Foundling Stories - Stacey Halls and Rose Tremain by Judith Allnatt

In 1747, in a fine room at the splendid buildings of London’s Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright holds her one-day-old baby girl. Alongside other mothers, Bess draws a ball from a bag in a lottery held to decide who will win a place for their child as a pupil. This game of chance is played out under the eyes of invited benefactors, wealthy ladies and gents, who witness the show of human drama. Thus starts ‘The Foundling’ by Stacey Halls. 

In 1850, a baby, wrapped in sacking is abandoned at the gates of a wintry park in London where she is scented by wolves from the Essex marshes. She is found by a policeman, who hears the wolves’ howling and takes her to the Foundling Hospital. Thus begins ‘Lily’ by Rose Tremain. 

A separated family is a powerful engine to drive a story and perhaps the most poignant separation of all is that of a mother and baby. Stories of ‘foundlings’, babies found abandoned by parents or handed over in desperation to foundling hospitals, start with this heart-breaking premise and immediately fire the reader with a strong desire to see parent and child reunited. For me, this desire would probably be enough on its own to keep me reading but the two books above offer so much more in their examining of the relationships of adults caught up in the drama.

Receiving day at the Foundling Hospital. Wellcome Images

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fgqknntr

In ‘The Foundling’ poverty and the shame of illegitimacy force Bess to give up her baby, Clara. Like other brokenhearted mothers, as well as leaving the baby’s name and details at the hospital she leaves a token to identify her – half of a heart made of whalebone given to her by the baby’s father. All kinds of things were used as such tokens: slips of paper, embroidered ribbons, rings and pierced coins. Then if the mother were able to drag herself out of poverty and also save enough to pay a fee to the hospital for the child’s upkeep (a difficult feat), even when the hospital had given the child a new name they could be sure of reclaiming the right child by describing the token they left with them. 

Token on Marchmont Street, Author: Matt BrownNo changes made https://www.flickr.com/photos/londonmatt/53413014277/

                                  

The story takes a leap and the stakes are raised when Bess, after six years of scrimping, returns to claim her child only to find that a stranger has claimed her the very day after Bess had placed Clara in the hospital’s care. Avoiding spoilers - the exploration of what it is to be a mother deepens as the two women are brought up against each other. The genius of the book for me is the way in which Stacey Halls balances the representation of the needs of the two women so that despite the reader’s natural urge to see mother and daughter reunited there is also feeling for the damaged woman who has claimed Clara. This creates powerful dramatic tension and pulls the reader’s emotions in different directions, resulting in a gripping read that one can’t put down.

The Foundling Restored To Its Mother 1858 painting by Emma Brownlow
  1858. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

In 'Lily', subtitled ‘A Tale of Revenge’, Rose Tremain writes of poverty, cruelty and crime in Victorian London. The infant Lily is first placed in a loving foster family but is then wrenched away and returned to hardship as a pauper at the hospital. Now, as an adult, Lily has committed a murder and lives in fear of discovery. Tremain holds back the nature of the murder and the identity of the victim, masterfully managing the dramatic tension and creating a mystery that kept me turning the pages into the night.
However, the truly fascinating thing for me was the relationship between Lily and the policeman who rescued her as a baby. She feels he may hold the key to her salvation but she dare not confess to him for fear of the rope.

Tremain writes with all her usual subtlety and feeling, imbuing everyday objects with the emotional charge they hold for her characters so that they become powerful symbols of love and loss: a scarf that Lily knits for her only friend at the hospital, a deep, black well at the farm where Lily was happily fostered that comes to symbolise her worst fear of discovery and execution.

One of Tremain’s great strengths is that she looks unflinchingly at human darkness whilst still maintaining a feeling of authorial empathy and understanding. This novel moved me to tears – it is heartrending, compassionate and brilliant.

To find out more about the fascinating history of the Foundling Hospital and see examples of the tokens left by parents, do visit https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk

THE FALLEN WOMAN by Eleanor Updale

Today, a new exhibition opens at the Foundling Museum in London.

Frederick Walker, The Lost Path, 1863 © The Makins Collection

With a special emphasis on Victorian times, it is an exploration of society's attitude to, and depiction of, women who were caught straying outside the conventional bounds of sexual behaviour: caught so often because their pregnant bellies or fatherless babes told the tale of what they had been up to.

