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

John Betjeman, more than just a National Treasure

On May 17, 2026

John Betjeman’s passions encompassed Victorian gothic architecture; steam trains; the English countryside and seaside; provincial towns and country churches; and the cosy, banal miscellany of buttered toast, Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, Liberty lampshades, and Hillman Imps. Often sentimental and nostalgic, his accessible verses guaranteed him a place in the pantheon of National Treasures. Academics and scholars could be dismissive: he was rejected for the position of Poet Laureate in 1967 on the basis that his work was “lightweight,” * and that he was a mere “mere songster of tennis lawns and cathedral closes.” ** And as a teenager in the 1960s, eager to embrace sophistication, I was a little ashamed of liking his poetry as much as I did.

But Betjeman was not just a compound of cuddly whimsy and quirky charm. He cultivated fogeyism and winsomeness, but his work can be wry, mocking and satirical. Pathos jostles with a sardonic wit in his poems. He can be very funny; he engages with misfortune and adversity. He can also be a terrible snob and rather unkind. But neither his poetry nor his campaigning can be dismissed as “lightweight.”

Listen to a few extracts from a small selection of his poems:

For exuberant joyful absurdity nothing can equal A Subaltern’s Love Song:

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,

We in the tournament – you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy

With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn…

But remember too the wistful and understated poignancy of In a Bath Teashop with its restrained economy of detail bearing a wealth of humanity and tenderness:

“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another

Let us hold hands and look.”

She, such a very ordinary little woman;

He, such a thumping crook;

But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

In the teashop’s inglenook.

The autobiographical blank verse poem Summoned by Bells captured the tragic brevity of childhood with a pithy:

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells

And sights, before the dark of reason grows.

Betjeman allegedly regretted the publication of Slough, feeling that he had been unkind towards the town and its inhabitants, when it was uncontrolled industrialisation not the place itself which he abhorred:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

It isn’t fit for humans now,

There isn’t grass to graze a cow

Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens

Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,

Tinned minds, tinned breath…

Moreover, two years after he published those verses real bombs fell on England giving an unintended ugly twist to the poem.

In Westminster Abbey, written in 1940, for all its jaunty rhythm, Betjeman tackles darker themes of religious hypocrisy and racism:

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.

Spare their women for Thy Sake,

And if that it is not too easy

We will pardon Thy Mistake…

Keep our Empire undismembered

Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,

Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,

Honduras and Togoland;

Protect them Lord in all their fights,

And, even more, protect the whites.

Business Girls exhibits a tender empathy with the newly emancipated but poorly paid women of the mid twentieth century. And there is a hint that their independence came at too high a price, in part forced upon them by the carnage of the two World Wars:

From the geyser ventilators

Autumn winds are blowing down

On a thousand business women

Having baths in Camden Town…

Early nip of changeful autumn

Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,

At the back precarious bathrooms

Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions

Business women lie and soak,

Seeing through the draughty skylight

Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there poor unbelov’d ones,

Lap your loneliness in heat.

All too soon the tiny breakfast,

Trolley-bus and windy street!

How to Get on in Society is a wonderful spoof on faux genteel manners and pretensions:

Phone for the fish-knives, Norman

As Cook is a little unnerved;

You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes

And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?

The frills round the cutlet can wait

Till the girl has replenished the cruets

And switched on the logs in the grate…

(Pete Sarstedt’s 1969 hit Where do you go to my Lovely? which employed a similar technique, always reminded me of this poem. The song came out a mere fifteen years later but the list was very different, for lifestyle and societal ambitions had changed a great deal in that time.)

In 1973 Betjeman wrote and narrated Metroland, a television documentary focused on the suburbs of NW London. Between 1915 and 1933 the Metropolitan Railway had built houses adjacent to the line heading out of London through Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. They coined the slogan “Live in Metroland,” and produced a brochure promoting their Tudorbethan properties. The fulsome marketing language played on middle class aspirations, advertising spacious homes with gardens and garages in an idealised environment surrounded by trees and nature, but within easy commuting distance of the City.

Betjeman liked suburbia, and his commentary, delivered partly in verse and over an old black and white film shot from an MR train, sounds superficially like an unqualified homage to commuter towns, reflecting the MR’s own celebration of the comfortable suburban life of ladies who lunch, and their car washing, lawn mowing, golf playing husbands. But if there is affection in his portrait, it is tinged with regret, for Betjeman is conscious of the irony that in offering former city dwellers a quasi-rural retreat, the frenzy of construction destroyed the very countryside it promoted. When he looks out at the end of the MR line he reflects, “Grass triumphs. And I must say I am rather glad.”

