Chapter Two

The Life Behind Doors

As we have seen workhouses, known sometimes as ‘poorhouses’ or ‘houses of industry’, were not a new concept. Linton, in Cambridgeshire, established a ‘taske house’ as early as 1577, as well as a hospital which occupied part of the village’s guildhall. In 1582 nearby Cambridge proposed to build a ‘house to set pore men on works in and of reformation for idle persons’. A few parishes also began to build cottages for the elderly and infirm or inherited them in return for caring for the friendless poor in their old age. In 1623 an Act was passed to encourage the ‘erecting of hospitals and working-houses for the Poor’ but there was no element of compulsion, let alone standardisation, until 1834.

The workhouse movement spread during the eighteenth century, fostered in part by Sir Edward Knatchbull’s Act of 1723, which allowed parishes to erect workhouses in which the poor were set to work and to which they were restricted except for Sundays. Knatchbull hoped that it would both reduce the rates and mould the demeanour of those relieved. Some 600 workhouses were established by 1750, most very small – the poor were often looked after in cottages converted for the purpose. At Ashwell in Hertfordshire, for example, the workhouse established as ‘a house of good manners, piety, charity and industry’ actually housed 12 people. Relief was to be denied to any destitute villager who refused to enter the ‘house’, while those who did were obliged to sign over their goods, to work and to attend religious services, while being forbidden to leave without the vestry’s permission or, indeed, to gossip in the streets.

Gilbert’s Act of 1782 (named after Thomas Gilbert, the MP who introduced it) encouraged parishes to unite to build and maintain workhouses to house the old, the sick and the infirm, and so share the cost of poor relief. Able-bodied paupers were explicitly excluded; instead, they were to be provided with either outdoor relief or employment near their own homes. In addition, farmers and other employers were permitted to receive allowances from the parish rates so they could bring wages up to subsistence levels. In many ways the Gilbert Unions, as they were called, were prototypes of the New Poor Law, so it is no surprise that they were excluded from the 1834 Poor Law (Reform) Act until 1868.

The spread of workhouses was patchy. In 1777 the county of Cheshire had 31 workhouses, 11 of which were in the vicinity of Macclesfield. At about the same time, the cities of London and Westminster and the county of Middlesex had 86 workhouses, which housed 15,000 paupers in total. St George Hanover Square alone had room for 700 paupers, while rural Hampton Wick looked after just half-a-dozen. Because of precarious finances and poor management many only lasted a few years. Others contracted out their management to private individuals. In 1759 Kingston’s Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor entered into an agreement with a cloth merchant of London, who undertook to provide food, fuel, clothes, medical care and other necessities to the inmates, to bury the dead and to provide food for poor apprentices. In return he was to receive £420 per year.

From Almshouse to Workhouse

In many places, the Poor Law supplemented private provision made by almshouses, established through the wills of rich merchants and aristocrats, to care for the elderly. In the Derbyshire village of Etwall, for example, Sir John Parr left money in 1577 for a hospital to care for the ‘poor, needy and impotent’ of the village. The earliest of these charitable institutions, such as the Great Hospital in Winchester, dated from the eleventh century and they continued to be founded up until the nineteenth century. A few were large establishments, such as the Charterhouse in the City of London, which housed 80 ‘gentlemen’, but most were small, looking after only a handful of men or women perceived to be of irreproachable character. Like workhouses, almshouses were scattered at random across the landscape. Some places, such as Richmond in Surrey, had several of them, while the neighbouring – and much more important – town of Kingston had only one almshouse. It was built in 1669, in memory of the merchant William Cleeve, for ‘six poor men and six poor women of honest life and reputation’.

Like workhouses they could be indifferently run. Anthony Trollope’s novel of 1855 The Warden, which takes place in Hiram’s Hospital, an almshouse in Barchester, was based on a contemporary scandal. But, in general, conditions were always better than in a workhouse.

The early workhouse environment varied greatly. In well-run workhouses where there was no overcrowding, the elderly and the infirm must have been treated almost as if they were at home. In 1797 Frederick Eden found St Mary’s Reading ‘a comfortable and convenient lodging for the Poor, but not always sufficiently aired’. In most, however, living conditions were poor and there could be serious overcrowding, particularly in the years after the Napoleonic Wars when numbers rose as the result of economic depression. The workhouse at York, for example, was frequently condemned as insanitary, with one inspection reporting ‘a permanent reservoir of foul air, where idiots mix with children and with adults labouring with syphilis and gonorrhoea’. In 1787, at St Pancras, then on the northern edge of London, inmates slept five or six to a bed. An 1818 survey of Kettering found that:

A considerable number of new beds are absolutely necessary – the total number is 48 and at present there are 95 persons in the house – a very great proportion of the beds are in a very poor state… The master … has made a very proper division of the rooms for the separate accommodation of the men, women and children. The sleeping rooms of the latter are clean, wholesome and airy, but those of the men are confined close and exceedingly unwholesome.

Building the Bastilles

The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, which reported in 1834, was very hostile towards existing workhouses, describing them as places where:

The young are trained in idleness, ignorance and vice; the able-bodied maintained in sluggish, sensual indolence; the aged and more respectable exposed to all the misery that is incident to dwelling in such a society … and the whole body of inmates subsisted on food far exceeding … not merely the diet of the independent labourer, but that of the majority who contribute to their support.

