Chapter One

The World of the Workhouse

The word ‘workhouse’ has resonance: unfeeling, mean and bleak, casting a terrifying shadow over ordinary lives. It appears a deeply inhuman institution, and today we shudder at photographs of rooms full of identically dressed elderly men and women with no spark of life in their eyes. The scandal at Andover Workhouse in Hampshire was not unique, but rather the most shocking of several that erupted in the 1840s. Newspaper exposés later in the century and the writings of Jack London, Beatrice Webb and others have given a pretty bleak picture and shaped the workhouse’s legacy.

However, it often did not seem like this to practitioners. From the 1870s foreign social workers were impressed with the provision made for the poor by the British State, compared with what was available on the Continent or in the United States, where care was largely left in the hands of charities or the Church. It is also clear that the Poor Law Guardians – the men (and from the 1880s women too) who were responsible for administering and supervising the workhouse and its staff – were not always as unimaginative and penny-pinching as they have often been made out to be. In particular great efforts were made to care for children in the workhouse, to ensure that they did not repeat the mistakes made by their parents. And in many unions from the 1880s unemployment schemes were created to help the jobless.

And yet, for every enlightened union with imaginative Poor Law Guardians and dedicated staff, there were perhaps half-a-dozen places where the guardians were more concerned with keeping the rates low and, perhaps as a result, the staff were unresponsive to the conditions of those in their charge. Most workhouses, of course, fell somewhere between the two. An imaginative and a determined guardian, together with a dedicated master and matron, could make a big difference to the care offered.

A significant problem facing the central authorities was that the standard of food and accommodation, let alone the medical care or schooling offered to the children, varied tremendously, even between neighbouring workhouses. The British government had few real powers; officials in Whitehall might argue, persuade and on occasion embarrass but, particularly before the 1870s, they could be – and often were – ignored.

Poor Laws and Paupers

The greatest of all the paradoxes associated with the New Poor Law and the workhouse is that the workhouses were largely designed for able-bodied paupers, that is men and women between the ages of 16 and 60, who were judged fit enough to work for their living and therefore, should not require any assistance. There was certainly a huge pool of unemployed and semiemployed men, women and children who were casualties either of the economic downturn following the Napoleonic Wars or radically changing agricultural practices, which required fewer men on the land. Yet, within a decade of the establishment of the national system of workhouses, these people had largely ceased to be a burden on the Poor Law. Most had found work as a result of the ending of the economic depression from the mid- 1840s onwards. The workhouse thereafter became the refuge of the elderly, the sick, orphans and those who were incapable of earning a living.

To understand this paradox, we need to look at the origins of the New Poor Law. The Poor Law originated in the dying days of Elizabeth I’s reign, and it remained much the same until the early 1830s. Each parish became responsible for looking after those who were too ill, young or old to work, and the cost of so doing had to be paid for by a tax or rate on the property of the wealthier residents in the parish. Overseers of the poor were elected by the ratepayers each year to administer the system and maintain the accounts. In the more populous parishes, officials were paid to help.

This Poor Law and its processes worked well enough in the stable conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but, as the population increased and common land was enclosed as part of agricultural reforms, it came under enormous strain. Under what was known as the Speenhamland system (after the Berkshire village where it was first introduced), local magistrates or overseers of the poor often made up the wages of labourers from the poor rate or insisted that local farmers take on the unemployed. What initially seemed like an act of social solidarity soon became a nightmare for ratepayers, as more and more men and their families sought relief.

By the 1830s it was increasingly believed that there was widespread abuse of the system. Partly as a consequence of this, the government established a Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1832, to investigate the situation and make recommendations for change. Witness after witness gave evidence of apparent abuses, which seemed to be occurring across the country. In the Essex village of Great Henny, for example, William Newport, a churchwarden, and Edward Cook, the overseer, reported that: ‘A man of bad character, on account of which he is not employed, having two children or more, applies to the parish at the end of the week for relief, through loss of time, and has the same money given him as the honest labourer receives of his master for his labour for the same week’.

In London the authorities were also overwhelmed by the numbers seeking relief, and again there was a feeling that the system was being abused. Samuel Miller, assistant overseer of the parish of St Sepulchre in the City, declared that:

With respect to the out-door relief, there must, from the very nature of it, be an immense deal of fraud. There is no industry, no inspection, no human skill, which will prevent gross impositions belonging to this mode of relief. By far the greater proportion of our new paupers are persons brought upon the parish by habits in intemperance … After relief has been received at our board, a great proportion of them proceed with the money to the palaces or gin-shops, which abound in the neighbourhood.

The solution appeared to lie in cutting the number of people seeking support from the parish. Financial concerns were complemented by a favourite moral argument of the time – that the receipt of relief was corrupting the independent nature of the poor. To illustrate this, the Commission found a number of parishes where the outdoor relief had either been cut substantially or abolished altogether – and instead there was a proud and independent workforce. One such village was Thurgarton, near Southwell in Nottinghamshire, where Assistant Commissioner Cowell noted that:

The non-intervention of the poor laws constrained them [the labourers] to be habitually provident, thrifty and industrious… I cannot help thinking that had the whole body of labourers throughout England been left alone during the last 40 years – had there been no laws of relief whatever … no scale nor other similar interventions regulating wages – their general condition would be highly flourishing.

The reason why the parish authorities were able to abolish out-relief here was because Thurgarton was both fairly prosperous (it had a long-established savings bank and every family had a garden in which to grow food) and it was located close to the rapidly growing markets of Nottingham. This was in stark contrast to many overpopulated villages in the south and south-west of Britain.

The other way to reduce the poor rate was to establish workhouses – places to which the poor would be forced to move or face having their relief cut off. They were called workhouses because the inmates would have to contribute to their upkeep. The first ones had been established in the late seventeenth century and they had a significant impact. In Beverley, East Yorkshire, for example, a new workhouse opened in 1727 which was capable of housing 100 people. A year later the overseers reported that they had given:

notice to all the Poor that the Weekly Allowances were to cease at Midsummer: that such as were not able to maintain themselves and their families must apply to the governors of the workhouse to be by them provided for. And though before the opening of the house 116 received the parish allowance, not above 8 came in at first and we have never exceeded 26 in the house all this winter.

