Chapter Four

‘Fit for purpose’ – the Able-bodied Poor

At the heart of the workhouse system were the able-bodied paupers, that is men and women whom the authorities deemed capable of working but for one reason or another ‘sought the house’. They were the people for whom it was argued there were sufficient jobs if only they could be bothered to do them. To enter the workhouse meant a loss of dignity and an acceptance of the petty humiliations meted out by the staff, but also the increasing likelihood of growing institutionalised and becoming unable to adjust to life outside. Except in times of exceptional hardship most people strove to avoid the workhouse.

Entering the Workhouse

The Old Poor Law was on the verge of collapse in the early 1830s because of the large number of rural unemployed or, more often, underemployed men and women seeking relief, which led to a spiralling rise in the rates. The Poor Law (Amendment) Act of 1834 cut poor rates at a stroke by insisting that the able-bodied only receive relief within workhouses, where conditions were worse than in the paupers’ own homes (‘the workhouse test’). In addition, out-relief (small weekly allowances or pensions to the sick and elderly) was banned, although in most places it continued despite the efforts of the authorities in Whitehall. Every so often edicts would be issued demanding an end to out-relief, but it was not until the 1870s that the numbers in receipt of assistance really began to fall.

In most of the cases that came before the relieving officers or the guardians, it would have been considerably cheaper for the ratepayers, and better for applicants, had they been granted a few shillings of out-relief. However, this was not how Whitehall and many of the guardians saw it. Those seeking relief were to be offered the workhouse – the place of last resort, to be used when there was no alternative.

The Bethnal Green Standard for March 1866 reported the case of the wife of a wine porter who was in Guy’s Hospital with a poisoned hand. His wife applied to the relieving officer for temporary relief during her husband’s absence:

She told him that she had one day’s work every week, and that altogether she could earn about 1s 6d per week, that she was unwilling to break up her home, and that moreover she had friends who would assist her if the parish would do something for her. He ordered her the workhouse, and gave her an order to attend the Board [of Guardians]. She did so, and says that she was not asked a question, and was stopped when about to speak… She then went to one of the clergy, who gave her 2s 6d, and ordered her to make a fresh application, making use of his name, and saying that he would be willing to increase the stipend of the parish, if one were granted. The relieving officer called at her house, and said that nothing more could be done.

George Bartley’s manual for Poor Law Guardians of 1876 largely consists of warnings to new members of boards about not paying out unnecessary relief. If in doubt, he suggests that applicants be ‘offered the House’ instead of outrelief. He acknowledged that it was a decision that often met resistance. In most cases he found that ‘when the House is offered, an exhibition of temper is common and cases of great insolence are not unheard of. Many, however, particularly the old hands, prefer the more dignified way of retiring with a toss of the head, saying but too plainly “thank you, sir, I am above that”’.

In the early days of the New Poor Law, the clerk to the Bicester Union told the Poor Law Commissioners of the case of a tailor who had come before the guardians: ‘On the relieving officer giving his order [to the workhouse] he was rather abusive at first, but said he would rather be tied to the top of the highest tree in the parish than go there, and he has never applied for relief since’.

Sometimes there was no alternative to the workhouse, and when applicants accepted that they had no choice, it could be traumatic. The writer James Grant noted with regard to applicants to London workhouses in the late 1830s: ‘There are many who, in being compelled to seek an asylum in one of these places, resign themselves to utter despair. They regard themselves as entirely out of the world, and as placed beyond the pale of society as well as beyond the reach of sympathy’. The daughter of a Hertfordshire bricklayer, Lucy Luck remembered in her autobiography that, before her family entered the Tring Workhouse in 1851, they stopped nearby: ‘My mother sat down with one [child] on each side of her and one in her arms, crying bitterly over us before she took us into the union’.

