Four days after the second great daylight Gotha raid on London, Lady Louise Maxwell (above) wrote a letter announcing the foundation of a new philanthropic fund, the Home Fires Fund. Believing that it was ‘childish to expect a huge city like London […] can escape these occasional air raids’, and accepting that ‘We have come within the “War Zone” that is all, and must accept the risks of war as philosophically as we can’, she nevertheless pointed to ‘one class who cannot be expected to appreciate this point of view, and that is those unfortunate people in the East End whose homes have been destroyed by enemy bombs and who have lost their little all in the wreckage’:
If we in the West End feel a pang when we contemplate the possible destruction of our homes and all our beloved household gods, we know that, at anyrate [sic] if they are destroyed, we can more or less replace them; but think what it must mean to the poor, to whom their houses and their much-prized goods and chattels represent the savings of a lifetime, who know that once destroyed they have no means of recreating a home!!1
The Home Fires Fund, Lady Maxwell declared, would ‘help rebuild these wrecked homes’, though without providing any details at this stage of how this would actually be achieved.2
Like many women of her standing, Lady Maxwell was a serial philanthropist and knew how to organise a charity; the Home Fires Fund boasted an impressive array of supporters from the ranks of the great and the good: royals (H.M. Queen Mary as patroness, H.R.H. the Duchess of Argyll as president), nobles (the Duchesses of Abercorn (Dowager), Buckingham, and Marlborough, the Marchionesses of Londonderry (Dowager) and Salisbury), senior politicians or their relations (Austen Chamberlain, Edwin Montagu, Margaret Lloyd George, Miss Isobel Bonar Law), and soldiers (Viscount French, Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces), etc, etc. It no doubt helped that Lady Maxwell’s husband was Lieutenant-General Sir John Maxwell, Commander-in-Chief, Northern Command; she herself was the daughter of an Irish-American who made his fortune in mining. Lady Maxwell was clearly comfortable in her (acquired) class and, perhaps with the help of some American brashness, seems to have been well-accustomed to giving directions.
But despite all these good intentions and despite all this support, the Home Fires Fund never, as far as I can tell, came into existence.3
The reason for this is actually easily answered. Writing on behalf of the Government Committee on the Prevention and Relief of Distress, A.V. Symonds (assistant secretary to the Local Government Board) sent Lady Maxwell ‘copies of various memoranda &c. showing what we can do for the alleviation of distress caused by Enemy Air Raids’ and noting that it had been ‘reported’ that the Prime Minister had ‘accepted the principle of Government compensation for damage to property’. He therefore concluded that ‘in view of the provision already made there was really no case for a further Fund’.4
In reply, Lady Maxwell agreed to hold the Home Fires Fund in abeyance, pending a promised letter from Bonar Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the Conservatives. However, she still wondered – after speaking to the Duchess of Argyll – whether since, as the proposed government relief was limited to £20, whether ‘we might assist beyond that amount’.5 And, indeed, when the promised letter from Bonar Law never arrived Lady Maxwell eventually reopened the matter on this basis, arguing that her fund ‘will not in any way clash with the government [work?], as you will restore only the essentials and we propose to recreate the Homes‘.6 Symonds, however, held the line: ‘I still do not think that there is a case for another fund’.7
In between the formalities, there are hints here that the correspondents were actually getting a bit fed up with each other. I think a round of correspondence is missing between the last two I’ve cited here, as Symonds rebuts various charges not in the extent letters, in shockingly direct language for a civil servant writing to a member of the public:
There are just one or two points in it which I think ought to be cleared up…
If you will let me say so…
There most certainly has been no delay…
I hope you won’t misunderstand me.7
Indeed, so hot was Symonds’ blood at this point that he was forced to protest that ‘Although I am a Government Official, I am really alive to the value of human sympathy’!7
