Hilda Jennings

Hilda Jennings (1894–1978) was a British community activist, sociologist, author, and academic. She is best known for her efforts to improve the lives of working-class communities, particularly through her work in the East End of London, at the Bryn Mawr Community, and as Warden of the Barton Hill University Settlement.

Background Hilda Jennings was born into a Stafford family established in commerce. The family firm, R.T. Jennings & Son of Stafford, dated back to the 19th century and was, at its height, the largest local footwear manufacturer and wholesaler. In 1959, the business was restructured as Jen Shoes Ltd. Her father, Arthur Thomas Jennings JP (d. 1926), was a prominent businessman who owned the company until it was incorporated as a limited company in 1922. He also served as a director of the Stafford Railway Building Society.

The Jennings children enjoyed a comfortable and privileged upbringing, reflective of their family's social standing and commercial success. Both of Hilda's siblings went on to lead successful lives: her brother, Arthur Tildesley Jennings, joined the family business and later became its managing director, while her sister, Nellie Jennings, married Charles Venables, a wealthy industrialist and timber merchant from an industrial Quaker family, similar in status to their own.

Jennings' mother was Anne Madders, who married Arthur Thomas Jennings in 1892. She was from a Staffordshire farming family, then based at Seighford Grange.

Education Hilda Jennings attended Stafford Girls' High School and won an open scholarship in 1912 to attend St Hilda's Hall, Oxford. From there she went on to study at the London School of Economics, gaining a Master's degree in Social Science. She graduated at Oxford in 1920.

Career After leaving education, Jennnings first employment was as a school attendance officer in the East End of London. Charged with the vital role of ensuring children had full access to their entitlement to education, she navigated the difficulties it presented to their parents who relied on them to work. This led onto her role as Secretary to the Children's Country Holiday Fund, where she organised for boys from the East End to holiday in the Staffordshire countryside. She concluded that the future of Brynmawr should be multifaceted, and no longer overreliant on employment in the coal industry. With her arrival, sporadic social work training at the settlement became well established.

In 1939 Jennings, assited by Winifred Gill, was asked by Robert Silvey of BBC Radio's audience research department to conduct a local survey of working class listening tendencies. They found a particular benefit in the regular series of programmes on child care and maternal health pioneered by Margery Wace. After the outbreak of World War II, in December 1939, the BBC moved its continuous survey of listening from London to Bristol, with Silvey's department.

Jennings was known for encouraging people in the Bristol region while the area was being redeveloped in the 1950s and 1960s. During this time, she employed Priscilla Reuel Tolkien as her secretary. Jennings, having seen Tolkien’s growing interest, "gave her jobs beyond the scope of secutarial work to broaden her experience." This prompted Tolkiens study of Social Sciences at the London School of Economics, one of Jennings' own alama mater.

Personal Life Jennings was a keen and accoumplished poet, with a particaular love of and focus on nature, inspired by her upbringing in rural Stafforshire. During her time at Oxford, she was a regular contributor to The Fritillary Magazine of Lady Margaret Hall.

When based in Bristol at the University Settlement, she volunteered as an Air Raid Warden during the Second World War.

Following the Anschluss, fellow academic and Warden of the Verein Wiener Settlement Else Federn came to live and work with Jennings as a volunteer at the Britsol Settlement. Federn maintained contacts with other refugees and sought entry permits for them. Through this relationship, Hilda Jennings arranged for two children, Hans and Suse Weber, to come from Vienna on the Kindertransport to live in Stafford with her sibilings families.

Hilda retired to Staffordshire, where she lived on the estate of her sister and brother-in-law, Nellie and Charles Venables, spending these latter years reflecting on her life and writing her final academic work, Societies in the Making, published in 1962.

Jennings, Hilda; Gill, Winifred (1939). Broadcasting in everyday life: a survey of the social effects of the coming of broadcasting. British Broadcasting Corporation. OCLC 224036420