Lost park of ordinary heroes

Little known heroes find a place in a little known park

Shonali Muthalaly

David Selves was just 12 years old. But he dived into the water, to support “his drowning playfellow, and sank with him clasped in his arms.” This was in 1886.

Ordinarily, he would have been forgotten by now. After all, he was neither rich nor famous. But his courage impresses today as it must have done more than a century ago. For in a busy corner of London, there’s an old, hushed park where extraordinary deeds of courage are remembered, along with their ordinary heroes.

Wedged between office blocks, this park lies in the heart of London’s frenetic Barbican, bustling with bankers in expensive suits and secretaries clipping past in gleaming designer boots. Yet you’ll be lucky to find someone who can give you directions to it. The frantically posing tourists at Saint Paul's Cathedral, barely a minute away, hardly ever wander here, and Londoners seem to only stop by for a quick absent-minded cigarette or sandwich. But if anyone stops to listen, the powerful stories it tells are compelling enough to leave a lasting impact.

Postman's Park is one of London's most surprising secrets with some of the city’s most heart-warming stories.

In the evening, the park's a pool of darkness, locked and bolted. The quaintly named 'Guild & Ward Church of St. Botolph-Without-Aldersgate' next door, on the other hand, radiates warmth, with its burnishing lights and Scottish preacher's lilting sermon.

Set between King Edward Street and Little Britain, the park seems to be a part of the church (which stands on a spot where 'a church building has stood for nearly one thousand years,' according to a plaque).

But a notice at the entrance proclaims that it was created with land from the churchyards of "Saint Leonard’s, Foster Lane, St Botolph’s, Aldersgate and the graveyard of Christchurch, Newgate Street.” Today it is maintained by the Corporation of London, Open Spaces Department.

Once a popular lunchtime destination for workers from the old General Post Office, Postman’s Park was opened in 1880, opposite an old post office. It is shaped so irregularly it looks like it has been hastily squeezed in. It went on to become much more than just a backdrop to hastily-eaten sandwiches, and stately trees thanks to George Frederic Watts, a talented, painter and fiery philanthropist.

In 1887, Watts wrote to the Times, suggesting a memorial for ‘ordinary heroes’. After all, the rich, powerful and famous are always remembered, whether they're army generals, film stars or millionaires - celebrated for winning wars, teary lines or making enough money to raise grandiose buildings and glitzy marble plaques.

Watts – the son of a London piano maker, who reportedly despised the very rich and refused a baronetcy twice – campaigned for a memorial to remember regular people who displayed startlingly heroic acts of courage, and died in the process.

His letter suggested that a memorial of this sort would be a marvellous way to commemorate Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee Year. But no one paid him any attention.

Fortunately for the few people who stumble upon this moving treasure, and for the memory of the selflessly heroic men, women and children who are commemorated here, Watts would not give in. When he realised that neither the government nor town planners were really interested in raising marble to ordinary lives, he just went ahead and funded it himself, paying for the first 13 plaques.

His widow then added 34 after he died in 1904. Five more were added almost three decades later. There are tombs here from the park’s previous days as a cemetery. They are draped in so many layers of damp moss that only occasional words shine though - an ‘alderman’ here and ‘1800’ there.

But they are clearly not the main show here. Neither are the fountains, which burble politely on the pathway. Or the lush patches of purple flowers, surrounded by carpets of bright yellow maple leaves.

What counts is the fifty-foot gallery stretching across the end of the park, neatly plastered with plaques (most created by Royal Doulton). The brief descriptions on each are plain and unemotional. But that simplicity is their power. For these are stories that need no histrionics, or embellishments to move the random readers who wander past.

There is a plaque to John Cranmer, a clerk in the London County Council who drowned in 1901 when he was 23 years old, “while saving the life of a stranger and a foreigner.” And eight-year-old Henry James Bristow who died in 1890, when he “saved his little sister's life by tearing off her flaming clothes but caught fire himself and died of burns and shock.”

But perhaps the most vivid is the heart-rending remembrance to Solomon Galman, an 11 year old who “died of injuries after saving his little brother from being run over in Commercial Street.” At the bottom are his last words. “Mother, I saved him but could not save myself.”