Campaigner for Local Education celebrates 70th birthday

Elsie Lewis was born in Mile End Hospital and spent part of her childhood, from the age of nine, in a children’s home due to her mother’s psychiatric illness. From age 14 she kept house for father and looked after her younger brother and sister. Her father worked for the London City Mission and Elsie grew up as part of Memorial Baptist Church in Plaistow, where she is still an active member and one of the elders.

The church is in the process of merging with another local congregation and Elsie is part of the Transitional Leadership Team of “Church in Progress”, also of a group working on the redevelopment of its large historic building so it can be better used by the local community.

Elsie has a long history of local community involvement. When her sons started school in the early 1970s, Elsie, who had trained as an art teacher, discovered how bad standards of education were in the borough of Newham, and found that other parents at the school gates shared her concerns.

“We were absolutely certain that our children were not less intelligent than anywhere else”, Elsie remembers, “But we did realise that they had less opportunities than those available in most other areas.”

From a meeting in her house to discuss the problems came Newham Education Concern, founded in 1973 with the aim of improving the quality of education in Newham and having the role of parents in their children’s education recognised.

This grassroots group organised huge demonstrations that stopped schools being closed. They campaigned for more government money to be spent on education in Newham, and achieved the introduction of parent governors in Newham schools before this was common elsewhere.

The group had its first office in an old eel-and-pie shop at the bottom of Prince Regent Lane. Later it moved to the Barking Road near Green Street where the bookshop and resource centre are today. They started book clubs, literacy groups and toy libraries to help parents get involved with their children’s learning, and organised holiday clubs with camping trips in the countryside for 100 children every summer for twenty years.

Elsie is delighted to see the changes that have happened in local schools. “The improvement in our borough’s education has been phenomenal. Whereas we used to be the bottom of all the boroughs, now the league tables usually show that of the hundred most improved schools in the country, the largest number comes from Newham.”

As well as working as a teacher and teacher trainer in the East End for most of her career, Elsie was a school governor and involved in youth work and church work at Memorial Baptist Church. In the early 1990s she spent seven years running NOSH at the church. This was a lunch club organised by local churches providing a hot meal for asylum seekers, homeless people and others in need. Elsie and her late husband Jim had three children and fostered dozens more.

Elsie is celebrating her 70th birthday with a jazz concert at Memorial Baptist Church in Plaistow at 7 pm on Thursday 29th March featuring Classic Jazz star Keith Nichols and a school band.

The concert is open to everyone. It is raising funds for urgent building repairs at the church, of which Plaistow resident Elsie, who turned 70 on Saturday 3rd March, has been a member all her life.

Keith Nichols, one of the foremost authorities on Classic Jazz and an international performer, arranger and conductor, will be playing with a ten-piece jazz band from the Coopers Company and Coburn School in Upminster, called Decajazz. There are no tickets, but donations are invited. There will be refreshments and dancing.

For more information please contact the church office on 020 7474 6603.