The Life And Work Of Lady Allen Of Hurtwood

The life and work of Lady Allen of Hurtwood.

Part two

‘Children are more complicated than Kettles.’

We join Lady Allen as she was travelling to Norway in a rickety old army Dakota on the 4th march 1946 for the playwork part of her life story.

On a fuelling stop in Copenhagen, the head of the Froebel Training School whisked her away to see Emdrup. From here on I will use her own words as they deserve sharing. Page 196’ Memoires of an Uneducated Lady’

She goes on to describe the remainder of her tour which resulted in her establishing an international organisation with a focus on early childhood education, how this formed into OMEP which was supported by UNESCO and informed the work of UNICEF for whom she worked for a year as information liaison officer. She had to give up being chair of 9 other major and influential committees to find the time to fulfil this post. She used her role, among other things, to raise a budget for an enquiry into the plight of disabled children across Europe as well as those who had been orphaned or made homeless by the ravages of the recently ended war.

She describes having tea with Queen Mary (who she had last seen when she was very cross with Marjorie because of an unfortunate incident resulting in some unflattering pictures of her taken during a tree planting ceremony.) She makes a fleeting mention of the passing into law of the original Children’s Act only four years after her initial letter to The Times, which started the whole demand for the inquiry which led to the act.

She sold her beloved house, managed to find another property which she oversaw the conversion of and created a garden for. She disposed of CAs library to a university in America. Wrote two gardening books illustrated by Susan Jellicoe, and then she took up a new campaign.

The campaign for adventure playgrounds.

Lady Allen starts the chapter on playgrounds with a rather curious rider, she is trying to give a truthful account of her own experiences and she acknowledges that her mania for keeping things going would be futile if it were not for the great efforts of a good many people. This sounds to me as if there were disputes about who did what and who could claim what in the adventure Playground movement of the 1970’s don’t you recognise the note of diplomacy in that tone?

Following the picture post article in 1946 there was a wave of interest in these new spaces. She wrote for a pamphlet for the Under14s council and a playground was started in Camberwell under the auspices of Cambridge house. It lasted for 3 years before the land was developed. She never saw that one but became very involved with one in Clydesdale Road, North Kensington. Ruth Littlewood had watched children playing on a bombsite next to her house and it took a good deal of negotiation with landlords and hostile neighbours as well as fundraising to open the site in 1951. Marjorie was on the committee of this playground. She ‘managed to scrounge a hut for the playground and found a young man to be the playground leader.’

Because the space was so urgently needed, the site was opened up before the water board had put in a standpipe and before the international voluntary service for peace came to clear away the dangerous rubble. There was loud mouthed opposition, but ‘the children poured in’.

March 17th 1952

‘It had been the intention to focus on children aged 5 -10 but older and younger children were eager to come in to and experience shows it is possible to cater for a very mixed group. There were fights particularly over possession of tools but real crises were rare. It was surprising to see how many activities were going on at close quarters, without serious friction even when the playground was filled to capacity. Youngest children riding down slopes in a trolley or digging in a somewhat aimless fashion with sticks and trowels; while the older boys were working at pick and shovel excavation the girls were playing some housekeeping games around the huts and various mixed groups were making bonfires or hammering boards or diligently helping the leader to construct a brick seat against a boundary wall.’

The second leader created such a friendly atmosphere that he disarmed local criticism.

‘It is evident that the help children get from the Play-leader is useful to them emotionally as well as practically, in a child’s world a friendly adult who exerts a minimum of authority and is generous with his time and attention, maybe something of a rarity; and the children respond as if they have been waiting for just this sort of friendship.’ 1953 ma

In these two pieces of writing Lady Allen spells out clearly for us the nature of an Adventure Playground and the role of the playworker. Here are two vast areas of knowledge and information that we still pursue and research and write about and grasp to capture the essence of, written in the minutes of the first English playground with a proper supporting structure.

This site was a ¼ acre and had a budget of £400/year. When Lady Allen saw an article in the times on juvenile crime, she no doubt remembered the reactions of the people of Emdrup to the new junk playground, the eager belief that they had that it had put an end to juvenile delinquency.

She responded with another of her ’letters to the times.’

.’.. Municiple playgrounds are often as bleak as barrack squares and just as boring. You are not allowed to build a fire, you would head straight for juvenile court if you started to dig up the expensive tarmac to make a cave, there are no bricks or planks to build a house, no workshops for carpentry, mechanical work, painting or modelling and of course, no trees to climb...’ She does it again ! A perfect critique of the standard ill informed municipal play offer and a clear explanation of the effects on those spaces of the children they are intended to serve. (This is one very good reason why this woman sits behind me in meetings politely clearing her throat occasionally ...)

