Preface

When people of my parents’ generation were growing up, they were often threatened with the workhouse for being wasteful or profligate with precious resources, even for eating a slice of bread too many. It was a largely a reflex action but for my grandparents, and particularly for their parents, the workhouse and the world of the Poor Law was one that they strenuously and, so far as I know, successfully avoided. This book is an attempt to find out why they had that reaction.

The workhouse still has the capacity to shock. One of the most popular ITV programmes of 2013 was Secrets of the Workhouse in which half a dozen celebrities, such as Fern Britton, Felicity Kendal and Brian Cox, ‘researched’ their ancestors who had spent time in the workhouse. As in the tradition of such programmes, tears were to the fore and the horrors inevitably played up. According to the press pack which accompanied the show: ‘With no benefits system in place, destitute people were either left to starve on the streets or forced to submit themselves to the harsh conditions of the workhouse where they worked ten hours a day doing menial tasks such as breaking rocks up or picking apart ropes’.

In books a surprising bestseller in recent years has been Jennifer Worth’s Shadows of the Workhouse, in which she shows how the long shadow of the workhouse and the relieving officer still affected the lives of the residents of Poplar in the years after the Second World War. Reviews emphasised the harrowing nature of much of the book, but also that Worth stressed that the alternatives were often little better.

The temptation for writers and directors is to show the workhouse as being unremittingly Oliver Twist grim, ideally with a celebrity in tears as they discover the true horrors of the Poor Law system. Memorably this was the case with Jeremy Paxman in an early series of Who Do You Think You Are?, when he broke down after discovering how his great-grandmother Mary was ‘offered’ the workhouse after giving birth to an illegitimate daughter: “She committed the great sin of having a child and was faced with the decision to keep her family together and risk starvation or split them up and live in a dreaded workhouse. She chose to stay with her children, and I admire her decision”.

The truth, as this book will show, is more nuanced. In her review of the Secrets of the Workhouse TV programmes, Swansea University historian Lesley Hulonce commented:

To borrow a phrase from peerless John Motson this programme was indeed a game of two halves. One half saw leading historians such as David Green, Elizabeth Hurran and Allannah Tomkins offering articulate and knowledgeable commentary which was often bowdlerised by narration provided by Mr Carson, the butler from Downton Abbey (Jim Carter), whose script oscillated between reasonable historical rationalisations and rather hysterical (and often untrue) pronouncements.

Many people learn about the workhouse at school or by visiting museums. The scandal at Andover Workhouse in 1845, where starving paupers were forced to eat the marrow from the bones they were meant to be crushing, shocks modern students just as it did the readers of the newspapers in which each revelation was covered in lurid detail. But was every workhouse as bad? In these sentimental days the paupers who ground the bones are presented as the innocent victims of a cruel and misguided policy, forced into dreadful workhouses where the children were beaten and their parents neglected. Is this really the case?

One thing is clear from any study of welfare history, that, although the terminology changes, the problems and the solutions largely remain the same. Basically, how do you match up limited resources with the desire to help fellow citizens in need? How generous do you make the support offered to the destitute, the aged and the infirm? If it is too generous, then the taxpayer will complain of the financial burden and you risk the possibility of welfare dependency, that is people preferring to remain on financial support rather than find a job.

In the 1820s theorists, such as Revd J. T. Becher who was behind the establishment of what became the Southwell Workhouse near Nottingham, argued that workhouses would encourage the poor to ‘stand on their own two feet’. In words not dissimilar to those coming from the mouths of welfare reformers today, Becher wrote:

Let it be remembered that the advantages resulting from a workhouse must arise not from keeping the poor in the house, but from keeping them out of it, by constraining the inferior classes to know and feel how demoralising and degrading is the compulsory relief drawn from the parish to silence the clamour and to satisfy the cravings of the wilful and woeful indigent: but how sweet and wholesome is that food and how honourable is that independence, which is earned by perseverance and honest industry.

Conversely, if the financial support is not generous enough then the genuinely deserving will suffer and there will be scandals, and possibly even protests from claimants. There are striking parallels with scandals in social services and the National Health Service today. The Mid Staffordshire Hospital scandal between 2007 and 2009 could easily have occurred in workhouses 150 years ago. An inquiry led by Robert Francis found, ‘A chronic shortage of staff, particularly nursing staff, was largely responsible for the substandard care’. In addition, morale was low and ‘while many staff did their best in difficult circumstances, others showed a disturbing lack of compassion towards their patients’. In 1867 Matilda Beeton, a nurse at Rotherhithe Workhouse told an inquiry that: ‘On the whole it did not seem to me that a pauper’s life was regarded in any other light than the sooner they were dead the better’.

