In her own lifetime and since, Octavia Hill has not lacked admirers. HRH Princess Louise praised her conservation work long before agreeing to Hill's invitation to become the National Trust's first vice-president and then president. The Duke of Westminster was another supporter. Her portrait by Sargent, commissioned by friends, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. The house in Wisbech where she was born in 1838 is now administered by the Octavia Hill Birthplace Trust. And in 2012, the centenary of her death, a service in Westminster Abbey celebrated her achievements and a memorial in the nave was dedicated, describing her as ‘Social reformer and a founder of the National Trust’. What more is there to be said?
As this compilation of papers (first delivered at a conference at Sutton House in 2012) shows, she also had formidable critics: including her early mentor, John Ruskin; the Fabians who saw her as an obstacle to state pensions and welfare provision; and the suffragettes, who felt betrayed when she used her prominent public position to oppose votes for women. The editors, Elizabeth Baigent and Ben Cowell, present Hill as radical in parts of her work and as increasingly reactionary in others. What emerges is a balanced portrait, placing her firmly in her own time and explaining the complexities and contradictions in the different strands of her long career. The book consequently supplements, rather than supersedes, the biography by Gillian Darley, first published in 1990 and then republished in a revised and retitled edition in 2010. Darley contributes a chapter on Hill's campaigning to this latest book, which shows how her assessment has shifted over the last twenty-five years.
In a particularly revealing chapter entitled ‘Octavia Hill, Beatrice Webb, and the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1905–9: a mid-Victorian in an Edwardian World’, Laurence Goldman reveals the extent to which ideas formulated under the influence of, among others, the Christian Socialists and the Charity Organisation Society, were found to be inadequate for the needs of a new century. Hill was in her late sixties when she gave evidence to the Royal Commission and her testimony, with its assumptions about self-help and the undeserving poor, now makes painful reading. She was simply on the wrong side of the argument. In striking contrast, her contemporary, George Cadbury, and (a generation younger) Geraldine Cadbury, used their influence to address the causes of poverty and to press for state provision for the most vulnerable in society.
What emerges from the fourteen different contributions is how, paradoxically, Hill's distrust of solutions dependent on central and local government, helps to explain the remarkable success of the National Trust. She was keen that it should be called a trust because that would ‘bring forward its benevolent . . . character’. She also believed that the new organisation should develop and grow like her housing initiatives, stone by stone, property by property. In a concluding chapter, Ben Cowell shows how it was her friendship with Robert Hunter, a senior civil servant, which led to the creation of a charity that was independent of government, but with considerable powers granted by Parliament and set out in the National Trust Act of 1907. It is this body which has become a model for similar organisations around the world.
Her achievements, as well as her sometimes controversial housing initiatives, justify these finely nuanced essays. Hill emerges from their scrutiny as a more sympathetic figure than her detractors allow, and with her historical significance undiminished.
