The Lamerton Workhouse Orphanage

When Andrew McDay was forced to take up the position of Beadle at a workhouse orphanage, it opened his eyes to the suffering and ill treatment meted out to the children in the orphanage to make them work on one bowl of gruel a day. He wanted to make changes and did. The whip, the man who ran the workhouse for the beadle was thrown out and the drunk woman who was looking after the babies suffered the same fate. His hands were tied to some extent by the lack of money but he found help from strange places. One came from a workhouse, with her children and another he met when she tried to rob him on the way to the workhouse orphanage. He looked into her eyes and was smitten. Later when she was arrested for robbing the obsequious Lady Dymonds, who was by no account a lady, he begged his father, a famous barrister, to come down and defend her. Sometime after the trial Lady Dymonds is shot in the head but refuses to die. Andrew makes the orphanage workhouse run at a profit but that in turn takes work from the larger workhouse orphanage in Tavistock and the beadle starts to send up the children who do not earn money or are hard to control, for Andrew to look after. Andrew fights back by making the orphanage more profitable but he is making a rod for his own back.