Last Updated on 5 December 2025
Introduction
The area we now recognise as the home of Royal Wimbledon Golf Club was originally leased to the club by Mr & Mrs Frank Malleson in 1882 (see below).[i] What is less well known is the history of Camp Cottage and how it became a centre for social activism in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Camp Cottage
It was here that the reformer, Mrs Elizabeth Malleson hosted her open house Sundays with leading reformers such as Octavia Hill, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Clementia Taylor. And it was also from here that Elizabeth organised the first Working Women’s College whilst also working tirelessly to press for Women’s Suffrage, to campaign for John Stuart Mill’s parliamentary candidature and to support the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. But this remarkable lady didn’t stop there. When she left Wimbledon and moved to the Cotswolds, she went on to found the first Rural Nursing Association.
Early Life
Elizabeth Malleson was born in Chelsea on 29 October 1828, the eldest of eleven children. Her parents were Unitarians and committed Liberals. Her father was active in the Anti-Corn Law League whilst her mother was a lively, artistic woman who was also an active reformer. The family’s fortunes declined, in part because of their association with the Unitarians, and they subsequently moved to Croydon. It was there that Elizabeth attended a Unitarian school and formed a lifelong friendship with the Clementia Taylor and the Octavia Hill whose families lived nearby.[i]
In 1853, after a period as a governess at the home of the Hon. Henry Fitzroy, Elizabeth met the educationalist Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Mme Bodichon had conceived of the idea of a “people’s school” and had opened the Portman School off Edgware Road on 6th November 1854. This was a co-educational elementary school with children from a mixture of artisan and middle classes, including the young son of the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi.
Social Activism
Elizabeth married Frank Malleson, a wine importer, in May 1857 and the newly married couple then moved to Camp Cottage in Wimbledon. Frank Malleson was also from a Unitarian family and held a shared interest in politics and social reform. During this time, Elizabeth continued her tireless activism. She canvassed for J.S. Mill when he stood for parliament in 1865, she was a founder member of the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage, she campaigned for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and was deeply involved in organising relief for refugees from the Turkish atrocities in the Balkans. But perhaps her greatest achievement was the founding of the Working Women’s College in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury in 1864 and her subsequent work in running the establishment as Secretary from 1864 to 1877.[ii]
Inspired by Frederick Maurice’s ideas on adult education and her experience at the Portman School, Elizabeth had argued that the Working Men’s College should open its doors to women. Her arguments were rebuffed so Elizabeth persuaded her friends to contribute towards the establishment of a new college, one tailored to provide adult education for working women. Support came from, amongst others, J. S. Mill, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, William Morris and several Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Rossetti, Hunt and Maddox Ford.[iii] When the college opened in 1864, 151 women from a wide range of working class and artisan backgrounds enrolled to study subjects as diverse as French, German, Latin, Botany, Physiology, Political Science and Mathematics. And, as with the Working Men’s College, many of the students were active members of the College Council.
Life in Wimbledon
Elizabeth’s life at Camp Cottage in Wimbledon was a happy one, both domestically and socially. The Mallesons raised four children. One of her daughters, Hope Malleson, continued their activism as a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). They also found time to entertain their many friends including Peter Taylor MP, his wife Clementia and Mme Venturi (sister of Lady Stansfeld and ardent admirer of Mazzini). Sundays were an open house and lawn tennis was played ‘to the scandal of the Wimbledonians’.[iv]
Camp Cottage was ‘an old-fashioned roomy house with stabling and garden with a distant view of the North Downs’. It was also a financially successful time and they were able to add additional rooms and rented a large field, some woodland and 200 acres of ‘rough shooting’ land (see map below). Much of this land was subsequently leased to the Royal Wimbledon Golf Club, initially for a period of 21 years but subsequently gifted to the club.
Camp Cottage c1865
District Nursing and Gloucestershire
In 1877 Elizabeth suffered a nervous breakdown. Although her middle daughter, Rachel, supported the running of the college as her proxy, by 1882 illness and overwork finally forced a decision to move away from Wimbledon to Dixton Manor, a large rambling house north of Cheltenham.
Elizabeth Malleson 1882
The drive towards social activism appears not to have deserted her. Elizabeth was co-opted by Dorothea Beale, Principal of Cheltenham Ladies College to help found the Working Men’s College and a Young Women’s Institute in Cheltenham in 1883.[i] Elizabeth also found time to write a book, “The Early Training of Children”, but it was the squalor in the villages which made her realise that there was a need for local nursing provision. She launched an appeal to fund a trained midwife to serve the agricultural poor and after some challenges, including arguments with Florence Nightingale, she got the service off the ground and a national plan for Rural District Nursing was finally launched in August 1889. Elizabeth died at the age of 88 from influenza in December 1916.
[1] The Royal Wimbledon Golf Club, ‘The Club House History’, (2025) <https://www.rwgc.co.uk/the_clubhouse> [accessed 25 June 2025].
[2] Hope Malleson, Elizabeth Malleson (1828-1916): Autobiographical Notes and Letters Printed for Private Circulation, 1926).
[3] Owen Stinchcombe, ‘Elizabeth Malleson and the Working Women’s College’, Camden History Review, 16 (1989)
[4] J. F. C. Harrison, A History of the Working Men’s College: 1854-1954 (London: Routledge, 2014).
[5] Hope Malleson, Elizabeth Malleson (1828-1916): Autobiographical Notes and Letters Printed for Private Circulation, 1926), p 95.
[6] Owen Stinchcombe, ‘Elizabeth Malleson and the Working Women’s College’, Camden History Review, 16 (1989)
