young ‘wayward’ boys were reformed through education and training. This became his baby alongside the Public Schools Act (his original contribution to education reform). New South Wales was the first place in the world to introduce legislation aimed at establishing industrial schools. Parkes was responsible for a flurry of social reform legislation during this period. In the eyes of these reformers, industrial schools and similar schemes were to be havens for abandoned, poverty-stricken children with few hopes inlife.

How did Parkes’ global friendships influence policy formation? The Windeyers were particularly close to the Parkes family. William Charles Windeyer was born in London in 1834 and moved to NSW with his parents in 1835. His wife, Mary, was born in Buxted, Sussex, in 1837 and moved to Sydney with her family in 1839. The couple met in Hexham and married in 1857. One of the first graduates of the University of Sydney, William became a law reporter on Parkes’ Empire newspaper and the men remained life-long friends. William became an influential barrister and politician with Parkes’ encouragement and political support. His desire for social reform fuelled his political and professional life. William and Henry shared ideas through their meetings and correspondence.³⁰ William wrote to Parkes throughout his 1861 visit to England, learning about his meetings with philanthropists as well as others.³¹ Windeyer was as passionate as Parkes about education for women, as well as men, and became in 1891 the founding chairman of the Women’s College in Sydney. The families lived in and out of each other’s pockets and Parkes’ devoted daughter, Menie, stayed with the Windeyers on occasion.³² William and Mary also visited England in 1886 and 1887 to meet with men and women of like minds and lobbied for the expansion of the boarding-out system in England, a system they had helped to establish successfully with their friend Caroline Emily Clark.³³

Mary Windeyer is well known as an influential philanthropist. She was intimately linked to a powerful philanthropic network constituted of friends in Australia and elsewhere. Her friendship with Parkes meant that he referred to her as ‘The Little Lady’.³⁴ She supported the establishment of Sydney’s Foundling hospital, became a passionate proponent of the ‘boarding out’ of children as a result of her friendship with Clark, and later became President of Crown Street Women’s Hospital. Her correspondence was peppered with ideas about philanthropic reform as well as family life. Sheexchanged numerous letters with Parkes, Rosamund Hill, and Caroline Emily Clark on the matter of boarding out and general charitable issues, amongst chitchat about their children and friends. These personal letters and intimate relationships were used to political effect.³⁵ With Clark’s evidence, Lady Windeyer urged Parkes to legislate for policy change and encouraged the passage of the State Children Relief Act (1881) which led to the establishment of the State Children’s Relief Board and the boarding out of children.³⁶

Despite his political success, Parkes’ financial difficulties continued. In 1881 he returned to England, this time on holiday, and found a warm welcome in Birmingham, his childhood home.³⁷ Birmingham had long pioneered innovative public health schemes and philanthropic activity and continued to do so into the twentieth century. Parkes thrived in an area that was experimenting with the potential of local government to enact social policy change.³⁸ This innovative regional city was Caroline Emily Clark’s place of birth. It was also home to the Hill family, who were now testing boarding-out schemes in England.³⁹ Parkes had met the Hills on his visit to England in 1861, resumed their friendship when the Hills visited Australia in 1873 (discussed below) and their friendship continued via correspondence for the rest of the century. Matthew Hill was a radical lawyer who remained the Recorder of Birmingham for 26 years.⁴⁰ He became active in penal reform and the National Reformatory Union (NRU) and he was a keen participant in the activities of the SSA in its early years before his death in 1872. Birmingham remained the hub of the organisation’s activity and hosted the first congress.⁴¹

