The Time
and Talents Association
Spotted on a recent walk around Bermondsey: an
interesting-looking building just down from St Mary Magdalen Church, with a
distinctive façade - arts and crafts-style lettering spelling out the words
TIME AND TALENTS SETTLEMENT AD 1907. My curiosity piqued, I decided to find out
more about what this building was used for and whose “time and talents” we were
talking about!
 |
| Toynbee Hall Whitechapel |
It turns
out that the Time and Talents Settlement was an offshoot of the University
Settlement Movement, a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and
peaked around the 1920s in this country and the US. Its goal was to bring the
rich and the poor of society together by establishing what became known as "settlement
houses" in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class
"settlement workers" (university students, mostly from Oxbridge) would
live cheek by jowl with their less well-off neighbours and share knowledge and
culture with them.
The
settlement houses provided services such as day-care, education, and healthcare
to improve
 |
| Clement Attlee |
 |
| Oxford House Bethnal Green |
As higher
education opened up more and more to women, young female graduates began to
join the settlement movement. By 1887, they had their own Women's University
Settlement, founded "by women from various universities" (i.e. not just Oxbridge, as had been the case so far).
In 1895, riding
the wave of philanthropy that characterised this part of the Victorian period, the
Time and Talents Association was born.
 |
| Time and Talents 187 Bermondsey St |
This was a
kind of missionary organisation run, not by university students this time, but by
The first Time
and Talents Settlement in London was in Spitalfields, which soon moved to
Whitechapel where 30 “rough girls” attended. But given the strong
missionary element to their work, and the fact that Whitechapel was strongly
Jewish, they moved again, south of the river to Bermondsey in 1899. They took
over the building we see today at 187 Bermondsey Street, a former tailor’s
shop.
 |
| Bermondsey slum dwellings 1896 |
Though they
were venturing into the ‘uncharted waters’ of poverty-stricken south London
(often accompanied on their first visit by their maids!), the Time and Talents
girls rose to the challenge and visited factories at lunchtime to talk to
factory girls, sing hymns and distribute flowers. One of their aims was
to educate and fit the factory girls into service, which Time and Talents
considered to be “a happier and more helpful environment.”
The Bermondsey
Street premises included a club room and a smaller room that were used for “healthy
recreation”: singing, basket work, string work, knitting and sewing.
Afternoon classes were held in reading, writing and painting. There
were drill classes, cookery classes, health lectures and magic lantern
evenings. A penny lending library was also established and cheap dinners
were served on three days a week. There were, unsurprisingly, regular bible
classes too.
The many
factories in Bermondsey employed large numbers of girls who did dangerous work
in terrible conditions. Lay-offs and periods of unemployment were
frequent. Housing for these girls meant damp, overcrowded tenements. For
this reason, a hostel was set up in 1913 to house
girls who were experiencing these grim conditions at home. For many it was
their first opportunity to experience a room of their own.
 |
| Time and Talents centre Rotherhithe |
As time
went on, the Settlement’s original focus on helping factory girls broadened to
include welfare work for the whole community, including children and the
elderly, and a system for the training of social workers was put in place. During the
Second World War the “West End Ladies “at Time and Talents showed themselves to
be brave and hard-working, providing shelter for people bombed out of their
homes and continuing to run clubs and recreational groups wherever feasible.
References:
