A Toynbee to Remember

By Joy Travers

BLUEINK Review
A Toynbee to Remember offers unique insight into the First World War ..... through the correspondence of working class East Londoners William and Lizzie Toynbee and their son Stan, a military clerk stationed in Egypt far away from the bloody trenches of combat.
The correspondence begins when Stan volunteers for enlistment, but due to his physical ailments he never sees a battlefield. Meanwhile Will and Lizzie endure life in London, suffering everything from food shortages and illnesses to Zeppelin raids on civilians.
The Toynbee household also experienced its own discord ..... Wills hectic travelling schedule throughout the war (including Union organizer) speaker for the Voluntary Enlistment and War Savings Campaigns ... Lizzies anxiety at her husband and sons illnesses, wartime chaos and raising her two daughters. .....
Travers has a knack for historical prose .... since her writing effectively transforms ..... family history into a lively narration of life during wartime ... the 500 Toynbee letters on which the book is based serve as an exceptional primary source to a conflict that has been culturally dwarfed by World War II.

KIRKUS Review
A Scholarly real-life portrait of an East London working-class family, during and after World War I. ..... Travers very ably places everything in a broader historical context that touches on the still-contemporary problem of equitable distribution of wealth. This elevates her work above mere memoir and achieves her goal of adding incrementally to the body of British working-class history.
William began as a compositor ... but later co-founded a newspaper and eventually rose to elite status in Labour ranks ..... He and Elizabeth were also local organisers of the Brotherhood, a nontraditional church movement ..... During the war Will worked as a paid government orator all over Britain to drum up voluntary enlistment and, later, to promote what was called war savings .....
Happily Travers had the prescience to make copies of the lengthy correspondence ..... The originals, it seems, were burned by order of a new principal at Ruskin College, to which Travers had donated them.

CLARION Review
Scholarly and precise exposition lets illuminating family letters take center stage. .....
The book is organised by themes within the letters; voluntary enlistment, the politicks of war, and the wars impact on the home. This approach is more effective at deriving meaning from the letters than a chronological approach would be. .....
It is true Travers is a historian at heart the book is full of well-researched information that connects the Toynbees lives to the broarder world of their time. As such, her work will appeal most to others passionate about history or to those who trace their roots to working class England of the 1900s.

Joy Travers, born in 1926 in Walthamstow was brought up by her Toynbee grandparents. Evacuated in 1939-1943 and returning with the school to London, she left with Higher School Certificate. In 1959 she married Michael Travers whose rare book collection she donated to Sussex University after his death in 1977. The Collection can be accessed on Internet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481796194

Joy Travers

Joy Travers, born in 1926 in Walthamstow was brought up by her Toynbee grandparents. Evacuated in 1939-1943 and returning with the school to London, she left with Higher School Certificate. In 1959 she married Michael Travers whose rare book collection she donated to Sussex University after his death in 1977. The Collection can be accessed on Internet.

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2014 Joy Travers. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/31/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9618-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9619-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909514

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

1   Prelude 1914-15

2   From Compositor To Government Employee

3   Men, Money And Machines: The Voluntary Enlistment And War Savings Campaigns

4   Views On Government And Trades Unions.

5   Living With The War At Home And Abroad

6   Brotherhood Matters

7   War And Politics

8   Feeding The Guns And Filling The Trenches.

9   Fighting On The Home Front

10   After The War

Epilogue

Bibliography

About The Author

Endnotes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

How this portrait of this Toynbee family came to be written was the result of a chain of tenuous events which began when my father Edward Robinson agreed to put our tenth of the J S Middleton archive to the nine-tenths destined for Ruskin College. In a chance conversation with the then Principal of the College, John Hughes, I mentioned that I had some 500 letters exchanged between my grandparents and their only son during the first world war, and that my grandfather, W F Toynbee had been an active Labour and Trade Union pioneer.

I was directed to Victor Treadwell, who would be my tutor for the following two years. His guidance and encouragement, as I ploughed my way through WW1 background reading, never failed. Ruskin’s then Librarians David and Val Horsfield were unstinting in their help and advice and photocopied every letter (I donated the originals to the College) so that I could work on them in my own time.

The research involved many visits to Warwick University’s archives where Richard Story and his Assistants patiently guided me through the records of the Typographical and London Typographical Association Minutes and those of the London Society of Compositors.

The North Library at the British Museum held the Minutes of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee and two photographs of the rooms where they met, and copies of The P S A and Brotherhood Journal from 1925 onwards.

