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Kate Hall: First female museum curator in England

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As we develop the East End Women’s Museum it is important to reflect on the work done by early pioneers that gave women a voice in museums.

One such figure is Kate Hall, the first female museum curator in England. Not only did she represent women gaining employment in the sector, but she helped launch museum education in the East End. Museums were, and arguably still are, seen as places for the middle classes, to be used as cultural capital rather than community enrichment. However, museums were eventually brought into the poorer districts of London and Kate Hall was one woman at the front lines of their development. 

Illustration of Kate Hall © Katie May Anderson.

Illustration of Kate Hall © Katie May Anderson.

Kate Marion Hall was born in August 1861 to Harry Hall, an artist known for his drawings of animals and his wife Ellen Payne. Kate was educated at Highfield School in Hendon, taught by Fanny Metcalfe, a pioneer herself, who believed in education for women at all levels. Perhaps Metcalfe was an inspiration to Kate in later years. In 1881 Kate went to London and attended University College, despite her academic ability she amusingly never achieved a degree as “she never succeeded in mastering Latin”. After her university education she joined a philanthropic group at Toynbee Hall in Spitalfields, which still exists today. Toynbee Hall was founded by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett to provide free educational programmes in the impoverished East End. The classes included topics like literature, zoology, and philosophy and they also hosted complimentary societies and clubs. In 1891 Kate Hall began teaching nature studies at Toynbee Hall as part of the Natural History Society, marking the beginning of a great career.

The Barnetts of Toynbee Hall also helped establish The Whitechapel Library in 1892, which housed the Whitechapel Museum on the second floor. It was first curated by Kate's mentor, the botanist and geologist, Alfred Vaughan Jennings. In 1893 Kate Hall succeeded Jennings as curator of the Whitechapel Museum, later known as Stepney Borough Museum. This appointment made Kate Hall the first woman employed as curator in England. Kate transformed the museum into a community hub and focused on encouraging children to learn through interacting with nature. The museum included living plants, animals and famously even a beehive! Where possible, Kate encouraged visitors to handle the displays as she believed firmly in education on the natural world through experiencing it. The museums opening hours were extended to 10 pm, so that locals could visit outside of their working hours. The museum was a huge success under Kate Hall and Henrietta Barnett later claimed they had “no less than 104,406 (visitors) in two years”.

As a development of her work at Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel/Stepney Museum Kate founded the Nature Study Museum in 1904. Interestingly the building, a disused chapel of St George in the East church, had also been a mortuary. In 1888 it had housed the post-mortem of Elizabeth Stride, a victim of Jack the Ripper. With no refrigeration facilities the mortuary fell out of use and Kate Hall thought to put it to much better use. The tiny building received up to a thousand visitors a day, and it is spoken of in a 1907 guide to London's parks and gardens:

“The superintendence of the garden is left to Miss Kate Hall, who takes charge of the Borough of Stepney Museum in Whitechapel Road, and also of the charming little nature-study museum in the St. George's Churchyard Garden. What formerly was the mortuary has been turned to good account, and hundreds of children in the borough benefit by Miss Hall's instruction. Aquaria both for fresh-water fish and shells, and salt-water collections, with a lobster, starfish, sea anemones, and growing seaweeds are to be seen, and moths, butterflies, dragon-flies, pass through all their stages, while toads, frogs, and salamanders and such-like are a great delight. The hedgehog spends his summer in the garden, and hibernates comfortably in the museum. The bees at work in the glass hive are another source of instruction. Outside the museum a special plot is tended by the pupils, who are allowed in turn to work, dig, and prune, and who obtain, under the eye of their sympathetic teacher, most credible results.”

Kate not only revolutionised nature education in the East End but made an impression in academic circles. In 1905 Kate was one of the speakers in the Horniman Museum's winter series of lectures, speaking on "The life of the honey bee", "The work of the honey bee", and “Trees”. This was an accomplishment in itself, as the Horniman is the only museum at the time that invited women to give lectures, or at least recorded that it did so. Her lectures, compared to those of her male colleagues, were just as highly attended, showing her ability to stand for herself in the male-dominated field. As well as lecturing Kate Hall also published a book in 1908 titled Nature Rambles in London which documented the cycle of a year in the parks of London. This passage gives a great insight into her deep interest in the world around her and why she felt the children of the East End deserved to see nature:

“I cannot remember the time when I did not know the names of common trees. We lived with these trees, year by year, and season by season. Under the finest plane I have ever seen I read my story books, and when wearied with these, amused myself by discovering what intruders had taken shelter beneath the flakes of its bark.”
— Kate Hall

Her upbringing in the countryside gave her a lifelong passion for the natural world, yet rather than remain there she went to a place where nature was hard to find. Her aim was always to share that life-changing experience with those less privileged. As a curator she sought out ways to make her museum accessible and met the community where they were. She has a wonderful legacy and one aspect of her work may still be standing, the Nature Study Museum in the disused chapel of St George in the East church. A blog post from 2012 has photographs that show even its museum sign remained and it can be seen on google maps from 2016. Perhaps those seeking a lockdown adventure should look for this ruin and see if a part of East End history still survives!

Author 

Katie May Anderson grew up in Newham and is a recent graduate. She is primarily a researcher in dress and textiles but also enjoys studying the history of her local area. Twitter: @kmacostume.

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