Hunterian Museum

Draft transcript: The Story of London’s Foundling Hospital, Tuesday 5 April 2016

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HAYLEY: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's lunchtime lecture for the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. Those of you who regularly attend the lectures will know that Dr Sam Alberti always starts with the words with "Hello, my name is Sam and I work here." He no longer works here, so hello, my name is Hayley and I work here. For today's lunchtime lecture I'm very pleased to welcome Alison Duke, Collections Manager at the Foundling Museum, a position she has held for the past 12 years. She was previously at the Tate. If you google "Alison Duke, Foundling Museum" she's all over the project Foundling Voices, about people whose lives were associated with the Foundling Hospital. A fascinating piece of work and worth looking up. You might ask what the connection is between the Foundling Hospital and this particular institution. I'm sure this will become more clear during the afternoon. But one of the things that we do have in common is we form part of a group called Museum Mile, 13 small museums and some large in fact within roughly a mile radius of each other; we have put the maps on the chair. Not only can you find the Foundling Museum but the other museums in that grouping. Without more ado I pass over to Alison.

ALISON: Thank you very much and thank you for coming today. It is nice to be invited to come here. As you heard I'm Alison Duke, the Collections Manager at the Foundling Museum, I'm sure many of you have visited the museum, those of you who haven't we have a short walk away in Brunswick Square. The museum tells the story of the Foundling Hospital which was the first sort of home for abandoned children in this country. The slide I'm showing here is 1756 print by Benjamin Cole, the building stood in the part of Bloomsbury in what is now Coram Fields, and it was surrounded by the Foundling Hospital estate, which was 56 acres of land. So our story starts at the beginning of the 18th century in London. At that time it was a city that was the centre for Trade and Industry and at the heart of the beginning of a growing urbanisation of the country. This was largely fuelled by rural migration. It was a city of disease and poverty; those rural migrants away from their communities and support network, they could easily fall into destitution and crime if they failed to make a success of life in the city. This particular slide will be familiar to you. It is William Hogarth's Gin Lane, and it is his take on 18th century London and in particular highlighting the problems that the gin craze had caused. So, this is a painting of Thomas Coram. He is the founder of the hospital. Thomas Coram was not a particularly wealthy or influential man. He was born in Lyme Regis and his mother died at an early age, at which point he was sent to sea. He eventually made a trade of being a shipbuilder and spent much of his working life in the then American colonies, just outside of Boston in a small community called Taunton. He married an American woman and after having made a reasonable success of his time in America came back to London to semiretirement. As he walked around London he came across children and babies who had been abandoned on the streets. For Coram, this was a real sense of not only a waste of life, but a waste of a resource. He had been working in the colonies, he was aware of the need for young, healthy individuals to go out and settle the colonies and to make a success of them. So he set about campaigning for a home for these children. Coram was an exceedingly tenacious man, which he needed to be, because it took him 17 years of campaigning. This was largely to do with the fact that an institution like a Foundling Hospital was seen as something that would encourage more immorality other than actually be of benefit to society. Foundling Hospitals had been, you know, quite common on the continent, and had begun right through to the 14th and 15th century. They came to this country very late. Eventually, after he went around and walked the streets of London and went to visit various individuals who he thought might support his project, he succeeded in getting permission. This is an object that we have on display in the museum. It is Thomas Coram's pocket book. He basically notes all the people that he went to see and whether they gave him support. This one starts with the Duke of Richmond. This is the Royal Charter - apologies for the image because it actually cuts off the royal seal at the very bottom! - but you can come and see this at the museum. So this was signed by George II in 1739. It led to the creation of an institution that would help them. They held their first meeting of their governors in a pub near Somerset House, and then they took in the first children in Hatton Gardens, so also not far from here on the 17th March 1751. And it was a building they rented in order to do this. The children came in as young babies, they would have their name changed, so they would be baptised in the hospital. The reason for changing their names is the governors had told the mothers they would remain anonymous, this would enable her to start a new life and start afresh without having the possibility that her past life would come back to haunt her. Right from the very, very first day, when they only took in 30 children, there was huge pressure for places. And they had to devise systems of how they would choose which children were successful and which weren't. This print represents one form of that, which is the balloting system. So the women would come into the hospital