Who was Dr Barnardo

Q. A few more details, please.

A. Certainly. Thomas John Barnardo was born in Dublin on 4 July, 1845. He worked as a clerk until going through a religious conversion in 1862. He began preaching in the Dublin slums and then moved to London where he studied medicine. He planned to become a medical missionary in China.

Q. So why didn't he

A. While studying at the London Hospital, Barnardo opened his own raged school in Stepney, east London, and soon discovered the plight of homeless children in the city.

Q. There's a story about how he got the idea of orphanages, isn't there

A. Yes - a sentimental one, but moving nonetheless. One of the young pupils at his ragged school was reluctant to leave at the end of classes. Barnardo told him to go home because his mother would be worried. 'I ain't got no mother,' the boy replied. 'Haven't got a mother, boy Where do you live ' asked Barnardo. 'Don't live nowhere,' said the lad. He explained he often slept in one of the carts at the haymarket in Whitechapel. Something, Barnardo, decided, had to be done.

Q. So what did he do

A. Barnardo, a powerful orator, spoke about the problem at a missionary conference in 1867. The reformer Lord Shaftesbury was so moved by what he heard that he offered Barnardo help to start homes for these children. The banker, Robert Barclay agreed to support the cause and on 2 March, 1868, Barnardo had raised enough money to open a home for destitute children. By 1878 he had established 50 orphanages in London.

Q. Grim edifices to Victorian philanthropy

A. That's unkind. They weren't all that bad. In Ilford, Essex, for example, he built a village home for girls - a complete community with 70 cottages, school, laundry and church. It had a population of more than 1,000 children.

Q. I expect he was a temperance reformer, too

A. Well, that went with the job of Victorian do-gooder. As a young medical student he often used to put up mission tents outside pubs (and often got a thrashing from the landlord as a result). In 1872 Barnardo bought the Edinburgh Castle, an infamous gin palace in London, and converted it into the People's Mission Church and the country's first coffee palace.

Q. What's this about photography

A. An effective way of raising money as well as keeping records. In 1874 he started a photographic department in his Stepney Boys' Home and employed a photographer to make a record of every child admitted. The photographs were kept in albums and case-history sheets. There are more than 50,000 of them. He then developed a collection of 'then and now' pictures of the boys at the homes. These then went on sale to raise funds - a pack of 20 for five shillings - and also made good publicity.

Q. Any other good works

A. Barnardo also developed a project for sending children to Canada. Between 1882 and 1901 he sent 8,046 children, a significant percentage of the Canadian population. Thomas Barnardo died on 19 September, 1905, by which time nearly 8,000 children were living in his residential homes, more than 4,000 were boarded out, and 18,000 had been sent to Canada and Australia.

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By Steve Cunningham