And for her next stroke of genius?

A unifying body to help recongnise and establish the work of the adventure playgrounds and playworkers.

‘Many attempts had been made to improve play grounds but had failed when met with problems similar to those we encountered Clysdale road, It showed an urgent need for the pooling of experience. Doubts about the aims of adventure playgrounds and difficulties with the practical means were out of all proportion because the pioneers never talked to each another . the two groups in Camberwell and Kensington had never even known that the second group existed.’

A meeting at the NPFA (now Fields in Trust) was called for all interested parties. During this meeting it became clear that while there was huge support for the scheme, most people did not fully understand the role of the play-leader. Lady Allen had strong mixed feelings about this lack of understanding, she knew that ‘the right person was the key to success’. And wanted to see leaders properly paid.

The NPFA agreed to publish another of Her little pamphlets, that she had prepared earlier.

The playgrounds had up to this point been called waste material or junk playgrounds,. She thought they deserved better and invented the name Adventure Playgrounds which became the title of her pamphlet. (As she points out is used around the world to this day’) When asked to define it for the Oxford English Dictionary in not more than seven words, she said. ’a creative playground with tools and waste material.’

Again there was a flood of response to this pamphlet and she saw that a central organisation was definitely needed to ‘canalize all this enthusiasm into constructive work’.

A meeting was called in K&C Town Hall and about 200 people interested in starting a new adventure playground attended. The NPFA offered some support and it was agreed that a national co-ordinating body should be set up. It was not clear however, what the NPFA had actually offered. There was a need for money for administrative support, printed information and a centralized record keeping system for technical advice.... The Clydesdale Road committee had managed to keep on top of this work load so far but quite rightly anticipated a growing demand. There were other concerns in her mind about the understanding that the NPFA had for the concept of Adventure Playgrounds, but it was thought better to set up under ‘the umbrella’ that they offered than to try to establish a brand new organisation. So the NPFA Playground Committee was established and Lady Allen with her two women activist colleagues went along to the first meeting.

it was made clear that only two of them would be welcomed onto the committee even though it was they who had the first hand knowledge and experience of running an adventure playground. The women dealt with this by refusing to leave the meeting. But they continued to be referred to by the diminutive collective noun of ‘the ladies’.

Eventually two sites were found one in south and one in north London and an appointment was made to answer enquiries about the Adventure Playground Movement. In addition a new adventure Playground opened up in Crawley.

It was about this time that Lady Allen received a proposal of marriage from Herbert Morrisson which despite, his being a dear friend, she refused.

She and Polly took a brief but idyllic French holiday together, which I mention only to be able to tell how Polly rejected a delightfully bucolic picnic site because it had ‘ too many nightingales’.

Back to work in England and speeches in areas where the Adventure Playground movement had made brave starts. To Liverpool where a leader had been appointed, Grimsby, where a piece of dock land had been donated by a timber firm, and Bristol where the proposed site has trees and a stream.

She says, ‘ The people who came to hear me speak were enthusiasts. They were just as disillusioned as I , but they took it for granted that existing play spaces would become adventure playgrounds if a couple of concrete pipes were cemented down and an old traction engine brought in. This is not so. Children want above all things that they can move about and use for all sorts of purposes.

She wanted to make sure that playgrounds had plenty of adaptable materials and a good playground leader. This was a problem because there was nothing to model this role upon. It was utterly new. Also there was a groundswell of feeling that whilst the hours were awkward- the supervision duties were light and that the job therefore did not command a reasonable rate of pay. I guess the familiar remarks about ‘getting paid to play with kids’ must have started at about this time and continue to this day. Certainly in many organisations playworkers are still paid an embarrassingly small wage and are utterly undervalued by almost every one. These first play-leaders were found in surprising numbers, but were not paid a living wage.

Lady Allen was never pleased with the name Play-leaders which ‘suggested power rather than influence.’ I do not know if she ever came across the term playworkers, but it certainly seems to address her qualms.

In 1953 the LCC offered a space in Lambeth for an Adventure Playground site. They agreed to a peppercorn rent and to fence the area. It was the site of a bombed out school on Lollard street and, although the local residents had been asking for it to be turned into a playground, only two were willing to serve on a committee. The rest burst into complaints whenever anything went wrong. Lady Allen says that she felt that they did not make clear enough before the site was created, exactly what an Adventure Playground was.

