Postman's Park is a secret corner of London that should make us proud.
SIR – I am glad that Alice Ayres, the heroine whose deeds inspired the memorials at Postman's Park in London, should now have her own entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Comment, May 27).
There is something plain and honest in the wording of the ceramic tablets that could never be reproduced today. "William Drake," we learn, "lost his life in averting a serious accident to a lady in Hyde Park April 2 1869 whose horses were unmanageable through the breaking of the carriage pole."
Sometimes, the inclusion of professions makes their short tales more poignant: "Sarah Smith, pantomime artiste. At Prince's Theatre died of terrible injuries received when attempting in her inflammable dress to extinguish the flames which had enveloped her companion. January 24 1863."
The banal circumstances of sudden death are elevated by the tragic self-sacrifice of the heroes such as William Donald of Bayswater, aged 19, a railway clerk, who "was drowned in the Lea trying to save a lad from a dangerous entanglement of weed. July 16 1876".
Postman's Park is one of those secret corners of London of which we should be proud.