Mary Hughes was a voluntary social worker who lived among some of the poorest people in London and turned a formerly notorious pub into a teetotal refuge for the poor. At the building that housed the refuge – 71 Vallance Road, Whitechapel – she is commemorated with a blue plaque.

Mary Hughes was born in 1860 into a comfortable Mayfair home. She was the youngest daughter of Thomas Hughes, who wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and was an early Christian Socialist. She was educated at home and raised to believe that serving the poor was an obligation.

When she was 23, Hughes became housekeeper for her uncle in Longcot, Berkshire, where she volunteered on a local board of guardians, who ran the local workhouse and dispensed aid to the poor. She campaigned to allow people living in the workhouse to drink two cups of tea per day rather than just one.

Social work

In 1896 Hughes moved to Whitechapel to live with her sister Lilian, whose husband was the local vicar, and began working as a voluntary social worker. She visited people in slums, workhouses, doss houses, infirmaries, and wards where people were treated for venereal disease.

Her sister and brother-in-law died on the Titanic in 1912, and from 1915, Hughes chose to live in similar conditions to the poor, moving into a community settlement in Bow. She became a Justice of the Peace for the Tower area of Shoreditch then became a Quaker in 1918 and returned to Whitechapel.

Dewdrop Inn

In 1926, she converted a once notorious pub at 71 Vallance Road, the Earl Grey, into the teetotal ‘Dewdrop Inn: For Education and Joy’ (playing on words to suggest ‘do drop in’). The Dewdrop was a refuge for the poor, with a recreation room, canteen, meeting room, and an unheated scullery in which Hughes lived; ‘indignation keeps me warm!’, she declared. Hughes ate a frugal vegetarian diet and was known simply as ‘Comrade’. The walls of the Dewdrop were pasted with political and religious propaganda.

As a member of Stepney Borough Council, Hughes ensured that new housing estates were approved before she would support the building of a new town hall. She campaigned for elderly people in the local workhouse to be permitted an egg for breakfast rather than a watery oat broth known as ‘skilly’.

Later life and death

With her white hair and red cape, Hughes was a familiar figure in the East End. When Mahatma Gandhi visited the UK in 1931, he asked to meet her.

When Hughes was hit by a tram in 1936, she insisted on writing a note so that the driver would not be blamed before she was taken to hospital to recover.

Hughes died at St Peter’s Hospital, Whitechapel, on 2 April 1941. The nurses had recommended that she be quiet to save her strength, but Hughes reportedly died singing.

The architect who renovated the Dewdrop Inn for Mary Hughes told her that the 19th century corner pub building had hardly a right-angle in it. After her death it was renamed Mary Hughes House.

Further reading

• Sybil Oldfield, ‘Hughes, Mary (1860–1941)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (access with a UK public library card)

• Betty Wilson, ‘The Angel of the East End: “Miss Hughes” of Mayfair’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 June 1941, 19

• Thomas and Mary Hughes Letters, National Co-Operative Archive, Jisc

• Mary Hughes, Quaker Tapestry (accessed 10 March 2025)