Dorothy Soames was abandoned at London s Foundling Hospital as a baby
Her childhood was bereft of tenderness and physical punishment was common
Dorothy s mother Lena Weston, 31, asked for her back at the very start of the Blitz
This was first denied, but Dorothy escaped before being returned to her mother
Dorothy s child Justine Cowan only found out about her early life after her death
Georgia Drakaki
The cultural platform GREECE IN USA is a global organization that promotes Greek culture abroad and promotes international cultural cooperation. Founded in New York by the internationally renowned Greek adjunct professor CUNY Sozita Goudouna, one of America’s most prominent Greek curators.
GREECE IN USA makes an impressive opening amid a pandemic, launching, with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture, the group exhibition “The Right to Silence?” / “The Right to Silence?” on the penitentiary system, prison and incarceration regimes and the reform of criminal justice, in different geographical and political contexts. The first phase of the exhibition is currently presented at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, City University of New York with the participation of 43 Greek and Cypriot Artists, while the second parallel action is expected in February at “Undercurrent”, one of the most influential Brooklyn-based showrooms worldwide.
Patriotic appeal … A Flagship, Wearing the Flag of a Vice Admiral of the Red, Before the Wind off the English Coast, With a Cutter, a Ketch-rigged Sloop and Other Shipping, 1754, by Charles Brooking (H177.8cm x W312.4cm). Photograph: Foundling Museum
This dramatic painting by Charles Brooking hangs in the Picture Gallery of the Foundling Museum. Taylor White, treasurer of the Foundling Hospital at the time, commissioned the seascape in 1754. According to John Brownlow’s Memoranda or Chronicles of the Foundling Hospital, White had seen one of Brooking’s pictures in a shop.
Brooking painted this enormous picture – over three metres wide – in just 18 days, working in a room in the Foundling Hospital itself because his own garret studio was too small. The painting, Brooking’s largest, was intended to be a companion piece to Peter Monamy’s seascape An English Fleet in the Downs, which has been missing since the beginning
Children playing at the nursery school of a Founding Hospital, 1936
Credit: Fox Photos
The summer before last, a weekend babysitting my seven-year-old niece was spent playing Victorian school, which mostly involved me being rapped over the knuckles with a ruler or standing in the corner wearing a makeshift dunce’s cap while lamenting my own foolishness at having tried to make history fun. Far happier feeding her Victorian obsession from afar, I sent her a copy of Jacqueline Wilson’s novel Hetty Feather, the heroine of which is abandoned as a baby at the Foundling Hospital in London. That stalwart institution couldn’t be more Dickensian if it tried, I thought. Imagine my surprise, then, when reading Justine Cowan’s extraordinary memoir, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames, to learn that the Foundling Hospital did not close its doors until 1954.
Four of the worst places to live in Hertfordshire you wouldn t expect according to the people who live there
There s always something someone has to say
Updated
Tring is a historic market town in west Hertfordshire (Image: Warren Gunn)
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