Opening on 30th of November 6pm
Exhibition on 1st of December 12 - 6pm
14th December 12 - 6pm
15th december 12 - 4pm
Olive was born in Liverpool on 19 December 1923 and died in London on the 27 November 2019. Through a selection of precious documents, photographs, writings, books, artworks, mementoes, artefacts, and curios from a long life, One Hundred Years Of Olive presents a personal and social history of the 20th century and an intimate portrait of a good life lived by a good woman.
Olive Keidan wasn’t a public figure or famous person, but she was a remarkable woman who worked in social policy throughout her adult life, as a psychiatric social worker and university lecturer and was also a keen amateur painter, dressmaker, zoologist, botanist, writer, poet, cook, feminist, and socialist. Olive would have been 100 this year. To mark her centenary and to begin the process of creating a family archive, her daughter planned to select one hundred objects from her life for a simple publication to share with family and friends. As Olive’s life holds up a mirror to the seismic political, social and cultural upheavals, changes and progress of the 20th century, the team at Newington Green Meeting House suggested there might be wider public interest in a small exhibition of aspects of her life.
In recognition of the Unitarian movements’ commitment to social justice and Newington Green’s place in the struggle for women’s rights, One Hundred Years Of Olive will highlight Olive’s professional life and lived experiences in relation to the histories and shifts in social policy for women, children and the family, and particularly the emergence of the welfare state. The great gift of the welfare state was central to Olive’s professional interests, and it cared for her throughout her adult life and in her death. As her beloved NHS now faces its biggest crisis since its formation in 1948, it feels timely to look back at its pre-history, its birth and impact through the lens of Olive’s life, something she herself was thinking and writing about extensively in her later years**.
Olive’s family held her 90th birthday party at Newington Green Meeting House in 2013 and a memorial service for her at the New Unity chapel in Islington in 2019, so we are delighted to be returning to Newington Green to mark Olive’s centenary. Each week of the exhibition we will display different objects from different aspects of her life, offer a few interactions, and encourage everyone to bring and take away their own memories of 20th-century life.
** “People like me, born between the wars, seem to have taken up writing autobiographies as a major leisure activity… I have taken a route that is for me much more interesting – focusing on the social policies that I have lived with and that have been relevant to me, and in which I have had both personal and professional interest…Like rites of passage there are social policies that are important for each period of the life cycle. With marriage came my interest in the financial and work situation of married women, the socially approved family size, and how to achieve it. Then the interest shifted to provisions for families with young children and moved astonishingly rapidly to provision for students. Pension arrangements followed and finally the processes of care in old age, dying and the cost of burial. All along the route health provision goes in and out of focus as need rises and falls, and by old age care provision looks very important.” Olive Keidan, 2007