At the Mid Staffordshire, Francis cited a litany of failings in the care of patients which would have been familiar in many workhouse scandals. ‘For many patients the most basic elements of care were neglected’, he said. Some patients needing pain relief either got it late or not at all. Others were left unwashed for up to a month. ‘Food and drinks were left out of the reach of patients and many were forced to rely on family members for help with feeding’. And patients’ calls for help to use the toilet were ignored, with the result that they were left in soiled sheets or sitting on commodes for hours ‘often feeling ashamed and afraid’.

A Parliamentary enquiry on the conditions at Andover Workhouse in 1846 found similar neglect, but also appalling cruelty. The inmates: ‘said that when they found… a fresh bone, one that appeared a little moist, that [they] were almost ready to fight over it, and that the man who was fortunate to get it was obliged to hide it that he might eat it when he was alone’.

But the root cause of the problems at the Mid Staffordshire was cuts of £10 million imposed by the Trust’s management team. The Francis Inquiry laid much of the blame on them. The action they took to investigate and resolve concerns ‘was inadequate and lacked an appropriate sense of urgency’. This accusation could also have been laid at the feet of many boards of Poor Law Guardians, keener to keep the poor rate low than to help those in the workhouse. At Andover, where the poor rate was one of the lowest in Hampshire, it emerged that the guardians who were supposed to visit the workhouse regularly to check on conditions, had not done so. In particular the board’s chairman, the Reverend Christopher Dodson, had not been inside the workhouse for six years.

Only one remedy to help the poor is no longer considered: the workhouse. It is perhaps the only solution that is universally agreed a failure. In some ways the system was a victim of its own success. It succeeded all too well as a deterrent, even after the 1880s when workhouses had largely become hospitals cum orphanages cum old people’s homes. Charles Dickens has a poor old lady, Betty Higden, in Our Mutual Friend say: ‘Kill me sooner than take me there. Throw this pretty child under cart-horses feet and a loaded waggon, sooner than take him there. Come to us and find us all a-dying, and set a light to us all where we lie and let us all blaze away with the house into a heap of cinders sooner than move a corpse of us there!’ Generations of working class people would have agreed.

But it is now forgotten that the workhouse was there to cope when people could not or would not. It was the last port of call for the destitute and the dying. In 1849 a young Irish girl told Henry Mayhew: ‘What can we do? It’s better than starving in Ireland, this workhouse is’. In July 1870, The Times reported the case of two unemployed men, George Brown and William Hewlin, who were admitted to Whitechapel Workhouse in an extremely emaciated state, where they died of starvation shortly afterwards. Three decades later, a small bundle was handed to the porter at Marylebone Workhouse, with a note: ‘Oh pray, somebody be kind to my little darling. I have to work very hard for six shillings a week or I would look after her myself ’.

This book largely covers the period between 1834, which saw the introduction of the New Poor Law, and the First World War, by which time the workhouse had largely become an historical curiosity. There is the occasional reference to the world of the Old Poor Law, which was largely discredited by the 1830s but, although it was abandoned in 1834, still lingered on in many ways. Not least, because the workhouse and many of the ideas which lay behind it were developed by the practitioners of the Old Poor Law.

We are protected today by the welfare state in a way that would have been unthinkable 150 years ago and only in the dreams of social reformers a century ago. There are just about adequate pensions for the elderly, and if you are unemployed there are allowances and payments. And when we are ill the National Health Service provides hospitals, doctors and support when needed. In 1946 James Griffiths, Minister of National Insurance, then introducing proposals to establish the welfare state told the House of Commons that:

to those who profess to that security will weaken the moral fibre and destroy self-respect let me say this. It is not security that destroys us, it is insecurity. It is the fear of tomorrow that paralyses the will, it is the frustration of human hopes that corrodes the soul. Security in adversity will I believe release our people from the haunting fears of yesterday and make tomorrow not a day to dread, but a day to welcome.

Matters would have been very different for our great-grandparents. If they came from the small aristocratic or upper class elite – such as the residents of Downton Abbey – they would have had money enough not to worry about the proverbial rainy day. Doctors and live-in nurses would have treated them at home if they became sick or infirm. The middle and upper working classes had more money worries. For them the spectre of instant dismissal or debilitating illness was ever-present, providing the plots for many a Victorian novel. The prudent would have been members of a friendly society, such as the Foresters or Oddfellows, who made payments in case of sickness or unemployment. Or, with luck, they might have had enough savings to tide them through rough patches.

