Chapter Three

Working for the Workhouse

The workhouse had a complement of full-time staff, sometimes referred to as the indoor staff, who generally lived in either the workhouse or the grounds. The numbers varied considerably, with the smallest rural houses possessing only a master, matron, porter and perhaps an assistant nurse. The largest workhouses in London and the major provincial cities, by contrast, may have employed several dozen men and women.

Because the staff were relatively isolated, they created their own small communities, where friendships – and sometimes romances – developed as well as rivalries and squabbles. Some workhouses seem to have been happy places to work in, at least part of the time, judging by the surviving photographs of Christmas dinners and fancy dress dances. Staff communities were roughly similar to those formed by the servants in the great houses of the period, although they were markedly less rigid because the turnover of staff was much greater and they were not trying to ape their social betters. Instead they were trying to overawe their social inferiors.

The social status of workhouse staff was an enduring concern, of great significance to themselves and their employers, and reflecting all the confused Victorian and Edwardian thinking on the subject. The social reformer, and Poor Law Guardian, Louisa Twining noted that masters and matrons were all of the ‘low and uneducated middle-classes’. Their status was perhaps analogous to that of headmasters and mistresses in state or ‘board’ schools – that is, firmly within the respectable lower middle classes. However, the National Association of Poor Law Officials argued that workhouse staff should be compared to the rather better paid prison governors and governesses.

Within the workhouse itself, for example, the master was generally considered socially inferior to the guardians, chaplains and medical officers. This sometimes caused friction, although possibly less often than classconscious commentators observed. George Catch, who was a brutal master of several central London workhouses in the 1850s, had a huge inferiority complex when dealing with university-educated medical officers, and spent a lot of time obstructing their work as a result. ‘You are worth no more than this doorpost’, he repeatedly told one doctor at Newington Workhouse in South London.

There was some concern that middle class officers would be directed by their social inferiors or have to endure conditions to which their station had not accustomed them. The Poor Law Inspector Baldwyn Fleming was concerned about the quality of the eating utensils that middle class nurses might have to use: ‘In many places they are rough and not at all what the nurse is accustomed to. They may have to eat with a steel fork and a pewter spoon, and things of that kind; that is a matter of very small outlay, which the Guardians could meet without any trouble’.

Conditions improved from the 1890s onwards, when workhouses had largely become refuges for the aged and the sick. By then, adequately trained staff were employed and the strict discipline over staff and paupers was gently relaxed. Nevertheless, the frustrations of the work, boredom and the fact that the staff were almost always on duty meant that it was still easy for employees to rub each other up the wrong way. As many workhouses were situated on the edge of towns or in villages, and holidays were either short or non-existent, it was difficult for the staff to escape even for a few hours. As a result, in most workhouses, a constant stream of complaints about conditions and the behaviour of the master and his staff was sent either to the authorities in London or, more often, to the guardians. They usually concerned sexual improprieties involving female paupers, petty corruption or petty disputes between workhouse staff.

Masters and Matrons

The master (or governor) was firmly at the top of the workhouse hierarchy, together with the matron; they were usually a married couple. In fact it was difficult for a man to advance through the Poor Law service unless he was married to a woman who could act as matron. This arrangement had a lot of attraction to the Poor Law authorities, as it was one way of keeping wages down. An unmarried master asked the guardians at Bromley, Kent, in 1888: ‘Being very anxious to obtain a joint appointment as Master & matron of a union workhouse and my greatest disadvantage being single, may I solicit the sanction of the Guardians to marry, my wife being outside the workhouse buildings [that she was not employed in the Poor Law]’. The guardians did not object.

The master had very clear duties based on the strict segregation of the paupers by gender and age. He was in charge of the house as a whole, as well as the men’s side and casual wards, while the matron had responsibility for the women’s wards and the infirmary. The porter, the medical officer and the labour or taskmasters reported to the master, while the matron managed the nurses and kitchen staff.

Often other members of the master’s family could also have jobs in the house. Adult or teenage sons and daughters might teach the children or follow their parents into the business. However, guardians usually refused to employ couples with small children (euphemistically referred to as ‘encumbrances’ in job advertisements) and frowned upon those who had children while in post. Occasionally exceptions were made for suitable candidates, but in general it was thought that the workhouse and the company of paupers was no place for a small child. William and Mary Anne Bragger, who were master and matron at Wrexham in the early 1860s, exceptionally were allowed to have their two daughters with them, although an older son was boarded out.

The duties of workhouse staff were clearly laid down in a series of orders issued by the Poor Law Commission in London. The master was made responsible for the administration of the workhouse and the care and discipline of the paupers; in 1836 his tasks included reading ‘prayers to the paupers before breakfast and after supper every day, or [to] cause them to be read’ and paying visits to the wards at 11am every morning and 9pm each night. Staff duties remained largely unchanged during the whole period of the New Poor Law, although practitioners in the field interpreted the various orders in very different ways. In 1881 John Wyld, the master of Bishop Auckland Workhouse in County Durham, told a Poor Law conference that the responsibilities of a workhouse master were:

To evolve order, to arrange and classify [the paupers] to listen to the various wants, troubles, complaints and wishes; to care for the suffering ones tenderly; and to rigidly exact from the able-bodied shirk his quota of labour to help to support the house that shelters him; to keep and preserve provisions, clothing and stock; to prevent waste; … to keep his books and accounts; to exercise a gentle sway and controlling influence in harmonising any little differences that may … arise between the other indoor officers.

