The humble heroes of London’s Watts Memorial

Folajimi Olubunmi-Adewole died last weekend saving a woman’s life. Hearing her cries as she fell into the Thames from London Bridge, the 20-year-old, known as Jimi, handed his phone to a friend, told him to call the police, and with another passer-by dived into the river. The other man and the woman were rescued. Jimi was not.

His family have called for his heroism to be publicly remembered. A few minutes’ walk from the flowers left for Jimi on the riverbank sits an unassuming remnant of Victorian public-spiritedness, inspired by the same desire to remember everyday heroism.

The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice is in the former churchyard of Aldersgate’s St Botolph church, now called Postman’s Park after the old General Post Office building which bounds the southern edge. Designed by Ernest George, it’s a pitched timber structure rather akin to a village cricket pavilion. ‘At once moving and unintentionally quaint’, as Pevsner puts it.

The artist George Frederic Watts conceived the monument in 1887, arguing for ‘some permanent memorial to the deeds of heroic men, the sacrifice of whose lives is being constantly made and as quickly forgotten’. Inside are 54 ceramic tiles designed by William De Morgan and embedded along the wall, each emblazoned with the name of someone who sacrificed him- or herself for another. In a painterly script, the tiles display the heroes’ occupation, the date of their death and a short description of the events preceding it.

There is little apparent logic in the names Watts chose to remember. Many had died years, if not decades, before the memorial — then far from complete — was unveiled in 1900. The earliest, from 1863, is dedicated to a ‘pantomime artiste’ whose dress was enveloped in flames as she tried to extinguish another performer’s costume.