For her part, Lady Maxwell acceded to Symonds’ position this time with ill-concealed irritation, opening with a terse ‘Thanks for your letter’ (whereas previously she had been all ‘Thank you so much for your kind letter & all the particulars you so kindly sent me’).8 She further intimated that she was ‘sorry you do not yet approve of my scheme or our “Home Fires Fund” to assist in the East End!’, adding that while she proposed ‘to do nothing for the present […] everything is in order to bring it out in a moment if it is needed’.9
In her irritable desire to drive her point home to the obstinate Symonds, however, Lady Maxwell did make a further, revealing argument:
[You?] will forgive me [for?] saying, I am well acquainted with the [limitations?] of government action, & if (as I am assured) prompt assistance is not given to these people in the East End, & they do sally forth & begin breaking our windows & looting our houses, then I will be able to put my idea into practical action [at?] once, & see if a [?] human sympathy cannot be of more assistance than [?] & dry government dole.10
It seems to me that, despite her expressed sympathies at the outset for the working classes in their small houses, it was in fact the protection of her own much grander home – her London residence was in posh Belgravia, across the road from Hyde Park Corner and Buckingham Palace Gardens – and those of the upper ten thousand that was Lady Maxwell’s primary motivation. In her previous letter to Symonds, she had written
I cannot but think that in these Revolutionary [sic] days, anything that tends to promote good feeling & friendship between the upper & lower classes must be of use, & my Fund is really meant to [give?] us [the?] right to offer our friendship & prove our sympathy with the sufferers from this brutal form of barbarity, more than it is to collect money […]6
Of course, she was right: these were revolutionary times. September 1917 was about fifteen months after the Easter Rising in Dublin (which, incidentally, her husband, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, Ireland, had brutally repressed), six months since the February Revolution in Russia, just three months since the French army mutinies (not public knowledge, but she may well have known of them through her husband). And to be fair to Lady Maxwell, at the outset she had also offered a strategic rationale for relieving air-raid distress in the midst of a total war:
Think what the men at the front must feel whose houses are in ruins and their wives and children homeless, while they are fighting for their country over there. If we cannot protect their families, at least let us help them to keep their home fires burning until they return […] let all those who have not yet suffered from the Hun invasion help to recreate the ‘Homes’ that our soldiers dream of in the trenches!! The Germans may think that by destroying the houses of the poor, they can rouse up a feeling of animosity and bitterness between the East End and the West, a feeling of resentment that we should be spared while they have to suffer, but let us show the Huns that in this time of war, when all class distinctions have been levelled and we stand just as plain men and women before the guns – whether in England or in France – the spirit of true sympathy and brotherhood between rich and poor is too strong for even German bombs to destroy.11
Lady Maxwell wanted to head off class war in order to win the total war. Or less kindly, to ensure that the working class stayed in its place, while the total war was being won. Luckily for her and her class, the East End never did sally forth; and Symonds’ form of cool, unsympathetic government action proved to be up to the tasking of keeping the working classes quiescent during the heaviest period of bombing at the end of September and the start of October. Well, mostly – but that’s a qualification for another day.
Image source: The Tatler, 16 January 1918, 79.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://airminded.org/copyright/.
- The National Archives [TNA]: MH 57/186, letter, Lady Louse Maxwell, 11 July 1917; emphasis in original. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- There’s no mention of it in BNA under that name; searching for the constellation of names on the committee turns up nothing air raid related, either. [↩]
- TNA: MH 57/186, letter, A.V. Symonds, 17 July 1917. [↩]
- TNA: MH 57/186, letter, Lady Louise Maxwell, 19 July 1917. [↩]
- TNA, MH 57/186, letter, Lady Louise Maxwell, 8 September 1917; emphasis in original. [↩] [↩]
- TNA: MH 57/186, letter, A.V. Symonds, 29 September 1917. [↩] [↩] [↩]
- TNA: MH 57/186, letter, Lady Louise Maxwell, 30 September 1917; TNA: MH 57/186, letter, Lady Louise Maxwell, 19 July 1917. [↩]
- TNA: MH 57/186, letter, Lady Louise Maxwell, 30 September 1917; emphasis in original. [↩]
- Ibid; my emphasis. [↩]
- TNA: MH 57/186, letter, Lady Maxwell, 11 July 1917. [↩]