Moreover, though Betjeman is broadly comfortable with semi-detached houses and golf courses, he cannot resist a snobbish aside worthy of Nancy Mitford when he describes Neasden as “The home of the gnome and the average citizen.” There was an acidity never far below the surface in Betjeman’s work; he had previously parodied the aspiring inhabitants of suburbia in Middlesex:

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

Runs the red electric train,

With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s

Daintily alights Elaine…

National Treasure maybe, but Betjeman is not cuddly.He is too self-consciously clever and sharp for that. Yet those very qualities contribute to making him a better poet than he is sometimes credited with being.

Then alongside Betjeman the poet is Betjeman the campaigner, and again his work is far from that of a good natured, bumbling dabbler.

A founding member of the Friends of Friendless Churches, he edited and wrote part of the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Simon Jenkins in his own England’s Thousand Best Churches recalls Betjeman’s tireless campaigns to save redundant churches, and reminds us of our debt to

Three ghosts (who) inhabit all English churches. They linger in every arcade, peep from every gallery and flit across every monument. They are those of John Betjeman, Alec Clifton-Taylor and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Betjeman’s enthusiasm extended to secular architecture. A railway enthusiast and champion of Victorian architecture when it was unfashionable, he led the unsuccessful fight to save the Euston Arch, the doric entrance to the station which was demolished in 1961.But his influence and determination were instrumental in saving the most spectacular of all the Victorian railway stations – St. Pancras and its adjacent Midland Grand Hotel.

The work of George Gilbert Scott, 207 metres long and seventy metres wide, supported by 850 cast iron pillars and covered by an arched glass ceiling, the train shed at St. Pancras station is the acme of high Victorian secular architecture. When it opened in 1876 the hotel was the first to have electric lifts, “ascending chambers”, flushing lavatories, and revolving doors. In the 1890s the Ladies’ Drawing Room became the first Ladies’ Smoking Room in London. But when it closed in the 1930s it still had only five bathrooms for three hundred bedrooms. It became railway offices, then after bomb damage during the war it stood empty. In the 1960s both the station and the hotel were scheduled for demolition.

Their survival was ensured after Betjeman led the fight to prevent their destruction and they became grade 1 listed buildings in 1967.But the station was in decline as more of the north bound trains made Euston their terminus, and the hotel remained empty. In the 1990s English Heritage restored the exterior, and organised tours enabled us to see the magnificence which lay within beneath the layers of dust and dirt.

Salvation came in the form of Eurostar which since 2007 has operated out of St. Pancras. The station was renovated, and in 2011 the hotel reopened with 244 rooms – en suite – and sixty-eight apartments. The breathtaking grand stair once again curves up beneath the cerulean ceiling spangled with gold stars.

Betjeman died in 1984, too soon to see the magnificently restored station and hotel, but his statue stands, gazing up in delighted wonder at the glass ceiling of the train shed – and conveniently located for the champagne bar. Raise a glass to him when you travel this way; he saved something splendid for us all.

Statue of Betjeman gazing up at the glass ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras

Ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras

And you can visit his grave in Saint Enodoc’s churchyard in Trebetherick, Cornwall. Both St. Enodoc and Trebetherick, where he had spent childhood holidays, feature in his poems.

The fine lettering and decoration on the black slate are the work of the stone mason Simon Verity. In his introduction to English Parish Churches Betjeman praised the elegance of the stone carver’s craft, ubiquitous in graveyards until the middle of the nineteenth century, with letters and decoration deep cut into local stone. Sadly he contrasted it with the modern “machine made letters inserted into white Italian marble.”

It’s a beautiful location, near the sea, the old church partially sunk into the sand dunes, but… church and churchyard are surrounded by a hideous golf course. To reach them you must cross the sterile links, pass golfers in their pastel leisure-ware, and risk being hit by their flying balls. But Betjeman would not have minded; he loved golf and particularly liked to play on a seaside course.

*Helen Gardner, Merton Professor of English, Oxford

**Lord Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council.

Betjeman was appointed Poet Laureate when the position fell vacant again in 1972.

Grigoris Lambrakis – Zei

By Gravedigger

On May 3, 2026

In Activists, Medics, Politicians

The Old Theatre lay at the heart of the LSE: forum for the larger undergraduate lectures, arena for visiting speakers, and stage for febrile student union meetings. But on Thursday evenings politics ceded ground to culture when Film Soc. screened its weekly offering. And it was there, with singular surprise, that I first encountered applause in response to a film. In the provinces of my childhood, we had always hastened to exit the cinema before the credits rolled to avoid the then ubiquitous playing of the National Anthem. Free from that constraint a more leisurely exit prevailed but I had never witnessed an audience remaining seated, engaged in prolonged clapping long after the screen went blank.

The plaudits came from a group seated together near the front of the theatre. “It’s the Greek students,” my companion apprised me. It was 1970 and the film was Costa-Gavras’ “Z,”released the previous year.