The matron’s role was also clearly delineated. She was responsible for the female inmates, as well as children under seven of both sexes, and the orders required her to ‘see that the in-door work of the establishment is, as far as possible, performed by the female paupers maintained therein … to pay particular attention to the moral conduct and orderly behaviour of the female paupers and children; to see that they are clean and decent in their dress and persons, and to train them up in such employments as will best fit them for service’. Practical housekeeping issues, such as ensuring that the bed linen was changed monthly, also fell into her domain.

In practice, the couple’s work varied greatly depending on the size and importance of the workhouse. In the smallest rural houses, the matron may have actually nursed the sick inmates, while the master dealt with male paupers and the tramps. In the larger urban workhouses, masters and matrons managed a large number of staff, such as nurses and porters, and must have rarely come in contact with individual paupers. It is perhaps no wonder that in his account of an inner London able-bodied ward ‘the Indoor Pauper’ mentions neither the master nor the matron – he probably never encountered them.

For those trying to perform their duties conscientiously, these were demanding, often draining roles. The majority report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1909 thought that masters and matrons had an almost impossible job managing schools, lunatic asylums, workshop and infirmaries, as well as running the workhouse itself.

Paying the Piper

In general the guardians wished to appoint couples who could run the workhouse at the minimum cost and maximum efficiency – for the lowest possible wages. Assistant Poor Law Commissioner Sir Francis Head advised Kentish guardians in 1835 that the master ‘should be a person accustomed to the habits of your peasantry, acquainted with their character, of irreproachable moral conduct, with great firmness and mild temper’. Of the matron, the Commissioners in London required only that she should be comparable to a ‘trustworthy female servant’ and be paid at the same rate.

During the early years of the Poor Law, masters and matrons came from a variety of backgrounds. The first master and matron of the Gressenhall House of Industry in 1777 were James and Margaret Moore, an innkeeper and his wife from the nearby town of East Dereham. Many men had previously been non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in the army. There they had learnt how to instil discipline into unruly men and were sufficiently literate to deal with the paperwork required by the guardians and Whitehall. This was not always a guarantee of success, however. The notorious master of Andover Workhouse in Hampshire, Colin McDougal, was a former sergeant-major in the Royal Artillery; he had had an exemplary career in the army before being discharged in 1836.

Between 1878 and 1904, for example, the master of Britain’s largest workhouse at Crumpsall, north Manchester, was Frank Ballantine, who had risen through the ranks to become a Royal Artillery major. Another former NCO was Richard Cavendish, supposedly the illegitimate son of the King of Prussia. After seven years’ exemplary service in the 4th Hussars (where he rose to the rank of sergeant), he became master of Langport Workhouse in Somerset.

Others were promoted from within the workhouse themselves, particularly porters and their female equivalents, ‘porteresses’. In many smaller places, the porter was de facto the deputy master and thus in a good position to learn about their responsibilities. Porters learnt how to deal with all classes of paupers, for it was their duty to admit paupers who had a ticket from the relieving officer or a guardian, as well as casual paupers, and to maintain discipline in the house. They were expected to search paupers ‘or any other person whom he may suspect to have possession of any spirits or prohibited articles… To lock all outer doors and take the keys to the master at nine o’clock every night and to receive them again from him every morning at seven o’clock or such hours as shall be directed’.

Job advertisements give an idea of what the guardians were looking for. In The Times in August 1850 Amersham Workhouse in Buckinghamshire sought candidates who were ‘man and wife without encumbrance, members of the Church of England, of good health and unquestionable character and the master must be a good penman and competent to keep the workhouse books and accounts and perform all the duties prescribed by the orders of the Poor Law Board’. On the same page, Yeovil Workhouse in Somerset required that ‘the master be a good accountant and write a fair hand, the matron a good needlewoman and understand cutting out garments’.

A career path soon began to emerge: ambitious men started as porters, or possibly schoolmasters, and then became the master at a small workhouse, with the hope of crowning their careers by running one of the larger urban houses. Their wives may have been schoolmistresses or nurses, which gave them useful knowledge to run the female side. In 1862 Poor Law Inspector John Lambert told a parliamentary inquiry that, since the introduction of the New Poor Law, ‘there has been a great improvement in the kind of master who have grown up in the system; in my district there are several instances of workhouse masters who have been schoolmasters themselves, and they make some of the best workhouse masters’.

Whatever their background, they all had to be literate in order to deal with the mountain of paperwork required by the authorities in London and by the guardians themselves. The Poor Law Board believed that ‘clear and accurate accounts must be kept, as well for the protection of the ratepayers and the poor, as of officers themselves’. But a committee that investigated the situation in 1903 found that all the witnesses they interviewed ‘expressed the forms of accounts were needlessly elaborate and entailed much useless labour upon workhouse masters’. The masters in rural unions, where there was no clerical help, had to devote so much time to book-keeping that ‘they are often unable to pay sufficient attention to their other duties’.

