Arts, crafts and prostitution

When I was young, my parents used to keep bees on a wooded patch of land outside our home town of Newbury. I was always curious about the old ruins on the site amidst the trees, which suggested a house had once stood there. A manmade lake, now stagnant and dark, stood in the grounds, and away from the buzzing of the beehives the atmosphere was made eerie by looming specimen trees clearly planted by human hands. It was only much later in life, after starting my undergraduate degree in history, that I began delving into the story of what the ruins had been.

What I found astonished me. The house had been an old mansion by the name of Cope Hall – and besides an illustrious past that took in the Civil War and several generations of keen Victorian gardeners who had built the extensive grounds, the Hall harboured a secret. During the dying days of World War One, it had played host to a reformatory for female prostitutes, known as the Women’s Training Colony. There, in the leafy fastness of the Home Counties, ‘fallen women’ from the heart of Edwardian London had been sent to learn arts-and-crafts skills and fashion a new life for themselves in the fresh air. It was a story that, I discovered, had lain hidden within dusty archives and under the ruins of Cope Hall for eighty years, and I was to be the first to re-tell it. So fascinating was the story behind the Women’s Training Colony, that I decided to make it the subject of my undergraduate dissertation; you can find the full document for download below. But for those of you who can’t stomach 12,000 words, here’s a quick taster.

Edwardian Britain was a society that still viewed prostitution with no small degree of suspicion. Though the stigma attached to prostitutes had faded since the dark days of the Contagious Diseases Acts – when women suspected of harbouring venereal disease could be locked up and subjected to compulsory inspection – the prevailing attitude was still one of ensuring ‘social purity’ through penalising female prostitutes rather than their clientele. Social work was still dominated by Christian missions and probation for young people in its infancy. Into this unpromising environment was born an intriguing new organisation: the Committee for Social Investigation and Reform (CSIR). Its grandiose name was highly establishment, but its founders and associates were not; many came from the suffragist and suffragette movements, with big-name donors including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Fawcett. One of the principal founders of the organisation was Margaret Odeh, the wife of wartime artist Paul Nash, who before taking up the plight of female prostitutes had been part of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, and had taken to carrying a bull-whip to deter hecklers. Another key figure was Captain Arthur St John, a former fusilier in the Burmese wars who had read Tolstoy, become an anarchist and helped to resettle a pacifist tribe from Russia to Canada. The unorthodox and radical politics of the founders helped shape the outlook of the CSIR’s efforts – one aspect of which was the Women’s Training Colony.

Margaret Odeh, left; Millicent Fawcett, right

At first, the CSIR concentrated its work in the cities, working with sympathetic magistrates to prevent young women charged for soliciting from being taken by the Church missions – ever keen to save souls – and instead divert them into rehabilitation in one of the CSIR’s schemes. These schemes often saw the women being trained in handicrafts of one sort or another, such as weaving, millinery, or ‘artistic dressmaking’, in a programme that was inspired partly by the arts-and-crafts movement and partly by an early form of art therapy. The CSIR’s charges were not simply being trained for alternative employment, but also encouraged to free their minds through creative endeavour: as one of those involved claimed, “Not only do these handicrafts prepare the worker for life… but they have a moral value, as every craftsman knows. They form a marvellous tonic for the whole mind and nature.” Certainly this was a world far removed from the back-breaking, mind-numbing laundry-work awaiting those former prostitutes incarcerated in the Irish Catholic Magdalenes (a tragic fate captured poignantly in the 2002 film Magdalene Sisters).

Fired by a blend of early psychoanalytic theory and back-to-the-land romanticism, the CSIR went on to set up the Women’s Training Colony, choosing Cope Hall as a setting for the next stage of their efforts to rehabilitate women who had been forced to sell their bodies on the streets. It was to be a retreat more than an institution, a place where the women could grow flowers and vegetables in the Hall’s gardens, and where some could look after their (illegitimate) children – an amazingly liberal step in a society that viewed children out of wedlock as an unpardonable sin. It also took on some of Arthur St John’s anarchist leanings through encouraging self-governance, treating the women as ‘colonists’ who could help determine the direction of the initiative through weekly meetings.

In the end, the Women’s Training Colony folded through lack of funds, and a hardening of attitudes towards the cause it embodied, as soldiers returned from WWI carrying venereal diseases from the prostitutes they had visited. Yet through the course of their work, the CSIR had come to win the support of the Home Office, influence the way probation was carried out, and help steer a slow shift away from religious charity to secular social work. More than just a curiosity, its example had helped forge new, more empathetic approaches to tackling the ‘world’s oldest profession’.

To find out the full story of the Women’s Training Colony, you can download my thesis on it here:

The Women’s Training Colony – Guy Shrubsole

Below: Cope Hall on an OS map of the late 19th century; and as it appears now from the air, overgrown with trees