What is a Foundling?

Foundlings and the Foundling Hospital

‘Foundling’ is an historic term applied to children, usually babies, that have been abandoned by
parents and discovered and cared for by others.

Abandoned children were not unusual in the eighteenth century when the Foundling Hospital
was established. Unlike mainland Europe where Catholic-run institutions had been caring for
orphans and foundlings from as early as the thirteenth century, the UK relied on the Poor Law to
cater for needy families at a parish level. The only charitable establishment that received
foundlings as well as orphans was London’s Christ’s Hospital founded in 1552. However, by
1676 illegitimate children were prohibited.

By the early 1700s the situation for struggling parents was particularly acute in London.
Economic migration from the countryside had led to a population explosion, which put parish-
based poor relief under immense strain. Mothers unable to care for their children as a result of
poverty or illegitimacy had few options, leading to some abandoning their babies on doorsteps,
outside churches and even on rubbish heaps. It is estimated that around a thousand babies a year
were abandoned in London alone. This was the situation that confronted Thomas Coram on his
return from America in 1704. It would take Coram seventeen years of dogged campaigning
before he finally received a Royal Charter, enabling him to establish a Foundling Hospital ‘for
the care and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children’.

However, the term ‘foundling’ is a misnomer in relation to the Foundling Hospital, for although
its criteria and process of admission changed over the centuries, mothers were required to hand
over their child in person. There were only two exceptions to this rule. The first was during a
brief period known as General Reception which lasted from 1756 – 1760. In return for State
support the Hospital was required to admit every baby brought to its doors, and to this end a
basket was hung at the gates to enable babies to be left anonymously. General Reception led to
soaring mortality rates and baby trafficking, and it would take the Hospital many years to
stabilize following this brief but calamitous change of policy. The other exception applied to
babies who came with a donation of £100 which guaranteed a place on a ‘no questions asked’
basis. This scheme ran from 1756 to 1801, during which time approximately 75 babies were
admitted in this way.

Today, access to contraception, State support for families on low income, and changed attitudes
towards illegitimacy mean that child abandonment is very unusual in the UK. Although it is
considered to be a serious crime in many countries, including the UK where it is illegal, a
number of jurisdictions have made exceptions in the form of safe haven laws. These apply to
babies left in designated places such as hospitals or ‘baby hatches’, which enable parents to
safely and anonymously give up the care of their children. In a development that has been
criticized by the United Nations, baby hatches have been reintroduced in Europe and also in
China where an estimated 10,000 children are abandoned each year. In 2012 it was reported by
The Guardian that in the course of a decade almost 200 baby hatches had been installed across
Europe in countries as diverse as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic and
Latvia. Meanwhile, in 2015 the BBC reported that the US state of Indiana also considered
making the move to introduce baby boxes to prevent the deaths of abandoned infants. However,
the United Nations has spoken out against this spread, warning that the practice “contravenes the
right of the child to be known and cared for by his or her parents”.

https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/about/our-history/what-is-a-foundling/
Interview

I was one of Britain's last foundlings

Joanna Moorhead
Tom Mackenzie spent most of his childhood in the Foundling Hospital, a charity run on strict
Victorian values that brought up children born outside marriage. He was one of the last to be
admitted – and one of the last to leave

Jean Craig was cuddling her baby in the hospital waiting room when a nurse appeared and said
the doctor wanted to check him. She handed him over and waited. Five minutes turned to 10, and
10 to 20. Gradually, it dawned on Jean that her baby was not coming back. By the time the
doctor arrived to confirm it, Jean was sobbing uncontrollably. She knew she wasn't going to see
her son for a very long time, perhaps never again.

Jean's baby hadn't been stolen or snatched or forcibly removed: she had elected to hand him over
to the Foundling Hospital, to avoid the scandal of raising a child born outside of marriage. The
hospital would care for her son until he was a teenager and then send him out into the world with
a new name and a sanitised past in the hope that he would never be stigmatised for the
circumstances of his birth.

It sounds archaic, and it was. The Foundling Hospital was opened in 1741. But what is most
shocking about Jean Craig's story is that it didn't happen in the 18th century or even the 19th: this
was 1939. Derek, the child she handed over, is now 74 and this week he published his account of
being one of the last children taken in by the Foundling Hospital, where he endured a harsh,
Dickensian-style childhood well into the 1940s.