The Public Records Office at Kew were invaluable in helping me find my way through a morass of War Office, Ministry of Munitions and Ministry of Reconstruction files. The Staff of the Imperial War Museum spent considerable time searching out thepublications of the National War Savings Committee and posters used in the campaigns.

The Durham Minters’ Association permitted me to search freely among their archive and gave me access to Minutes Books. The Librarian and Staff in the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Reference Library made available photocopies of the Newcastle Evening News and Prudhoe Street Chapel.

Special thanks are due to the Staff of the national Newspaper Library at Collindale for hours of photocopying of national and provincial newspapers, the PSA and Brotherhood Journal, Public Opinion and other contemporary material: and to Mr. Bird, the Labour Party Archivist at the Museum of Labour History for interrupting his work to seek out documents for me, and to the Archivist at Transport House for access to T U C and Joint Parliamentary Committee papers. I am also indebted to Mr. A E H Gregory, former Secretary of The Brotherhood Movement and to the Headquarters Staff in Leamington Spa for assistance.

My unreserved thanks go to Rick Vidal, April Ross, Janine Carey and very specially Kim Cavannah, all of whose encouragement and support have seen me through.

Joy Travers

FOREWORD

Joy Travers’s A Toynbee to Remember is a distinctive contribution to working class history in several respects. While it is true that the genre has attained a new and appropriate stature—due in no small measure to the influence of the History Workshop movement launched by Raphael Samuel from Ruskin College in the late 1960s—its presentation has been dominated by the aggregates and averages of collectivity, characteristic of sociological surveys, industrial relations case-studies, opinion polls and market research.

Thus working class family structure, consumption patterns, class-consciousness, work-place dynamics, housing-estate communities have become common objects of study by social scientists, much of it undertaken with at least one eye on the implications for social policy and the distribution of wealth, a purpose inherited from successive analyses of poverty from the mid nineteenth century. Since the 1930s with the inception of Mass Observation and the post-Second World War development of oral history, and the encouragement of a practical historical consciousness among workers themselves (one role of the History Workshop), it has been possible for socially distant academics to approach more closely both workers’ life experience and their own reflections on it.

The difficulty, of course, is the absence of evidence to write a three dimensional biography of the individual member of the working classes within the context of his/her family relationships. For this the public records of whatever kind are not enough—even in the age of welfare from the cradle to the grave! A narrative showing not only what people did but how they thought of what they did within the changing political, economic and social contexts of their lives is necessarily dependent on intimate records like family correspondence and diaries.

That literate working people wrote letters and kept diaries need not be doubted. They could also write autobiographies and memoirs and some of these have been published. Others who achieved a high public profile, usually associated with responsibility in office with a variety of organisations from a club to the state, provide ampler material for biographies. These cases are a small minority which cannot be presumed representative. For ‘ordinary’ folk, whatever they wrote they rarely preserved: traditionally, working class evidence down the generations was reminiscence by word of mouth, a legacy, perhaps, of a class-introspective illiteracy. Hardly anyone, except themselves, thought that their experience of life was worth observing and none was anxious to preserve it in a form which gave access to outsiders, least of all sinister upper-class improvers or the police. These habits died hard in relatively static working-class communities which, furthermore, the daily grind neither required nor facilitated the writing of detailed or value-searching letters to those worthy of the effort.

We return to the matter in hand. Joy Travers had two advantages not normally available to the social historian. She was able to write, with great intimacy and frankness about her own immediate ancestors of whom her own limited memory could be supplemented by the reminiscences of her kindred. Even more important, she was in possession of a large cache of family correspondence which had somehow survived (if not in its entirety) and was particularly revealing of the relationships and social awareness of its members because they were dispersed and challenged by the exigencies of ‘the Great War’—the father Will, over the length and breadth of Britain on campaigns to promote voluntary enlistment and war savings; the son Stan, to Egypt as a military clerk. At the domestic centre in London remained Will’s wife Lizzie and their daughters Dorothy and Marjorie. The correspondence shows how the family kept together by a mutual affection and invocation of common Brotherhood values in a period of unprecedented trial and stress. Moreover, they reveal how one clear-eyed trade-unionist took up the post of itinerant propagandist for the war effort against Prussian militarism and, at length growing disillusioned, turned to the reconstructed Labour Party as the working-class hope of the future. Aided by Mrs. Travers’s extensive citation of the letters, here we have at last, in an impressive immediacy of detail, an authentic work’s-eye view, so to speak, of the massive domestic impact of the war, including Zeppelin raids, food shortages and casualty lists, usually perceived from less intimate or more elevated angles. Mrs. Travers has been able to recapture the peculiar ethos of the times thanks to the spontaneous, unguarded exchanges of those much put-upon folk and, by dint of much laborious research, has replaced their correspondence in its wartime context. As far as the evidence allowed she supplies a family prologue and epilogue, to make up a general chronological, but unpretentious, account of these purposeful working-class Toynbees.

