On the morning of 22nd April, almost one hundred years to the day of his great valour, a VC Commemorative paving stone will be placed outside Wandsworth Town Hall. The day will also see the unveiling of a green plaque on No92 Fountain Road, the house where he and his family lived for many years.
A small footbridge on one section of this leads into Lydden Road, a street very much associated with another soldier who fought at the Battle of Arras, but whose fortune was very different from Corporal Foster. It was here that a painter called Robert Baron settled with his wife Annie. He was from Middlesex and she from Dawley Green, Shropshire. By the time of the census the family were living at 17 Lydden Road and William Thomas was the youngest of four children.
His baptism records indicate he may well have been born in Wardley Street. Robert and Annie had seven children in total and by , they had moved one door along to No What a place to grow up, these bustling streets so influenced by the presence of the Harrison and Barber slaughterhouse and its attendant industries, would have been alive with the smells and sounds of horses, hawkers, costers, twenty four hour activity.
It was a frenzied world fraught with danger and exploitation. In August three young women were killed in an explosion and a fourth permanently disabled at a firework factory on the site of what is now the Henry Prince Estate.
An employee accidentally stood on one of the toy cap guns. A little bit further down the road in , a huge new workhouse complex was opened on Swaffield Road, keeping everyone on their toes. Only last week our Summerstown Walk provided a harrowing account of what could happen when the wheels come off. Betsey Higgs entered this workhouse in having been abandoned by her husband with two small children and pregnant with a third.
