Read about our founder, the UN official
Find out about Lady Goodman, Volunteer Centre, Kensington and Chelsea’s founder, what drove her to establish the Volunteer Centre along with her other great personal achievements.
In 1967, Anstice Goodman became interested in channeling the skills of volunteer workers to the needs of their area. In 1969 she persuaded organisations in Kensington and Chelsea to support the official establishment of the bureau, which became an independent charity in 1976.
In its first month the bureau attracted all manner of volunteers - housewives, actors, hairdressers, a model, a mechanic and the manager of a local firm. Within a few years the bureau had become a nation-wide resource. Anstice became concerned about the lack of care available to those suffering from mental illness, and was later instrumental in forming the Kensington and Chelsea branch of Mind.
Lady Anstice Goodman had a history of activism and helping people, she was driven by a desire to know and to discharge God's will and inspired great love from people of all backgrounds and interests. She once said,
"I'm not really consistent about anything, I'm a responder to what comes up at the moment."
her life history is a reflection of that quote.
Lady Goodman, was chief welfare officer for the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) after the Second World War. Acting against official policy she succeeded in arranging visas to the West for hundreds of refugees. Saving hundreds from death at Stalin’s hands.
Based in Germany, she managed to alleviate the living conditions of displaced Russians and Poles in camps at Geissen and Wetzlar. Russian officers who arrived to seize their nationals would be asked to wait, while she helped families to hide or escape. Later, at the end of the 1960s, Lady Goodman was to the fore in establishing the Voluntary Workers' Bureau,.
Lady Goodman had been born Anstice Crawley on December 7, 1911 at Bishopthorpe Palace, the residence of the Archbishop of York, then Cosmo Lang. Her father, Stafford Crawley, was chaplain to the Archbishop at Bishopthorpe, which is on the banks of the Ouse three miles from York.
Anstice Crawley was Canon Crawley's fourth child, one of two daughters and three sons. One of her brothers was Aidan Crawley, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Air in Clement Attlee's Labour Government; in the 1960s he was Conservative MP for West Derbyshire, and finally, from 1969 to 1973, chairman of London Weekend Tele-vision.
Anstice Crawley was educated at home by governesses, and never encouraged to go to university. From her father, however, she had imbibed a deep Christian faith, and she returned from her youthful travels with a strong sense of wanting to help, which she focussed at that time on the unemployed in the East End.
Anstice Crawley raised funds from local businesses to set up the Fellowship Club in sheds on a canal in the Isle of Dogs, where the unemployed could learn various crafts. During this period she lived at Lambeth Palace as the guest of Cosmo Lang, who had become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1928.
Subsequently, she worked with Mary Trevelyan, raising money for the international Students' House. The outbreak of war took her to the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot, where she worked as a nurse for Voluntary Aid Detachment. Soon she was second-in-command in the military hospital at Farnborough, where, to the Commandant's displeasure, she started a committee which encouraged sufferers from scabies to seek treatment.
Soon, however, Anstice Crawley moved on to take a diploma in Social Science at the London School of Economics (evacuated to Cambridge in the war), after which she returned to practical work as personnel officer for 2,000 women factory workers. It was a post which proved an ideal preparation for the rigours of UNRRA.
In 1948 Anstice Crawley married, as his second wife, Victor Goodman, Clerk to the House of Lords. The First World War, in which he had won an MC and Bar, had left him with emphysema, and he had Parkinson's Disease. By 1959, when he became Clerk of the Parliaments and was appointed KCB, she was nursing him devotedly. He had been a trustee of British Museum since 1949; and she shared and greatly enjoyed his interest in history and the arts.
After her husband’s death in 1967, she turned her attention to Notting Hill. The area was alive with activism; following the years of decay and poverty people were doing things for themselves. Seizing on the mood of the moment, Lady Anstice decided that it was time to co-ordinate people’s good will, and set about establishing the Volunteer Centre.
This article was taken from The Telegraph’s obituary section click to read Lady Anstice’s Obituary.