The site opened in April 1955 and although the fence was not complete there was a leader in post; there is a delightful description of him that featured in an article in a weekly magazine. ‘ a man with no pretensions- just an knack of handling children... from the smallest Lambeth child upwards every one calls him ‘arry,. He is a bulky, happy man with a turned up nose, spectacles like Billy BUNTERS A RUMPLED SHIRT, A TEAR IN HIS TROUSERS AND ARMY BOOTS LACED WITH STRING’. (NB playworker chic is born.) ‘ nothing annoys harry. Nothing hurries him. He is diffident with prim little girls, as large men always are he is on terms of understand and level friendship with the tough little boys and the faintly hostile older ones. He laughs all over his broad face if you suggest he ‘understands’ the children. ‘nobody understands anybody else’ he says’ i think i just sympathise with them.’

His job was a hard one... imagine being the first playworker with a ‘faintly hostile’ community and a committee meeting every two weeks consisting of not only the brave locals but the titled and the former service men and mayors and such like. All of them depending you and you alone to manage this radical new social experiment. t wasn’t til sometime later that they managed to get hold of an old hut which proved expensive to reconstruct (Over (£1000) but it did provide them with lavatories electricity and indoor play space, a tools store carpenters bench and books for the children. (A rarity at this time remember. Rationing was still in place and there had been a a first world war followed by a depression then a second world war. People had nothing. Resources were more than scarce they were not there at all. For children to have access to books was treasure indeed.)

The children painted the hut and the signage and took great pride in it... again this is a tradition that we take for granted in our work now, but imagine the shock of a child painted sign on a child painted building. The girls cleaned and swept the building, because they chose to, and outside all the kids began digging and building and demolishing and cooking on fires it looked a mess. It was referred to locally as ‘The Ruins’ an eyesore.

The children seemed to have adored it and it attracted not only school aged children but tiny totters and well as older kids already employment, (Dont forget that the school leaving age at this time was still 14/15 years. ) the groups mixed harmoniously and gravitated toward their own spaces and interests without impinging on each other’s play. (How great it would be for playground designers to attend to this now.) When the older kids said they wanted to build a sandpit for the little ones, they worked hard to construct it and then spent a couple of weeks playing in it themselves. Lady Allen remarks that she was ‘ glad that these tough young men were catching p on a pleasure that they had missed. An adventure playground is about the only place where that can be done.’

There was always a shortage of building materials and the playground gladly accepted donations, in one case a lorry load of old LCC blackboards.

There was a mistake. There was an attempt to build a play mountain. Several lorry loads of top soil were dumped onto the site, unfortunately it was London clay and whilst the children enjoyed the pottery and mud slides, the ruining of clothes and homes became too much of a problem and it had to be taken away and turfed over. Harry took a great deal of criticism from locals and was flooded with good ideas from over helpful committee members. So another learning point was discovered. The committee members made suggestions about the site to Harry through only one committee member. Is this the start of good management practices unique to the Adventure Playground movement?

The site was presented with an old life boat which became a huge favourite and suggested imaginative and adventurous narratives unlike and old van which was just pushed around until it broke. The site was learning about what worked and what didn’t in their situation.

Having invested so much energy in the publicity campaign to disseminate information about adventure playgrounds, the site now found itself inundated with journalists and TV crews. Apparently the children enjoyed this for a while but eventual it interrupted the ‘business in their affairs.’

Lady Allen found the press coverage that Lollard received, mixed in content and quality. Her main messages were still simple. ‘ A massive supplyof materials and a resourceful and sympathetic leader.’

Harry left the site, he had been working lo hours in a stressful job for little money and apparently trying to bring up a family. He was replaced by Joe Benjamin, who stayed for while before moving onto the Grimsby Playground. He found that Lollard was run with too much outside interference and not enough involvement from local people. This criticism was held to be true by Lady Allen but she wonders about the right thing to do in a case like this, where local people were still generally unforthcoming about supporting the site through a management committee. Should the outsiders step away from the project it would simply fold. A difficult situation and one that was much replicated in the early years. She points out that in the places where adventure playgrounds were most needed the people who did take on some form of public service were involved in the unions or local government,( to that list, I would add church work. nottinghill adventure playground and much of the inspirational playground work in that area was heavily supported by the local ecumenical church consortium. ) She suggests that Joe did very well with the playground in Grimsby getting local support but ended up doing much of the work that should have been done by a supportive committee.

Another staggering and pertinent bit of information coming from this time was the fact that in the face of complaints that the Adventure Playground was dangerous, Captain Bratt of the NPFA and the treasurer of Lollard, managed to get Lloyds of London to insure the site for claims up to £50,000 for £5 per year. They were ‘impressed by the fact that a responsible adult was with the children and by the argument that the children who were deeply engrossed in what they were doing are less likely to have accidents than those who are driven boredom to use fixed equipment in ways for which it was never intended. After more than 20 years, she says’ no parent has ever made a claim against a adventure Playground..’ would that that were still true.