Will Toynbee may not have been one of the big names of Labour History, yet he was one of many devoted middling activists who helped to endow the new Labour Party with its particular post-deluvian fraternal appeal. He was after all ruled by the same Brotherhood moral code as his more celebrated friend, Arthur Henderson, who addressed the theme of social Reconstruction in the Brotherhood Journal as early as October 1914. Clearly the route to a Labour Christian socialism did not lie solely through the Independent Labour Party.

Victor Treadwell

Ruskin College

1994

(NB The Brotherhood Movement has no connection with Freemasonry—JDT)

Chapter 1

Prelude 1914-15

It is customary for parliamentarians and local politicians who reach the top of their career to publish autobiographies or memoirs, or to be the subject of extensive biographies and critiques. There was a plethora of such publications between the two World Wars. During the last quarter of the last century a mass of books appeared about the lives of ordinary people who never rose to prominence even in their own neighbourhood or place of work: diaries and records of working class men and women and, with the growth of all shades of feminism, especially women. It is rare, however, to come across an almost unbroken exchange of letters between members of a trade unionist’s family written during that first national experience of ‘total war’. There are close on five hundred letters exchanged between June 1915 and June 1919 by Will and Lizzie Toynbee and their son Stan, who was stationed first in Gallipoli and then in the Middle East.

Whereas ordinary British men and women had lost members of their families and friends in far-off Crimea or South Africa, when the first World War began no-one, from the War Office and Cabinet to the unskilled worker, had a distinct idea of what it would mean to all the nation and, although foreboding was great, a general feeling prevailed that it would be over quickly and the men would be home for Christmas. As the years passed and the war became bigger than the wildest nightmares of its makers… all powers and parties were utterly stunned by the lavish scale of the sacrifices demanded.¹

The Toynbee family were in many ways just another working class unit: the father, William Frederick (Will), the mother, Elizabeth Bell (Lizzie), two sons and two daughters from Will’s first marriage, one son and two daughters of their own.² Will Toynbee possessed qualities which led him into middle rank prominence in several areas of experience; and it is that middle rank status which makes their exchange of letters unique. The correspondence ranges over three main areas of Will’s life. First, and the most fundamental, his faith as expressed in dedication to the Brotherhood Movement; second, his Labour Party and Trade Union activities as a member of both the Party and the Typographical Association; and third, his work for the Government’s Voluntary Enlistment, Recruitment and National War Savings campaigns. Since all three areas are interlinked and concurrent, it is necessary at this stage to outline their nature and Will’s involvement in two of them up to the beginning of the war and all three during it. They should also be placed in the context of the very little that is known of his early personal life.

William Frederick Toynbee was born at 43 Chiswell Street in the Clerkenwell district of London on July 13 1860, the second child and eldest son of John and Maria Jane Toynbee. He was, therefore, a Cockney, born within the sound of Bow Bells.³ Will’s father described himself then as an Accountant. The Whitbread Brewery owned terraces of houses next to the brewery on both sides of Chiswell Street. No.43 is still there at the end of a terrace. John Toynbee came from a middle class commercial family who had owned property in the East India Dock Road.⁴ Maria Jane also came from a genteel background: her father, William Reed, was a cheese monger; and two of her female cousins ran an Academy for Young Ladies in Islington. Because of a family quarrel, money which should have gone to Will’s father went elsewhere and the family was left much impoverished. It may well be that John was an alcoholic, which could have been a factor in his losing his share of the money. At any rate, he changed work three times between Lydia Jane’s birth in1857 (Tinplate workers’ clerk), Will’s in 1860 (Accountant), Samuel Coley’s in 1863 (Tinman’s clerk) and lastly in George Ernest’s in 1866 (Accountant in the Great Eastern Railway company.) His family also moved three times during those nine years.