In the eyes of the Commission, workhouses had three main objectives: to look after those parishioners who could not look after themselves, that is the aged, the infirm and children; to act as a deterrent to those who would not work; and lastly, to function as a means of reducing the poor rate by forcing the indigent into the workhouse. As these officials established the local boards of guardians, the Poor Law Commissioners generally insisted that existing workhouses be closed and that the guardians build new premises that conformed to current thinking. Architecture was to play a role in shaping both the inmates’ humility and the ratepayer’s pocket. Sir Francis Head, Assistant Poor Law Commissioner for Kent, told a local magistrate who argued for the retention of the existing buildings:

The very sight of a well-built efficient establishment would give confidence to the Board of Guardians; the sight and weekly assemblage of all servants of the union would make them proud of their office; the appointment of a chaplain would give dignity to the whole arrangement, while the pauper would feel it was utterly impossible to contend against it.

Naturally there were protests. Radicals railed against ‘pauper bastilles’ which they believed would oppress the poor and destroy their ancient rights. Ratepayers and many guardians were concerned about the expense of the new buildings. And the poor themselves were fearful about the conditions found therein, their fears reinforced by some blood-curdling stories. In 1829 a pauper was sentenced to 21 days in gaol for spreading the rumour that the broth offered at Shadwell Workhouse included human remains. And in 1839 Edward Tufnell reported to the Commissioners that in Kent it was rumoured ‘that the children in the workhouse were killed to make pies with, while the old when dead were employed to manure the guardians’ fields in order to save the expense of coffins’.

The erection of new workhouses was piecemeal. In areas where there had been considerable protests against the new legislation, particularly in the north of England and in Wales, they were only introduced slowly. Despite appalling conditions in the town’s workhouse (one of five maintained by the union), Huddersfield had to wait until 1862 for new premises at Deanhouse, which quickly proved unsatisfactory. In October 1866 the local Poor Law Inspector R.B. Cane regretted that ‘so ill-arranged and incomplete a building was ever erected’. Another inspector later claimed that it had been built on the coldest and draughtiest spot in the Pennines. After many years of opposition Todmorden finally opened a workhouse as late as 1877, more than 40 years after the introduction of the New Poor Law.

By 1839, when there were 583 English and Welsh Unions in existence, 252 new and 175 old workhouses were in operation. A further 67 new workhouses were under construction, and 9 old workhouses were undergoing renovation. Although geographically patchy – few new workhouses were initially built in London or the north- this was still the largest and most expensive Stateinspired construction project that had yet been seen in peacetime. There was no financial support from Whitehall, the new premises had to be paid for either by local ratepayers or from the sale of the old workhouses. The new house at Bromsgrove for 300 paupers, for example, cost £5,150, plus another £440 to buy the three-acre plot of land. The contract was let in September 1836, and the premises opened during the spring of 1839.

In rural and semi-rural areas, workhouses were generally built on the outskirts of the central town or village in the union. Bromsgrove’s, for example, was on the main Birmingham road, about a mile from the centre of the town. In part this was because land was cheaper here, but the location also meant that paupers could come and go unseen. And despite the fanciful wishes of the Poor Law Commissioners little civil pride was invested in them, so there was no desire to build workhouses in a prominent place, as might happen with a town hall. Nonetheless, a rural workhouse situated on the brow of a hill could dominate the countryside for miles around.

Industrial or urban workhouses were inevitably in the heart of the city, rubbing shoulders with the poor. In 1844, Friedrich Engels described Manchester’s workhouse as being ‘like a citadel’ that ‘looks threateningly down from its high walls and parapets on the hilltop upon the working people’s quarter below’.

The workhouses of the 1830s were generally built to a pattern, with the central buildings surrounded by work and exercise yards. In some places, such as Blean, paupers’ dormitories were ranged around the courtyard, which, as The Times pointed out, did not allow the inmates any view of the surrounding countryside: ‘nothing is to be seen but dead walls’. Unsurprisingly, the most important rooms were naturally assigned to the master and matron; their quarters were often positioned in the centre of the workhouse complex, so that they could see at a glance what was going on. At Southwell it is still possible to see how it worked. Yet although this layout worked well on paper, the reality was different. Edward Smith, who inspected many workhouses in the south-east during the 1860s, found that the rooms were very close in warm weather. He also argued that the master and matron were rarely in their rooms, and were constantly supervising the paupers in other ways.

Much more common were radial or windmill designs, where four three-storey buildings emanated from an octagonal hub (where the master and matron lived), set within a rectangle defined by a three-storey entrance block and single-storey outbuildings forming the perimeter of the workhouse, the whole complex surrounded by a wall. The basic design was not dissimilar to the prison ‘panopticon’, proposed by Jeremy Bentham to allow an observer to watch prisoners without the prisoners knowing, thus conveying a ‘sentiment of an invisible omniscience’. The resulting geometrical conceit provided four exercise or work yards to be used by men, women, boys and girls, completing their segregation in the house. The basic design – by a young London architect, Sampson Kempthorne – was for 300 paupers, but it could easily be scaled down or up to meet the requirements of the individual union.

A journalist from Household Words visited one such establishment in Hampshire in 1867:

Passing down Southampton-wards, the reader may remark a formal, gloomy building standing off the railway to the left. It has small narrow windows and high walls. Its shape is of the well-known windmill pattern, with the four wings for wards and the centre for the master’s house. A younger brother of the Millbank Penitentiary, who has settled down to agricultural pursuits, with a surly regret for the turnkeys and warders, the handcuffs and punishment cells of the metropolitan head of the family, is what this building suggests most strongly as we pass it in the train.

