Asylum-seeker hero

SIR – Professor Patrick Leman of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College, London, is reported to want portraits of “people from different ethnic groups, different cultures” alongside busts of those such as Sir Frederick Mott, a founder of the Maudsley hospital (report, July 15).

He may be unaware that those of us with the name Mott are descended from 17th-century Huguenot asylumseekers. Some have contributed greatly to science since then, including a Nobel laureate in physics (1977).

Would it not be better to leave the bust of Sir Frederick Mott as an inspiration to modern-day foreign students and asylum-seekers studying at King’s? The history of “white men” in England is rarely as straightforward as it might appear. Stephen Mott

Shap, Westmorland