The extraordinary history of the Foundling Hospital starts with Captain Thomas Coram, who had no children of his own, but who lobbied for the establishment of a home for the many abandoned children he saw inhabiting the streets on his daily walk from Rotherhithe to the City of London. He had spent many years living in Nova Scotia, where he made a moderate fortune as a shipbuilder before returning in 1719 to his native London with his American wife, and was incensed at the waste of life, having experienced American labour shortages. It took nearly 19 years for his efforts to finally bear fruit, but what a legacy and what a history. The building which housed the children in the nineteenth century is now demolished, but the 1937 building from which the orphanage was administered still exists today as a museum. The institution in its early days attracted the patronage of two of the most famous artistic names of the eighteenth century - the artist William Hogarth and Georg Frideric Handel, the composer, who performed his Messiah within its walls in order to raise funds.
An estate of 56 acres was purchased in Lamb's Conduit fields in 1739 and a building erected at which, it was announced, that at 8 o'clock on a designated evening in 1741, twenty children would be received who were not suffering from any contagious disease. The persons bringing them would not be asked any questions and each infant should bear a distinguishing token, so the child could be identified in the future. On this first night of reception, a group of young women approached the Hospital, weeping and carrying bundles which they placed in the appointed place, observed by the governors and the curious in dimmed light.
The hospital later developed a policy of accepting only illegitimate children on the personal application of the mother, for whom the child was a firstborn child and under the age of twelve months. The only legitimate children admitted were those of soldiers or sailors killed whilst in the service of the country. The mother could not be a widow and also had to satisfy the Hospital committee of her previous good character.
Once a child was admitted to the Hospital, a mother could have no further communication with her infant. The child was immediately baptised in the Hospital's chapel with a new name but the mother was never informed of this name. All she was given was a certificate containing the registered number of her infant which she could use to make inquiries. She could visit the Hospital and see all the children together, as could any member of the public, but even if she thought she recognised her own child, she was not permitted to speak to them apart from any of the other children or those in charge. No Thoroughfare (Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins, 1867) illustrates this situation through its "veiled lady" whose desperation to identify the child she left at the Hospital is poignantly portrayed as her sorrow leads her to accost and bribe a Hospital nurse into telling her the name given to her son and to return twelve years later to observe the children at dinner and persuade an attendant to identify the named child.*
By 1870, Hospital boys were being apprenticed to a trade at age 14 and girls went to work as domestic servants once they turned 15. The Hospital was responsible for the children until they turned 21 and invited those apprenticed to visit the Hospital once a year at Easter when, if their employer's reports were favourable, they were awarded a sum of money. Some of the old 'foundlings' still visited their old home in Lamb's Conduit fields even after forty or fifty years of work and consulted the secretary in relation to the best investment for their savings.
The Hospital is also notable historically as a meeting place of painters, due to Hogarth having the enlightened idea of persuading artists to donate paintings as a fundraising measure. Meetings were then held which attracted wealthy, polite society who made donations for the upkeep of the children. As there were no art galleries or museums in London at the time, British artists were able to exhibit their work in public for the first time and gain exposure. These meetings led directly to the foundation of the Royal Academy of Artists by Sir Joshua Reynolds (who also exhibited at the Hospital) in 1768.
Handel, who in 1749 offered a performance of vocal instrumental music to raise funds for the completion of the Hospital chapel, was also instrumental in expanding and maintaining it as a building and institution. He conducted the first of many performances of his Messiah in the chapel in 1750 and later became a governor. He also gave annual benefit concerts until his death in 1759. A strong musical tradition was thus begun at the Hospital where the boys were taught to play musical instruments so they could participate in the Hospital's orchestral performances. These skills then led to interest in recruitment by the Royal Navy.
Fortunate were the children accepted as 'foundlings.' The Hospital, from its founding years, was progressive in its medical care for its children, often engaging the services of prestigious physicians and medical professionals who gave their services free of charge. Smallpox inoculation was mandatory for all children admitted after 1743 and contributed to the survival of its infants from the smallpox scourges which prevailed in London throughout the nineteenth century. My grandmother was indeed lucky to have come to live in such a place of care and innovation rather than a workhouse where disease and contagion were rife. At the time, it was the most her unmarried mother could have done for her, but definitely the best choice, although it must have been a heartbreaking one. By 1891, it was a self-contained subculture of society which had, according to the census records of that year, Thomas Bassett as school steward, a head schoolmaster, an assistant schoolmaster, a drill master, a housekeeper, four school mistresses, two sewing mistresses, a trained nurse, a needlewoman and twelve domestic servants, three of whom doubled as kitchen maids and a housemaid and one of whom was a cook. The domestic servants were also described as "nurses for children," reflecting the fact that a large proportion of the female working population aged from 16 upwards in the United Kingdom at this time were employed to look after young children.
Despite its dining room being used by Dickens as the model for the "Please sir, I want some more" scene in Oliver Twist, the Hospital was an innovation, particularly as it accommodated the babies of "fallen women"; those who had given birth to illegitimate babies and for whom there was no thought of keeping their child unless they had family to whom they could turn. As many of these women were from poor backgrounds, their families did not have the capacity to take them in and these children usually ended up living on the streets and turning to crime to support themselves. The Foundling Hospital was a tremendously important contribution to social change.
Pictured is the staircase formerly in the Boys' quarters of the Hospital, removed to the building which now houses the Foundling Museum.
