ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1893, Hugh Legge, a member of one of England’s ancient aristocratic houses and a recent graduate of Trinity College, Oxford arrived in Bethnal Green, the heart of the slums of East London. He came to live among the poor as a resident in Oxford House, the high Anglican university settlement established less than a decade before. In an age of fashionable slumming, settlement houses enabled young Oxford and Cambridge graduates to “peep into” the nether world of darkest London,1 literally to settle among the poor, while recreating the relationships, comforts and rituals of the all-male world of the university. The men’s settlement movement was a self-conscious attempt to create nation and community through vertical bonds of comradeship across class lines. Legge quickly established the Repton Club for boys in a notoriously unrespectable street and reserved an entire floor of the club for boxing, one of East Londoners’ favorite pastimes. Legge found the respectability of collarwearing boys “uninteresting,” “not at all the sort my club was meant for.” He referred to the “rough lads” who came to the club as “my lads” and “my boys. ”
