Correspondence of the Foundling Hospital Inspectors in Berkshire 1757-68 Edited by Gillian Clark Correspondence of the Foundling Hospital Inspectors in Berkshire 1757-68 Correspondence of the Foundling Hospital Inspectors in Berkshire , 1757-68 Edited by Gillian Clark Berkshire Record Society volume I 1994 Published by the Berkshire Record Society do Berkshire Record Office, Shire Hall Shinfield Park, Reading RG2 9XD Printed in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication The University of Reading, Berkshire ISBN o 9524946 0 4 © Berkshire Record Society 1994 Contents Acknowledgements iv General Introduction v Foreword vii INTRODUCTION The Foundling Hospital xi The records xiv The inspectors xvii Reception into the hospital xxviii At nurse: the occupation of wet nurse xxxv Wet nursing in practice: arrival at nurse xxxxii The first year at nurse xxxxiv The second, third and fourth years at nurse il Children who stayed after the fifth anniversary Iv Return to the hospital Iviii Conclusion Ix Editor's note Ixi THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL 1757 I 1758 1 1759 2 1760 77 1761 115 1762 150 1763 163 1764 174 1765 190 1766 204 1767 210 1768 %9 Appendix: a list of nurses' names 243 Index 248 Acknowledgements The Society gratefully acknowledges generous contributions to the costs of this volume from the Marc Fitch Fund and the Earley Charity. General Introduction This volume is the first to be issued by the Berkshire Record Society. Berkshire records have hitherto been published only by national societies as parts of series of general interest, by local historical and archaeological societies whose prime concerns lay however elsewhere, or by individuals. Several very useful and sometimes very scholarly texts have appeared, but there has been no systematic programme of publishing Berkshire material. The lack of such a publishing programme has long been a cause for regret and at various times the question of'establishing a record society for Berkshire has been raised and debated but not decided upon. The eventual founding of the Society in 1993 was the result of an initiative by the History Department of Reading University, actively supported by the County Record Office, the Berkshire Family History Society, the Berkshire Local History Association and by several other local societies and interested individuals. The commitment of the University throughout the venture has been especially important. The Society is particularly grateful for the award of a research grant in the Department of History which made possible the appointment of a Research Assistant, Mr Ian Mortimer. He has prepared two texts which will be issued as volumes two and four in the series. For the present volume the Society has been fortunate in securing as editor the services of Dr Gillian Clark who has been working on the records of the Foundling Hospital for several years and has contributed articles on children at nurse to a number of journals. The Society appreciated that these letters provided the material for a fascinating and original first volume with a wide appeal. In the course of preparing the volume 1 have been helped enormously by Dr Ralph Houlbrooke, Mrs Joan Dils and Mr Ian Mortimer. Dr Houlbrooke read the introduction and a substantial part of the text; Mrs Dils also read a large part of the text and prepared the map and Mr Mortimer prepared the whole of the volume for printing and compiled the index. I must also record my thanks to Professor Michael Twyman and Mr Mick Stocks of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at Reading University for their ready help and advice and for undertaking the printing of this volume. Finally I should like to acknowledge the role of Professor Donald Matthew of Reading University, who first gathered together the small group of people •interested in launching the Society, and who has acted as Chairman of the Record Society steering group since its inception, and of all members of that group, without whom the Society would not have come into being. Peter Durrant General Editor Foreword My attention was drawn to the letters written by the Foundling Hospital's inspectors as I reached the end of a period of research into London children at nurse, looking at both children from private families where it was customary to employ rural wet nurses and children placed across the same geographical area by charitable institutions. In the course of this work The Thomas Coram Foundation for Children' had given permission for me to have access to the records of Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital so that I could look for the names of children sent to the county of Berkshire from the hospital, and the names of the wet nurses and inspectors working for it in that county between 1741 and the end of 1760. Sarah Millard, who, in the course of her work, took a special interest in The Foundling Hospital records at the Greater London Record Office, suggested that it would be worth my while to examine the correspondence of the hospital's inspectors to the governing body because it held many references to wet nursing. It turned out to be well worth inspection, not only for this reason but for many more as well. While the general correspondence to the hospital secretary had been examined, and comment made on it, by others interested in the foundlings, this particular section had not received attention. Study of the correspondence soon revealed not only a wealth of material that would reinforce and supplement the work already done on children at nurse and on institutional nursing but also a vast amount of local information that had not previously been available. The content of the letters alone makes the collection interesting; the quantity of letters, backed up and substantiated, as they are, by large numbers of well-kept hospital records, makes it of special value. There were inspectors country-wide acting for the hospital in the mid- eighteenth century, although most were in the south-east. The earliest letters from inspectors to have survived in quantity were written in 1759, eighteen years after the opening of the hospital, and two years after the start of a period of unrestricted entry. The hospital had increased its intake rate from about 100 children a year to nearly 4000 a year and this had stretched its resources to their limits. The letters continue while the hospital sustained that ^ level of intake for a further two years, successfully placing all the children with wet nurses for the first five years of each child's life, and they go on through the years that those children remained in the care of the hospital. They provide an unselfconscious and factual commentary on the lives, illnesses and deaths of the children, on the responses of their foster families to their coming and their going, and of the responses of the communities where they lived. They provide a unique insider view of women working in 1. The Thomas Coram Foundation for Children is at 40 Brunswick Square, London WCl 1AZ. Viii BERKSHIRE RECORD SOCIETY the informal domestic economy, a view which reveals wet nursing as a community occupation. Like all letters they reveal a great deal about the writers; in this case, commitment to the welfare of the children on the part of people with busy professional and family lives, sustained over many years. They reveal too in many cases an empathy and understanding of the problems of poverty across a great social divide. The immediacy of the style and the detail in the content capture the attention from the very first. The introduction to this edition of some 550 of these letters explains how the Foundling Hospital came into being, how it functioned, and how it responded to the change in intake policy imposed on it, during the first 30 years of its existence. It describes the role of the inspectors, a group of men and women working for it in a purely voluntary capacity (but to a professional standard) and explains how, in the course of their work, they came to write the letters. It introduces the inspectors whose letters were chosen for transcription, setting them within their social context, and explains the basis of the choice. It also introduces the children and comments on their background since this is central to so much of the care they required, and follows them through their childhood at nurse, looking at the relationships which they developed with their foster parents. The introduction to the letters is intended to supply background information which will make for easier reading and a greater appreciation of what the inspectors and the governing body achieved on behalf of the children in their care. It also seeks to set the wet nursing of the foundlings in the general context of this practice. At the time of writing the provisions of the Children Act 1989 were being translated into action. This legislation, which marks a watershed in attitudes to childcare, embodies the principles that parents with children in need should be helped by local authorities, in partnership with voluntary agencies, to bring up their children themselves, and that parents continue to have parental responsibility even when their children are not living with them. It was therefore a particularly interesting time to look at a situation where parents were enabled to hand the responsibility for their children to an organisation. In the course of preparing the letters for publication I have incurred several debts of gratitude. The Thomas Coram Foundation for Children was generous in giving me permission to transcribe correspondence and theh to publish those transcriptions, together with extracts from other records. I thank the Director and Secretary of the Foundation, Mr Colin Masters, now retired, and his successor, Dr Chris Hanvey, for their interest in what I have been doing and for permission to make use of the records.