Tales of London

One of London's lesser known, yet more emotionally poignant museums, can be found in the centre of Bloomsbury. A place of care for destitute infants, young mothers would turn up at its doors in the hope of providing a better life for their child, knowing that they may never see their son or daughter again. This was the Foundling Hospital: a foundling was a very young child abandoned by its parents; a hospital, in the eighteenth century, referred to 'hospitality' rather than medical care.

The main character in our story is Captain Thomas Coram, a “pioneer in the cause of child welfare”. Coram was born in Dorset in 1688 to a humble but respectable family. His father was thought to be a master mariner, and his mother died when Thomas was just six years old. At only eleven – still of primary school age – he was sent to sea to earn money for the family. He was apprenticed to a shipwright, and lived for some time in America. 

But Coram was a very plain spoken man, and was severely lacking in diplomacy. This led to court cases, the arson of his ships, and even an attempt on his life. Coram was no doubt the sort of man that struggled to make friends, and he was probably rather unpleasant to be around. But he also had a strong sense of social justice: whilst in America he had campaigned to set up a colony for destitute ex-serviceman and to give land rights to the Mohicans. He returned to England in 1704 and by 1720, now comfortably off, he moved to Rotherhithe near the docks of London. It was here that he witnessed the poverty that would move him to establish the Foundling Hospital.

During the eighteenth century the population of London exploded from 600,000 to a million, attracting labour from the countryside. But most of this new influx fell into destitution, and many had to resort to crime in order to stay alive. They were reliant on the Poor Law, where parishes would distribute funds whilst differentiating between the deserving and undeserving poor. From 1723, an even worse solution was introduced: the workhouse. This was the provider of last resort for the destitute, who would do anything to avoid its prison-like conditions, which are famously described in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

In the early 1700s the mortality rate for children under five in London was an absolutely shameful 75%. Within the workhouses, this rocketed to 90%. Mothers who were unable to care for their new-born baby would often leave them in church yards or even on rubbish heaps, in the hope that someone might take them in and care for them – although the sad reality was nearly always far removed from that optimism. On Mainland Europe, Catholic-run institutions had provided hospitals for orphans and foundlings since at least the thirteenth century, but there was no equivalent in England.

Thomas Coram set out to change this sorry state of affairs. It took him seventeen long years, but he was described by a legal adversary as being “a man of that obstinate, persevering temper as never to desist from his first enterprise, whatever obstacles lie in his way”; a man without such a character would no doubt have given up long before the project’s success. There was no template for setting up such a hospital, but Coram did require a charter of incorporation from the king. He therefore began to petition the great and the good, writing a list of every influential person that he could think of in his pocketbook. He walked ten or twelve miles each day to lobby them personally.

Coram faced an uphill struggle right from the start. In the eighteenth century destitution was seen as a moral weakness: you simply weren’t working hard enough, or God would have rewarded you with success. The prevailing attitude of the time was that establishing a Foundling Hospital would simply encourage the wages of sin by lending legitimacy to birth out of wedlock. Consequently, Coram’s appeals to the nobility and high ranking church officials – those supposedly Christ-like men – fell on deaf ears. He even wrote in a letter to a friend that he might as well have asked them to “put down their breeches and present their backsides to the king and queen”.

Coram then tried a different tactic: instead of approaching gentlemen, he approached upper class ladies, and appealed to their emotions as mothers. This turned the tide in Coram’s favour. Charlotte, the Duchess of Somerset, became the first signatory in 1729. In 1735 the first petition was presented to King George II, and was signed by twenty-one ladies “of quality and distinction”. These ladies pressured their husbands and their fathers into doing the same, and two years later a second petition, signed by “Noblemen & Gentlemen”, was presented to the king. It contained the signatures of twenty-five dukes, thirty-one earls, twenty-six other peers, thirty-eight knights, and the entire Privy Council – including the king’s son the Prince of Wales, and the Prime Minister Robert Walpole. There were 375 signatures in total.

On the 17th October 1739, after almost two decades of struggle and seemingly insurmountable odds, King George II signed the Royal Charter establishing the Foundling Hospital. On 20th November at Somerset House by the Thames it was presented to the Duke of Bedford, the landowner and first President of the Foundling Hospital. Coram by this point was seventy years old, but his work had only just begun. Continue the story with part two here!

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