Mary Jane Kinnaird, Emma Robarts and the YWCA, YWCA Central Club, 16-22 Great Russell Street WC1. The Young Women’s Christian Association has its roots in two separate developments in 1855. The first was the setting up of a hostel for Florence Nightingale’s nurses, on their way to and from the Crimea, by Mary Jane Kinnaird. In 1857 it was opened up to working girls. This hostel was in Upper Charlotte Street and continued to offer accommodation and other facilities such as a lending library after the war. Three further hostels followed in the early 1860s following the establishment by Kinnaird of the Association for Girls (1861).
Meanwhile, Emma Robarts in Barnet founded ‘a band of 23 friends who agreed to meet in spirit each Saturday evening to plead for each other, for loved ones individually and for young women as a class’ (Percival 1954: 54). By 1859 this had become a successful prayer union - spreading to a number of towns and villages. But it did not stop there - in the words of Robarts, ‘If we pray for others, we must also work for them’. At the time of her death Emma Robarts was working on a union of the Prayer Union and the Association for Girls. Arrangements were soon completed - and the title Young Women’s Christian Association was formerly adopted in 1877.
Here we can also see some of the many interconnections between the people involved in these initiatives we are looking at. Mary Jane Hoare came from a powerful banking family and married Arthur Kinnaird, the banker and Scottish Liberal MP, who was earlier involved with Quentin Hogg’s Youth’s Christian Institute and the Regent Street Polytechnic. Their son succeeded George Williams as President of the YMCA and was involved in many voluntary organizations. Mary Jane Kinnaird was also a close friend of Lord Shaftesbury - who was a keen supporter and long time President of the YMCA, and the first President of the YWCA.
Further developments in the work of the Association included the opening in London of the first restaurant for women in the country (1884), the establishment of the Working Women’s College, Beckenham, Kent (now Hillcroft College, Surbiton) and the initiation of a number of key detached youth work projects in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. in Spitalfields [Cox 1970]; and Marylebone - with a base in this building [Goetschius and Tash 1967]).
The Foundation Stone for the YWCA Central Club was laid by Queen Mary in 1929. The building itself was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in a neo-Georgian style. The Central Building also housed, for some time, the national offices of the Association (they moved to Bedford House, Baker Street in 1953, and on to Weymouth Street in 1967. The head office later moved to Oxford).
Cox, D. M. (1970) A Community Approach to Youth Work in East London, London: Young Women's Christian Association.
Duguid, J. (1955) The Blue Triangle, London.
Goetschius, G. and Tash, J. (1967) Working with Unattached Youth. Problem, Approach, Method, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Percival, A. C. (1951) Youth will be Led. The story of the voluntary youth organizations, London: Collins.
Seymour-Jones, C. (1994) Journey of Faith. The history of the YWCA 1945-1994, London: Allison and Busby.
Note: This page is part of our virtual walk around the history of informal education (in central London).
Walking for real: If you would like to do the informal education walk for real then why not join us on our next scheduled walk. It's free! Follow the link for joining details.
© Mark K. Smith. First published August 7, 1997. Last update: October 01, 2008
