Today is the 157th anniversary of the birth of my husband's great aunt Adelaide Mary Ann Slatter (1868-1947). Ada, as she was known in the family, was the fifth of six children of Mary Shehen Slatter and John Slatter. All the children were born into increasingly desperate poverty as John struggled to get and keep enough work to support the growing family.
Looking carefully at Ada's baptismal record from St. Mark's of Whitechapel, I read the name of Brooke Lambert as the person who baptized Ada.
It took three nanoseconds of searching to learn that Brooke Lambert was born into privilege, became curate and vicar of St. Mark's after receiving degrees at Oxford University, and led antipoverty efforts for many years. He made his own observations and wrote and sermonized about poverty before Charles Booth undertook his statistical analyses of the poor of London.
A 2007 book by Nigel Scotland, Squires in the Slums, examined the settlements and programs of another social reformer of the time, Samuel Barnett, who along with Lambert was considered a "squire in the slums."
Ada eventually escaped her impoverished childhood: she worked hard as a servant, saved her money, and in 1895, she sailed to America to begin again in Ohio, where her father had settled a few years earlier. Ada married James Sills Baker and they had two daughters, Dorothy and Edith.
Remembering Ada and celebrating her resilience on the anniversary of her Whitechapel birth.
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