Muriel Lester

• 1. Introduction

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  Muriel Lester turned down a place at Cambridge University to live in voluntary poverty in one of London's poorest districts. That choice, made in the early 1900s, would set her on a path that took her from the slums of Bow to the ashrams of India, from the prisons of Trinidad to the peace councils of the Netherlands. She would become close friends with Mahatma Gandhi, earn the nickname "Mother of World Peace" in Japan, and attract the attention of the United States government, which sent agents to monitor her speeches. When the American Catholic activist Dorothy Day visited England in 1963, she was asked what she most wanted to do in London. She said she wanted to see Muriel Lester. Who was this woman, and how did a Baptist businessman's daughter from Leytonstone become one of the world's most closely watched peace campaigners?

• 2. From Leytonstone to Bow

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  Lester was born at Gainsborough Lodge in Leytonstone on the 9th of December 1883. Her father, Henry Edward Lester, was a prominent Baptist businessman who served as president of the Essex Baptist Union and chairman of the West Ham school board. The family was prosperous enough to live at The Grange in Loughton, and Lester attended the progressive day school Wanstead College before moving on to St Leonard's School in St Andrews, Scotland. She was baptised into the Fillebrook Baptist Church in 1898, at the age of 15.

  The turning point came in 1902, when her father took her to visit a factory girls' club in Bow, in the East End of London. She left that visit feeling she had to help. She gave up any thought of university, became a social worker in the area, and moved into the community herself. She taught Sunday School at the local Baptist Church and lectured widely on poverty. She also campaigned for basic provisions such as milk for children under five.

• 3. Kingsley Hall

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  In 1915, Lester and her sister Verona Doris Lester established Kingsley Hall on Botolph Road in Bow. The name honoured their brother, who had died young in 1914 and left the sisters an inheritance they used to fund the organisation. The building had previously housed a "Strict and Particular Baptist congregation" and had been known as Zion Hall.

  The sisters converted it into London's first purpose-built children's nursery, running it for local children from the start. Kingsley Hall then grew into what they called a "People's House" - a place where local residents could study, worship and attend social events. A second Kingsley Hall was opened in Dagenham in 1930. Lester also acquired a wooden house that she renamed Rachel Cottage, using it as a holiday home for East End children. A blue plaque marking the Lester sisters' connection to it still stands at 49 Baldwins Hill in Loughton.

• 4. Gandhi in Bow

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  Lester first met Mahatma Gandhi in 1926, during a trip to India that had been arranged after Professor Gangulee - son-in-law of the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and Mrinalini Devi - visited Kingsley Hall earlier that year, was impressed with her work, and invited her to travel there. She stayed at Gandhi's ashram in October 1926 and visited Shantiniketan.

  When Gandhi came to London in September 1931 for the Second Imperial Round Table Conference on India's future, the British government had arranged a suite of rooms at the Hilton Hotel and a fleet of cars for his use. He rejected all of it and instead stayed at Kingsley Hall with Lester for twelve weeks, choosing to live among the East End poor. He was accompanied by his secretary Mahadev Desai, his son Devdas Gandhi, and his British supporter Mirabehn. He received important visitors while sitting cross-legged on the floor. Local children came to give him birthday toys, which he gently placed on window sills and in carriages before taking them back to India when he left.

  Lester accompanied Gandhi again in 1934, on his anti-untouchability tour through earthquake-shaken regions of Bihar. Gandhi said of her that she "manifested the gospel of reconciliation to people in daily life as did few others," and told her directly: "of all my English friends, you are by no means the least." Kingsley Hall today is home to the Gandhi Foundation voluntary organisation.

• 5. Nine Tours for Peace

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  Lester was a founding member of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian pacifist organisation. In 1933 she became its Ambassador-At-Large, and afterwards its Traveling Secretary. To take on the role fully, she handed over the running of Kingsley Hall to her sister and threw herself into building the Fellowship's global presence. She completed nine international tours in the 1930s alone, travelling to the Middle East, China and Japan. In Japan she was known as the "Mother of World Peace."

  On those tours she spoke against war and against the trade in arms and drugs, including the opium trade. In 1937 she travelled through Japan with her nephew George Hogg, who then continued to Shanghai and eventually into the Chinese hinterlands. Hogg became famous for saving sixty orphaned boys, marching them 1,100 kilometres to safety.

  Lester had a particularly large following in the United States and contributed to the Fellowship of Reconciliation's magazine Fellowship. She befriended civil rights figures such as Bayard Rustin. The US government sent agents to report on her speeches, including one in Chicago in 1939. In Canada, she met pacifist and socialist Mildred Fahrni and invited her to work for six months at Kingsley Hall.

• 6. Detention and Defiance

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  Lester's pacifism during World War II put her on a direct collision course with government authorities. In 1941, while on a tour of the Americas, her anti-war speeches led to her detention in Trinidad. She was forcibly repatriated to Britain, briefly imprisoned in Holloway Prison, and had her passport confiscated.

  Back in London, she continued working alongside other peace activists, raising funds that Kingsley Hall used for food, clothing and children's activities during the war. She had been pictured at the International Council of War Resisters' International meeting in the Netherlands in July 1938, standing fourth from the left in the group photograph - already a recognised presence among Europe's organised pacifists. After the war ended, Lester continued her work with IFOR.

  The roots of her commitment to non-violence reached deep into her reading life. She had been shaped by the writings of Leo Tolstoy and his teachings on non-resistance, ideas she passed on to students at Loughton Baptist Union's Sunday School. During World War I she had spoken plainly about the cost of war, saying that "the first casualty in every war is truth."

• 7. Later Years and Legacy

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  Lester retired from full-time work in 1954. In 1963, on her eightieth birthday, she was made a Freeman of the Borough of Poplar. She died on the 11th of February 1968 at her home, Kingsley Cottage in Loughton, Essex. She never married, never had children, and donated her body to science.

  The Nobel Prize organisation believes she may have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize before World War II, though records of nominees were not kept prior to 1939, so the nomination cannot be confirmed. She published two autobiographies: It Occurred to Me in 1937, and It So Happened in 1947, both with Harper Brothers.

  A vegetarian cooperative house at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor was named after her, though it has since been renamed. Her archive is held at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. In 2017, she was featured in the Clever Essex Campaign, which recognises what it describes as "Essex's greatest ambassadors." Lester had been a strict vegetarian since childhood, a habit formed under the influence of her school headteacher's wife - a commitment she maintained so firmly that in her later years she turned away a parcel of vitamin pills and liver capsules sent by an American friend, on the grounds that they were not vegetarian.