Happy Sunday everyone! Following on from my London Marathon post yesterday I spotted a Twitter link to a story about the first man to run the London Marathon with Motor Neurone Disease. This guy, Mark Maddox, is absolutely amazing, since his diagnosis with MND back in 2010 he has run the Liverpool Marathon and skydived, and today he's running in the London Marathon. GO MARK GO!

Yesterday I took advantage of the sunshine to visit the Foundling Museum near Russell Square in north London. It was Britain's first home for abandoned children, founded at a time when Britain had a high infant mortality rate and women were blamed for daring to get pregnant out of wedlock, regardless of whether or not the circumstances had included her consent.

The Foundling Museum by me!

 It was created by a man named Thomas Coram, who campaigned for a Royal Charter to create a hospital for abandoned children. He was eventually granted the Charter by King George II. A house in Hatton Garden was used as a temporary hospital when it first opened, while the proper hospital was built in Bloombury in the middle of the 1740's. The charity had several famous men as governors and supporters over the years, including the artist William Hogarth and the musician George Frederic Handel. Hogarth donated several paintings to the museum, which opened as the world's first public art gallery, while Handel allowed a concert performance of Messiah in order to help raise funds.

The hospital was given a government grant, under the condition that it would accept every infant brought to it's doors. The hospital was overwhelmed, along with women who had borne illegitimate children there were also women whose husbands had left to fight in one of England's numerous wars at the time. The men weren't paid until they came home and it often meant that they wives were left in poverty back home, they couldn't afford another mouth to feed and so placed their children under the protection of the hospital in the hopes that when their husbands returned they would be able to reclaim their children.

After 1801 the practise changed and the rules were tighter, children would be admitted if the mother showed that the father had abandoned her and that this was her only child. It was believed that if she gave up her child the mother could then "rehabilitate" herself in the eyes of society by returning to respectable employment, something that would be impossible if she had a baby to care for.
 

Thomas Coram's statue by me!

If you visit the museum at the moment you can visit the current exhibition in the basement, which focuses on the tokens left by the mothers of the children. These were used as a way to identify the child should the mother or father return to claim them, as part of her petition to get her child back the woman would need to describe what token she had left with it. The tokens were sealed up in the admission packets of the children, if the child was reclaimed then the packet was opened and if the mother's description matched the token then she could be reunited. I must admit it was difficult to work out which was more heartbreaking, the number of children that were never reclaimed, or the number of stories that seemed to end with the parents coming back for their child only to find it had died in the intervening years. The children themselves never knew who their parents were, their names were changed when they entered the hospital and if no one came to claim them then their records were never opened, they were never given the tokens their mothers had left them. This was probably done to give the children a "clean slate", no one would know if they were illegitimate or not, but at the same time severing all links with their past seems rather harsh in the light of the modern world.

There were some happy endings though, some mothers were married and were able to come back with their husbands to claim their child. The babies were nursed by women in the countryside before being brought into the city and some of these nurses bonded with their charges to the point where they "adopted" them (there was no formal adoption process back then). Some of the children maintained their links to the Foundling Hospital for the rest of their lives, the father of the artist Emma Brownlow was a Foundling and he became Secretary and Treasurer of the Hospital, dedicating his life's work to the running and administration of the hospital.

If you are ever near Russell Square then I would highly recommend a visit to this museum. It's a few minutes walk away from Russell Square station, entrance is £7.50 (£8.25 if you're a British taxpayer and happy to pay the GiftAid price) for adults and free for children under 16. You visit this museum and then head on over to the British Museum for a good day out!

Have a nice day everyone!

The V&A Museum

Hopefully you remember that when I went to Westminster Abbey I stopped off at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, also called the V&A.

In the past I've only stopped by the V&A very briefly, mainly while visiting the London Family History Center or visiting for a clue as part of a friend's scavenger hunt. I must admit that I wasn't fully prepared for how big it is, I normally go in via Exhibition Road but this time I went to the main front doors along Cromwell Gardens (I think that's the name of the road).

I took a right and came into a lovely large gallery with a high ceiling and a small fountain in the middle. The combination of the ceiling, the fountain and the gorgeous marble statuary scattered around made me feel as if I was in the garden of an Italian Rennaissance villa, it was a stunning effect and one that you really can't appreciate unless you visit. There's even two small balconies on the floor above, with the front covered with more marble carvings like a proper villa balcony.

After wandering around various other galleries, including one full of gorgeous Chinese artefacts and a Japanese one with some very pretty kimonos I stumbled across the central courtyard (also known as the John Madejski Garden) with a currently dry fountain in the middle. What I was most amazed by was the ornate brickwork and mosaics along wth tops of the windows. It's a hidden artwork in itself, from the outside of the building you picture the whole building as have a rather plain facade with bits of statuary here and there, but then you find this lovely red brickwork instead.

