Ada Salter was an English social reformer, environmentalist, pacifist and Quaker, President of the Women's Labour League and President of the National Gardens Guild.
31 Facts About Ada Salter
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Ada Salter had several sisters - Mary, Beatrice, Alice and Adelaide - and a brother, Richard, who became a minister in Lancaster.
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Ada Salter Brown was active in the Methodist church and on the radical wing of the Liberal Party before she moved to London.
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In 1897, after the marriage of her sister Mary Baldwin, Ada Salter transferred to the Bermondsey Settlement, in south-east London.
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Ada Salter had always insisted on living in the slums, among the poor, ever since arriving in London.
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Ada Salter charged poorer patients only a small sum and the poorest nothing at all.
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Ada Salter 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 teenage girls.
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In 1902 she temporarily gave up work when the couple's only child, Ada Salter Joyce, was born.
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Ada Salter 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 Independent Labour Party.
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Once again it was Ada Salter who had blazed the trail for him to follow.
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In November 1909 Ada Salter 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.
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Ada Salter responded by throwing herself into the work of the Women's Labour League, which she had co-founded in 1906 with Margaret MacDonald, wife of Labour's rising star, James Ramsay MacDonald.
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Ada Salter rose to be first its National Treasurer and then in 1914 its National President, the leader of all the Labour Party women in Britain.
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The WLL was not tied to any particular suffragist movement but Ada Salter supported the non-violent Women's Freedom League, led by her friend Charlotte Despard, rather than endorse the tactics of the Women's Social and Political Union led by Emmeline Pankhurst.
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Ada Salter followed John Ruskin in believing that fresh air and contact with nature improved people not only physically but mentally and morally.
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Ada Salter became a proponent of urban gardening, and a pioneer of organised campaigning against air pollution in London.
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Ada Salter had in 1910 started to recruit women in the local factories to a trade union, the National Federation of Women Workers, led by Mary Macarthur.
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Ada Salter was hailed by the ILP and the WLL as the inspiration of this big step forward for women's rights at work and for this, as well as for the huge organisational effort including what we would now consider as family food banks during the dockers' strike of 1912, she was honoured by the trade unions which are known today as Unite and the GMB.
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Ada Salter spoke out for equality among workers, not just in the workplace but in the labour movement:.
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Ada Salter had always since her youth opposed war and becoming a Quaker had fortified her commitment to peace.
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Ada Salter was a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and from 1916 she worked with Alfred for the No Conscription Fellowship.
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Re-elected to Bermondsey Council in 1919, Ada Salter was appointed Mayor in 1922, making her the first woman mayor in London and first Labour woman mayor in Britain.
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Ada Salter had launched in 1920 her famous Beautification Committee and now she launched her housing campaign, demolishing the slums that could be demolished and beautifying the slums that could not.
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Finally, after the 1934 London County Council election, when Labour led by Herbert Morrison took control, Ada Salter was able to spread her green socialist ideals to every corner of the capital.
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Ada Salter felt the 1939 war as much a catastrophe as the 1914 one.
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Ada Salter died, cared for by her sisters, in Balham Park Road, Battersea, on 4 December 1942 and was accorded a Quaker funeral at Peckham Meeting-House, where she was an elder.
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Ada Salter believed that people would become truly human only by valuing nature and valuing each other.
28.
The Alfred Ada Salter Bridge is a footbridge leading off Watermans Lane, between Stave Hill and Redriff Road, near Greenland Dock as part of the Russia Dock Woodland.
29.
Ada Salter's statue was only the 15th public statue in London to a woman.
30.
In January 2023, English Heritage announced that a blue plaque would be unveiled later that year in Southwark which Ada Salter had lived in during the late 1890s.
31.
The plaque was unveiled in March 2023 at 149 Lower Road in Rotherhithe where Ada Salter lived in the late 1890.