This article explores the history of the Foundling Hospital
together with some of the research that has been carried out
recently on the archives held at LMA. It was written by Janette
Bright and Gillian Clark who have both carried out research using
the archives.
History and organisation
Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital is the longest-established
children’s charity in England, founded in 1739 and still providing
care today under the name of Coram. Since that date it has
kept its records, its music and its art collection safely. The
administrators set a consistently high standard of record keeping
and record retention. There are long runs of documents of all kinds
and entries in one series cross check with those in another with a
high level of accuracy. This collection of paper records, with
exceptions that include the current Coram client records, now
occupies 800 linear feet of shelving at the LMA (LMA reference:
A/FH). The closure period for all records with personal data,
including governors’ minutes, is 110 years.
The Foundling Hospital opened in Hatton Garden and moved to
Lambs Conduit Fields. During the 1750s it expanded with
residential units at Ackworth (Yorkshire), Shrewsbury, Aylesbury,
Barnet, Chester and Westerham (Kent). It was supported by the arts
world, notably by William Hogarth and George Handel, whose work was
on show or performed for the benefit of the children. Charles
Dickens, who lived nearby, was a patron. In the 20th century the
Thomas Coram Foundation for Children moved to Redhill, and then to
Berkhamsted, becoming the Thomas Coram School. In 1950 the school
became Ashlyns, managed by Hertfordshire County Council, while the
Foundation returned, with its art treasures, still a child care
charity, to 40 Brunswick Square, part of original Bloomsbury site.
The rest of that site became Coram Fields, a play area for children
in perpetuity. At the beginning of this century Coram Campus was
built next door to No. 40, to house Coram’s child care work,
leaving this building to become the Foundling Museum.
The Foundling Hospital was established for the “maintenance and
education of exposed and deserted young children” with an executive
Committee of Governors and about 300 well-placed non-executive
Governors, who were prepared to use their influence to promote its
cause. They were responsible for the running of the London site and
for a network of wet nurses in rural areas who looked after the
babies for the first five years of their lives and who were
supervised by volunteer inspectors, often family and friends of the
non-executive Governors.
The Governors met regularly and recorded all their decisions in
the minutes of the meetings and in Books of Regulation. They
arranged for registers to be created to record the admission of
each child and the token it brought in, its placement at nurse, the
inspector supervising the nurse in her home parish, illness,
smallpox inoculation, death or survival of the child to
apprenticeship. They kept incoming correspondence and accounts from
the inspectors, copybooks of out-letters, receipts for the wages of
the nurses, infirmary records, burial certificates for babies who
died; petitions for admitting and for reclaiming a child and so
on.
In 1801 (and after 18,000 children) the Governors changed the
objective of caring for exposed and deserted children to that of
caring for illegitimate children. They were admitted only if the
petitions submitted by their mothers made a sufficiently strong
case for their ability to make a new start in life. Children were
with foster mothers during their early years, returning to London
for schooling and moving on to apprenticeships. The governors
recorded all their decisions and kept applications they received
for the posts of school master, drill master, matron, steward,
apothecary, preacher and organist – and copies of the rules of
conduct that they created for them all. They kept the orders of
service for chapel, sermons that were preached, books of household
goods and provisions ordered, school masters’ and weekly lesson
reports. For 150 years they maintained registers of children with
foster carers and in their apprenticeships, the apprentice
indentures and testimonials from the masters. In about 1850, some
of the tokens left with the children as identifiers in the 1700s
were separated from the admissions records and put in display cases
in the building alongside the art collection to attract interest in
the charity.
The work of the charity in the 20th century moved to the support
of single mothers through day care, fostering and adoption.
Administrative and client records were deposited at LMA. Coram
continues these services today and has extended into working with
both parents and with vulnerable children. In 2004 the Foundling
Museum opened to display some of the documents, photographs and
artefacts, notably a re-creation of the room where the General
Committee met, the tokens in their display cases, and to house the
substantial art collection, including Hogarth’s portrait of Coram,
and the music collection, among which is Handel’s copy of
Messiah.
Archives and Research
Many researchers have been inspired to write both short papers and
longer published accounts of aspects of the Foundling Hospital –
the vast amount of records available means there are still many
areas of research still untouched. As well as two major
accounts of the running of the institution in the 18th century
(Nichols and Wray, History of the Foundling Hospital and Gillian
McClure, Coram’s Children), which were both written almost entirely
with the use of the court, general and subcommittee records, other
more recent publications have also used the admission billets,
petitions and correspondence (Alysa Levene, Tanya Evans, F
Barret-Ducrocq and Gillian Clark). Family history, a subject much
in vogue at present, has also generated many articles – sometimes
tracing specific individuals from their foundling roots to the
modern day.
The University of the Third Age (U3A) used the records in 2006/7
for a project that looked into the apprenticed foundlings - their
lives both before and after admission, and are now about to embark
on a new project looking at the education of children in the
Victorian era.
The Foundling Museum uses the archives for its permanent and
temporary exhibitions and in 2010 an exhibition called Material
Witness, will look in depth at the textiles left as identifiers and
tokens. The tiny fabric scraps found amongst the admission
billets form the largest archive of datable textiles in Europe, if
not the world (see John Styles, The Dress of the People).
Other ongoing research using the archives includes an in depth
look at the tokens and identifiers themselves, the lives of the
governors who run the institution, and research into the
introduction of small pox vaccination.
Like Hogarth, Handel, and Dickens, many writers, musicians and
artists are still inspired by the lives of the children and the
running of the organisation. Jamilla Gavin’s Coram Boy, Jacqueline
Wilson’s Hetty Feather and countless other contemporary artists
have created work inspired by the children, the tokens or the
hospital – including in this year work by Paula Rego, Mat Collishaw
and Tracy Emin. Janette Bright first came to look at the tokens at
the hospital and in the archives in the hope that they would
inspire her own textile art (see
http://www.easttextile.co.uk/ for more
information). She ended up being so inspired by the archives that
with Gillian Clark she has now become an authority on the tokens,
research on which will form the basis of a book they are
co-authoring, and hope to publish shortly called The Token
Triangle.
You can find a quick guide to tracing a foundling in the records of
the Foundling Hospital at LMA called "
Finding Your Foundling" on our
information leaflets page.