Sarah was born in Islington, London, one of five children. Her father Robert worked as a coal merchant in London but, when the family relocated to Suffolk in 1871, he became clerk to a miller. Sarah’s mother Lucy had no occupation. In 1901, aged thirty-four, Sarah was working as a governess at Wytham Abbey in Berkshire, the home of the Earl of Levan and Melville. This was a popular occupation for relatively well-educated women from lower middle-class families. Shortly after, Sarah trained as a midwife, qualifying by sitting the examinations of the Central Midwives Board. Midwifery had become a legally recognised practice in Britain in 1902, following the first Midwives Act. In 1911 Sarah was registered as working as a health visitor in Lincoln, where she lived alone. She remained a practising midwife until 1939, with a business address at 31a, Mortimer Street, London.  

In 1930, aged sixty-three, Sarah moved to Flat 1, 65, Harrington Gardens, which had just been acquired by Women’s Pioneer Housing. It was her home for over twenty-five years and she died there on February 16th 1956.

The Inness sisters at Flat 2 came from a Naval background. The daughters of a chief engineer in the Royal Navy, they were born in Southsea, Hampshire and boarded at Saint Margaret’s Naval School.

Both sisters joined the nursing profession. Between 1892 and 1895 Lissie trained as a nurse at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital in Exeter, Devon. She qualified in 1895 and joined the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Navy Nursing Service. She was based at Haslar, the Royal Navy hospital in Hampshire and became a Sister there in 1901. She stayed in the navy, serving in Hong Kong from 1901 to 1923. In 1923 she became a state registered nurse and moved to Queensberry Place, in Kensington. Maude trained at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, where she qualified in 1901 and became a state registered nurse in 1924.  

In 1930, Lissie invested £200 in Women’s Pioneer Housing and both sisters moved into Flat 2, 65 Harrington Gardens. Maude moved out in 1934 to live with their sister Ada in nearby Lexham Gardens. She was still living there and working as a nurse in 1939. Lissie died at her home in Harrington Gardens on October 12th 1936.  Maude died in Windsor, Berkshire in 1954. 

Mary became a resident of Flat 3 in 1930 after investing £50 in the organisation; perhaps she had heard of Women’s Pioneer Housing from her sister Rhoda, who had moved into another of their properties the previous year.
As a typist, Mary was part of a modern all-women workforce. From the late nineteenth century, huge numbers of women – mostly from lower-middle class backgrounds and relatively well-educated - began to enter the office to take up work as typists. It was viewed as suitable work for women, and women typists offered a cheap way for the Civil Service to boost efficiency and productivity (they were, of course, paid at a much lower rate than men). For the women themselves, it opened up opportunities to move to the city and live independently, engaged in work that had gained a certain cultural status as associated with youth and glamour. Yet, in reality, it was low-paid with little prospects for promotion: married women had to resign, and those that remained unmarried could only progress to supervising new typists.
As an unmarried woman, Mary followed this path. Rising through the ranks at the Board of Education, she was appointed a superintendent of women typists in 1903. Eight years later, Mary was promoted to chief superintendent of women typists and shorthand writers.
Mary died in 1956. She remained a tenant of 65 Harrington Gardens until her death, spending a total of twenty six years at Flat 3.

Helen was one of the first tenants of Women’s Pioneer Housing. In 1923, she invested £110 in the company and moved into Flat 4, 29 Gledhow Gardens. She acted as a tenant representative between 1922 to 1923 and later moved to Harrington Gardens when it was purchased by Women’s Pioneer Housing in 1931.
Helen was born in Edinburgh, the eldest daughter of the Reverend Donald Masson and his wife Helen. Donald was both a medical doctor and a Doctor of Divinity, who was an extremely active campaigner for the Gaelic language [footnote https://sites.google.com/site/albanystreetedinburgh/home/house-list/number-57/number-57---information-on-other-residents]. In 1884, Helen invited some of her former peers from Edinburgh Ladies College to her family home in 57 Albany Street, with the purpose of building a support group to help women overcome the barriers that stood in the way of women who wanted to enter higher education. A Guild was established, with Helen acting as its first President until 1886; it eventually became known as the Mary Erskine School Former Pupils’ Guild and still exists today with over 3,000 members globally.
Helen later left Edinburgh to work as a governess in Keighley, Yorkshire, where she lodged with her sister. At some stage, she relocated to Paris and in 1913, the year her father died, she is registered as living at 24 Rue Lauriston. Helen’s whereabouts and activities during World War I are unknown, but by 1918 she was back in London.
Helen was seventy-two years old when she moved to Harrington Gardens. She died there just three years later, in April 1934.