The master and matron were placed at the centre of a three-way relationship with the guardians who employed them, the staff with whom they worked and lastly the paupers whom they oversaw. The most important of these was the relationship with the guardians. The master made regular reports to the weekly or fortnightly meetings of the guardians, describing what had happened in the house, briefing them on problems with the inmates, and requesting permission to buy new stores. He also presented the many books he kept for their inspection, including the punishment book.

The reports that Alexander Chetham, the master of Spotland Workhouse in Rochdale, Lancashire, made in the 1830s and 1840s are perhaps typical:

26 April 1837: Margret Lord was brought here in a chair Feby not expected to live long. On Monday morning she came into the kitchen and asked leave to go to Town. Mrs said she thought she had something about her that did not belong her. She said she might search her. She did so and delivered her of a gown she had round her body. She told her she had done rong in doing so. She imeadiately went up stairs brought her cloths and had them Examined and took herself off highly affronted.

May 3: we have had two funerals since last Wedensday. James Crabtree upwards of 70 yr and Martha Cooper 69 years.

May 10: Ann Clegg is yet very troublesome. We are in want of a Quantaty of knives.

Considering the responsibilities, wages were generally low, which must have deterred good candidates from applying and ensured that the most able and ambitious couples only spent a few months at a workhouse before seeking advancement. This was particularly true in the smaller rural unions. At Cleobury Mortimer in Herefordshire, 17 masters were appointed between 1854 and 1918; the average turnover in provincial unions during the same period was seven. There was no national pay scale, and the temptation for guardians was to keep the wages as low as possible. Herbert Preston-Thomas found that the practice of guardians in the West Country was to ‘support the appointment of the person offering to do the work for the least salary, as otherwise their constituents would blame them for not being efficiently economical of the rates’.

Andover paid Mr and Mrs McDougal a joint salary of £80, plus board and lodging (referred to as ‘rations’). This seems to have been about the average wage for the larger rural workhouses – Yeovil was also offering that in 1850. At the same time, Belford in Northumberland was paying £30 to Thomas and Mary Foster as master and matron, and even this low sum had had to be increased from £20 in order to attract the couple from neighbouring Alnwick, where they were already master and matron. Larger urban houses paid more. At Wrexham, with nearly 250 inmates, the master received £60 and the matron £40. At Liverpool, with 3,500 paupers, the master was paid £350 in 1869.

The low wages and generally poor conditions on offer caused difficulties in recruiting masters and matrons, particularly for the smaller rural workhouses. As a result, guardians did sometimes appoint staff whom they must have known were unsuitable. For example, the master appointed at Andover after McDougal’s resignation in 1845, a Mr Price, had to resign soon after when stories of overcrowding at Oxford Workhouse, where he had previously been master, came to the public attention. He was succeeded by a Mr Brice, who was sacked after three years for taking liberties with the female paupers.

Despite the need for testimonials (Amersham required five) and the payment of sureties or bonds (Amersham wanted two bonds of £100 each), to be forfeited if service was unsatisfactory, it was all too easy to hire poor or inappropriate staff. Many of the couples employed at Belford, for example, proved unable to deal with the paperwork, instil discipline into the paupers or manage the house effectively. In a few cases they failed on all three accounts. The shortage of qualified officers meant that it was relatively easy for poor staff, who had perhaps been sacked elsewhere, to find new positions. Lambeth Workhouse in south London, for example, employed George Catch, even though they must have known of his reputation after he was sacked from the neighbouring Strand and Newington workhouses. And Tadcaster Union in Yorkshire hired Catherine Leivers, despite the fact that she had been dismissed from Poor Law institutions in both Leeds and Bradford. This changed with the growth of a career path within the Poor Law from the 1870s onwards. Masters, matrons and their staff continued to be dismissed – usually for financial or sexual irregularities – but rarely for gross incompetence.

The opportunity for graft and petty corruption was rarely absent from the administration of the Poor Law. George Bartley acknowledged the problem in his guide for newly elected guardians published in 1876:

If he is a good man and the Master of a Workhouse … he has enormous power for good or evil in his hands; underpaying him is very unjust and a great mistake; but if he is at all inclined to go wrong, underpaying him will certainly encourage him in doing so for he can easily make up his income in an improper manner.

Masters and matrons, if they were so inclined, could supplement their income by illegally selling the provisions or using them for their own families. One of the reasons why the paupers starved at Andover was that Colin McDougal, the workhouse master, was stealing the rations to feed his own family. Dr Joseph Rogers, who was a Poor Law medical officer in London between the 1860s and 1880s, wondered how it was possible that many ‘masters of workhouses with limited incomes should succeed in leaving at their deaths so much money, as so many of them do’. He cited the example of Daniel Haybittle, the master of the Strand Workhouse, one of the poorest and worst-run workhouses in the metropolis, who left £2,000 on his death.

