In walking through the park just north of Bethnal Green tube station, I was surprised to see a gothic revival chapel attached to one of the pair of fine 1680s houses, which turns out to have been the Institute of Community Studies founded by Michael Young and is currently for sale:-
There is a very unexpected inscription attached to the chapel:-
It turns out that Wyndham Deedes, having fought in the Boer War and at Gallipoli, and serving as Chief Secretary to the British High Commissioner in Palestine, devoted himself to unpaid social work in East London, opening a bookshop, translating Turkish novels into English, eating only a biscuit for lunch, and a labour member for Bethnal Green on the London County Council, retiring to Hythe where he had sold Saltwood Castle to live in a one-room bedsit.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Fromkin’s book (A peace to end all peace) adds something to Deedes biography for 1914.
It would be interesting to learn more about his record as a Labour councillor.
He strikes me as being one of many ‘servants of empire’ who were social outliers and whose insights as such might tell us more about British history than convention usually requires.