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facts about alice ayres.html

23 Facts About Alice Ayres

facts about alice ayres.html1.

Alice Ayres was an English nursemaid honoured for her bravery in rescuing the children in her care from a house fire.

2.

The Chandlers owned an oil and paint shop in Union Street, Southwark, then just south of London, and Alice Ayres lived with the family above the shop.

3.

The manner of Alice Ayres's death caused great public interest, with large numbers of people attending her funeral and contributing to the funding of a memorial.

4.

Alice Ayres was born into a large family in 1859, the seventh of ten children of a labourer, John Ayres.

5.

In 1881, Alice Ayres worked as a household assistant to Edward Woakes, a doctor specialising in ear and throat disorders.

6.

The family lived above the shop, with Henry and Mary Ann Chandler sleeping in one bedroom with their six-year-old son Henry, and Alice Ayres sharing a room on the second floor with her nieces, five-year-old Edith, four-year-old Ellen and three-year-old Elizabeth.

7.

Meanwhile, Alice Ayres, wearing only a nightdress, had tried to reach her sister but was unable to get to her through the smoke.

8.

Ellen clung to Alice Ayres and refused to be dropped, but Alice Ayres threw her out of the building, and the child was caught by a member of the crowd.

9.

Alice Ayres went back into the smoke a third time and returned carrying badly injured Elizabeth, whom she dropped safely onto the mattress.

10.

Alice Ayres missed the mattress and the crowd below and fell onto the pavement, suffering spinal injuries.

11.

Alice Ayres was rushed to nearby Guy's Hospital where, because of the public interest that her story excited, hourly bulletins were issued about her health and Queen Victoria sent a lady-in-waiting to enquire after her condition.

12.

Alice Ayres's condition deteriorated and she died in Guy's Hospital on 1885.

13.

Alice Ayres's body was not taken to Guy's Hospital's mortuary, but was laid in a room set aside for her.

14.

Alice Ayres was posthumously recognised by the Metropolitan Board of Works-controlled Royal Society for the Protection of Life from Fire, who awarded her father John Alice Ayres a sum of 10 guineas in her honour.

15.

Alice Ayres was given a large public funeral, attended by over 10,000 mourners.

16.

Alice Ayres's coffin was carried from her parents' house to her grave in Isleworth Cemetery by a team of 16 firemen, relieving each other in sets of four.

17.

Alice Ayres 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.

18.

Sir Francis Hastings Doyle wrote a well-received poem in honour of Alice Ayres, as did leading social reformer and women's rights campaigner Laura Ormiston Chant.

19.

Alice Ayres's loving tenderness to the children committed to her care and her pure gentle life were remarked by those around her before there was any thought of her dying a heroic death.

20.

Alice Ayres was an uneducated working-class woman, who after her death underwent what has been described as "a secular canonisation", 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.

21.

The version of Alice Ayres presented to the public as a woman devoted entirely to duty embodied the idealised British character at the time, while the image of a hard-working but uncomplaining woman who set the welfare of others above her own embodied the idealised vision of the working class presented by social reformers, and the ideal selfless and dedicated woman presented by campaigners for women's rights.

22.

Watts's view was shared by others who sought to provide inspirational material on British heroes, and authors writing about Alice Ayres systematically altered the fact that the children rescued were members of her family, instead describing them as the children of her employer.

23.

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.