Mary Carpenter, who became close to the Hills, was born to reforming Unitarian parents in Exeter in 1807, but the family moved to Bristol in 1817 so that Mary’s father, a preacher, could attend to the large congregation of Unitarians located there. Unusually for the time, among women if not Unitarians, she was extremely well educated, but her ambitions were frustrated early in life. Unlike her brothers, she was barred from entry into the religious profession and academia, where they each found fulfilling roles, and so she became determined to follow a different, socially useful path. Many visiting reformers, including American preacher and philanthropist Joseph Tuckerman, who stayed with her family on their international travels, profoundly influenced Mary. Through Tuckerman’s influence she became convinced of the necessity of working with the poor, and poor children in particular. Following in his footsteps, she became a passionate social reformer, initially in Bristol where she established the Working and Visiting Society as well as a Ragged School. In 1854, also in Bristol, she set up the first girls’ reformatory school in England. With the Hill sisters and their father, she helped to disseminate ideas about child rescue throughout the world that had a powerful impact in Australia.⁴² When Mary toured the United States in 1873, she used her research to make recommendations for reform.⁴³ Barred from entry into most professions, well-educated middle-class philanthropic women like Carpenter were making their mark on society in new ways by becoming career philanthropists, learning new political tools in the process.⁴⁴ Carpenter became a key mover in the National Reform Union from which the SSA emerged.⁴⁵ Matthew Hill led this section of the SSA and as a result Carpenter and the Hills worked closely together. Mary became one of the key campaigners in the Punishment and Reformation Section of the SSA together with Matthew Hill and his daughters.⁴⁶ It is important to understand the depth and breadth of these private relationships that sustained this organisation in the mid-to late century.

The Hill daughters were Carpenter’s contemporaries. Rosamund Hill was born in 1825. Her sister Florence followed soon after in 1828. Their well-connected parents based the family in London, during these years, where many of their children later involved themselves in philanthropic concerns ranging from prison and educational reform to juvenile delinquency. Both Rosamund and Florence received an extensive education at home and school. In 1851 the family left London for Bristol, where they met and campaigned with Mary Carpenter. Rosamund became her father’s private secretary and accompanied him on visits to institutions. She wrote frequently about her experiences and published her own suggestions for reform, lobbying social policy personnel far and wide.⁴⁷ After their father’s death in 1872, the sisters, intrepid philanthropic travellers, set off for Australia to visit their paternal aunt and to meet with their social-reforming cousin Caroline Emily Clark.

In Sydney the sisters were reunited with Parkes, whom they had first met in 1861. He treated them to a tour of key philanthropic institutions including Darlinghurst Gaol, the Benevolent Asylum, the Randwick Asylum and the Female School of Industry – all of which they later wrote about in What We Saw in Australia (1875).⁴⁸ Florence exchanged letters with Henry Parkes on her findings, hoping to influence his own moves towards reform.⁴⁹ The Hill sisters also liaised with William Charles Windeyer as he conducted the Royal Commission on Public Charities, New South Wales, in 1873. Rosamund gave evidence to the Commission, along with Clark. Windeyer went on to implement their recommendations regarding the boarding out of poor children in New South Wales and the two women continued to correspond and meet with the Windeyers about their philanthropic plans in England until the end of the century. This Australian scheme was a world first. The Hills were well-respected researchers and their opinions were highly regarded amongst reformers in Australia. But their knowledge and data about Australia were also shared amongst a network of active researchers across the world.⁵⁰

Women like Rosamund and Florence helped create a new class of professional female philanthropists who were to become prominent in public health, alongside doctors and other professionals, at the turn of the century. They also, for the most part, became prominent suffragists.⁵¹ By the end of the nineteenth century, the Royal Commission on Public Charities in NSW was recommending that the work of these women be formalised and that some, especially those women active on charitable Ladies’ Committees, be paid for their labour. This new cohort of women workers reaped opportunities that generations of women before them had lacked.