During the eighteenth century many parishes established workhouses, although few lasted all that long. At Gressenhall in Norfolk, the unemployed from 60 local parishes were placed in a ‘house of industry’ where they could live and be employed in fruitful labour. Sir Frederick Eden, who visited in 1795, found that the men were either farming the adjoining land or combing wool, dressing flax and hemp and weaving them for use in the house. The women and children (more than half of the 530 inmates were under 14) spun worsted for manufacturers in Norwich. Such a hive of industry sounds encouraging, but the parson and diarist James Woodforde, who visited in 1781, was not impressed: ‘a very large building at present tho’ there wants another wing. About 380 Poor in it now, but they don’t look either happy or cheerful, a greater Number die there, 27 have died since Christmas last’.

By the 1830s most parishes had at least one such building, and the overseers of the poor managed it in their own way. Some were harshly run, but many were organised humanely, at least by later standards. The commissioners appointed in 1832 to investigate the Old Poor Law, for example, were very impressed with the standard of the beer brewed at the workhouse at St Martin’s, Reading. However, most were too small to cope with the demand. And in many places overseers of the poor preferred to support the sick and elderly outside the workhouse for humanitarian reasons and because it was actually cheaper.

Theorists such as the Rev J.T. Becher, who was behind the establishment of what became the Southwell Workhouse in Nottinghamshire, argued that workhouses should act as a deterrent to the poor. In his pamphlet The Anti-pauper System (1828) 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’.

Influenced by Becher and others, the Commission members had made up their minds about what had to be done, even before they met. Critically, they had persuaded themselves that, by and large, those who sought work could find it. This view came not from studying the economy as a whole, but from selected parishes where rigour in the administration of the Poor Law was being practised. As early as 1798 the political theorist Jeremy Bentham in his Pauper Management Improved argued that: ‘Not one person in a hundred is incapable of all employment. Not the motion of a finger, not a step, not a wink, not a whisper, but ought to be turned to account in the way of profit’. The Commission members concluded that it was therefore relatively easy for men whose relief was withdrawn to find other work, noting that: ‘One of the most encouraging of the results of our inquiry is the degree to which the existing pauperism arises from fraud, indolence or improvidence’.

In March 1834 the Commission report recommended the abolition of out-relief and the placing of all paupers in new workhouses where conditions were intentionally worse and more humiliating than those to be found outside. This was to become known as the ‘workhouse test’. The idea was that the poor would not wish to endure such conditions, so they would either find gainful employment or turn to charities and each other for support.

The new rules were introduced on 1 June 1835. Their impact was swift. Eight days later the New Poor Law Commission, the department that administered the system, received this petition from nearly 100 bewildered agricultural labourers from Haverhill:

We the undersignants the poor inhabitants of the parish of Haverhill in the County of Suffolk are in a very low condition through the reduction of wages and for the want of employment which when having employment our wages are from 7 to 8 shillings per week which us with large families are made up to 1s 3d per head per week to support ourselves and family, which out of this small sum we have to find cloths and working tools and to pay from 3 to 4 [£] per year rent for our cottages.

Which it may be considered by you Gentlemen to be a starving condition, therefore we should be very thankful if you could grant us any further assistance, which we have made application to the Gentlemen the Guardians and [visitor of] the parish for more assistance or an order for the workhouse and they refuse us, therefore we apply to your worship to do something for us.

Their petition was ignored. It is not known what happened to the petitioners, but it is probable that most of them were soon forced to leave the land in search of work elsewhere.

Mr J. Boreham, vice-chairman of Risbridge Union (which included Haverhill), told a Select Committee of the Poor Law in 1837:

Where the great number of unemployed labourers have gone, or how employed, I cannot imagine… At this time (December) there is not an able-bodied labourer out of employ nor has there been more than one or two for several months. The parish of Steeple Bumstead had nearly 50 men and boys unemployed. Now, with what have migrated without the interference of the guardians there are not men enough to cultivate the land in that parish.

Those that remained were in a pitiable state. The Times, in December 1838, reported that a petition from the Reverend R. Roberts of Haverhill ‘and the whole of the gentry and ratepayers of the Union’ had been presented to the guardians, urging an increase in the out-relief offered to the poor. But the guardians refused, citing orders from the Commissioners in London that forbade ‘all out-door relief to the able-bodied labourer, no matter however poignant his and his family’s suffering might be’.

The Times also cited the case of Edmund Basham (one of the signatories of the petition of 1835) who was forced through illness to enter with his wife into Haverhill Workhouse. His cottage was taken and given to a pauper family with seven children, under decidedly questionable motives. ‘A happy thought seemed to strike [the guardians]: “we will put them into Basham’s cottage and force Basham in here and this man and his family will be off our hands”’. The correspondent noted that Basham had worked hard for 30 years and had never received any parish assistance.

Charles Dickens once wrote that the pauper’s alternatives were ‘of being starved by a gradual process in the house or by a quick one out of it’. Many preferred to beg, borrow, steal or simply to expire in some wretched room in the East End, as did 69-year-old William May, a former sailor. May was found dead and very emaciated in December 1842. He had recently fled a workhouse, shouting: ‘They want to kill me’. Asked to return, he had replied, ‘No, it is of no use, as I should have nothing but porridge, porridge for breakfast, porridge for drink’.

Respectable artisans such as Joseph Gutteridge, a silk weaver and freethinker from Coventry, refused to have anything to do with the Poor Law and the shame it brought. Thrown out of work, he and his young family were close to starvation: ‘I was severely blamed that I did not apply to the parish for relief, but I would rather have died from sheer starvation than, being so young, have degraded myself by making such an application’.

A decade after the introduction of the New Poor Law, The Times continued to report outbreaks of the burning of ricks and other property belonging to farmers in Norfolk and Suffolk, which its correspondent attributed to the workhouse. He asked a labourer what was the cause of the fires, and he replied: ‘If there had been no Union, in my opinion there would have been no fires, and everybody says the same that I hear. The Union distresses people and drives them mad’. Many out-of-work labourers refused to enter the workhouse, and those who tried were defeated by the need to get a ticket signed by local farmers indicating that they could not employ the individual.

Friedrich Engels was undoubtedly right when, in 1844, he described the authors of the 1834 Poor Law report as wishing ‘to force the poor into the Procrustean bed of their preconceived doctrines. To do this they treated the poor with incredible savagery’. And the historian David Green, among others, has suggested that the new system was designed to solve the problems of chronic underemployment in rural southern England rather than the needs of the manufacturing areas.

