The Tokens and the Foundlings

Drawing on an archive of personal testimonies from some of the last foundlings, Caro Howell, Director of the Foundling Museum presents the extraordinary story of the UK's first children's charity; the Foundling Hospital (now CORAM).

The streets of London in the 1720s presented startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, respectability and debauchery, extravagance and utter destitution. Poverty and disgrace resulted in huge number of babies being abandoned. So shocked was he by this situation, that Thomas Coram, a former shipbuilder began a one-man campaign which led 17 years later to the establishment of a "Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children" which became known as the Foundling Hospital.

Philanthropic acts by artists including Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds and also Handel, not only raised funds for the hospital but transformed it into a fashionable place for art and music, including the first performance of Handel's Messiah. For the 25,000 children who were accepted (until its role changed in 1953), it was a place of 'maintenance and education'.

Today, some of the original hospital furniture, artworks and staircases, have been rehoused in what is now the Foundling Museum, which stands on the same site. The Museum also hosts archive documents and tokens; objects like buttons and coins left by the mothers as a unique means of identification should they ever be able to return at a later date when their fortunes had changed and reclaim their children.

Using personal accounts from 'Coram's children' Archive on 4 tells the astonishing and moving story of the Foundling Hospital and its legacy.

Producer: Sarah Blunt

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2015.