Grave Stories - Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Captain Coram and the Foundling Hospital

On April 19, 2026

Between Brunswick and Mecklenburg Squares in Bloomsbury lie Coram’s Fields, children’s playgrounds and sports pitches to which no adult may be admitted unless accompanied by a child. And at 40 Brunswick Square an elegant building houses the Foundling Museum and Art Gallery. To the side sits a bronze of Thomas Coram.

Thomas Coram (1668-1751) was a ship builder and sea captain. Born in Lyme Regis in Dorset, he went to sea at the age of eleven, later establishing successful businesses first in America, and later in London.

In the early eighteenth century the mortality rate for children under five in England was 75%. This was the direct result of poverty. Thousands died from cheap gin given to them by their mothers as an appetite depressant, an estimated 1,000 babies were abandoned every year on the streets of London, children were deliberately blinded or maimed before being sent out to beg, and infanticide was common.

Unlike the authorities of the day for whom poverty was no more than a symptom of idleness and moral degeneracy, Thomas Coram had a big heart, a great love of children and an unwavering resolve. He determined to establish a home for children whose mothers could not look after them. An ugly combination of byzantine legal restraints and royal prerogatives meant that Coram needed a charter of incorporation from the king before he could establish his Foundling Hospital. For seventeen years he trudged the streets of London lobbying influential people to sign his petitions requesting a charter. The church and the nobility were not helpful. But eventually he was able to exploit the fashion for charitable works amongst society ladies to obtain their signatures, and through their influence those of their husbands. A charter was granted, and money donated.

The first thirty children were admitted to the Foundling Hospital in 1740.

Unlike its continental predecessors Coram’s Hospital was a secular institution, maintained by public subscription. Babies were not deposited anonymously but brought in by their mothers on admissions days. Demand for places always exceeded supply and in the early days admittance was determined by lottery. If mothers drew a white ball from a bag their child was accepted, a black one meant there was no place for them, a red put them on a waiting list in case any of those initially accepted were found on examination to have infectious diseases, in which case the Hospital could not risk admitting them. A brutal system, but so were the alternatives of later years when admissions were based on the moral character of the mother, restricting places to those babies whose mothers had been deserted, widowed, or raped.

Coram always hoped that the children would be reunited with their mothers if their circumstances changed and they could afford to take them back. When the babies entered the Hospital, they were baptised with new names and given new clothes to protect the mothers’ identity. But a billet recorded each child’s date of admission, sex, age, original name, and details of the clothing in which they had arrived. A piece of material was taken from this clothing, half of it remaining with the mother and the other half attached to the admission document. Mothers were also encouraged to leave a small token. The billet was then wrapped, sealed, numbered, and the child given an identity tag with their number. In the event of a mother seeking to reclaim her child or needing to prove her innocence if she were accused of infanticide, production of the matching fabric, and recognition of the token would lead to the opening of the billet and the identification of the child.

In the nineteenth century the secretary of the hospital, John Brownlow, unsealed the old admission forms with the scraps of fabric attached and filed them in ledgers.

Few women were ever able to reclaim their children, and by 1790 when the token system was replaced with receipts, 18,000 tokens had been left. Today there is a heartbreaking display of the unclaimed tokens in the Foundling Museum: coins, playing cards, little pieces of lace or embroidery, buttons, medals, small bracelets and rings,

But Coram was determined that the children who remained in his care would have the best life and opportunities possible. They were fostered in the countryside until they were five years old, when they returned to the Hospital. There they were provided with decent food, practical if not pretty clothing, health care, inoculations, and education, and at Coram’s Hospital the latter was considered as important for girls as for boys. And if this sounds a little bleak, remember the alternative. When the children left, they were well placed to find employment, albeit usually in the military or in domestic service, but again remember the alternative.

The Hospital was also the venue for Britain’s first public art exhibitions. William Hogarth was an early supporter of Coram: he and his wife Jane fostered children, and he donated artworks to the Hospital encouraging fellow artists to do the same. The latter were not slow to realise the benefits of having their work on display before the affluent patrons and visitors to the Hospital. They began holding annual dinners there and these gatherings evolved into the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768. Meanwhile the Hospital built up an admirable collection of contemporary art.

