Birmingham People’s Kindergarten, Greet

Description:Infant children are tidying the kindergarten room. ‘Home life’ was the basis of activities. Children were encouraged to help each other by doing domestic and garden work and looking after pets. There is a dove in the cage.

Julia Lloyd, of the Lloyd banking family, opened the Greet Kindergarten in a room donated by Mrs Barrow Cadbury. It was set up, in the words of Sir Oliver Lodge, Principal of the University of Birmingham, ‘to bring to the smaller children of the poorer people the same advantages as we desire and arrange for our own’. Lloyd trained in Berlin. Greet Kindergarten was one of only two free people’s kindergartens in Britain that catered for poor children in 1905.