While Charlotte Despard is well known for her work as a suffragist, her work with the poor is less recognised. Despard left her upper middle-class life and home in Esher, Surrey to move to one of the most deprived areas of London and improve the lives of the people that lived there. She helped make fundamental changes to regulations surrounding outdoor relief and improved the lives of those in workhouses. Her legacy of change was monumental.
Charlotte Despard (née French) was born in 1844 in Ripple, Kent. As typical for women of the period, she received little education, which she regretted for the rest of her life. In 1870 she married Maximilian Despard. The couple had no children, possibly because of Maximilian’s poor health. As a young woman, Despard had visited the poor in London’s East End, and of her experiences she wrote: “I returned home feeling useless and wretched.” However, it was after her husband’s death in 1890 that her friends encouraged her to take up charitable work as a way of listing her out of her melancholy.
She became involved with a charitable project in Battersea known as the Nine Elms Flower Mission, which was overseen by her friend, the Duchess of Albany. Ladies with country gardens sent their flowers to be distributed to those living in the slums, as a way of uplifting the poor. In the Victorian period it was frowned upon to give money directly to the poor, as it was believed that it would cause people to become dependent on charity. Those who benefited from the Mission’s work had been vetted by the Charity Organisation Society, who distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’. Later, Despard challenged the Charity Organisation Society’s strict rules which determined if people were worthy of receiving aid.
Despard decided to move to London, to live among the people she was trying to help. She bought a house at 95 Wandsworth Road and initially lived there part-time, returning to her home in Esher at the weekends. However, she soon made the decision to leave her comfortable, middle-class life behind, and moved full time to the district of Nine Elms.
In 1901 the population of Nine Elms was 169,000; it was the poorest district in the area. Charles Booth’s poverty map of the time shows Currie Street, where Despard later lived, marked in black, meaning ‘lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal’. It wasn’t unusual to see semi-naked children running around in the streets, and in hot weather people would sleep in the streets as the houses were over run with vermin. It was said you ‘could smell Battersea before you saw it’ due to the coal dust and fumes from the railway depot and gas works. Many of the men were unemployed, while the women worked in laundries or the Price’s candle factory.
Despard introduced important facilities to the area. She opened a drop-in health clinic in her home, youth and men’s clubs, soup kitchens, and nutrition classes with subsidised food for new mothers. She also integrated herself into the community. After moving to Battersea she began to adopt less fine, mainly black, clothes. Her conversion to Catholicism further endeared her to her mostly Irish Catholic neighbours. One of Charles Booth’s investigators wrote, after observing her at work:
Mrs Despard, a very noble minded Roman Catholic lady, gives her life to these people, and especially to the young among them, and the people recognize her devotion. The boys’ club she had made her home: or, perhaps, one might better say, her home is their club. She does not find them unmanageable. They submit readily to her gentle force.
In 1894 Despard joined the Lambeth Board of Guardians, which came under the jurisdiction of the Wandsworth Poor Law Union. She was committed to improving the lives of those living in the workhouse and challenged the use of the word ‘pauper’ rather than ‘person’. Her achievements included the ending of the workhouse practice of serving rotten vegetables and ceasing the mistreatment of elderly women, who would be punished if they committed the ‘misdemeanour’ of being too frail or ill to work. In 1898 she won single mothers (who were separated from their children on entering the workhouse) the right to visit their children.
Although Despard did not begin her work as a campaigner and reformer until she was almost fifty years old, she dedicated the rest of her life to helping those in poverty and to changing the ‘institutionalised brutality of the Poor Law’. She became a household name throughout the country, not just in London. Her activism and interest in the plight of the poor led her to socialism, and then to the suffrage movement. She continued to fight for the poor, women, and the disenfranchised into her nineties and was one of the most remarkable women of her era. She died in 1939, at the age of 95; in her obituary one person was quoted as saying “… to all of us her death is the loss of a great light”.
By Maggie Jones, a U3A Shared Learning Project researcher for the Citizens Project
Bibliography:
Hochschild, Adam. ‘John French and Charlotte Despard: The Odd Couple.’ History Today 61:6, June 2011.
Linklater, Andro. An Unhusbanded Life – Charlotte Despard Suffragette, Socialist and Sinn Feiner, Hutchinson of London, 1980.
Mulverhill, Margaret. Charlotte Despard: A Biography. Pandora Press, 1989.