and they would take a ball out of a cloth bag and if they received a white ball then their babies would then have a medical exam to make sure it was healthy, and if it passed the medical exam the child would be accepted. If she picked out a black ball, she would then have to just take her child away and the child would not be accepted. There were also some red ball, which if the woman chose a red ball she was a "just in case", so if one of the white balance babies failed the medical her child would then go through to the medical examination. This isn't actually the origins of blackballing, which started in gentleman's clubs but it takes on similarities. This system lasted from 1742‑1755 at which point the hospital was trying to respond to the huge demand for places and it approached the Government for a financial grant. And the Government agreed to give £10,000, but it came with a condition and the condition was that they had to accept every single child admitted to the hospital. This led to an onslaught of numbers of children and from all round the country as well. There were individual who is were paid to transport children down to London, known as Coram men, some of them appear to be a bit unscrupulous. If any of you have either read Jamila Gavin's book Coram Boy or seen the National Theatre production, she has taken an example of one of these transporters in that story. In order to cope with this huge onslaught they actually introduced the idea of a basket, so the woman could come up and put the child in a basket at the gate and then ring for the porter and the porter would come and collect the child. This slide is actually of the Paris Foundling Hospital, which actually had a turning wheel where the baby could be pushed round inside the building; the London Hospital never had one of these. For General Reception they had to open up branch hospitals, these hospitals ranged from Ackworth in Yorkshire, through to a small home in Barnet, north of London, at the time through to Chester, I'm trying to think of the others, I should have written them all down. There were six in total. For the period that General Reception lasted, which continued through to 1760, they had the onslaught of 15,000 children during this time period. The hospital was always very keen on record-keeping and this was partly because they promised the woman that she would always retain the right to come back and request to claim her child. The governors didn't always accept these claims, they really wanted to make sure that she was in a position to look after her child again. But in order to do so they then had to keep accurate records and ensure that they could trace a child which they had changed the name of. So each child would have a billet, and this is an example of one of these, it is the admission document and so it would give the basic details of the child, the sex, their approximate age, it might have any identifying marks. Then there would also be this printed clothing list where they would write notes or mark what clothes and what objects the child had come in with. It would also include the number that the hospital gave to each child. I can't actually read what this one is because it is a scribble, but it is a very, very early child, because it has actually got Hatton Garden printed at the top, so it dates from that very early stage of 1741 or 2 there, interesting, an interesting thing. Then what would happen is this billet would be kind of folded up and kept in the records and so if the mother came back she would say I brought a male child on this date and they would then go through the records until they found that. They also used another form to identify the child which is the Foundling Hospital tokens as they are known. The mother was encouraged to bring an object with her that would act as a means to identify the child. And so this object token would be wrapped up in the billet and so it would help when they then unwrapped them that she would be able to find them. In the 19th century the billets were actually opened up and some of the tokens that were inside them were put on display. They were bound in books, which is how they now are seen in the archive. You can see on this particular one it has got a piece of paper and also a piece of fabric, there are over 5,000 pieces of fabric in the Foundling Hospital archive collection. They range from embroidered pieces, simple ribbons and pieces cut from the child's clothing and they frequently would cut a piece from the clothing. They would put two pieces so the mother would be given a matching piece. They are also a resource in terms of for research because they are unique, you think about 18th century textiles and what survived, it is very much kind of sort of royal outfits, aristocracy
et cetera, these 5,000 pieces of working‑class fabric are there. There were also quite a lot of paper‑based ones, and they would often note as this one, you probably can't see t that the child has been christened. They would sometimes come from the parish where the mother was and it would be signed by parish officials, noting that you know the circumstances of the child's birth and the fact that the child had been christened. Some of them contained notes written by the mother or a proxy which would express her hopes for the future, the possibility of her child having a good life, the possibility of her being able to return to reclaim her child. Some of them are little poems, but some of the more moving ones are in poor handwriting and just the child's name. This particular billet has three tokens on it, so it has the note, the yellow ribbon and also a playing card. And playing cards are quite common within the collection of