Postman’s Park, the City’s gem of a park, is usually entered off St Martin’s Le Grand. Postman’s Park is actually made up of five churchyards, from an era when a lot more people died and were buried in the City.
It’s a peaceful delight with a little pool and a fountain burbling away gently, lots of curving flower-beds and lawns. At the end is a little lean-to with a wall commemorating local heroes.
For instance, Mary Rogers, ‘a stewardess of the Stella who gave up her life belt and voluntarily went down in the sinking ship’; or Frederick Alfred Croft, a train inspector who ‘saved a lunatic woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal station but was himself run over by the train, January 11, 1878’; and the bathos of four men ‘who lost their lives in bravely striving to save a comrade at the sewage pumping works East Ham 1st of July 1895’.
This is the explanation of how Postman’s Park and its modest but moving memorial were conceived.
These are examples of heroic sacrifice from the many plaques on display.
