They are striking images. We notice first the backdrop of the Salisbury Crags; next the chimney stacks, oast houses, the walls and roofs of densely-packed buildings. We are in the early twentieth-century Canongate – circa 1910 – a still industrial landscape in which breweries and gasworks jostle for space either side of the steep road that leads up to the Castle and down to Holyrood.
Look again and we see something rather different. Within this grimy urban scene is a garden in which children, the eldest no more than seven, are shown at various pursuits. In the first image, we watch them at some sort of performance, as does the small audience in the shelter nearby. In the second they are at play, concentrating hard on the moves that they execute.
The dissonance between industrial landscape and children at their games is remarkable, but what we see is not the result of an Edwardian version of Photoshop. Rather the photographs document one especially innovative component of the wave of social and urban reform which was aimed at the poor who then worked in the Canongate, and lived in the slums that had been made of its once fine houses.
Such work is usually associated with the metropolitan clearance and improvement programmes of the City Council (much influenced by its Medical Officer of Health, H.D. Littlejohn), or the Conservative Surgery approach developed by Patrick Geddes. But there were others who worked to effect change in the Old Town, among them the young woman in the centre of the photograph of the children at play. By telling her story and that of the kindergarten she founded (for that is what the photographs depict) my aim is to show how often it was in those pre-welfare state days that women initiated acts of social and urban reform and which, in this instance, placed the Canongate at the forefront of the most progressive welfare work of the period.
These ventures were less often manifested in dramatic demolition and new building, and more often took the form of working within existing environments and communities. Nevertheless, such women initiated significant, if subtle, transformations to lives and landscapes in the Old Town, offering a model of welfare practice which still has resonance today.
Figures 1 and 2 (as well as 5) show the children of St Saviour’s Child Garden (SSCG) in its second home at 8 Chessel’s Court. Opened in November 1906, this kindergarten was the outcome, in microcosm, of the very particular confluence of contemporary anxieties about the lives of the urban poor, especially children, with late Victorian social theory and feminist ideology, all of which were embodied in the work and life of its founder, Lileen Hardy, the woman the children watch so closely as they play.
Like so many women reformers before and after her, Hardy did not seek personal glory and left no papers; she is not knowable in the way that a Geddes or a Littlejohn is. So we must come to her obliquely, through official records and the documentation that survives of the kindergarten itself. Thus we find her first in Census records in the place of her birth, Salisbury. Born in 1872, she was one of the six children of a chemist. By 1901, and described as a kindergarten teacher and governess, she was resident in Edinburgh, working for a family in Charlotte Square. She was, then, one of a relatively new type of woman: a daughter of the middle classes who wanted, and likely needed, to work, and who, thanks to the opening up of education to girls by mid-century feminists, could receive a decent education and even entertain thoughts of a career.
Friedrich Froebel’s concept of the kindergarten (and its development by his followers) was at the forefront of progressive thinking about education at this date. It appealed to reform-minded Victorians and Edwardians as they sought to turn away from the rigidity of contemporary social codes. As Hardy herself wrote:
‘The kindergarten discards the abstract learning and instruction which have no relation to the child’s physical, mental or spiritual needs, and places him instead in a little world of action where he can develop his personality along the lines of his own natural activities, his social life by contact with his peers. In childhood there is only one true means of real self-expression, and that is play. Organised play, is, in the child-stage – work!’
Integral to the successful practice of the kindergarten method were, in Froebel’s mind, trained women teachers. They did not need to be mothers; indeed, by virtue of their training they could out-nurture those who had actually given birth. He thereby opened up a significant area of work for middle-class single women but, importantly, one which did not transgress their femininity. Hardy, in an appeal for a co-worker, written in 1907, explained:
‘To be a kindergartner is the perfect development of womanliness – a working with God at the very fountain of artistic and intellectual power and moral character. It is therefore the highest finish that can be given to a woman’s education to be trained for a kindergartner.’
