THE HEROES OF EVERYDAY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 82, Issue 305, 24 December 1938, Page 3

THE HEROES OF EVERYDAY

“Postman’s Park,” a Church’s

Roll of Honour

pEW who come to London, and few I Londoners themselves except workers in the City, know of the re markable roll of honour in the old churchyard of St. Botolph, Aldersgate, behind the General Post Office. It was the gift of G. F. Watts, the famous artist, whose widow died only recently, writes a special correspondent of the London Observer. The City garden, in which London men and women who lost their lives trying to save others are commemorated, is formed from the churchyards of St. Botolph’s, Christ Church, Newgate, and St. Leonard’s, Foster-lane, with an additional piece of land bought by subscription in 1900. Its popular name is “Postmen’s Park.” A fountain stands there, and a sundial; at one side the squat church of St. Botolph’s, whose unlovely exterior is no index to its contents, fills the corner of St. Martin's le Grand and Little Britain. Hard by, on a May night in 1738, John Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed.” Here, in this unexpected garden bounded on every side by tall buildings, and the dull thunder of City traffic, G. F. Watts raised a covered arcade bearing the words “In commemoration of heroic self-sacrifice.” It faces lawns, flower-beds, old trees. Pigeons whirl about it. Someone is usually reading or sleeping on the seat within. The arcade is a pleasant place for rest or contemplation, but it is something more—the home of p Roll of Honour which has been called the “simplest, more moving, and spontaneous of privately-executed memorials of individual heroism.” Only two people were sitting in the arcade when I visited it. Above their heads memorial plaques, line upon line of them, made of glazed Doulton ware and filling perhaps half of the wall, ran down the entire length of the quiet loggia. There are over fifty of these plaques; space is left for many more. The wall is, as it were, the epitome of certain acts of high courage that, but for this lasting memorial, would have been forgotten long ago. At -the time of Queen Victoria’s first Jubilee, G. F. Watts suggested the erection of a monument to the heroes of everyday life—“those likely-to-be-forgotten heroes” —was his only too accurate phrase. Twelve years passed before further action, and then Watts had to undertake the wprk himself. Mrs. Watts, in a letter to the Parish Council of St. Botolph’s after her husband's death, spoke of *a permanent record of deeds for which no V.C. would be received, and of which there would be no history except that buried in the volumes of past newspapers.” After the searching of newspaper files, G. F. Watts erected the first thirteen tablets of glazed ware, greenlettered. When he died Mrs. Walts carried on the work: the memorial is now maintained by the churchwardens of St. Botolph’s. Here one finds the name of Mary Rogers, stewardess of the Stella, who, on March 30, 1899, sacrificed herself by giving up her life-belt and going down voluntarily with the sinking vessel. A ship appears in the corner of the

plaque. There is a crested helmet of a City constable on the memorial tc Alfred Smith, killed in an air-raid while saving the lives of women and girls in June, 1917. Daniel Pemberton, aged sixty-onc, was a foreman on the old L. and S.W. Railway. “Surprised by a train while gauging the line” in January, 1903, he "hurled his mate out of the track,” saving one life at the cost of his own. Herbert Maconoghu, a Wimbledon schoolboy, aged thirteen, whose parents were absent in India, “lost his life in vainly trying to rescue his two schoolfellows who were drowned at Glover’s Pool, Croyde, N. Devon, in August, 1882” Twenty years before, in the early ’sixties, Sarah Smith, a “pantomime artiste at Princes Theatre,” died ut terrible injuries after attempting in hei inflammable dress to extinguish the flames which had enveloped her companion. Now. nearly eight dccadcd later, her name is read daily by the City workers who come to Postmen s Park. They read. also, of William Fisher. • nine-year-old boy. On July 12, 1836, he lost his life in Rodney road, Walworth, while trying to save his litt’e brother from being run over. One day in 1902 two men, Arthur Strange—a London carman—and Mark Tomlinson, made a desperate venture to save two girls from a Lincolnshire quicksand, only to be trapped themselves; their gallantry is recorded on the Watts memorial. So the list runs. The plaques are simply designed, phrased, lettered. This is the least ostentatious of memorials. It evokes fifty stories—the story of Edmund Emery, who was drowned when he jumped from a Thames steamboat to rescue a child; the story of William Donald, of Bayswater, a railway clerk, aged nineteen, who was drowned on the Lea in the summer of 1876 when trying to save a lad from a dangerous entanglement of weed. The terrible explosion at Silvertowa in January, 1917, is recalled on the memorial to P. C. Grecnoff, a Metropolitan constable who saved many li. es by his devotion to duty. Another constable, Percy Edwin Cook, one < f i the latest names to appear, “vcLf.tarily descended a high tension chr : iber at Kensington to rescue two w. <- men overcome by poisonous fume n October 7, 1927.” Many children are remembered here, the youngest of them Henry James Bristow, a boy of eight, who at Walthamstow in 1890 saved his little sister’s life by tearing off her flaming clothes. He caught fire himself and died of burns and shock. You will read on the wall the stories of rescues and attempted rescues from asphyxiating gas, from burning houses, from runaway horses, from broken ice. 1 There are memorials to doctors, .1 lighterman, a domestic servant, a fitter's labourer, a clergyman, a compositor, a signalman, many policemen. The St. Botolph’s arcade, with its central statuette in memory of Watts, is for London only: Watts hoped vainly that provincial towns might have adopted the plan.