page_title: Postman's Park
section_title: Post-First World War memorials to police officers
hierarchical_section_title: Postman's Park / Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice / Royal Doulton / Post-First World War memorials to police officers
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration of PC Alfred Smith, who died whilst ushering 150 women and children to safety in Central Street, London, during a German air raid on 13 June 1917
context_page_description: Postman's Park is a public garden in central London, a short distance north of St Paul's Cathedral. Bordered by Little Britain, Aldersgate Street, St. Martin's Le Grand, King Edward Street, and the site of the former headquarters of the General Post Office, it is one of the largest open spaces in the City of London, the walled city which gives its name to modern London.
  Postman's Park opened in 1880 on the site of the former churchyard and burial ground of St Botolph's Aldersgate church and expanded over the next 20 years to incorporate the adjacent burial grounds of Christ Church Greyfriars and St Leonard, Foster Lane, together with the site of housing demolished during the widening of Little Britain in 1880; the ownership of the last location became the subject of a lengthy dispute between the church authorities, the General Post Office, the Treasury, and the City Parochial Foundation. A shortage of space for burials in London meant that corpses were often laid on the ground and covered over with soil, thus elevating the park above the streets which surround it.
context_section_description: On 13 June 1917, P.C. Alfred Smith, an officer of the Metropolitan Police, was patrolling Central Street in Finsbury, approximately 900 yards (820 m) directly north of Postman's Park. At about noon, fifteen German aircraft began a bombing raid, devastating the area. Around 150 women and girls working in the nearby Debenhams factory panicked in the explosions, and ran out into the street while the air raid was still in progress. PC Smith and the manager of the factory shepherded them back to safety in the building, but Smith was caught by the blast of one of the bombs and died.
  Following Smith's death J. Allen Baker, Member of Parliament for Finsbury East, launched a public fund to support Smith's widow and young son and to provide a suitable memorial to him, raising a total of £471 14s 2d (about £27,000 as of 2020). On 13 June 1919, two years to the day after Smith's death, a memorial tablet to Smith made by Royal Doulton was unveiled at the start of the empty row directly above De Morgan's original tiles.
  After the addition of Smith's memorial tablet, no further changes were made to the memorial in the years following the First World War. Although Mary Watts had always been opposed to the idea of a public subscription, in 1927 T. H. Ellis, Parish Clerk of St Botolph's Aldersgate, approached her to propose public fundraising to complete the memorial. Mary Watts agreed and an appeal was launched in May 1929, aiming to raise funds to repair and restore the by now run-down loggia, and to install additional tablets. By this time Watts's work was out of fashion, and the appeal was not as successful as was hoped, raising only £250 (about £15,000 as of 2020). Of this total £30 was spent on the restoration of the loggia, leaving £220 for placing future tablets.
  Disliking Royal Doulton's tiling designs, and with her time and money increasingly devoted to the maintenance of the Watts Gallery, Mary Watts by now was losing interest in the memorial and by 1930 had handed complete control to the Heroic Self Sacrifice Memorial Committee. Neither Mary Watts nor the Committee had added new names to the list originally proposed by Watts, and thus there were no proposed names more recent than 1904, with the vast majority dating back to the 19th century. The Committee decided that rather than use these by now dated records, they would request suggestions from relevant public bodies. The British Medical Association was asked to suggest brave medical professionals, the Metropolitan Police Service to suggest brave police officers, and, in light of the park's name, the General Post Office was asked to suggest heroic postal workers. The Metropolitan Police suggested the names of three officers who had died while rescuing others, and on 15 October 1930 tablets to the three officers, manufactured by Royal Doulton to a similar design to their previous tablets, were added to the second row and unveiled by Hastings Lees-Smith, the Postmaster-General, in a ceremony also commemorating the 50th anniversary of the opening of the park, attended by Mary Watts and many police officers and relatives of those being commemorated.
  At this time, one of De Morgan's 1902 tablets was removed. Commemorating four workers who had died in an accident at the East Ham Sewage Works in 1895, Watts had mistakenly listed the incident as having taken place at the West Ham Sewage Works in 1885. The De Morgan tablet was removed and replaced with a Royal Doulton tablet giving the correct location and date. As the Doulton tablets were in such a different style to De Morgan's, the replacement tablet was installed in the second row next to the three new tablets to police officers, rather than in the space left by the original.
caption: Contemporary illustration of the death of Alfred Smith
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