Hardy was among the first students at the Sesame House for Home-Life Training, in London. This had been established in 1899 by members of the Sesame Club, an association for those interested in what were described as the ‘new principles’ of literature, art and education. Sesame House served in part as a finishing school, intended ‘to fit girls and women more fully for the woman’s life’ through the acquisition of housekeeping skills but it had as its ‘secondary purpose the preparing of girls who need to earn their livelihood as certificated lady nurses to children, as kindergarten teachers, and as nursery governesses.’ Teaching was, naturally on Froebelian lines; the head and her assistant being ‘imported’ from Pestalozzi-Froebel Haus in Berlin.
In the large house on Acacia Avenue, St John’s Wood, Hardy entered a ‘world of action’ for young women, following a curriculum which encompassed, as a journalist reported, ‘the theory and practice of education, child-development, natural science, hygiene and general household management.’ This learning through doing also extended to the unique feature of Sesame House, its Free Kindergarten. This was an initiative to expand the benefits of the kindergarten method from the middle classes to the children of the working classes. For, at the same time as Froebel’s ideas chimed with contemporary ideals of womanliness, his emphasis on child nurture and self-realization offered one way to address contemporary concerns about the state of the nation and its people.
At their root was the growing awareness that Britain no longer enjoyed the industrial and imperial dominance it had built up since the eighteenth century: competitor powers such as Germany, the US and Japan were increasingly powerful and, as time would tell, bellicose. At the same time, the possibility of the nation being able to maintain, at the very least, its world status, seemed ever more under threat as a new wave of detailed social research revealed the abject state of health of its workers. In Edinburgh statistics showed that death rates in the Old Town were twice that of the New (the population of the Canongate was an overcrowded 40, 000). If Britain were to progress, changes needed to be wrought on the bodies and environments of the urban poor.
For advocates of the Free Kindergarten, as Hardy, by virtue of her training, became, the starting point for reform lay with society’s youngest members. She wrote: ‘…everyone who is thinking about the problems of poverty and degradation will acknowledge that no other method can compare with that of striking at their root in the children of today who will be the men and women of tomorrow.’ Slum conditions, Free Kindergartners argued, stifled the children’s true instincts, especially when they were at an age ‘when the instinct for activity and industry is strong.’ No society could continue to prosper if this were the case. The solution was to do what Hardy would planned: create the transforming environment of a kindergarten within the slums themselves. There, instead of being banished to wander the streets, or be watched over by a disgruntled older sister who should have been at school, young children could daily embark on a morning of activity which was designed to enable them to realize their potential to contribute fully to society.
It took Hardy five years to realize in the SSCG what she called ‘the great desire of my heart.’ In the meantime she had to earn a living. Her great fortune, and a key influence on the form her kindergarten took, was to find employment with a very particular Edinburgh family, the Whytes, at number seven Charlotte Square.
Jane Whyte was a prominent member of Edinburgh’s progressive circles; her husband, The Reverend Alexander Whyte, was well-known in his day as a theologian, academic and minister of Free St George’s Church, Shandwick Place. Since the early 1880s she had been part of the Secular Positivist group that met in the nearby home of James and Edith Oliphant (whose sister Anna was married to Patrick Geddes). Among its concerns was the improvement of the quality of life of the poor in Edinburgh, and it was from this group that emerged, under Geddes’s aegis (though not for long his direction) the Edinburgh Social Union. Largely run by women, Whyte was a founder member, and it was she, with her brother, who in 1887, purchased Whitehorse Close, one of the first properties that the Union would renovate and run as model social housing.
It seems unlikely that Hardy was unaware of Whyte’s endeavours, and it surely led her to make her own way to the Old Town. Some time in 1905 or 1906 she attended a service at the Episcopalian church of Old St Pauls (OSP). Since the early 1890s the church had developed a programme of social work in the slums that formed its hinterland, which aimed at transforming the lives (inner and outer) of the poor, gaining a new impetus with the appointment as its rector in 1897 of the charismatic Albert Laurie. By 1902, this work comprised a women’s settlement, which ran a team of women district visitors, and housed in the former type foundry at Whitefoord House, there were club rooms, a gymnasium, and a dispensary which offered affordable medical care.