Family legend has it that during John Toynbee’s lifetime the family solicitors’ managing clerk stole the deeds to the East India Dock Road property and, when the theft was discovered, threw them into the Thames and then disappeared. The Dickensian overtones notwithstanding, corroboration of the other part of the story has recently come from another branch of Toynbees in New Zealand.⁵The family has often been asked if there is a connection with the Arnold Toynbee of Toynbee Hall fame. Arnold’s father was Ear, Nose and Throat Surgeon to Queen Victoria. His sister Gertrude, in the introduction to her edited family letters, writes that her father told her he was ‘one of 15 siblings’.⁶ Joseph’s son Arnold was born in 1852 and the William Frederick of this story in 1860.

Instead of going on with his education when he reached 11 years of age, Will was sent to a firm of solicitors to learn the profession. On his way to work he passed a printing house in City Road Islington and, having struggled to come to terms with legal work which had no interest for him, he decided he wanted to be a printer. Every morning for a full week he went into the print shop asking to learn the trade and was thrown out of the door for trespassing. At the end of the week the printer realised that the lad was serious about learning the craft and took him on as an apprentice. A fully-fledged compositor in 1880, Will joined the Brighton branch of the Typographical Association while working on the Sussex Daily News there. He gave his age as 21, which he would not attain until the July, celebrating his majority on Bastille Day.⁷ It seems that his mother was superstitious, since the date of his birth as 13 July was not revealed to his family until his death. The family always celebrated his birthday on 14 July.

Will was a man of some presence: six foot tall with a touch of ginger in his hair and moustache and clear blue-green eyes. While at Brighton he found himself a partner, Elvina Barnard Goodchild of Bosham where her father was a gardener.⁸ The couple’s first child, Lionel Claude, was born in London in 1881 at the home of Will’s parents at 37 Lowman Road Islington, Elvina’s name on the birth certificate appearing as ‘Toynbee formerly Goodchild’. There is still no record of the marriage. The first daughter, Florence Eva, was born in 1883 at 40 Ringcroft Street, Islington while Will was living at 27 Brunswick Road, South Tottenham. Frederick William came along in 1885 and by 1887 the family had moved to Sculcoates near York where Laura Annie was born on 22 February and where Elvina died five days later.⁹ It is likely that Elvina did not approve of Will’s trade union activities or of his being a compositor, because he describes his occupation on her death certificate as ‘insurance agent’.¹⁰ Since trade union shops in the print industry were few and far between in those years, it is reasonable to suppose that insurance provided more stable work and a more regular income. Will continued working in the North, took up his TA membership again with a branch in the area and then worked ‘on the tramp’ some of the time.¹¹

Two years after Elvina’s death, a widower of only 27 with four children under the age of seven, Will left the older ones—aged six and four respectively—‘in care’ of the local authority, and the babies with members of the Toynbee family—according to his son Stan. Will’s brother George had married in Newcastle in 1889. Will witnessed the marriage¹² and it seems that George and his young wife may have been willing to give a temporary home to Will’s babies. While working in Newcastle Will met Arthur Henderson and together they helped found the Newcastle Evening News in1892. Henderson was a Director and Will became the Managing Secretary. It was perhaps at that time that Will joined the Brotherhood Movement, possibly due to Henderson’s influence. Henderson himself was a staunch Methodist.¹³

The Brotherhood Movement began with one man’s initiative. In the 1860s John Blackham worshipped at Ebenezer Congregational Church in West Bromwich. His father was a printer and publisher there and Blackham travelled widely as the firm’s representative. In his travels he had come across groups of working men gathered at street corners on Sundays apparently with nothing to do. He canvassed those groups, asking what sort of meeting would rekindle their interest in the Gospels as part of their daily living. The replies were direct and almost universal: they wanted something bright, and joyful, the talk would not be too deep or too long and all would need to be made to feel welcome.¹⁴ In 1875 Blackham established in West Bromwich the first Pleasant Sunday Afternoon of praise, prayer and bible readings. Soon PSAs, as they came to be known, sprang up throughout the North and Midlands, usually attached to Baptist or Methodist churches. The Congregational and Free Churches tended to establish Men’s Own and Women’s Own Meetings where worship was a common activity on Sundays, but where the men and women pursued their own activities during the rest of the week. Both PSAs and Men’s and Women’s Own Meetings spread throughout the country and by 1905 a National Brotherhood Council had been formed, although from 1875 onwards Blackham himself had opposed the formation of a central, national organisation. In 1906 the Movement had 600,000 members and by 1914 had grown to 1,300,000 some 700,000 of whom were women. The figures bear comparison with the 1,000,000 trade union members and others who, Arthur Henderson claimed, contributed to the Labour Party in 1906.¹⁵ That same year Henderson had written that:

the working classes were not so much hostile to Christ as to the Churches… . they go in good numbers to P.S.As, Adult Schools and Men’s Sunday Meetings… according to the Secretary of the London P.S.A. Federation, the movement in London alone has during its 15 years existence now established 120 societies, having about 30,000 members.¹⁶

