Tony Ross - The Ice Monster

The admiral is the only sailor to live at the hospital. He was thrown out of the old sailors’ home for being drunk and disorderly.

The colonel and the brigadier are also Chelsea Pensioners.

The one-eyed sergeant major is in charge of everyone and everything that comes in and out of the hospital, and don’t you forget it.

All the Chelsea Pensioners are overseen by the Royal Hospital’s formidable Matron.

Queen Victoria is the ruler of the British Empire. In 1899, she had been on the throne for what was the longest reign in British history, a staggering sixty-two years.

Abdul Karim is always at the Queen’s side. He is her handsome young Indian attendant, also known as “Munshi”.

Sir Ray Lankester is the museum’s portly director.

The sandwich-board man roams the streets, trying to convince everyone that “THE END IS NIGH”.

The captain is in charge of what was, in 1899, one of the Royal Navy’s most modern warships, HMS Argonaut.

The Sticky Fingers Gang is a rough and tough band of child robbers, who are infamous for being the greatest thieves in London.

Raj the First has his own confectionery emporium – or sweet trolley.

And last, but certainly not least…

…is the Ice Monster itself, a woolly mammoth that died ten thousand years ago. The lifeless animal was discovered by Arctic explorers, perfectly preserved in the ice.

One bleak winter night, in the back streets of London, a tiny baby was left on the steps of an orphanage. There was no note, no name, no clue as to who this little person was. Just the potato sack in which she was wrapped, as snow fell around her.

In Victorian times, it was not uncommon for newborn babies to be abandoned outside orphanages, hospitals or even the homes of upper-class folk. Their poor, desperate mothers hoped their children would be taken in and given a better life than their birth families could provide.

However, it was hard to imagine a worse start in life for this baby than at : Home for Unwanted Children.

Twenty-six orphans lived there, all crammed into a room that should have slept eight at the absolute most. The children were locked up, starved and beaten. On top of that, they were forced to work day and night. They had to assemble gentlemen’s pocket watches from tiny pieces until they went blind.

All the children were painfully thin, with filthy rags for clothes. The orphans’ faces were black with soot, so all you could see in the gloom were their hopeful little eyes.

When a new baby arrived at the orphanage, all the older children would come up with a name for them. They liked to work their way through the alphabet so their names would be as different as possible. The night the baby in the potato sack was left on the steps, they had reached E. If she had been found the day before, she might have been called “Doris”. A day later, she could have been a “Frank”. Instead, she was named “Elsie”.

This prison of an orphanage was run by an evil old boot named Mrs Curdle. Her face was usually fixed in a permanent grimace, and she was covered from head to toe in warts. She had so many warts even her warts had warts. The only thing that made her smile was the sound of children sobbing.

Mrs Curdle would scoff all the food donated for the orphans, so the children in her care had to eat cockroaches for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“Creepy-crawlies are good for you!” she would chuckle.

If any of the orphans spoke after “candles out”, she would stuff one of her pus-sodden old stockings in their mouth. They would have to keep it there for a week.

“That’ll keep you quiet, windy wallet!”