The committee was joined in 1957 by Drummond Abernethy who became and remained an enthusiast for adventure playgrounds. (This is the only mention made in her book of Drummond, who is cited by many in the old guard of the playworld to have been the leading motivator in the adventure Play movement. I wonder if this is what her caveat at the top of the playgrounds chapter is about?

When Jo Benjamin left the site it was taken over by Pat Turner, who wrote a fascinating book about the experience called ‘Something Extraordinary’ and by all accounts it was extraordinary. He had no rules, but clear standards for the playground. The children heard classical music and he played the violin as he wondered a round the site. He encouraged the kids to be a greater part of the neighbourhood which broke down many of the barriers between the adventure playground and the community. he encouraged the craze for camping in tents and cooking meals over open fires. This was a significant factor in the lives of many kids whose parents were working when they had their mid day lunch break. They were able to come to the playground at lunchtime and cook their own meals.

Gardening took off in a big way and the children planted and tended their plots and learned how to make compost from the left-overs of the Lambeth Walk market.

The site acquired another hut which was used for painting and jiving and poetry writing. The children went on to produce a newspaper and an operetta! The under fives had a supervised playgroup session funded by the save the children fund. Lady Allen was keen to maximise the use of the site all year round, which she saw as another way of making adventure playgrounds unique.

In about 1960 the lease ran out on Lollard and the Adventure playground closed and another school was built on the site.

As far as I am aware this is about the closest we have of an adventure playground biography. Certainly I have heard that when Nils Norman was visiting sites trying to collate information for his catalogue of London adventure playgrounds he found few people with any real sense of the history of their site beyond a few notes and photos fading away in show boxes in the playground attics.

She says that it took many years to argue that an adventure playworkers salary should be on a parrwith other social workers. And she was concerned about qualifications and training. ‘Good leaders with an instinct for following children’s interests are born not made ‘she says’ ‘but there are some skills that can be taught.’

She undertook a fact finding visit to Stockholm 1954, and saw how their parks had play spaces open to the children at any time, without fences and using a great deal more space than the adventure playgrounds had. They were staffed by play-leaders occasionally when they opened up a store and supported to children in a slightly different play experience. She thought that this should be shared in the UK , so she re-invented for them the term ‘Play parks,’ wrote an article and a pamphlet (the ideal way to share information . many of my pamphlets have reached sales of up to 50,000)

The LCC were persuaded to start looking at the concept of play parks and Pat Turner, formerly of Lollard, moved to the LCC parks department and was put in charge. he made a great success of the play parks and the one o clock clubs that went along with them. Another mission completed. Lady Allen then did a piece of work with the Rowntree foundation on play provision for under fives living in high rise blocks. The research and published results highlighted shocking facts which illustrated that little children had nowhere to play with their peers. This received wide spread publicit., But that was not enough for her. Lady Allen wanted to do something constructive about this situation and wrote a pamphlet ‘design for play’. 1961. In 1965 there was another pamphlet ’ new playgrounds’ looking at a greater play offer for all children.

Then she mentions a little something that she wrote to help the planners and architects and other involved in public housing who were becoming increasingly worried by the lack of play provision for high rise children. This is the incredible ‘Planning for play’ 1968. it is an utterly comprehensive guide to playwork theory as it was worded at that time. Our language has changed since, but every one of the concepts she describes, we are rediscovering and claiming for ourselves. She gives illustrations on playable spaces as applied to housing estates and nearby open parks, she describes the playful use of sloap spaces. She encapsulated delightfully the inspiration and wonder of the adventure playground, and writes clearly and in unsentimental terms about the vital need for adventure playgrounds which welcome children with disabilities and additional needs and describes how to create an adventure playground which will do this work. She writes in clear and uncluttered language about the philosophy behind each element of play design and illustrates, from her extensive experience across the world the inspired design solutions to the practical problems of creating a sandpit, planting, and the management of a playground. She slates play ground designers who design to adult desires and try to fit children into those ideals. She fights for the aesthetic element of a playspace and for the comfort of the children and the adults who accompany them in their playing. She describes in concise and unpretentious terms the need to preserve the wild spaces in a city, a concept which has recently been marketed as ‘liminal space’ by some pretentious play upstart.

This book should be made compulsory reading for any one in play design or play work or local authority or RSLs, community development and parks departments. it is ,by far the best book on the practical issues about play and playspaces and how to support them that I have ever read and it should be re- published at once.