As the growth of the Brotherhood Movement spread throughout the Midlands and then into the South, the differences between them and the established Non-conformist churches became more obvious. The churches, with their insistence upon theological exegesis and disputation, were out-of-touch with the Christian expectations and practices of workers and their families. The Brotherhood motto: One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren set the tone for a rapid development of practical Christianity coupled with a growing concern that individuals should receive the rights to which they were entitled and enjoy also an increasing share of the industrial wealth to which they contributed their labour.¹⁷ The Movement was also a protest against the increasing exclusivity of middle-class religious institutions and of the Free Churches in particular.

The national leaders were mainly eminent Free Churchmen such as Baptist Ministers F B Meyer and Dr. John Clifford; Sylvester Horne MP and influential Liberals spoke at public gatherings. Before the war Lloyd George had a curious, mutual aid relationship with them, as did Asquith and other Liberal politicians when the Non-conformist leaders were pressing for reforms in their favour to the religious input in successive Education Acts.¹⁸ Regionally and locally, however, the Movement’s strength was in local church ministers and lay speakers whose zeal and dedication filled church halls on Sunday mornings, afternoons and evenings. By 1889 the Northern Counties edition of the Journal, The P.S.A. Leader, was published each month in Manchester. Brotherhoods throughout the country contributed to it and exchanged news of membership numbers, progress and attempts to form regional and local associations.

When Will and Lizzie Toynbee left Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 30 January 1896, their wedding day, for Walthamstow they worshipped at Marsh Street Congregational Church there and soon became involved in the creation of a Men’s Own Meeting. Marsh Street Congregational was a bastion of middle class Liberalism and Will bided his time before helping to establish a more politically-oriented Men’s Meeting. As early as June 1909 reports in the Walthamstow Guardian showed that Will was already becoming a thorn in the side of Marsh Street Congregational Men’s Meeting of which he was vice-president. Speaking at a Sunday meeting in June that year, Will made it quite clear that all was not well: he had been reproved for considering everyday matters at such meetings, he said, because they were not ‘spiritual’. His Christianity was no use to him at all, he continued, if it did not control his actions in all matters, and he believed that:

. . . bringing everyday life—the most material things of a most material life—to the touchstone of the Gospel was not lowering, but raising, the standard of life among the men who so considered them.¹⁹

Then he referred to a statement by a former PSA Secretary that, since they had brought their material concerns into their Brotherhood meetings, his members had shown moral improvement in their benefit societies, trades unions and workshops. Will ended his address by recommending that his listeners should make the Brotherhood ideal colour their political action as well as being part of their most intimate concerns. In the November of the same year Will was openly pleading with Marsh Street Congregational Men’s Meeting to stop trying to cover up or gloss over differences which in their essence were vital, but to state them frankly in the light of day. Obviously the dissension was over what his opponents considered to be their ‘spiritual’ and his ‘material’ conception of Brotherhood. Should their propaganda be evangelism or social Christianity? Will asked and answered his question with a survey of guidance from both Old and New Testaments, which pointed to a whole-hearted and authoritative declaration of God’s care for the material welfare of His created beings. Next he weighed in with the argument which had, in essence, prompted the birth of the Brotherhood Movement. It was impossible not to escape the conclusion, he continued, that for centuries:

the Church, originally formed by and among the poor, had, by accepting and coming to depend upon financial support from the wealthier classes, gradually become divorced alike from the worker and from the Gospel in its purity.²⁰

He earned loud cheers from some sections of the meeting, but the fight was really on between him and the more affluent church members and officers.

Had such reports appeared only in the local press it would have been bad enough for Will, but in August 1909 the split at Marsh Street was mentioned in the PSA Leader for all to read. T W McAra, a regular member of the Council of the London Federation of Brotherhoods, spoke at Marsh Street and stated how a sad languishing and loss of influence had come to the pioneer Brotherhood of Walthamstow. However, he continued, some men of faith had quietly set about the task of reorganisation, experiencing for their pains hearty denunciation from their opponents, and the faintest of blessing from their friends. The result had been astonishing, McAra proclaimed, all signs of decrepitude and decay having disappeared within a few months, thus proving how right were those who had rescued the Meeting from its wan and anaemic condition. Marsh Street was going from strength to strength.²¹