Hardy saw an opportunity, and proposed to Laurie that she open a kindergarten under the church’s auspices. He had long been interested in child welfare and education and the addition of some sort of educational facility to its programme would place OSP (and the Episcopal church) at the forefront of welfare provision in the Old Town. After much debate and discussion about whether a school or kindergarten would be better, Hardy prevailed and it was agreed that she could establish the SSCG at the OSP’s mission hall (St Saviour’s, hence the kindergarten’s name) in Brown’s Close. It was opened on All Saint’s Day, 1906 (Figure 3).
Into the panelled mission room were brought tables and chairs; the walls adorned with appropriate pictures. A curtain of Liberty fabric (made by Hardy, the modernity of her taste signified by its manufacturer) divided the space in two, closing off the hall’s altar. Clean, well-lit and ventilated, it was at once a very different space from the one-roomed dwellings in which most of her charges dwelt, and a familiar one, housed, as it was within a dilapidated pair of old cottages and situated at the end of a narrow close. It embodied, therefore, the sort of transformation that the children would themselves undergo as they were exposed to the new influences and values of kindergarten.
Marking their transposition into this new environment, the children began each day by donning a smock (blue with a red/pink collar and cuffs) and, once called to order, sang a greeting song to one another. Next came some marching or running, then the more serious ‘work’ began in making the room a fit space for play. They watered the potted plants, brought fresh seed to their canary, dusted the furniture and made the dolls’ beds, later taking turns to act as ‘monitor’ and distribute food at break time. By the spring of 1907, a patch of wasteland attached to the hall was cleared and, with advice from Patrick Geddes himself (surely via Jane Whyte), was laid out. This served both for play but also as a site where the children could learn to cultivate plants to their potential as they were being nurtured by Hardy herself, (Figure 4).
Although Hardy initially ran the kindergarten largely on her own, she soon benefitted from the wave of women-originated and women-centred work developing alongside her venture in the Old Town. OSP’s team of district visitors identified potential children for the SSCG (after Laurie had selected the first dozen or so pupils) and persuaded mothers to let them attend, while from its dispensary came nurses to look after the children. Hardy lived in their hostel at Plainstone’s Close before moving in 1908 to Chessel’s Court. The city’s Medical Women were also valuable allies. Inheritors of the mantel of the Edinburgh Seven, they were tireless workers up and down the Royal Mile. Chief among them was Dr Isabel Venters, ‘the lady wi the reid heid,’ as locals called her, who was the surgeon to the OSP’s dispensary and became the SSCG’s medical inspector. Important too were the young women who worked with Hardy as fellow kindergartners and the wealthy, predominantly female, ladies in the New Town who donated money for her work.
That we know all this about the kindergarten, and have photographs of the children at ‘work’, is thanks to Hardy’s careful documentation of her heart’s desire from its beginning. The progressive nature of the Free Kindergarten (at this date there were no more than five in the British Isles) meant that its advocates had to work hard to propagandize its benefits for society. Hardy also needed to cultivate support for her work in its early days. Her first ‘publications’ were a series of handwritten letters describing the daily life of the kindergarten and particular events. These were distributed to interested parties and served to elicit gifts of equipment and teaching assistance. The need for directly financial support became more acute as the kindergarten entered its third year. Until this point Hardy had, by dint of careful saving while a governess, provided most of the funding. Now it was clear that it was doing good work – district visitors reported how popular an institution it was among Canongate mothers – it needed a more secure financial basis.
In 1908, therefore, Hardy initiated a more concerted fundraising campaign producing a foolscap pamphlet, The Life of a Slum Child. Complete with suitably dreary photographs, this documented a slum child’s first years and showed how she might be transformed by the kindergarten. Its distribution seems to have encouraged benefactors to support the move, in September 1908, to the larger premises at 8, Chessel’s Court, and its conversion into a suitably transformative environment. This had six rooms as well as a large rear garden (subsequently augmented by a second) and allowed Hardy to begin teaching her older children the 3Rs, and much more activity in the open air (Figure 5). In 1912, when funds were again tight, Hardy turned the round letters into a book, the Diary of a Free Kindergarten.
In writing the Diary, Hardy’s intention was to gain support for the SSCG, whether financial or in kind. As such, the facts and images she included were intended as persuasive devices to elicit sympathy in her readers. In some respects, then, we might understand it as a work of fiction. Nevertheless it is possible, as this article has done, to use it to build a basic outline of the kindergarten’s history and, whatever Hardy may have intended, to glean from it unintended information: a sense of what it was like to be a young middle-class reformer in the Edinburgh slums, and the characters of the children and their families who were the objects of her work.
