Page 5, 19th April 1962

19th April 1962

Page 5

Page 5, 19th April 1962 — 'Miracle Worker' of S.W.1
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People: Hugh Kay, Urch
Locations: London

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'Miracle Worker' of S.W.1

By Hugh Kay
LONDON County Council has -•-4 made a 30-year loan of 0,000 to a work that exists to solve the insoluble, a work run often from a bedside phone by a partly disabled Catholic nurse.
This unusual step has
been taken, to use the
official terminology, "in order to enable Ladyeholme Housing Association to continues its valuable social work."
The loan lifts the immediate pressure of mortgage and interest payments from the shoulders of LadyehOIrrie's founder, Miss Edith UFO, leaving her with a little more time and energy for her "family" of unmarried mothers, prostitutes, ex-prisoners, abandoned wives and children, homeless poor, the physically and spiritually handicapped.
A wartime injury to her spine sent Miss Urch into the ranks of those elect social workers who construct, out of their own disability, a new world for the derelict, the outcast, the helpless and hopeless.
Sold
The mortgages concern the three houses in South London where Ladyeholme (so called from the medieval spelling of the name of Our Lady) offers refuge and a chance to "refuel" to those who fall outside the scope of the usual statutory and voluntary welfare schemes.
There used to be four houses, but one had to be sold to pay for current expenses. There need to be many more — and there will be, If Miss Urch has her way.
She also wants a Receiving House for giving shock treatment and assessing the needs of newcomers before assigning them to the "In-Between Flats" in the type of house already in operation, where they stay for anything up to 18 months.
The ultimate aim is to offer a third stage, houses and fiats which the In-Betweeners can move into on the easiest possible terms when their rehabilitation is well under way.
"Then," says Miss Urch, "it will be their torn, perhaps, to help others submerged in the troubles they once knew themselves. lt may be easier to ask a once troubled soul, now restored and well established, to receive into his or her home a young person desperately in need of help."
The doom of Miss Urch's home and office at 68 Warwick Way, near London's Victoria Station, are open to old and young of all creeds and none, of all races and colours and classes. A thousand of them have passed through her hands.
Who?
Who are they?
The prostitute with a child who wants to "get out of the game" ...
The men who made money out of her will try to track her down. They threaten Miss Urch with carving knife, cosh and razor blade, stopping her in the street, ringing her up late into the night.
But the stout little figure, walking resolutely hut painfully, defies them, refuses to disclose addresses, shames and shocks the bully into turning away.
The mother of four, with another on the way and her husband in prison. turned out of her rooms on Christmas Eve by a landlady of the anti-life brigade . . .
The ex-prisoner, homeless, alone. medically unfit . . .
The teenage expectant mother, unmarried, abandoned, re fected by her family, terrified . .
The social misfit, the convalescent neurotic, the inept, the erring Miss Urch has no need to search the highways and the byways; they come to her. The phone bell rings incessantly. The knocker on the Woe door sounds again and again.
Once in the houses, installed in rooms or little flats, the newcomers are helped to help themselves. Many of them bring whole families with them.' Social workers, lay apostolate actionists, and always Miss Urch herself are there to advise and guide. But the principle is to make everyone as selfreliant as can be.
Each person or family does his own cooking. pays his own small rent as far as he can, finds employment, establishes new friendships. Residents of a house are all of different kinds—to avoid the swapping of case histories and the bad effects of two of a kind retarding each other's progress.
They learn to help each other, without asking questions. One day, after a new life has opened up, they may be able to help others in groups ike the "Recidivists Anonymous" recently conceived by a distinguished prison worker.
Even as things are, they come Out of Ladyeholme on terms enabling Miss Urch to claim 75 per cent success. From Ladyeholme. girls have been happily married, Catholics are restored to the sacraments, reconciliations are effected, deposits are




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