The Establishment of London House: Building a British World in the Late Imperial Heartland, c.1930–1945

Abstract

In 1930, a trust was formed to provide a home for men of British descent from throughout the Empire who had come as students to London. The Dominion Students Hall Trust (DSHT) and its physical embodiment, London House, thereafter emerged as centres for imperial connectedness. Through the support and finance of elites in business, banking, and government, and partnership with imperial interest groups, London House established itself as a symbol of and locus for the pre-eminent imperial vision of the inter-war. This vision was founded on a belief in the value of cooperation between Great Britain and the self-governing Dominions, constituents of a ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ or ‘British world’. In this article, British world cooperation is shown to have been fundamental to the foundation and success of the DSHT, making London House an instance of what Tamson Pietsch has termed ‘British world sites’. Drawing on this idea, the article demonstrates how preconceptions about imperial unity and British race patriotism affected the DSHT's foundation as well as London House's architecture. It concludes with an appraisal of how the deterioration of the British world's cachet as a source of imperial unity and supranational identity was received by both institutions.

Keywords:

• British world
• Dominions
• empire
• inter-war
• education
• Goodenough College

Acknowledgements

For their help with research under COVID-19 conditions, I would like to thank the staff and archivists of the Churchill Archives Centre, Royal Institute of British Architects, National Records of Scotland, and Goodenough College. Images have been kindly provided by the latter, whose support with the project is gratefully acknowledged. For their comments and help with submission, I would like to thank Felicity Barnes, the two anonymous reviewers, and the editorial staff of the Journal.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mansion House Appeal Agenda, 2 June 1930, Goodenough College Archive, London (GCA), 1/1, fol. 8.

2 L. S. Amery, ‘Mrs F. C. Goodenough’, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, Amery papers (CAC), GBR/0014/AMEL 1/7/92, file 1.

3 L. S. Amery, My Political Life, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1953), 2:370.

4 GCA, 1/1, fol. 8; ‘Home for Students in London: Proposed University Hall’, The Times, 4 April 1930.

5 For the intellectual history of Greater Britain, see: Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). For an overview of limitations and ambiguities in British world scholarship, see: Rachel K. Bright and Andrew R. Dilley, ‘After the British World’, The Historical Journal, 60.2 (2017), 547–568.

6 ‘London House: The Lord Mayor’s Appeal’, The Times, 3 June 1930.

7 GCA, 1/1, fol. 8.

8 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2015, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2016), 78–79; John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 112–143; Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 17.

9 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Keith Robbins, Nineteenth Century Britain: Integration and Diversity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

10 Felicity Barnes, New Zealand’s London: A Colony and its Metropolis (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012), 2–4. For the backdrop to these processes, see: Duncan Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought’, Journal of Modern History, 77.3, (2005), 523–562.

11 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 223–264.

12 Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, in The British World: Diaspora, Culture, and Identity, ed. Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (London: F. Cass, 2003), 6.

13 John Darwin, ‘A Third British Empire? The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. J. M. Brown and W. R. Louis, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4:66; James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter 15.

14 Andrew S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c.1880–1932 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 188. See: Felicity Barnes, ‘Bringing Another Empire Alive? The Empire Marketing Board and the Construction of Dominion Identity, 1926–33’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 42.1 (2014), 61–85; David Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade: Culture, Ethnicity, and Market in the Empire-Commonwealth, 1880–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

15 Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation.

16 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism.

17 L. S. Amery to ‘P. M.’ [Ramsay Macdonald], 9 April 1929, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 2/1/17.

18 ‘Oversea Students in London’, The Times Educational Supplement, 552 (14 November 1925), 482.

19 M. Trevelyan, ‘Oversea Students in London’, The Spectator 161.5749 (2 September 1938), 371.

20 Negley Harte, The University of London, 1836–1986: An Illustrated History (London: Athlone Press, 1986), 201–203, 210, 222–223.

21 H. A. L. Fisher, ‘Our Universities’, in Centenary Addresses, Bound Together in One Volume, ed. R. W. Chambers (London: University of London Press, 1927), 26–27.

22 David Kilgour, A Strange Elation: Hart House, The First Eighty Years (Toronto: Hart House, 1999).

23 Fisher, ‘Our Universities’, 27–28.

24 Amery, ‘Mrs F. C. Goodenough’.

25 L. S. Amery, ‘Speech for London House Dinner’, 12 November 1946, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 1/7/92, file 2.

26 Florence Amery to Maeve Goodenough, 4 April 1948, GCA, 1/1, fol. 6; Maeve Goodenough to L. S. Amery, 17 May 1927, GCA, 1/1, fol. 10; Maeve Goodenough to L. S. Amery, 12 June 1927, GCA, 1/1, fol. 11.