Unions in Northern England, in particular, were seen by many as an attack on the poor and their rights. Various parishes had already adopted the workhouse as a deterrent to the idle and dissolute. Others made relief to the able-bodied dependent on the performance of tasks; in Huddersfield, for example, paupers in the workhouse were employed in street cleaning. One of the radical leaders of the protests, Richard Oastler, wrote in the Northern Star in 1838 that ‘the real object of [the New Poor Law] … is to lower wages and punish poverty as a crime. Remember also that children and parents are lying frequently in the same Bastille without seeing one another or knowing the other’s fate’.

There were also regional differences in social conditions: the poor in the north were more independent and relatively wealthy compared with their cousins in the south and the Midlands. The poor rate was also lower in the north. The academic Hilary Marland suggests that this was due, in part, to the large number of voluntary organisations and friendly societies (which supported men out of employment), and a greater tendency for the poor to rely on druggists and quacks for medical treatment rather than seek help from Poor Law infirmaries.

Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief

The Victorian middle and upper classes were fond of quoting the biblical phrase that the ‘poor are always with us’. And indeed they were. Labourers toiled in every field and every factory and the streets teemed with men and women with no visible means of support.

Who you were in Victorian and Edwardian society depended on your social class. It was possible to move between classes, although their erstwhile social equals treated those on a downward path with pity, while those making their way were regarded as vulgar nouveau riche. Your status was most obviously indicated by the clothes you wore. Before exploring the slums of the East End, the American writer Jack London had to change into tattered clothing:

No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the difference in status effected by my clothes. All servility vanished from the demeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact… My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class, which was their class.

There were so many of the poor. The Victorian philanthropist and social reformer Seebohm Rowntree found that 30 per cent of the population of York at the end of the nineteenth century lived below what he called the ‘poverty line’. He divided them into those who were in: ‘primary poverty’, (that is, ‘families whose total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency’), and ‘secondary poverty’, (that is ‘families whose total earnings would be sufficient for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency were it not that some expenditure of it is absorbed by other expenditure either useful or wasteful’). A decade earlier Charles Booth had also found in the East End of London that about third of local people had great difficulty in making ends meet.

In explaining why a country as rich as England should have so much poverty, the Victorians tended to ignore economic reasons in favour of psychological ones. The Socialist writer G.D.H. Cole argued that the Victorian philanthropist’s weakness (and it applied just as much to Poor Law theorists) lay in a tendency to look ‘much less at the causes than the effects’. The poor were poor, it was argued, because of character defects. Those who wanted to improve could do so by following the examples of the men in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, whose chief object was ‘to stimulate youths to apply themselves diligently to the right pursuits … and to rely upon their own efforts in life, rather than depend upon the help or patronage of others’.

Such a view permeates the whole debate about the poor, who they were and what could – or should – be done with them. As early as 1788 one of the local guardians, Edward Parry, wrote about Gressenhall Workhouse for the Society for Bettering the Conditions of the Poor. He believed the adult inmates to be ‘profligate men who through idleness and debauchery … [had] reduced their families to depend on the establishment for their support’. Little had changed a hundred years later, when Charles Booth, in his 1889 survey of admissions to the Stepney Workhouse, blamed drink (13 per cent of admissions), immorality and laziness, as well as old age and sickness, as causes. He added: ‘Unwillingness to work is closely connected with selfindulgence in other ways and there is no known cure except the pressure of “neither shall he eat”’.

In 1902 the Reverend Joseph Anderson of Liverpool was adamant that the chief cause of poverty was the ‘great lack of want of the spirit and gospel of Jesus’. If everyone acted as Christians should, he argued, the drink problem would be solved, those incapable of fending for themselves would be cared for, and the unemployed would be found work, even if it was only poorly paid.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries social reformers increasingly pointed out the damage that drink did to working class families. In 1844 the German writer Friedrich Engels noted that on Saturday nights in Manchester: ‘I have seldom gone home without seeing many drunkards staggering in the road or lying helpless in the gutter’. And according to the charity worker William Grisewood in the 1890s: ‘Chief amongst the destroyers of home and family happiness is drink. Other causes have slain their thousands, but drink its tens of thousands’.

The cause of drunkenness among the poor was twofold: firstly the ready availability of beer and spirits and secondly the appalling conditions among which people lived, which often caused them to seek escape at the bottom of a glass. Engels felt that the working class was ‘deprived of all pleasures except sexual indulgence and intoxicating liquors’. The problem was not the indolent and feckless nature of the working classes, but an economic system which resulted in both huge unemployment and underemployment. Not until the First World War was there full employment – for the first time. In such a climate it was difficult, even for the hard-working and the motivated, to earn enough to keep body and soul together. Men could be thrown out of work through no fault of their own or suffer some other calamity, such as illness in the family, starting the downward spiral towards the workhouse. And once there, it became very difficult to return to normal life.

Equally important was underemployment. Labouring work, whether on the land or in towns, was irregular and depended on the seasons and the fickleness of the British weather. A bad winter would throw thousands on to the street, as women could no longer work picking vegetables in the fields and men were unable to find temporary labouring jobs. As Henry Mayhew realised: ‘In almost all occupations there is … a superfluity of labourers and this alone would tend to render the employment of a vast number of the hands of a casual rather than a regular character’.

Even in a normal year there was a huge pool of men who could be employed on a casual basis, day by day, in the ports of Liverpool and London or in factories elsewhere. On good days adequate money might be earned, but for most families bad weeks were the norm. As a result, city streets were full of shabby men looking for work, referred to as ‘loafers’ or ‘shirkers’ by middle class observers. Many were too weak – through near starvation or the ill-effects of drink – to earn much, except the odd tip for carrying a bag or hailing a taxi. From such people came the truly destitute men and women who ended up in the workhouse.

Most people undertook a variety of different jobs in order to make ends meet. In his study of eighteenth-century beggars, Tim Hitchcock argues that men, women and children, as well as begging on the streets, ‘constructed a life… [by] selling ballads or their bodies, by working as shoe blacks and chimney sweeps, cinder sifters and errand boys, as criers and hawkers, sellers of mackerel and cabbage nets’. They also sought support from charities and the Poor Law, where appropriate. In his report to the Poor Law Commission for 1838, Mr Tufnell, the Assistant Commissioner for Kent and Sussex, noted:

I am disposed to think that the poorer classes are more frequently above the charity of the rich than the latter imagine, and that this arises from the impossibility of detecting the numerous sources of income that are enjoyed by the labourer, besides the simple receipt of the money wages of the head of the family which are usually all that are taken into account and what is not seen is supposed not to exist. While the Uckfield labourers were supposed to be starving, they were dancing at 2s 6d per head.