Music too flourished at the Foundling Hospital. Children with talent were encouraged and there was a band. Handel wrote the Hospital’s anthem and directed annual benefit concerts featuring the Messiah and Music for the Royal Fireworks in the Hospital chapel.

There was a sad coda to Coram’s life, for after all his work and achievements he was voted off the board of governors, probably due to his lack of sycophancy and inability to flatter potential donors. He continued to attend the baptisms, stood godfather to more than twenty babies, and regularly sat in the Hospital colonnades distributing gingerbread to the children. After the death of his wife, he neglected his private affairs and with his fortune dispersed he faced difficult times. His friends raised a subscription to provide him with an annuity for the last two years of his life.

Thomas Coram is now in his third burial place. Initially, in accordance with his wishes, he was buried in the chapel of the Foundling Hospital. When the old buildings were demolished and the Hospital moved out to Berkshire in 1935, Coram moved with it being reinterred in the crypt of the new chapel. In 1955 when the last children left the Foundling Hospital and the buildings were sold to Ashlyn’s school Coram was again exhumed and translated to St. Andrew’s church in Holborn.

Tomb of Thomas Coram, Saint Andrew’s Church, Holborn. It bears the coat of arms of the Foundling Hospital designed by Hogarth.

An inscribed stone remains in what is now Ashlyn’s school chapel, it commemorates

Captain Thomas Coram, whose name shall never want a monument, so long as this Hospital shall subsist.

But Coram’s real memorial is neither in Saint Andrew’s church nor in Ashlyn’s school. Back in Coram’s Fields are the seven acres of children’s park and playgrounds. After the original Hospital was demolished its committee room, picture gallery and oak staircase were transferred to the Foundling Museum. And the work of the charity, now known simply as Coram, continues to be directed from the adjacent Coram campus. Today the charity focuses on adoption, fostering, health and drug education in schools, support for vulnerable young people leaving care and those facing homelessness. It is committed to celebrating and destigmatising care and continues the Coram tradition of using music and art to promote its aims.

Portrait of Captain Coram by Hogarth. The Foundling Museum also has works by Gainsborough, Reynolds and Zoffany.

See https://coramstory.org.uk for more on the history and current work of Coram.

For more on the last years of the Foundling Hospital in Berkshire see Memories of the Foundling Hospital, recalled by three of the last children to be resident there, on You Tube, Coram April 2021

Before there was Amazon, there was Pryce Pryce-Jones

By Gravedigger

On April 5, 2026

In Shopkeepers

Before there was Amazon, there was the Royal Welsh Warehouse, and before there was Jeff Bezos, there was the more bardically named Pryce Pryce-Jones.

Born at Newtown in Powys, when Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834-1920) was twelve years old he was apprenticed to a local draper. Ten years later he took over the business.

In 1840 the penny post had been introduced in the United Kingdom, a cheap, uniform delivery system. Pryce-Jones took advantage of this to send out fabric swatches and price lists to rural customers who could then place orders by mail. But it was the arrival of the railway in Newtown in 1859, facilitating a next day delivery of goods by cheap parcel post throughout the country, which enabled Pryce-Jones to expand his business beyond recognition.

In 1861 he brought out the first mail order catalogue in the world, and in 1879 established the Royal Welsh Warehouse adjacent to the railway station. And what a warehouse: a massive structure of red brick, joined in 1895 by a second six-storey building linked to it by a bridge, and by a further extension in 1904.

The business expanded with the railways. In its heyday it employed 4,000 workers. The warehouse had its own printing press, its own post office and its own railway siding. Pryce Jones was the first person in Wales to install a telephone in his home, keeping him in constant contact with his business.

He supplied all the goods which you would find in any department store, but at the heart of his empire was flannel made from Welsh wool. At exhibitions in Europe, America and Australia he won gold medals and built-up a customer base of 200,000. He supplied the royal houses of Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy and Russia.

In 1876 he patented the world’s first sleeping bag and immediately secured a contract to supply the Russian army with 60,000 of his “Euklisia rugs.”

At home, his customers included Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria, the latter so enamoured with her Welsh flannel bloomers that she gave him a knighthood.

