On 15th April Boydell and Brewer will be publishing the story of Thomas Coram, written by Dame Gillian Wagner. These days there are probably few people who know who Thomas Coram was, but there are many thousands on whose lives he has had an impact. He was a man ahead of his time, a man of energy and drive, honest, straight, difficult to get on with at times, but one who achieved great things, for children in particular, and he deserves to be remembered.

Thomas Coram was born in Lyme Regis in 1668. His family were probably minor gentry, and he liked to term himself Thomas Coram Gent - the title of the book - but the family were not well off. He had to go to sea at the age of eleven, and later went into business, concerned with shipping, trade, imports and exports. He seems to have taken ships to America himself, and so is known in some documents as Captain Coram, but he did not like to be addressed in this way, as captaining merchant ships was seen as the work of hired workers, not gentlemen.

Thomas went to Massachusetts when he was a young man, and spent ten years building ships in Boston and Taunton, where his timber house still stands and he is celebrated in the stained glass of the church. His time there ended unhappily, however, and disputes in which he appears to have been the injured party led to his return to England in serious debt, which he had to work to clear.

Back in England he became an influential adviser to people thinking of trading or settling in North America, then still being opened up and a place of great promise but some risk as well. Although to the end of his life he was planning to return to North America, he never made it, but continued trading and advising others, being influential in the plans to settle Nova Scotia. As a patriot, he wanted to see Britain’s colonies in North America thrive, as he saw them as an excellent source of timber and other natural resources.

He was, you might say, a middle-ranking cog in the mighty machine which was grinding away to create the British Empire - a combination of massive industrial growth, population boom, international trade, wars to protect the trade, imperialism in the establishment of colonies and the seizure of those set up by other countries, leading to increasing wealth and international power for the country as a whole.

So what had Thomas Coram Gent to do with children?

Thomas had an independent mind. He was an ardent Anglican and was keen to see the faith spread. He was absolutely straight in an age in which graft was the way things got done, and this may have lost him some friends or deals, but it also meant that people could rely on him and his word. He believed strongly in women’s rights and equal opportunities for girls. In this he was way ahead of his time, but appears to have had little impact on history. He was also appalled at the way in which foundlings were treated, and he decided to act.

Foundlings

At that time there were no services for children who were abandoned and their life expectancy was very short. Babies were abandoned for a number of reasons. There were young women who had become pregnant but who had been deserted by the father of their child; there were daughters in well-off families where the father was not seen as a suitable match, and there were mothers with families who could not afford to feed another child. The common factor was that social pressures led them all to abandon their babies.

Thomas Coram’s motto was that every child matters (ahead of his time again), and he felt that the loss of children was an appalling waste of life. His campaign began in 1722, when he came across foundlings at the roadside. He first tried to interest men of influence to set up an institution for the foundlings. He even - unsuccessfully - petitioned King George II. After years of fruitless effort he turned to titled ladies for support and over a period of several years he got together a list of twenty-one ladies of quality and distinction - whom he termed Dames de Charite and who put their names to his petition. Their influence was such that a Royal Charter was granted, and in 1739, the Foundling Hospital was set up.

Sadly for Thomas Coram, he was ousted from the Board of his own creation only two years later, perhaps as a result of improper conduct on the part of others involved. He still visited the children - (although married, he had none himself) - and when he died in 1751, he was buried beneath the altar of the church at the Hospital.

In setting up the Foundling Hospital, Thomas Coram was in rough terms over a hundred years ahead of the field. It was the mid-nineteenth century before people such as Dr Barnardo and Rev Stephenson initiated the major charities which still serve children and young people in need today.

Thousands of children have been cared for by the Foundling Hospital over the subsequent centuries, and the Coram Family is still a major charity, serving children in the London area, though the Hospital itself was closed in the 1930s.

Dame Gillian Wagner, the author of this biography, was herself Chair of the Thomas Coram Foundation and the first woman to hold this role. She had also been Chair of Barnardo’s and had written a biography of Dr Barnardo as well.

The two tasks differed considerably. Much had been written about Dr Barnardo, but little was known of Thomas Coram. No full biography had ever been prepared, the main text being an extended essay, and Gillian Wagner had to turn to libraries and archives in the United States for information. In particular Thomas Coram had corresponded with a Boston minister, using him as a confessor and counsellor. (The lack of written correspondence today will surely make writing biographies much harder in future when electronic records have been wiped.)

What emerged was that Thomas Coram was a man of integrity in an age of corruption, and Gillian Wagner clearly found him a sympathetic character and came to identify with him in his struggles. She is well placed to judge him, both as an author with several carefully researched books to her name, but also because she has made her own mark in the field of childcare, having headed up Barnardo’s and the Thomas Coram Foundation and chaired the influential Wagner Working Party which produced A Positive Choice and its sequel Positive Answers.

The book throws up some interesting questions. To what extent are developments the result of individual efforts and to what extent are they symptoms of social movements? By the end of the nineteenth century there were many philanthropic ventures through which children’s needs were met, but when Thomas Coram started his campaigning in the early eighteenth century, his was a lone voice, and although the Hospital did good work, it took a long while to set it up and it did not prove to be a catalyst for other ventures.

Do we have people like Thomas Coram around today, arguing their cases doggedly in the face of deafness on the part of those in power? Certainly there are those who have battled to set up new forms of provision to meet social need in recent years - Dame Cecily Saunders and the hospice movement, Erin Pizzey and women’s refuges, Leonard Cheshire and Sue Ryder in services for people with disabilities and serious illnesses - and some of them have had the sort of forceful personalities which have led to clashes with those who joined them of the sort which Thomas Coram experienced

There are undoubtedly key people today who have had an impact on children and young people - Lord Laming and Baroness Howarth for example - but services are so much more developed now that there may not be quite the same scope for innovatory practice and personal impact that there was in Thomas Coram’s day. Their careers show, though, that it remains important to be alert to children’s needs and to bad practice. The individual impact remains important.

Thomas Coram Gent has been brought out of the wings and into the limelight by Dame Gillian Wagner, and we are in a position once more to applaud him and acknowledge our indebtedness to a man who battled on children’s behalf in earlier times. And perhaps we should consider again the legacy we ourselves are leaving.

Next month we will review the book, Thomas Coram Gent, by Dame Gillian Wagner, obtainable from Boydell and Brewer Ltd., PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF. Tel. UK (0)1394 - 610600 Email trading@boydell.co.uk. ISBN 1 84383 057 4.