From The Times, July 4, 1924
To the Editor of The Times.
Sir, The holiday season is upon us, and there is hardly a middle-class family from Land’s End to John o’ Groats that is not busily making its arrangements for the annual festival of “getting away”.
Fortunately the share of the working classes in this festival is now far greater than it used to be, in the days when Mrs Humphry Ward made her eloquent appeals for vacation schools and organised playgrounds for the London children left behind, but even now the writer found, on visiting a school last week, that 12 out of 50 children had never been to the country at all.
At a modest reckoning, there must on any working day in August be well over 600,000 children left in the streets of London — shut out from school playgrounds, most too small and too weary, or too encumbered with babies, to make their way through the hot streets to the nearest “open space”.
No doubt bigger boys do get away to the parks and the outskirts, but even for them August means the closing down of the beneficent activities of the schools, swimming competitions, excursions, and cricket matches, and even parties for Wembley! August, in fact, means the dullness of paving-stones, and the opportunity for much that is worse than dull.
The Evening Play Centres Committee has obtained permission from the Board of Education and the London County Council to open six “Holiday Play Centres” in school playgrounds in the poorest and most crowded districts of the East and South. We propose to do so for three weeks of the August holiday, if the public will provide us with the small sum needed for a minimum of paid supervision and for the purchase of “stock” — bats and balls, chalks, paints, and plasticine. £200 is all we require, and even a lesser sum would enable us to carry out part of our programme. Past experience has shown us that for this outlay we can provide for 600 children a day in each playground, and even for more if voluntary helpers come forward. What has happened to the voluntary helper? She used to be quite catchable before the war, but I find it hard to reach her nowadays. Cheques and offers of help should be sent to me at The Mary Ward Settlement, Tavistock Place, WCI.
Yours, Janet P Trevelyan.
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