I met at St Martins by arrangement a scholar Hilary Chapman visiting from New Zealand to discuss a boy Henry Sutherland who was born in 1851 in the St Martins Workhouse in the most unpromising circumstances. Henry with his mother Mary Sutherland features in the Tom Stoppard trilogy The Coast of Utopia where the young boy Henry is rather a waif like figure: the Russian writer and political refugee Nicholas Ogarev has taken up with Mary. But in adult life because of Ogarev’s early educational support to the boy, Henry qualified as a medical doctor in Paris and led his life there. St Martins was the natural venue for us to meet. Ogarev has a poem ‘At Bedtime’ set to music by Tchaikovsky Opus 27 which is described as an evening prayer.
St Martin-in-the-Fields