Foundling Hospital tokens. In the 18th century the back of playing cards were kept blank and people would often write their contact details and they were a precursor to a visiting card. Because they were blank notes would be written on the back of them. They often acted as the paper‑based note. In addition to the things that we have just seen, actually pinned to the billet pages, there were also some hard objects, mainly coins, medals, some more everyday items. We have a squashed thimble and a pot of rouge. These items couldn't be pinned to the documents when they were bound in books so they were actually separated away from the billet that identified the child, which meant that a lot of these we actually don't know which child they represent. But you can see, there are about 300 of them in the museum's collection and you can see over 200 of them on display in the museum. The mothers were very much aware that they should bring an identifying object with them. So this one has actually been engraved with its purpose. "This is a token" quite a few in order to make them identifiable were personalised in some way, this one it is possibly the initials of the mother, the "EB" not entirely sure. They were also a way that mothers recorded, as well as the notes, their emotional attachment to the child. Some of them also had initials of the parents and the child's date of birth. Some of them were very much handmade like this rather lovely red heart which has been embroidered here. It has also got pinned to the back a scrap of paper which has the child's name on it or the name that the mother had given the child as opposed to the child's new name. Another method of ensuring that the object would be identified is to kind of clip or cut the coin, coin clipping was actually against the law, but in this case this penny has been clipped and the actual billet that it came with described it as being, the child came with a notched coin and so we have actually been able to match this particular token back up with the child. As far as we know John Hunter had no involvement with the hospital, however I do have a story connecting his brother, William, and so from 1756 children could be left on a no questions asked basis if accompanied with £100. It was a huge amount of money and from 1756 when it started until 1801 when it finished only 75 children came in this way. If you are thinking about this it includes that period of General Reception where 15,000 came in you get a sense of the scale. William Hunter is believed to have told a story of being approached for help by a famous peer's daughter, who had become pregnant. He first suggests she goes to a friend's house to give birth in secret, but the woman tells him that her father won't let her out of his sight. I fear it is rather too late for that! He then goes on to say that if she can give birth in total silence with the help of a couple of trusted servants he will offer to deliver the child to the Foundling Hospital with the £100 donation. The woman actually gives birth to twins that Hunter accordingly does deliver them to the hospital and so what's the evidence for this? There is only one set of twins who were delivered with £100. Each of them came with a playing card noting the child's name. One George, one Joseph. Both had the name Hunter written on them. This is the one for George, several of the £100 children actually kept their own name and this is the case for these two children. Sadly Joseph died of a fever while at the hospital, but George is a bit luckier and he survives to be apprenticed out to a coffee man called John Silk. That is the Hunter connection. So I spoke about the children being baptised when they came into the hospital, they were then sent out to nurse, wet nursing if the child was still young enough and required that. This was due to economic reasons for the hospital. It was just more practical for them to send the children out to families where the woman could look after them rather than have schools of women inside the hospital caring for the children. They largely went out to agricultural communities mainly in Kent, Essex and Surrey, but also Berkshire. This woman looks rather serious and scary but I suspect it was just because she was having to sit so still for the photograph. The hospital had a group of inspectors who were responsible for recruiting, paying and checking up on the nurses. So after they had spent some time in a kind of family life they would then return at the age of about five to a much more institutional life. This is the London Hospital with a group of the children lined up outside. You can hopefully just see the circle in the triangular roof, that is the clock, so just keep that in the back of your mind. And so their life at the hospital was much more regimented, the hours of the day were planned out, boys and girls were kept very separate, the day would include chapel service once a day and twice on Sundays. This is the only time girls and boys would be present in the same space together, they weren't allowed to mix. The children were given a basic education. It slightly changed over the time we are talking about because there were the various parliamentary acts that encouraged more education and the length of time that children should be in education and before they could go out to work. They also did get a bit of training via the work they did at the hospital, things like mending clothes, working in the gardens. And this was all designed to send them out into the world as useful citizens. And so they did that by apprenticing them out in their early teens. Most of the girls became domestic servants. Some apprenticed in dentures described the girls in wider