The nature of the applicants inevitably changed over the 90 years of the New Poor Law. The number of young and middle-aged men and women ‘applying for the house’ fell dramatically, as they either obtained work in the booming Victorian economy or found preferable alternatives to the workhouse and its petty humiliations. In 1844, for example, just over half of those admitted to the workhouse in Richmond, Surrey, were recorded as being unemployed or destitute, a quarter were ill or infirm and a fifth were children, that is under the age of 12. Twenty years later, the numbers of unemployed or destitute had fallen to 40 per cent and the proportion of ill or infirm paupers had risen to just over a third of all applications. By the end of the century, the number of those admitted who were unemployed or destitute had fallen to less than a fifth.

In some places the New Poor Law proved almost too successful in reducing the number of able-bodied paupers, whose cheap labour was needed to keep the workhouses running at the lowest possible cost to the ratepayers. In the 1840s rural workhouses were already reporting that they did not have enough able-bodied paupers to undertake all the work that needed to be done. In June 1846 the guardians at Caersws in Mid Wales were considering hiring labourers to perform some of the heavier tasks. And in rural Norfolk a shortage of female able-bodied paupers meant that local women had to be employed to help clean and cook in the workhouse.

With the exception of the workhouses in London and the largest provincial towns, most workhouses were by the 1850s housing only the incapable, elderly and sick. As early as 1854 the economist Robert Pashley noted that ‘each building which we absurdly call a workhouse is in truth a general hospital, an almshouse, an idiot house, a blind asylum, a deaf and dumb asylum … and a workhouse. But this last part of the establishment omits to find work even for the able-bodied’. Pashley and his fellow commentators had failed to notice that the able-bodied paupers, for whom the system had been designed, were disappearing rapidly, leaving only the unemployable. Even in Stepney, in the heart of London’s poverty-stricken East End, Charles Booth found by 1889 that most able-bodied paupers were in the house because of sickness or old age. A decade later in York the other great social investigator of the period, Seebohm Rowntree, described the residents of the workhouse as follows: ‘although not imbecile or infirm, [they] nevertheless belong to the class of the “unfit”. Some are feeble-minded and dull-witted, others have some physical defect which puts them at a disadvantage in the industrial struggle’.

However, contemporary observers, such as ‘the Indoor Pauper’ and Charles Booth clung to old preconceptions, tending to cite the weakness of a pauper’s character as the reason for their plight. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ wrote: ‘I question if five in a hundred will ever be found to owe their degradation to anything save their own misdeeds… The truth is, the general run of indoor paupers deserve their fate, and a great many seem to like it better than any other’. Charles Booth shared this view, giving examples of men and women at St Pancras Workhouse in London, such as: ‘Single man. Labourer. Age 38. Chargeable many years; could get his own living, but too lazy to work; nothing at all the matter with him’. Many of the cases Booth describes had either grown up in the house or come from broken homes, for example:

Youth. Aged 18. His father was a labourer, a total abstainer and a respectable hard-working man who died some years ago. His mother was a chronic drunkard, and immediately after her husband’s death the whole family had to go in. The boy has been prosecuted for throwing up situations. Refused to work except ‘when he liked’.

Few applicants to the workhouse had ever earned enough to save for periods of hardship – or if they had, it now lay in pawnbrokers’ shop windows or in the hands of landlords. Because they rarely had permanent employment, they could not join a friendly society, which entitled members to benefits to help with illness or unemployment.

The complex reactions of Booth, Rowntree and others to workhouses and their inmates were characteristic of the age. Most Victorians had two contradictory views of the pauper. The first, deep-rooted notion was that pauperism was a plague and more women had to be prevented from succumbing to this condition by whatever means possible. It was argued that such people were naturally lazy, only too willing to take everything offered by society and then grumble that it was not enough. Their lives had been corrupted by indolence and vice, particularly drink and, in the case of women, immorality. To provide anything more than the bare minimum would only encourage an increase in their numbers, because it was natural to them to live off the ratepayers rather than complete a day’s honest toil.