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Being given to the Foundling Hospital meant that everything was taken away from Derek – not
just his mother but his name too. "Derek Craig" disappeared, and a boy called "Tom Humphreys"
took his place. The intention, explains Tom today, was to cleanse his past, to "legitimise" him.

Everything the 26-year-old Jean knew about the Foundling Hospital sounded marvellous: a
wealthy, benevolent organisation that would raise her child in fresh country air, far from the
smog-filled streets of London. In time, she hoped, when she was married, she could claim him
back. For now, she thought he was in the best place.

But Jean could not have known that when in 1935 the hospital had moved from its original
Bloomsbury premises to rural Berkhamsted, it had taken its harsh Victorian values with it.
Derek's childhood would be heartbreakingly tough and comfortless, and at times downright
cruel: he would know love only briefly before it was snatched away again.

The hospital authorities, Tom is at pains to point out, always meant well. The problem was that
their morals and philosophy, their practices and even their language, belonged more in the time
of Hogarth and Gainsborough, the 18th-century artists who donated their works to raise funds for
its charitable work, than the mid-20th century.

"Their view was that we were the offspring of fallen women. We would be cared for and fed, and
educated up to a point, but we should always know our place in life: the boys wore a military-
style uniform – the expectation was that they would join the army – and the girls wore white
pinnies over their dresses and little white caps, because they would become servants. There was
no understanding of the damage that institutional life, without individual care and affection,
could do to small children, or of the horrors that could happen when older children were put in
charge of younger children, and allowed to bully and even torture them."

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From the outset, the Foundling Hospital's view was paternalistic and superior: mothers should
regard themselves as lucky that their children were being accepted, much as the 18th- and 19th-
century mothers, whose children would otherwise have died, and whose fate was determined by
lottery, had seen themselves as fortunate if their babies were taken in. This paternalism extended
to tricking the mothers into handing their child over for a medical examination, without realising
that this was the final farewell, as happened in Jean's case. "The hospital authorities had 200
years' worth of experience of separating mothers from their babies – they knew it was a very
difficult moment and that even women who had agreed could become hysterical or change their
minds when they were required to actually hand them over," says Tom. "So they had their
methods for doing it in a way that they thought would be least likely to provoke a scene or cause
trouble."

Tom with his foster sisters Monica, centre, and Janet, a younger fellow foundling, in Saffron
Walden in the early 1940s.

One thing the Foundling Hospital did get right, says Tom, was the realisation that a baby needed
a family: so after Jean gave him up he was fostered out to a couple called Elsie and Cecil who
lived near Saffron Walden in Essex, where most of the foundlings' foster homes were. They had
a biological daughter called Monica, who was three, and another foundling called Janet who was
18 months old. Their two-bedroom terraced cottage became Tom's for five years. "I really think
if you don't get proper love and security in the first few years, nothing can make up for it later,"
he says. "Fortunately, I did."

All that ended, though, on a day in 1943 when a coach arrived in the village to collect all the
foundlings who had reached five: they were to become boarders at the Foundling Hospital. Elsie
went on the journey with Tom: at Berkhamsted they were shepherded into a large hall and a
nurse gave a speech about the Christian ethos of the hospital, and the importance of obeying the
rules. Then came the words they'd been dreading: "Time to go back to the coach now, ladies."

Within a few minutes, says Tom, the mothers were gone. In his book, he describes the heartbreak
of what happened next to the "sorrowful group of confused, unhappy infants … some sank to the
floor in utter defeat, many made a headlong dash to the door through which their mothers exited,
only to have their way blocked".

To Tom, the hospital was immense. "The corridors seemed endless. I remember thinking that
first day, if I get lost here I'm done for – I'll never find my way out," he says.

His most precious possession, a white fluffy rabbit that he took to bed every night, was taken
away – all the children, he says, were parted from their toys and shown the vast, 30-bed
dormitory where they were to sleep. That night he remembers the sound of weeping from the
many lonely boys and girls.

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His early years in the Foundling Hospital were characterised by an absence of love and affection
– "There was no one you could run to if you scraped your knee, no one to give you a cuddle," he
says – and by humiliating rituals, including having to hold their pants up inside out for inspection
by the nurses. Unsurprisingly, bed-wetting was ubiquitous – and insensitively handled.