Responding to that kind of encouragement, Will did not let up. He used every opportunity he found of bringing political issues into his Addresses. He used the Sweated Trades Board Act (1910) as a peg on which to hang a blistering attack upon the ‘cant’ which expressions like ‘freedom of contract’ had been shown to be. Why were the pulpits silent, he asked in view of the tender solicitude the Lord Jesus Christ displayed for human life?, adding that cant had crept into religion once people tried to explain away as spiritual many of the mandates which were unmistakenly (sic) material.²² At meeting after meeting Will used the Scriptures, and especially the Gospels, to affirm his blazing belief that Brotherhood meant there is no sacred or secular: God has it all; there are no such fine distinctions. What was more, he affirmed, the first time God called a Man to special work was in the face of an industrial crisis when Moses freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.! No wonder his splendid address was followed with keen interest when he voiced such beliefs at Wood Street Union Church PSA in a working class area of Walthamstow.²³

Will was doing in his church what he had done all his working life in his Union activities: appealing unashamedly to working class men and women. He succeeded to the point where Marsh Street Men’s Meeting was able to put another paragraph in the Journal, asserting that a purpose which was definite and determined and worked consistently attracted men in the street, especially when it preached the practical application of Christianity. That was what 15 months of practically undeviating exposition on this line had done. The membership had doubled and people were enthusiastic towards a programme of aggressive work.²⁴

In October 1910 a massive Demonstration organised by the Walthamstow Association of Brotherhoods in conjunction with Adult Schools, made its way amid three Silver Bands and streaming banners from three different starting points in the town to the Victoria Baths. Will was President of the Association that year and the national journal noted also that on the way to the Demonstration enthusiasm overflowed the principle streets. There is a picture in the Journal of Will and the National Secretary, Willie Ward, leading the main column between pavements crowded with men and women.²⁵ Brotherhood Demonstrations wherever they took place were gala events in the lives of the ordinary people.

Each issue of The P.S.A. Leader and Brotherhood Journal carried news of new groups being formed all over the country. There was always a frank and lively exchange of correspondence reflecting diverse opinions about politics, belief and the aims of the Movement itself. Between 1910 and the beginning of 1911 Will took up any and every social question which presented itself to the public. When the 1911 National Insurance Bill was proposed, having stated that he was in favour of it, he pointed out in the Men’s Meeting that he would add a strong proviso that if the individual was to receive the care of the community, then upon the individual rested the responsibility, & no shibboleth could divest him of it.²⁶

Despite the growth in numbers and interests in Marsh Street Congregational Men’s Meeting, the differences which had appeared in 1909 were widening. At the beginning of 1911 it announced in The P.S.A. Leader and Brotherhood Journal that

perhaps the most favourable sign of our growth was… that there is scarcely one Sunday in the year when… at least one of our members [is] not speaking or singing at other meetings; and second, that to celebrate the beginning of their tenth year Mr. Arthur Henderson, JP MP takes the pulpit morning and evening on Sunday, and speaks to the Brotherhood in the afternoon.²⁷

Henderson did not speak at any of their meetings that day. The Church deacons, backed by ordinary members of the congregation and the Minister, who did not share Will’s political views and commitment, refused to allow Henderson to make an appearance. For them it was the final impertinence and they issued Will with an ultimatum either to leave the Men’s Meeting or accept the strictly denominational view propounded by the Church.

Will must have known that arranging for Henderson to speak would provoke the Church to act. The revived Marsh Street Congregational Men’s Meeting had already acquired a large and enthusiastic membership which was making its influence deeply and widely felt in a densely populated neighbourhood. It had elected its own leaders who had desired and endeavoured to work in perfect harmony with the Marsh Street Church ministry and deaconate. However some of the church members failed to understand and sympathise with the objects and methods of the Brotherhood Movement and a Church Meeting had decided that the Officers and Committee of the Brotherhood—all but four committee members—must be elected by the Church as a Church and their policies imposed upon the Brotherhood.²⁸ The Church also threatened to expel Will, a move which he vigorously and successfully contested. He then announced that he would set up his own Men’s Meeting. He did so, using the name Marsh Street Men’s Own, found a local cinema to rent on Sundays and, within a couple of years, had acquired over 200 members, many from the Marsh Street Congregational Men’s Meeting. The Church then renamed its branch Marsh Street Men’s Meeting. The explanation of the split was printed in an eight-page appeal for money to build an institute for all the Men’s Own activities. It announced that MSMO had rapidly increased to more than 400 members and the Committee had decided to take an option to buy a site for £1017.10s. They had acquired the services of an architect to prepare a sketch for a proposed building, which they included in the pamphlet. The members had agreed to contribute or collect at least £1 each but, as the writer pointed out, the men are mostly working men and the leaders are richer in Brotherhood enthusiasm than in pocket…²⁹ Will added a few paragraphs to the appeal, making the point that the scheme could be financed as a speculation in a fortnight, but that as a Brotherhood possession it would be invaluable and for that alone we are working. Will’s vision had been endorsed by the members whom he most wished to reach and serve but, by breaking away from Marsh Street Church, MSMO had become entirely self-supporting. The members paid for the rent of the cinema; they paid for the printing of the syllabus; they paid for the soloists and speakers at the meetings. It was a remarkable beginning.