Despite regular audits and the supervisory role of the guardians, it was not difficult to defraud the Poor Law Union and it was hard to prove that this was being done. The master at Gressenhall, Philip Reynolds, was accused on a number of occasions of feathering his nest, although nothing was ever proved and he remained in post for over 20 years. In 1871 John Webster, a pauper in the workhouse, wrote to the Local Government Board alleging that Reynolds grew his own vegetables on the workhouse vegetable plot, appropriated materials to build himself a greenhouse, used firewood meant for the paupers, and entertained visitors at the guardian’s expense (‘that you might as well be in Oxford Street, for the gigs rattling all night long’). When the inmates attempted to protest at these abuses, he had them locked up all night. The guardians investigated and dismissed the accusations. However, over the next few years there were a number of other small scandals, including complaints about the quality of workhouse food and a protracted affair in which Reynolds was forced to pay back £18 to cover the cost of coal which had mysteriously vanished from the workhouse stores.

Often the guardians had no real interest in the paupers in the house. Poor Law Inspector Herbert Preston-Thomas claimed that the master could act like a ‘despot’ because the guardians exercised little control, since they met infrequently and rarely visited the house. Before the scandal at Andover, the guardians were generally apathetic, and the chairman of the board, the Reverend Christopher Dodson, had not visited the workhouse for several years.

In disputes and allegations at the workhouse, it was natural for the guardians to support their staff, particularly the master. At Marylebone in 1856 the master and two porters were accused of flogging two young women who had caused a disturbance in the refractory women’s ward. A local magistrate brought the case to the notice of the guardians, who reprimanded the staff about the need to treat the inmates with kindness, ‘considering the extreme provocation they had received’, and warned them that they would be dismissed if behaviour like this happened again. Public pressure, however, forced the Poor Law Board to intervene; it demanded that the master, Richard Ryan, be sacked. Despite considerable protests from the guardians, he was forced to resign.

Public criticism of cruel or indifferent workhouse staff was severe, although it often took a tragedy to expose their behaviour. On 28 December 1872 the satirical magazine Punch pilloried the superintendent of the casual ward of St Giles’s Workhouse in London ‘ who caused the death of a child by refusing to receive it, with its mother, on a vile night, and who stuck to his brutal lie that the mother was drunk’. The writer contrasts his cruelty with the charitable spirit of the season, noting that ‘it is a Christmas thought to be heartily glad that George Cannon … will spend his Christmas Day in gaol, and some three hundred and sixty days after in that edifice; at hard labour. And I hope the officials will take care that it is hard’.

At the Gressenhall, the guardians threatened to resign en masse when the Local Government Board peremptorily sacked the master without consulting them. Rudely awoken late one night in January 1911, Robert Neville refused to take in a man who had just tried to commit suicide. The rector of Whissonsett, from where the pauper came, complained to the Board in London, who sent an inspector to investigate. He concluded that Neville had been wrong not to admit the man. Unfortunately the guardians became annoyed when the inspector did not meet any of them to discuss the case and they resented the superior tone adopted by the Board. Eventually, the Board moderated their letters, and the guardians accepted Neville’s dismissal, although they ensured that he received generous superannuation based on his long service in the Poor Law.

Boards appointed visiting committees which, according to the Poor Law Inspector Edward Smith, visited ‘too infrequently and in too great a hurry and are too much disinclined to recommend change’. It did not help that until 1893 guardians could only enter the workhouse with the permission of the master. Will Crooks’s biographer noted that after this was changed ‘there began, not only in Poplar, but all over the country, a marked improvement in the treatment of old people in the workhouse’.

On occasion the guardians or, in particular, the chairman would interfere too much in the workings of the workhouse. This was one of the charges made against the new generation of reforming guardians who were elected in the 1880s and 1890s. Will Crooks and George Lansbury, two working class trade unionists elected to Poplar in 1892 found most of the officers very hostile. During a fire which broke out in the workhouse, one of the officers exclaimed: ‘The only thing wanting is that Crooks and Lansbury should be put on top of it’.

Running the Workhouse

Each master and matron supervised a team of staff who ran the workhouse on a daily basis. Almost every workhouse had a porter and possibly his wife, a taskmaster to supervise the paupers’ work, and a nurse or two to care for the elderly and infirm. Where there were pauper children, there might be a schoolmaster and mistress. Poor Law Unions were also responsible for vaccinating children, so there would be a vaccinator (often the medical officer or doctor), and registering births, marriages and deaths (the registrar was often the clerk). On the professional side there was the clerk to the guardians (normally a solicitor), a medical officer and often a chaplain (usually a local curate). The admission of paupers to the house and the administration of out-relief was the responsibility of the relieving officer.

The smallest unions, such as Richmond in North Yorkshire, were run by only a few staff. Here in 1849 the guardians employed just a clerk, a relieving officer and the workhouse master and matron. More typical, perhaps, was Richmond in Surrey which, at the same time, had 160 inmates and a staff of 18, comprising a clerk, treasurer, master and matron, workhouse porter, chaplain, two medical officers and vaccinators, two part-time vaccinators, a relieving officer, five assistant overseers and two registrars of births, marriages and deaths.

