Toynbee Hall Research Articles

The Social Settlement after Twenty-five Years

More than a quarter of a century has elapsed since a letter, written by a passenger on an English railway train as he sat on the bank beside the track waiting for a broken-down engine to be repaired, resulted in the founding of the first Social Settlement. The writer was the Reverend Canon Samuel A. Barnett, then Vicar of St. Jude's Church, Whitechapel, in East London, and the settlement was Toynbee Hall. Mrs. Barnett has recently published an interesting account of the steps that led to the realization of the settlement idea. She describes the lack of knowledge of the poor on the part of earnest, thinking men, when she and her husband took up their work at St. Jude's, and tells of the visits they made to Oxford from time to time to talk to little groups of cultivated, serious young college men to get them to care about the poor and their problems. Some of these men came to Whitechapel for a visit, to see for themselves the conditions of poverty, and occasionally some would take lodgings in East London, when they left the university to begin their lifework. In this way a connection was established between Whitechapel and the university, and discerning spirits were able to see that each side had contributions of value to make to the other.

Telegraphy without Wires, and the Guarding of Coast Lines by Electric Cable

IT appears from an article in Commerce, December 16, that Mr. W. H. Preece, in a lecture on “Telegraphy without Wires,” at Toynbee Hall, said, that from experiments at the Goodwin Lightship it had been found impossible to get a message on board, and “that the intervening sea-water performed much the same function as an iron plate,” I would like to call the attention of the readers of NATURE to my paper laid before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in January 1893, when it was shown that neither salt nor fresh water had any appreciable effect on the transmission of these electrical waves. Take this case—an iron steamer afloat above a cable lying on the sea-bottom. If the steamer have on board suitable apparatus, messages sent along the cable from a single Leclanche cell can be and have been read on board ship by ordinary sailors. If it is possible to so convey messages to a vessel not moored by an anchor, it is surely possible to do the same to a moored ship such as a lightship. Mr. Preece's failure at the “Goodwin” is not due to the action of salt water, for, if electric vibrations work through salt water in the Firth of Forth, they will equally do so at the “Goodwin.”

“Toynbee Hall”

“Toynbee Hall” SAMUEL HALES SAMUEL HALES Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Library, Volume s1-V, Issue 1, 1893, Pages 177–189, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s1-V.1.177 Published: 01 January 1893