household duties, which could be a wider range of duties if the household ran their business from home which was common at the time. Boys tended to have a wider range of named occupation - gardeners, wig makers, gardeners, butchers and a variety of metrical workers. Many were sent into the services. The Navy in the 18th century and the army by the 19th century. In the 19th century the hospital instituted a boys band and many of these boys went into army bands and forged successful careers there. The Foundling Hospital held a duty of care over the children until the age of 21 and so they would check up on them to make sure they were being well cared for and would at times actually remove the children from masters who had been mistreating them. This group of children in their uniforms gives you a little bit of a sense of the expected roles that they would go on to have. The girls do very much look like domestic servants and the boys' uniforms have a military feel to it. However, even though it was quite a regimented institutional life, there was some fun! I thought I would pop this photograph in and it is a sports day from 1899. There is also a very short piece of fantastic old film footage that goes along with it. By the early 20th century, London had changed. It had grown enormously and the Greenfield site that the hospital was built on had been developed. Also it had the industrial and railway area to the north at King's Cross. So in common with many other charitable institutions the governors decided to move out of London and they sold the Foundling Hospital estate. They went, first of all, to Redhill in Surrey to a temporary building and then to this purpose‑built site in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. The 20th century was great time of change for the hospital, not just because of the move, but it had also become apparent that the institution had not really changed from its origins in the Georgian period. The pattern of care I described earlier remained. Each child still had their name changed and they were fostered out and returned to the institutional life before being apprentices. Some changes started to develop in the 1920s and 30s, where a few of the called brighter girls being given the opportunity to attend the Camden School for Girls. There were also wider employment opportunities available and some girls were trained in secretarial skills and went on to work in offices. In addition, the hospital started a practice of sending the children out to camp every summer, which provided some freedom from their everyday restricted life. The main big change happened after World War II, the war itself was not a good time for the children at the institution. Many of the teachers were away at war, the practice of summer camps had ended and the children were kept isolated within the grounds to the point that there was concern among the towns people of Berkhamsted and the children were actually brought out to the fence so that the towns people could actually see that the children were still there and were being looked after. During this time a lot of the institutional issues of bullying that happened and because there weren't many able teachers quite often the care for the children remained among the older children which then led to this. Following the war the hospital began to end the pattern of institutional care and they kept children in foster care. The site was sold to the Local Education Authority and the last children left in 1954. This is now Ashlyne School and is a state secondary school. So that's the institutional practices. I want to talk a little bit more, some of the things we have in our collection these extraordinary artworks. So this is William Hogarth's March of the Guards to Finchley. Hogarth was central to the developing of the Foundling Hospital art collection. He saw the Foundling Hospital as not only an opportunity for artists to give something to a charitable institution, but a way that would benefit local artists. He said, look, at this point there were no public art galleries and so artists really couldn't promote their work in public spaces. But he felt like an institution like the Foundling Hospital would enable, would become very much a public place and people would come. He was also responsible for doing the coat of arms for the hospital and had a hand in designing the children's uniforms. He and his wife cared for some of the children during the fostering period. And the painting that I showed you earlier, this is again William Hogarth and it is the first work that entered the hospital collection and it is a stunning portrait of Thomas Coram. As I mentioned before, Coram was not a particularly established, influential individual but Hogarth gives him the stylistic method to show him that way. So he paints it in the grand manner style with the pillar and the drapery and the vista out to sea. It is also the various objects associated with Coram, the globe on the floor is turned to the Atlantic, showing Coram's spheres of interest. He's holding in his hand the seal for the Royal Charter which is on the desk next to him. This is the painter Allan Ramsay's response to Hogarth's portrait, the two artists were rivals. This is Dr Richard Mead, he's our key medical figure at the Foundling Hospital. He was an early governor and gave advice on the care of the children, the standards that they should think about. The hospital was extremely innovative when it came to the healthcare of the children. So for example unusually the children were not fed beer, probably largely to do with the fact that the hospital actually had a source of safe water on its grounds. But there were also things like the idea that the