Thomas Coram

Thomas Coram was born in Lyme Regis around 1668 and went to sea at eleven. He learned shipbuilding, spent about ten years in Massachusetts trying to establish a shipyard, quarrelled with his neighbours, was sued and shot at, and came home to London with little to show for it beyond a habit of speaking his mind and a strong Christian conscience.

Walking into the City from his lodgings in Rotherhithe, he saw newborn babies abandoned on dunghills and left to die in doorways. There was nowhere for a desperate mother to take a child, and the parish would rarely do more than let it perish. Coram decided there should be a hospital for foundlings, and in 1722 began collecting signatures for a petition to the king. Nobody in power wanted to be associated with illegitimacy. It took him seventeen years. His breakthrough was to persuade first the duchesses and then their husbands to sign, and in 1739 George II granted a charter.

The Foundling Hospital took in its first babies in 1741 and moved to purpose-built premises in Bloomsbury. Hogarth painted Coram's portrait and Handel gave benefit performances of Messiah. Coram himself, tactless and uncomfortable in polite company, was voted off the governing body in 1742 after falling out with fellow governors.

He spent his last years sitting in the hospital's arcade, handing out gingerbread to the children, and living on a pension raised by friends. He died in 1751 and was buried in the chapel.