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

the lives of the local poor. The movement started in 1884 with the founding of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel (where volunteers such as Clement Attlee and William Beveridge cut their teeth) and Oxford House in Bethnal Green – both still in existence.

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 privileged West End women looking to help young working girls. The idea was that they gave up their ‘cosy’ lives to put their time and talents into the service of others, widening their horizons and developing a social conscience. Broadly speaking, their aim was to provide a home life for factory girls, improve the quality of the latter’s day-to-day experiences and raise aspirations – while at the same time instilling Anglican values. The Time and Talents organisation is especially interesting by virtue of being one of very few set up and entirely run by women.

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.

With the arrival of the welfare state after WWII, the nature of the work changed again and emphasis was placed more on neighbourhood services. The Bermondsey building today, part studios and part residential, is now listed by Historic England for its special architectural and historic interest. But the work of the Time and Settlements organisation, now based in a former mortuary in Rotherhithe, continues to offer community services for young and old – a fine example of Victorian philanthropy living on into the 21^st century.

References:

http://www.timeandtalents.org.uk/our-history

http://www.exploringsouthwark.co.uk/time-and-talents/4588921105

http://stories-of-london.org/settlement-houses/