When Pryce-Jones died he was buried in the cemetery of Saint Llwchaiarn’s church, Llanllwchaiarn, on the edge of Newtown.

Granite obelisk, the family grave of Pryce-Jones

The epitaph records Pryce-Jones tenure as High Sheriff and as M.P. but makes no mention of his long, and far more remarkable, career in trade.

Pryce-Jones’ sons took over the business, but it faltered in the depression years of the 1930s when it was taken over by the department store Lewis’s of Liverpool. Then in the 1960s the Beeching cuts reduced Newtown’s railway, once the hub of the mid-Wales railways, to just one through route running from Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth. The goods yard disappeared, and the volume of trade conducted by the once mighty warehouse declined.

Lewis’s in turn closed its doors in 2010, ironically the victim of the growth of online shopping. The warehouses had a brief half-life as a multi-let commercial enterprise until they were sold at auction in 2025 and now stand empty.

They still dominate the town, the Pryce-Jones name picked out in large letters reminiscent of the Hollywood sign, but today, like Ozymandias’ transient empire, “nothing beside remains.”

Royal Welsh Warehouse, detail of the original 1879 building

Royal Welsh Warehouse, the 1895 building; the bridge between the two older warehouses no longer exists

Alfred and Ada Salter: Political Triumph and Personal Tragedy

By Gravedigger

On March 22, 2026

In Medics, Politicians

I am fond of Rotherhithe; it is a comfortable walking distance from Tower Bridge but just far enough east to discourage most tourists… apart from those who congregate at the Mayflower Inn from where a grumpy bunch of Protestant separatists may have sailed in 1620.

There is the little Brunel Museum located in the engine house designed by Marc Isambard Brunel as part of the infrastructure of the Thames Tunnel; the scant remains of Edward III’s Manor House; a few cobbled streets around St. Mary’s church, and somewhere in the graveyard the remains of Christopher Jones, the ship’s master on the Mayflower; St. Mary’s Free School, established 1613 to educate the children of impoverished seafarers, and bearing two statues of the charity children in their blue uniforms; and a Swedish, a Norwegian and a Finnish church.

Memorial to Christopher Jones, Saint Mary’s churchyard, Rotherhithe. The Saint Christopher figure looks back to the old world, and the child forward to the new.

Saint Mary’s Free School, now a private house

Figures of charity children in their blue uniforms

Otherwise, Rotherhithe today is a comfortably ordinary sort of place, its massive docks and wharfs long gone, but I envy those who live in the warehouse conversions along the river and drink in the Angel, a cosy 1830s pub built out over the Thames on wooden posts. From its balcony there are stunning views upriver to Tower Bridge and the jostling skyscrapers of the City.

The Angel marks the boundary between Rotherhithe and Bermondsey, both part of the Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey between 1900-1965. In an open space beside the pub is one of my favourite memorials: Dr. Salter’s Daydream.

Alfred Salter (1873-1945) entered Guy’s Hospital Medical School on a scholarship at the age of sixteen. He garnered prizes, first class honours, and gold medals. With his star burning so brightly, it was expected that he would assume a Harley Street practice, a consultancy, or a prestigious research post; Lister had invited him to join the British Institute of Preventative Medicine.

But during his time at Guy’s, Salter had become familiar with Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. I would not have envied the inhabitants in those days. Alongside the docks and the factories processing leather and hides, Salter visited courtyards where one water closet and one standpipe, operating for only two hours per day, served twenty-five houses. The dwellings were damp and cramped, with verminous walls, their occupants half starved. Jacob’s Island, made notorious by Dickens in Oliver Twist, lay in Bermondsey. Salter decided that this was where he would work.

He went to live in the Bermondsey Settlement which provided health and education services for one of the worst slums in London. Fenner Brockway, in his biography of Salter, describes a romantic figure bursting with life and energy, “known as the Settlement firebrand – militant Republican, militant Socialist, militant Agnostic, militant Teetotaller, militant Pacifist.” In these years Salter was also a member of an international organisation which assisted political refugees, Anarchists and Socialists fleeing oppressive regimes, and landing clandestinely from incoming ships at Rotherhithe docks.