When Tom was six, and moved to the main school, the real cruelty began. It came from two
directions: other boys and sadistic masters. Tom remembers how the monitors would electrocute
the younger boys, taking lightbulbs out of fittings and forcing the little ones to put their fingers
into the socket. "Sometimes, for a bit of real fun, they'd line up six or seven of us and make us
hold hands – then the shock would go right down the line and we'd all get it," he says. But the
institutional cruelty was horrific too: in his book, he describes being given a public caning in
morning assembly: six hard strikes on the palm. One boy with whom he is still in touch was left
with permanent damage to his hand, he says, as a result of being caned.

But times were about to change. In 1946, the Curtis Report, which looked into the needs of
children in care, was published: almost overnight, says Tom, the governors of the Foundling
Hospital realised that their way of raising children was all wrong. "After treating us like army
recruits, they finally came to appreciate that we were, after all, children and needed love and
affection rather than discipline and rules," he writes in his book.
The head teacher was replaced by a more humane man, George Hodgson. He and his wife,
Margaret, took a special interest in Tom, even inviting him to spend a holiday with them when
no foster carer could be found.

By now 11, Tom had no inkling about his mother or why she had given him up. "We were told
nothing whatsoever about our real families, and if they sent presents or cards they were withheld
because the authorities thought it was unfair if some children received them and others didn't,"
he says. "But I had always clung on to the idea that my mother was out there somewhere, and
that she must have had a good reason for giving me up."

And now, in 1949, came the first evidence that he might be right: George and Bessie Deedman,
in whose foster care he had spent several holidays, put in an application to adopt him. "It was
very kind, and I was very fond of them, but they were in their 60s and, much as I would have
liked a family, I wasn't sure it was going to be best for me to spend my adolescence with people
late on in their years," says Tom.

Tom with his wife, Ausra, who encouraged him to write his memoir. Photograph: Jim Wileman
for the Guardian

So when he was called to Mr Hodgson's office and told that the adoption would not be going
ahead because his birth mother was unwilling to give her consent, he was relieved – and excited
because now he knew he had a mother and there was a chance she wouldn't consent to an
adoption because one day she wanted him back. What was more, Tom had overheard that his
mother's name was Jean, that she was married to a solicitor called Duncan Mackenzie, and that
they lived in Dingwall, in the Highlands of Scotland. "I never forgot that information, because I
knew it could help me find her one day," he says.

Tom left the Foundling Hospital, aged 15: his class was the last to be enrolled and the last to
leave – ever since, the property at Berkhamsted has been an ordinary school, with pupils from
the town. He worked as a photographer's assistant and in other jobs before national service in the
army. When that ended, in 1959, he travelled to Dingwall in the hope of finding Jean Mackenzie.
"I only had a few days to do it because I had to be back in my old job on the Monday morning,"
he says.

In Dingwall, he discovered that the Mackenzies had moved to Edinburgh and by the time he
traced his mother to the office where she worked, it was Saturday morning. "I thought there was
bound to be no one there then," he says. "But I phoned up just in case."
Tom Mackenzie with his mother Jean on her 80th birthday.

By a twist of fate, Jean was actually working that day – it wasn't uncommon to work on Saturday
mornings in those days. When Tom got to the office he asked for her. "I stood at the bottom of
the stairs, and I heard her coming down behind me," he says. "She said later that she knew it
must be me – she had waited and hoped, through all these years, that I would find her."

Tom was adopted by Jean and Duncan just before he turned 21 and carries their surname.

Today he is fit and healthy, and still works full-time, running a keycutting and shoe-mending
business in Plymouth. He has been married four times and it was his present wife, Ausra, who
encouraged him to write the book. His earlier marriages, he says, failed because he was always
looking for a mother, not a wife; although he and Jean remained close until her death (and he
also got to know his biological father, Raymond, Jean's former boyfriend) it was always hard to
make up for those motherless years. He has three children himself – Vicky, 45, Ross, 38, and
Grant, 25 – and he'll never forget how he felt when each of them reached five.

"I remember looking at them at that age and thinking, how would it be if they were torn away
from their family, from their parents, from all they'd known, and sent to an institution? Children
are resilient – I was resilient. But the price I paid, the price all of us foundlings paid, was a high
one."

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/08/britains-last-foundling-tom-
mackenzie