The second major wave of building occurred from the mid-1860s onwards, as the result of a damning series of reports by Dr Edward Smith and his Poor Law inspector colleagues on infirmaries in both London and the provinces. At Worcester the inspector concluded that ‘the provision for the sick is inconvenient and defective, especially that for males; the foul wards are confined in space and the medical officer considers that better fever wards are wanted’. And of St Saviour’s Workhouse in Southwark, Harry Farnall bluntly observed that: ‘The workhouse does not meet the requirements of medical science, nor am I able to suggest any arrangements which would in the least enable it to do so’.

In addition, there was a growing realisation that the workhouse had a purpose for which it was not designed. It was no longer solely a deterrent to the able-bodied; increasingly it comprised a hospital, an orphanage and a home for the elderly. Shortly after the Andover Workhouse scandal, the Illustrated London News argued that workhouse architecture was ‘in fact tracings from designs for American prisons’, and proposed a new generation of light and airy buildings from which inmates could see the open fields beyond. Inevitably, the first generation of workhouses soon came to be regarded as being old-fashioned. Dr Edward Smith, writing in 1866, criticised their ‘narrow rooms and inconvenient arrangement of the offices’. This was acknowledged by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Poor Law Board, George Sclater-Booth, in a speech to North-East Hants Agricultural Association in November 1867:

I think there can be no doubt that public opinion will require that the appliances and comforts bestowed upon these sick, aged and infirm shall be more in accordance with modern notions than was intended or expected 30 or 40 years ago when these workhouses were originally built … we have no longer able-bodied paupers to be maintained in workhouses and that they are diverted from their original purposes and converted into receptacles for a different class of people altogether.

In the bigger workhouses there were usually separate buildings for the infirmary and the casual wards. This was in order to prevent infection spreading and to remove troublesome vagrants from the more peaceable permanent inmates. Some 150 new workhouses were built between 1840 and 1875, largely in London, Lancashire and Yorkshire, where previously few houses had been built. Where the guardians were agreeable architects now adopted Italianate, medieval or Elizabethan styles, which fitted in well with contemporary fashion and looked less intimidating than those of the previous generation. A charming example, still surviving, is the gothic-influenced gateway at Ripon, which exhibits more than a hint of the medieval almshouse.

On the outside the workhouses usually had more ornamentation, perhaps reflecting the beginnings of a more humane attitude towards the paupers and the growth of civic pride. A clock tower over the entrance block or a decorated door entrance was common. Occasionally, the Poor Law Board felt compelled to intervene in order to curtail the ornamentation proposed by over-enthusiastic guardians. In 1870 they refused to sanction proposals for one workhouse ‘to introduce encaustic tile paving in the entrance hall, moulded Portland stone stairs to the chapel, an elaborate coffered ceiling to the chapel, decorated ceilings to the committee rooms, Parian cement pilasters and other decorations in the covered way to the chapel, and Portland stone decorations to the front of the building’. But sometimes the improvements were realised, as at Prestwich, near Manchester, where a new workhouse opened in March 1870. The Manchester Guardian eulogised the new buildings, which had cost £40,000 (including land) and housed 312 paupers in rooms which ‘were well lighted, well ventilated, and airy, while every modern appliance had been taken advantage of which would add to the comfort of the inmates and conveniences of the officers of the Union’.

The main features of buildings such as the Prestwich Workhouse were the long corridors with wards leading off them for men, women and children. This allowed greater ventilation, always a problem in earlier designs, and the inmates no longer felt that every aspect of their lives was under the gaze of the master or matron. Even so, the long walk down gloomy and dully painted corridors (brown or green and cream were favourite colour schemes) must have been depressing.

By 1870 fewer corridor workhouses were being built. Instead, buildings generically known as ‘pavilions’ were erected to house the various types of paupers, from children to the very old – recognition in bricks and mortar of the differences between paupers. The idea was to separate the buildings, so that it was difficult for disease to spread. The Manchester Union infirmary, which opened in 1878, had seven parallel three-storey pavilions, each with room for 31 beds, a day room, a nurse’s kitchen and lavatories; all were separated from each other by airing yards about 80 feet apart.

The original ‘pavilion’ design was based on military hospitals built during and after the Crimean War, which provided light, airy and extremely wellventilated wards for soldiers to recover in. There were sometimes called Nightingale Wards, after Florence Nightingale, who argued for such places. The largest of these (indeed the largest hospital ever built) was the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley, which stretched a quarter of a mile along Southampton Water and provided 138 wards – which, ironically, turned out to be poorly ventilated. Workhouse pavilions proved to be usually less satisfactory than even the successful hospitals on which they were based. Inmates were allocated less space, as guardians argued that the wards would not be occupied during the day. Windows were smaller and, as a result, the ventilation less effective.

Some 46 buildings in pavilion style were erected between 1870 and 1914, again largely in the north of England and on the outskirts of London (where a number of schools and infirmaries for inmates from several unions were built on greenfield sites). One of the first of the type was at Madeley in Shropshire, which opened in 1875. It replaced two smaller workhouses condemned by the Poor Law Board and consisted of a central single-storey block, containing a dining hall and kitchen, which was linked by covered walkways to two-storey accommodation blocks. Other separate blocks included an infirmary, isolation block, entrance block and workshops.

At Brentford, now the site of the West Middlesex Hospital, The Builder reported the opening of a new workhouse in the pavilion fashion in November 1902. It provided spacious, modern accommodation for the inmates with facilities which would surely have drawn protests from guardians of an earlier generation that the paupers were being mollycoddled. However, the journal was keen to stress that ‘the buildings are of plain design, no money being wasted in ornament’.

