Ada Salter

Ada Salter, née Brown (20 July 1866 – 4 December 1942) was an English social reformer, environmentalist, pacifist and Quaker, President of the Women's Labour League and President of the National Gardens Guild. She was one of the first women councillors in London, the first woman mayor in London and the first Labour woman mayor in the British Isles.

Born in Raunds, Northamptonshire, Ada Brown was active in the Methodist church and on the radical wing of the Liberal Party before she joined the West London Mission in Bloomsbury to work as a Sister of the People in the slums of St Pancras. The Sisters were run by Katherine Hughes, an inspirational Christian Socialist, but in 1897 Ada transferred to the Bermondsey Settlement. There she met Dr Alfred Salter, agnostic and socialist, a resident engaged in medical research into infectious diseases on a farm in Sudbury (now Wembley), Middlesex. Under her influence Alfred converted to Christianity and joined the Liberal Party. They both committed to the Society of Friends (Quakers) and started to attend the Deptford Meeting. They were married in Raunds on 22 August 1900.

Ada had always insisted on living in the slums, among the poor, ever since arriving in London. Now she was equally insistent on staying in Bermondsey, a place she had fallen in love with despite its drab poverty. Alfred, who was such a brilliant doctor he could have made a fortune as a consultant, therefore set up a GP's medical practice in Jamaica Road. He charged poorer patients only a small sum and the poorest nothing at all. Ada continued as a social worker at Bermondsey Settlement, where she already had a high reputation for the clubs she ran, especially those for the "roughest and toughest" of the teenage girls. In 1902 she temporarily gave up work when the couple's only child, Ada Joyce, was born.

Ada was President of the Women's Liberal Party in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe but in 1906 she left the Liberal Party when it failed to honour its promise of granting the vote to women and soon joined the ILP (Independent Labour Party). The ILP was the political party most favourable to the rights of women and wanted to stand women candidates, including Ada, at the next council elections. This put Alfred, a Liberal councillor on the London County Council (LCC), into an awkward position. In 1908 therefore he also left the Liberals, to found an ILP branch in Bermondsey. Once again it was Ada who had blazed the trail for him to follow. In November 1909 Ada was elected to the borough council for the ILP, becoming the first woman councillor in Bermondsey, first Labour councillor in Bermondsey, and one of the first women councillors in London. However, in 1910, personal tragedy struck when the Salters' daughter, Joyce, only eight years old, died of scarlet fever in one of the periodic epidemics that swept through the slums.

...
Wikipedia