TOYNBEE HALL

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 71, 17 December 1935, Page 9

TOYNBEE HALL

Golden Jubilee Celebrated (British Official Wireless.)

Rugby, December 14. • The golden jubilee of Toynbee Hall, in Whitechapel, one of the best-known social settlements in the world, was celebrated by a distinguished gathering last night presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the original founders. A letter from the Prime Minister, Mr. Baldwin, as chairman of the Pilgrim Trustees, announced a gift of £lO,OOO towards the funds needed for the enlargement of the premises and the improvement of the equipment.

Toynbee Hall, the “Mother of Settlements,” was recently described by the Archbishop of Canterbury as “the story of a great'adventure of friendship.” The foundatioji of the Settlement by Samuel Barnett and a small group of Oxford and Cambridge men in 1884 was the first contribution of the universities to the great social awakening which took place in England in the generation after the Reform Act of 1867 and the institution of compulsory education in 1871.. The transformation which it effected is still incomplete, but Toynbee Hall has contributed notably at every stage. From the beginning it has been a national institution. Among the remarkable group of men associated with its early development some of the more famous were Asquith, Balfour, Milner, the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Robert Morant, Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Sir Cyril Jackson. To these Sir William Beveridge, Sir Arthur Salter, Sir Walter Layton, Professor R. 11. Tawney, and others no less well known, succeeded. Its record of pioueer social work is outstanding. Adult education, industrial conciliation, unemployment insurance, sociological research, the scout movement, popular travel; these are a few of the fields iii which it has pointed the way. Toynbee Hall played a notable part in the dock strike of 1889 and its tradition was maintained by its efforts at peacemaking in East London in the general strike of 1926. There are now settlements in all the principal countries of the world, including some 700 in America. Meantime the Mother of Settlements continues to adventure and pioneer, and its manifold activities, in and out of Whitechapel, make it nothing less than a microcosm of the voluntary and official social agencies of Great Britain. . The name of Toynbee Hall was given in memory of Arnold Toynbee, who died a year before its foundation. A man of singular nobility of mind and character, Toynbee spent his strength in endeavouring to share with working men the ideals of a university.