At the Settlement, Salter met and married Ada Brown (1866-1942), a social worker. They bought a house in Jamaica Road in Rotherhithe where they lived above his surgery. Under Ada’s influence the former militant agnostic joined the Society of Friends, whose values accorded with the pacifist and ethical socialist beliefs which he and Ada shared.

Salter, who became known as “the poor man’s doctor” began by charging 6d for consultations but waived his fee if people were unable to pay, which did not endear him to fellow GPs. Later he introduced a mutual health insurance scheme in Bermondsey, described as “an NHS before the NHS.” He placed great emphasis on preventative medicine and education, promoting health centres and showing health propaganda films. His practice grew, and he took on four partners who shared his principles and worked on a co-operative basis.

In 1903 Salter was elected to the Borough Council and in 1922 he stood for Parliament as an Independent Labour (ILP) candidate. Having expounded the ideals of socialism, in his closing speech on the eve of the poll he told the electorate:

If you want a member of parliament who will vote for cheaper beer, you will elect one of the other candidates. If you want a member of parliament who will vote for an army and navy to defend Britain and the Empire, you will elect one of the other candidates… I will vote for prohibition. I will vote against all credits for the armed forces.

Most of his audience were drinkers and most of the men had served in the forces during World War I. His agent, horrified and fearing he was losing votes with every word, phoned the committee room begging them to send an urgent message calling the doctor to a life and death case.

Yet when the results came in next day, Dr. Salter had won and West Bermondsey had been captured for Socialism. In his maiden speech Salter introduced a motion in favour of a minimum living wage for all workers and condemned the fabulous dividends paid to shareholders. With a rare literary flourish he quoted Russell Lowell,

Have ye founded your thrones and altars then,

On the bodies and souls of living men,

And think ye that building shall endure,

Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?

In his constituency Salter worked for better housing, free school meals, nursery schools, and playgrounds, recognising that these were as essential as medicines in improving public health. He understood that improvements in nutrition and the environment were vital to bring down deaths from tuberculosis. Under his guidance the council encouraged the use of tuberculin tested milk; the first municipal solarium in Britain was established to prevent and treat not just TB but also rickets and skin diseases; swimming pools, public baths and wash houses were built.

Salter himself bought Fairby Grange, an old mansion in Kent with twenty acres of grounds, and presented it to the Council to serve as the first convalescent home in Britain.

In 1929 he resigned his medical practice believing it was more important to focus on his political work removing the causes of sickness through help for the unemployed, adequate pensions, and recreational facilities.

Meanwhile Ada Salter had been elected as Mayor by the Borough Council, and the Labour majority replaced the union jack over the town hall with a red flag bearing the borough arms, fulfilling a prediction – “The red flag shall fly over the town hall” – which Ada had made when she was the only Socialist among fifty-six councillors. Ada also declined to wear the mayoral robes and chain of office. The Tory press was scandalised. But these were symbolic gestures, and she was soon introducing changes of greater social significance.

Campaigns against air pollution, pushing for the establishment of a green belt and promoting urban gardening, were at the heart of her work. Over two years nine thousand trees were planted in the borough. Thousands of cuttings from flowering plants at Fairby Grange were transported for summer bedding. Old gravestones were move to the walls of churchyards and the graves covered with flowers. Public buildings and lampposts were adorned with window boxes and hanging baskets. Bulbs, seeds and seedlings from Fairby were given to anyone in the borough with space to plant. In Southwark Park, which had been little more than a stark open space, flowerbeds and benches were laid out specifically with the elderly and mothers with young children in mind.

Both Salters dreamed of turning Bermondsey into a Garden Village. In Wilson Grove back-to-back slum dwellings were replaced with council owned cottages with gardens, drawing admiration at home and abroad. But a change in national government in 1924, and problems of space for rehousing the dense population, meant that elsewhere in the borough blocks of flats replaced the slums. Yet under the Labour Council gardens were built around the flats and tenants encouraged to grow plants on their balconies.

It was not easy. Fenner Brockway wrote:

For two years the planting of flowers was a complete failure. The children trampled on them and tore them up…the Housing Committee was coming to the conclusion that the gardens would have to be replaced by concrete yards. Then in the third year a daffodil broke through the earth –and the children were taught to guard it as though it were a fairy. The victory of the flowers was won. Adults and children now take pride in them.