Isabel was born at St. Audries House, West Quantoxhead, Somerset to an aristocratic family. Her father was Captain Sir Alexander-Fuller-Acland-Hood, 3rd Baronet. He had been a Captain in the Royal Home Guards and was the Member of Parliament for Somerset West from 1859 to 1868. Born Alexander Hood, he changed his name in 1849 when he married Isabel Harriet Fuller-Palmer-Acland. The Aclands were one of the oldest families in Somerset and wealthy landowners.
In 1901 Isabel was a nun at Ascot Priory in Berkshire. This was the mother house of the Society of the Most Holy Trinity, a community of nuns within the Anglican Communion. By 1929, she had left the convent and was living in a flat in Stanhope Gardens, Kensington.
In 1930 Isabel invested £5 in Women’s Pioneer Housing and moved in to Flat 5 at 65 Harrington Gardens. This was her address when she died on January 19th 1933, although her place of death was recorded as North Hill, Highgate in London.

Gertrude Leverkus moved into Flat 6 after she had personally redesigned 65 Harrington Gardens. This was one of around 40 property conversions she carried out for WPH in the interwar years. Leverkus was first appointed by the organisation in 1923 - appointing a woman architect fitted in with the early pioneer’s ambitions to employ women in professional roles wherever possible.
Gertrude was born in Germany but largely raised in England. Her sisters were similarly ambitious – the eldest, Elsie became an artist and the youngest, Dorothy, qualified in medicine in 1927 from UCL and the London Medical School for Women. Gertrude studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL from 1915 to 1918, where she was the first woman to graduate with a BA from the School of Architecture. After further evening study at UCL she passed the examinations of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). She was among three women elected associates of the institute (ARIBA) in December 1922 (the other two were Eleanor Hughes and Winifred Ryle), and went on to obtain the Town Planning certificate in 1925. Gertrude was elected a Fellow of the RIBA in 1931.
Alongside her work for WPH, she acted as Housing Architect for the borough of West Ham after WWII, designed the Annie McCall maternity Hospital, and worked in private practice for Norman & Dawbarn, architects for Crawley and Harlow New Towns. Later on she was appointed a governor of the Brixton School of Building. 

Throughout her career, Gertrude was committed to helping other women architects. In 1932 she established the Women’s Committee of the RIBA to promote the interests of women architects and advocated architecture as a career for women in 1939 at the 21^st anniversary dinner of women’s enfranchisement organised by the Suffragette Fellowship.
Gertrude moved to 65 Harrington Gardens after her mother’s death, and lived there until her retirement in 1960.

Anne was born into a large family of nine children in Southsea, Hampshire. Her father, Dugald, was a fleet surgeon in the Royal Navy and her mother, Isabella, had no occupation. After Dugald’s death, Anne was registered as living with her mother and brother Ernest in Bramham Gardens, Kensington, in 1929. Ernest had followed in his father’s footsteps and was working as a surgeon commander in the Royal Navy.
A year after her mother’s death in 1930, Anne invested £50 in Women’s Pioneer Housing and moved in to Flat 7, 65, Harrington Gardens. She was still there in 1939 and working as a civil servant. By 1956, Anne was living at Queen Alexandra’s Court in Wimbledon. She died in Wimbledon Hospital on January 3rd 1957. 

Vera invested £1 in Women’s Pioneer Housing and moved in to Flat 8 in 1932. She had spent the previous decade living with her sister Margaret after what appears to be a failed effort to start a new life in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Vera’s 1921 Canadian immigration papers note that she was a trained secretary and domestic worker; she had lodgings arranged in Nova Scotia, spoke English and French, had £50 and would probably stay in Canada. Her aim was to set up a poultry and bee keeping business. 
However, Vera’s new life in Canada wasn’t to be. After just one year, she returned to England and moved in to Stanhope Gardens, Kensington with Margaret (who was married). However, when Margaret divorced her husband, she and Vera moved to a flat in Redcliffe Square in Kensington. She remained there until her move to Harrington Gardens.
Unfortunately Vera’s time at Flat 8 wasn’t as peaceful as she might have hoped. Not long after moving in, she was forced to complain to the WPH Management Committee about the ‘unneighbourly behaviour’ of Laura Gargett, the occupant of Flat 9. As a result, Laura was evicted in August 1932.
Five years later, Vera left Harrington Gardens to move to Putney with Margaret. She later moved to Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex and died in a nursing home in Hastings on June 18th 1964. 