On their return to England, the Hill sisters used their experience in Australia to ‘castigate English authorities for being too slow to adopt a similar course’.⁵² Philanthropic ideas were clearly not simply transported to the colonies but contributed to reforms in the mother country and elsewhere.⁵³ Correspondence from Parkes continued and he remained a conduit of information about Australia throughout the 1870s. From their home in North London, where they were based from 1879, the Hill sisters continued to campaign for social reform and to write. Florence converted to Unitarianism after her father’s death and, following the passage of the Education Act of 1870, was elected to the School Board for the City of London, on which she served until 1897. She focused some of her attention on the training of girls for domestic service within these schools. She died in 1902. Rosamund continued to work in prison and poor law reform and remained particularly concerned with the plight of parentless poor children. She believed children were better placed in the homes of working parents rather than institutions and campaigned for boarding out along these lines. She also became a Poor-Law Guardian for St Pancras before moving to Oxford, where she died in 1919.⁵⁴

Philanthropy and politics

Ambitious Scottish migrant Dr Arthur Renwick headed improvements in NSW public health when he returned to Sydney from Edinburgh. Renwick was born in Scotland in 1837, the son of a bricklayer. The family migrated to NSW as bounty emigrants in 1841. Unlike many other migrants, the family settled well and made good in the colony. Arthur attended Redfern Grammar School and then the newly established University of Sydney where he obtained a BA in 1857. He moved back to Scotland to undertake his degree in medicine at an emerging world-class centre for maternal health and midwifery at the University of Edinburgh. He graduated to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Rising quickly through the ranks he returned to Sydney, keen to make his mark on the Australian medical profession and the colony more broadly.⁵⁵

Renwick had his fingers in almost all pies relating to social policy and public health in nineteenth-century Sydney. He used his work with many different metropolitan charities, to hone his skills and develop his philanthropic experience. His medical expertise, and the international networks he formed with many of the individuals discussed above, helped to transform the professional practice and experience of childbirth, maternal and child health in late nineteenth-century NSW, together with pensions for the elderly and the boarding out of children. As he laid his professional roots in Sydney, Renwick became the visiting medical officer at the Benevolent Asylum, which was opened as a refuge for the aged, infirm and destitute in 1821 but catered mainly to poor pregnant women and their children by 1862.⁵⁶

In 1868 he married Elizabeth Saunders at a ceremony performed in Redfern Congregational Church. Renwick was fiercely ambitious. In the 1870s he commenced professional work at the Deaf, Dumb and Blind institution, becoming President in 1880. He also laboured as an honorary physician at the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary and then became director and honorary consulting physician; he was engaged as a medical officer for the Australian Union Benefit Society and examiner for medical degrees awarded by the University of Sydney. A passionate believer in educational reform he donated £1000 to the University of Sydney in 1877. Renwick was also at the forefront of most public health schemes in colonial NSW, as similar schemes were established in England with the Public Health Act of 1875. The SSA facilitated the social mobility of medical professionals in Britain and Renwick eyed his opportunities for advancement in Australia.⁵⁷ Philanthropy helped nurture middle-class status, social capital and distinction. Networks were created in private and public.

Henry Parkes also enjoyed Arthur Renwick’s friendship as they moved together through NSW’s political hierarchy.⁵⁸ Florence Nightingale presented two papers to the SSA in 1858 on hospitals. Her research and recommendations for reform in hospitals were publicised by the SSA. She sent Parkes a personal copy of her ‘Notes on Hospitals on 24 Oct 1866’.⁵⁹ At the time, Arthur Renwick was beginning his wholesale transformation of the medical regime at The Benevolent Asylum’s hospital. The Windeyers were also friends with Lucy Osborn, Nightingale’s trainee in Sydney, and helped to spread her ideas for medical reform.⁶⁰ The Lancet and other medical periodicals disseminated the findings of the SSA and they were clearly discussed amongst medics in Australia and abroad.⁶¹ At the helm of New South Wales’s medical profession, Renwick managed Nightingale-trained nurses and transferred knowledge of medical and philanthropic care in diverse national contexts as he travelled around the world meeting with different practitioners. During the 1880s Renwick became the first president of the New South Wales branch of the British Medical Association.⁶²