Thanks to a habit of donation started by William Hogarth (one of its original benefactors) the Foundling Hospital became the first public art gallery in the UK, so it is appropriate that this exhibition is illustrated with paintings by some of the most celebrated artists of the period it discusses. They include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Frederic Watts, and those whose work is shown on this page.  Using art, music, newspaper reports, artefacts and records from the Foundling Hospital archives - and with reference to fictional, as well as real unmarried mothers of the time - the exhibition describes their plight.  They were likely to be rejected by their families, unable to find work or other support, and to face the prospect of the workhouse and an early death for themselves and their children.

Richard Redgrave, R.A., The Outcast, 1851 © Royal Academy of Arts, London, 

photograph by John Hammond

The hypocrisy of blaming everything on the woman was not lost on the painters or on many social commentators of the time. Yet the artists weren't just pointing out double standards in a society where male sexual incontinence was accepted, or even condoned. There was also an element of salaciousness in some of the visual warnings about the distress dishonour could bring. To depict the women was also to invite speculation about what they had done, how, and with whom.

The museum, on the site of the original Foundling Hospital, is an ideal location for such an exhibition.  The curator, Professor Lynda Nead, examines much more than the plight of 'Foundling' mothers, but they, of course, are at the heart of the display.

Henry Nelson O’Neil, A Mother Depositing Her Child at the Foundling

Hospital in Paris (detail), 1855 © The Foundling Museum

The exhibition takes us through the emotionally searing process by which a mother might secure her child's admission to the Hospital.  First there was a trip to the porter's lodge to collect an application form. The porter kept a notebook in which he assessed each woman's appearance. His emphasis was on a quality that hangs over the entire exhibition: respectability. By the mid nineteenth century, almost 100 years into its existence, the Foundling Hospital had abandoned its original 'first come first served' policy, and an experiment with random balloting. The Hospital authorities shifted their attention from the children to the mothers, and the women they were most willing to help were those who, to their minds, carried the least 'guilt' and showed the best potential for rehabilitation.
 It was not only the babies who were to be 'saved'.


Although there can be no doubt that many of the children were the result of consensual intimacy, and others of exploitative relationships or even rape, the story that the then governors of the hospital wanted to hear was of the 'fallen' woman. She had strayed or allowed herself to be seduced, and for her child to be worthy of rescue from the harsh life a single parent could offer, she must show shame and regret.
For that reason, each applicant had to write a petition, recounting the circumstances that had led to the birth, and pleading for her child's acceptance. The exhibition includes a sound installation by the musician Steve Lewinson, drawing on the archives with the aim of bringing the petitioners' voices to life.
Of course, women came to know of the requirements for entry, and their petitions were crafted accordingly. It's important to exercise a certain amount of caution before assuming that they convey a completely accurate picture of lifestyles or circumstances.
 To be successful in finding care for her child, a woman had to show that this was her first 'mistake' (an assertion that might be supported by anatomical evidence from a midwife). She had to construct a narrative that suggested she had been led astray, and possibly that her very innocence had made her vulnerable to manipulation.
All this was put to the test at an interview. It was a process that needed deliberate preparation, and possibly assistance from someone who could help with writing the petition, or supply clothes for the public appearance. There's a grotesque parallel with some of the contortions modern day aspirational parents put themselves though for the sake of their children's education, but I won't go into that here.

Emma Brownlow, The Foundling Restored to its Mother, 1858  ©Coram in the care of the FoundlingMuseum

The interviews probably took place in one of the rooms depicted in a painting on display in the exhibition.
 In the background you can see some of the donated pictures which made the Foundling Hospital such a successful visitor attraction. The room itself was saved when the original Foundling Hospital was demolished between the Wars, and was reconstructed in the 1930s building that is now the Museum.

I have written a little here before about my father's experiences in the Foundling Hospital. He spent his entire childhood there, just after the period examined in this exhibition, having been admitted as a baby in 1913.  After he died - unaware of his origins - in the mid 1970s, the law was changed, and in 1985 I was told something of his back story. The narrative was identical to so many in the exhibition. A young woman was promised marriage, tricked into anticipating the vows, and then abandoned. Her petition told how her fiancé had fled to America, leaving her alone.
I know now, after some research, that the man was in London throughout. It must have been necessary for my grandmother to make up that part of the story to paint herself as the right kind of victim.

It intrigues me that, more than a century on from the period covered by this exhibition, the the person in charge of the Foundling Hospital archives felt it necessary, when giving me the 'facts', to stress that my grandmother was 'respectable'.