children shouldn't be kept in tight swaddling and he, Dr Mead, promoted the idea of inoculation against smallpox as a widespread practice throughout the hospital, they inoculated using the pre‑Jenner vaccine and then went on to use the Jenner one. You can see from this portrait that Richard Mead is a rather different individual to Thomas Coram. And then the hospital began to build its collection through the donation of works from other artists. It became somewhere where artists felt they should give a work to in order to be seen as part of the art scene at the time. This is Reynolds' painting, it is not a terribly good Reynolds, but, you know, if you have got a Reynolds in your collection you don't really complain about that! The collection also included the work of Benjamin West, the second President of the Royal Academy, his work replaced the first altar piece done by an artist called Andrea Casali. This is a growth of the artwork in the collection and it led to the artists becoming artist governors. So when they donated a piece of work they would then be appointed a governor. Every year they would have an annual dinner and it was discussions at these dinners that led to them needing a society of their own, so the Society of Artists grew out of the artists' meeting at the Foundling Hospital thank eventually led to the Royal Academy. This is a relief by Rysbrack, he was the second artist made a governor after William Hogarth. This rather nice sort of Dutch‑inspired round painting is by a very young artist, a young Thomas Gainsborough. I think it was designed for a particular room, which I will show you an image of in a moment, where the artists were actually invited to donate a work for the design of this room. I think it gives you a sense of Gainsborough's status and standing that even at the age of 21 he was considered that he should be invited to contribute. This is the room, you can't actually quite see the Gainsborough in this image, it is just to the right of the fireplace, which is where the Rysbrack is. This was very much designed as the place for the hospital's VIPs to come when they visited. It is also where the governors held their meetings. And the artists saw it as a place where they could really promote the work of British artists and show what they could do. And in this room artists included Francis Hayman, Joseph Highmore and the work of Thomas Gainsborough and others. It also included this fantastic ceiling which was created and donated by sculptor William Wilton. Other craftsman got involved, the cartouche on your left they were commissioned by Edward Eves, and they were incorporated into the chapel design. The clock was made by the famous clockmaker, John Ellicott, it is one of two we have in our collection. Ellicott also advised the hospital on that very large clock that I showed you in the front of the building. The final key creative figure involved was the composer George Frederic Handel. The bust is in our collection of Handel here. He approached the governors and offered a benefit performance much. It was phenomenally successful that he actually needed to repeat it the following week. Because they had a slight issue with people who didn't have tickets coming in. Handel went on to write the Foundling Hospital anthem and the score that you can see on the score is the one for the anthem. Handel went on to give a performance every single year for the benefit of the hospital, right through to when he died. It was during the second year's performance that he played Messiah at the Foundling Hospital. Messiah had first been performed in Dublin where it had been fairly successful and well received. However, when Handel brought it to London it didn't go down so well. This was probably because it includes religious texts, but it was being performed in very secular settings such as concert halls, theatres, et cetera. So it is really only when Handel brings it to the chapel of the Foundling Hospital for the benefit of a charitable organisation that it starts to take off. And it has become the sort of well‑known, loved piece we all associated with benefit performances. Handel also decides to continue to help the hospital and in his will he instruct that a copy of all the parts, so the musicians and the singers' parts of Messiah are copied out and delivered to the Foundling Hospital. This enables the hospital to go on continuing to give performances after his death. The museum today continues the tradition of working with artists who are engaged in social issues. And every two years we invite free creative individuals to become a fellow at the museum so there is a Coram, a Handel and Hogarth fellow. The piece on your left is Grayson Perry, who was one of our fellows and the piece on the right is by the artist David Shrigley, which he contributed to an exhibition that we had. We continue to have a programme of working with contemporary artists, our summer show will be an exhibition featuring around 60 contemporary artists and curated by Cornelia Parker, it is around the idea of ‘found’, artists contributing to the exhibition a piece on that. At the moment the exhibition is about drawing on childhood, which features illustrations of fictional characters who founds, orphaned and it starts with Tom Jones and goes through to Harry Potter. And then Hayley mentioned that I should let you know our opening hours, just to finish off, we are open six days a week from Tuesday through to Sunday and it is 10‑5 Tuesday to Saturday and 11‑5 on Sunday. I do hope that if you haven't visited the museum that you will take the opportunity to come and see us. (APPLAUSE) How did I do on timing, excellent. I think we do have some time for questions.

