Two new statues have been unveiled beside the River Thames in Bermondsey. One of socialist doctor Alfred Salter and the other of his wife Ada.

The couple championed free healthcare in south London half a century before the National Health Service.

Ada Salter and her husband also helped regenerate Bermondsey’s slums and planted thousands of trees in parks, playgrounds and churchyards in the years before and after World War I.

An original statue of Alfred Salter and his daughter Joyce, who died of scarlet fever aged just nine, were stolen from Bermondsey’s riverside walk by metal thieves in 2011.

More than £60,000 has been raised in a public appeal and a similar amount has been contributed by Southwark Council. This has allowed the original statues to be replaced and also an additional bronze of Ada Salter to be erected at the site. The money will also fund anti-theft security for the new artworks.

Artist Diane Gorvin, who sculpted the original statues in 1991, was commissioned to create the new.

It has taken 72 years to finally erect a fitting memorial to Ada Salter.

Amazingly it is the first public statue of a woman politician in London, also the first of a woman trade unionist and the first of a woman environmentalist and the first of a Quaker woman.

It is a disgraceful fact that there are only 15 public statues of women in London and three of them are queens. Margaret Thatcher actually has two statues in London but for fear of vandalism of her hated image neither is in public space.

The Salters certainly deserve their statues. Alfred was a doctor, a socialist and a Labour MP who with his wife Ada dedicated his life to London’s poor. The couple were both Quakers. 

In 1900 Salter and his wife Ada, set up a free health centre in Bermondsey. It would be nearly half a century before the rest of the capital and the country would enjoy comparable free health care under the National Health Service, introduced by the post-war Labour government in 1948.

The Salters soon realised that charity was not enough and involved themselves in local politics. Alfred Salter was elected as a councillor for the Progressive Party — a Liberal front. 

It didn’t take long for the couple to discover that, just like Clegg and his hypocritical gang today, Liberal politics have far more to do with power than with principle.

In 1908 both joined the Independent Labour Party. The ILP with leaders like Keir Hardie, dockers’ leader Ben Tillett, George Bernard Shaw and Edward Aveling, son-in-law of Karl Marx, was courageously opposed to the jingoistic militarism that was gearing up for the slaughter of World War I.

After the war, in 1919, both Salters were elected to the London County Council. It was Ada who focused on LCC work after Alfred was elected as the local Labour MP in 1922. He would hold the seat with a just one short break until World War II.

In another notable first Ada was elected the first ever female Labour mayor anywhere in Britain. 

She not only helped to make the LCC into a progressive force but helped thousands with her groundbreaking social clubs, especially for young working women.

Ada also set up her world-famous Bermondsey Beautification Committee to demolish the acres of unhygienic sub-standard housing. She organised the planting of thousands of trees in every street and built green playgrounds for working-class kids.

The couple, inspired by the socialist ideals of airy planned garden cities, oversaw the sweeping away of slum housing.

Thanks to Ada, even today Bermondsey is still one of London’s greenest boroughs.

Now once again Ada and Alfred Salter are back in Bermondsey. You will find them on the riverside walk near Cherry Gardens Pier, Rotherhithe.

The local community and the many activists who helped raise the money to get the statues back deserve our gratitude for refusing to let the memories of these two important working-class heroes die.