This year on Thursday 16th June, Shout Out Loud attended the unveiling of the Ayahs’ Home blue plaque at 26 King Edward Road, Hackney, East London. We’ve written about the ayahs previously and for South East Asian History Month, we wanted to shine a light back on the ayahs and their resilience, and provide a behind-the-scenes of the unveiling of a blue plaque.
The term ‘ayah’, is said to derive from the Hindi, Urdu and similar Portuguese word for nursemaid, and in this context is applied to women who served the British in India and other colonies as children’s nannies, nursemaids and ladies’ maids.
The ayahs were South and East Asian women working as nannies and nursemaids for colonial families in India and other countries under the British Empire. These women dedicated their lives to the families and children they worked for, yet sadly this loyalty was not always returned. Ayahs were often brought along to care for the children on the return crossing to Britain, but once they arrived the ayahs could find themselves abandoned here, without a job, or the means to survive or travel home.
The Ayahs’ Home (1900-1921) in Hackney seems to have been the only named institution of its kind providing safety for these women, and every year it sheltered around 100 ayahs and amahs (as nannies from East Asia were known).
Not all of these women were stranded, however, some were seasoned travellers, crossing the seas multiple times, while the Home acted as a kind of agency for the women who made repeat journeys between Britain and Asia.
East London resident Farhanah Mamoojee felt inspired to visit the Ayahs’ Home building after watching the BBC documentary ‘Passage to Britain’, and was surprised to find no commemoration of the space. So, she reached out to the English Heritage blue plaque team and set out to propose the Ayahs’ Home for a blue plaque.
We created a series on the plaque nomination process last year, and you can check out Plaque to Basics here.
Farhanah, like Hannah in the series, found the application process straightforward, and checked in regularly with the English Heritage team to hear about the status of her proposed plaque.
So, how does a blue plaque go from idea to an unveiling?
Once nominated, the plaque needs to be approved by the Blue Plaques Panel, who meet three times a year to discuss nominations and choose the recipients. It is a very selective and competitive process, owing to the popularity of the scheme, and only about one in five suggestions are taken forward.
Once confirmed, extensive research is undertaken by the blue plaques team on the individual or group to be commemorated and the surviving buildings associated with them, one of which is chosen to bear the plaque. Following further agreement by the Panel, and once the building owner has agreed to have the plaque, the team can set in motion the creation of the blue plaque and arrange for its installation.
The plaque itself is handmade by skilled craftspeople – Frank and Sue Ashworth and Ned Heywood – and you can learn more about that process here.
To find out more about its installation, we caught up with builder Trevor Ramsay, English Heritage’s blue plaque installer extraordinaire for the past 17 years.
Once a site has been established and confirmed for the plaque, Trevor arrives early in the morning the day before the unveiling to install the plaque on the wall of the building. Though the brickwork of buildings varies, it usually takes Trevor around 4-5 hours to install the plaque.
It’s standard practice for Trevor to cover up the plaque with tape once it’s inset on the wall so that it can be officially revealed the next day at the unveiling. So far Trevor has put up roughly 180 plaques, working between March and the end of October/early November to get around 10-12 up each year.
Ayahs’ Home plaque the day before the unveiling
The smooth-running of a plaque unveiling ceremony relies on a lot of moving parts, and we caught up with event photographer Lucy Millson-Watkins, who has attended around 40-50 plaque unveilings and taken roughly 70-80 official blue plaque photos (which are used on the English Heritage website).
Though all unveilings are special, Lucy finds that for those who feel particularly close to the cause, or are family members and friends of the commemorated, they are particularly touching, and the Ayahs’ Home was no exception.
English Heritage CEO Kate Mavor speaking at the unveiling
Journalist and presenter Anita Anand and actress and comedian Meera Syal opened the curtain and officially unveiled the plaque
A plaque unveiling celebrates the lives of those commemorated by the plaque, and gives an opportunity for family members, friends, historians, public figures and those interested in the cause to speak on what the plaque means to them and signifies in history.
As Farhanah pointed out in her speech at the unveiling, the Ayahs’ Home blue plaque “is of great importance not just for Asian history, but British history and international history”, and she hopes that it will encourage others to “take a closer look at the hidden stories within their local communities, so we can continue to diversify the histories that are told around the world”.