It would be easy to assume from the above that, over time, conditions for the paupers got better. Advances certainly occurred, though they were uneven; more took place in the larger urban workhouses where there was money and imagination enough to build, rebuild and invest in new facilities and better services. Life for a pauper here was much better in 1910 than it had been in, say, 1840. Nor were they the only beneficiaries. By the 1890s houses were occasionally built for the master and matron, and sometimes for other senior staff as well, in the workhouse grounds of the larger unions. In 1905, at Crumsall in northern Manchester, the guardians built a large detached house for the new master, Captain Frank Cresswell, and his wife, showing the enhanced status of the master and the fact that he was no longer involved in the day-to-day supervision of the inmates. But some things did not change: the porter’s lodge, where the porter and his wife lived, was still usually near the main gate, so that the porter could be summoned whenever somebody desired entrance to the house. In the smaller workhouses, nurses had rooms near the wards, so that they too, could easily be called in cases of emergency.

Most workhouses developed piecemeal. New buildings were erected either when necessary or when forced by the authorities in Whitehall, and others were demolished or remodelled when circumstances changed. The Times in 1867 described the workhouse at Farnham in Surrey, for example, as being an ‘ugly ill-conditioned series of buildings… The infirmary buildings, workrooms, farm buildings, children’s wards, as well as other wards, form three sides of a square in a hotchpotch building, if possible uglier and more inconvenient than the one in front, which completes the square’. Even after the damning public inquiry which exposed how bad conditions were inside, it was not demolished; instead new infirmary blocks were added in 1870 and 1900.

Conditions in small rural houses remained much as they always had been. When H. Rider Haggard visited Norfolk workhouses in the 1890s, he was shocked to come across ‘poor girls with their illegitimate children, creeping dirty-faced across the floor’, and ‘the old, old women, lying in bed, too feeble to move’. And many of the casual wards described in 1929 by George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, had clearly not changed much in 60 or more years.

Marylebone Workhouse – An example of change over 200 years

One of the capital’s most important workhouses, Marylebone’s chequered history has been well documented and, interestingly, attracted a lot of praise from contemporaries. Its early years were troubled; the original workhouse in Marylebone opened in 1752, but soon became overcrowded, as well as infested with rats from a nearby burial ground. A new workhouse was opened on the site in 1776 with room for 1,000 paupers, although initially it only housed 300. Despite outbreaks of fever, which came from the burial ground, the original workhouse continued as an infirmary until 1791, when the authorities finally took notice after a fever had killed both the matron and the apothecary. A new and well-ventilated infirmary, with room for 300 paupers, was then built next to the new workhouse. The growing population of the parish meant that by the late 1790s the workhouse was already overcrowded, although not as badly as the neighbouring ones. Further buildings were erected after the Napoleonic Wars to cope with the increasing numbers of poor people in the parish, taking the capacity up to nearly 1,500, plus another 300 in the infirmary.

In the mid-1830s the journalist James Grant found the building ‘of very great size; it is not only the largest in the metropolis, but the largest in the United Kingdom… Of all the workhouses which I have seen, the arrangements in that of Marylebone seem to be better than in any other’. A decade later Marylebone, in common with workhouses across London, was overwhelmed by a flood of applicants fleeing the potato famine in Ireland. The highest number accommodated on a single day was 2,264 (there were beds for 1,500), when even the workshops were pressed into service as additional dormitories.

A recurring problem was how to deal with infants and small children; the guardians were severely criticised by the Poor Law Inspector in 1843 for conditions in the infant wards. A particular problem was the provision of decent lavatories. The guardians themselves admitted, for example, that a ‘proper urinal [should be erected] for the male children to prevent the clothes of the other children being wetted, which is frequently the case at present’. The problem was lack of space – there was nowhere to put new toilets, let alone make the other alterations that the Commissioners had recommended.

Slowly conditions began to improve as functions were transferred from the main site on the Euston Road. In 1860 children were finally moved to a new school about 10 miles distant in the countryside at Southall, but easily accessible by rail. In common with other workhouses, Marylebone was visited by Poor Law inspectors at least once a year and generally more often. Their opinions as to its effectiveness varied. Reports submitted between 1859 and 1866 by Harry Farnall emphasised that the premises were defective in both size and internal arrangement, particularly the male ablebodied and convalescent wards. One of his colleagues, R.B. Crane, proved rather more sympathetic to the regime in 1863: ‘The guardians seem to have used their best endeavours to obviate the defects in this establishment. The inmates appeared in a cleanly condition, well clothed and cared for, and apparently in a contented state. The workhouse, on the whole, was in as good order as I could expect to find it’.

By now most of the inmates were either elderly or infirm. In 1862 Farnall suggested that the guardians provide a warm shawl for each bedridden woman and a warm cape with sleeves for each man confined to bed. He also sought to have looking glasses provided ‘so as to prevent the necessity of the inmates hoarding up, as they do now with so much care pieces of broken looking glass’.

Temporary casual wards opened in 1867 to cope with the needs of vagrants. Unusually, scriptural texts were painted in large red letters on a blue background on the walls. They exhorted vagrants to turn from their criminal and indolent ways – although it is debatable, of course, how many inmates could read them. The wards only lasted a decade before a new block, based on radically different and more secular principles, was opened in 1876. ‘The Indoor Pauper’, who was probably an inmate in the early 1880s, found it the harshest of all the casual wards he stayed at and describes the experience in unflattering terms:

[Each casual] has four pounds of oakum to pick with not one of the usual aids. ‘We do not allow you to beat the oakum here’ remarked the taskmaster in truculent terms to myself. And every particular of the work has to be done before the casual is released… There is a metal pot, with a cover, in each cell; but the cover does not quite fit tight, and the pot, which serves as latrine, emits in consequence a most noisome smell. If ever the cholera visits London, I am quite sure it will make an early appearance in Marylebone Workhouse and not spare the inmates.