The door on the other side was carved with pictures of various leaders of various fields, and the top had this marble carving of two men with the words "Better it is to get wisdom than gold".

The leader in the field of sculpture is none other than Michael Angelo, and of course he had his own space on the door.

I only managed to get around half of the ground floor as my legs were very tired and refusing to carry me further, so once I went back inside I followed the final gallery down to the door at Exhibition Road and started to head home. But before I got to the station I paused to take one last photo of the monument that always strikes me whenever I visit this little corner of London.

Bomb damage. During the Second World War the V&A was hit by several bombs dropped by German planes. A lot of the various collections had been stored safely in various places around England, including some pieces stored in an underground station that the V&A shared with the British Museum. But two bombs exploded in Exhibition Road itself, causing a lot of damage to the facade of the building and destroying the glass roof. While the damage looks awful, and while the bombs themselves blew out all the windows and doors, the craters are not actually structurally unsound. At the time it was decided to not repair the damage since it was not actually harming the building, and after the war the damage was kept like this as a memorial.

In 1985 a carving was included further along the wall which reads; "The damage to these walls is the result of enemy bombing during the Blitz of the Second World War 1939 - 1945 and is left as a memorial to the enduring values of this great museum in a time of conflict". To me I like it because it's a reminder of what happened to London. Most of the city was repaired when the war was over, but occasionally you'll find things like that remind you of what the city went through. The V&A holds many beautiful artefacts from history, I find it very fitting that it also holds one of the ugly sides of history too.

Have a nice day everyone!

Ohio!

I would like to apologise now for the lack of posts in the past two weeks. I went on holiday to Cincinnati in Ohio because a friend there was getting married and I was invited to the wedding. This meant that I didn’t make a post because I was on holiday and then when I came back I went straight back to work so spent the following weekend catching up on my sleep and chores.

However I am happy to say that I had a lovely time in Cinci! I was staying with my lovely friend Meg, who was one of the bridesmaids, and also got to see Ames (maid of honour) and Beth (the bride). I left London while it was in a heatwave and found that Ohio was in one as well. It was a good thing I had packed a pair of shorts with me “just in case” since I would have baked to a crisp in my jeans.

Cincinnati Museum, photo by me.

We went to the Cincinnati History Museum, which was very cool, it’s made out of an old train terminal (we don’t have anything the same size in London as we’re still using all our train terminals). We ended up in the natural history wing where we found Native American artefacts, stuffed animals, and a cave! I’ve never been in a cave in a museum before, it had running water and everything, suddenly I wanted to close down Waterloo and turn it into a museum complete with a very nifty cave!

Ice cream! Photo by Meg.

Ames, Beth and Tim The Groom took me to Skyline for a Cincinnati Three-way, which is chilli on top of spaghetti with grated cheese. The cheese was orange! Cheddar cheese is not meant to be orange! As far as “comfort food” (my uncle described it as such when I told him about it) goes I think the British can do much better, if any of them come to the UK I will be sure to make them a nice toad in the hole to prove what comfort food really is. Thankfully the next day I could forget all about their strange orange cheese because Meg took me to an ice cream place and we had cookie dough ice cream that was AMAZING, even better than Ben & Jerry’s (creamier and less sugar-stuffed).

Me and Liz at the Reception, photo by April Besl.

 

There was also a bachelorette party (which was fun but ended in true legendary “we won’t talk about it” style) and a rehearsal dinner and before we knew it the wedding day was here! It was a really lovely wedding, and along with only being my second ever wedding it was also the first time I had seen a Catholic mass. The reception was a lot of fun, I haven’t danced so much for quite a long time. Every time I sat down for a breather I was pulled back up to my feet again. I had to have quite a long lie in the next morning. Between the rehearsal dinner, the wedding and the reception I managed to get to know a whole bunch of people, so a big thank you to Cheryl (poppet XD), Manny, Liz, April, Morgan, Kirk (aka "Ames' bloke") and Karl (aka "Ames' brother") for being fantastic company!

It's not traditional for the Beefeaters in London to kill people with spades,

but apparantly it's common in Ohio.

And then on Sunday, the day before I was flying home, Ames took me, Meg, Liz and Liz' husband Brad to a renaissance faire! We don’t have anything like that in the UK that I know of. We spent the entire day there, live music, people in costume, jousting, the whole nine yards and it was completed by perfect weather, it was an excellent day out! Monday was spent sleeping, packing, seeing some parks in Cinci and having one of the BEST burgers I've tasted before Ames dropped me off at the airport and I had to say my goodbyes.

So a big thank you to Meg, Ames and Beth for a fantastic week in the USA! And many congratulations to the bride and groom, Beth and Tim, and here's to many happy years!