Alice Ayres

Alice Ayres (12 September 1859 – 1885) was an English nursemaid honoured for her bravery in rescuing the children in her care from a house fire. Ayres was a household assistant and nursemaid to the family of her brother-in-law and sister, Henry and Mary Ann Chandler. The Chandlers owned an oil and paint shop in Union Street, Southwark, then just south of London, and Ayres lived with the family above the shop. In 1885, a fire broke out in the shop, and Ayres rescued three of her nieces from the burning building, before falling from a window and suffering fatal injury.

Britain, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, experienced a period of great social change in which the rapidly growing news media paid increasing attention to the activities of the poorer classes. The manner of Ayres's death caused great public interest, with large numbers of people attending her funeral and contributing to the funding of a memorial. Shortly after her death, she underwent what has been described as a "secular canonisation", being widely depicted in popular culture and, although very little was known about her life, widely cited as a role model. Various social and political movements promoted Ayres as an example of the values held by their particular movement. The circumstances of her death were distorted to give the impression that she was an employee willing to die for the sake of her employer's family, rather than for children to whom she was closely related. In 1902, her name was added to the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice and in 1936 a street near the scene of the fire was renamed Ayres Street in her honour.

The case of Alice Ayres came to renewed public notice with the release of Patrick Marber's 1997 play Closer, and the 2004 film based on it. An important element of the plot revolves around a central character who fabricates her identity based on the description of Ayres on the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, with some of the film's scenes shot around the memorial.

Work with the Chandler family Alice Ayres was born into a large family in 1859, the seventh of ten children of a labourer, John Ayres. In December 1877, her sister Mary Ann (older than Alice by eleven years) married an oil and paint dealer, Henry Chandler. Chandler owned a shop at 194 Union Street in Southwark, about south of the present-day Tate Modern.

In 1881, Ayres worked as a household assistant to Edward Woakes, a doctor specialising in ear and throat disorders. By 1885, she had become a household assistant and nursemaid to the Chandlers, living with the family. Another neighbour told the press that "no merry making, no excursion, no family festivity could tempt her from her self-imposed duties. The children must be bathed and put to bed, the clothes must be mended, the rooms must be 'tidied up', the cloth must be laid, the supper carefully prepared, before Alice would dream of setting forth on her own pleasures". Although the shop was near the headquarters of the London Fire Brigade and the emergency services were quickly on scene, by the time the fire engine arrived intense flames were coming from the lower windows, making it impossible for the fire brigade to position ladders. Meanwhile, Ayres, wearing only a nightdress, had tried to reach her sister but was unable to get to her through the smoke. The crowd that had gathered outside the building were shouting to Ayres to jump. She missed the mattress and the crowd below and fell onto the pavement, suffering spinal injuries. Ayres was rushed to nearby Guy's Hospital

The oil and paint stored in the shop caused the fire to burn out of control, and when the fire services were eventually able to enter the premises the rest of the family were found dead. The body of Henry Chandler was found on the staircase, still clutching a locked strongbox filled with the shop's takings, It took the form of a solid red granite obelisk, and is still today the tallest grave marker in the cemetery. while increasing literacy rates led to a greater interest in the media and current affairs among ordinary workers. In 1856, the first military honour for bravery open to all ranks, the Victoria Cross, had been instituted, while in 1866, the Albert Medal, the first official honour open to civilians of all classes, was introduced. Additionally, a number of private and charitable organisations dedicated to lifesaving, most prominently the Royal Humane Society (1776) and Royal National Lifeboat Institution (1824), were increasing in activity and prominence, and gave awards and medals as a means of publicising their activities and lifesaving advice.

Painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts and his second wife, designer and artist Mary Fraser Tytler, had long been advocates of the idea of art as a force for social change, and of the principle that narratives of great deeds would provide guidance to address the serious social problems of British cities. (The idea of inspirational examples as a force for social improvement, as advocated in Samuel Smiles's 1859 Self-Help, was a key tenet of late-19th-century Liberalism and of the settlement movement.) The most vocal advocate of this approach was probably the historian James Anthony Froude, who in his Short Studies on Great Subjects had called for biographies that could be given to the lower classes with the injunction "Read that; there is a man—such a man as you ought to be; read it; meditate on it; see who he was and how he made himself what he was, and try to be yourself like him". (Owing to National Portrait Gallery acquisition rules, the portraits were not allowed to be exhibited in the NPG until ten years after the death of their subjects, and were housed in the Watts Gallery until the NPG was permitted to display them.) Seventeen portraits in total were donated to the NPG as part of Watts's Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame is now divided between the NPG and Bodelwyddan Castle.