This was written in 1985

Why should it have mattered? After all, who could be more deserving of public or philanthropic support than the innocent child of truly dissolute parents?  At first sight, the Victorian obsession with worthiness seems ridiculous, or at least rather quaint. But do we persist today in penalising the children of those we regard as 'undeserving'?  Why is it that we find ourselves able to accept a care system so bad that its 'beneficiaries' often leave 'care' woefully unprepared for adult life, and with few of the supports other children now expect well into their twenties? According to the Who Cares Trust, almost 40% of prisoners aged under 21 were in care as children. A quarter of young women leaving care are pregnant or already mothers, and only 13.2% of children in care obtain five good GCSEs - compared with 57.9% of all children.*
 Are we so relaxed about consigning those children to a bleak future because we think it's all they deserve?  Do we see it as the inevitable consequence of the inadequacies of their parents? Are we in any position to sneer at the Victorian moralists, or to set ourselves up as so very different from them?

We may scoff at the Victorian obsession with 'respectability'.  It may seem to have been an odd criterion for rationing places in an orphanage, and I know that many of the children raised in the Foundling Hospital were not allowed to forget their mothers' sins.  But for all the shortcomings of the institution, the lucky children whose mothers passed the entrance test were given the tools to forge a future and to raise families of their own. I know now that my grandmother went on to marry and to have 'legitimate' children.  I have no idea whether she ever told them of her past.  She can never have known what happened to her son, whose name was changed on the day she gave him away. I'm grateful to live in an era when I am not expected to carry her 'shame' with me, but grateful too that she was spared the fate of so many fallen women and that, thanks to the Foundling Hospital, my family has survived and prospered ever since.
 At least, when she 'fell', somebody caught the baby.


George Cruikshank, A destitute girl throws herself from a bridge,
1848 © Wellcome Library,London

Here are details of the exhibition:

The Fallen Woman -
The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ
25th September 2015 - 3 January 2016
Open: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 - 17:00 and Sunday, 11:00 - 17:00. Monday closed.
Admission: £8.25 (including Gift Aid), concession £5.50 (including Gift Aid). Children, Foundling Friends and Art Fund members go free. Half-price admission for National Trust members.
Tube and train: Russell Square, King’s Cross St Pancras and Euston

http://foundlingmuseum.org.uk

* http://www.thewhocarestrust.org.uk/pages/the-statistics.html

www.eleanorupdale.com

MY CORAM CUP by Penny Dolan

 Ever since the National Theatre’s poignant production of  “Coram Boy”, based on Jamila Gavin’s novel for young people, I’ve longed to visit the Foundling Museum. Living in Yorkshire, my trips to London are usually filled with precious family events so it wasn’t until this summer, as part of a short burst of house-sitting, I was able to make the visit. 

Just me, myself.

Paul Theroux, talking about travel writing recently, said writers should always travel alone, except for their notebook. Although my expedition was not a great one, I recognised what he meant.

Well, what a remarkable August day it became! Having mislaid my pocket-sized A to Z ( a well-worn palimpsest of post-it notes and scribbled addresses) I had to decipher the poorly shown street names on my phone, in the dull light of a drizzly morning.

I stared around than usual. I strolled through several garden squares, nicely replanted to reveal their original 18^th Century designs and worried the work would be undone by austerity cuts. I enjoyed the Georgian architecture of the district more keenly than during visits when I’ve been wracked by publisher-meeting nerves.

Then just before noon, I bumbled in through the Foundling Museum’s door, all that's left from what was once the Foundling Hospital. 

I was immediately greeted and ticketed by a keen young thing. However, she also thrust a large round disc bearing the number 5 into my palm.  

Er, why? 
She repeated her explanation twice.

 Then her words connected with an item I’d partly glimpsed a day or two before on the Foundling Museum website: EXCHANGE. 

I had become “one of the ten randomly selected participants who can take home a piece of this constantly changing artwork today.” I had become involved with the work of the conceptual artist, Clare Twomey.

Clare had been invited by The Foundling Museum to create a piece of art inspired by the Museum. The Foundling Hospital, begun by Thomas Coram, used art to attract wealthy sponsors and it was this collection that began the Royal Academy.  Clare's interest, as I understand it, was in the human interactions within the story.

The intention was to provide a home for babies and children whose mothers were unable to care for them. There were only a limited number of places, and after the mother had been interviewed, the selected child was handed over and that was that.  

Mother. Child. Two things that should go together were separated.