During a smallpox epidemic at about the same time, a ward was created for victims from one of the men’s workrooms. Nurses were strictly confined to the building and a man was posted at the yard gate to prevent communication with the rest of the workhouse; all food and stores were passed through him. These severe measures worked: out of 215 patients, only 22 died.

In 1867 part of the wall of one of the female infirm wards collapsed – fortunately killing nobody as all paupers were in bed at the time. It was clear that the main buildings, now almost a hundred years old, needed replacing. The infirmary moved a couple of miles west to Ladbroke Grove in 1881, although the confinement wards remained at the workhouse. The Architectural Association, which paid a visit before it opened, were impressed: ‘The interior walls and tracery of the windows are very nicely executed in white Suffolk bricks. The chapel is warmed by means of one of Mr Saxon Snell’s patent “Thermhydric” stoves, which are also used in the wards’.

The moving of the infirmary naturally freed up more space to accommodate the paupers, and numerous changes were made. During the 1880s, for example, a new block to house 240 able-bodied women was opened. However, conditions remained generally poor. In 1895 the Local Government Board approved a plan to rebuild the workhouse and demolish all pre-1867 buildings. This work was undertaken in two stages and cost in the region of £80,000. The foundation stone of the back block of buildings was laid in May 1897 by the Bishop of London in the presence of the boys’ band from the Poor Law school at Southall, and it opened exactly a year later. The front block, heralding the dawn of a new century, opened in March 1900, and it attracted attention and comment.

The journalist T.W. Wilkinson was particularly impressed by the size and the facilities of the new workhouse when he visited in 1905. In particular, the dining room had space for 1,200, and the kitchen was equipped with a mincing machine, used for ‘artificially masticating the meat supplied to old and toothless paupers’.

Walls, Wards and Workrooms

There were often plots of land around the buildings of both rural and suburban workhouses, where paupers, young and old, cultivated fruit and vegetables – although they did not necessarily get to eat the fruit of their labours. In his manual for guardians of 1876, George Bartley recommended that workhouses keep pigs to eat any waste food, commenting that their meat ‘makes a pleasant occasional change in the officers’ diet’, but he warned against keeping pigs too close to the house itself: ‘I have seen a row of sties within a very short distance of the infirmary windows, and absolutely close to the work-sheds, used by all the old men for the greater part of the day. The smell was dreadful and must have been most injurious’.

Even in London some workhouses presented a bucolic appearance. At St Pancras in the 1850s Miss S.E. De Morgan found ‘a flower garden which was cultivated by able-bodied paupers for the use of the master and matron’. The Rev. Osborne Jay hinted at darker reasons when, in 1891, he described one London workhouse in Life in Darkest London:

A forecourt of neat flower beds, closely shaven grass plots, smooth paths, and trees which had been pruned until their branches had reached the legitimate amount of foliage. The Bastille stretched further than the eye could see, and seemed a standing rebuke to its poverty-stricken surroundings, for it was clean … not a spot on it, not a stain, nothing to show a trace of sympathy for the misery and sin of the people who lived in the neighbourhood.

The workhouse would have been surrounded by walls designed to stress the separation of the paupers inside from the freedoms of the world outside. Many observers and critics of the new system, such as Miss De Morgan, thought that the ‘high walls and bolted doors recalled the idea of a prison’.

In practice, the walls were not as secure as might be thought. It was not uncommon for outsiders to hoist over tobacco and alcohol for friends in the house. On occasion, inmates climbed the walls to make their escape. One of the witnesses in the trial for corruption of an Islington guardian in December 1889 was an inmate called French. According to The Times, he was refused leave of absence over a bank holiday by the workhouse master, so he got out by climbing the wall and while doing so he witnessed a cart from the workhouse carrying stolen items.

The walls could not prevent discharged paupers from talking about their experiences, so local people generally had a good idea of what it was like inside. These stories simply added to the bad reputation of the workhouse and acted as a further deterrent to anybody who might think about seeking admission. Andrew Doyle noted down one piece of doggerel he found in a casual ward in the mid-1860s:

It’s very unkind, nay, further, cruel

To give here merely a drop of thin gruel

But let them keep it, we can do without it –

And I mean to let half the town know about it!

Contact with the outside world was further restricted by limited visiting hours. At Crumpsall Workhouse in Manchester in 1879, visits to sick and infirm paupers could only take place on the first Saturday of the month between the hours of 2pm and 4.30pm (5pm in summer). Potential visitors were warned: ‘No visit to exceed half-hour duration’. Paupers were also released from the workhouse for only a few short hours each month, although the Poor Law authorities were always keen to stress that paupers could discharge themselves at short notice.