The Salters had always been pacifists: both worked with the No Conscription Fellowship in World War One, and Alfred’s 1914 pamphlet Faith of a Pacifist had been translated and clandestinely distributed in Germany. In the 1930s he had spoken out in Parliament against arms sales and profiteering from war preparations. Both he and Ada worked for the Peace Pledge Union. He opposed the bombing of civilian areas in Germany despite the damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe in his own constituency. His last speech in Parliament in 1942 was a plea for peace reasoning that it was a terrible fallacy that ends justify means:

We cannot believe that any new or righteous order of society will be achieved by evil means, by overcoming evil with greater, more potent and more effective evil

His last political act was to join a two day fast to draw public attention to famine and starvation in Greece; under the combined impact of the Nazi occupation and the British naval blockade 30,000 people had died in the winter of 1941-42. Churchill’s government reluctantly lifted the blockade in February 1942.

The Salters chose cremation and have no gravestones. In 1949 Fenner Brockway wrote that the Borough of Bermondsey, despite its war time devastation, was Salter’s monument.

But Dr. Salter’s Daydream, the bronze memorial beside the Thames, remembers not just Alfred and Ada Salter’s medical and political achievements, but their private tragedy. For they had a daughter, Joyce. Unlike other middle-class parents, they did not send her to a boarding school outside the borough, for they did not believe that any child should have privileges denied to others. She attended a local school and made friends with local children. Her parents reserved a room in their home for Joyce and her friends. There everything was washable, and the toys and furniture regularly disinfected. Nonetheless when she was eight years old Joyce caught scarlet fever for the third time.

The Salters did not draw their blinds as was customary following a death. “She was our sunshine,” said Ada. “Why should we shut out sunshine?” Joyce’s portrait hung in their study, and to the end of her life Ada decorated it with flowers every day.

Portrait of Joyce with her father.
Image source: wikimedia creative commons, licensed under CC by 4.0 international license

Dr. Salter’s Daydream, bronze designed by Diane Gorvin, 1991.
Dr. Salter, remembering happy times with his daughter, looks towards the Thames, where Joyce leans against the wall.

Ada Salter with her gardening spade, her left hand is designed to hold the flowers which are often left for her.

As can be seen from the photograph above, Joyce was a beautiful child. Unfortunately the bronze of her is not so successful as those of her parents.

Joyce’s cat poised on the wall above her. In the background Tower Bridge, and modern skyscrapers in The City.

*****************************************************************

The information reproduced here about the work of Alfred and Ada Salter comes largely from Fenner Brockway, Bermondsey Story, the life of Alfred Salter, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1949.

Bookcover by Arthur Wragg. Dr. Salter always cycled to Parliament on the old bicycle illustrated here.

Lynn Morris of the Journeyman Theatre wrote and performed Red Flag over Bermondsey about the life of Ada Salter in 2016.

William Golding and Human Evil

By Gravedigger

On March 8, 2026

In Writers

The BBC recently commissioned a four-part adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It has provoked particular interest here in the West Country, for when Golding published it in 1954, he was teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. In the opening sequences of the production the boys stranded on the island are wearing Bishop Wordsworth’s school uniform… the school authorities must be convinced that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Now elderly men, former pupils have appeared on local news channels speculating that the writer took inspiration from the behaviour of boys in his classroom, though no one has laid claim to have been the role model for Jack or Roger.

The Guardian critic, Lucy Mangan, after praising the acting, skewered the essential weakness of the production with an acuity worthy of her much-missed predecessor, Nancy Banks-Smith:

It falls victim to the modern curse of psychology. All the main characters are explained by a neat backstory. Jack comes from a loveless household. Ralph’s alpha maleness is tempered by compassion because he comes from a secure home, but his mother is ill. Simon is mentally fragile because his abusive father plays mind games with him and his mother…It reduces the elemental power of the story, along with its point, which is how much evil there is in a man and whether it can be overcome. This is the question. Not how much therapy he needs.

Since its publication Lord of the Flies has seldom been far from a school syllabus. No surprise, for it is of a manageable length; well written but in accessible prose; all the main characters are adolescents; the story is gripping; and there is endless scope for discussion of symbols, allegories, irony, and inherent human depravity. A cornucopia for teachers and pupils alike.