Not all workhouse inmates were innocent victims, of course. The institution could also provide a ‘safe house’ for criminals on the run. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ said that in his workhouse there were a number of professional thieves, ‘at the bottom of their profession as a rule’, who sought ‘the house’ to avoid the police, or when their victims became aware that they were being preyed upon.

Guarding the Guards

The workhouse was the most public face of the Poor Law. But behind them lay several layers of central and local political and administrative control. The 1834 Royal Commission on the Poor Law recommended:

The appointment of a central board to control the administration of the poor laws … empowered and directed to frame and enforce regulations for the government of workhouses, and as to the nature and amount of relief to be given and the labour to be enacted in them, and that such regulations shall, as far as may be practicable, be uniform throughout the country.

The result was the creation of the Poor Law Commission, which was replaced in due course by the Poor Law Board (1847–1871), the Local Government Board (1871–1919), and the Ministry of Health (1919 until the Poor Law was abolished). Their respective tasks were to administer the legislation, particularly the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and to ensure that paupers across England and Wales were treated as equally as possible. Scotland and Ireland had their own Poor Law systems.

The Poor Law Commissioners (and their successors) did not have a good reputation. Social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb saw the Local Government Board as a reactionary body concerned only to preserve the anachronistic principles of the New Poor Law. More recent academics, such as Christine Bellamy, largely agree with the Webbs. Possibly the only one of the early Commissioners to be remembered was the social reformer and administrator was Edwin Chadwick, who was the dynamic force behind the introduction of the New Poor Law. But he was forced to resign in the wake of the Andover Workhouse scandal.

In particular, from the 1870s the Local Government Board failed to address the changing nature of the workhouse. For example it refused to prepare for the large and expensive institutions that the bigger urban unions were building, such as the one at Chorlton in north Manchester. It was also reluctant to accept that many workhouses were turning into hospitals and homes for the infirm and the elderly.

The prevailing complacent attitude is perhaps best summed up by the evidence given by William Lumley, legal secretary to the Poor Law Board, to the Carnarvon Committee on Conditions in Prisons in 1870. In a statement which bore little resemblance to the reality experienced by most paupers, he said the workhouse inmate was ‘generally far too comfortable to prefer going to gaol, where he would be kept to hard labour for a certain time. There is good clothing, there is a warm building and there is attendance in case of any illness; and there is generally speaking some consort and companionship with acquaintances and neighbours’.

Initially the number of workhouse staff was small and their workload prodigious. In 1844 the Poor Law Commission had an establishment of three secretaries, nine assistant commissioners (inspectors) and 31 clerks. By 1864 this had risen to 43 clerks, 12 inspectors and 4 secretaries. Judging by the surviving correspondence at The National Archives, most letters, often raising complicated points of Poor Law administration, seemed to have been answered almost by return of post. Huge volumes of reports were prepared annually for Parliament, general orders were issued to local Poor Law Unions and inspectors dispatched to investigate potential scandals.

The primary task of the Commission and its successors was the direction of local Poor Law Unions with the issue of orders, through correspondence and by inspection. At its core were the reams of orders and instructions for the Poor Law Unions to follow, ranging from the food to be served at breakfast and the size of cells for vagrants to the treatment to be provided in unusual cases that might present themselves to the guardians. These orders were supposed to be read out at board meetings of the guardians and then implemented. Often, however, they were ignored unless they were considered too important to disregard, or unless a particularly conscientious clerk to the guardians saw to their implementation.

In theory at least, every eventuality was covered. Guides for guardians and Poor Law officials were published, which summarised the legislation and the orders that accompanied it. However, in practice the number of letters seeking guidance on particular cases received by the Commissioners and their successors shows that these guides must have been little consulted.

In turn, Whitehall at times attempted to ‘micro-manage’ the affairs of individual boards of guardians. In 1861 and 1879, for example, there were objections to the request of the Ludlow guardians to change the day on which they met in order to suit the guardians from outlying villages. And in the late 1850s the Poor Law Board expended considerable effort in an attempt to recover 2s 4d misspent by an officer of the Manchester Union.

Much of our knowledge of the operation of the New Poor Law comes from the tightly bound volumes of correspondence found in series MH 12 at The National Archives. Only letters from individual unions survive; unfortunately, the replies and correspondence after 1900 were lost during the Blitz. Individual boards of guardians, or their clerks, sought advice on difficult cases, returned surveys and requested the approval to recruit (or dismiss) staff. Scribbled draft replies can often be found on the letters: proposals to deviate from the principles of ‘less eligibility’ were normally quashed, as were ideas about spending ratepayers’ money on fripperies; attempts to involve Whitehall in local disputes were brushed aside, and occasionally sound advice was offered on best practice at other unions. In 1871, for example, the Southwell Union wanted to send a pauper family to Canada, but did not know how. The Board in London suggested Southwell’s clerk approach his colleagues in Sunderland.

The most public form of control came through the Assistant Poor Law Commissioners (later Poor Law Inspectors and Local Government Inspectors), who were the link between Whitehall and individual Poor Law Unions. They were very much the eyes and ears of central government, as well as being its public representatives to a much greater extent than such inspectors are expected to be today. In the 1850s the Treasury recommended that the inspectors should be worldly-wise and experienced in life, yet to have had a career was to be discouraged, and appointments were to be made at a salary level that would attract gentlemen. In 1872 James Stansfield, the first President of the Local Government Board, said that he wanted inspectors to be ‘men of experience and of tact, accustomed to deal with men, knowing the boards of guardians and having their confidence’. Appointment was generally for life. In 1906 Chief Inspector J.S. Davy was in his thirtysixth year of service, and in earlier generations both Sir John Walsham and Andrew Doyle spent over 30 years in post. Most had previously been lawyers or came from the landed gentry. However, there were some exceptions: Andrew Doyle (1809–1888) had edited The Times in the early 1840s, and Herbert Preston Thomas (1841–1909) was a pioneering mountaineer and had written the popular Edwardian ballad, ‘The Cricketer’s Carol’.

The work itself could be arduous and individual inspectors were often overworked. Initially there were only nine to cover the whole of England and Wales. One inspector might be responsible for unions in half-a-dozen counties. Generally, they seem to have been a very conscientious body of men (the first women were not appointed until the 1880s, and then only to supervise the schooling of workhouse children). Andrew Doyle, for example, pioneered work on statistics, and his reports were supported by pages of tabulated figures. In a less regulated age, the collection of statistics from farmers was not popular, and when Doyle tried to obtain them from Denbighshire and Shropshire in 1854, many of the forms were burnt. One farmer cut his in pieces and returned it endorsed: ‘The idea of such questions. What next!’

