Page 137 - The Secret Museum

pew in the chapel and several times referring to the hospital in his novels. In Little

Dorrit, Tattycoram is a former foundling.

Soon, destitute mothers from across the country came to the hospital holding their
own warm bundles in their arms. So many came that, before long, a lottery system
was set up as a way to decide which babies could be admitted. Mothers had to draw
a ball from a bag. If it was white, their baby became a foundling; if it was black, it
returned home with its mother. If the mother drew a red ball, she could wait and I
take another turn if there was still a space for a baby at the end of the day.

When a mother left her baby she was asked to leave a token which would link her
to her child, in case one day she was able to come back to claim him or her. Very

often, the mother had nothing to leave so a piece of fabric was cut out of her dress, or
the baby’s (baby clothes were usually made from their mother’s old clothes). The
mother kept a fragment, and a matching fragment was attached to the registration
billet that was kept for each child. The billets and tokens were stored in sealed
envelopes at the Foundling Hospital. (They were found in drawers by a secretary of
the hospital in the nineteenth century and bound into books, which became the archive
that remains today.) It was heartbreaking to think that the children never knew of the

existence of these tokens, had no idea that their mother’s touch was there, hidden
inside an envelope or book they would never see.

The books are now in the London Metropolitan Archives, apart from one, which is
in the museum itself. There are around 200 tokens on display in the Foundling
Museum, mostly objects and trinkets left by mothers that would not fit inside the
books, but the fabric tokens are fragile and all kept in storage.

When I visited the museum, I went behind the scenes into their archive. It is a
small room on site, filled with paintings there isn’t room to display and grey boxes
full of things waiting to be catalogued. Few people come in here, but, the week I

visited, a former foundling had been in and had unearthed a Foundling Hospital hymn
book; the hospital’s signature hymn was written by Handel. I was allowed to pick a
grey cardboard box, lucky-dip style. Inside it I found tapestries made by girls at the
Foundling Hospital, a bag belonging to Thomas Coram, and two tokens. One token
was a bonnet with a heart-shaped card, the other was a handkerchief showing all the
counties of England; both were carefully wrapped in tissue. These two tokens had
once been on display but are now too fragile to show. The map is symbolic of the

fact that the babies came from all over England and that the Foundling Hospital
mission was unrestricted in access.

To see the rest of the fabric tokens, which have never been on display, I went to
the London Metropolitan Archives, just behind the lively restaurant- and shop-filled
Exmouth Market. I was handed several big leather-bound books containing tokens
and certificates.

I put my hand on the cool leather front jacket of the first book and took a deep
breath. I turned a page. I touched a piece of fabric. It contained so much feeling, this