From thoughts like those, Clare devised EXCHANGE, and this is how it worked for me. 

Outside the "gallery", like the mothers before the Board, I was told that I only had one chance. I was shown into a large basement room where 1,550 apparently identical white cups and saucers were arranged across five large tables. On the date of my visit, some were no longer pairs. just saucers.

 Mother. Child. Cup. Saucer. 

My task was to go round the room, choose one cup only, pick it up and read the good deed, printed within a blue or pink design, on the bottom. If I agreed to do the deed – interpreted in some way to suit my situation - then I could take the cup away with me. If not, I had to replace the cup in the saucer and walk away, like those mothers had to walk away.  

No second chance. No other option. What’s decided is decided.

I went around, reading all the now-empty saucers, their words identical to the promised deed on their missing cup. Then I studied the apparently identical pairs, rather as the wealthy sponsors might do, surveying the rows of identically uniformed foundling children or the list of petitions..

Afterwards – I was going to write “after the ceremony” because that is how it felt – all the participants who had chosen a cup queued up. We had our number and deed recorded in a log book. Unlike the Foundling Hospital children, whose names were changed on entry, we were able to write our own names and thoughts.

A few extra visitors had arrived, like tardy mothers. They stood around hopefully, asking if they could be part of the project.

“Not today”, they were told, as others had been in the past.   

Not selected. No second chance for you, my dear.

Meanwhile, my blue printed cup was swaddled tightly in paper and placed in a discreet brown paper bag. I brought my cup back home, eventually, to Yorkshire as a reminder to do my good deed when I could.

In case you are interested, my task was to “Use one day of annual holiday to volunteer for a charity.” Being self-employed and without fixed holidays, this task takes some re-thinking. What I take the "deed" to mean is “Go out and do something practical to help people for a day rather than just noodling, daydreaming or writing about it.” Suggestions welcome.

EXCHANGE as an event, closed on the 15th of September, but if you’d like to find out about EXCHANGE, or join in with the project by doing a good Coram deed yourself – sadly, without any cup as inspiration – you can find out about it by click this EXCHANGE or the one above. And if you haven't visited the Foundling Museum, do go!

Penny Dolan.

ps. As my children’s novel, A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E (Bloomsbury) included a homeless child needing shelter, the entire unplanned experience on a wandering sort of day felt highly serendipitous!

pps. Apologies! 

I've may have given this post a misleadingly alliterative title (MY CORAM CUP) because EXCHANGE was set up and curated by THE FOUNDLING MUSEUM

The CORAM FOUNDATION (now known as CORAM), which is a children’s charity, is not directly involved with arranging the curatorial programme at The Foundling Museum.

ANOTHER SIDE OF CHRISTMAS 1918 by Eleanor Updale

Merry Christmas! Today's the day.

I hope you haven't been driven here by a ghastly family argument or loneliness heightened by the propaganda of the season. As you can see, the History Girls never rest, and I have taken time off from basting the turkey to bring you today's reflections on the past.

Most families have long-established traditions for the big day, ranging from the pre-lunch walk to the endless game of Monopoly. My household is no exception, though for us, the pattern is newly formed. Our children lack living grandparents on both sides, and my own father had no history of family Christmases to pass on.
He was brought up in the Foundling Hospital: the great orphanage founded by the extraordinary 18th century philanthropist, Captain Thomas Coram.


Some of you may know the site,near King's Cross in London, where the original building stood. It is now known as Coram's Fields - a splendid play area where no adult is allowed unless accompanied by a child.

Balloting for admission to the Foundling Hospital in the early days:



My father was admitted as a baby in 1913. Like all the Foundling Hospital children, he was baptised with a new name (Edmund Updale) and sent out to a foster family until his fifth birthday, when he was scooped back into the main school. In later life, he talked very little about his experiences there. That was partly because of a lingering (and deliberately induced) sense of shame at his mother's disgrace and his own dependence on charity, and partly a reflection of the age in which he lived. Glorying in disadvantage was not yet fashionable in the brief time we had together. He died in 1976.

Throughout my father's lifetime, the law prevented him from finding out about his true background, but shortly after his death the rules were changed, and I have discovered much of the story, and met some of the foundlings who shared his upbringing. I will keep his personal details for another time (and perhaps another place) but today, since it's Christmas, I will (after a bit of a digression into the history of the Foundling Hospital) tell you about a pair of twins who were classmates of his. I had the privilege to meet them in the 1980s, shortly before they died.