The inspectors’ main duty was to inspect individual workhouses and report back their findings to the Commissioners in London and the guardians themselves. They were supposed to visit annually, but smaller workhouses were inevitably inspected less frequently.

As their visits were arranged in advance, it was generally possible to present the house in the best possible light. Often the inspector was accompanied by the master and the guardians, which made it difficult for staff, let alone the pauper inmates, to make complaints. In the mid-1860s there were a number of scandals involving the appalling conditions in workhouse sick wards or infirmaries. Poor Law inspectors were asked to conduct public inquiries. Some of the worst conditions were found at Rotherhithe in south-east London. A nurse at the Rotherhithe Infirmary, Matilda Beeton, was sufficiently appalled to complain about conditions there. She wrote to the Poor Law Inspector Harry Farnall (who conducted the subsequent investigation) that she remembered his visit to the infirmary:

When there, you asked me about the nursing, the food and other things; I think you will recollect I gave you the most favourable answers. In this I know I was doing wrong towards you, but I now confess to you I was afraid to tell the truth of things to you, through the master being with you…

As soon as the Poor Law Inspector passes through the lodge it is known all over the house, and one has to run one way and one the other to hide such things as perhaps you might want to see; this is done by the master’s orders and he engages your attention perhaps only for a few minutes; this I witnessed on more than one occasion.

The inspectors also advised individual boards of guardians, investigated cases of abuse and prepared reports on a wide range of subjects from vagrancy to the provision of workhouse schools. Perhaps their most difficult task was to persuade local guardians to spend money on improving conditions in the workhouse, particularly when it came to large capital expenditure. They had few powers of compulsion. Herbert Preston Thomas, who was an inspector in East Anglia and then the West Country in the 1890s, stated bluntly that the only remedy he possessed to deal with inadequate practice was the sledgehammer of sacking the officers.

Where the union chose to ignore the inspector, there was little he could do about it. The master at Rotherhithe grumbled to Matilda Beeton that: ‘It’s all very well for Mr Farnall to say this is right and the other wrong, but the board do not bind themselves to act up to his suggestions, or they might not have anything else to do’. Indeed, in his report on the scandal at Rotherhithe, Inspector Harry Farnall reproduced the comments he had entered in the visitors’ book on 2 January 1865:

I have this day inspected the workhouse; the house is in precisely the same state of cleanliness and order as usual, but I am obliged to add that the house is in the same state as regards its defects; these defects I have frequently pointed out to the guardians, and a reference to the last report written in this book will point out to the guardians what those defects are.

Five years earlier he had written to the Poor Law Board: ‘I wish, and very earnestly wish, that I had the power to persuade the guardians to build a new workhouse for this important and rapidly improving parish’.

The People Behind the Boards

Direct control over the workhouse was exercised by the Poor Law Union. There were about 583 individual Poor Law Unions, together with 100 or so independent Gilbert Unions (that is unions which pre-dated the New Poor Law but still remained in existence). The numbers of unions varied over time as small ones were sometimes merged and, less often, new ones created. They take the name from the fact that they were unions of individual parishes. Unions covered very diverse areas, ranging from rural ones such as Rhyader or Southwell, where a few employees cared for a small number of elderly paupers, to North Manchester or Poplar, which ran an extensive range of institutions including orphanages and infirmaries, looked after thousands of people and employed hundreds of staff, from firemen to matrons.

Poor Law Unions were a new departure in British administration. The number of parishes within a union varied – in rural areas there could be a dozen or more. Both Mitford and Launditch (Gressenhall) Union in Norfolk and Southwell Union in Nottinghamshire were each made up of 60 parishes. In large cities, on the other hand, only two or three parishes might be combined into a union. Poplar in London’s East End thus comprised Poplar, Blackwall, Bromley and Stratford-by-Bow parishes.

The unions were largely established between 1834 and 1838 by the Assistant Poor Law Commissioners working with local landowners and magistrates. The ideal was to have a market town surrounded by smaller rural parishes, which meant it would be easy for paupers and, more importantly, the guardians to get to the workhouse. Unions could and did cross county boundaries; Bishop’s Stortford Union on the borders of Hertfordshire and Essex, for example, consisted of the small town of Bishop’s Stortford itself and 10 surrounding rural parishes from Essex and Hertfordshire.

In many places local politics intervened to prevent this. Particularly important were the interests of the landed gentry. In Northamptonshire, Assistant Poor Law Commissioner Richard Earle drew up the boundaries to suit local magnates. The boundaries of Potterspury Union, for example, resulted from lobbying by the Duke of Grafton for all the lands that formed his estate to be the basis of the union.

The unions were managed by boards of guardians, elected by the ratepayers. Each parish sent a number of guardians in proportion to the size of its population, and in many ways they provided a buffer between the centralising tendencies of Whitehall and the forthright localism that still pervaded local government. Guardians relied on central government for advice about the administration of the Poor Law, but they were not above ignoring, or delaying implementation of, policy laid down by the centre when it suited them. They had much more say over conditions generally and the treatment of individual paupers than lay officials have today.

In rural areas the guardians were largely farmers. In Ludlow, in 1860, 22 members of the Board farmed the land locally, supplemented by six Anglican clergymen, six gentlemen, two lawyers and an auctioneer. In urban areas the guardians were usually tradesmen and small businessmen. George Lansbury, one of the first guardians with working class roots, noted that some of his fellow Poplar guardians in the 1890s were ‘delegates of interests – house agents representing slum landlords or representatives of the dock companies… But most of them were small tradesmen – milkmen, chemists, builders and so on’.

The first woman guardian to be elected was Martha Merrington, in Kensington, in 1875. (The second woman guardian was not elected until the 1880s.) Already well-known from her work on the local school board, once elected she was appointed to a local relief committee, as well as becoming a visitor to the workhouse and the workhouse infirmary. As with so many subsequent female guardians, Miss Merrington became particularly interested in pauper children and their schooling.

Until 1894 a property qualification ensured that only reasonably wealthy residents could be elected to the board – the very ones who would benefit most from keeping the poor rate low. After 1894 all adult men and women were eligible for election, provided they paid the poor rate, and this development saw the transformation of many unions, with an increasing number of women and working class men elected as guardians. In 1893 there were 159 women guardians; two years later the number had risen to 875.

