Overlooked Britain Postman’s Park in the City of

Overlooked Britain Agony in the garden

lucinda lambton Since 1900, heroes who’ve died saving people’s lives have been celebrated at Postman’s Park, London

London pride: the heroes’ memorials, made of Royal Doulton china

Show me a spot that’s as charming as it is mournful as Postman’s Park in the City of London and I will munch away at my hat.

It’s an amalgamation of three burial grounds – Christ Church Greyfriars; St Leonard’s, Foster Lane; and St Botolph without Aldersgate. They have all been eased into one picturesque garden, peopled with as rare and as delightful surprises as you are ever likely to come upon.

Created as a memorial to ‘heroic self-sacrifice’, it’s an assembly of memorials, with the names recorded in an ornate typeface by William De Morgan on Royal Doulton china.

There were to be 54 such plaques, with blue flowers entwined with various arrangements of leaves and some with Tudor roses. Each story was separated by tiles of a glowing brown. They were proposed by the great Victorian painter GF Watts. They were originally intended as decorative extras for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations in 1897.

The garden was opened to the public in 1900, with the avowed intent that it should honour the ordinary men and women who had died saving the lives of others; whose everyday modesty determined that they would otherwise be forgotten. A sheltered loggia was built to house the memorials. At the time of its opening, 120 tablets were in place, with a further nine planned during Watts’s lifetime. He died in 1904, when his saintly wife Mary took over and oversaw the installation of another 35.

In 1972, key elements of the park, including the memorials, were Grade II listed. In 2009, a city resident Jane Shaka added a new tablet – the first in 78 years.

The list of the memorialised is heart-stirring and exciting, although I fear that, by dint of its old-fashionedness, it is bound to be read with more than a glimmer of a smile.

Alice Ayres was the ‘daughter of a bricklayer’s labourer who by intrepid conduct saved 3 children from a burning house in Union Street Borough at the cost of her own life, April 24 1885’.

On the memorial to Mary Rogers, a ‘stewardess of the Stella’, we read that she died on 30th March 1899 – ‘Selfsacrificed by giving up her lifebelt and voluntarily going down in the sinking ship’. Walter Peart was an engine-driver and Harry Dean a fireman on the Windsor Express, who on 18th July 1898 ‘sacrificed their lives in saving the train’.

James Hewers, who died on 24th Sept 1878, was killed by a train at Richmond ‘in the endeavour to save another man’. Somewhat uncharitably, it was recorded that ‘he may have been intoxicated at the time of the accident’. Then there was John Cranmer Cambridge, a 22-year-old

clerk on the London County Council, drowned near Ostend while ‘saving the life of a stranger and a foreigner’ on 8th August 1901.

Soloman Galaman was only 11 when he was struck down by injuries after saving his little brother from being run over in Commercial Street. Samuel Rabbeth, a medical officer of the Royal Free Hospital, ‘tried to save a child suffering from diphtheria at the cost of his own life’; he died on 26th October 1884.

Edward Morris, aged only 10, was ‘bathing in the Grand Junction Canal’ when he ‘sacrificed his life to help his sinking companion’. Perhaps most dramatic was Henry James Bristow of Walthamstow, who died on 30th December 1890, saving ‘his little sister’s life by tearing off her flaming clothes but caught fire himself and died of burns and shock’. He died of poisonous gas. Ten years earlier, George Blencowe was only 16 ‘when a friend bathing in the River Lea cried for help’ and George ‘went to his rescue and was drowned’. Oh dear, oh dear.

Above and left: The Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice. Far left: GF Watts in a Vanity Fair cartoon, 1891

Of PC Edward George Brown Greenoff of the Metropolitan Police, we read, ‘Many lives were saved by his devotion to duty at the terrible explosion at Silvertown 19 Jan 1917’.

And so it goes on and on… A runaway horse, a comrade in the sewage pumping works, an aged mother dying on a staircase; Ellen Donovan of Lincoln Court ‘rushed into a burning house to save her neighbour’s children and perished in the flames’.

Last but by no means least is Leigh Pitt, a 30-year-old ‘reprographic operator’, who in 2007 ‘saved a drowning boy from the canal at Thamesmead, but sadly was unable to save himself’.

How did they amass such a wealth of obscure detailing? What an assembly it is! Every rescuer is given an ennobling identity. Three heart-warming cheers for George Frederick Watts and his worthy companions.