On 5 September 1887, a letter was published in The Times from Watts, proposing a scheme to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria by means of collecting and commemorating "a complete record of the stories of heroism in every-day life". He cited the death of Alice Ayres as an example of the type of event he proposed to commemorate, and included in his letter a distorted account of Ayres's actions during the Union Street fire. Watts's suggestion was not taken up, leading Watts to comment that "if I had proposed a race course round Hyde Park, there would have been plenty of sympathisers". Sir Francis Hastings Doyle also wrote a well-received poem in honour of Ayres, as did leading social reformer and women's rights campaigner Laura Ormiston Chant. including as the first story in F. J. Cross's influential Beneath the Banner, (The Red Cross Hall has no relationship with the International Committee of the Red Cross; it was built on Redcross Way in Southwark, as part of a number of cottages in the area planned by Hill.) Watts himself refused to become involved in the project, as his proposed monument was intended to be a source of inspiration and contemplation as opposed to simply commemoration, It is an idealised image depicting Ayres as the rescued rather than the rescuer, blending religious imagery with traditional 19th-century symbols of British heroism, and bears no relationship to actual events. Ayres, in a long and flowing pure white gown, stands at a first floor window, surrounded in flames and holding a small child. A fireman stands on a ladder and reaches out to Ayres and the child; meanwhile, a sailor in full Royal Navy uniform holds a second child.

Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice In 1898, George Frederic Watts was approached by Henry Gamble, vicar of St Botolph's, Aldersgate church in the City of London. St Botolph's former churchyard had recently been converted, along with two smaller adjoining burial grounds, into Postman's Park, one of the largest public parks in the City of London, and the church was engaged in a protracted financial and legal dispute over ownership of part of the park. To provide a public justification for keeping the disputed land as part of the park, and to raise the park's profile and assist in fundraising, the church offered part of the park as a site for his proposed memorial. Watts agreed, and in 1900 the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was unveiled by Alfred Newton, Lord Mayor of London, and Mandell Creighton, Bishop of London. The memorial consisted of a and wooden loggia with a tiled roof, designed by Ernest George, sheltering a wall with space for 120 ceramic memorial tablets. Made by William De Morgan in the Arts and Crafts style, the green-and-white tablet reads "Alice Ayres, daughter of a bricklayer's labourer who by intrepid conduct saved 3 children from a burning house in Union Street, Borough, at the cost of her own young life April 24, 1885".

Changing attitudes and differing perceptions Although the public would have been familiar with the concept of a female national heroic figure following the widespread coverage and public admiration of Harriet Newell, Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale, the ongoing coverage of Ayres and her elevation as a national hero was unusual for the period. at a time when, despite the gradual formal recognition of the contributions of the lower classes, national heroes were generally male and engaged in exploration, the military, religion or science and engineering. while George Frederic Watts, although he was opposed in principle to discrimination based on class and saw the Memorial as being theoretically open to all classes, had remarked that "the higher classes do not or ought not to require reminders or inducements". Press reports at the time of the fire described Ayres variously as a "little nursemaid", As well as Watts's 1887 description of Ayres as "the maid of all work at an oilmonger's", but nonetheless describes her as displaying the "typical English virtues—courage, fortitude, and an unquestioning sense of duty".

While George and Mary Watts and their fellow paternalist social reformers, along with the broadly sympathetic mainstream British press, portrayed Ayres as an inspirational selfless servant to her employer, others had a different view. The left-wing Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper complained that the lack of support for Ayres's family from the state was symbolic of poor treatment of workers as a whole.

In popular culture Alice Ayres came to renewed public notice with the release of the 1997 play Closer by Patrick Marber and the 2004 BAFTA Award- and Golden Globe-winning film Closer based on it starring Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen. A key plot element revolves around the memorial tablet to Ayres at the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman's Park, in which it is revealed that the character Jane Jones (played by Portman in the film), who calls herself Alice Ayres for most of the story, has in fact fabricated her name and identity based on the tablet on the memorial, which she reads at the time of her first meeting with Dan Woolf (played by Jude Law) near the beginning of the film. The park, and the memorial to Ayres, feature prominently in the opening and closing scenes of the film.

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