Remembering When

Ada opens a playground by planting a tree. Alfred is on her left.

Dr Alfred Salter and his wife Ada, nee Brown, settled in poverty stricken Bermondsey in 1898 and began their campaign to improve the health and wellbeing of the local population in SE London

By Ken Hayes - Honorary Membership Secretary

• Alfred Salter and daughter Joyce

Alfred was born on 16th June 1873 in South Street Greenwich to Walter and Elizabeth Salter. He was educated at the John Roan School in Greenwich. He studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital from 1889 and qualified in 1896.

In 1896 he was awarded the Golding- Bird gold medal and scholarship in public medicine and a research scholarship in Pathology. He was then made house physician and resident obstetric physician at Guy’s Hospital and was also appointed as bacteriologist to what became the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine. In 1898 Dr Salter became a resident at the Methodist Settlement in Bermondsey, an area of widespread poverty. The main employment in this area was the Port of London docks, which operated on a casual daily basis making it hard to make a decent living wage. He was shocked by the poor health and housing conditions. Ada Brown was born in Northamptonshire in 1866 and at the age of 30 left her well off home to become a social worker as a Methodist Sister of the People in the London slums where she met Alfred. They married in 1900 and Alfred set up his medical practice and was elected to the new Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey for the Liberal Party. He and Ada then began their work to alleviate the effects of poverty on the health of the local population. Dr Salter only charged a minimum fee for medical consultations and gave them free to those who were unable to pay anything. They both joined the religious Society of Friends, known as Quakers, and were pacifists. This led to them starting out with their plan of setting up a pioneering local health service. Alfred also set up a mutual Health Insurance scheme which gave allowances to members during ill health and started an adult education school for men on Sunday mornings. Their daughter, Joyce, was born in 1902. In 1903 he was elected to fill a vacancy on the London County Council caused by the election of George Cooper as MP for Southwark and Bermondsey. Alfred was re-elected to the LCC in 1907 but soon resigned. Ada had already left the Liberals because they refused to give women the vote and Alfred now joined her as a member of the Independent Labour Party. When Cooper died in 1909, Alfred stood in the by-election but finished third of the three candidates.

Ada Salter was elected in 1909 to Bermondsey Council, the first woman elected to Bermondsey Council and she campaigned for the rights of women workers and encouraged them to join Trade Unions. This brought about the ‘Bermondsey Uprising‘ in 1911 when thousands of women workers went on strike. Ada organised food supplies for the hungry families. She was given an honour by the Trade Union movement and she was elected in 1914 national President of the Women’s Labour League. Alfred was elected MP for Bermondsey in the 1922 General Election, the result being announced by the Mayor of Bermondsey, Ada Salter, the first woman Mayor in London. The Salters were devastated when their only child, Joyce, had tragically died of scarlet fever at the age of eight in 1910, which made them determined to create better housing and health care for the local population. Dr Salter promoted free health care using modern methods, a Health Centre, a Solarium for tuberculosis sufferers and educational films about personal hygiene. As a result by 1935 the annual infant mortality rate had fallen from 150 to 69. And no women died giving birth. Ada led a Beautification Committee to transform the slums planting 9,000 trees, offering prizes for the best window boxes, opening playgrounds at Long Lane, Tanner Street and Tooley Street and organising sports and musical events. In the 1930s, with Ada elected to the LCC, Herbert Morrison tasked her with spreading beautification all over London. She planted trees and gardens everywhere, and helped create the Green Belt. In 1931 Ada was elected Chair of the National Gardens Guild. As Chair of Housing, Ada prepared ambitious plans to replace 180 year old tenements with lower density developments such as in Wilson Grove, formerly Salisbury Street, where 1035 people lived in 155 homes. She pushed through a slum-clearance programme, which was a model for other parts of the country. Alfred Salter remained an MP until his death at Guy’s Hospital in 1945 and was pre-deceased by Ada in 1942. They both dedicated their lives to improving the health and wellbeing of the working classes in SE London. The Salters are commemorated by statues along the Thames River Path in Bermondsey.

• Ada Salter