In 1881, Arthur Renwick lobbied for the passage of the State Children’s Relief Act and he became the first president of the State Children’s Relief Board. In that role, he oversaw the introduction of the boarding-out scheme in New South Wales initiated by Clark in South Australia and passed by Parkes. The Board used the services of paid inspectors and lady volunteers to inspect homes, to ensure that the children were properly cared for. From 1896, the board had the power to grant custody to the child’s own mother and to pay her for maintenance if she were impoverished, widowed or deserted. These payments were, in effect, an innovative form of family income support.⁶³ By the late 1880s, most poor children in New South Wales were boarded out rather than institutionalised. In 1889, the board had 2284 children under its care and women supervised most of them. Arthur Renwick in turn supervised these women in his capacity as president of the scheme.⁶⁴

During the 1890s Renwick travelled to Europe and the United States in order to compare philanthropic practices in different contexts, to share details of his work in Sydney and to use his knowledge on his return.⁶⁵ All this voluntary work laid the roots for his political power.⁶⁶ Charitable and medical work consumed his working days but they were inseparable from his desire for political, professional and personal advancement.

Renwick’s passion for social reform spanned the life-cycle and he gave as much of his attention to the aged as he did to infants and their mothers when he campaigned for the passage of the old age pension. This was eventually passed in 1900 in New South Wales, but not until 1909 in England. Scholars have argued that such an instance exemplifies the Antipodes as a ‘social laboratory’ of the world.⁶⁷ We can see, however, that the long history of this policy began many decades earlier in the friendships and relationships nurtured and sustained by the individuals and their progeny detailed here. Arthur’s wife, who became Lady Elizabeth Renwick, was also a keen charitable campaigner. She worked as a school teacher before her marriage and became a renowned suffragist, working with the National Council of Women of New South Wales. She served as president of the Young Women’s Christian Association and was involved with a host of other voluntary organisations including the Benevolent Society.⁶⁸ The Renwicks’ and Windeyers’ friendship continued through the final decades of the nineteenth century, with both families remaining passionate about social and political reform.

Deeply engaged in charitable activity in Sydney, Lady Windeyer took on the mantle of chairing the Sydney committee of the first Australasian Conference on Charity held in Melbourne in 1890. Also part of this international philanthropic organisation were Miss Deas Thomson and Miss Macleay, whose fathers had been actively involved with the Benevolent Society. This community of philanthropists, bound by formal and informal networks, hoped to organise a conference in Sydney, with Renwick among the keynotes, but this was postponed while another conference was organised in Chicago. Renwick represented Australia at this US meeting and Margaret Windeyer (William and Mary’s daughter) travelled with him, campaigning for female suffrage as well as charitable reform.⁶⁹ Lady Renwick and Margaret worked together on the Colombian Exposition and the Congress of Representative Women in Chicago in 1893. Margaret travelled to the US, representing the Womanhood Suffrage League ‘to promote women’s intellectual and cultural achievements’ and to extoll Australia’s pioneering activities with regards to women’s suffrage. While she was based in London in 1894, Margaret Windeyer also met with Florence Hill and attended a conference on boarding out held in Charing Cross. She wrote to her mother explaining how it ‘so gratified me to think of all the good in the Boarding out direction you have done’.⁷⁰

On Margaret’s return to Australia she continued to campaign for women’s rights and set up the National Council of Women in the Windeyer family home with Lady Renwick, Lady Allen, Miss Deas Thomson – these were the wives and daughters of familiar, prominent, and long-serving philanthropic men – on 5 November 1895. Margaret returned to long-term overseas travel, speaking about suffrage in England as well as America, training as a librarian in the US, before returning to Sydney in 1901, to take up a position at the Public Library of New South Wales.⁷¹

On his death in 1897, her father William Windeyer was remembered by English boarding-out organisations for his influence on their practice.

In his Report as Chairman of the Royal Commission 1873–4 on the Public Charities of NSW, he exposed the defects of the treatment of such children in that colony, in Barrack Schools (akin to those in the Mother Country) and defined the more enlightened methods being gradually adopted elsewhere. With his co-operation and that of Lady Windeyer and of others interested in the movement, the system in New South Wales has been re-organised and now affords a model to other states. ⁷²

Philanthropic women utilised their husbands’ and fathers’ political influence in their philanthropic practice and as part of their own claims for political authority and the broader enfranchisement of women.⁷³ Australian women, who travelled and campaigned around the world, were at the forefront of these global campaigns for women’s political representation and social reform.