When we were introduced to the book in our early teens my schoolmates and I were passionate about it, delighted to chew over its themes, self-consciously cynical in our discussions of man’s capacity for savagery and the fragility of social norms.

Golding wrote the book as an antidote to Ballantyne’s Coral Island, a once popular children’s adventure story advocating Christianity and the humanising influence of British colonialism. For Golding there was nothing there to admire or glorify; beneath the thin veneer of civilization, he believed, lay a selfish and violent desire for power, and a herd mentality where individuals could quickly descend into barbarity under evil leadership, and ostensibly decent people reveal murderous sociopathic instincts.

Golding’s focus on the dark side of humanity was influenced by the rise of fascism in the 1930s and by the violence and atrocities of World War Two. Later he wrote:

“My book was to say: you think the war is over and an evil thing destroyed. You are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.”

The book ends with a naval officer chiding the boys for their “unBritish” behaviour while, in an obvious parallel, his own warship anchored in the bay embodies an aura of menace. “Irony,” we all wrote in capitals in the margins of out texts.

Yet, on an adult reading, it is not the most subtle of works, and we might crave a little optimism, but our current international landscape affirms its timeless relevance.

Following the success of Lord of the Flies, Golding retired from teaching and moved to the Wiltshire village of Broadchalke. He produced twelve more works of fiction, novels of the human condition, achieving cult status in the second half of the twentieth century.

Rites of Passage, the first novel in his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth won the Booker Prize in 1980. Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989) completed his story of a voyage to Australia in the early nineteenth century. It is one of my favourite novels both for the harrowing descriptions of the twelve-month voyage in the cramped wooden ship, and for the vivid portraits of the passengers drawn from the whole spectrum of society.

Golding evokes the creaking timbers, the thick air, the foetid atmosphere, the decks streaming with seawater, the darkness, and the claustrophobia so vividly one might retch alongside the exhausted, nauseous emigrants.

Through his motley protagonists he exposes patronising class and gender systems, pretension, power, privilege, arrogance, self-delusion, vanity, and double standards. His trenchant prose can engender in one paragraph an amalgam of sympathy, pity, loathing, irritation, and contempt for any one character.

Again, he lays bare the fragility of civilisation and the ease with which social constraints can collapse to be replaced by casual cruelty, this time amongst adults. Some critics have interpreted the closing chapters of Fire Down Below as a “happy ending,” with Edmund Talbot, having developed self-knowledge, determined to do good in the future. But I suspect this is a misreading of Golding’s conclusion. No one will do good in a rotten borough, and Talbot remains insensitive, self-absorbed, shallow, and pompous. Never more so than in his obtuse response to Zenobia’s message, “Tell Edmund I am crossing the bridge,” which carries even more poignancy than Charles Summers’ tragic death.

Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 for novels which with “realistic narrative…illuminate the human condition in the world today.”

He is buried under a yew tree in Holy Trinity churchyard, Broadchalke. The inscription on the stone has not been deeply incised but can still just be read:

Grave of William Golding and his wife Ann Golding

Remember with love

William Golding

1911-1993

Ann Golding

1912-1995

It is the star to every

wandering barque

The quotation is from one of Shakespeare’s most famous and beautiful love sonnets, number 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring barque

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

So perhaps Golding’s personal life was happier than his social and political weltanschauung might imply.

Golding’s grave, Holy Trinity churchyard, Broadchalke, Wiltshire

William Golding, Rites of Passage, Faber and Faber (1980).

Close Quarters, Faber and Faber (1987)

Fire Down Below, Faber and Faber (1989).

Josephine Butler and The Contagious Diseases Act

By Gravedigger

On February 17, 2026

In Activists

My admiration for the work of Josephine Butler (1829-1906) is tempered by an uncomfortable aversion to the religious beliefs which kindled and stoked her extraordinary achievements.

Butler grew up in a conventional, albeit liberal, middle-class family with strong religious principles, political connections, and social awareness. Her father was an active supporter of Catholic emancipation, the abolition of slavery, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and reform of the Poor Law.