Hardy comes across as a serious and devout young woman; like so many of her generation she felt that the privileges she had enjoyed as an educated middle-class woman required of her a career of service, working to better the lives of her working-class sisters and their children. That such work was also liberating – allowing her to live alone (albeit with a housekeeper) and move beyond class boundaries – is clear. Describing a working party formed of herself, and assorted fathers, brothers, and mothers of the children, to prepare the new garden at Brown’s Close she wrote: “There is a delightful naturalness in our personal relations all working together. To exchange tools with a man and take a turn at his job gives a pleasant intimacy which nothing else brings.”
That hers might have been a sometimes solitary existence also comes through. Following the move to Chessel’s Court, and another working party (there were many), one of the mothers inspected her new quarters. Admiring its simplicity – ‘If ye put onything mair in it ye would spile it.’ She added ‘it must be lonesome for ye. If ye only had some yin to come in nights, to share your bed.’
Building a relationship with the mothers was core to the Free Kindergarten project. As Hardy wrote, ‘She who takes the child by the hand takes the mother by the heart.’ The benefits of better manners, cleaner habits and sociability that the environment of the SSCG brought to the children – which the mothers soon acknowledged – would, it was anticipated, encourage them to effect changes in their homes, in turn improving conditions for all the family. The relationship was clearly a good one. In June 1908 the mothers invited Hardy and other kindergarten workers to a picnic at Cramond. Subsequently they created a Mother’s Guild with the aim of co-operation between school and home; its rules included putting the children to bed ‘at a fixed early hour.’ A collective gift of a new offertory table (Laurie visited weekly to conduct prayers), Hardy noted, brought a lump to her throat. While the sight of a mother, who had given birth only two weeks previously, scrubbing a neighbour’s floor, made her muse on the fuss she had made over a recent illness, writing ‘It is not only Crimean Wars that make Florence Nightingales. Commonplace everyday life creates many heroines in the Canongate.’
And what of the children? The poverty of their living conditions is a constant theme in Hardy’s account. She notes how when her first three pupils arrived at the mission hall, they assumed it was her home because, like theirs, it was one room with a partition. Later on, she records watching them create a tenement from the middle-class architecture of a donated doll’s house, and quotes them: ‘this is my hoose, that’s your hoose, that’s Peggie’s hoose.’
The challenges of language are another theme, a shorthand for the initial divide between the middle-class Englishwoman and her high-spirited Scots-speaking charges. Initially, they had difficulty with her name, settling, at first, for ‘the wumman’ and then ‘the wumman’ with the apology, ‘I’m aye forgetting your name.’ They were mystified when asked to sweep the floor, thinking she meant flowers rather than the ‘flair’ (these are Hardy’s transliterations). Gradually Hardy learnt their language, realizing that ‘what’s the matter’ was better substituted by ‘what’s wrang wi’ ye.’ Such adaptations on her part signal what becomes clearer as the Diary progresses: the sense that mutual incomprehension gave way to a growing sense of cooperation in a shared venture.
The first cohort of children left in 1911, moving on to the care of ‘the model slum headmaster’, Andrew Young at the New Street School. Their teacher reported proficiency in class work, four ranking among the best in class, and their very good manners, writing ‘They are most amenable, very mannerly, kindly natured, and truthful always.’ They were the first of many ‘graduates’ for the SSCG long outlasted the lives of its founder. It was only in 1977, by which date the slums were gone and people had, perhaps, forgotten the imperative behind it, that it was closed. Nevertheless, today concerns for child welfare persist. And while there is much that we might find patronizing in the SSCG, Hardy’s model of working within existing communities, of getting to know parents and building relationships between school and home, and of trained teachers using a child-centred (rather than outcome-focused) approach to early-years education, might yet be a benchmark for future progress.
Elizabeth Darling is Reader in Architectural History at Oxford Brookes University. The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland helped to fund the research which underpins this article.
[Published in The Evergreen Vol. II]