Conclusion

A steady correspondence, on private and public matters, passed between all of these male and female researchers and campaigners, moving between England, Australia and elsewhere. These networks helped to create a new class of professional male and female philanthropists who were to become prominent in public health, alongside doctors and other professionals, at the turn of the century.⁷⁴ Organisations like the SSA facilitated their social mobility and provided a hub for information exchange.⁷⁵ Their ideas, philanthropic tools and campaigns travelled with these individuals as they traversed the globe, responding to social need and campaigning for global political change. Ambitious philanthropists, medics, journalists, lawyers and politicians, women as well as men, had a particularly significant role to play in the colonies, where the workings of government were in the process of being formulated. They used the tools of the colonial and local government to solidify their networks, moving from the local to national and international stages. Those involved with the SSA cut their teeth with this pressure-group activity, sharing knowledge and resources at the Congresses and in their transactions. They often moved on to political maturity and power in government where they could flex their developing policy muscles with ease. These individuals were professionals, researchers and activists – keen to make their mark on the societies within which they lived, to improve them but also their own prospects in life. Their work was focused on the policy arena: philanthropists ‘investigated and counted’ to justify their demands for reform, as well as to make their own claims for political and social power.⁷⁶

A collective biographical approach that links all these colonial intergenerational philanthropists through their correspondence as they journeyed across the empire reveals the importance of friendships, family and ‘informal networks’ for the sharing of ideas and data regarding education, medical, social and political reform around the empire in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.⁷⁷ It reveals how the policy arena was gendered in significant ways but how women used their private lives to make their mark firmly on public social policy. Women and men used their research and experience to claim what Swain has labelled ‘expert speaking positions’, sharing their ideas with men and women of like minds.⁷⁸ They were devoted to their own social and political advancement, and that of their families, but they were also passionate about contributing to the ‘welfare of the world’ and enfranchising others to do the same.

About the author

Tanya Evans is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University where she teaches Australian history and public history. Her publications include Unfortunate Objects: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (Palgrave, 2005), with Pat Thane, Sinners, Scroungers, Saints: Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (2012) and Fractured Families: Life on the Margins in Colonial New South Wales (2015).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Letters belonging to Caroline Emily Clark, State Library of NSW, AC 47; Clark, Caroline Emily (1825–1911),’ Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed 15 September 2015, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/clark-caroline-emily-3212/text4837.

2 Shurlee Swain, ‘Florence and Rosamond Davenport Hill and the Development of Boarding Out in England and Australia: A Study in Cultural Transmission,’ Women’s History Review 23, no. 5 (2014): 744–59; Elizabeth A. Harvey, ‘“Layered Networks”: Imperial Philanthropy in Birmingham and Sydney,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 1 (2013): 120–42. See also: Mark Peel, Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

3 Paul Smyth, ‘The British Social Policy Legacy in Australia,’ in Colonialism and Welfare: Social Policy and British Imperial Legacy, ed. James Midgeley and David Piachaud (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011); Jill Roe, Social Policy in Australia: Some Perspectives, 1901–1975 (Stanmore, N.S.W: Cassell Australia, 1976).

4 Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

5 Arts and Humanities Data Service, ‘McGregor, Goldman and White’s Catalogue of the Published Papers of the NAPSS,’ UK Data Service, 1, accessed 24 June 2015, http://doc.ukdataservice.ac.uk/doc/5209/mrdoc/pdf/guide.pdf.

6 Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics, 32.

7 Daily News, 26 Sept 1870, 5. The phrase is the journalist’s and this report is cited in Lawrence Goldman, ‘A Peculiarity of the English? The Social Science Association and the Absence of Sociology in Nineteenth-Century Britain,’ Past and Present, no. 114 (February 1987): 137.