But, at the age of seventeen, the then Josephine Grey had a religious crisis; becoming disenchanted with the Anglican church she began speaking directly to god in prayer, an intimacy which became the basis of her life and vocation. And this is where, as an atheist, I begin to feel a little uneasy: for a Victorian lady conformity to the social norms of church attendance is unsurprising but developing a hotline to god is disturbing.

When in 1852 she married George Butler, an academic and Anglican clergyman, she wrote that they often

prayed together that a holy revolution might come about and that the Kingdom of God might be established on the earth.

Although offended by her husband’s fellow dons speaking of

a moral lapse in a woman…as an immensely worse thing than in a man

she chose not to voice her views on the subject but

to speak little with men, but much with god.

Yet after the death of her daughter Eva, and her own problems with depression, she

became possessed with an irresistible urge to go forth and find some keener pain than my own, to meet with people more unhappy than myself.

Since the Butlers had now moved to Liverpool this was not difficult, and her activities immediately surpassed the conventional charitable works expected of clergy wives: she began visiting the workhouse where she sat in the cellars, picking oakum with the women while discussing the bible and praying; she established a hostel for women who had been seduced and abandoned, and helped them to find work; she offered shelter in her own house to prostitutes in the terminal stages of venereal disease.

But it was in 1869 that Butler’s most innovative work began. The Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 sought to reduce the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, particularly in the army and navy, by maintaining a supply of uninfected prostitutes. To this end the police were authorised to detain any women who were suspected of prostitution – no evidence was needed. Any unattended woman from the age of twelve could be apprehended. Police powers were frequently misused against women whose only crime was poverty.

The women were then subjected to an invasive medical examination, which Butler described as “surgical rape.” If they were found to have venereal diseases they were sent to a lock hospital, one of the old leper hospitals, called after the locks or rags which covered the lepers’ lesions. Incarcerated in these institutions, more like prisons than hospitals, the women had no means to support their children and were unlikely to obtain employment on release. If women refused the examination, they were subjected to a three-month prison sentence or hard labour.

There was no enforced examination of their male clients who were exonerated from any responsibility. The Acts, as Butler made clear, were there to protect male health rather than to eliminate venereal diseases.

Butler established The Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, the first politically focused campaign organised and led by women. She toured Britain, speaking at scores of meetings, arguing that the Acts were discriminatory on grounds of both sex and class for they

not only deprived poor women of their constitutional rights and forced them to submit to a degrading internal examination, but they officially sanctioned a double standard of sexual morality, which justified male sexual access to a class of “fallen” women and penalised women for engaging in the same vice with men.

No surprise that Butler met with opposition from pimps, brothel keepers, clergy, and politicians. At one meeting cow dung was thrown at her, at another the windows of her hotel were smashed, at a third threats were made to burn down the building. She was disowned by friends and acquaintances, for it was not acceptable for a respectable woman to speak publicly on sex and prostitution. There were personal attacks by journalists and MPs. The London Daily News thundered

Women like Mrs. Butler are so discontented in their own homes that they have to find an outlet somewhere… and take pleasure in a hobby too nasty to mention.

For James Elphinstone MP, Josephine Butler was

worse than a prostitute.

Another newspaper vilified her as

an indecent maenad, a shrieking sister, frenzied, unsexed, and utterly without shame.

And a Royal Commission set up in 1871 defended the one-sided nature of the legislation:

There is no comparison to be made between prostitutes and the men who consort with them. With the one side the offence is committed as a matter of gain; with the other it is an irregular indulgence of a natural impulse.

The statement could not have substantiated more palpably Josephine Butler’s accusation of double standards.

It was not until 1886 that the noxious Acts were formally repealed, largely because of her relentless campaign. As one MP told her,

We know how to manage any other opposition in the House or country, but this is very awkward for us, this revolt of women.

Meanwhile Butler had toured France, Italy and Switzerland meeting women conducting similar campaigns. There she had become aware of the “white slave trade,” of girls as young as twelve being kidnapped or bought, and trafficked from England to the Continent, where they were sold as prostitutes. Alongside Florence Soper Booth and William Stead she became involved in her second great campaign, to expose child prostitution and the associated trade.