27 L. S. Amery to Maeve Goodenough, 3 January 1953 and 6 January 1953, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 1/7/92, file 1.

28 Amery to ‘P. M.’.

29 GCA, 1/1, fol. 25.

30 Maeve Goodenough to L. S. Amery, 6 January 1953, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 1/7/92, file 1.

31 For Kerr’s interest in university reform throughout the Empire see: National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh, Lothian papers (NRS), GD40/17/344 and GD40/17/244.

32 NRS, GD40/17/14, fols. 344–345.

33 Philip Kerr to M. Goodenough, 4 March 1929, GCA, 1/1, fol. 20.

34 Janet Sacks, ed., The World in a London Square: A Portrait of Goodenough College (London: Third Millennium, 2011), 26–27. Both Fisher and Kerr served as founding Governors of the DSHT from 1930–1940. They were joined in this capacity by F. C. Goodenough (Chairman until his death in 1934), Amery (1930–1955), James Atkin, Lord Atkin (1930–1944), Sir William Beveridge (1930–1938), Sir John Caulcutt (1930–1943), Sir Howard Frank (1930–1932), Sir Henry McAuliffe (1930–1952), and Henry Mond, Lord Melchett (1930–1931). Baker’s work for Barclay’s Dominion, Colonial and Overseas Bank (est. 1925) amounted to designing a headquarters for their Cape Town branch, completed in 1933.

35 Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 154–155.

36 Kerr to Vincent Massey, 14 May 1930, NRS, GD40/17/251, fol. 537.

37 According to the 1925 British Empire Universities Year Book, there were approximately 1210 students from the Dominions (South Africa and Rhodesia, Australia, Canada and Newfoundland, and New Zealand) in Britain in 1923, 1188 in 1924, and 1218 in 1925. Respective numbers for London were 433, 492, and 561. NRS, GD40/17/452, fols. 27–28.

38 Maeve Goodenough to L. S. Amery, 6 January 1953.

39 Andrew Saint, ‘Ashbee, Geddes, Lethaby and the Rebuilding of Crosby Hall’, Architectural History, 34 (1991), 206–223; Mary Trevelyan, From the Ends of the Earth (London: Faber and Faber, 1942).

40 ‘Preliminary Memorandum’, 1 October 1928, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 2/1/15, file 2.

41 Notable instances include the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris and the International Student House movement in the United States.

42 GCA, 1/1, fol. 8; F. C. Goodenough to L. S. Amery, 30 November 1928, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 2/1/15, file 2; F. C. Goodenough to L. S. Amery, 19 December 1928 and 14 December 1930, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 2/1/17; E. C. Pepper, A Place to Remember: The History of London House, William Goodenough House and the Burn (London: Ernest Benn, 1972), 15.

43 Pepper, Place to Remember, 14. The Tavistock Square site was at the Upper Woburn Place end; F. C. Goodenough to L. S. Amery, 19 December 1928 and 4 March 1929, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 2/1/17.

44 GCA, VM2/8, fol. 12; Sacks, World in a London Square, 24.

45 Letter from the ‘Oldest Member’, n. d., GCA, 1/1, fol. 1.

46 As Keith Hancock wrote of an Australian national identity in relation to Britain, it was ‘not impossible’ to ‘be in love with two soils’. W. K. Hancock, Australia (London: Ernest Benn, 1930), 68. For explorations of a composite ‘Britannic’ identity in the Dominions, see: Douglas Cole, ‘The Problem of “Nationalism” and “Imperialism” in British Settlement Colonies’, Journal of British Studies, 10.2 (1971), 162–164; Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 41; Darwin, Empire Project, 147, 288.

47 Draft letter, April 1935, GCA, 1/1, fol. 2; ‘Letters to the Editor: London House’, The Times, 29 May 1935.

48 Reginald Brabazon, Lord Meath, ‘London as the Heart of Empire’, in London of the Future, ed. Aston Webb (London: London Society, 1921), 257–258; Felix Driver and David Gilbert, ‘Capital and Empire: Geographies of Imperial London’, GeoJournal, 51.1 (2000), 27; David Gilbert, ‘London of the Future: The Metropolis Reimagined after the Great War’, Journal of British Studies, 43.1 (2004), 104–110.

49 Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 38.

50 Pepper, Place to Remember, 14–15.

51 ‘A Hub of Friendly Empire’, London House Magazine, 1.7 (1953), CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 1/7/92, file 1.

52 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass, 4 (2006), 124–141; Simon J. Potter, ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire’, Journal of British Studies, 46.3 (2007), 621–646.