8 Lawrence Goldman, ‘The Social Science Association, 1857–1886: A Context for Mid-Victorian Liberalism,’ English Historical Review 101, (1986): 112.

9 These perspectives build on a rich and wide-ranging scholarship on the history of philanthropy including Anne O’Brien, Poverty’s Prison: The Poor in New South Wales (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988); Brian Dickey, No Charity There: A Short History of Social Welfare in Australia, revised ed. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990); and John Murphy, A Decent Provision: Australia’s Welfare Policy, 1870–1949 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

10 Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics, 76.

11 Paper 786, ‘How May the Efficiency of Prisoners’ Aid Societies be Best Promoted?,’ Transactions of the Social Science Association (Tr.); Paper 563 786, ‘A Concise Account of the Colony of South Australia, compiled from Official Data,’ Tr.,1862; Paper 49, ‘Address on Jurisprudence and Assimilation of the Law: ‘Includes Comments on Irish Land Law and Convict System’; Paper 562 1623, ‘The Australian Gold Discovery, and its Effects upon Australia,’ Tr. 1861; Paper 612, ‘Address on the Repression of Crime’ Tr., 1882; Paper 539, ‘On the Relations between Great Britain and her Possessions Abroad: Refutes Argument that Britain would be Better Off without the Colonies,’ Tr., 1863; Paper 725, ‘The Convict System of England’ – ‘short survey of history and results of transportation,’ Tr., 1862, and Paper 872 ‘The House of Shelter for Females,’ Tr., 1860; Paper 916, ‘Review of ‘Our Convicts’ by Mary Carpenter’ Tr., 1865–6; Paper 926, ‘Address on Education’ Tr., 1859, ‘Surveys system of education in England, USA, Canada’; Paper 927, ‘Address on Education’. Tr., 1861, discusses Australian universities; Paper 1474, ‘On the Superintendence of Female Emigrants’ Tr., 1863; Paper 1475, ‘The Influence of Emigration of the Social Condition of the Highlands,’ Tr., 1863; Paper 551, ‘On the Colonies as Fields of Experiment in Government’ Tr., 1870; Paper 2096, ‘On the Healthiness of the Anglo-Saxon Race in Australia,’ Tr., 1859.

12 Presented at the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science Meeting in 1864, York, England.

13 For a flavour: Goulburn Herald and Chronicle, 13 January 1872, 3. Brisbane Courier, 9 January 1866, 3. Queensland Times, Ipswich Herald and General Advertiser, 16 December 1869, 4.

14 Perry Anderson quoted in Lawrence Goldman, ‘A Peculiarity of the English?’ 133–4.

15 Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics, 18.

16 For further discussion, see Judith Godden, ‘Philanthropy and the Woman’s Sphere, Sydney, 1870–circa 1900’ (PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 1983), ch. 4.

17 Michael Roberts, Making English Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

18 Quotation from Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics, xii. See also the Catalogue of the Published Papers of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1857–1886, UK Data Service. On McGregor, see Robert Pinker, ‘McGregor, Oliver Ross, Baron McGregor of Durris (1921–1997),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), September 2004, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/68437; Oliver R. McGregor, ‘Social Research and Social Policy in the Nineteenth Century,’ British Journal of Sociology 8 (1957): 152–3.

19 Catalogue of the Published Papers of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1857–1886, UK Data Service.

20 The Times, 20 December 1950, 7; Allan W. Martin, ‘Sir Henry Parkes (1815–1896)’, ADB, vol. 5 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1974), 403.

21 Henry Parkes, An Emigrant’s Home Letters, with preface and notes by Annie T. Parkes (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1896), 9.

22 Martin, ‘Sir Henry Parkes’.

23 Henry Parkes, Fifty Years in the Making of Australian History (London: Longmans Green, 1892), 131–2.

24 Henry Parkes, Australian Views of England; Eleven Letters Written in the Years 1861 and 1862 (London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co, 1869), Letter IV, 41; Parkes, Fifty Years in the Making, 147.

