Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice

The Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in London's Postman's Park is a 50-foot wooden loggia commemorating 54 ordinary people who died while saving others. Conceived by artist George Frederic Watts and unveiled in 1900, the memorial contains space for 120 ceramic plaques detailing acts of bravery, such as eleven-year-old Solomon Gelman rescuing his brother from a horse and cart.

London Β· from the walk β€œSecret London: Hidden Alleys, Ancient Stones & Forgotten Stories” Β· audio ~4 min Β· Generated

Postman's Park, King Edward Street, London EC1A 7BT

What acts of bravery are commemorated at the Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in London?

Right, I'm going to take you somewhere that most Londoners have walked past a thousand times and never noticed. This little green patch right here... Post-man's Park. And before you ask β€” no, it's got nothing to do with posting letters through doors. Back in eighteen twenty-nine, the General Post Office moved into a massive building just over there on Saint Mar-tin le Grand, and the postal workers started coming here on their lunch breaks. The name just stuck. Now here's the thing most people don't know. The ground you're standing on is actually Higher than the streets around it... because so many bodies were buried here over the centuries that corpses were just laid on the ground and covered with soil, raising the whole park above street level. Cheerful, right? But the real reason I bring people here... is that wall over there. Under that wooden shelter. Go on, have a look. Those fifty-four ceramic plaques each remember an ordinary man, woman, or child who died trying to save someone else's life. This was the brainchild of an artist called George Frederic Watts. Son of a piano maker, reportedly Despised the wealthy and powerful β€” turned down a baronetcy Twice. In eighteen eighty-seven, he wrote a letter to The Times proposing a monument to celebrate everyday heroism for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Nobody cared. The letter was applauded and... forgotten. But Watts didn't give up. When the memorial was finally unveiled in nineteen hundred, it was a fifty-foot wooden loggia with space for a hundred and twenty plaques. Only Four were actually in place on opening day. And poor old Watts? He was eighty-three and too ill to even attend his own ceremony. Now let me tell you about some of the names on that wall, because These are the stories that get me. In the early hours of April eighteen eighty-five, a fire broke out in an oil shop on Union Street. A young woman named Alice Ayres was sleeping upstairs with three little girls. Escape through the burning building was impossible. She threw a feather mattress from the window, then carried each child to the ledge and dropped them down to the crowd below. Alice herself fell from the window, missed the mattress, and died at Guy's Hospital. Her last words were... "I tried my best and could try no more."

And then there's the one that breaks every cabbie's heart. Little Solomon Gel-man β€” the plaque spells it Galaman, but that's wrong β€” he pulled his four-year-old brother out of the way of a horse and cart on Commercial Street, but fell between the wheels himself. He was eleven years old. His parents were immigrants who needed interpreters when giving their account of what happened, and the newspapers just spelled the name however it sounded. His dying words to his mother? "Mother, I saved him, but I could not save myself."

Work on the memorial stopped altogether in nineteen thirty-one with only fifty-three of those hundred and twenty planned tiles in place. And then... silence. For Seventy-Eight years, nothing. Until two thousand and nine, when a plaque was added for Leigh Pitt, a print technician from Surrey who died in two thousand and seven rescuing a nine-year-old boy drowning in a canal in Thames-Mead. Now here's what I always think about, sitting in the cab on a long fare... there are still sixty-six Empty spaces on that wall. Watts designed it for a hundred and twenty names. It's an unfinished masterpiece β€” sometimes called "The People's Westminster Abbey." No kings. No generals. Just... ordinary people who ran Toward danger when everyone else ran away.

Nearby stories