The largest workhouses, accommodating several thousand paupers, employed dozens of staff. Also in 1849, for example, Manchester employed 134 men and women, including two stokers and an assistant infant nurse at the industrial schools at Swinton, while in the main workhouse were found a barber, apothecary and clothing storekeeper. The workhouse at Whitechapel in East London, with nearly 200 staff, even employed a part-time fire-engine keeper, William Childe; he was paid £6 a year and combined this work with being a ‘beadle and messenger for Trinity Square’.

Staff were recruited by various means. The Lancet, Poor Law Journal and other professional journals carried advertisements for medical officers and other specialist staff. Advertisements for other positions appeared in newspapers, for instance The Times, although few of its affluent readers would have been enthused by the post of Assistant Porter at Bradfield, Berkshire advertised on 9 June 1851, at a salary of £15 ‘with board, lodging, washing in the workhouse’. Other situations advertised that day were for a porter at East London, master and matron at Clifden (Bristol), a schoolmaster and mistress at Downham Market (Norfolk), and a parochial messenger ‘of active habits’ for St James, Westminster.

Advertisements in The Times give an idea of the type of candidate the guardians were looking for. At Marylebone, in July 1848, the union was seeking to employ a porter and required:

a married man, without encumbrance, between the ages of 30 and 50, of sober habits and good command of temper. He must be able to write a fair hand and keep plain accounts. Salary 14s per week with board, lodging and washing; his wife will be allowed to live at the lodge with him.

The successful candidate’s wife would no doubt have been expected to supervise the female refractory ward or perhaps act as a seamstress. It would not have been an easy job for the couple to undertake – Marylebone Workhouse at the time was grossly overcrowded with some 2,000 inmates, many of whom were destitute Irish who had fled the famine.

Attracting suitable staff was difficult because the wages were poor and the work irksome. There was a huge turnover of staff, particularly at the junior levels, such as porters and nurses; they often left within a few months for better paid jobs elsewhere or were sacked for incompetence or cruelty to the paupers. Between 1836 and 1899, for example, Bicester Workhouse in Oxfordshire employed 22 porters, each staying an average of just under three years each (although only three served between 1842 and 1860). One of them, Alfred John Payne, lasted only three months in 1876, resigning because he disliked the work. Another short-lived porter was John Bowley, who had previously been the porter at Thame Workhouse and appointed in May 1842. He was sacked six months later, in November, following complaints over his treatment of the paupers.

The smaller workhouses generally preferred single men or widowers as porters, ideally with another useful trade. At Llanfyllin, in rural mid- Wales, for example, when a vacancy for porter became available in 1845, the successful candidate, John Griffiths, was offered a salary of ‘£18.4.0 per annum with an allowance of £3.3.0 a year in lieu of groceries together with the usual rations, apartments and washing in the workhouse’. Griffiths’ job offer, however, was on condition that he learned how to make shoes. In the 1870s Congleton Workhouse in Derbyshire was looking for candidates who were bakers, in order to bake bread for the inmates. Such a provision also had the benefit of ensuring a certain level of intelligence and competence.

Many porters had recently been inmates or former paupers. They had the advantage of being cheap to employ, as well as knowing the workhouse and its secrets and perhaps being not overly worried about disciplining paupers. A good number seem to have been recruited either by word of mouth or by notices placed on the workhouse door or in public places locally, particularly in rural areas. The porter often set the tone for the rest of the workhouse, for he was in many ways its public face. Porters dealt with the roughest and most abusive of the admissions, which may have coloured their generally rude attitude to the inmates. In a Commons debate in 1891 one MP described how a vagrant was admitted into one workhouse ‘in about the same tone in which a surly gamekeeper would address a half-broke retriever’.

The more important posts for masters, medical officers and porters were filled by interview with the guardians. Despite the low wages, the number of applicants could be surprisingly large. Over 120 applications were received when the post of workhouse master and matron at the small Northumbrian workhouse at Belford was advertised in March 1902. The successful candidates were John and Leah Petrie, porter and ‘porteress’ at Sunderland, who were to be paid £35 and £15 per annum respectively.

Applicants were asked to bring testimonials from previous employers and to provide a guarantee bond to indemnify the guardians in case of financial fraud or personal bankruptcy. This was a common requirement in the public sector; even teachers at board (local authority) schools had to give such bonds, and there were a number of companies whose business was providing them. It was a good business to be in, because they were rarely invoked. At Southwell, the successful applicant for the post of master had to provide two sureties of £50 each.

Then, as now, references might not always mean very much, particularly if the guardians were keen to see the back of a member of staff. James Kilner, the clerk of the Strand Union and a friend of the brutal workhouse master George Catch, recommended Catch and his wife Selina for the post of master and matron at Newington with the comment that ‘their general conduct … has been characterised by honesty, integrity and sobriety, and that they discharged the duties of master and matron with firmness and efficiency’.

Each board of guardians decided how much they could afford to pay based on local circumstances and the nature of the people they employed. Ever conscious of the ratepayers who elected them, the guardians were notoriously reluctant to pay more than the bare minimum, although they would often increase the salary paid in order to keep good staff or to reward good performance, such as helping out in a particular emergency or saving the ratepayers’ money through cutting expenditure. The Petries at Belford were paid an additional £5 each in 1903 after having been in post for a year. Eventually they left in 1908 to go to better paid positions at Barton Regis on the outskirts of Bristol.