The second attitude was much more sympathetic, particularly towards the elderly and children. The authorities and the middle classes had an increasingly rosy view of the elderly couples worn out by years of honest labour, who they felt should be encouraged to spend their declining years at leisure in ‘the House’. Children, too, were perceived as innocent victims of the system, who should be made comfortable and trained in skills so that they would not burden the Poor Law as adults. However, the unimaginative and penny-pinching ways in which most workhouses were run frustrated attempts to improve conditions until the late-Victorian period.

The system’s deficiencies were viewed with sense as well as sentiment, with many observers also noting the effect of the workhouse on paupers. The institution often proved a quagmire from which, once drawn in, a man or woman found it increasingly difficult to escape, except in their imaginations. Fred Copeman, who grew up in Wangford Workhouse in Suffolk during the First World War, remembered his mother, who was also in the house, ‘always seemed to be discussing what she would do when her ship came home. All the inmates had this habit and talked constantly of what they would do when they got out. Very few of them ever left, however’.

One unfortunate inmate who seems to have struggled to cope outside was Elizabeth Sexton, who was admitted nine times to her local workhouse in Smallburgh, Norfolk between 1839 and 1844. On her first visit she was accompanied by her husband and five dependent children. A year later, in April 1840, pregnant and deserted, she entered the house again with her children. Here her daughter Louisa was born and died, and Elizabeth also lost a son before she was discharged in September 1841. She was back in the house a week later and stayed until March 1842; she was readmitted ten days later. Three months later, in June, she was discharged, then readmitted the same day. By this time she was pregnant, claiming that the father was the workhouse master, although this could not be proved; a son, Richard, was duly born in October. In May 1843 the entire family was discharged but was readmitted the same day; they were next discharged in July and readmitted in August. The family spent the winter as indoor paupers and were discharged in April 1844. A month later the younger children were readmitted, having been abandoned at the workhouse gates by their grandmother. In July their mother and the two older children were readmitted. Two days later they discharged themselves, but were readmitted the following day and remained for a fortnight. Thereafter, Mrs Sexton and her family seem to have left the area, but it is likely that the children spent much of their upbringing in other workhouses.

Fallen Women

If workhouse children excited pity, the worst form of condemnation was heaped on the single mothers of illegitimate children – arguably even vagrants received better treatment. Many large towns had lying-in hospitals, paid for by voluntary donations, where poor women could be delivered of their babies, but these refused to admit single women, because polite society had long condemned the bearing of children out of wedlock. But there was an additional financial problem for the Poor Law authorities, as an illegitimate child could end up being the responsibility of the parish or Poor Law Union.

Under the Old Poor Law great efforts were made to track down the fathers and make them either pay for the upkeep of the child or marry the woman. Illegitimate children could be quite a burden on the ratepayers, so it was in the interest of the authorities to minimise the expense where possible, either through compelling the woman to marry or by passing the responsibility on by sending the woman back to the parish of her birth (known as the ‘place of her settlement’), so that the authorities there had to take responsibility for her and, more importantly, her bastard child. A third of the women who were removed from parishes in Cambridgeshire between 1660 and 1834, for example, were expectant mothers.

In theory, marriage provided authorities with the most acceptable solution to a woman’s predicament, even if the union was not entirely a voluntary one. It was not unknown, however, for a man who had married a woman in a ‘knobstick wedding’ (as the phrase was), and enjoyed a wedding feast at the expense of the parish, to then disappear without trace, thus leaving the authorities to bear the costs of the wedding and raising the child. In 1793 Esther Herbert, from Fulham, London, became pregnant with the child of Samuel Gillingham, a local ne’er-do-well. The overseers made the couple marry and, in a calculated fit of generosity, the parish paid for a marriage licence and a celebratory dinner. Having had his fill of roast beef and ale, Gillingham fled immediately after the proceedings, never to return.