Symbolically, there was only one entrance to the workhouse through which everybody had to enter and depart. Here paupers and visitors alike had to undergo interrogation by the porter as to the purpose of their visit. Their reception was generally hostile. Miss De Morgan, who wished to visit inmates and was armed with a letter of introduction from Lord Torrington, later wrote: ‘The porter at the outer door, who half opened it to ask what I wanted, shut it in my face, observing that he had something else to do than to take messages to the master and that they knew nothing about lords there’. George Lansbury had similarly negative impressions of his first visit to Poplar Workhouse as a new guardian:

Going down the narrow lane, ringing the bell, waiting while an official with a not too pleasant face looked through a grating to see who was there, and hearing his unpleasant voice – of course, he did not know me – made it easy for me to understand why the poor dreaded and hated these places, and made me in a flash realise how all these prison or bastille sort of surroundings were organised for the purpose of making self-respecting, decent people endure any suffering rather than enter.

Both the receiving rooms and casual wards were placed close to the entrance. The receiving rooms (or wards) were where new pauper entrants stayed until they had been examined by the medical officer. Personal possessions were taken away and each new pauper was issued with an anonymous – and inevitably badly fitting – coarse blue uniform and a pair of slippers, boots or clogs. Often these rooms were in the worst condition of any to be found in the workhouse. The Times described the receiving ward for women and children at Farnham as being: ‘without ventilation, one person sleeping in it would make the atmosphere unwholesome in a very short time, if not actually poisonous, and yet several persons may have to sleep there, heaped round with stinking rags which in-coming paupers generally wear’.

The formalities that took place here were bleak and unwelcoming. Families and couples were separated by gender and individual paupers placed into one of the categories laid down by Whitehall: male child under 14; able-bodied man between the ages of 14 and 60; old man over 60; female child under 14; able-bodied woman between the ages of 14 and 60; and old woman over 60. Infants under two were allowed to stay with their mothers. The paupers were then allocated to the appropriate ward in the house.

Some unions attempted to subdivide their paupers yet further. In the 1860s Mitford and Launditch had 20 categories for the 63 women in the workhouse at Gressinghall, including ‘prostitutes’, ‘women incapable of getting their own living from syphilis’ and ‘idiotic or weak-minded women with one or more bastard children’. By the end of the nineteenth century the Local Government Board was encouraging workhouses to divide paupers, particularly the elderly, into ‘deserving’, who would be rewarded with better conditions, and ‘non-deserving’, who would not.

Personal possessions were taken away and stored until such time as the owners left, although many paupers tried to smuggle tobacco or other items in the crevices of their bodies, hoping that they would not be searched too thoroughly. In the Whitechapel casual ward, Jack London was worried about being searched for tobacco. A fellow inmate told him, ‘Oh no … this is the easiest spike going. Y’ought to see some of them search you to the skin’.

Sometimes there was a separate ward (the ‘foul’ or ‘itch’ ward) for applicants with skin diseases, where they might stay for a day or two before entering the workhouse proper. The authorities tried to guard against the itch (scabies), a common condition suffered by many poor people which could spread quickly through the house. At Wapping, Charles Dickens, who visited in 1850, described the ‘itch’ ward:

in an old building squeezed away in a corner of a paved yard, quite detached from the more modern and spacious main body of the workhouse. They were in a building most monstrously behind the time – a mere series of garrets or lofts … and only accessible by steep and narrow staircases, infamously ill-adapted for the passage up-stairs of the sick or down-stairs of the dead.

Also near the entrance were the casual or tramp wards housing the vagrants. Conditions in the casual wards were likely to be worse than in the rest of the house, because to provide even a half-way decent environment might attract hordes of tramps. They were regarded, with some justification, as troublemakers who could be a bad influence on the rest of the paupers, so efforts were made to keep them away from the other inmates. They were also often disease-ridden. Jack London waited for admission to a workhouse with two men suffering from smallpox:

Whereat my flesh began to creep and crawl, and I asked them how long they had been out. One had been out two weeks, and the other three weeks. Their faces were badly pitted (though each assured the other that this was not so), and further, they showed me in their hands and under the nails, the smallpox ‘seeds’ still working out. Nay, one of them worked a seed out for my edification, and pop it went, right out of his flesh into the air. I tried to shrink up smaller inside my clothes, and I registered a fervent though silent hope that it had not popped on me.

In the main body of the workhouse, or in separate blocks or pavilions, were housed the various wards and other facilities, such as a chapel, schoolrooms, dining rooms and a laundry, as well as quarters for the master and matron and other members of staff. There were also exercise (often called airing) yards and work yards, where able-bodied paupers were expected to contribute towards their keep by breaking stones or picking oakum. (Oakum consisted of the loose fibres obtained by unpicking old ropes and was sold on to shipbuilders; it was mixed with tar and used for caulking wooden ships.)

The exercise or airing yards were carefully separated by gender and category, and children might play there and adults talk or read. At Marylebone the airing yard was surrounded by beds of flowers which made it ‘bright and cheerful, [with] seat after seat occupied by paupers reading in the sun’. However, 40 years previously Miss De Morgan had found at neighbouring St Pancras that, to approach the infirmary, the visitor had to pass through a yard where there were ‘a number of idiotic epileptic and lunatic women and girls, all harmless but distressing objects, especially some of the girls who caught hold of the visitor’s dress and clamoured, either for sweets or to be let out’.

Light and Heat

At first, lighting would have been provided by candles, but these were soon replaced by gas. Bromsgrove, which was not the most progressive of unions, introduced gas lighting in 1851, when the local gas company had reduced its charges by half. Coal gas, however, was extremely smoky and produced layers of sticky soot which got everywhere and had to be thoroughly cleaned. Rooms also had to be well-ventilated because gas depleted the oxygen in the air.