“Z” began with an arresting content warning: in lieu of the habitual disclaimer, it informed the audience,

Toute resemblance avec des evenements reels, des personnes mortes ou vivantes n’est pas le fait du hazard,

And in case this lacked sufficient clarity it confirmed the intentional similarity to real events with determined capitalization,

Elle est VOLONTAIRE.

The film was based on the political novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos published in 1967, an account of the murder of Grigoris Lambrakis and the subsequent investigation into his assassination.

Grigoris Lambrakis (1912-1963) was born in Kerasitsa, a village in the Peloponnese, and studied medicine in Athens. He was a champion athlete, holding the Greek record for long jump for twenty-three years, winning gold medals in the Balkan Games, and participating in the controversial 1936 Olympic Games.

During the Axis occupation of Greece, 1941-44, he worked in his brother’s clinic where they sheltered partisans and supplied them with false identities. During the famine of those years, he set up the Union of Greek Athletes who held competitions to raise money to fund food banks for the starving population.

Throughout the Civil War years which followed the withdrawal of the Axis powers Lambrakis treated the wounded on both sides of the conflict. For this he was accused of “anti-national activity” by the conservative, monarchist government and spent six months in the Goudi prison in 1948.

During the 1950s while specialising in gynaecology and endocrinology, Lambrakis operated a free weekly clinic for patients unable to afford medical care.

So far, a clever, talented, decent man living his life and doing what good he could along the way, principled and with a certain courage. Then in the 1960s came a significant shift in focus: Lambrakis became committed to radical social and political change.

Something had been rotten in the state of Greece since the mid-1930s: an unpleasant amalgam of domestic dictatorships and foreign oppression. In 1935 the monarchy had been restored by a rigged plebiscite. George II then facilitated the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas. Between 1941 and 1944 the Axis occupation, the collaborationist government under Rallis, and the British blockade reduced the country to starvation. More than 200,000 people died in the famine.

In 1944 it was understood that the Communist EAM/ELAS, whose members had been at the heart of national resistance against the occupying powers of Nazi Germany and Bulgaria, would be given a significant voice in the new government, and that the collaborationist Security Battalions would be put on trial. This did not happen. Instead, Churchill, who combined hysterical anti-Communism with a crazed desire for British hegemony, sent troops under General Scobie to escort the Greek government in exile home from Egypt.

Back in Athens, Scobie ordered the EAM/ELAS forces to disarm, while supplying the anti-Communists with ammunition. A mass protest in central Athens was met with police opening fire and in a savage assault killing twenty-eight people. The Battle for Athens, thirty-seven days of fighting, ensued with the British troops and right-wing nationalists ranged against the Communists. The defeat of the latter when the British flew in extra troops was followed by the White Terror of 1945-6 with arrests, torture, exile and murder of leftists. The Greek Civil War continued until 1949 with an estimated 150,000 dead.

Throughout the 1950s, repressive right-wing regimes were funded and supported by America, where a morbid fear of Communism ran even deeper than in Britain. These successive governments connived with the extravagantly funded monarchy to maintain a stranglehold on the constitution. Former partisans and dissidents were sent to re-education camps on remote islands; censorship was rife; the power of trade unions was limited and trade unionists imprisoned; the power of the army and police went unchecked.

Against this background Lambrakis stood for the Hellenic Parliament in 1961 as an Independent member for Piraeus under the umbrella of the United Democratic Left (EDA), the only legal left-wing organisation since the civil war. His platform was one of peace and democracy, his aim to eliminate all trace of fascism at home and to free Greece from the foreign presence supporting it.

In his pre-election address he told his audience,

Dear friends we are running for election with two pursuits: peace and democracy. We want peace so that no missile bases will be established on Greek soil and we can have friendly relations with our Balkan neighbours. We want real democracy… to put an end to arrests, forced exile…and to have the most beautiful achievement of the Greek people finally recognised: our heroic national resistance against Italian and German fascists and their local collaborators.

Lambrakis opposed Greek involvement with NATO and reliance on American economic aid, sought to close the US missile base near Thessaloniki, and fought the establishment of nuclear bases in Crete. He established the Committee for International Détente and Peace in Greece and attended international pacifist meetings and demonstrations.

In April 1963 he joined the march organised by CND from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston to London. The Bertrand Russell Youth Committee for Nuclear Disarmament led by a law student, Michael Peristerakis, planned another march from Athens to Marathon later that month, differing from the marches in western Europe in that it was a demonstration for social change, democracy, and the right to freedom of expression as well as disarmament. In a perfect, though undoubtedly unintended, illustration of the need for these reforms the Karamanlis government and the police banned the march. Despite a display of intimidation thousands of marchers ignored the official ban; 2,000 were arrested and three hundred injured. Only Lambrakis, claiming his parliamentary immunity, was able to reach Marathon, walking alone holding the same banner he had carried at Aldermaston bearing the nuclear disarmament symbol and the word “Greece.” But when he tried to complete the return march, parliamentary immunity failed him and he too was arrested.