For many ambitious young men and women, serving as a guardian became a convenient way to learn the political ropes before moving on to greater things. The Royal Commission, which investigated the Poor Laws between 1905 and 1909 was told: ‘Many men simply become guardians as a stepping stone to the town council; they wish to gain confidence in speaking and use the boardroom as a practising ground… They are often ignorant and indifferent and stand for other reasons than their knowledge or interest in the poor’.

The arrival of women guardians naturally sparked a mixed reaction among their male colleagues. Some, like George Bartley, a guardian in Ealing during the 1860s and 1870s, welcomed their arrival in his manual for new guardians, published in 1876: ‘It is obvious that a woman even if she has intelligence and education but up to the average standard of a Guardian can inspect many details and quickly see defects which a body of men might overlook for years’. But old attitudes die hard, and as late as 1907 the vicechairman of Belford Union in Northumberland was complaining to the Local Government Board that women were ‘better at home looking after their own work’.

Perhaps of equal importance was the arrival of working class men and women on boards of guardians. In the 1880s ‘the Indoor Pauper’ had called for such a development: ‘Men who have relatives and former comrades in the house would unquestionably keep a sharp eye on abuses likely to pain their friends and still sharper eye upon them if they felt they themselves were ever likely to ‘come to the Union’. Two of the earliest were George Lansbury, who had once loaded coal wagons and Will Crooks, the son of a ship’s stoker, who had himself spent some time in Poplar Workhouse as a child. Both were leading London Socialists who were elected to the Poplar Board of Guardians in 1893. They stood in order to moderate the effects of the Poor Law on the sick and needy among their neighbours. As Lansbury put it: ‘I determined to fight for one policy only, and that was decent treatment for the poor outside the workhouse, and hang the rates’. Perhaps more typical was Amos Sherriff, who was elected as a guardian in Leicester in 1901. Born in 1856, he had grown up in extreme poverty before becoming a Salvationist, an active member of the Labour Party and a cycleshop owner.

As guardians, both women and working class men sought to introduce better conditions in the workhouse. Within six months of her appointment as a Poor Law Guardian in Chorlton, Manchester, suffragette Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst had comfortable Windsor chairs with high backs introduced for the elderly to sit on and had made changes to both diet and dress. Bread was cut into slices and buttered with margarine, each person being allowed to eat as much as they desired, the surplus being made into puddings with milk and currants. She chose new material for dresses and bonnets for the girls and women, and she was also successful in persuading the guardians to allow the inmates to go for outings in their own clothes, rather than the degrading workhouse uniforms.

Similar reforms were initiated in Poplar, where pauper clothing was abolished, an improved diet introduced and greater freedoms introduced for inmates. Local officials who mistreated the inmates were either disciplined or pensioned off. In Lansbury’s words, ‘we revolutionised the place from top to bottom’. Even so, when the writer Jack London spent two nights there in 1902, he found that the workhouse, although better than its neighbours, was still bleak and unwelcoming.

Where there were only one or two women or working class men on a board, they might have a hard time persuading the other guardians that reforms were necessary. In Leicester, Amos Sherriff led a vocal campaign against the fact that any man in receipt of poor relief was automatically disenfranchised for a year. Instead of accepting bread, he urged the unemployed to demand that the guardians should provide land and workshops where men could earn a living wage. As Labour was always in a minority on the board, Sheriff was usually frustrated in his ambitions.

In Manchester, fierce exchanges took place between Mrs Pankhurst and the die-hards among the guardians, chief among whom was a boot merchant named Mainwaring. When he realised that his outbursts of rudeness were helping ‘the charming Mrs. Pankhurst’ to win supporters to her side, he tried to control himself by writing ‘Keep your temper!’ on the blotting paper in front of him.

However sympathetic they were to the paupers in the workhouse, the new guardians could be as harsh as anyone else on those they deemed to be ‘scroungers’. Miss Augusta Brown, a guardian in Camberwell, was asked in 1895 whether women were not too emotional for Poor Law work. She replied that, on the contrary, they were ‘not sympathetic enough; they are too hard and severe, especially to their own sex’. And in his election addresses, George Lansbury regularly called for labour colonies ‘for the repression of the habitual casual and repression of the loafer’.

The most important figure among the guardians was the chairman. Often these men were in post for many years and inevitably gained great influence and expertise. In Congleton in 1857 Randle Wilbraham succeeded his father as chairman, after he had been 20 years in the chair. Wilbraham junior in turn served 28 years.

Some were less then prepossessing. The medical officer Joseph Rogers described the chairman of the Strand Union in London, in 1854, as being the proprietor of a cookshop, who would ‘often come to the house on a Sunday morning dressed in the greasy jacket in which he had been serving à-la-mode beef the night before, and unshaven and unshorn he would go into the chapel with the pauper inmates and afterwards go to the Boardroom and had breakfast with the master and matron’.

At the centre of the Andover Workhouse scandal of 1847 was the chairman of the guardians, the Reverend Christopher Dodson, rector of Gateley and Penton Mawsey. He dominated meetings of the board with his sarcastic tongue and a bullying manner. He was a popular figure locally because he kept the poor rate low, largely through economies driving workhouse inmates close to starvation. He also appointed a succession of workhouse masters who proved mostly unsuitable.

Other chairmen were more sympathetic towards staff and inmates. Joseph Cropper was chairman of Kendal for nearly 40 years from 1853. Showing decidedly non-Victorian self-doubt, he noted in his diary for April 1873:

I was in the workhouse again on Friday; just the usual round, and the poor old men and crooning old women and the poor little half-orphaned babies, and bewildered or senseless imbeciles, and the nurse and her cares, and the matron and her contracts for flour and tea, and discussion of servants’ behaviour, and the porter’s lodge and the vagrant list. I go through it and go through it again, and wonder if I help and if I shall do this and no better work for them or for others, on to the end.

Even after Cropper had left the board, his obituarist noted that on Sundays he would often return to the Poor Law Infirmary ‘and anything graphic or stirring was saved to be read aloud on these occasions’.

The guardians met fortnightly, usually in a boardroom at the workhouse, which were described by one observer in the 1860s as ‘a mixture of an Old Bailey court, a small chapel and a third class railway waiting room’. At each meeting the guardians heard reports from the workhouse master, the relieving officer and other officials, and were read circulars from Whitehall. They might also interview individual paupers who sought admission or discharge from the workhouse, or discipline those who had caused trouble. Other matters the guardians might discuss were the refurbishment of the ‘house’, setting the poor rate, auditing the union’s accounts and non-Poor Law issues, such as the registration of births, marriages and deaths.