But the vast majority of Queen Victoria’s subjects were members of the working class. Although conditions did slowly improve for ordinary people over the 80 years between 1834 and the First World War they were never good. Uncertainty ruled their lives, for relatively few jobs outside the railways, the military and the Post Office, offered job security, let alone a pension. Many jobs were casual or part-time, and even fewer were well paid. Some managed to save against unemployment, while others sought shortterm help from a charity or neighbours. The elderly, who could no longer work and were not looked after by their families, might well spend their last years in the workhouse.

At the bottom of the pile were the semi-employed who made ends meet in a variety of ways, mainly by casual labour but also, where necessary, by begging and petty theft. In Charles Booth’s famous Poverty Map of London drawn up in the early 1890s, the districts these people lived in were coloured dark blue for ‘very poor, casual chronic want’ or black for the ‘lowest class. Vicious semi-criminal’, compared to light blue for ‘poor 18s-21s for a family’ and purple for ‘Mixed. Some comfortable. Other poor’. Booth further describes the people in the very poor category as:

Casual earnings, very poor. The labourers do not get as much as three days work a week, but it is doubtful if many could or would work full time for long together if they had the opportunity. Class B is not one in which men are born and live and die so much as a deposit of those who from mental, moral and physical reasons are incapable of better work.

It was these characters who haunted the workhouses.

There are very few accounts of what it was like being destitute, not knowing where your next meal was coming from or where you would lay your head each night. In Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, the Old Etonian Eric Blair (George Orwell) describes his experiences. He was living in a poor district of Paris at the time and had just been robbed:

You have thought so much about poverty – it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping…

You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless…

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk…

You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

Much of what we know about life inside the workhouse, particularly the casual wards which housed the vagrants, comes from articles and books written by journalists and social reformers who spent a few nights there. Most only spent a night or two in the workhouse before returning to respectable life. The best-known account is undoubtedly Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which includes descriptions of a number of casual wards. Yet the first journalist to do this was probably James Greenwood, who wrote about his night in the casual ward of Lambeth Workhouse in 1866 for the Pall Mall Gazette. His intention was:

to learn by actual experience how casual paupers are lodged and fed, and what the ‘casual’ is like, and what the porter who admits him, and the master who rules over him is like; and how the night passes with the outcasts whom we have all seen crowding about workhouse doors on cold and rainy nights. Much has been said on the subject – on behalf of the paupers – on behalf of the officials; but nothing by anyone who, with no motive but to learn and make known the truth, had ventured the experiment of passing a night in a workhouse, and trying what it actually is to be a ‘casual’.

His articles caused a sensation. ‘Daddy’, the genial inmate who oversaw admissions, became for a short time a Music Hall hero, but more seriously James Greenwood showed how grim conditions actually were and, over time, helped push through reforms.

Writing in the early 1900s, Mary Higgs had a more serious purpose. She was the wife of a Congregationalist minister in Oldham and, in several pamphlets and articles, described her experiences in workhouses and common lodging houses, as part of a campaign to improve the conditions for women in these institutions. In an article called ‘The Tramp Ward’, she wrote: ‘My friend and I started on a well-planned tour of investigation; we dropped out of civilisation in a town far enough away to tramp from and set our faces towards a place where friends were ready to receive us. We told no lies’.

Access to the workhouse proper was more difficult. As a result there are very few eyewitness accounts by the inmates themselves. Memoirs, such as those by Charles Chaplin, Henry Morton Stanley (Thomas Rowlands) and George Lansbury, describe their time as children in ‘the house’ or as a Poor Law Guardian. But with the exception of Indoor Paupers by ‘One of Them’ (1885) there are few, if any, accounts by adult paupers. This fascinating book had been forgotten before I came across it on the shelves of the London Library. Peter Higginbotham subsequently discovered that the ‘Indoor Pauper’ was one John Rutherford, an inmate at Poplar Workhouse. Nothing else is known about Rutherford, even if, indeed, that is his real name.

To this reader, however, much of Indoor Paupers has a ring of truth it. The author is not above sentimentalising situations in the workhouse and some of the characters coincide with the prejudices of his middle class readership. Even so, there is enough bitter experience and common sense narrative to allow readers to gain an idea of what it was like – the camaraderie as well as the horrors and the tedium. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ pops up throughout my book. I thought you should know why.

Simon Fowler,

Kew, June 2014