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9 December 1885—11 February 1968

Ambassador of Peace

There was little in Muriel Lester’s childhood that suggested what she would make her life’s work. Born into a wealthy British shipbuilding family, she and her two siblings, Doris and Kingsley, were sheltered from the poverty endured by the lower classes in Victorian England. Once, when she was eight years old, Muriel passed through a London ghetto while riding on a train. Astounded at the “gardenless, sordid, unsavory dwelling houses,” she incredulously asked the nanny accompanying her if people actually lived in them. “Oh yes,” the nanny replied. “But they don’t mind it. They’re not like you. They enjoy it.”

Lester never forgot this first experience of poverty, and while still in her teens she became a dedicated socialist. Deciding to forgo a university education in order to work for social justice, she and her sister used an inheritance from their brother, who died young, to open Kingsley Hall, a settlement house in East London. The house offered shelter and meals to the poor and served as a nondenominational chapel. Lester lived there for the next two decades, attending to the needs of London’s least privileged.

Influenced by the pacifist writings of Leo Tolstoy, Lester opposed World War I and joined the newly formed Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in 1914. During the years of the war, “God Save the King” wasn’t sung in Kingsley Hall. She explained that the fourth line, “Send him victorious,” could only mean “killing, wounding, gassing, starving, lying, spying, drinking, and venereal disease” in peacetime. The victory she wanted was “the conquest of slums, disease, ignorance.”

Although a deeply religious woman who believed that warfare was antithetical to Christianity—it was, she said, a “daily crucifixion of Christ”—Lester grew dissatisfied with the failure of mainline churches to embrace pacifism or to condemn the capitalist system she believed encouraged warfare. “The doctrine of the Cross, self-giving, self-suffering, forgiveness, is the exact opposite of the doctrine of armies and navies,” she wrote. “One must choose between the sword and the Cross.” Institutional Christianity, she feared, had chosen the sword while paying lip service to the Cross.

In 1926 Lester traveled to India to meet Mohandas Gandhi, and the two established a close friendship that lasted until his assassination in 1948. In 1933 she became ambassador at large or “traveling secretary” for the FOR, a post she held for the next thirty years. She traveled around the globe nine times, speaking against war and in favor of nonviolent conflict resolution and reconciliation. By the time she retired in the late 1950s, she had been twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was internationally recognized as one of her generation’s leading pacifists.