Ventilation was a constant problem. The wards were inevitably draughty, either by accident or design, and paupers, particularly the old and the sick, must have felt the cold dreadfully. It is little surprise that they often resorted to stuffing airing bricks and windows with anything they could find, such as old rags or the pages from magazines, in order to keep in the heat. In many workhouses there was a constant battle between the staff, who tried to ensure proper ventilation and healthy blasts of fresh air, and the paupers trying to keep warm.

Each ward or day room had a separate fireplace or stove, but these were inadequate to heat the draughty rooms and posed a fire risk. At Crumpsall Workhouse infirmary in the 1890s nurses wrapped lumps of coal in paper to avoid disturbing the patients when stoking the fires at night.

Other places had a system of central heating using hot water pipes, which threaded their way through the building and were supplied by a central coal-fired boiler. One of the first casual wards to include this form of heating was St Olave’s Workhouse in Rotherhithe, which opened in the early 1870s. It had 40 sleeping and working cells for men on the ground floor and 12 for women above, all of them supplied with hot water, heating and night commodes. At ‘Romton’ casual ward in the late 1920s George Orwell wrote: we had to ‘roll up our coats and put them against the hot water pipes, and made ourselves as comfortable as we could. It grew foully stuffy, but it was not warm enough to allow us to put our blankets underneath so that we could use one to soften the floor’.

In larger workhouses the central coal or gas-fired boiler might be maintained by a full-time boiler-man, but in smaller institutions able-bodied paupers kept the systems going. This was a much sought-after job because, although the work was arduous, the boiler room was always warm – a rarity in the workhouse. Plentiful hot water was important in the kitchens and in the receiving and casual wards, where new inmates were bathed before their admission. It wasn’t always achieved, however, and many grumbled that the water supplied was tepid.

Cleanliness, Godliness and Daily Routine

It was always a battle to keep workhouses clean. The older ones, in particular, were not designed with cleanliness in mind, as they had lots of small rooms and awkward corners. Cleaning largely depended on the physical labour of the able-bodied women paupers, who washed, dusted, polished and scrubbed the floors. And it was often cursory so problems quickly built up through indifference and neglect. Fred Copeman, who grew up in a workhouse before the First World War, often came across his mother on her knees scrubbing the floor. Such a situation was far from ideal, as pauper women were often physically weak (and on occasion mentally fragile) and certainly not motivated to work hard. Mary Higgs, who stayed in a casual ward in the early 1900s, found that parcels of paupers’ clothing had only been dusted on the front, and that nobody had bothered to open the parcels to tackle a moth infestation inside.

Both Higgs and her friend, deemed fit and healthy by the authorities, were at least required to clean the ward thoroughly before they left:

My friend was told to stone [that is wash the floor and apply ‘whitening’ to give a sheen] the place completely through, including the three cells not used (which looked clean), to blacklead the hot-water pipes all down the passage, dust everywhere thoroughly, and clean the step. Meanwhile I had first to do some shelves, and then stone a spiral stair and floor of a small larder… I think, probably, the work we did would have taken the ordinary tramp a full day.

Such rigorous cleaning was valuable, but it was not always demanded. Many institutions managed without, such as the poorly-run Farnham, where one larder was described by The Lancet as resembling a ‘stalactite cave of filth; there is no other image to adequately describe the foulness of these parts… A horrid smell used to issue from it into the kitchen which at times made [the cook] quite ill’.

Cleanliness and hygiene began to improve from the 1870s, largely because doctors and nurses increasingly understood their importance. Florence Nightingale, who was the leading campaigner for improved hospitals and workhouse infirmaries, emphasised in her Notes for Nurses that: ‘The answer to hospital mortality is neither prayer nor sacrifice but better ventilation, better drainage, and a higher standard of cleanliness’. This emphasis coincided with the late Victorian obsession with the moral and physical virtues of cleanliness – it permeated respectable working-class households and was something that the Poor Law authorities were naturally keen to encourage. Nor were their concerns restricted to workhouse inmates. At Brixworth in Northamptonshire, and no doubt other unions as well, out-relief (assistance outside the workhouse) could be denied to paupers who did not keep their houses neat and tidy.

Intimately connected with cleanliness was the laundry, although it was one of the least regarded parts of the workhouse. Each house got through vast amounts of linen, cotton and towelling, all of which needed washing and ironing, even if the result was often not much whiter than before. By the end of the nineteenth century most guardians had invested in steam laundries comprising vast tubs and huge spin dryers. The workhouse buildings at the Norfolk Museum of Rural Life at Gressenhall claims to have the only steam laundry still working.

As might be anticipated, the laundries were largely run by pauper women. In the 1860s Thomas Archer visited a workhouse on the eastern edge of London. The laundry was:

A long outbuilding, almost open on one side, and furnished with sinks and troughs and coppers, which are fully sufficient to provide for the due cleanliness of all the apparel in the establishment… I am a little disappointed at the appearance of the women who are engaged in this part of the building … they are amongst the least attractive females it has ever been my fortune to become acquainted with; and what personal advantages they may possess are not heightened by the flat-bordered workhouse cap, the blue check uniform covered with a coarse apron, and bare arms, the elbows of which resemble knobs carved out of some hard, but easily discolourable, substance.

In Merseyside, the American consul to Liverpool Nathaniel Hawthorne toured a laundry on wash day. He found ‘the whole atmosphere … hot and vaporous with the steam of wet garments and bedclothes. This atmosphere was the pauper-life of the past week or fortnight resolved into a gaseous state, and breathing it’.

