Victoria League

For The semi-professional Australian soccer league, see National Premier Leagues Victoria.

The Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship (1901–present) is a voluntary charitable organisation which connects people from Commonwealth countries. The Victoria League had about 500 members in Britain in 2000 and their chief patron is Queen Elizabeth II. It is one of more than 80 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that promote cooperation and peace within the Commonwealth of Nations. With its headquarters in Leinster Square London it has leagues in Australia, New Zealand and Zimbabwe, and affiliated organisations in the United States and Canada.

History

The start of the Second Boer War was the catalyst for an outpouring of patriotic support for the British Empire in the Mother Country and in the white dominions and colonies. This affected men and women, but because of the politics of the time was reflected in women founding their own charitable organisations, to build links across the empire with like-minded women and to give practical help in supporting the war effort in way that were considered suitable for Women, such as caring for wounded soldiers and helping by comforting the relations of soldiers killed fighting in the war.

In Canada Margaret Polson Murray was the catalyst for the founding of the Canadian Daughters of the Empire while in South Africa Dorothea Fairbridge was a leading activist in the Guild of Loyal Women. Both organisations sent representatives to Britain to make contacts and to drum up support for the war effort. Fairbridge was a leading socialite of the Cape Colony and was friends with some influential British ladies who had met her while visiting South Africa. Three of these ladies, Violet Markham, Violet Cecil, Edith Lyttelton, would prove instrumental in setting up a new London based organisation. They initially met at 2 Millbank, Westminster (opposite Victoria Tower Gardens — small park on the north bank of the River Thames adjacent the Palace of Westminster) where they agreed to arrange the inaugural meeting of what was to become the Victoria League.

London society embraced the idea, and the initial meeting was held on 2 April 1901 at 10 Downing Street (the official residence of the Prime Minister) at the invitation of Alice Balfour, the sister of Arthur Balfour and a niece of Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister. Present at the meeting were Violet Markham, Violet Cecil, Edith Lyttelton, South African representatives from the Guild of Loyal Women, the wives and sisters of Cabinet Ministers, the wives of the leaders of the Loyal Opposition, and other representative ladies. They all attended dressed in mourning cloths out of respect for the recently deceased Queen Victoria, and agreed that the new organisation would be called the Victoria League of the respect for Queen Victoria. They appointed Margaret, Countess of Jersey to the chair and Edith Lyttelton secretary. The ladies at this inaugural meeting agreed for the Victoria League to be "an association of women of the British Isles who are in sympathy with Imperial objects and desire a close union between the different parts of Empire", and pledged that the Victoria League would "support and assist any scheme leading to more intimate understanding between ourselves and our fellow subjects in our great Colonies and Dependencies", "become a centre for receiving and distributing information regarding the different British dominions, especially information of importance to women", and also resolved that the Victoria League would promote "any practical work desired by the Colonies and tending to the good of the Empire as a whole".

The Victoria League also stated that it was non-political, by which they meant the Victoria League was not representing or supporting any particular political party, as at the time most prominent British politicians in the two main political parties supported similar aims to those of the Victoria League. The Victoria League was from its inception immersed in factional rivalry with its two colonial sisters the Canadian Daughters of the Empire and the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa. The primary driving force behind this rivalry was social snobbery. While the great and the good of British society were willing to organise and lend practical help to fellow members of the British Empire in the colonies, they considered those in the colonies to be their social inferiors and as such were willing to work with them but not as equals. British women at the heart of the establishment also assumed that the drive for empire derived its strength from the centre and failed to realise that along with the growing demands for dominion status, the women of the empire outside Britain were developing their own views on the relationships between their own nascent nations and the rest of the empire.

The need for moral and financial help to aid in the practical help for those suffering in ongoing the Boer War meant that even if they had wanted to the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa, were in no position to contest the leadership of the Victoria League, and more or less amicably they agreed to hand over all their British subsidiary organisation to the control of the Victoria League. However the Canadian Daughters of the Empire did not have such an urgent need for support and as they were founded before the Victoria League there were discussions in 1901 between Canadian Daughters of the Empire and the Victoria League over which organisation would affiliate with the other. Both organisations were giving practical help to the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa and in June 1901 where the South African delegates made it clear that their organisation preferred an alliance with the Victoria League so the minutes of the meeting recorded that:

Result: abandonment of [Margaret Polson Murray] of her original idea to form a big London Committee. Willingness to propose the Daughters of the Empire League as an allied association of the Victoria League, and to co-operate in very possible way.

Margaret Polson Murray returned to Canada, where control of the Daughters of the Empire passed to a new central organising body based in Toronto and over the coming decade the relationship between the Victoria League and the now renamed Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire remained ambiguous and not particularly cordial.

Further reading

• — Lists officials in 1910 and state that the league had about 10,000 members.
• — A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St. Andrews