Despite the authorities’ best efforts, women still entered workhouses to have their children. Elizabeth Bennett, a widow with four children, was delivered of an illegitimate child at Andover in June 1845. She was alarmed when the chaplain ‘spoke to her about adultery and false oaths’ and then prayed with her. She admitted adultery to the inquiry (‘it was bad, but not very bad’) – but denied she was a common prostitute. She said that when she found she was pregnant the guardians had taken away the out-relief for merly provided to her children.

The authorities despaired when women came to have several illegitimate children, often by different fathers. One such case, at Maidstone in the 1860s, was Eliza Wright whose husband had died, leaving her with a toddler. Thereafter, in the workhouse, she had four children, presumably by separate fathers because their names are not shown on the birth certificates. Eventually, she settled down with John Bright, a labourer at a local paper mill, and it is possible that her last son, John, was his.

A study of St Martin’s Workhouse in central London in 1817 and 1818 suggests that a third of the women between the ages of 16 and 44 who entered the house did so to have children, and another 11 had been returned from other parishes to have their babies. After 1834 the pointless and cruel removal of pregnant women declined, although it did not cease altogether and the legislation was not finally repealed until the 1940s. But that was the best that could be said for the New Poor Law. Strenuous efforts were still made to discourage mothers from having illegitimate children, and the illegitimacy rate did fall dramatically during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, in 1880 5 per cent of births were still out of wedlock and they were likely to take place in the workhouse.

Neither mother nor child was entitled to outdoor relief, so the woman was automatically forced into the workhouse if she was not able to support her child at home. Depending upon her circumstances, her other children could also be taken from her and raised in the workhouse until she was able to care for them. Inside the workhouse these mothers endured an unenviable existence, subject to petty humiliations to remind them of their shame. On appearing before the guardians before admission, they were likely to encounter sniggers and knowing winks. In a few places they were made to wear a yellow top (which earned them the name ‘jacket women’) instead of the blue one worn by other paupers. This practice was forbidden in 1844, although some unions, such as the one at Gressenhall, continued to issue the jackets for at least another 20 years.

Lying-in women in general received a poor diet as they recovered from the birth of their child. In some workhouses mothers were given a diet of fluids until the seventh day after the birth and then returned to the general food regime or dietary, without any supplements or special treatment. In 1866 Edward Smith, the medical officer to the Poor Law Board, found that ‘the diversity in the amount of food obtained by lying-in women is very remarkable; and the feeble gait and pale spiritless aspect are proof that the quantity of food allowed is deficient for some’. Other workhouses were better – Smith found some in which nursing mothers were placed on a diet of meat, sometimes with the addition of butter, tea or perhaps beer.

However, it was not uncommon for mothers of illegitimate children to be further discriminated against. At Andover, for example, any additional items allowed for new mothers, such as tea and sugar or toast and water, were not given to those who had had illegitimate children. Mrs Bennett told the assistant commissioner investigating conditions at Andover Workhouse in the 1840s that it was not until five weeks after her confinement that she was allowed anything nourishing, that is ‘between a quarter and half of a pint of beer, a little tea in the morning, and a piece of bread with a little dripping on it’ – and even that was not always provided. Initially she was offered cheese but could not eat it, receiving instead mouldy bacon and beef ‘which had been boiled to a rag’ and toast and water, although the bread ‘was sometimes burnt up into a coal’. Bennett pleaded with the matron, Mrs McDougal: ‘Will you allow me a bit of something extra otherwise I’ll never get out of this bed. I get so weak; I keep giving the child the breast, but I have nothing to eat. I am very hungry in the night’. She was reluctantly given a little beer.

The child itself suffered: ‘Poor dear goose. It was pretty near starved to death; pretty near. The mistress said nothing would be allowed for it until it was a month old. Some cold water was given to it. The doctor afterwards ordered some arrowroot, but it was almost a week before I got it’. Indeed, Bennett was still so weak that she collapsed during the cross-examination and had to finish giving her evidence from a bed brought into the town hall. In common with treatment of the other paupers in Andover, Mrs Bennett undoubtedly suffered more than she might have elsewhere.