Although the authorities liked to think that the chapel was the heart of the workhouse community, its real centre was the dining room. Often half-starved before they entered, and certainly not fattened on the diet provided by the guardians, most paupers spent a lot of time thinking about food. As the ‘Indoor Pauper’ noted, ‘not a morsel more than is absolutely necessary to support life in a state of health is handed out to the cook’.

In larger workhouses there were separate dining rooms for men and women; otherwise they shared the same room but ate at different times to avoid contact between the sexes. The rule about eating together in a communal dining hall was sometimes ignored, especially in the older workhouses. At Pudsey in Yorkshire in the 1830s, one pauper remembered being served with ‘large black bowls filled with oatmeal porridge and milk, and a big podgy person who figures as Master filling black earthenware mugs with a ladle and the poor, miserably clad people hobbling away with their meal to their room, which was not very tidy or over clean’.

The food was normally served up in the presence of the master or matron or another senior member of staff. In Oliver Twist Dickens was fairly accurate in his description: ‘The room in which the boys were fed, was a large stone hall, with a copper at one end: out of which the master, dressed in an apron for the purpose, and assisted by one or two women, ladled the gruel at mealtimes’.

Dr Edward Smith, who prepared a report on dietaries for the Poor Law Board in 1866, described the process of serving food which seems to have been common in many workhouses. The paupers were allowed to have their meagre rations measured, and a notice to this effect was placed in the dining room.

The soup, tea and other liquid foods are put into vessels of known capacity, and the pudding, meat, bread, butter and solid foods are weighed to each person. Relays of inmates are provided with trays to carry the food to the dining-rooms and the sick rooms. The process is effected with varying degrees of rapidity … notwithstanding the exposure of the food to the cool air, it is for the most part still warm (sometimes hot) when the inmates eat it.

The eating utensils were normally made of battered tin – they would almost certainly have been stolen, had they been of any better quality. In most workhouses, meals were eaten off ceramic plates. In a few places, Smith found that wooden trenchers were used, but they ‘are very antiquated, require much labour in scouring to keep them clean, and keep up a daily distinction of inferiority between the table of the inmates of a workhouse and that of the poor living around them.’

The food was usually prepared in separate kitchens by paupers, under the supervision of a paid cook or, occasionally, the matron. The quality of the food offered was generally awful, because the skills of the kitchen staff were negligible (yet Smith noted that their work was generally ‘very fairly performed’), the quality of the provisions poor and the expectations of the inmates low. Food was usually boiled, although an increasing number of workhouses offered roast meat two or three times a week. Dr Smith found that the meat was ‘almost universally salted in pickle’ as a preservative – an important consideration when there was no refrigeration – which made it tough and probably less nourishing than it should have been.

The newer workhouses of the 1870s and later had better kitchens which could do more than just boil the food. In the early 1900s the kitchens in the new Marylebone Workhouse particularly impressed the journalist T.W. Wilkinson:

A large, lofty room, lined with white glazed bricks, and with a score of steam-jacketed coppers, tea coppers, roasting ovens, and the like, it seems to have been designed and fitted for a regiment of Brobdingnagians. Here they make sixty-gallon milk puddings, have three teapots of eighty gallons capacity each, cook a quarter of a ton of cabbage at an operation, and steam potatoes by the ton.

It was a principle of the Poor Law that inmates in the workhouse should contribute to their upkeep as far as possible. As well as reducing the burden on the ratepayers, this acted as a deterrent to any able-bodied person who might otherwise be tempted by the workhouse. Women cleaned, sewed and cooked, and men made goods for other paupers or for sale to the public. Miss De Morgan came across a group of aged women sewing a coarse stiff calico, which she was told was for shrouds: ‘We’ve been at them all this week. There’s many wanted now. We shall want them ourselves soon’.

Many of the tasks performed by the paupers, particularly the casuals and the male paupers, took place in work yards, which were open sheds or unheated rooms. At Whitechapel, in the 1880s, ‘John Law’ (the pseudonym of the novelist Margaret Harkness) found that:

The workshops lay close together and in each of them men were redeeming the time by making something for the use of the workhouse. Tailors squatted on tables, boot-makers cobbled and patched, men plaited mats; each pauper had his task, and knew that the morrow would bring the same work, that as surely as the sun rises and sets, his task tomorrow would be the same as it was at the moment.

The results of pauper labour could provide a reasonable source of income for the guardians, as their products were either sold or used in the house. In March 1908 Cheadle Workhouse, for example, made a profit of £40 13s 3d on firewood and £8 12s 3d on broken stone (sold to the Highways Department to be used in surfacing roads), while £31 11s 2d worth of home-grown vegetables were consumed in the house.

Even the sick and infirm were expected to take a part. At Manchester, in 1882, the Local Government Board queried making patients in the surgical wards pick oakum. The chairman of the guardians defended this by arguing that ‘the patients referred to were persons who were recovering but obliged to lie in bed and it was thought it would be more agreeable to them to find them something to do, than they should idle their time away’.

Occasionally there were complaints that pauper labour undercut commercial producers outside. In 1888 the Firewood Cutters’ Protection Association protested that their desperately poor members’ livelihoods were being taken away, as a result of cheap firewood being sold by unions in the East End. Whitechapel offered a robust response, arguing that it was not prepared to admit ‘that the fact of a man being employed in the workhouse deprives him of the right to contribute to the labour of the country the produce of which he is a consumer’.

As we will see, the workhouse formed a community. The most important element of which was the building. As the demands on the workhouse changed so did the buildings; in many places what were once little better than prisons eventually became more like hospitals. Even so they were hardly places anybody would choose to spend time in, as they were draughty, dirty and desperately dull.