Laura moved in to Flat 9 in November 1929, having invested £5 in Women’s Pioneer Housing shares. As a former militant suffragette, her life before moving to Harrington Gardens had been an eventful one. On March 3^rd 1912 she was arrested for smashing windows and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment in Holloway prison (the sentence was later reduced to one month). Laura was incarcerated alongside several prominent suffragettes, including Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Wilding Davison and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence. [footnote https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029500200073] While suffragettes generally received better treatment than ‘common criminals’, conditions were usually grim and force feeding became a common tactic used by the authorities to combat hunger strikes.
Upon Laura’s release from Holloway in May 1912, her suffragette sisters threw a ‘welcome home’ party for her and her friend Victoria Summers at St John’s Hall in Palmers Green. With the hall decked out in the suffragette colours of purple, white, and green flags and tables ‘[groaning] with sandwiches, cakes and dainties’, Sylvia Pankhurst took to the stage to pay tribute to Laura and Victoria. She declared that Laura and Victoria had gone to prison for a principle and 'sacrificed home comforts and liberty for a cause, the great cause of womanhood'; Pankhurst also awarded them the Holloway brooch.
On April 19th 1932, the WPH Secretary requested authority to ask Laura to give up her flat on account of 'unneighbourly conduct' towards Vera Larminie, the occupant of Flat 8. She would not go easily. In June, Geraldine Lennox, a fellow imprisoned ex-suffragette and WPH Committee member, twice met with Laura in attempts to persuade her to vacate her flat. Laura responded by sending a cheque for her rent until 29th September. The cheque was held, pending a referral to the Tenant Members Committee. 
On July 12th a resolution was passed 'that Miss Gargett be asked to vacate her flat at 65 Harrington Gardens as owing to its close proximity to her neighbours it seems difficult for her to live in neighbourly fashion as laid down by her agreement and also in Rule 97 of the rules of the Society.' This was communicated to Laura by Torr and Co. and on 26th July she agreed to leave on 18th August.
Laura moved to 33, Leinster Gardens, Paddington, London, the home of Sir Robert and Lady Alice Gardiner. She lived there until 1935. She died on December 17th 1936 at 52, Addiscombe  Road, Croydon, although her address at death was 8, Phillemore Gardens, Kensington.

Emma was born in Portugal, the daughter of the notorious merchant Ignacio Jose de Paiva Rapozo. A colourful character, Ignacio gambled away the fortune he had made trading ivory in the mid-nineteenth century, only to become wealthy once more by entering the opium business in Mozambique in the 1870s. [ footnote https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02582473.2019.1627402?af=R] . Emma’s brother Jose and her brother-in-law John Peter “Pitt” Hornung, took over Ignacio’s lands upon his death, turning the focus of their business from opium to sugar. Hornung, in particular, became incredibly rich from the proceeds of the plantation company; in Mozambique, the family name became synonymous with cruelty and exploitation. [footnote http://fcsh.unl.pt/mozdata/files/original/6/3305/MOZ_145.1.pdf]
Emma moved to London in the 1920s, by which time she was in her forties – perhaps she was encouraged by the fact that several of her siblings also lived in England. Her sister Laura lived with her husband Hornung at West Grinstead Park, West Sussex [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitt_Hornung     https://www.flickr.com/photos/44042852@N04/45026850294/in/photostream/] and her brother Arthur resided in London with his wife Eva Glas (nee Sandeman). In 1929, Emma invested £200 in Women’s Pioneer Housing and moved in to Flat 10 at 65 Harrington Gardens. Although she kept the flat on until her death in 1943, she spent much time in West Grinstead near her family. She died at Fullers Farm in West Grinstead on 15th August 1943, with 65 Harrington Gardens registered as her second address.

Charles and Elizabeth Buck were the caretakers for 65 Harrington Gardens, having moved in in 1932. By 1939 there were fifty-six properties owned by WPH and research from entries for every tenant reveals that about 40% of these premises had designated live-in caretakers at this time.  The description covered two main formats, as follows: 

 Female only caretakers: 13 

Husband and wife joint caretakers:  9 

Total properties covered: 22 

 Total WPH properties in 1939: 56 

% with either form of caretaker: 39% 

Surviving records show that WPH was slow to appoint caretakers, with married couples initially being allocated short-term tenancies with this responsibility attached.

The Bucks brought up their three children at 65 Harrington Gardens and remained there until 1962, a record total of 30 years!