Conditions improved from the 1880s onwards with the arrival of women guardians, who combined the censorious attitudes of the period with a desire to improve the lot of single mothers and their children. The Workhouse Girls Aid Society was founded by a group of London guardians to find foster parents for the babies and suitable work for the mothers, in the hope that they might re-enter respectable life. The Society even accepted that ‘a girl gets more than one chance before we give up trying to help her’, although women guardians were noticeably harder on those who had more than one illegitimate child.

Keeping Body and Soul Together

Nothing summed up the penny-pinching nature of the Poor Law in the minds of the general public better than the dull and mean food and drink provided to the paupers. It is something that surfaces time and again in literature of the period, beginning of course with Oliver Twist. Most dramatic were the horrific revelations about conditions in the Andover Union Workhouse, where, as we have seen, starving inmates were forced to eat the marrow from rotting bones to survive and children lived on scraps thrown to the chickens.

For both paupers and the staff the most important room in the workhouse was the dining area. Here men, women and children ate their dull meals in separate rooms so that there could be no communication between them. In fact, there should have been no noise at all, for the Workhouse Orders and Regulations laid down by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1836 stated that ‘silence, order and decorum should be maintained’.

Further orders were given about mealtimes. Breakfast took place at 6am in summer (7.30am in winter), dinner was at noon, and supper at 6pm. Meals were to be eaten in a dining hall or day room under strict supervision. No food was to be taken away uneaten, although it was not uncommon for paupers to smuggle out pieces of bread to be swapped or sold for tobacco. Samuel Green, one of the starving paupers at Andover during the scandal of 1846, told MPs: ‘Most of the people who take ’bacco sell their bread. ’Bacco is a very wholesome thing especially in the workhouse’.

Will Crooks’ father, who was in the Poplar Workhouse, was disciplined for providing his son with food saved from his own rations:

Somehow his father, away in the men’s ward, got to know that young Will … was not able to eat the fare provided in the workhouse. The men occasionally had suet pudding and one dinner-time the old man secretly smuggled his portion into his pocket. In the afternoon he made over to the children’s quarters, hoping to hand it to Will. The pudding was produced, the lad’s hungry eyes lighted up, when, behold! It was snatched away, almost from his vary grasp. The burly figure of the labour master interposed between father and son. This was a breach of discipline not to be tolerated in the workhouse. ‘But the boy’s hungry, and this is what I’ve saved from my own dinner,’ argued the father (all in vain).

It was difficult to compare what was provided in the workhouse with the diet of the average labourer, although many observers thought that it was better than that available to the poorest labourers outside the house. For example, in 1852 the magistrate Alexander Somerville claimed that the ‘workhouse diet in this county, low as it is, is better than half the Wiltshire workers get at home’. Such was not the intention, however. The Workhouse Orders and Regulations of 1836 clearly stated that ‘the diet of the paupers shall be so regulated as in no case to exceed, in quantity of food the ordinary diet of any class of able-bodied labourers within the same district’. To provide too much might excite complaints from aggrieved ratepayers and even encourage the poor to enter the workhouse. To provide too little would provoke scandal, as the Andover Workhouse scandal and response to Oliver Twist showed. In general, the authorities erred on the side of caution. Paupers had to be fed at the lowest possible cost on a diet no better than that available to the poor outside the workhouse.

Sixty years after Somerville, Seebohm Rowntree’s survey of poverty in York found that the dietary laid down by the Local Government Board was more generous than that enjoyed by families in the city living below what he called the poverty line. In the case of one family, he remarked that although the wife was ‘an exceptionally clever and economical housekeeper’, the family budget was ‘4s 5d per week below the sum required to provide such a family with the diet supplied to the able-bodied poor in the York workhouse’.