FLOOR: You said it finished in 1954 and I wonder whether any adults now who were in the Foundling Hospital at that time and whether people who were there formed some kind of club or society in those years?

ALISON: Excellent question. Hayley mentioned the Oral History Project. Incorporated within those individuals, we interviewed 76 former pupils, which is the term that we tend to use with individuals who are still alive. Because as you can imagine the term Foundling which comes with the stigma of illegitimacy can be difficult for people; some don't mind it. We interviewed those individuals, we suspect there are probably 400‑500 people still alive. And the oldest person is about 98, but there have been quite a few of them who made it over the 100 year mark, so they are obviously quite long lived, you know the harsh beginning in life made them hardy. It kept them going. So in 1948, so just while the institution was changing, they did decide to create an organisation so a sort of alumni group as it were, which is called The Old Coram Association. They come and they meet up three times a year at the museum where it is a great time for when they come and have a gossip and you learn so much about what happened to them at school. But it is definitely, you know, for quite a lot of them the connections they made while at the institution and their common history that binds them together has been very important to them. For many it is part of their extended family.

FLOOR: A classic talk, really interesting. I just want to ask do you think the children that ended up at the Foundling Hospital had a life better than the average working‑class child in the East End of London?

ALISON: It depends what time period you are talking about. So during the 18th century where largely the alternative would be the workhouse, in the 18th century I think it is something like 75% of children died generally before they reached the age of five; I think it is five and then in the workhouse that rises to 90% before their first birthday. So I think when you are talking about that time period you know clearly and also because they were given an apprenticeship that the hospital arranged they were then given the opportunity to support themselves. So I think I would argue that for the 18th and probably into the 19th century you know it was very much a clear benefit in terms of survival and their economic well‑being. Obviously they tended to miss out on the emotional care that families give to their children. I think during the 20th century as society was changing and the hospital was really struggling to keep up with that, a lot of the former pupils feel quite bitter in a sense about the fact that they weren't given the sort of care that other individuals were, and certainly for the girls who weren't given the opportunities for other trades, I think, you know things were, that idea of being a domestic servant at the time when that was becoming an occupation that less and less women were going into. It was probably a different one. A lot of them remain very happy though with their kind of background and what they were given. So I think it depends on the person as well.

FLOOR: In the early 18th century if they died what sort of burial did they have? Were they put in a pauper's grave?

ALISON: They were buried in a parish nearby, they were not buried on site at the Foundling Hospital. One thing to note is the huge majority of children who did die were actually in foster care because they were at their most vulnerable years from birth through to when they were five and then returned to the hospital. They would be buried locally in the parish churches. The hospital would pay for the burial.

FLOOR: I heard that other wealthy institutions, say for example Lincoln’s Inn in the 18th century, had babies abandoned with them. I wonder if there are any records of a liaison between such organisations and the Foundling Hospital, and to take the babies eventually, and were they funded from the richer institutions?

ALISON: Not that I'm aware of. I mean during obviously the period of General Reception where they had to take all the children, then the onus of the financial care was on the Foundling Hospital. Certainly kind of before that period and afterwards the mothers would actually be coming in person to apply and by the beginning of the 19th century the system it become very formalised and she would actually need to fill in a printed form which gave the details of you know her circumstances and what had happened to her and this is when the hospital was kind of tightening up its admissions criteria, so it needed some way of being able to judge between the different cases. But the institution was trying to financially support itself through donations and as far as I'm aware they tended not to take, you know, if someone didn't fit the criteria they would then actually be sent to the workhouse?

