Talk by Penny Stokes to BFHS Newbury Branch 14 May 2025
The Foundling Hospital for “exposed and deserted young children” in London was the creation of Thomas Coram and a cohort of aristocratic patrons (including the composer Handel, and the artists Hogarth, Gainsborough and Reynolds) whom he recruited in the 1730s and 1740s.
The hospital operated through a provincial network of (usually middle-class) inspectors, who in turn recruited (usually working-class) mothers to wet-nurse and foster the babies alongside their own families. Newbury made a significant contribution to this operation, receiving and nurturing hundreds of London’s abandoned babies in the 1750s and 1760s.
The system was managed locally by four inspectors: Dr John Collet, a physician with his own practice in St Mary’s Hill; Hannah Aldworth, a philanthropist whose portrait hangs in St Nicolas’ Church; her sister-in-law Naomi Southby; and John Cates, a tanner from Donnington who was succeeded on his retirement by his nephew John Whale. Collet managed the greater part of the Newbury operation, allocating children to mothers, arranging payments, transport and the supply of clothing, and attending to their many illnesses. Around 200 children passed through his care alone. His dedication to their welfare is clear from his 90 surviving letters to the hospital in London.
At the age of 5 or 6 the children were generally returned to London for education and apprenticeship. However, Collet often negotiated with the hospital to put them to local apprenticeships, avoiding the emotional trauma of leaving the only families that they had known.
The foundlings who came to Newbury left no local mark, other than in the burial registers of Newbury, Shaw and Speen, where their many premature deaths were indicated by the inclusion of their foundling hospital numbers. The last of these on record was in 1769, two years after Collet retired.
