Rosa Waugh Hobhouse (1882–1971) was a British social worker and pacifist, who vigorously campaigned for a negotiated end to World War I. She was also a poet, a prolific author and teacher. Described by Sylvia Pankhurst as a ‘Quaker with a mystic temperament’, she spent much of her early adult life living and working among the poor of London’s East End. She wanted a society based on egalitarian principles which had no divisions on the basis of gender, race, class or nation. Towards this goal, Rosa Hobhouse, along with the social activist Mary Hughes and the social reformer Muriel Lester, entered into voluntary poverty as an example of how society could be modelled freed from the constraints and inequalities of class.
Early life Rosa Waugh was the youngest of Benjamin Waugh and his wife Sarah's 12 children, of whom eight survived to adulthood. She was born on 22 June 1882 in New Southgate, London, but spent most of her childhood in St Albans, at the family home of Otterleigh, Hatfield Road.
Waugh was mainly home tutored by her two eldest sisters, Bertha and Freda. Bertha encouraged her creative writing and poetry. For example, as a teenager Hobhouse compiled a quarterly publication The Scribbler,Three issues of The Scribbler are in the Hobhouse Archive, Women's Library, LSE, London. collections of her own and friends’ stories and rhymes, which she would sell for a penny to family and friends.
Waugh's father was a Congregationalist minister who became increasing involved in protecting the rights of vulnerable young children. In 1884, he co-founded the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Five years later this society became the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children with Waugh as its first director. Thus, from an early age, Rosa Waugh became acutely aware of social inequalities; reinforced by visits with her sister Bertha to the poor families of St Albans and from working with her mother to raise money for ‘Mrs Waugh’s Hesba home’1891/92 report for Mrs Waugh’s Hesba Home, ibid founded by Sarah Waugh for frail and sick children of St Albans in memory of her daughter Hesba who had died, aged three years, of meningitis.
Art school and teaching in London
In 1897, at the age of 15, Rosa Waugh began an art school training at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Her sister Edna, three years older, had already been studying there for four years, and Waugh found herself drawn into her sister’s wide circle of art school friends who included Augustus John, Gwen John, Ambrose McEvoy and Albert Rutherston. Edna (later Edna Clarke Hall) frequently drew Rosa, as did Augustus and Gwen John.
In the autumn of 1903, when her father’s retirement made it necessary for Rosa to earn her own living, she opened a teaching studio for women in a rented two-room apartment in Ealing, London. Rosa structured her syllabus in a similar way to that experienced by students at the Slade. Initially her students were required to ‘draw from the Antique’ (her father gave her two casts of Antique sculptures for her 21st birthday).
When her students had developed sufficient skills in drawing the inanimate body they could progress to Life Drawing. Drawing was taught by Rosa, and painting by Gwen Salmond, a Slade friend; with Augustus John and Albert Rutherston as visiting tutors. Rosa had hoped that her Ealing studio would provide her with a regular income and help build her professional reputation, both as a teacher and practising artist. Reality, however, became something other. Except for a brief upturn during 1906 and 1907, Rosa struggled to attract sufficient students.For an account of her years teaching in London see Hobhouse’s autobiography ‘An Interplay of Life and Art’ pp59-78: LSE Library Archives, London. Letters to her close friend Katie Edith GliddonCorrespondence between Rosa Hobhouse and Katie Gliddon; Hobhouse Archive, Women’s Library, LSE, London. are peppered with her worries at earning sufficient to pay the rent on her Ealing studio.
She was forced to undertake other teaching roles; for example she taught drawing part-time for a local boys' school in Ealing, that is, until the spring of 1908 when the school acquired a sports field and decided that the new sports master could also teach drawing! She also worked as a private tutor, tutoring young children in drawing, and also occasionally English and Maths.
Rosa’s experience of teaching drawing led her to develop a new approach to teaching Perspective which she called Natural Perspective. Inspired by a passage in Joseph Conrad’s Mirror of the Sea, describing a seaman’s experience of seeing distant ships, Rosa’s new system emphasised the spectator’s own experience of spatial perception rather than the use of geometrical systems devised to represent it. She gave public lectures In 1907 RH gave perspective lectures at Ealing Town Hall and 2 Wyndham Place, London; and in 1908 at the Third International Art Congress for the Development of Drawing & Art Teaching, London. on her new ideas on spatial perception and representation.
In 1910, W T Stead published ‘Perspectiveland, or Peggy’s Adventures and how she learnt to draw’; a book which summarised, in an accessible story form for younger children, Rosa’s new system for teaching Perspective.
Although it ultimately proved impossible to earn sufficient from this independent teaching venture, Rosa discovered a love of teaching which she continued to do for much of her adult life. Her studio also gave her a focus of sociability. She became friends with many of her older students: for example with Helen Saunders who not only became a close friend but went on to become a member of the Vorticist movement. Another studio friend, Freda Bayldon, became a miniature painter.