There were two matters on which the guardians were notoriously reluctant to spend money, despite prodding by Whitehall: buildings and staff. Even minor capital expenditure might be resisted. In the 1920s it took three years for the local Poor Law inspector to persuade Belford Union to install a telephone, despite its obvious usefulness.

There were often attempts to reduce the pay of the professional officers or to offer new recruits less than the going rate. In 1850, for example, Ludlow guardians tried to cut the wages of the workhouse staff by a fifth, in recognition of ‘the great and general distress under which the agricultural parishes of the Union suffer’. The Poor Law Board disagreed, saying that if wages were cut any further, they would be unattractive to candidates of the required calibre. The general policy of low wages meant that guardians were often unable to keep good staff and were reduced to employing unsatisfactory men and women.

Another contentious issue was the supply of goods to the workhouse, from which a great deal of money could be made by the guardians and their friends. It is clear that petty corruption was common. George Lansbury noted of the Poplar guardians that ‘their … worst object was merely a trivial corruption over minor contracts. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” was the kind of policy where jobs and contracts were concerned’.

Occasionally guardians might appropriate workhouse property and services for their own good. At Kensington, the guardians in February 1871 were found to have ordered and consumed alcoholic beverages at dinners after board meetings, for which they only paid a nominal amount. Across London, in December 1889, Mr Furlong, the vice-chairman of the Islington guardians, was accused of stealing ‘old rags and other refuse’ and using workhouse labour to decorate his house, including one pauper Rogers ‘who was an artist, painting screens and pictures in the Lavatory’.

The guardians had little training for the responsibilities they held. Few, at least until the 1890s, gave any thought to the underlying causes of poverty. Most shared the view that paupers had largely ended up in the workhouse through their own fault and that there was a rigorous need to discourage pauperism. Nevertheless, this attitude could sometimes be tempered by humanity towards individual paupers. The guardians’ amateurishness was revealed in many ways, not least their dilatory consideration of the cases of paupers brought before them. The Royal Commission, which reported in 1909, was concerned that ‘even when relief is given to the right people, it is too often inadequate in nature and ill adapted to the particular needs of the case’. Ill-informed idiosyncrasies might also result in interference in the work of the professionals they employed. In Norfolk, for example, guardians objected to having maps in the schoolrooms, since geographical knowledge might lead to emigration and a diminution of the reserve of labour that was useful to farmers at harvest time. In the 1840s other guardians elsewhere in the county were concerned about teaching pauper children. Putting the ‘torch of knowledge into the hand of the rick-burners’ might provoke further disturbances in an already unsettled countryside.

Guardians had a reputation for being unimaginative and mean-spirited that is not entirely deserved. Although many were primarily concerned to keep the poor rate as low as possible, most were also genuinely keen to help the men, women and families in their care. Their greatest limitations, perhaps, were an inability to understand the broader causes of pauperism and a lack of will to alleviate poverty in any significant way.

Keeping Out of the Workhouse

The Poor Law was not the only help available to the destitute; it was designed to be the last resort. There were alternatives for men and women in temporary difficulties, or for those regarded as respectable (for it was almost as easy for the middle classes to drift into financial difficulties as their poorer cousins).

At a very basic level, friends, neighbours and work colleagues might have a whip-round to help a family in temporary financial trouble. Many observers agreed with Friedrich Engels, who, in the 1840s, said that ‘although workers cannot afford to give to charity on the same scale as the middle class, they are nevertheless more charitable in every way’. Sixty years later, the Reverend William Conybeare claimed that it was ‘largely the kindness of poor to poor which stands between our current civilisation and revolution’.

Short-term loans could be arranged from pawnbrokers by pawning a handkerchief or an overcoat. It was a staple of many working class budgets. Alison Backhouse’s study of the pledgebook of George Fette, a York pawnbroker in the 1770s, suggests that many of his customers were regulars who pledged small items of bedding or clothing twice a week. And Robert Roberts in his memoir of growing up in Manchester, noted that, at a local pawnbroker in Salford in the early years of the twentieth century: ‘Housewives after washday on Monday pledged what clean clothes could be spared until weekend and returned with cash to buy food’. The items would be redeemed on Saturday nights, so that the family would be dressed in some respectability on the Sabbath.

Shops might be persuaded to offer goods on account for regular customers in temporary difficulties. This was one service street-corner shops offered that the high-street stores would not, although there was always the risk to the shopkeeper that a customer would default. Robert Robert’s mother ran one such shop and sometimes grumbled that she was in effect a banker to the community. But if she had not done this, her customers would have gone elsewhere.

Even the poorest families could share a meagre meal. On a harsh winter’s day in Poplar, Will Crooks, the pioneering working-class guardian, came upon the following scene in a slum court: On the muddy ground in the far corner a woman sat weeping. ‘She ain’t been living here long, Mr Crooks’, volunteered another woman from her doorstep. ‘Her husband’s got no work, and this morning she were a-sending her four children to school without a bite, so I calls ’em in here and shared out wot we was having for breakfast’. [A loaf was shared between the two families.]

I’m proud of the poor… And I declare it’s a dirty insult for outsiders to say that these people are degraded by the feeble efforts I make as a guardian to give bread to the hungry. It’s nothing to what they do for each other. That woman sharing her bread is typical of what you’ll find in every street and corner of Poplar, where the pinch of hunger is felt.

Many working class men joined a friendly society through which, for a few pence a week, you would receive benefits in a period of unemployment or sickness. At the height of the movement, in 1901, just over half the adult male population of England and Wales were members of societies such as the Ancient Order of Foresters, the Oddfellows or the temperance Rechabites. Even a century earlier a third, probably more, were members. Membership was not just the privilege of the more prosperous working class; most societies also had unskilled or poorly paid members.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, societies typically charged weekly premiums of between fourpence and sixpence for basic sickness and burial benefits. These were amounts that a man in regular employment could afford without great difficulty, but which might well be out of reach for those without jobs or in sporadic employment. Such men found it difficult to maintain regular payments and would thus lose any benefits they might have accrued from membership.

