A Shout-out to a Statistician: My Life in Lockdown London

A Pandemic can make for some odd bedfellows, but I’ll get to that in a minute. When I moved with my family to London in the summer of 2019 I was over the moon. I’d be up to my eyeballs in history, with museums, theatres, pubs and my beloved Arsenal at my fingertips. I’d also be within a few hours of Normandy and the Continent; travelling back and forth between Britain and the Europe; gorging myself on history. And for the first few months that is exactly what I did. I was even able to squeeze in a site inspection to the Pacific. On March 23, 2020, however, everything just stopped.

In response to the COVID-19 Pandemic Prime Minister Boris Johnson shut down Britain. Travel ended and we were told not to leave our houses except for an hour’s exercise every day. My historical “world” went from encompassing the entire ETO and PTO to the space within the four walls of our flat.

Re-runs got boring pretty quickly and before we knew it my family were using any excuse we could find to go even just a few steps beyond our threshold. We’d use our allowed hour a day of exercise to walk around the neighborhood. As we did so I started noticing more and more of the ubiquitous blue plaques on many of the houses. Anyone who has visited London will know what I’m talking about; large blue signs that tell you “Lord so and so” lived here from “then to then.” The sort of things I generally passed by with only the barest of recognition.

With the options for getting my historical fix now somewhat constrained, I began to pay a lot more attention to these plaques. Before anyone knew it, Anna, Madeleine and I were going out of our way to find plaques, take pictures of plaques and do google searches of the names on the plaques. As the boundaries of our lockdown grew, so did our search for new plaques. Now, as a way to mark the end of the week and to enjoy something other than sitting around the house, we go for a long walk every Saturday to get some fresh air, see a bit more of our new hometown-and look for new plaques. The weekly “plaque quest” has become a way to stay sane in the midst of the pandemic and to keep my finger in the historical pie so to speak.

There must have been some sort of serendipity then, when during one recent walk we came across a blue plaque to Sir George Laurence Gomme (18 December 1853-23 February 1916). The plaque said that Gomme was a “Clerk of the London County Council, Folklorist and Historian who had lived at the house from 1895-1901.” In ordinary times I probably would have barely noticed the plaque or Gomme’s name. When I got home and did a quick search, however, I realized how much I owed to the London County Council statistician. He has, in fact, become one of the unsung heroes of the pandemic to me and a boon “historical companion” as I travel around the city.

Gomme was born in Stepney the second of 10 children in a good middle-class home. He attended the City of London School until 16 but did not go on to university. Instead he went to work for the railroad and then the Fulham Board of Works, then the Metropolitan Board of Works, which eventually evolved into the London County Council (LCC). Essentially he was a mid-level government bureaucrat. Normally it was not the sort of stuff to get someone’s blood pumping. But fortunately for Londoners and those of us who love London, there was another side to Gomme’s life. The government statistician was also a passionate amateur folklorist and historian of his hometown.

Along with his wife Alice Bertha Gomme, (1853-1938) Gomme was a founding member of the Folklore Society in 1878, helped found the Victoria County History Project, which is an

encyclopedic history of each of England’s historic counties and has been ongoing since it began in 1899; worked closely with leading arts and crafts designer Charles Robert Ashbee in creating the Survey of London, which records the details and seeks to preserve some of the city’s most important London architectural and historic landmarks and wrote prolifically on folklore and London’s history. Most importantly for my future sanity, in 1901 in his position as chief clerk of the LCC, Gomme headed up the effort to bring the Blue Plaque program under the auspices of the council.

By the beginning of the 20th Century the commemorative plaque program that had first been proposed by William Ewart in 1863 and administered by the Society of Arts was on the verge of extinction. Deeply involved in commemorative and preservation efforts in the city, rather than see the program fade away, Gomme had it brought under the auspices of the LCC in 1901. Initially given the stirring title, “Indication of Houses of Historical Interest in London” program, it was while administered by the LCC that the program formalized plaque criteria and finalized the unforgettable royal blue design. By the time the LCC was abolished in 1965, some 250 plaques had been placed. A further 262 blue plaques were added while the program was administered by the Greater London Council and in 1985 the Blue Plaque scheme was turned over to English Heritage, which continues to manage the program. Today there are more than 900 Blue Plaques in and around London’s many boroughs. The most recent, as of this writing, is to Dame Helen Gwynne Vaughn, who served in the Woman’s Auxiliary Corps during World War I, Commandant of the Woman’s Royal Air Force 1918-1919 and, during World War II was the Chief Controller of the Auxiliary Transport Service.

It is safe to say that without the efforts of Laurence Gomme, not only would the Blue Plaque program probably be a now-forgotten bit of Victorian esoterica, but I would probably have gone insane. So, I wanted the first post on my new History Dispatches Blog to give a brief shout out to one of my favourite new historical figures-Sir George Laurence Gomme.

As I move forward with History Hikes and this blog, I plan on sharing some more of the plaques that I have discovered during my time here in lockdown London, as well anything else of historical interest that strikes me along the way. Please consider checking this blog out on a regular basis as I hope to have something new to say at least once a week. I’m planning for there to be a new blog post every Wednesday; at least until we are all allowed out and about again. Also be sure to check out the shorter news section at History Here, where I’ll post any updates on travel, books I’m reading, or new plaques I’ve found. Hope you enjoy the posts!

For more information on Sir George Laurence Gomme and Blue Plaques check out: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques

If you are coming to London and want to find your own plaques I’d recommend downloading English Heritage’s Blue Plaques of London App

As well as

Blue Plaques App, a privately developed app that provides a street view, Wikipedia article and directions to the more than 900 Blue Plaques in London

For Further Reading:

The English Heritage Guide to London’s Blue Plaques: The Lives and Homes of London’s Most Interesting Inhabitants, by English Heritage

Lived in London: Blue Plaques and the Stories Behind them, by Emil Cole