Elizabeth Fox Howard was a extremely brave girl, who turned pals with Mahatma Gandhi and stood as much as the Third Reich. She was not afraid to take dangers to interrupt down social limitations with kindness and to offer compassionate help to essentially the most susceptible, when the state and the bulk of society reviled and rejected them. She summed up her ethos as: ‘Alongside the purely reduction work, we had been all the time attempting to hold a quiet and unostentatious message of friendship and reconciliation’.
Elizabeth ‘Elsie’ Fox Howard, was born on March 6, 1873 at Cleveland House on Hoe Street in Walthamstow, a home that her father Eliot Howard owned from 1871 to 1897. It nonetheless stands at No. 285 Hoe Street. Photo: Portico
Elizabeth was born right into a famous and rich household of pioneering scientists and profitable chemical producers, the Howards of Bruce Grove, Tottenham. Her upbringing was privileged and really non secular and though it was sheltered, Elizabeth realized a powerful sense of public responsibility, the significance of group service and an curiosity in social justice from her father Eliot Howard, who was one of Essex’s senior magistrates and a beneficiant philanthropist.
In 1898, Howard Road in Walthamstow was named in honour of the Howard household, as Elizabeth’s uncle David Howard, was the final proprietor of the Rectory Manor property on which the street was constructed. Photo: Google Street View
Just earlier than her thirtieth birthday, in 1903, Elizabeth left the Church of England and joined the Religious Society of Friends, often known as The Quakers. With the zeal of the convert, Elizabeth quickly turned one of the main Quakers of her era.
Elizabeth Fox Howard aged 40 in 1913
Quakers are pacifist, so throughout World War One, she turned a jail chaplain, visiting absolutist conscientious objectors in Dartmoor Prison, who had refused to help the navy in any manner. She additionally gave support to enemy internees throughout the Great War and post-war she visited Germany for the primary time in 1920, to guide reconciliation with the German folks. From then, proper up till the outbreak of World War Two, Elizabeth spent months of yearly on reduction, or reconciliation work in Germany.
In 1897, Elizabeth’s father bought Ardmore in Buckhurst Hill (in what’s now Ardmore Lane), from his longstanding friend Dr. Thomas Barnardo, the founder of Barnardo’s. The home was demolished in 1994. Photo: Margaret Sinfield
When Mahatma Gandhi visited London in 1931 to attend the All-India Conference, he visited Elizabeth Fox Howard at Ardmore. This go to was organized (in all probability via Muriel and Doris Lester, who had been internet hosting Gandhi at Kingsley Hall in Bow) to offer Gandhi a personal and quiet day away from the glare of publicity. It was a shiny and heat Sunday, and Elizabeth went for an hour lengthy stroll with Gandhi and his entourage, in Epping Forest, over Warren Hill and alongside Fairmead Bottom.
After lunch, they had been joined by main members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, (a bunch of Christian Pacifists), for an off-the-cuff convention with Gandhi, to debate his instructing of non-violence and ‘the regulation of love’. After this assembly, Elizabeth and Gandhi continued their friendship in the years that adopted, corresponding by way of letters in which Gandhi addressed her as ‘Sister’ and took curiosity in Elizabeth’s work in Germany.
The Quaker convalescent dwelling in Bad Pyrmont. Photo: The Library of the Religious Society of Friends
From July 1933 till warfare broke out in 1939, Elizabeth and the British Quakers in Germany, established a convalescent dwelling in Falkenstein and later in Bad Pyrmont, for political prisoners who had been imprisoned in focus camps by the Nazis. Refuge was given, normally for a fortnight, to launched victims of the Nazi regime and their households, to recuperate from their ordeal. Approximately 800 folks recuperated there, together with Jews, Catholics, Lutherans and folks of all of the Left Wing political events. One of the friends later described it as ‘that island of kindness amid a storm of wickedness’.
Elizabeth Fox Howard in the early Nineteen Fifties, with Ernst Reuter the Social Democratic Mayor of Magdeburg till 1933, who she helped to recuperate from imprisonment in a Nazi focus camp. He later turned the Mayor of Berlin throughout the post-war years
Elizabeth herself was arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 and interrogated in regards to the British Quakers’ actions in Germany and her connections with those who had been thought of to be performing in opposition to the pursuits of the Third Reich. Fortunately, she was launched with out hurt however she was very involved about what data the Gestapo could have gleaned by studying her papers that that they had confiscated.
When World War II ended, she once more returned to Germany, now in her 70s, to proceed her reconciliation work and to supply reduction to displaced individuals. She died in 1957 on the age of 84.
Stephen Ayers is a member of Waltham Forest History and Heritage Network. He can also be a tour information and historian researching the historical past of Walthamstow Wetlands and water provide in East London, the River Lea and the Lea Valley. He is understood on social media as ‘Wetlands Steve’ and might be adopted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram or by way of his web site.
