Emma Cons

Emma Cons bought a notorious Lambeth music hall, turned it into a temperance theatre for working people, and out of it grew three national companies. She trained as an artist under John Ruskin, worked as a watch engraver until the trade union objected to a woman doing it, and spent her twenties and thirties in housing reform with Octavia Hill - managing tenements, collecting rents in person, and building the Coffee Tavern movement to give working men somewhere to go that was not a pub. In 1880 she took over the Royal Victoria Hall, a rough hall in a poor district, and reopened it as the Royal Victoria Coffee Music Hall: no alcohol, cheap seats, variety and then opera excerpts and Shakespeare lectures. It lost money continuously and she raised the difference for thirty years. She added science and art classes that became Morley College, still in Lambeth. She was elected one of the first three women on the London County Council in 1889 and was promptly ruled ineligible by the courts because she was a woman; she carried on attending. Her niece Lilian Baylis came to help in 1898 and inherited the theatre in 1912, and the Old Vic, English National Opera and the Royal Ballet all descend from what Cons started. She never married and lived with her sister and later with Baylis. Morley College was bombed in 1940 with heavy loss of life among people sheltering there. A blue plaque marks her house in Lambeth. Ruskin remained a correspondent and supporter for years, and she credited his teaching with the idea that beauty was owed to the poor as much as to anyone.

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