When the duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton
was rushed to the Lindo Wing at St Mary’s
Hospital earlier today, anxious to avoid hundreds
of paparazzi camping outside, she almost
certainly missed the little plaque at the entrance.
The memorial pays tribute to the anonymous
donor “who was not unmindful of his neighbors’
needs” and who paid for the wing in 1937.
In fact he wasn’t so anonymous: the wing is
named after him. Frank Charles Lindo was a
wealthy Jew, descended on his mother Adeline’s
side from the Heilbut family, and on his father
Charles’s side, it appears, from one of London’s
most famous Sephardi families. While it is not
clear exactly how he is related, the Lindo name is
particularly associated with the silver Lindo Lamp,
the earliest known English menorah, which was
commissioned in 1709 on the marriage of Elias
Lindo to Rachel Lopes Ferreira.
Born in 1872, Frank Lindo married Violet
Portman, a member of a British aristocratic family
and a member of the board of management at St
Mary’s. When Lindo died in 1938, he had donated
£111,500 to the hospital, including £5,000 on the
morning of the opening of the Lindo Wing so that
it could open free of debt. While nowadays
considered state-of-the-art, at the time it was
meant for ”patients of moderate means” who
could not afford private care but were too well off
to be treated in a charity hospital for the
“deserving poor”. In his will, Lindo left his house
at Aldeburgh to the hospital as a convalescent
home for the nursing staff, with an endowment
fund of £25,000 for its maintenance.
“His gifts, sympathy and understanding made
possible the erection and equipment of this
building for the relief of sickness and suffering,”
says the memorial plaque, “and will remain for all
time a monument of his outstanding generosity.”
Surely he would have shepped much nachas
from the royal baby born in the birthing suite he
funded.
Lik