Because of poor pay and bad working conditions discontent among workhouse officials and their staff was endemic. In his manual of 1876, George Bartley warned new guardians that they should expect to be regularly approached by the officers:

In one year I noted that almost every person except the master of the workhouse, who perhaps deserved it most, came up with the same application, namely for an increase in pay… The truth was that in our union the rate of pay was pitched so low that even with the increase, everybody was dissatisfied and only looked forward to sufficient time elapsing when they would be able with decency and some chance of success, once more to apply for a repetition of the increase.

He thought that there should be annual incremental increases based on performance, but this sensible course was not adopted until the 1930s.

The low wages were compensated for, to an extent, by the fact that board and lodging were included, and there were pauper servants to cook and clean. From the guardians’ viewpoint this meant that the indoor staff were always on the premises and always on duty. The ‘rations’ provided were much the same as those given to the paupers, although rather more generous. However, in the larger workhouses, the master, matron and their senior staff at least could live very comfortably.

The master and matron received six times the rations given to the paupers. In 1865 Catherine Leivers, matron of the small Tadcaster Workhouse, was entitled to the following rations per week: ‘1lb flour; 1/2lb sugar; 1/4lb butter; 1/4lb bacon; 1/4lb cheese; 1/4lb coffee; 3oz tea; 12 pints ale at 1s 6d per gallon; 6lbs fish or 4lb meat; 4 eggs’. Other staff members were less generously treated and the levels of rations were often a matter of dispute with the guardians. Poor Law Inspector Baldwyn Fleming told a parliamentary inquiry in 1902 of the case of a nurse whose ration of bacon was reduced from cured bacon at 7d a pound to the cheaper green bacon at 4d.

One of the guardians said, ‘I have to eat green bacon and I do not see why officers at the workhouse should eat better bacon than I get’, quite overlooking the fact that the appetite of a man who lived the greater part of the day in the open air on a farm was quite a different thing to the appetite of a nurse, who spends her time in the vitiated atmosphere of the sick wards. The nurse left, and I believe myself that this was the straw which broke the camel’s back.

In most small and middle-sized unions, salary rates hardly increased during the nineteenth century. At Bicester, for example, the amount paid to the porter (£20) remained unchanged between 1836 and 1899, while the master’s salary actually fell from £70 in 1836 to £50 at the end of the century. This may seem strange, but the Victorian period suffered little inflation. In fact, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century the cost of living fell by about a fifth, largely as a result of the import of cheap food and manufactured goods, so even the poorest workhouse officials would have found themselves better off.

Even so, expenditure on wages rose from about 12 per cent of the national expenditure in the Poor Law in the early 1870s to 18 per cent 30 years later. Much of the increase was attributable to the greater numbers of nursing and ancillary staff taken on to run workhouse infirmaries, together with contributions to the new superannuation scheme introduced in 1896.

It was not until 1885 that the National Association of Poor Law Officers was set up to represent men and women employed in workhouses, although fewer than 10 per cent of officers were members in 1893 and under a third in 1898, at the height of its power. The Association had little influence in negotiating pay rises, but its greatest achievement was to establish a superannuation scheme based on contributions from guardians and the officers themselves according to length of service. It also offered guarantee bonds for members at a cheaper rate those that provided by commercial insurance companies.

Wages were not the only source of discontent among workhouse employees. Living as they did in close proximity, indoor staff would often have been expected to mess together, sharing meals made from the rations by a pauper cook. In the less happy houses social differences, real and perceived, often led to friction between the officers. At Blean, Kent, the master wrote to the guardians in 1854: ‘I do not wish to disparage the porter – but I do distinctly say, if we have the porter forced upon us to take his meals, it will (in the eyes of the inmates) very much lessen the position we have held as master and matron of this Union’. The fact that the porter had formerly been a pauper probably had something to do with the protest. When the master and matron were allowed to have their meals separately, the schoolmistress began to object to the eating habits of the schoolmaster and porter. It did not help that, because the workhouse was isolated, it was difficult for the staff to escape one another. The porter at Blean soon resigned, ‘being unable to give satisfaction and quite tired of this secluded way of living’.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The level of care offered to the inmates varied tremendously between workhouses and even within a workhouse. To a certain extent, it depended on the facilities provided by the guardians, the attitudes of the master, matron and senior staff, and the physical layout of the building. Abuses were certainly more common in the older and smaller workhouses than in the newer ones built in the 1870s and later.

Such scandals were the exception. Many masters and matrons attempted to maintain decent conditions and an effective administration for their inmates. The Poor Law reformer Louisa Twining paid tribute to these men and women: ‘They are generally a most respectable and deserving class of persons, discharging very onerous and disagreeable duties with zeal, kindness and fairness’. Caring, well-organised and motivated individuals could make a great deal of difference to how a pauper was treated. James Greenwood was impressed by the seemingly unflappable and sympathetic ‘Daddy’, the Tramp Major at Lambeth. Indeed, for a short while ‘Daddy’ became a minor celebrity on the music hall stage, as a result of a song based on the articles Greenwood wrote about his experience of spending a night in the casual ward for the Pall Mall Gazette.

