In the autumn of 1903, when her father’s retirement made it necessary for Rosa to earn her own living, she opened a teaching studio for women in a rented two-room apartment in Ealing, London.
Drawing was taught by Rosa, and painting by Gwen Salmond, a Slade friend; with Augustus John and Albert Rutherston as visiting tutors.
Rosa had hoped that her Ealing studio would provide her with a regular income and help build her professional reputation, both as a teacher and practising artist.
[4] Letters to her close friend Katie Edith Gliddon[5] are peppered with her worries at earning sufficient to pay the rent on her Ealing studio.
In 1910, W T Stead published ‘Perspectiveland, or Peggy’s Adventures and how she learnt to draw’; a book which summarised, in an accessible story form for younger children, Rosa’s new system for teaching Perspective.
In the summer of 1909, exhausted and disillusioned by her continual struggle to earn sufficient money from private teaching, Rosa Waugh decided to close her Ealing studio and applied (successfully) for a permanent position as Teacher of Drawing, Training Department, University College, Cardiff.
[8] In 1914 Waugh met Muriel Lester and Mary Hughes who became lifelong friends and co-dedicatees to her vision of a society based on Christ’s message of universal love and one which had no division on the basis of class, gender, race or nation.
In February 1915 Hobhouse and Hughes moved into the two tiny attic bedrooms above the main meeting space of Lester’s newly founded community settlement of Kingsley Hall in Bow.
[9] In March 1915, at a dinner party for Christian activists, Rosa met Stephen Hobhouse, her future husband: someone similarly committed to working among the dispossessed in London’s East End.
A decade before Stephen met Rosa, inspired by Tolstoy, he had renounced his heirship to the Somerset estate, in order to devote himself to working with the poor and oppressed in London’s East End.
Three days after the outbreak of WW1 Stephen Hobhouse had set up, and become Chair, of the Friend's’ Emergency Committee which supported the families of British residents of German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish nationality.
Rosa also at this time, more informally, had been assisting wives and dependants of Germans and other European nationalities in the East End of London where local communities were particularly hostile to ‘enemy aliens’.
Following a honeymoon of ‘an hour or two in Regent’s Park’ they caught the bus back to Stephen’s tenement flat at 36 Enfield Buildings, Hoxton to begin their life of ‘voluntary poverty’.
During her years of living in the East End prior to her marriage Rosa had become convinced that in order to achieve social justice, Christians could not simply talk, do an occasional good deed and placate their conscience by giving to worthy causes.
Rosa believed that the only way she could attain fellowship and understanding with neighbours in the East End and elsewhere was through living a life of similar penury; by giving away what you do not need and entering into a state of ‘voluntary poverty’.
Their attempt to ‘unclass’ themselves by entering into voluntary poverty as part of their desire to model a society liberated from the constraints and inequalities of class was ultimately unsustainable for them.
But, unlike their East End friends in times of hardship, they were not facing entry into the workhouse: they had the ‘safety net’ of a Trust Fund.
In the event, no British delegates managed to journey from the UK to Holland as the government closed the North Sea shipping lanes over the conference period.
When will ye come out of your ways, and arm yourself with the Mind of Christ?”[14] Shortly after their marriage, Stephen and Rosa Hobhouse wrote a further Pacifist pamphlet that they regularly distributed in their local streets and at peace meetings.
It called upon ‘Men and Women of Vision’ to ‘cease from their present tasks of destruction and to work at once towards the building up of Europe and the world into a peaceful Federation of Co-operative States’.
Clara Cole and Rosa Hobhouse set out from Knebworth, Bedfordshire dressed in black ‘rather like the Sisters of Mercy’, as a protest against War.
Their aim was to try and ‘create an atmosphere of love and brotherhood between all nationalities, instead of this deplorable feeling of hatred which at present exists and is daily fermented by the press’.
They had walked fifty miles, spoken at many impromptu road-side meetings and distributed 2,000 Peace leaflets [17] before being detained by police near Kettering, Northamptonshire on the fifth day of their Pilgrimage.
They were charged with ‘having by word of mouth and circular made false statements likely to prejudice the recruiting, training and discipline of the Forces, and with having in their possession at the time of their arrest, without lawful authority, documents, the publication of which was in contravention of Regulation 27 of the Defence of the Realm Act’.
Hobhouse spoke out against oppression and bloodshed, whether in the slums or in international relations; explaining how she did not wish ‘to invent conscientious objectors but to appeal to the divine element in every man’.
These three months experience served to deepen Hobhouse's convictions as to the injustice of a social system that ‘practically creates the poor criminals’ who were her fellows in Northampton and for the need for prison reform.
Rosa was involved with various community projects, and from 1921 worked as a drawing teacher in Stepney, while Stephen Hobhouse, prompted by all he had experienced and witnessed during his fourteen months imprisonment, devoted his time and energies to accumulating evidence for and editing a major report on conditions in prison.
Rosa consequently resigned her Stepney job, gave up the tenancy on their Hoxton flat and joined her husband for a year at Ditchling, East Sussex where he had found employment with the St Dominic’s Press, editing Greek and Latin texts.
At Kingsley Hall, in schools or various Children’s Play Centres Rosa had told stories about the Man with the Leather Patch and other characters.
Rosa wrote biographies of her friend and fellow worker in the East End, Mary Hughes; and also of the ‘Father of Homeopathy’, Christian Samuel Hahnemann.