Albert Farmer

He told us that our dad was born December 3rd 1915 and that he was an ‘illegitimate’ child. In Sept 1916 he was accepted into the Foundling Hospital and baptized as ‘Albert Farmer’. That is NOT his real name. No wonder we couldn’t find a birth certificate! It also means I am not a ‘Farmer’ either!
He was then ‘fostered’ out to Ellen Ede until he was 5 years old and was then brought back into the hospital and trained to go into the army at age 15. They wore uniforms and did drill parades every day. It was a hard life. (They got a hard boiled egg once a year!)

Thomas Coram started the hospital in 1739 and some of the benefactors were Charles Dickens, (They say his story of ‘Oliver Twist’ was based on the hospital) George Handel (Handel used to play the ‘Messiah’ in the orphanage) and William Hogarth (Painter who started the Royal Academy of Arts of London with the paintings from the hospital).

Evidently the hospital had 3-400 ‘orphans’ in the hospital and it is believed that many were from royalty! They open the records after 80 years (1916-1996) so we were told that we would finally get to know our Dad’s REAL name.

We had a tour of the hospital, it is now a museum, and June couldn’t stop crying. We saw the stairs where Dad used to run up and down and the ‘font’ he was baptized with. We saw the uniforms he wore and photo’s of the kids parading for royalty at the weekends. (Were they visiting their own child?) We even picked out Dad as a kid in one of the photos.
Bert also told us that our dad was captured in Java in 1942 and in 1943 the Japs were shipping some prisoners of war to Borneo in a ship called the ‘Suez Maru’.
Off the coast of Borneo, a US submarine, the USS Bonefish’, torpedoed the ship. (The Commanders name was Tom Hogan) Those that didn’t go down with the ship were shot in the water.