In it there is a plea from Lady Allen for a centralised home for information and research about playspace design and theory. One senses that she feels that her book should not have o have been necessary, because this centre was proposed by her in the very earliest days of the involvement of the NPFA in the business of play.’ It is largely because of this lack of a centralised resource on play that local authorities and landscape designers and architects keep on , year after year making the same unsatisfactory play spaces, the same mistakes. It is because we have not given them this information that we have’. Her tone is clear. She wants to communicate these things she knows so much about and has worked so hard to do well. She writes without ego but with passion. She was invited by the UN to contribute her panoramic view to a discussion about ‘playground activities, objectives and leadership’. To cut a long story short, it was as a result of that meeting that in 1963, the International Play Association was formed. Surprised?... no of course you are not.

She describes how adventure playgrounds all over the world have taken on different characteristics, some are very concerned with building others with animals, some are free and are accused of anarchism and some are over regimented and cannot bear to see children engaged in aimless activity so impose activities more purposeful to adults upon them (she cannot agree with this.) she is bemused by the fact that urban architects and planners of her day seem to have no interest in the success or failure of the playspaces they construct,. An engineer designing a kettle will worry at the problem it until it pours right, she says. ‘ It is true that children are more complicated than kettles and there is no absolute way to prove the social and psychological value of playgrounds.... but my approach has been to try anything that has a germ of interest, if it works, splendid. If it fails, scrap it and try something else.’

In 1965 She embarked on a lecture tour of the states, she did 18 speeches in 11 days, had tea with ‘Mrs Johnson at the white house (how does she make that sound so parochial?) gave a lecture at the wonderful Guggenheim museum of art on ‘Playgrounds, the Emerging Art form’ . She was thrown a grand banquet on her birthday on May 10th. The US press loved her calling her ‘the no nonsense dowager and the filler-in of gaps.’

It is at this point in her autobiography, that she mentions the creation of LAPA which was an umbrella body for London adventure playground and of which she was the chair. The aim of the group was to help new sites avoid the mistakes of the past, this sounds simple but involved a great deal of information gathering and sharing. The organisation was funded by ILEA the Inner London Education Authority, who also funded block grants for the salaries of adventure playground leaders and assistants. Read that again. Training and trainee placements were organise for those coming new to playwork and peripatetic playworkers were employed to support and work with staff on each of the (1974) 61 - and rising- adventure playgrounds. The total number reached about 80 in london by the time that thatcher closed down ILEA and there was no longer any permitted local government support for this movement.

And one last thing..

‘I saw another gap...’ in 1964 a friend of Pollys’ had a child with a profound disability and Lady Allen suddenly realised that disabled children were not accessing the adventure playgrounds that were blossoming all over London. These children and their families felt the stress caused by this lack very acutely. So she did what you would expect, set up a trial scheme to see if it was possible and what was needed for disabled children to play. She set up 5 of these projects in different parts of London, and saw them running with real success. So she set about starting an adventure playground where disabled children could come in the term time and the holidays. She ‘became the chairman of a small committee to find a site fundraise plan buildings and landscaping and interest parents doctors and educationalists.’ Not so much really. She found a site, drove the bull dozer, modelled streambeds and splash pools and sandpits. The building was designed with the advice of all specialists attended to. Wide doorways, a kitchen and spacious playroom big enough for children in wheel chairs and a high number of adults to support them.

‘In February 1970 the experimental playground opened in the gardens of the rectory in Old Church street Chelsea. Peaceful and spacious with walls of old mellow brick there was a comforting sense of enclosure without shuttering out the busy life going on outside in old church street.’

She believes this was the first ever Adventure playground designed specifically for disabled children. ( please read Adventure playgrounds for handicapped children for a complete description of this site.) at the time of writing her autobiography in 1974 , She had found another three sites to develop for HAPA across London. There were eventually 6 that were run by the organisation she established to co- ordinated the sites. Since that time many of them have lost her initial inspiration as well as the ability to work inclusively, through a lack of engagement in the adventure playground agenda and an understanding of playwork in the current umbrella organisation.

My own wonderful Chelsea site (Successor to the original old Rectory site,) is where I first met lady Allen some 11 years after her death. Well you didn’t think a little thing like her own mortality would get in the way of her work did you? (as she says, the passage of time has never yet restricted my opportunities for interesting work.)

In a moving end to her book, she talks about the joys of her busy life and scaled down joys of her quieter days. She wishes that she could visit her beloved surrey hills again and indeed her daughter Polly showed me a photo of her taken beside a little caravan on those hills take only a couple of weeks before her death in 1976.

Her closing words in the memoires of an uneducated lady?

‘The work I have chosen to do is never finished’.

And that, my dears, is her legacy.