My Shero: Margaret McMillan, Early Years Pioneer

The McMillan sisters, Margaret and Rachel, were born respectively in 1860 and 1859. They were activists within the English Socialist movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During the 1920s, Margaret gained national and international fame for introducing blended play-based learning and welfare within the purpose-designed environment of her open air nursery school, located in Deptford, South East London.

Margaret and Rachel did not start off in London, however. They were born in Westchester County, New York. Following the death of their father and youngest sister in 1865, the McMillans’ mother took them back to her family home in Inverness, to live with their stern, Gaelic speaking grandparents.  Margaret grew up to become forthright and fiery, Rachel, quiet, calm and contemplative.  By all accounts the McMillan sisters were devoted to each other, and formed a lifelong partnership, focused on social reform for children. By 1889, their mother and grandparents had died, and the sisters moved to London. 

Margaret began to build a reputation as an orator, losing her job as companion to a wealthy Park Lane aristocrat when she made a fiery speech on the Socialist platform at Hyde Park Corner on May Day 1892. In 1893 both sisters relocated to Bradford, following an offer of employment to Margaret as a speaker and lecturer for the new Independent Labour Party (the ILP). Margaret was to deliver a programme of Socialist lectures to a wide variety of audiences across Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Margaret was elected to the Bradford School Board as a representative of the ILP in 1894, and set to work with the forthright approach that had so irritated her grandmother. She quickly came to the firm conclusion that it was impossible to educate a tired, dirty, infested, diseased and hungry child, and the height of adult cruelty to insist that such children entered a public education system that did not concern itself with their holistic welfare. She introduced an impressive range of reforms to the schools in the area. 

With Rachel at her side to help with lobbying and fund-raising, Margaret was responsible for Bradford becoming the first education authority in the country to provide school baths and showers in 1897 and free school meals in 1902. Margaret was successfully re-elected to the Bradford School Board in 1900, but in 1902 a new Education Bill became law, resulting in the abolition of the School Boards, giving control and management of elementary schools to the District and County Councils- to which women could not be elected. Margaret publicly protested her demotion, complaining that reforming women had been ‘put on one side’, but the male leadership of the ILP refused to argue this case for her with the national government. 

The sisters therefore returned to London. Margaret was introduced to the South East London district of Deptford in1903 when she was appointed as the manager of a group of elementary schools in the area, finding conditions very much as she had found them in Bradford. So again, she and Rachel set to work and by 1906, in collaboration with other like-minded campaigners, they won the political support to lead a deputation to Parliament to lobby for the compulsory medical inspection of school children. This aim was subsequently realised in the Education (Administrative Procedures) Bill of 1907, and on the strength of this success the sisters secured a substantial bursary to open a school clinic in Deptford. But a chance comment from one of the clinic nurses soon led them to consider an ambitious extension of their initiative: 

 It’s all a waste of time. These children come here, are cured and go, but in two weeks- sometimes less, they are back again. All these ailments could be prevented; their cause is dirt, lack of light and sun, fresh air and good food. 

The McMillans subsequently determined that they would open an experimental overnight camp in the small yard of the privately donated house in which the clinic was located, for the use of local girls. The back yard was canvassed over and washing facilities were provided for the children, by means of connecting a friendly neighbour’s boiler to a shower head! A local welder donated his time to make beds for the children from some old gas pipes. Margaret and Rachel set up a standing order to a company in Scotland to send regular consignments of oatmeal, to provide the children with a cheap and nutritious breakfast.

One of the night camp girls begged to bring her little sister along, because the child was unwell, and the family hoped that the McMillans' regime would help her to get better. Sadly the child died not long afterwards, and Margaret then determined that she and Rachel should instead focus their attentions on the provision of daycare and education for the local under fives in order to provide good nourishment, sunshine, fresh air and healthy outdoor play activities before rickets and consumption took hold. The sisters subsequently received this opportunity in 1914, when, in the months before World War I, they were offered a house with grounds by Deptford Council in which to set up what was initially termed a ‘baby camp’.

The baby camp was a great success, but the hard physical work took its toll upon the sisters, by now both in their middle fifties.  Sadly, in 1917, the last full year of the war, Rachel died after developing a rapid ‘wasting’ illness. Following the war’s end, a national and international interest began to grow in what was now called the Rachel McMillan Open Air Nursery’s holistic play-based learning and welfare regime, principally due to its hugely positive results in terms of Deptford children’s greatly improved health, behaviour and academic achievements.  

Margaret McMillan went on to serve on the Education Committee of the London County Council and was subsequently elected first president of the Nursery Schools Association in 1923.  She gave a BBC radio broadcast about her work in 1927; in this she powerfully stated her rationale:

You may ask, why should we give all this to the children? Because this is nurture, and without it they can never really have education. The educational system should grow out of the nursery schools system, not out of a neglected infancy. In the nursery school, everything is planned for life. The shelters are oblong in shape. The air is moving there always; healing light falls through the lowered gable and open doors. This world is full of colour and movement. If Great Britain will go forward with nursery schools she will sweep away the cause of untold suffering, ignorance, waste and failure.

 

Queen Mary opened The Rachel McMillan Teacher Training College in Deptford on 8^th May 1930. Margaret McMillan gave the inaugural speech, characteristically proposing: 

The real object of our work is nurture... we are trying to to make a place which shall be a training ground for the happier generations of the future.

She died less than a year later, on 29^th March 1931, but Deptford memories of her activities and their impacts remained. In 1960, the BBC interviewed local people about their memories of Margaret McMillan in her centenary year. One commented:

Margaret McMillan gave her whole life to us children. She was truly a wonderful person in so much that she never thought of herself one bit. I can see her now, a determined figure with a head of lovely silver hair…. Her whole life was centred around us children.... I can still hear her now saying ‘you may be poor now but if you want, there is nothing to stop you sitting in the Houses of Parliament.

Another said:

Miss McMillan came and opened new and wonderful doors for us... thank you Miss McMillan.

One of her colleagues commented: 

When I visited Deptford I had to ask my way through smelly streets, but all whom I asked became eager friends as soon as I mentioned Miss McMillan’s name. At last I came to a door in the paling and when this was opened I saw a garden full of delphiniums. In among the flowers were many little children, like flowers themselves, with gay overalls and coloured ribbons in their hair.

I grew up in South East London during the 1960s and 70s within walking distance of the McMillan Teacher Training College and Nursery. I later discovered that my own nursery teacher had trained in the McMillan teacher training college. As a developmental researcher myself, I am convinced that the innovative practices that the McMillans introduced, and which many of the locally trained nursery and primary school teachers still espoused in the 1960s played a large part in forming the inquisitive mind that eventually led me to study for a PhD. 

So from me, too, thank you, Miss McMillan. You steadfastly followed your vision even when the going got incredibly tough, including circumnavigating enormous barriers that were placed in your way, simply because you were female. By the end of your life, not only had you succeeded in your dreams to produce a blueprint for hugely optimising the prospects of socio-economically deprived children; your pioneering practice reached out to nurture the as yet unborn, including me. And for that reason, you are my Shero. 

You can read more about Margaret McMillan and other Early Years Pioneers in my co-edited book, Early Years Pioneers in Context