Source: The Terrible Sights of London & Labours of Love in the midst of them by Thomas Archer (Author of Strange Work and The Pauper, the Thief & the Convict) London, Stanley Rivers & Co. 1870, reproduced at www.victorianlondon.org
*A link to this story is here: http://www.victorianlondon.org/health/foundlinghospital.htm
The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, St.Pancras, London WC1N 1AZ
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www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk
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Knowing now that my grandmother spent her childhood in an orphanage during the Victorian era, my mind was immediately filled with images of the institution in which Oliver Twist had the misfortune to find himself in Charles Dickens's novel of the same name. A cold, bleak, grim place where the main diet was gruel, strictly rationed. My research found that before an orphan or "pauper child" arrived at an actual orphanage or "workhouse" they were sent to a privately run "baby farm." This was a requirement set out in Jonas Hanway's Act of 1767; all pauper children under the age of six from London parishes were to be sent to the countryside at least three miles from London or Westminster. Poor relief was administered by English parishes until 1834 when the Poor Law Amendment Act was enacted and parishes were combined into "poor unions." Hanway's Act survived and the new unions continued to send their children to privately run baby farms.
Dickens's Oliver Twist was born in a workhouse to a mother who had been taken there after she was found lying in the street, heavily pregnant. She had evidently walked some distance and no-one knew her, where she was from or to where she was going. His mother having died almost immediately after giving birth, Oliver was 'farmed' until, at the age of nine, he was sent to a workhouse to be schooled and taught a trade. After having the temerity however to ask the formidable Mr Bumble for a second bowl of gruel, he was immediately put up for sale - "a bill was pasted on the outside of the gate offering a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the hands of the parish. In other words, five pounds and Oliver Twist were offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade, business or calling." (Chapter II, Oliver Twist, first published 1839)
Once children entered a workhouse, they were given schooling for at least three hours a day in reading, writing, arithmetic, religion, history and geography for boys, needlework, knitting and domestic employment for girls. Such were the areas of instruction at St.Marylebone's Workhouse in the 1840s, a workhouse school where it appears orphans were lucky in the schooling they received as some in authority had questioned whether such children even needed to be taught to read and write. The Poor Law Amendment Act included the principle of "less eligibility" which, it was argued, allowed workhouse children to receive an education of lower quality than that given to children of modest means who lived in the community.
Jonas Hanway, when he formulated the concept of babies being nursed before they entered an orphanage or workhouse, was a governor of the Foundling Hospital, an orphanage at St.Pancras which received babies born to mothers who were unmarried and unable to provide for them and the one which admitted the infant "Edith Irwin". Edith, perhaps feeling the stigma of being brought up in an orphanage, promoted in Australia the story that she had lived with "an aunt" when she was a child. This "aunt" however, may simply have been the woman to whom she was sent to live before entering the Foundling Hospital, where she was living at the time of the 1891 census, aged nine, with 99 other girls aged from eight to 14.
As can be seen from Oliver's experience at Mr Bumble's workhouse school, discipline was harsh at such places and children were treated as if they were chattels and fodder for the workforce. A strict routine was enforced in whichever institution children without parents lived; the Foundling Hospital being no exception. It provided security, but the children were largely isolated and were often left unprepared for the world outside. But, all things considered, my grandmother was fortunate to have entered this place of residence as an infant. The Foundling Hospital, which still exists to this day as a museum, was a more benevolent institution than the grim and spare parish workhouses in which many children lived and worked until they were deemed old enough to leave and earn a meagre living with the basic skills taught to them in accordance with their lowly station in life. It was in fact "the first, vitally important step towards society's recognition of its responsibility to care for all children"* and its social aims survive and exist today in the form of Coram, the UK's first-ever children's charity.
Sources: www.workhouses.org.uk
London Metropolitan Archives (www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/lma)
*Exhibition note from The Foundling Hospital Museum display
www.coram.org.uk
There had always been myth surrounding my maternal grandmother; born in London, she arrived in Sydney in 1910 and worked as a governess before marrying a stockman and settling on a property near Warialda in northern New South Wales, or so the family legend held. She died in 1955, before I was born, so I never knew her - only of her reputation as a rather formidable, matriachal woman who eventually left her husband and moved their two children to the nearby town of Inverell so they could attend high school. Always puzzled by her ownership of a 1900 edition of Mrs Beeton's Household Management (now passed to me), as it was not clear why a governess would need to refer to such a publication in her occupation, this mystery was finally cleared after I searched the online 1901 UK census records and found "Edith Irwin," aged 19, living in a residence in Streatham, London where she was listed as "Cook, downstairs."
My interest piqued, I searched the 1891 census records, but to no avail; there was no record of her at all. My mother then gave me the clue, shortly before she died, that unlocked Edith's origins - she was an orphan "who lived with an aunt." No "aunt" was located by me, but when I typed the word "orphanage" into the search engine, presto! There she was - a resident of the St Pancras Foundling Hospital, along with many other girls aged from eight to 14.
I had found her, but needed to know more - what was life like for a young orphan girl in late Victorian London? When and how did she arrive at the Foundling Hospital? And were there any records relating to her parents - whose names she knew, as they appeared on her marriage certificate. The items I have inherited from her - an exquisite crystal perfume bottle with an elaborate silver cap, a silver dressing table set with a glorious design of cherubs and angels had always fascinated me; she was clearly a woman who loved beauty. The fact she had been born into a situation where she sat on the bottom rung of society in London, yet manage to acquire items of beauty, apparent self-sufficiency and self-reliance only made me more curious and determined to discover more about her and the eras in which she lived - the late Victorian and the Edwardian, the end of which coincided with her embarking upon the ship which would bring her to her new home (and a new era) in Australia.
My hunger leads me to commence a fabulous journey of discovery into the period of my grandmother's life which coincides with the elegant and glittering fin de siecle, together with the social, cultural and culinary aspects of daily life. Please read on...