The Daily Bread

Ever fearful of the charge of luxury, the Commission and its successors kept strict control over meals served in the workhouse. At the heart of the system was the dietary, which laid down what was to be offered to the paupers at every meal, together with the weight or volume of the food available. Until 1848 workhouses had to use one of six dietaries, that is a weekly rota of meals set by Whitehall. These were by no means arbitrary: government officials took a great deal of care in preparing dietaries that were as nutritional as possible according to the knowledge of the time. As early as 1846, Dr Lyon Playfair devised a scientific scale listing the weights of food provided in the workhouse rations in terms of nitrogen and carbon, in an attempt to more accurately meet the inmates’ nutritional needs.

The dietaries dictated the exact amounts of food to be offered to the various types of pauper. Able-bodied men were provided with more than women or children. The foods specified were bread, gruel, meat, broth, cheese, potatoes and rice or suet pudding. Some regional differences were allowed for so that on the coast, for example, fish was often substituted in place of meat. Special dietaries were provided for women, new mothers, children and the aged. In general, they were a scaled-down proportion of that offered to able-bodied males. For adult women (who generally received 80 per cent of the male diet) and the old, this may not have mattered much, but for babies and young children the dietary was at best poor.

The scandal at Andover led to this strict control over menus being relaxed, partly because during the inquiries it was revealed that the dietary prescribed had had a mistake in it. Thereafter unions could choose their own menus, but these, and all minor changes to them, had to be agreed in London. Improvements appear to have been marginal. In the 1860s an investigation into the effectiveness of dietaries was conducted by Edward Smith for the Poor Law Board. He noted that:

The general effect of the dietaries in use is upon the whole to maintain a fair degree of health and strength; but they do not gratify the taste or meet with the cordial approbation of the inmates. The aspect of the inmates is not commonly that of robust health, neither is there any marked accumulation of flesh; but the aspect is not generally unhealthy, and the appetite, spirits and general strength are fair.

Despite the relaxation of the rules, it was common for the Poor Law Board to object to items or meals proposed by the guardians. Even simple things like the allowance of sugar for tea or treacle for gruel could be struck out. The Wharfedale Union in Yorkshire, for example, wanted to introduce a new dietary in 1869, but it was told that milk porridge should replace tea on Tuesdays and the quantity of pudding should be increased from 12 to 14 ounces for adults.

In 1901 workhouses returned to dietaries laid down by Whitehall, although unions now had a wider choice of dishes they could serve. A lot of the petty regulations requiring the approval of any changes to menus were abolished. The intention was to allow paupers, especially children, to eat as much as they liked of the cheaper carbohydrates, particularly bread, in order to fill them up. Unfortunately, the guardians and their officers did not always understand the new rules and this led to problems. The Congleton Chronicle, for example, reported that one guardian claimed that the bread ration was more than he could eat, while another joked that they should print up menu cards for the workhouse.

The paupers were also unhappy with the changes. In Ripon, the Visiting Committee noted that: ‘There were complaints that the new diet list did not include meat and potato pie which had proved to be the most popular dinner’. And in Bradford, paupers decided to take matters into their own hands. In March 1901 the Manchester Guardian reported:

At the Bradford Workhouse yesterday the new dietary of the Local Government Board came into operation, when served with gruel instead of tea, according to the order, the women rose in a body and left the room. Three women who were ringleaders were yesterday brought before the Stipendiary Magistrate. These women, with others, had refused to work on the food, and had also behaved in a rowdy manner to the Workhouse Master… Each defendant was sent to prison for a week.

Generally the food on offer was just plain and unexciting, in part because the hot dishes were almost always boiled. Edward Smith found that ‘the cooking of the food is a very simple process and consists of boiling almost exclusively’. Suet pudding was also typical of the dull fare offered, although it could be improved with a savoury sauce or gravy. The medical officer at Belford, Northumberland, Dr Cunningham, was moved to write to the guardians about the pudding in 1877:

The inmates complain they cannot eat it… I consider it a very indigestible meal for old people and especially for the women – they never taste it. I would submit for your approval that a dinner of rice and milk be substituted. It would have the advantage of being digestible, nutritious, one that the inmates desire and at the same time it would cost no more than the meal they get at present.

