A long and touching letter to Croker explaining the circumstances of the resignation of the writer’s husband, Edward Hawke Locker (1777-1849), as senior Commissioner of Greenwich Hospital, a post he had held since 1829. As it makes clear, he was suffering from what the period called 'mental failure' but which we now recognize as the onset of dementia/ Alzheimer's disease. He had previously been Hospital Secretary from 1819 and had also partly grown up there, his father, Captain William Locker, having been its Lieutenant-Governor, 1793-1800. Croker, an old friend of Locker, had been Secretary of the Admiralty when he was appointed Secretary at Greenwich and instrumental in that.

Administrative / biographical background
Greenwich (i.e. the town centre) as it exists today is almost entirely the creation of E.H. Locker, based on a proposal he put to the Greenwich Hospital Board in 1825. In 1823 he had also revived an unexecuted suggestion, made in 1798 by his father when Lieutenant-Governor, and founded the Naval Gallery in the Painted Hall (1824-1936), so he is also the effective creator of the Greenwich Hospital Collection: this has in turn been a core element of the National Maritime Museum holdings since it began and it includes a number of works that Locker commissioned and/ or presented to it, notably items connected with his naval forbears. He was overall the key éminence grise in Hospital affairs and modernization during a fairly difficult twenty years and more. His other talents and achievements are also of related interest, as a traveller, a good artist and in earlier days secretary to Admiral Sir Edward Pellew, later Lord Exmouth, when Commander-in-Chief in the East Indies. All this came to an unexpected end in 1843 when he showed symptoms of what we would probably now call Alzheimer’s disease: unaccountable lapses of recognition and memory, wandering off and so on. This letter is his wife’s detailed account to Croker, one of her husband’s old professional friends (and with whom he was a founder-member of the Athenaeum club). It follows up an earlier one in which she had asked him for possible help regarding their son, Frederick, supposing Locker received insufficient pension – though he in fact did so –mentioning Sir Robert Peel (PM) who was in the event very kind on the matter of EHL’s retirement. Not surprisingly, printed references to the reason are discreet (for example in the much later and heavily edited 'Reminisences' of Frederick Locker – by then Locker-Lampson): this is, by comparison, detailed but also ‘dignified, loyal and affecting’ (as James Fergusson, the dealer from which it came described it in his list). Mrs Locker (née Boucher) was herself an attractive character of whom the Museum has a little-known portrait - with her husband and Frederick- among the crowd in H.P. Briggs’s painting of Lord Howe and George III on board the Queen Charlotte in 1794 (BHC0476: GH Coll.). A portrait of Locker as he was about the time of the letter is that by H.W. Phillips (BHC3165), presented to the Hospital by his family in 1872.