Postman's Park lies a few streets north of St Paul's Cathedral, close to the Museum of London. It earned its name by being just around the corner from GPO national headquarters, which meant postal staff were its most frequent users. These days it's a convenient space for local office workers, especially those with cigarettes to smoke or lunches to eat. I counted 23 benches altogether, which is a lot of seating in a fairly small space, although technically Postman's Park is one of the largest public spaces in the City.
The park comprises three former churchyards, surplus to requirements in the mid 18th century after burials in built-up London were prohibited. Only St Botolph Without Aldersgate survives, the other two churches having been destroyed in the Great Fire and/or the Blitz. Churchwardens took many years to clear the gravestones, and the park opened sequentially between 1880 and 1890. But one strip of land beside Little Britain proved overly tempting for development, and in 1896 St Botolph's was forced to try to raise £12000 to retain it as open space. They struggled.
Enter painter George Frederic Watts with a project he hoped would inspire the public to donate more. He'd long wanted to build a monument to commemorate ‘heroism in every-day life’, but had nowhere to put it, until finally St Botolph's vicar stepped in gratefully to offer a location. Watts originally hoped for a three-sided cloister, but scaled down his plans to fit the space and ended up building a single wooden loggia against the wall of an adjacent building. All he needed now were tiles to commemorate the exploits of the brave folk whose stories he'd been cutting out of the newspapers for years.
The Wall of Heroes, or the The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, was opened with great ceremony on 30th July 1900. Alas George was now an old man and too ill to attend, and only four of the proposed 120 tiles were ready in time. They'd been produced by the master designer William De Morgan, who didn't come cheap, and the cost of the project was spiralling out of control. By the time George died in 1904 only 13 tiles had been installed, forming a single line across the centre, including "In A Boiler Explosion At A Battersea Sugar Refinery Was Fatally Scalded In Returning To Search For His Mate" and " Died Of Injuries Received In Trying To Save A Child From A Runaway Horse". These were truly extraordinary acts.
George's wife Mary then took over the project, in conjunction with the Heroic Self Sacrifice Memorial Committee. By December 1905 the first of five rows was finally complete, then in 1908 a second row appeared underneath. Here we find such gems as "Saved A Lunatic Woman From Suicide At Woolwich Arsenal Station But Was Himself Run Over By The Train", "Died Of Terrible Injuries Received When Attempting In Her Inflammable Dress To Extinguish The flames Which Had Enveloped Her Companion", and "Risked Poison For Himself Rather Than Lessen Any Chance Of Saving A Child's Life And Died". This time the tiles were by Royal Doulton, and not quite so impressive, indeed you can still see the creative disconnect if you compare the rows on the memorial today.
Mary soon lost interest in the project so it took over ten years for the next tile to appear, this time by public subscription to commemorate a policeman killed during a German air raid. The next three tiles took another decade to appear, again commemorating dead police officers, including "Voluntarily Descended High-tension Chamber At Kensington To Rescue Two Workmen Overcome By Poisonous Gas". One further tile was added in 1931 to fill a gap created by the earlier removal of a design with a factual mistake (the Sewage Pumping Works is in East, not West, Ham, as every pedant knows). And then the memorial went into hibernation, with only 53 of the 120 intended spaces filled. [Paul's Flickr album]
Suddenly in 2009 a 54th tile was added. The colleague of a drowned print technician thought his self-sacrifice would be an appropriate addition to the wall, and the Diocese of London agreed, so "Saved A Drowning Boy From The Canal At Thamesmead, But Sadly Was Unable To Save Himself" now appears on the top row. That's the top row which was meant to be the second row, except the first row was never added and neither was the fifth, if you're following this. No further tiles have followed, so Leigh Pitt stands out somewhat as the sole representative of the last eighty years.
Until and unless Watts' vision is ever completed, The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice remains incomplete and generally overlooked. Most of those who visit come to sit down, eat, smoke or fiddle with their phones facing in entirely the wrong direction to be inspired by any of the stirring tales behind them. This also makes it difficult for those of us who'd like to admire the tiling to get up close, for fear of invading the personal space of office workers enjoying some time alone. I turned up at ten on a weekday morning to find a single interloper eating breakfast from a plastic tub in front of "By Intrepid Conduct Saved 3 Children From A Burning House At The Cost Of Her Own Young Life", and when I came back an hour later she was still there. If paying your respects, time your visit carefully.
This post is from an occasional series of things you probably already knew, but that I hadn't properly blogged about before. I gave Postman's Park fairly short shrift back in 2004, because blogging was a lot briefer back then, so this time I thought I'd do it justice. Sorry if you thought you'd heard it all before. But it strikes me that sometimes it's important to blog the obvious stuff, rather than forever chasing the increasingly obscure, because there'll always be people to whom the 'well-known' is fresh and original.