The split in the Brotherhood Movement between what the evangelical groups called the spiritual and what they labelled as material about the kind of group which Will ran, mirrored in effect the growing split between the religious and secular arms of the Labour and Trades Union movements. In fact Will’s MSMO was only material in the sense that he refused to separate the everyday needs of human beings from their spiritual ones; but in the incorrect labelling of his as a Cinema crowd, we may have a clue also to some of the attitudes which drove Labour and Union supporters away from religious affiliations. If people professing to be active Christians were bitterly opposed to other Christians allying themselves to the workers’ cause, why should workers themselves remain within the framework of believers? Once firmly established, MSMO set about forming a Sisterhood in which Lizzie would be deeply involved and would become its first President. They envisaged that the Constitution recently drawn up would "preclude the possibility of the hall ever being alienated from the purposes of the Brotherhood or divorced from the control of the members. As importantly, there would be other benefits because:

The demand for a commodious and accessible hall in Walthamstow is so pressing that a very material revenue is assured from letting… . The institute, too, should be of real service to the large number of young men now belonging to the Brotherhood.³⁰

Marsh Street Church’s refusal to allow Henderson to speak on that Sunday in January 1912 was made against a background of darkening industrial unrest, and the prospect of a miners’ strike. In February 1911 the P.S.A. Leader and Brotherhood Journal published a three-page article entitled About Coal and Coal-Mining; in October A.G.H. Gardiner, Editor of the Daily News contributed another on the Movement’s Social Aims, which attacked the individualism of the old Liberal reformers for encouraging people to look after themselves at the cost of others. The following year the same Journal began a series called Social Contrasts, which featured on the first page an article on the Lambeth Coroner’s condemnation of insanitary dwellings next to one headed Twenty Million Pound Baby—Vincent Walsh MacLean—born with that inheritance. ³¹ Since Will read his Journal regularly, he must have welcomed the outspoken way in which it was challenging accepted ideas about the nature of society.

The Marsh Street situation reflected the much wider controversy which had engaged the Movement and the Church nationwide since the Movement’s membership leapt towards its first million at the beginning of the second decade of the century. A paper read at the 1909 Annual Conference had defined the relationship as that of parent (the Church) and child (the Brotherhood)

born in the sacred wedlock of the evangelical revival of thirty four years ago, following one of those memorable missions in our churches by Messrs. Moody and Sankey.³²

Thus wrote one of the many ministers who saw the Movement as the Church’s own, with a fairly lively disregard for John Blackham’s account of what did in fact occur. In less than three years after becoming a national organisation, the divisions were deeper, livelier and sometimes most acrimonious as attempts to keep politics out of religion were pitted against equally vigorous ones to include them.

In October 1912 the Journal printed a perspicacious comment on the recent Presbyterian Synod, which bore out much of Will’s expressed views. The Synod had received a report accusing Brotherhood organisations of being increasing hostile to the Churches and a hindrance to their work. That, said, the writer, was simply a sign of the times which was symptomatic of a widespread disappointment that the help given by the Church to the Brotherhood Movement had not brought more people into the churches. The paragraphs which followed must have brought comfort and encouragement to Will in his bid to maintain the new democratic creation of MSMO. Granting the truth of there being a substantial dislike in the Brotherhoods to sacerdotalism and priestcraft most obviously in the Free Churches and a tendency to criticise the lethargy and ineptitude of the Churches over such matters as the recent labour troubles, it was not so much hostility to the Church as such, the writer continued, as a desire that the Church be seen as a power for righteousness rather than a mighty business organisation which she sometimes appears to be. The Churches should not therefore expect their membership to increase because of the help they gave the Brotherhoods, but should be willing to give without receiving anything in return."³³

