Sector: Housing
I came across Irene Manby’s name in the records of the Women’s Provisional Club (WPC). She was among its first members, joining in November 1924, and was listed as ‘Founder and Director of a Chain of 30 to 40 Residential Clubs in London, Country and by the Sea since 1917.’ I was intrigued: finding affordable accommodation was a long-standing problem for single working women and one that Agnes Garrett, Cecil Gradwell, Lena Ashwell and Gertrude Leverkus all committed time, effort and money to solving. However, Irene seemed to have made this her mission and had built a national organisation. What was her story?
As I dug around for information, Irene proved to be somewhat elusive. Her business, the Ladies’ National Club, was active from 1918 and the 1940s. It grew apace and was reported to have 15,000 members and between 20 and 70 properties but there are no company records. She was frequently mentioned in newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s but is the only woman working in the inter-war period for whom, so far, I have not found a single picture. She never married and the only details about her personal life come from the interests she lists for the WPC: travel, philosophy and table tennis. Fortunately she occasionally wrote letters to newspapers and was a willing public speaker, so between newspaper reports and census records it is possible to paint a patchy picture of her life.
The pre-Club years
Irene Manby was born at Hoo Hall in Suffolk, a farmer’s daughter and the youngest in a large family of six girls and one boy. There was a seventeen-year age gap between Irene and her eldest sister, Ethel. Her brother was a corn merchant, and most of her sisters became governesses. Irene initially followed this path, moving to Bristol. However by 1911 she had trained as a nurse and masseuse and was living in Margate with her sister, Maude, and possibly renting out some rooms – three single women were listed as visitors and she had a housekeeper and another servant. Sometime after this she headed to Canada to work in Montreal, suggesting she had at least a working knowledge of French.
When war broke out, Irene was 32 and, hearing of the need for French-speaking nurses, returned to Europe. She was one of eight women who travelled to a French Military Hospital at Neufchateau in Alsace, in the border region between the Vosges mountains and the River Rhine, It was over-crowded, with six doctors, 1,500 patients and no nurses. She wrote home telling of her initial experiences.
“We spent all day getting here from Paris and finally arriving about 11pm… Next morning at eight we reported ourselves to the Medecin Chef and were taken to our wards. This is what I saw in my ward: Twenty beds consisting of two iron trestles with three planks across them, a straw mattress and pillow, two..sheets and a dirty brown blanket.. one large table in the middle of the room with everything imaginable on it – milk (uncovered and full of flies) ink, paper, tins, spittoons. pipes, tobacco, old bits of rag, dirty bottles of every description. No chair to sit on anywhere. A large tin bath, which they get into, all of them, twice a day.. I spent all the money I had on improving it.”
During trips to England she gave talks at clubs and schools on the conditions in France to raise money for the hospital. Often she asked for a handkerchief, a useful, multi-purpose item, as an entrance fee. In 1916 she travelled to Canada and the United States, raising funds on behalf of the Anne Morgan American Funds for French Wounded. Anne Morgan (1873-1952), daughter of banker J.P. Morgan, had had a home in Versailles since 1903, where she lived in a ménage à trois with the agent Elisabeth Marbury and the interior designer Elsie de Wolfe. She supported a range of women’s causes including labour rights and in 1932 she became the first American woman to be appointed a Commander of the French Legion of Honour.
‘Says French Sick Need Our Help: Miss Manby, English Nurse Tells Of Hospital Beds Without Sheets Or Pillows’ was the headline of the article on P.2 of the New York Times on 15th February 1916. She painted a graphic picture of conditions ten miles from the front, where soldiers arrived on trains in the middle of the night and lay on the floor until another man freed up a bed by dying. Disease was a bigger risk for many men than their wounds and it was a challenge to instil basic hygiene practices when clean water was hard to access. She made a plea for donations of linen and cash.
By the end of 1917, she had left her job in the hospital and was living in Bexhill-on-Sea, continuing with her fundraising as secretary of the local White Elephant Committee. Now there were shortages of food and fuel and more women were needed in the W.A.A.C. The idea of communal kitchens was mooted and Irene had her own spin. She wrote to the local newspaper two months before rationing was introduced suggesting that, in each road, a kitchen was offered for every day between 11 and 3 to make an affordable meal for everyone on the street. She had clearly given it a lot of thought, laying out all the details of the complicated logistics and stating a range of benefits. ‘Although I invite criticism, I would ask the public to remember that it is not a scheme planned with a view to benefiting individuals..but the much higher aim of helping the country in the present serious time.’
Her proposal does not appear to have gained any traction.
The formation of the Ladies’ National Club
Perhaps, however, this is where her ideas about communal living originated. ‘Servantless Homes: New Movement at Bexhill’ was the title of a short article published in February 1918. Irene had alighted on a different scheme, where empty houses would be converted into unfurnished apartments for short or long-term rental, with a canteen, a pantry and separate locked larders for each tenant. Women living here would get the comfort and seclusion of a private home with the services offered by an hotel.
When Irene laid out her idea, she was inundated by thousands of letters from women who thought that the scheme was already in operation. Irene later admitted that she had gone into it with little knowledge and experience of the legal and domestic implications of what she was proposing. Speaking to the Ilford Soroptimists in 1933 she said ‘If I had known then what I should have to undergo, nothing would have induced me to touch it’.