For Lambrakis the battle for the release of political prisoners was part of the same struggle as that for pacifism: peace and civil rights were inexorably linked. Over 1,000 political prisoners arrested at the end of the Civil War remained incarcerated. Antonis Ambatielos, a trades unionist and member of the Greek resistance had been arrested and sentenced to death in 1947, his sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. To draw attention to his case and that of other political prisoners, Lambrakis made a statement to the British press during a visit there by Queen Frederica. Pointing to the undemocratic and unconstitutional interventions of the reactionary queen in parliament and government, and her resistance to the desire of the Greek people for democracy, freedom, and the release of political prisoners, he issued a prescient warning,

I wish to warn the queen that with her attitude she is leading the throne to a sure demise.

The resulting publicity resulted in the cause of the Greek prisoners being taken up by British Labour MPs and an international conference calling for an amnesty of all Greek political prisoners was held in Paris.

In May 1963 Lambrakis attended an anti-war meeting in Thessaloniki despite having received death threats. In full view of a large police and military presence a pickup van drove towards him and a passenger in the back of the truck delivered blows to his head. Five days later he died of his injuries.

Over half a million people attended Lambrakis’ funeral despite attempts by the government to limit the turnout. The letter “Z,” an abbreviation for the Greek “Zei,” He Lives, appeared on buildings and hoardings in Greek cities.

The Investigating Prosecutor, Christos Sartzetakis, was pressured by the government to return a risible false narrative of a traffic accident. He refused, emphasising the culpability of high-ranking police officials, members of the paramilitary and of the repressive para-state apparatus who initiated the attack.

The assassination contributed to the fall of the Karamanlis government, and the electoral victory of Papandreou’s Centre Union in November brought some reforms with the release of political prisoners, wealth redistribution, economic liberalisation and education expansion.

In 1964 a new political organisation, the Lambrakis Democratic Youth, was formed with Lambrakis’ friend Theodorakis as its first president.

Yet change was limited, and after King Constantine engineered a split in the Centre Union Papandreou resigned heralding political instability, and a series of short-term weak governments. Nonetheless in the elections scheduled for May 1967 the Centre Union confidently expected to emerge as the largest party and to be able to rule in coalition with the United Democratic Left. But precisely four years after Lambrakis’ march to Marathon, on April 21^st, 1967, the military Junta seized power claiming instability (nothing new) and the threat of an anarcho-Communist takeover (from the Centre Union?) as justification… Both the monarchy and the CIA have always denied that they lent their support to the coup.

Leading politicians and political activists were arrested, the constitution suspended and martial law declared. Political opponents were imprisoned and tortured. Amnesty International estimated that over 10,000 people were arrested and imprisoned within the first few days of the regime, and six months on more than 2,000 had been subject to torture. Political parties were suppressed, military courts established, civil liberties collapsed, freedom of assembly outlawed, surveillance introduced, the press censored.

The Investigating Prosecutor who had identified the agents responsible for Lambrakis’ death found himself in prison, while all charges against the perpetrators were dropped. Against this background Vassilis Vassilikos published “Z.” It was promptly banned in Greece as was the subsequent film with soundtrack by Theodorakis who was exiled. Even possession of Lambrakis’ scientific papers became an offence.

At the end of the film before the credits there is a list of some of the things banned by the Junta, they include: long hair for men, miniskirts, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pinter, new maths, the peace symbol, Sociology, the letter “Z.” The absurdity amused us, but must have appeared less than humorous to the Greek students.

The Junta fell in 1974 under the impact of internal splits, student protests, and the ill-fated attempt to invade Cyprus. The country transitioned by free vote to a Presidential Parliamentary democracy, the Hellenic Republic, with an independent judiciary, press and trade unions.

Since 1982 the Athens Classic Marathon has been dedicated to Grigoris Lambrakis.

Grave of Lambrakis, the First Cemetery, Athens

The quotation on the grave is from Yiannis Ritsos, Poet, Communist, and Member of the Greek Resistance.

Ritsos’ poem Epitaphios was inspired by the photograph of a mother weeping over the body of her son who died when police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of striking tobacco workers in Thessaloniki in 1936.The poem was publicly burned during the Metaxas dictatorship. Theodorakis set it to music. It was sung in the streets following Lambrakis’ funeral. Ritsos was sent to a prison camp by the Junta.
(Photograph from a Greek newspaper, Rizospastis, May 10 1936 unknown author).

The bronze on Lambrakis’ grave portrays a dove of peace, Lambrakis bearing his CND banner on his march to Marathon, and his profile. There is a famous photograph of him with the banner. It is copyright but you can see it on Wikipedia if you google Lambrakis.

Captain Coram and the Foundling Hospital

By Gravedigger

On April 19, 2026

In Philanthropists

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.

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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.