FLOOR: You mentioned Barnet in North London, that was a peripheral or satellite branch of the family hospital? Apart from the fact that there was a well‑established workhouse there, where would they have gone in Barnet?

ALISON: It was a small house of which we are still not 100% certain of its actual site. And I think it is actually in is it Barnet Magen, I think? It was a home that cared for I think only about 30 children and it was run by a local woman called Mrs Prudence West who I think was reasonably wealthy and a landowner and she had sourced this house that would care for the children there. And the Barnet Hospital only lasted a few years during the period of General Reception. The location is still not certain. There is somebody who is a volunteer of the museum who is a local resident in Barnet who has taken it on herself to find out and she thinks she's very close.

FLOOR: You mentioned about the mothers, the possibilities of mothers reclaiming their children, do you know how often that happened?

ALISON: It seems to have been very rare, this idea of mothers being able to reclaim their child. In most cases it seems like she was never actually in the position to do so. In some cases the hospital did not feel like her circumstances had changed to the point where it was suitable for her to actually take back the care and in some case, so sadly they would go through this thing where she would make a claim and the hospital would check her out and then they would go to the billets and they would open them up, find the child's billet, find the number and then they would discover that sadly the child had actually died which must have been completely distressing and heart rending for the poor mother having gone through all of that. It changes slightly over the period there, in less than 1%.

FLOOR: Was there ever a circumstance where one of the nurses had given birth and gave their baby to one of the Foundling Hospitals and then looked after them.

ALISON: Not that we were aware of, but if the hospital had discovered that was the chase they would have fired the woman employed. There is the influence of the Jacqueline Wilson’s Hetty Feather series of books which the audience may be a little too old for. Jacqueline Wilson was another of our fellows; she wrote a book and now a series of books about a Victorian Foundling and Hetty's birth mother actually gets a job at the Foundling Hospital so that she could meet Hetty, in reality the hospital would not have allowed that to have happened had they have known, it would have been incredibly difficult for the mother to have really identified her child among the many hundreds.

FLOOR: I think you mentioned that England was one of the last countries to establish the concept of a Foundling Hospital, and in the early 14th and 15th century they were in the other European countries, any reason for that?

ALISON: I think it was the focus of what the Foundling Hospital was about. Largely on the continent they were run by the Catholic Church so there was this concept of, I think, the redemption of the mother through this, whereas I mean the London hospital also had that sense of allowing the mother to kind of reclaim and start afresh. But this is a different focus, for the Catholic Church it was less of an issue and the idea that a society here and in this country felt that it would encourage more illegitimate children which was the battle that Coram had to convince people. I don't think it is entirely clear but the first one started in Italy, so they seem to have begun in very much Catholic countries. And I mean they spread right around the world so there are actually some in South America; we are all putting our hands up for that research trip!

HAYLEY: OK. Right well, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank Alison very much for coming over and giving us this fascinating insight into a really amazing, not only amazing collection but amazing institution with such a wonderful history. I was lucky enough to see the tokens exhibition, and it is not often you see an exhibition that brings a lump in your throat. I would commend this collection to anyone who has the time to do the very short walk from here to Brunswick Square. Alison, thank you very much indeed. (APPLAUSE).

If you have enjoyed this lunchtime talk, please do come to the next lunchtime talk. Mention was made of Jenner and pre‑Jenner vaccination, our next lunchtime talk is on the 17th of May and looking at the life and work of Edward Jenner as part of the forthcoming vaccination exhibition. On your chairs are Museum Mile maps so you can follow up and the usual evaluation forms. We know you have filled them in before but we love your opinions, please complete them again. Thank you for coming.

Lynn Jackson

2016-04-22

Kruger, Hayley

Hewlett-Packard Company