035. Lady Allen on Froebel Training School, Emdrup, Copenhagen

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The life and work of Lady All en of Hurtwood.

Part two

Children are more complicated than Ke le s.

We join Lady All en as she was travelling to Norway in a rickety old army Dakota on the 4 th 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 wordsas they deserve sharing. Page 196 Memoires of an Uneducated Lady

She goes on to describe the remainder of he r tour which resulted in her establishing an interna onal organisa on with a focus on early childhoodeduca on, how this formed into OMEP which was supported by UNESCO and informed the work of UNICEF for whom she worked for a year asinforma on liaison officer. She had to give up being chair of 9 other major and inuen al commi ees to nd the me to full this post. She used herrole, 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 orphanedor 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 incidentresul ng in some una e ring pictures of her taken during a tree plan ng ceremony.) She makes a ee ng men on of the passing into l aw of theoriginal Childrens Act only four years a er her ini al le er to The Times, which started the whole demand for the inquiry which l ed to the act.

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

The campaign for adventure pl aygrounds.

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 sheacknowledges that her mania for keeping things going would be fu le if i t were not for the great efforts of a good many people. This sounds to me asif there were disputes about who did what and who could claim what in the adventure Playground movement of the 1970s dont you recognise thenote of diplomacy in that tone?

Following the picture post ar cle in 1946 there was a wave of i nterest in these new spaces. She wrote for a pamphlet for the Under14s council and aplayground was started in Camberwell under the auspices of Cambridge house. I t lasted for 3 years before the land was deve loped.

She never saw that one but became very involved wi th one in Clydesdale Road, North Kensington. Ruth Li lewood had watched children playing ona bombsite next to her house and it took a good deal of nego a on with landlords and hos le neighbours as well as fundraising to open the site in1951. Marjorie was on the commi ee of this pl ayground. She managed to scrounge a hut for the playground and found a young man to be theplayground 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 inte rna onalvoluntary service for peace came to clear away the dangerous rubble. There was loud mouthed opposi on, but the children poured in.

March 17 th 1952

It had been the inten on to focus on children aged 5 -10 but older and younger children were eager to come in to and experience shows it ispossible to cater for a very mixed group. There were ghts par cularly over possession of tools but real crises were rare. It was surprising to seehow many ac vi es were going on at close quarters, without serious fric on even when the playground was lle d to capacity. Youngest childrenriding down slopes in a trolley or digging in a somewhat aimless fashion with s cks and trowels; while the olde r boys were working at pick andshovel ex cava on the girls were playing some housekeeping games around the huts and various mixed groups were making bonres or hammeringboards or diligently he lping the l eader to construct a brick seat against a boundary wall.

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

It is evident that the help children get from the Play-leader is useful to them emo onally as we ll as prac cally, in a childs world a friendly adult whoexerts a minimum of authority and is generous with his me and a en on, maybe something of a rarity; and the children respond as i f they havebeen wai ng for just this sort of friendship. 1953 ma

In these two pie ces of wri ng Lady Allen spell s out clearly for us the nature of an Adventure Playground and the role of the playworker. Here are twovast areas of knowledge and informa on that we s ll pursue and research and write about and grasp to capture the e ssence of, wri en in theminutes of the rst English playground with a proper suppor ng structure.

This site was a acre and had a budget of 400/year. When Lady All en saw an ar cle in the mes on juvenil e crime, she no doubt remembered thereac ons of the people of Emdrup to the new j unk playground, the eager belie f that they had that it had put an end to juvenile de linquency.

She responded wi th another of her le ers to the mes.

... Municiple playgrounds are o en as bleak as barrack squares and just as boring. You are not all owed to build a re, you would head straight for juvenil e court if you started to dig up the e xpensive tarmac to make a cave, there are no bricks or planks to buil d a house, no workshops for

carpentry, mechanical work, pain ng or modelling and of course, no tree s to climb...She does it again ! A perfect cri que of the standard ill informed municipal play offer and a clear explana on of the effects on those spaces of thechildren they are intended to serve. (This is one very good reason why this woman sits behind me in mee ngs politely clearing her throatoccasionally ...)

And for her next stroke of genius?
http://www.playtowerhamlets.org.uk/documents/children%20are%20more%20complicated%20than%20kettles.doc


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

Many a empts had been made to improve play grounds but had failed whe n met with problems simil ar to those we e ncountered Clysdale road, Itshowed an urgent need for the pooling of expe rience. Doubts about the aims of adventure playgrounds and difficul es wi th the prac cal meanswere out of all propor on because the pioneers neve r talked to each another . the two groups in Camberwell and Kensington had never even knownthat the second group existed.

A mee ng at the NPFA (now Fields in Trust) was called for all i nterested par es. During this mee ng it became clear that while there was hugesupport for the scheme, most people did not fully unde rstand 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 li le pamphlets, that she had prepared earlier.