Teaching in Cardiff In the summer of 1909, exhausted and disillusioned by her continual struggle to earn sufficient money from private teaching, Rosa Waugh decided to close her Ealing studio and applied (successfully) for a permanent position as Teacher of Drawing, Training Department, University College, Cardiff. For the next three years she taught drawing to women training as primary and secondary school teachers, as well as teaching Art at two local schools: the Cathedral Road Girls’ School in Cardiff and a girls’ school in Chepstow run by the du Bochet sisters.
Professionally Rosa’s three years in Cardiff were a fulfilling time, but she felt increasingly out of touch with her family and London friends. In the summer of 1912 Rosa resigned her post. Following her resignation a close friend Louise (Salaman) Bishop gave her financial support for six months’ immersion in various writing projects, for example finishing the writing of a biography of her father, Benjamin Waugh, and also for reflection on her future career plans. For much of this time she lived in Uffington, Berkshire.
Rosa found researching and writing about her father’s philanthropic work a life-changing experience. His life of working for the rights of the poor and dispossessed accorded with her own Christian Socialist principles. It awakened in Rosa a desire to follow her father’s lead and devote herself to working with and among the poor and dispossessed. In the summer of 1913 she began a decade of working and living in London’s East End.
Living and working in London’s East End
Rosa Waugh’s first job was as a Superintendent at an East London Summer Vacation Play Centre, attached to Highway School in the parish of St George in the East, now part of Stepney. There were just Rosa and two other helpers to cope with the 200-300 children that attended each session. Here Rosa began to learn about the lives of those ‘ensnarled by poverty’ which stunted the growth of many of the children who attended the play centre through a protein lacking diet, and robbed many of their younger siblings of their lives.
When the Summer Vacation Play Centre job ended Rosa resolved to stay living and working in the East End. With her meagre earnings Rosa rented a series of rooms locally. Over the next few years she took a series of part-time jobs, such as Superintendent at Dining Centres and evening recreation schools for children, and as a teacher of drawing at the Dame School run by the ‘indefatigable Miss Lavinia Botterill’, and at Myrtle Street Central School; as well as doing voluntary work with various Distress and Care Committees, at a local Juvenile Labour exchange and with the newly formed Probation Service. For a few months she was a Quaker chaplain - to Nellie Best imprisoned for six months in Holloway Prison for anti-conscription activities.For details of Rosa Hobhouse’s early years in the East End see ‘An Interplay of Life and Art’ pp112-130
Upon her return to London in 1913 Rosa began to regularly attend Quaker meetings; firstly at the main London Friends’ meeting venue at Devonshire House, Bishopsgate and then locally in Hoxton. Whilst living in Cardiff Rosa had occasionally attended Quaker meetings; a part of her questioning of institutional Christianity. For Rosa it was not enough to preach social justice in sermons and books without taking some practical steps towards creating a more egalitarian society. Thus she had found herself drawn towards the Quaker’s call to live a life of peace, simplicity and equality. Inspired by George Lansbury’s editorials in the Daily Herald, in 1914 Rosa Waugh also joined the Independent Labour Party and was soon regularly speaking at Labour meetings. Indeed in 1915 she was described as ‘one of the most promising of the women of the Independent Labour Party’.
In 1914 Waugh met Muriel Lester and Mary Hughes who became lifelong friends and co-dedicatees to her vision of a society based on Christ’s message of universal love and one which had no division on the basis of class, gender, race or nation. Initially the three lived and worked together towards their shared goal of social equality. In February 1915 Hobhouse and Hughes moved into the two tiny attic bedrooms above the main meeting space of Lester’s newly founded community settlement of Kingsley Hall in Bow. Lester lived close by. Kingsley Hall was an ambitious enterprise that offered support and varied opportunities to the local Bow community with a Montessori inspired nursery school, a men’s school, a lunchtime restaurant for working women and evening activities.For further information about Kingsley Hall and Muriel Lester’s work see Seth Koven's ‘The Match Girl & the Heiress’, Princeton University Press 2014
Marriage In March 1915, at a dinner party for Christian activists, Rosa met Stephen Hobhouse, her future husband: someone similarly committed to working among the dispossessed in London’s East End. Stephen Hobhouse was the eldest son of Henry Hobhouse, a wealthy Somerset landowner and Liberal MP. A decade before Stephen met Rosa, inspired by Tolstoy, he had renounced his heirship to the Somerset estate, in order to devote himself to working with the poor and oppressed in London’s East End. At the time of their meeting Stephen was living (with an Austrian ‘enemy alien’) in a tenement flat in Hoxton, east London. He too was a Quaker and pacifist and, at the time of their meeting, was heavily involved in Quaker led work to support the wives and other dependents of foreign nationals. Three days after the outbreak of WW1 Stephen Hobhouse had set up, and become Chair, of the Friend's’ Emergency Committee which supported the families of British residents of German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish nationality. Rosa also at this time, more informally, had been assisting wives and dependants of Germans and other European nationalities in the East End of London where local communities were particularly hostile to ‘enemy aliens’.