Muriel Lester

Muriel Lester (9 December 1883 – 11 February 1968) was a British social reformer, international pacifist campaigner, writer and religious nonconformist. She was a founding member and secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) and a member of the International Council of War Resisters' International (WRI).

Early life Lester was born at Gainsborough Lodge in Leytonstone on 9 December 1883. Her father was Henry Edward Lester, a prominent Baptist businessman, president of the Essex Baptist Union and chairman of West Ham school board. Her mother was Rachel Mary Lester . Lester was their third daughter but instead chose to live in voluntary poverty and focus on social reform and philanthropy work. Lester visited a factory girls’ club in Bow, a poor district of the East End of London, with her father in 1902 and felt that she needed to help the poor. She became a social worker in the area, She taught Sunday School at the local Baptist Church. Kingsley Hall was named after her brother who died had young in 1914, leaving the sisters an inheritance which they used to set up the organisation. It was housed in a building that had formerly been known as Zion Hall and had been used by a "Strict and Particular Baptist congregation." She remained a strict vegetarian throughout her life. In her later years, she rejected a parcel of vitamin pills and liver capsules an American friend had sent her as they were not vegetarian. He was impressed with Lester's work and invited her to travel to India. She stayed at his ashram in October 1926 and visited Shantiniketan.

During Gandhi's visit to England from September 1931, to attend the Second Imperial Round Table Conference on India’s future in London, the government provided a suite of rooms at the Hilton Hotel and a fleet of plush cars for him to use. He was accompanied by his secretary Mahadev Desai, his son Devdas Gandhi and British supporter Mirabehn. Gandhi would sit cross-legged on the floor to receive important visitors. He said Lester "manifested the gospel of reconciliation to people in daily life as did few others" In order to devote herself to the Fellowship, she turned over the running of Kingsley Hall to her sister. In Japan, Lester was known as the "Mother of World Peace." She spoke on her tours against war and the trade in arms and drugs, In 1937, Lester travelled with her nephew George Hogg in Japan, from where he continued to Shanghai and later the Chinese hinterlands. He became famous for saving 60 orphaned boys, marching them 1,100km to safety. thumb International Council of War Resisters' International (WRI) meeting in Bilthoven, Netherlands in July 1938. Lester is standing, fourth from the left. Other individuals pictured include José Brocca (Spain), Hem Day (Belgium), Olga Fierz (Switzerland), Ruth Fry (Britain), Hagbard Jonassen (Denmark), George Lansbury MP (Britain), Bart de Ligt (Netherlands) and Přemysl Pitter (Czechoslovakia)During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Lester remained an active pacifist. In Spanish pacifist José Brocca's book White Corpuscles in Europe (1939) the American writer Allan A. Hunter viewed the close of the Spanish Civil War and the opening of World War II from across the Atlantic, and despite the desolate outlook in Europe saw some grounds for optimism in the work of humanitarians including Lester.

Lester was pictured at the International Council of War Resisters' International (WRI) meeting in the Netherlands in July 1938, standing fourth from the left of the photograph.

Lester had a particularly large following in the USA, She befriended members of the civils rights movement, such as Bayard Rustin.

In 1941, Lester's anti-war speeches on a tour of the Americas led to her detention in Trinidad.

Lester died on 11 February 1968 at her home, Kingsley Cottage, Loughton, Essex. The Nobel Prize organisation believes she may have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize at some point prior to the World War II. (Records of nominees were not kept prior to 1939.)

The since renamed vegetarian Muriel Lester Cooperative House at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor was named after her.

In 2017, Lester was featured in the Clever Essex Campaign, which is aimed to "recognise Essex’s greatest ambassadors."

The Muriel Lester Archive is held at the Bishopsgate Institute, London.

Autobiographies It Occurred to Me (Autobiography), Harper Brothers, 1937 It So Happened, Harper Brothers, 1947