25 Parkes, Australian Views of England, Letter IV, 41.

26 Marion Diamond, ‘Henry Parkes and the Strong-Minded Women,’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 38, no. 2, (2008): 152–62. See also, Diamond, Emigration and Empire: The Life of Maria S. Rye (London: Routledge, 2013).

27 Parkes, Australian Views of England, Letter IX, 97.

28 Florence Hill letter to Parkes, 27 April 1862, Parkes Correspondence, vol. 53, Mitchell Library (ML), CYA 923.

29 ‘Middle-Class Female Emigration Impartially Considered. The Emigration of Educated Women Examined from a Colonial Point of View. By a Lady Who has Resided Eleven Years in one of the Australian Colonies,’ Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science 10/56, 1 October 1862.

30 Windeyer Family Papers, ML, *D30 CY494.

31 ‘Windeyer, Sir William Charles (1834–1897),’ ADB, accessed 12 June 2015, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/windeyer-sir-william-charles-1062/text8145.

32 Letters from Menie: Sir Henry Parkes and His Daughter, ed. A.W. Martin, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), 48.

33 Windeyer Family Papers, 1827–1928, ML, *D159, CY2559; and the Letters of Mrs Windeyer, 1885–1888, ML, MSS 8397.

34 Martin, ‘Sir Henry Parkes,’ 441.

35 Papers of Lady Windeyer, 1829–1943, ML, MSS 186 Box 5, CY2643.

36 Letters exchanged with Hill include the following from the papers of Lady Windeyer, ML, MSS 186/13, 13 December 1873, 2 September 1874, 18 November 1874, 20 July 1890.

37 Parkes, Fifty Years in the Making, 381.

38 Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners, Scroungers, Saints: Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 14, 20, 57.

39 Michael Horsbrugh, ‘Her Father’s Daughter: Florence Davenport Hill, 1829–1919,’ International Social Work 26, no. 4 (October 1983): 1–13.

40 Marion Diamond, ‘Henry Parkes and the Strong-Minded Women’, 153.

41 Brian Rodgers, ‘The Social Science Association, 1857–1886,’ Manchester School 20 (1952): 283, 305.

42 John Ramsland, ‘Mary Carpenter and the Child-Saving Movement,’ Australian Social Work 33, no. 2 (1980): 33–41. Ramsland’s major source is Jo Manton, The Life and Work of Mary Carpenter (London: Heinemann, 1976).

43 John Ramsland, Children of the Backlanes: Destitute and Neglected Children in Colonial New South Wales (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1986), 164.

44 Mary Carpenter, ‘Reformatory and Industrial Schools in India,’ Transactions (1874): 348; Rodgers, ‘The Social Science Association,’ 285.

45 Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics, 44.

46 Rodgers, ‘The Social Science Association,’ 283–310.

47 Deborah Sara Gorham, ‘Hill, Rosamond Davenport (1825–1902),’ ODNB, accessed 8 November 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33875.

48 This was published in 1875 and is available digitally at https://archive.org/details/whatwesawinaustr00hilliala.

49 Parkes Papers, State Library of NSW (SLNSW), A988, 1873, 378–384; A923, 17 April 1862–1875, 446–453.

50 Gorham, ‘Hill, Rosamond Davenport,’ ODNB.

51 Godden, ‘Philanthropy and the Woman’s Sphere,’ 138.

52 Swain, ‘Florence and Rosamund,’ 752

53 Ibid., 744.

54 Florence Hill, Children of the State: The Training of Juvenile Paupers (London: Macmillan and Co, 1868).

55 Malcolm Prentis, The Scots in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), 33, 54.

56 Noel Gash, ‘A History of the Benevolent Society of NSW’ (MA thesis, University of NSW, 1967), ch. 12, 101.

57 On England see Goldman, ‘The Social Science Association,’ 106.

58 Letter regarding loan made to Henry Parkes, A916, on joining boarding out committee A923, 12 November 1879, 67–70, ML.

