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The tokens mothers left with their babies, kept in case they could ever come back.
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In Foundling Museum.
Thomas Coram spent seventeen years petitioning for a hospital for abandoned children and opened it in 1739, the country's first. Hogarth was a governor and gave paintings; Handel conducted Messiah in the chapel to raise money and left the hospital a score. The result was, incidentally, Britain's first public art gallery, since people came to look at the pictures and paid for the privilege. The museum keeps that art, the rococo Court Room rebuilt intact from the demolished hospital, and the Gerald Coke Handel Collection upstairs. The rest is harder. Mothers leaving a baby were asked for a token so the child could be identified if they ever came back — a coin, a scrap of printed cotton, a hazelnut, a ring, half a playing card. Almost none ever did. The tokens are displayed in a long case, and they are what people remember.
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