Leila Rendel (1882-1969) was a social worker and children’s campaigner. She co-founded the Caldecott Community, a pioneering boarding school, which cares for distressed and vulnerable children.
Rendel came from a well-connected London family. Her father was William Rendel, a civil engineer, and her mother was the daughter of a well-known Victorian publisher, Kegan Paul. Rendel attended a private finishing school in Wimbledon, where fellow pupils included Eleanor Roosevelt – the future First Lady of the United States.
In the early twentieth century Rendel worked in partnership with Phyllis Potter, who was a like-minded young woman from a similar background. Together, they founded a day care nursery school for the babies and young children of the poorest working mothers in London’s St Pancras. Many of these women worked for long hours and little money at the local match factory. The aim was to ensure that the very youngest and most vulnerable children could be cared for in a place of safety. The need and demand was so great that a new, more permanent, building was soon necessary, and in 1911 the Caldecott nursery was established. It was named after the Victorian children’s book illustrator Randolph Caldecott, whose pictures covered the nursery walls.
In 1917, Rendel and Potter took out a lease on a country house in Maidstone, Kent. The nursery expanded into a residential home and boarding school for the deprived and needy children of St Pancras. This community would provide the children with a support system as they grew up. Rendel and Potter continued their partnership until 1931, when Phyllis Potter left the community and was replaced as co-director by Ethel Davies. Davies worked alongside Rendel until the latter’s death.
After the Second World War the community moved to the manor house of Mersham-le-Hatch, near Ashford, Kent. The house was the ancestral home of the Brabourne family, who themselves became an intricate part of the running of the community.
Rendel’s aim was to create a secure base for deprived and abused children until they reached school leaving age. She also intended the community to serve as a place they could later return to for consultation and support. Additionally, she aimed to provide a temporary residential centre for local authority children until the right care was found for them.
Leila Rendel and Ethel Davies created a community that served as a power house of ideas for how to better understand children and their needs. They created an environment of kind, unforced, underlying discipline, which would help the children in their future adult life.
As their work developed, they were also able to care for children who were survivors of severe physical and emotional abuse, by providing a residential and therapeutic community. Leila Rendel and the Caldecott Community became a byword within social work for their ground-breaking success working with emotionally deprived children and they were able to offer training to social workers.
Following Rendel’s death in 1969, the Caldecott Community continued to care for distressed and disadvantaged children, changing its name to the Caldecott Foundation in 1997. The children they help have often been excluded from mainstream schools and other care homes.
Rendel was a pioneer who helped to transform the care of vulnerable children. She was able to offer hope to those who, because of their experiences, were disruptive, difficult to engage with, and lacked social skills. Through the work of the Caldecott Foundation, her pioneering work continues to this day.
By Jennie Patterson, a U3A Shared Learning Project researcher for the Citizens Project
Sources:
Elizabeth Lloyd, The Story of Community.
Simon Rodway OBE.
Leila Margaret Rendel obituary, 1969.
The Caldecott Foundation, www.thecaldecottfoundation.co.uk
Header image:
Randolph Caldecott, Illustration from The complete collection of pictures & songs, “This is the House that Jack Built”, Wikimedia Commons.