To publicise their cause Stead famously purchased a thirteen-year-old girl, Eliza Armstrong, from her mother for £5 and took her to a safe house in Paris. He then published a series of articles describing what he had done and exposing the extent of child prostitution. Butler followed this with speeches in London calling for greater protection of the young and the raising of the age of consent. Ironically both Butler and Stead faced police questioning following this audacious testimony and Stead was charged with abduction and imprisoned for three months.

Nonetheless in 1885 the age of consent was raised to sixteen and the procurement of girls for prostitution by drugs, intimidation, fraud, or abduction made a criminal offence.

Butler had traditional views on the importance of chastity for both men and women although this was informed as much by the lack of birth control and the risks of childbirth, as by a moral stand. Moreover, in the aftermath of the reforms of 1885 and 1886 she spoke out against the purity societies like the White Cross Army who sought to increase the prosecutions of brothel keepers and ban indecent literature… including information on birth control. She derided

the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force,

and sounded a warning:

beware of purity societies…stamping on vulnerable women.

Knowing that women with no income and nothing else to sell would sell themselves she joined the fight for the training, higher education, and access to a wider range of jobs for women. She was instrumental in setting up the Married Women’s Property Committee which successfully pressured Parliament to get rid of the legal doctrine of coverture whereby when a woman married her property passed to her husband.

It is impossible to overestimate the achievements of Josephine Butler. Her work to eliminate sexual double standards, child prostitution, and the white slave trade, complementing the battles for the vote, education, and employment opportunities, brought not just concrete economic, political, and legal change, but was a precursor of the second wave of feminism, attacking the invisible power structures rooted in attitudes and prejudices.

She displayed enormous courage in addressing such unpopular causes. It is invidious to make a comparison, but if the suffragists encountered opprobrium for being so unfeminine as to demand the vote, how much more was Josephine Butler denigrated for daring to discuss prostitution and contagious diseases in polite society.

So how can I have any reservations about this woman? It is the religion. The social historian Sarah Williams argues convincingly that religious faith and spirituality grounded Butler’s activism and that her radical sense of justice was informed by her inner life of prayer. Suffering drove her grief for others, prayer was the basis of her vocation, and a part of her action to transform society. Similarly Judith Walkowitz considers Butler’s biography of Catherine of Siena (1878) an “historical justification for her political activism.”

The mystic Catherine of Siena, allegedly worked among the sick and the poor, helped bring peace to the Republics of Italy and encouraged the return of the Papacy from Avignon. Catherine’s reported lifestyle however is frankly creepy: it involved rigorous fasting, at one time an attempt to survive on the Eucharist alone; giving away other people’s possessions; drinking pus to overcome her disgust at the sight of patients’ sores; and having visitations from Jesus inviting her to drink his blood, and more… let’s not go there. She is hardly a great advertisement for political action informed by religious belief.

And the difficulty with anyone who believes that they have a direct line to any omnipotent god lies in the danger of their beliefs being a matter of faith, convictions not open to question or reason. This may not be a problem when they are doing good, but Josephine Butler’s beliefs were not always sound. There was her arrogant assumption that Britain had a mission to make converts to Christianity across the globe, and her endorsement of British Imperialism:

looked at from god’s point of view England is the best, and the least guilty, of the nations.

This led her to a position of apologist for British action in the Second Boer War. She did not acknowledge an abhorrent battle over the Witwatersrand gold mines, to which neither Boers nor British had any legitimate claim. Instead, she bought into the jingoism which claimed that the Boers were not fit to govern, and that the British were protecting the native South Africans. Her claim that British military manoeuvres were the “work of the holy spirit,” is the more repellent in the light of the British concentration camps where 100,000 Boer civilians, mostly women and children, were kept in appalling conditions, and where 26,000 died.

Yet though, like everyone, she may be a flawed personality, and I may be alienated by her dogmatism and piety, there can be no doubting her courage, determination, and singular successes in improving the lives of working class women and girls. So, when I was in her native Northumberland, I sought her grave in Saint Gregory’s churchyard in Kirknewton to pay her the huge respects she undoubtedly merits.

Grave of Josephine Butler, Kirknewton, Northumberland

For more on Josephine Butler see Sarah C. Williams When Courage Calls: Josephine Butler and the Radical Pursuit of Justice for Women (2024)