This generosity was relatively rare. In most workhouses the inmates were not cruelly treated, but they were institutionalised and neglected, and their complaints and concerns were ignored. Will Crooks found that in the Poplar Workhouse:

The inmates had not sufficient clothes and many were without boots to their feet. The food was so bad that the wash-tubs overflowed with what the poor people could not eat. It was almost heart-breaking to go round the place and hear the complaints and see the tears of the aged men and women. ‘Poverty’s no crime, but here it is treated like crime’, they used to say.

The problem was not just a lack of resources, although penny-pinching by the guardians was often a factor; often the staff just did not care. Masters and matrons, in particular, usually accepted conditions as they were and proved unwilling or unable to improve matters. Joseph Rogers described one master at the Strand: ‘he had lived long enough in the service of the Poor Law … to be fully aware that no good would accrue to him or his by too much zeal in the performance of his duty’. The other officers would have followed the master’s lead – there was little incentive for them to do otherwise, as there was no financial reward, little chance of advancement, and old hands discouraged new members of staff. But above all, as the Royal Commission on the Poor Law report of 1909 noted:

The men and women we harnessed to the service of the workhouse, invariably develop an all-embracing indifference to the suffering they cannot alleviate, the insane they cannot enliven, to the virtuous they cannot give courage, to the indolent they cannot correct, and to the vice they cannot punish.

A determined master and matron could run the workhouse more or less as they liked, with little interference from the guardians, let alone the Poor Law inspectors or, provided all the paperwork was completed satisfactorily, the authorities in Whitehall. The master’s word was law and both staff and inmates could suffer if the master (or indeed matron) took against them.

In the absence of effective supervision, a number of workhouse masters and matrons were cruel in the extreme. The scandal at Andover is the bestknown example, but mid-Victorian newspapers and the correspondence with the authorities in London are littered with other cases. One of the most unpleasant of workhouse masters was George Catch. He had begun his career as a policeman but, on the election of a friend as chairman of the Strand Board of Guardians, he became the workhouse porter. On the retirement of the workhouse master and matron, he and his wife – ‘being equally unsuitable’ in the eyes of Dr Joseph Rogers, the union medical officer – took over their positions.

Rogers eventually exposed Catch before the guardians for the mistreatment of a woman in the lying-in ward. Despite the woman’s extreme pain, Catch had delayed calling the doctor in until nine days after the birth of her child, so that Rogers did not qualify for a fee for being present at the birth. Subsequently, Mr and Mrs Catch got another appointment at Newington Workhouse in south London. In his autobiography Rogers noted: ‘So intensely tyrannical and cruel had been the rule of this man, that the day that he resigned the keys and was leaving the House, the whole establishment – at least those who could leave their beds – rose in open rebellion, and with old kettles, shovels, penny trumpets, celebrated their departure from the premises’.

At Newington, Catch’s treatment of the inmates did not improve. He once deprived a crippled pauper of his crutches and again fell out with the medical officer, whom he accused of sleeping with a nurse. Forewarned by Joseph Rogers, the medical officer produced a certificate, signed by the chief gynaecologist at Guy’s Hospital, testifying to the girl’s virginity. The parliamentary inquiry into George Catch’s behaviour at Newington showed how much day-to-day power masters had. Catch was accused of:

refusing to appoint special advisers for insane patients … in transferring sick people from the body of the house to the infirmaries without instructions from the medical officer, and in opposition to his wishes … in refusing to admit Margaret Dillon into the workhouse at night, although she had an order of admission from the relieving officer, on the plea that she was intoxicated, but with seeing her, in consequence of which she remained all night at the workhouse gate.

Assisted by friends on the Strand Board of Guardians, Catch ended up at Lambeth Workhouse, where his behaviour became worse. He harassed a young woman, who ran away. Catch, thinking she was hiding up a chimney in one of the female infirm wards, tried to smoke her out by pouring hydrochloric acid onto some substance and directing the fumes up the chimney. Had the girl been in the chimney, she would have suffocated, but the only effect was that the old women in the ward started sneezing and coughing. This was reported to the Poor Law Board, where Henry Fleming, Poor Law Inspector for London, minuted: ‘If Mr Catch had been an old & faithful officer, with an excellent general character, I think this act of his might have passed with a severe reprimand. But considering his previous history, the odium of which his [appointment] has brought upon the P.L.B.’, there was no course but dismissal.

Supported by many of the guardians, Catch declined to go. Instead, he sued the solicitor, Samuel Shaen, who had circulated a pamphlet exposing Catch’s misdeeds. Although Catch won the case, he was nonetheless dismissed, featuring in the 1871 census for Kensington as a ‘poor law official (out of employ)’. Without much sympathy, Rogers noted that, in his final years, ‘he drifted downwards until ultimately, being without means and having tired out all his friends, he in a fit of despair threw himself in front of a Great Western train and was cut to pieces’.