Some succumbed to petty theft to make ends meet, stealing goods from shops and pawning them. The starving silk-weaver Joseph Gutteridge was sorely tempted: ‘One morning I stood before a baker’s shop where the loaves were temptingly exposed, and never in my life was I so near becoming a thief. The impulse to procure a piece of bread for my starving wife and children was so strong that I could scarcely resist’. Fortunately, the landlord of a neighbouring pub took pity on him and gave him threepence for beer, but Gutteridge again resisted temptation and spent the money on a loaf.

Another alternative was to seek help from a charity. To the Victorians, there were few social ills that could not be cured by a healthy dose of philanthropy. The historian Frank Prochaska has remarked: ‘No country on earth can lay claim to a greater philanthropic tradition than Great Britain. Until the twentieth century, philanthropy was widely believed to be the most wholesome and reliable remedy for the nation’s ills’. The Royal Commission on the Poor Law acknowledged in 1909 that:

No one can have taken part in an enquiry such as ours without being impressed … by the multitude and variety of voluntary organisations established for ameliorating the condition of the poor, the large sums which pass through their hands and the amount of time and effort devoted to them by a veritable army of charitable workers.

The poor had a bewildering choice of charities from which to seek assistance. The social reformer Frederick D’Aeth conducted a survey of Liverpool’s charities in 1909 and found 357 bodies, of which just over 300 were engaged in some sort of welfare activity. Although Liverpool was historically particularly well provided for, a glance through any trade or street directory will produce details of dozens of charities in every town, which gave grants and pensions to the poor. Assistance ranged from almshouses to bread and coals for poor widows and small payments to the temporarily destitute and their families.

A generation earlier, in Lambeth there were at least 57 mothers’ meetings, 36 temperance societies for children, 25 savings banks or penny banks, 24 Christian endeavour societies, 21 boot, coal, blanket or clothing clubs, and two maternity societies. There were 16 nurses and two part-time doctors, as well as a part-time dentist who attended the poor, in addition to those sponsored by the provident dispensaries which were closely linked to the churches. Furthermore, there were two ‘servants’ registries, two lodging registries, two ‘industrial societies’ which employed women at needlework, one burial guild, one convalescent home, one hostel for the dying, one invalid kitchen, cripples’ classes, a children’s play school, a day nursery, a ‘prostitutes’ institute’, several libraries and dozens of Sunday schools – in addition to the extensive work of extra-parochial and trans-denominational organisations. Almost half the Nonconformist chapels and all the Anglican parishes in the borough also provided relief to the poor in cash or kind.

The geographical distribution of charities, particularly those which attempted to help the very poor, was random. They were concentrated in the older cathedral cities and market towns, with fewer in the newer industrial towns of the Midlands and the North. In rural areas, the Anglican parish priest was the first person to whom those in trouble turned.

Charities were also particular about whom they supported. They were there to help the ‘deserving poor’, that is those who were industrious but had fallen on hard times through no fault of their own, for whom a small grant, loan or donation of bread or coals would help the applicant become self-sufficient again. They were not there to help the indolent ‘undeserving’, who by definition were fit for nothing but the workhouse. In Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw has fun with this concept, when Alfred Doolittle says:

I am one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of all that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time… It’s always the same story: ‘you are undeserving: so you can’t have it.’… I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more… Well they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving.

William Grisewood, secretary of Liverpool’s Central Relief Society, spoke for many when he argued that ‘the persons aided by the Society belonged to a stratum just above the pauper class, and this is still in measure true, our aim being to prevent, when possible, the indigent from sinking into that class’.

The charities wanted to help people who would benefit quickly (and gratefully) from support, rather than those who might become a drain on resources for many years, or indefinitely. As C.S. Loch, secretary of the Charity Organization Society, said, the question was ‘not whether a person was “deserving” or “undeserving”, but whether … the distress can be stayed and self-support sustained’.

It is clear that charities helped people who fitted their own perception of the ‘deserving poor’, such as older Christian men and women or orphaned children of fallen soldiers and sailors. The saying ‘cold as charity’ reflected the contempt that many people felt for charities and the men and women who ran them. The family of the freethinking Joseph Gutteridge was refused help by a local charity because of his beliefs, or rather lack of them; they were only spared the workhouse – where, ironically, such hypocrisy would have held scant sway, as applicants were judged on their need – by his indignant neighbours.

On the other hand, the system could be abused and not every pauper was a passive recipient of whatever benefits the parish and local charities were prepared to dole out. Those with sharp wits and low cunning could take advantage of the duplication between rival charities and the gullibility of potential donors. For others, this could be the only way to survive. Charles Booth found a widow in the East End who attended every mission hall and every mothers’ meeting she could: ‘This brings her soup three or four times a week and sometimes a loaf of bread, and so the poor woman keeps her little room and the children with bread’.

It was the regular abuses of charity like this that the Charity Organization Society (COS) was established to combat. Founded in 1869, it sought to structure the way in which charities assessed and investigated those seeking aid and to coordinate the work of other charities. It encouraged local charities to interview applicants rigorously before offering assistance and to cooperate in establishing registers of the local poor, ideally in conjunction with the Poor Law authorities, to ensure that people were not claiming more than they were due. The rigorous methods and arguments of the COS had an impact on many Poor Law Guardians in the late nineteenth century. According to its first secretary, Charles Loch, the society was committed to the idea that ‘to be beneficent, charity should assist adequately, i.e. so as to produce self-help in the recipient’. Unfortunately this message was widely misunderstood, and the COS soon acquired a reputation for pedantic meanness. Its critics, of whom there were many, claimed that its abbreviation stood for ‘Cringe or Starve’.

The poor were able to use charities and the Poor Law as part of a survival strategy and it was not hard to work the system when charities and Poor Law authorities did not coordinate their efforts. Long-established charities run by the local church were often an easy touch, since they were not well organised. Speaking to a Poor Law conference in 1901, the Reverend L.R. Phelps, a guardian from Oxford, complained that:

Charity people are the worst poachers in the world! This is brought home to me when I see them giving money and food to vagrants, encouraging loafers and beggars, relieving the people of the expense and care of their children… These are all, I venture to say, the proper objects of the attention of the guardians.

However easy it might have been, surprisingly few paupers seem to have taken advantage of the opportunities available to manipulate the system. Most were broken people, struck down by ill-health or ill-fortune, who were barely able to look after themselves, let alone mastermind any attempts at deception. In order to survive, they generally preferred to beg in the streets or turn to petty crime. The New Poor Law had truly established the workhouse as a place of last resort, fear of which spread far beyond those forced to experience life inside its walls. It was a reputation that most guardians, for most of the time, were happy to promote, and it was here to stay.