In 1870, a rather special establishment was founded. This was the Metropolitan and City Police Orphanage – designed to be a home for the children of deceased London police officers.

The rather imposing building was called Fortescue House, and it was located on London Road in Twickenham, to the south-west of London. In 1871, the children of officers from the separate City of London Police were also admitted (see childrenshomes.org.uk/TwickenhamPolice for more details).

The orphanage could not house everyone: it was designed for children between the ages of seven and 12 (as children would be expected to work from the age of 12, of course). Those admitted with clothes, food and drink and education – and the aim was to train the children up to be able to get an honest job or apprenticeship once they left the place. The orphanage was popular with all ranks of society, with Queen Victoria donating £100 to it in 1872, and the Prince of Wales – later Edward VIII – gifting an American organ a decade later.

In 1874, the orphanage relocated to Wellesley House on Hampton Road, although still in Twickenham. This was due to increased numbers: Fortescue House was too small to meet demand, whereas the Hampton Road property could accommodate more than one hundred children (as Peter Higginbotham has noted, Fortescue House continued to help poor children, becoming a boys’ home run by the National Refuges for Homeless and Destitute Children).

The 1881 census, on TheGenealogist, gives an insight into the operation of the home, and who lived there. At this time, both the matron and the headmistress of the orphanage school were widows – Ellen Williams, a 45-year-old Welsh woman, was the matron, and 33-year-old Londoner Hannah Eliza Evans was the headmistress. There were separate infant and junior heads – the latter one of the few male members of staff, Henry Charles Jackson, aged just 21 – and a whole roster of other domestic staff. The infirmary required nurses; the laundry needed several laundrymaids. There was also a needlewoman, cook, kitchenmaid, several housemaids and a scullery maid, all needed to keep the orphanage working smoothly, and the children to be kept fed, watered and schooled.

Efforts were made to provide the children with both education and employment. One Christmas, a trip was put on to the Royalty Theatre, where the children watched a performance by the Juvenile Opera Company, followed by a high tea, organised by the officers of C Division – it was noted that ‘the youngsters did ample justice’ to the food. After this, they were given toys by the theatre managers, as well as crackers.

Fundraising for the orphanage was necessary, although monies were also provided by the officers having made weekly subscriptions prior to their deaths, and fetes and concerts – as well as athletics competitions – were regularly held at various locations, including at the Alexandra Palace, where the Grand Police Fete offered ‘an endless round of amusements from 10am until 10.30pm’ for the price of a shilling. Well-known entertainers, including singers and comedians, gave their services at these events, and there were organ recitals, ‘aquatic feats’ and scientific exhibits provided.

Although the orphanage had been set up to cater for children aged seven to 12, the 1881 census shows that within a decade of its operation, this age range had expanded, with several 13-year-olds and even a 14-year-old living there. George Bartholomew, a 13-year-old from Lambeth, was one of the older children; William Ford, aged eight, from Hackney, was one of the more typical residents. The babies of the orphanage, however, included Henry Croft, from Deptford, who was just six years old when the census was taken, and John Edward Barker, born in Notting Hill five years prior to the census. Both boys and girls were homed here, and in 1881, the oldest girls included Flora Apps, 12, from Shoreditch, and Florence Goldsworth, 13, who was originally from Somerset.

Looking into these children to find out how and when they ended up in a police orphanage reveals, unsurprisingly, some sad stories – but sometimes ones with happy endings, too. Little Henry Croft, for example, was born in July 1874. Henry was his parents’ first child, born just 11 months after their marriage: police constable George Croft, then 29, had married Elizabeth Susannah Gower in Chiddingstone, Kent, in August 1873, and had named his firstborn after his own father. His marriage didn’t even make its third anniversary, for George died in the first quarter of 1876, aged just 32. His son, Henry, became a terracotta presser finisher, and subsequently a watchmaker. He married Mary in 1899, and settled in south London. In 1902, he served eight years as a sergeant with the Royal Fusiliers (Volunteers), and in May 1918, a month before his 44th birthday, he enlisted with the RAF for the duration of the war. When it ended six months later, he continued with the RAF Reserve until April 1920.

Flora Apps, meanwhile, was the daughter of William Apps and his wife Jane Harriet, née Pack. Her parents had married in Shoreditch in 1867, by which time, William – a farmer’s son – was already a policeman. In 1871, she had been living with her family at 8 Albert Street in Shoreditch. Father William – originally from Heathfield in Sussex – was then 36; mother Jane, who had been born in New York, was 32, Flora was two, and her little sister Mary Ann was just ten months old (a brother, William, would follow in 1876).

Around the time of her brother’s birth, her father was mentioned for the only time in the press, when it was reported that he had helped track down a man accused of obtaining goods by false pretences. William Apps died in Whitechapel in 1877, leaving three children aged between two and eight. At 12, Flora was in the orphanage – but she was not actually an orphan (her mother only died in 1910). She appears to have been in the orphanage only temporarily, perhaps as some kind of respite for her newly widowed mother, for the 1891 census shows that Flora was living at home in Shoreditch again, with her mother and siblings. Jane Apps was making a living as a police bed maker and female searcher, with the family income supplemented by Mary Ann’s dressmaking, and William’s work at a leather warehouse. On 17 June 1892, in Hoxton, 25-year-old Flora Apps marred 23-year-old confectioner Arthur Henry Newman. She proudly listed her late father as a police officer on her marriage entry, which was signed by her little sister Mary Ann.

One of the other children in the orphanage with Flora in 1881 was 13-year-old George Bartholomew, whose father, Robert, had also been a police constable. George’s family was originally from Titchfield in Huntingdonshire; Robert and his wife Maria had relocated their family to south London sometime between 1861 and 1864. In 1871, they were living at 32 Caroline Street, Lambeth, with six children. The eldest, James, was 15 and working as a labourer; the youngest, Alice, was just 10 months old. At this point, Robert was 32, and his wife Maria 36.

Like William Apps, Robert Bartholomew can be found in newspapers of the 1870s, again giving evidence in various court cases. He is listed as Police Constable Bartholomew, 129 C, showing that he was part of C Division of the Metropolitan Police, which covered Mayfair and Soho. The final mention of his name comes in 1874; he died three years later, aged 45. However, as with the Apps family, mother Maria had not died by the time her son was in the orphanage, and that the term ‘orphan’ sometimes meant simply that the policeman father had died, leaving his family at risk of poverty and destitution. The taking on of his child or children gave them the opportunity of completing their education and getting training for a job that they could then use to help their surviving families out.

In the Bartholomews’ case, Maria had stayed in the family home at Caroline Street after her husband’s death, and was eking out a living as a needlewoman, helped by her daughters Rose and Alice, who took in washing. In 1890, George married Emily Ann Spencer – by this point, he was working as a gunmaker back in Lambeth. This remained his career, but he eventually moved out of London to Gloucester, where he can be found in the 1911 census, with Emily and their four surviving children (four more had died in the previous 20 years). His son Charles, born in 1902, after their move to Gloucester, was given the middle name of Robert, in memory of his policeman grandfather. George Bartholomew, former resident of the orphanage, died in Gloucester in 1915, aged 47, only two years older than his father was when he died.

The orphanage itself survived until the 1930s, when finally, a lack of funds and increased provision for policemen’s widows in terms of pensions, combined to make the establishment unviable. Nearly 3,000 children had been helped by the orphanage over the course of its 67 years. From now on, the children of deceased officers would be able to stay in their own family homes, rather than in a house that, while well meaning, could only have served to emphasise to these children, some of whom were very young, that they had had a major loss inflicted on them.