53 John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 2, 9, 256; At Home With the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

54 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

55 GCA, 1/1, fol. 25.

56 John Flint, Cecil Rhodes (London: Hutchinson, 1976), 217.

57 Herbert Baker, Cecil Rhodes by His Architect (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); Herbert Baker, Architecture and Personalities (London: Country Life, 1944), 20–46; John Stewart, Sir Herbert Baker: Architect to the British Empire (Jefferson: McFarland, 2022), 20–64.

58 GCA, 1/1, fol. 24; Baker, Architecture and Personalities, 131–138.

59 Tamson Pietsch, ‘Rethinking the British World’, Journal of British Studies, 52.2 (2013), 462.

60 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 148.

61 Pepper, Place to Remember, 21.

62 Pepper, Place to Remember, 24.

63 James Barrett to F. B. N. Drummond, 21 January 1937, GCA, 6/3.

64 Pepper, Place to Remember, 24.

65 The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1937: The 169th (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1937), 86.

66 Pepper, Place to Remember, 21, 26, 29.

67 Drummond to M. A. Frost, 26 November 1937, GCA, 1/2, fol. 3; ‘London House Opening Ceremony by Her Majesty Queen Mary’, 3 December 1937, GCA, 1/2, fol. 8.

68 GCA, 1/2, fol. 5.

69 Baker to Maeve Goodenough, 4 December 1937, GCA, 1/1, fol. 27.

70 Baker, Architecture and Personalities, 217.

71 Christopher Hussey, ‘London House: A Hall of Residence for Dominion Students in London’, Country Life, 47.2527 (1945), 1085. For imperial undertones in neo-Georgian architecture, see: Julian Holder and Elizabeth McKellar, ‘Introduction: Reappraising the Neo-Georgian’, in Neo-Georgian Architecture, 1880–1970: A Reappraisal, ed. Julian Holder and Elizabeth McKellar (Swindon: Historic England, 2016), 1–11.

72 Fisher to Baker, 5 December 1937, RIBA Study Room, London, Baker papers (RIBA), BaH/6/7.

73 Amery, ‘Speech for London House Dinner’.

74 R. S. Henderson, ‘Mecklenburgh Square’, The Times, 13 June 1939.

75 R. T. E. Lathan to William Goodenough, 11 November 1937, GCA, VM6/28, fol. 34.

76 Baker to F. Cummins, 13 June 1939, GCA, VM6/28, fol. 36.

77 William Goodenough to L. S. Amery, 18 December 1940, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 1/7/92, file 2.

78 Between September 1939 and November 1945, approximately 4205 of the 12,000 officers passing through London House came from the Dominions: 1311 Australians, 2509 Canadians, 232 New Zealanders and 153 South Africans. GCA, 22/2b.

79 Lawrence Turner to Baker, 13 October 1940, RIBA, BaH/69/2. Turner lived nearby, at 56 Doughty Street.

80 Letter to L. S. Amery (unsigned), 28 January 1942, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 6/3/90.

81 William Goodenough to L. S. Amery, 7 October 1943, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 1/7/92.

82 A T. Scott to Baker, 3 March 1944, RIBA, BaH/65/4.

83 Baker to Scott, 4 March 1944, RIBA, BaH/65/4.

84 Baker to Scott, 10 July 1944, RIBA, BaH/65/4.

85 ‘Twenty-First Annual Report of the Council of Governors of the Dominion Students’ Hall Trust’, 31 March 1951, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 1/7/92, file 1.

86 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 471.

87 William Goodenough to E. L. Jackson, 31 December 1946, GCA, Barclays/3 (BB 80/3361).

88 Mary Trevelyan, ‘The Welfare of Overseas Commonwealth Students in the United Kingdom’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 110.5069 (1962), 334–336; J. M. Lee, ‘Commonwealth Students in the United Kingdom, 1940–1960: Student Welfare and World Status’, Minerva, 44.1 (2006), 1–24.

89 William Goodenough to Jackson, 31 December 1946.

90 Interview: Eric Machtig, Admiral Bromley and William Goodenough, 18 January 1943, GCA, 22/3.

91 ‘Agenda for the 55th Meeting of the Council of Governors of the Dominion Students’ Hall Trust’, 7 November 1950, Appendix C, CAC, GBR/0014/AMEL 1/7/92, file 2. The Sister Trust merged with the DSHT in 1965.

92 A. G. Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonization’, Past and Present, no. 200 (2008), 213.

93 Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 14, 118–119, 140, 196.

94 W. David McIntyre, ‘The Strange Death of Dominion Status’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 27.2 (1999), 193–212.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jake William Bransgrove

Originally from New Zealand, Jake William Bransgrove is a former Member of Goodenough College. He is currently a PhD student in History at the University of Cambridge.