The Foundling Hospital was always good at PR. In its earliest days, with Handel and Hogarth as patrons, it was the glitterati charity of choice, and a venue for society concerts.
The wonderful Foundling Museum still holds an art collection of staggering quality, including this magnificent portrait of Captain Coram by Hogarth, and treasures such a manuscript of the Messiah, donated by Handel himself.

In the 20th century, photographers did their best to portray Christmas at the Foundling Hospital as a time of unrestrained joy.

Mixing the pudding/ Learning Carols /Putting up the decorations:

I think we can all guess the degree to which those images were staged, but no doubt special events did happen. However, for most of the time, nothing was allowed to challenge the rule of routine, and that is where the twins come in.

They were born on Christmas Eve, 1913. One can only imagine the circumstances that drove their mother to give them up. It would be possible now for any descendants to find out her story - up to a point.
Like all official records, the Foundling archives must be approached with caution. Getting your child into the institution was not easy. The mother had to produce a deposition explaining how she had landed in her predicament. Unless she had been widowed, she had to portray herself as as a respectable girl led astray, preferably with the promise of marriage in the background. The midwife was required to declare that this was the unfortunate woman's first confinement. You weren't allowed to make the same mistake twice.
Heaven knows what happened to the children of women who failed the tests. The pressure to lie was intense. My own natural grandmother wrote convincingly of he fiance absconding to America. I traced him through electoral registers, still living in London at the time of my father's birth, and for years afterwards.

Love tokens, left by the mothers of babies given over to the care of the Foundling Hospital:


But back to the twins...

Their first four years were spent in the relative normality of a foster home. During that time they were never disabused of the notion that the people looking after them were their parents, and no one did anything to prepare them for the arrival of a car to take them away on their fifth birthday.

the two old men were visibly moved when they told me about being wrenched from their foster parents. But their sadness was not caused only by losing people they had come to love and depend upon. They were still angry, seven decades later, about missing that family Christmas. The date had given the memory of the separation extra force, and that was why it was one of the first things they spoke of when I met them. Other former foundlings talked of cold dormitories, harsh teachers, and the horror of hitting puberty unprepared. For the twins, it was the lost Christmas that dominated their memories - and of course, though they cannot have known it at the time, it must have been a very special Christmas for families everywhere: 1918 - the first since the end of the Great War.

My father and the twins are probably somewhere in this picture. Apparently the teacher was every bit as nasty as he looks:



These days, it's hard to imagine how anyone could have been so cruel as to deny the twins a few days of family fun. And yet those involved probably felt they were doing the right thing. We are all prisoners of the orthodoxies of our times, and we have different ways of torturing children in care now: from serial fostering to surrounding them with low expectations (including the assumption that most will get only four GCSEs,). Many are thrown into the outside world at 16, and those who want to stay on to do A levels may have to fight - particularly if their eighteenth birthday falls before the exams.

But it's Christmas, and I shouldn't be ranting...

Instead, I can tell you some positive things about what has become of Captain Coram's 18th century vision for deprived children.

The Foundling Hospital no longer exists as a residential institution, but in its new incarnation as the charity, Coram, it is a leading force for improving adoption practice throughout the country. It has a formidable record. 97% of adoptions organised by Coram remain secure (one in five of those arranged by other agencies breaks down). Coram also unites children with their prospective adopters remarkably quickly, which may be a reason for the success.
The charity is also in the forefront of innovation in family law, music and art therapy, and all sorts of services for children and families in need.

You can find out more at www.coram.org.uk where there are links to more details about the history of the Foundling Hospital.
If you haven't yet made your Christmas charity donations, you would be hard-pressed to find a better cause.

I've told you the story of the twins because at Christmas they are always on my mind. But even though, to modern eyes, the authorities acted shockingly in their case, those two boys had a lot to be grateful for. Like their classmate, my father, they may have lacked love, but they were given shelter, healthcare, and an education which fitted them to make the most of the opportunities created by the social upheavals of the 20th century. They were lucky - and to be the child of a foundling is to be privileged indeed.

I never pass the statue of Thomas Coram outside the Foundling Museum without touching his foot and saying thank you.

By saving my father, the philanthropists of long ago made possible my own easy passage through life. Just one generation on, our family's fortunes are transformed. Was that institutional care really so bad?

Now. Why not turn off the computer, go and hug your loved ones, and have a very merry time for the rest of Christmas day?

www.eleanorupdale.com