The first one to open was at 15-16 Marine Mansions next to the croquet ground in Bexhill-on-Sea. The two buildings held homes for about twenty people (ladies or ladies with children). Rooms cost 15s a week unfurnished including lighting, cooking, baths, rates, taxes. Laundry and ironing facilities were available. There were two sitting-rooms for guests. Such was the confidence in the proposition that Marine Mansions was barely open before plans were afoot for Clubs in St Leonards and London. By January 1923 there were fourteen clubs. Irene claimed that sometimes when new houses were to be opened, queues of would-be residents filled the whole street and literally invade the building as if it had been a sale. At one point she filled four houses in a single day. She quickly moved to a quasi-franchise model whereby each individual Club was in charge of a resident proprietor whilst subject to general regulations laid down by the central office. She apparently built a sense of community among members by providing weekly updates on their activities in The Times, though perhaps in sections not digitised as I have so far not found an example.
Predictably, as women made strides towards independence, there were naysayers. In December 1924, General Sir Ian Hamilton, ‘vigorously assailed’ women’s clubs when opening a British Legion Club at West Ham, (at that point open to anyone with a connection to the armed forces as long as they were men). ‘In no woman’s club is the comfort up to the mark or the food or the drink or the attendance’, he claimed; then continued: Their ‘atmosphere of cocktails, scented cigarette smoke and bridge is warranted to make a licensed victualler grow dizzy.’ Women who were barred from joining most men’s clubs (and, indeed, rejected from becoming members of some Royal British Legion clubs as late as 2005) ‘rose in arms’ against this characterisation of club members as disreputable women with low standards, (though quite honestly the cocktails and card games sound quite fun to me). Irene was immediately presented with an invitation to dine at the Ladies National Club headquarters in Cromwell Road in the New Year so he could eat his words as well as a delicious meal.
‘Only those who have tried it know how wearisome even the best of furnished rooms become after a time, while the average boarding-house or hostel, though all very well as an expedient, has nothing home-like about it. One loses one’s independence, almost loses one’s identity, in such places, where there are endless restrictions, rules and regulations which must be conformed to’ wrote ‘Chrystobel’, in the women’s column of the Bromley Mercury in June 1931. She gave the scheme her full support.
The Clubs were divided into three groups: Group 1 Clubs had a dining-room and lounge, with all meals provided; Group 2 had a lounge only, with periodicals and newspapers; breakfast could be served in one’s own flatlet; in Group 3 Clubs a group provides an evening meal only at a small charge. Each Club had 30 to 40 residents and male relatives were admitted. As the network expanded members could sub-let their room to another member or do a swap. Members could use the lounges as non-residents and special provision was made for women whose business took them from one part of the country to another.
Since there were plenty of other options for women – alongside an advertisement for the Ladies National Clubs in The Times in 1934 are over 70 rental listings for individual locations in London, variously described as suites, flatlets, artistic divan rooms and serviced flats – Irene needed to stress what made her proposition unique. It could offer very good clubs in the best parts of London, Brighton, Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Folkestone, Liverpool and Tunbridge Wells ( an illustrated book was available).
‘These Clubs are planned to attract GENTLEFOLK who appreciate the finer way of living adn who like to be considered as individuals and not as members. Members may furnish their own Rooms if they wish or take one Furnished to sample CLUB LIFE. Some Suites have private Bath Rooms; several Clubs are CENTRALLY HEATED and the new ones in BELGRAVIA and MAYFAIR have a passenger lift.’
How many Clubs were there? The size fluctuated as locations opened and closed. Irene undertook a number of speaker engagements in the 1930s, often at the Soroptimist Clubs, in Edinburgh, Croydon, Ilford, Leicester and Plymouth. In some reports in the 1930s figures of 60 and even 70 are given with the membership as high as 1,500. However, the numbers shared in a report of the 21st anniversary celebrations in June 1938 are probably the most reliable, stating 30 clubs and between 700 and 800 members, with over 2,000 residents in the last two decades. At the lunch were the managers of the 30 locations, a resident from each one and ‘representatives of the societies with which Miss Manby has been associated during the build up of the scheme’, none of which, frustratingly, is mentioned.
Petering out
Irene’s business was another casualty of the Second World War. An advert on Friday 19th April 1940 in the Kensington News and West London Times lists 17 locations, mostly in London: 5, 7 and 11 Cromwell Road; 38 Queen’s Gate; and 35 Cranley Gardens all in SW7; nos 7, 41-43, 45, 47 and 49 Barkston Gardens in SW5; 97-99 Eaton Place SW1; 15-17 Horton Street W8. The rest were in Sussex and Kent: 3 Chichester Place in Brighton; 24-26 Poole Road in Bournemouth; 5-11 Hartington Place in Eastbourne and Oakhurst, Mount Ephraim in Tunbridge. Fifteen months later on 11 locations remained and that is the last reference I have been able to find. By then Irene would have been nearly 60 and with regular bombing raids on London and food rationing, the decision to wind things up cannot have been a difficult one. Thanks to a disgruntled letter to the The Times about postal charges in 1948, I know that by then she had moved down back to Sussex, to 7 Albany Villas in Hove, close to the sea. Irene died in 1963, her many achievements forgotten. Perhaps this post will bring some more of them to light.
Sources include:
Evening Star and Daily Herald 16/8/1915; The Halesworth Times, Southwold and General Advertiser 2/11/1915; New York Times 15/2/1916; Bexhill-on-Sea Observer 29/12/1917; 16/2/1918; 22/6/1918; The Suffagette 26/7/1918; Daily Mirror 3/1/1921; Kent & Sussex Courier 28/1/1921; Sussex Express 2/3/1923; Daily News 6/12/1924; Bromley and West Kent Mercury 12/6/1931; Croydon Times 14/10/1933; East Counties’ Times 2/11/1933; Western Morning News 10/10/1936; The Times 2/6/1938; The Times 10/3/1948
Women Who Meant Business 