The playgrounds had up to this point been called waste material or junk playgrounds,. She thought they deserved be er and invented the nameAdventure Playgrounds which became the tle of her pamphlet. (As she points out is used around the world to this day) When asked to dene it forthe Oxford English Dic onary in not more than seven words, she said. a crea ve playground with tools and waste material.

Again there was a ood of response to this pamphlet and she saw that a central organisa on was denitely needed to canalize all this enthusiasminto construc ve work.

A mee ng was called in K&C Town Hall and about 200 pe ople interested in star ng a new adventure playground a ended. The NPFA offered somesupport and it was agreed that a na onal co-ordina ng body should be se t up. It was not clear however, what the NPFA had actually offe red. Therewas a need for money for administra ve support, printed informa on and a centralized record keeping system for technical advice.... TheClydesdale Road commi ee had managed to keep on top of this work load so far but quite rightly an cipated a growing demand. There were otherconcerns in her mind about the understanding that the NPFA had for the concept of Adventure Playgrounds, but it was thought be er to set up unde rthe umbrella that they offered than to try to establish a brand new organisa on. So the NPFA Playground Commi ee was establishe d and LadyAllen with her two women ac vist colleagues went along to the rst mee ng.

it was made clear that only two of them would be welcomed onto the commi ee eve n though it was they who had the rst hand knowledge andexperie nce of running an adventure playground. The women dealt with this by refusing to leave the mee ng. But they con nued to be referred toby the diminu ve collec ve 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 AdventurePlayground Movement. In addi on a new adventure Pl ayground opened up in Crawley.

It was about this me 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 men on only to be able to tell how Polly rejected a deligh ully bucolic picnicsite because i t had too many nigh ngales.

Back to work in England and speeches in areas where the Adventure Playground movement had made brave starts. To Liverpool where a leader hadbeen appointed, Grimsby, where a pi ece of dock l and had been donated by a mber rm, and Bristol where the proposed site has trees and astream.

She says, The people who came to hear me speak were enthusiasts. They were just as disillusione d as I , but they took it for granted that exis ng

play spaces would become adventure playgrounds if a couple of concrete pipes we re cemented down and an old trac on engine brought in. This isnot 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 wasnothing to model this role upon. It was u e rly new. Also there was a groundswell of f eeling that whilst the hours were awkward- the supervisiondu es were li ght and that the job therefore did not command a reasonable rate of pay. I guess the famili ar remarks about ge ng paid to play withkids must have started at about this me and con nue to this day. Certainly in many organisa ons playworkers are s ll paid an embarrassingly smallwage and are u erly undervalued by almost eve ry one. These rst play-leaders were found in surprising numbers, but were not paid a living wage.

Lady Allen was never pleased wi th the name Play-leade rs which suggested power rather than inuence. I do not know if she e ver came across theterm 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 siteof a bombed out school on Loll ard street and, although the local residents had been asking for it to be turned into a playground, only two werewilli ng to serve on a commi ee. The rest burst into complaints whenever anything went wrong. Lady Allen says that she fe lt that they did not makeclear 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 leade r in post; there is a deligh ul descrip on of him thatfeatured in an ar cle in a wee kly magazine.

a man with no pretensions- just an knack of handling children... from the smallest Lambeth child upwards eve ry 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 li le girls, as large men always are he is on termsof understand and level friendship with the tough li l e boys and the faintly hos le older ones. He laughs all over his broad face if you suggest heunderstands the children. nobody understands anybody else he says i think i just sympathise with them.

His job was a hard one... imagine being the rst playworker with a faintly hos le community and a commi ee mee ng every two weeks consis ngof not only the brave locals but the tled and the former service men and mayors and such like. All of them depending you and you alone to managethis radical new social expe riment.

t wasnt l some me later that they managed to get hold of an old hut which proved expensive to reconstruct (Over (1000) but it did provide themwith lavatories el ectricity and indoor play space, a tools store carpenters bench and books for the children. (A rarity at this me remember. Ra oningwas s ll in place and there had been a a rst world war followed by a depression then a second world war. People had nothing. Resources were morethan scarce they we re 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 i t... again this is a tradi on that we take for granted in our work now, butimagine 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 allthe kids began digging and building and demolishing and cooking on res it looked a mess. It was referred to locally as The Ruins an eyesore.

The children seemed to have adored it and it a racted not only school aged children but ny to ers and well as older kids already employment,


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publicit., But that was not enough for her. Lady Allen wanted to do something construc ve about this situa on and wrote a pamphlet design forplay. 1961. In 1965 there was another pamphlet new playgrounds looking at a greater play offe r for all children.

