Alice Ayres was a nursemaid to the family of Henry and Mary Ann Chandler. The Chandlers owned an oil and paint shop in Southwark, south of London. In 1885 fire broke out in the shop and Ayres rescued three of her nieces from the burning building, before falling from a window and suffering fatal injury. The manner of Ayres’s death caused great public interest, with large numbers of people attending her funeral and contributing to the funding of a memorial.
About Alice Ayres in brief
Alice Ayres was a nursemaid to the family of Henry and Mary Ann Chandler. The Chandlers owned an oil and paint shop in Southwark, south of London. In 1885 fire broke out in the shop, and Ayres rescued three of her nieces from the burning building, before falling from a window and suffering fatal injury. The manner of Ayres’s death caused great public interest, with large numbers of people attending her funeral and contributing to the funding of a memorial. In 1902 her name was added to the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice and in 1936 a street near the scene of the fire was renamed Ayres Street in her honour. The case of Alice Ayres came to renewed public notice with the release of Patrick Marber’s 1997 play Closer, and the 2004 film based on it. An important element of the plot revolves around a central character who fabricates her identity based on the description ofAyres on the memorial. It has been described as a “secular canonisation”, being widely depicted in popular culture. Although very little was known about her life, she was widely cited as a role model. Various social and political movements promoted Ayres as an example of the values held by their particular movement. The circumstances of her death were distorted to give the impression that she was an employee willing to die for the sake of her employer’s family, rather than for children to whom she was closely related. After rescuing the three girls, Ayres tried to jump herself but was overcome by smoke and caught by a member of the crowd.
She returned to the room she shared with the three young girls and threw them out of the window, dropping Edith onto a mattress. Elizabeth dropped onto the mattress and survived, while Edith clung to Ayres and refused to be dropped, but Ayres threw her of the building and the child was caught by the crowd and died from smoke inhalation. She was described as ‘not one of your fast sort—gentle and quiet-spoke, and always busy about her work”. After her death, Ay Res was described by a local resident as ‘gentle’ and ‘quiet-spoked’ She was born into a large family in 1859, the seventh of ten children of a labourer, John Ayres. In December 1877, her sister Mary Ann married anOil and paint dealer, Henry Chandler. Chandler owned a shop at 194 Union Street, about 400 yards south of the present-day Tate Modern. The family lived above the shop. Ayres shared a room on the second floor with her niece, Edith, four-year-old Ellen, and Elizabeth, three, who lived with the Chandlers. Although the shop was near the headquarters of the London Fire Brigade and the emergency services were quickly on scene, by the time the fire engine arrived intense flames were coming from the lower windows, making it impossible for the fire brigade to position ladders. The fire brigade had to wait until the next day.
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This page is based on the article Alice Ayres published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