When the Reverend Sylvester Horne MP became National Brotherhood President-elect for 1913, in an interview with the Westminster Gazette he made his view clear that, were it not for the Brotherhoods, the Churches could keep neither young nor old people. He continued that

. . . so far from recruiting their membership from the Churches, the Brotherhoods make their most effective appeal to men who have never attended the ordinary religious services… the men have come in because they have found something that interests them, and their hostility or indifference to Christian teaching is very soon changed to the warmest sympathy and desire for personal service. That is why I am persuaded that the influence of the Church in the life of the community… cannot be indicated apart from the Brotherhood Movement now-a-days.³⁴

As the Movement’s membership swelled, MSMO made a bid to attract money from other Brotherhood organisations by taking a full page advertisement in the Journal for its proposed new building. For 18 months, the advertisement proclaimed, the members had levied themselves to guarantee the rent and had acquired the nucleus of a building fund, and if each organisation gave just one collection, the advertisement concluded, then MSMO would be able to achieve its aim.³⁵

Viewed even within the context of its day and age, the appeal seems hopelessly over-ambitious. What prompted Will, as President, to persuade MSMO to advertise a second time for help nationwide is not clear. Walthamstow had an Association of several flourishing Brotherhoods: the London Federation, of which the Walthamstow Association was a member, was active and growing. Yet Will appealed to neither of those. Or perhaps he did and, not getting the response he needed’, cast wider. The appeal failed. MSMO continued to expand, however. Its activities widened: there was a Debating Society, the Apollo Dramatic Society, the Band and Choir, the League of Three for teenage boys. Its members took part in all local Demonstrations and in the huge national gathering held annually in a different major city. Will made a point of attending every Sunday if he could, either speaking at MSMO or at another Brotherhood at least once. In 1913 he was President of the London Federation Council and in 1920 President of the London Federation itself.

Before her involvement in the Brotherhood Movement in Walthamstow Lizzie Dobson, as she then was, had joined in 1894 a newly-opened Methodist Free Church in Prudhoe Street Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She was working as a waitress when Will met her sometime around 1892 when he and Arthur Henderson helped to found The Newcastle Evening News. The paper’s Prospectus declared:

This Company has been formed for the purpose of establishing an ‘Evening Newspaper for the great Industrial Community of the North of England’. The need for a journal which shall fully recognise and advocate the wants of the workers, while placing in the hands of the general public a thoroughly efficient Newspaper, is clearly apparent… . The lack of sympathetic treatment—indeed, the almost constant misrepresentation of the workers’ aims by the ordinary press of the country, has emphasised the want of an outspoken mouthpiece as a vital necessity to the existence and well being of the cause of Labour Organization.³⁶

In those years the Newcastle area was served by a number of newspapers: the North Star, Newcastle Journal, Sunderland Post, Alnwick and County Gazette, and the Durham County Advertiser, all of which gave strong support to the Conservatives. The Newcastle Daily Leader, Shields Daily News, Newcastle Daily Chronicle and the Durham Chronicle gave equally strong support to the Liberals.³⁷ In 1892 the editors of the Daily Chronicle and Daily Leader both left, with the apparent demise of both papers, an occurrence which allowed the first workers’ paper in the area to be established. The Directors included the President and Secretary of the Newcastle Typographical Association and W F Toynbee, another member of that body.³⁸ Somehow they obtained a capital of £50,000 in £1 shares, with Trades Unions holding an unlimited number and private individuals being entitled to a maximum of 50 shares each. In that way they hoped to keep control out of capitalist hands. Milne goes on to claim that the Prospectus was less than fair to the other local newspapers because, although the Evening News’s growing manifestations of working class militancy were not welcome, the uncompromising attitude of the colliery owners had drawn such criticism from both the Leader and the Durham Chronicle as to rebut the allegations of the Evening News’s Prospectus about newspaper bias against working men.³⁹ Criticism of the owners’ attitudes in one strike, however, does not rebut the general allegations in the Prospectus. The left-hand margin of the Paper’s letterhead bore the following vertical legend: The People’s Paper/A Family Paper/A Sporting Paper/A Newspaper/A Labour Paper/A Football Paper/A Cycling Paper/A Cricket Paper/An Athletic Paper/An Outspoken and thoroughgoing Exponent of Organised and United Labour. Radical and Progressive. An All-Round Working Man’s Paper.⁴⁰

The paper received good support from advertisers, ensuring a first issue of 115,000 copies, which fell