Then she men ons a li l e something that she wrote to help the planners and architects and other involved in public housing who were becomingincreasingly worried by the lack of play provision for high rise children. This is the incredible Planning for play 1968. it is an u erly comprehensiveguide to playwork theory as it was worded at that me. Our language has changed since, but every one of the concepts she describes, we arerediscovering and claiming for ourselves. She gives il lustra ons on playable spaces as applied to housing estates and nearby open parks, shedescribes the playful use of sloap spaces. She encapsulated deligh ully the inspi ra on and wonder of the adventure playground, and writes clearlyand in unsen mental terms about the vital nee d for adventure playgrounds which welcome children with disabili es and addi onal needs anddescribes how to create an adventure playground which will do this work. She writes in clear and unclu ered language about the philosophybehind each element of play design and illustrates, from her extensive expe rience across the world the inspired design solu ons to the prac calproblems of crea ng a sandpit, plan ng, and the management of a playground. She slates play ground designe rs who design to adult desires and try

to t children into those ideals. She ghts for the aesthe c element of a playspace and for the comfort of the children and the adults who accompanythem in their playing. She de scribes in concise and unpreten ous terms the need to preserve the wild spaces in a city, a concept which has recentlybeen marketed as liminal space by some preten ous play upstart.

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

In it there i s a plea from Lady Alle n for a centralised home for informa on and research about playspace design and theory. One senses that she f eelsthat 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 theNPFA in the business of pl ay. It is largely because of this l ack of a centralised resource on play that local authori es and landscape designers andarchitects keep on , year a er year making the same unsa sfactory play spaces, the same mistakes. It i s because we have not given them thisinforma on 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 wi th passion.

She was invi ted by the UN to contribute her panoramic view to a discussion about playground ac vi es, objec ves and leadership. To cut a longstory short, it was as a result of that mee ng that in 1963, the Interna onal Play Associa on was formed. Surprised?... no of course you are not.

She describes how adventure playgrounds all over the world have taken on different characteris cs, some are very concerned with building otherswith animals, some are free and are accused of anarchism and some are over regimented and cannot bear to see children engaged in aimless ac vityso impose ac vi es more purposeful to adults upon them (she cannot agree wi th this.) she is be mused by the fact that urban architects and plannersof her day seem to have no interest i n the success or failure of the playspaces they construct,. An engineer designing a ke le wi ll worry at theproblem it un l it pours right, she says. It is true that children are more complicated than ke l es and there i s no absolute way to prove the socialand psychological value of pl aygrounds.... but my approach has been to try anything that has a germ of interest, if it works, splendid. If i t fails, scrap itand 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 shemake 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 10 th. The US press loved her calling her the no nonsense dowager and the ller-in of gaps.

It is at this point in her autobiography, that she men ons the crea on 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 informa on gathering and sharing. The organisa on was funded by ILEA the Inner London Educa on Authority, who also funde d block grants for thesalaries of adventure playground leaders and assistants. Read that again. Training and trainee placements were organise for those coming new toplaywork and peripate c playworkers were employe d 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 me that thatcher closed down ILEA and there was no longer any permi ed l ocal governmentsupport 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 werenot accessing the adventure playgrounds that were blossoming all ove r London. These children and their familie s felt the stress caused by this lackvery acutely. So she did what you would expect, set up a trial scheme to see if it was possibl e and what was needed for disabled children to play. Sheset up 5 of these projects in different parts of London, and saw them running with real success. So she set about star ng an adventure playgroundwhere disabled children could come in the term me and the holidays. She became the chairman of a small commi ee to nd a site fundraise planbuildings and l andscaping and interest parents doctors and educa onalists. Not so much really.

She found a site, drove the bul l dozer, modelled streambeds and splash pools and sandpits. The building was designed with the advice of allspecialists a ended to. Wide doorways, a kitchen and spacious playroom big enough for children in whee l chairs and a high number of adults tosupport them.

In February 1970 the experimental playground opened in the gardens of the rectory in Old Church street Chelsea. Peaceful and spacious with wallsof old mell ow brick there was a comfor ng sense of enclosure wi thout shu ering out the busy life going on outside in old church street.

She belie ves this was the rst ever Adventure playground designed specically for disabled children. ( please read Adventure playgrounds forhandicapped children for a complete descrip on of this si te.) at the me of wri ng her autobiography in 1974 , She had found another three sites todevelop for HAPA across London. There were eve ntually 6 that were run by the organisa on she established to co-ordinated the sites. Since that

me many of them have lost her ini al inspira on as well as the ability to work inclusively, through a lack of engagement in the adventureplayground agenda and an understanding of playwork in the current umbrella organisa on.

My own wonderful Chelsea site (Successor to the original old Rectory site,) is where I rst met lady Allen some 11 years a er her death. Well youdidnt think a li l e thing like her own mortality would get in the way of he r work did you? (as she says, the passage of me has never yet restrictedmy opportuni es for interes ng work.)

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


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Her closing words in the memoires of an uneducated lady?

The work I have chosen to do is never nished.

And that, my dears, is he r legacy.

Documents

035. Lady Allen on Froebel Training School, Emdrup, Copenhagen