59 Henry Parkes, Fifty Years in the Making, 177.

60 Annual Report of The Benevolent Society, 1870, 361.06, ML, 7.

61 The Lancet 94, no. 2406 (9 October 1869): 522–3; The Lancet 109, no. 2806 (9 June 1877): 859; The British Medical Journal 2, no. 352 (28 September 1867): 275–6; The Lancet 91, no. 2320 (15 February 1868): 241.

62 Prentis, The Scots in Australia, 164–5.

63 Ron Rathbone, A Very Present Help: The History of the Benevolent Society of New South Wales (Sydney: State Library of NSW Press, 1994), 8; Brian Dickey, No Charity There: A Short History of Social Welfare in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 61–4; Stephen Garton, Out of Luck: Poor Australians and Social Welfare, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990) 91, 92, 106; Murphy, A Decent Provision, 15; John Ramsland, ‘The Development of Boarding-Out Systems in Australia: A Series of Welfare Experiments in Child Care 1860–1910,’ Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 60, part 3 (1974): 186, 187, 192–6; T. H. Kewley, Social Security in Australia, 1900–1972 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1973), 14.

64 State Children’s Relief Board Annual Report 1895, 3, cited in Godden, ‘Philanthropy and a Woman’s Sphere,’ 133, 135.

65 Annual Report of the Benevolent Society of New South Wales for the Year Ended 31st December 1892, 361.06/B, ML SLNSW.

66 Martha Rutledge, ‘Renwick, Sir Arthur (1837–1908),’ ADB, accessed 23 December 2013, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/renwick-sir-arthur-4467/text7287.

67 Smyth, ‘The British Social Policy Legacy,’ 176; Roe, Social Policy in Australia.

68 http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/PR00513b.htm. The source used to compile this entry was Brian Dickey, ed., The Australian Dictionary of Evangelical Biography (Sydney: Evangelical History Association, 1994). Additional detail on the Renwick family comes from Ruth Renwick’s scrapbook in Gosford Local Studies Collection, Gosford Library.

69 Windeyer Family Papers, ML, MSS 186, CY2645; Margaret Windeyer’s Scrapbook, ML, MSS 4653X, CY 3594. Windeyer’s mail in the US was sent care of Arthur Renwick at the NSW Government Building in Chicago.

70 Letter from Margaret to her Mother, 12 Campden Hill Road, Kensington, 1 May 1894, Margaret Windeyer Scrapbook 1866–1939, ML, MSS 4653X, CY 3594 1 (1). On these women’s leadership roles as international suffragists see Marilyn Lake, ‘Women’s International Leadership,’ in Diversity in Leadership: Australian Women Past and Present, ed. Joy Damousi, Kim Rubinstein and Mary Tomsic (Canberra: Australian University Press, 2014), 71–90.

71 Margaret Windeyer Scrapbook 1866–1939. On 19 July 1897 she attended a meeting at the Women’s Institute for thefoundation of the National Council of Women of Great Britain with her mother. See also James B. Windeyer, MargaretWindeyer, 1866–1939, Founder of the National Council of Women of NSW (Canberra: Wild and Wooley, 2008), 2, 9, 13, 21.

72 Resolution contained within a letter of sympathy sent to Lady Windeyer from the Boarding-Out and Cottage Training Homes Association (Workhouse and other Children), Westminster, 3 November 1897. Letters were also sent from other organisations including The State Children’s Aid Association 3 November 1897, Windeyer Papers 1827–1928, ML, *D159 MF CY 2559.

73 Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001).

74 Godden, ‘Philanthropy and the Woman’s Sphere,’ 138.

75 On England see Goldman, ‘The Social Science Association,’ 95–134, 106.

76 Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics, 18.

77 On ‘informal networks’ see Swain, ‘Florence and Rosamund’ and Harvey, ‘Layered Networks’.

78 Swain, ‘Florence and Rosamund,’ 747.