The case of Catherine Leivers is less well-known. She was matron of the small Tadcaster Workhouse, where she was the sole paid employee, a most unusual situation by the 1860s. In February 1865 she was exposed as a result of a public protest against the way in which one of her victims, Elizabeth Daniels, had been buried. There followed a torch-lit demonstration in which an effigy of the matron was paraded and eventually burned in front of the workhouse. According to a local newspaper:

A crowd of people numbering 300 or 400 collected in the High Street and then proceeded to the Market Place, headed by the Tadcaster drum and fife band and a banner on which it was inscribed ‘He that oppresseth the poor oppresseth his maker’… Mr Edward Spink the town bellman got up and proclaimed the object of the meeting, which he stated was ‘to openly show their disapproval of the manner in which the matron of Tadcaster Union Workhouse treated the inmates.

A petition was sent to the Poor Law Board in London, which requested that an inspector be sent to investigate the matron’s bad behaviour. Andrew Doyle was given the task. He interviewed a number of witnesses who revealed the extent of Leivers’s sadistic behaviour, not just towards the women but also towards young children. One witness was Bridget McCormick, who had been inside the house for two months. She said:

I saw Mrs Leivers strike Elizabeth Daniels with the poker on the head and cut a great gash in it. Also she hit her with the coal rake and cut her arm. She also struck repeatedly with the rolling pin. During the two months I was in the workhouse, Mrs Leivers beat Elizabeth Daniels three or four times a day… I saw her beat Charley Townend and Willy Townend on their bare backs with a thick stick until they were black and blue, for taking a drink of water. She also beat them with the rolling pin.

The guardians naturally were very defensive about the accusations. John Bromet, the clerk, wrote to London:

The board wish to remark that almost from the very day the matron came to the workhouse and introduced the system prescribed by your Board a prejudice has existed against her in the town and has gradually increased up to the present time. To this they attribute the circulation and the consequent exaggeration of many false reports with reference to the treatment of paupers in the workhouse… Any complaints by the paupers have been very rare indeed… The house itself, the linen etc are always remarkably clean.

The public inquiry did not last long, however. As the first witnesses began to give their damning evidence, the guardians dramatically left the hall with Mrs Leivers and demanded her resignation, thus forcing the abandonment of the inquiry. We do not know what happened to Mrs Leivers – she may well have been employed again elsewhere.

Certainly most scandals were the result of weak or ineffectual guardians who failed to control inappropriate behaviour by workhouse staff. Even a conscientious and experienced guardian such as George Bartley offers no advice in his guide for dealing with the master and his staff or visiting the house.

As a consequence, not a few unions were effectively run by their officers rather than by the guardians. At Great Yarmouth, in the 1880s and 1890s the union was dominated by a local solicitor, Frederick Palmer, clerk to the board of guardians. When Ethel Leach was elected to the board in 1895, she found that there were no agendas for meetings of the board, let alone minutes or accounts. When she asked to see the minutes of the assessment committee (which administered the collection of the rates), she was forbidden to look at them in his office and had to read them on the quay. Eventually Palmer overstepped the mark; the Local Government Board insisted on his dismissal after he circulated a salacious cartoon at a meeting of the guardians.

It is perhaps in workhouse infirmaries that some of the most shocking abuses emerged. At Rotherhithe in south-east London, for example, an inquiry into the infirmary castigated the master and matron for laziness in 1866. Among the claims that Matilda Beeton, a nurse at the infirmary, made to the Poor Law Board was that she had complained ‘to the master and matron … both of the conduct of the pauper nurses and the condition of the patients; but the matron had told her that she (Miss Beeton) “must get used to all that, as workhouses were not like hospitals”’.

Such a view was all too common. Another nurse, Jane Bateman, told the Poor Law Inspector about the deathbed of a Mrs Ward at another London workhouse, this time in Paddington:

When I went around the ward where she was one afternoon, I observed her pillow had been taken away, and she looked very ghastly, and asked Vernum [an elderly pauper nurse] where the pillow was, and she said ‘She’s nearly gone and I always take the pillows away to make them go quicker, and I have taken her pillow away.’ I had the pillow put back immediately, but Ward died half an hour later.

The general attitude can perhaps best be summed up by Matilda Beeton, the nurse who reported the conditions at Rotherhithe: ‘On the whole it did not seem to me that a pauper’s life was regarded in any other light than the sooner they were dead the better’.

Where the workhouse was well managed by the master and the matron, and the staff worked in good conditions with appropriate levels of pay, the lot of the pauper inmates was much improved. Yet, too often where the guardians were only interested in keeping the rates low, the workforce were meanly paid, indifferently managed and endured poor conditions which resulted in friction between colleagues and a high turnover of staff. Matters, however, improved particularly from the 1880s when better trained and more professional medical men, began to be appointed. Even so they often could do little to improve the lives of the paupers, so inevitably apathy and an uncaring attitude to the inmates often set in. As the 1909 Royal Commission found:

The men and women we harnessed to the service of the workhouse, invariably develop and all-embracing indifference to the suffering they cannot alleviate, the insane they cannot enliven, to the virtuous they cannot give courage, to the indolent they cannot correct, and to the vice they cannot punish.