Social Worker/Politician/Pioneer of Ethical Socialism

44

Married

5 Stork's Road, Bermondsey, London.

WFL

Complies

Ada was born into a well to do Methodist farming family in Raunds, Northamptonshire in 1866. A champion of ethical socialism, she left the comfort of Raunds as a young woman to work in the slums of St. Pancras as a Sister of the People to improve the lives of working women and their families. She later transferred to the Bermondsey Settlement where she ran several Working Girls Clubs and other community initiatives for the poor. It was there that she met her husband Alfred a medical doctor and the two married in 1900.

Ada aligned herself with the radical wing of the Liberal Party, but she left in 1906 when it failed to honour its promises on votes for women, joining the Independent Labour Party (ILP) instead. She became deeply involved in the work of the ILP, a party that organised emancipation in the factories and on the streets. She was enthused by the ‘real business’ of ‘practical socialism’ and in that same year helped found and lead the Women’s Labour League. When it formed a year later in 1907, Ada supported the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) a Votes for women society led by her friend and fellow poverty campaigner Charlotte Despard. Ada eschewed the more violent tactics of Mrs Pankhurst’s WSPU.

In 1909, Ada became the first woman Councillor in London, and with husband Alfred, she helped lead the ‘Bermondsey Uprising’ in 1911 when the working population of Bermondsey went on strike for better working conditions. Ada’s recruitment of 14,000 local women into the National Federation of Women Workers led by Mary Macarthur was instrumental. Ada did not take part in the suffrage boycott of the census that was also organised in 1911 to protest at women not having the vote and endorsed by the WFL. The reasons are unclear why she complied, but many women like Ada who campaigned for better living conditions in poor areas believed women should fill in the census because its details helped reveal the true state of overcrowding and infant deaths for example. The couples census form also reveals the tragic loss of their own daughter Joyce to scarlet fever. Interestingly, Ada's husband Alfred lists Ada on the census as simply a ‘housewife’ - yet she was so much more.

Ada also became the first woman Mayor in London in 1922. As Mayor of Bermondsey, she steadfastly refused to wear the mayoral regalia, nor acknowledge Royal ceremonial occasions. Neither would she fly the Union Jack on Bermondsey Town Hall; instead, she chose to fly the red flag of socialism, emblazoned with the Bermondsey heraldic symbol. Ada believed strongly and campaigned throughout her life for the development of co-operatives, green spaces, universal suffrage, free school meals, free national health service, slum-clearance and humane working conditions. During her time in office, she planted thousands of trees in Bermondsey to improve the air quality, developed green spaces, planted municipal flower beds, had well-designed social housing built, communal laundries, clinics, swimming pools and a solarium.

As pacifists, she and Alfred turned to Quakerism and both passionately spoke out against WW1 and then WW2, which they saw as an inevitable consequence of the injustices of the Versailles Treaty towards Germany. Ada is only the 15th woman in London to be accorded a statue. Her figure (as part of Dr Salter’s Daydream group sculpture, situated by the Thames in Bermondsey) marks her work as a woman trade unionist, a woman environmentalist, a Quaker, and a woman politician.

Contributed by: Lynn Morris, playwright and performer inspired by Ada's story (www.journeymentheatre.com)

Sources and further reading:

Ada Salter: Pioneer of Ethical Socialism by Graham Taylor (Lawrence and Wishart 2016)

Under Salter Lectures, there is a full transcript of Lynn Morris’s one woman play about the life of Ada Salter called ‘Red Flag Over Bermondsey’ at https://quakersocialists.org.uk/