However, his request was not acted upon.

In some places the food served to paupers was on occasion unfit for human consumption. In the late 1880s a guardian in Camberwell, Miss Augusta Brown, tried to improve the soup served at the workhouse, which was made of water, onions and grease. She took a bowl of it to the board meeting, but her fellow guardians refused to touch it. As the soup had already been turned down by her cat and dog, she thought that wise. Indeed, few guardians were prepared to taste the food served in their name.

Occasionally, the inmates enjoyed a particular dish or meal. Edward Smith noted that dishes which had some residual flavour were the most popular: ‘Meat and potatoes, meat and potato pie, and Irish stew are the most generally liked. Pea soup is less generally disliked by the adults and the aged than I had expected to find, but disliked by boys and girls’. Amazingly, the popular Liverpudlian meat, hardtack biscuit and vegetable stew known as lobscouse, or scouse, may have originated in the workhouse. The first recorded use of the term was in 1837 by the cost-conscious medical officer of the Liverpool Workhouse, who reported to the Poor Law Commission about the successful application of the ‘evaporating process’ to ‘Meat Scouse’, leaving ‘a solid mass of nutritious food’. Despite its continued association with pauperism, scouse became a popular local dish, always eaten with red cabbage pickled in vinegar.

One reason why the food improved was the increased interest taken in it by a new generation of women and working class guardians in the 1880s. Guardians such as Charlotte Despard in Lambeth, instituted simple changes like providing sliced bread for the elderly and children, who had difficulty cutting loaves or gnawing chunks.

Others found more fundamental faults. On his election as a guardian in Poplar, in 1892, George Lansbury visited the workhouse, where he viewed the supper of oatmeal porridge with concern:

On this occasion the food was served up with pieces of black stuff floating around. On examination, we discovered it to be rat and mice manure. I called for the chief officer, who immediately argued against me, saying the porridge was good and wholesome. ‘Very good, madam,’ said I, taking up a basinful and spoon, ‘here you are, eat one mouthful and I will acknowledge I am wrong.’ ‘Oh, dear no,’ said the fine lady, ‘the food is not for me, and is good and wholesome enough for those who want it.’ I stamped and shouted around till both doctor and master arrived, both of whom pleaded it was all a mistake, and promptly served cocoa and bread and margarine.

Only the larger workhouses employed a cook. Food in the smaller establishments was generally prepared by the workhouse matron, who had no training in catering, assisted by able-bodied paupers of varying degrees of competence. As a result, elementary mistakes were made. One visitor described the kitchen at the Huddersfield Workhouse as follows:

They had two coppers so set that their tops were separated only by a space of three inches. When I was there they were boiling clothes in one and soup in the other; and there were no lids on them. When the soup boiled over into the clothes I raised no objection, but when the clothes boiled over into the soup, I said I would not stay to dinner.

Another guardian, Louisa Twining, found tea and cabbage boiled in the same cauldron at the Tunbridge Wells Workhouse.

The whole system for the provision of food was open to abuse. Most guardians were either oblivious to the abuses or connived at them. In many workhouses, perhaps the majority, contractors supplied inferior products, short measures were given to the paupers, and goods were stolen from the stores. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ pointed out that ‘in many workhouses [the paupers] are half starved or a little more, just that a few may make illicit gains, while a few more gorge inordinately’. There was a general belief that there was collusion between tradesmen and the master of the workhouse. Occasionally this sparked off public protests. In 1852 there was a riot in Ripon when the workhouse matron was accused of boiling 19 pounds of meat in a copper from which only 15 pounds of meat were produced. The Poor Law Board was called in to investigate.

As a deterrent to short measures, printed copies of the dietary were prominently displayed in workhouse dining rooms, although (at least in the early years) relatively few paupers could read them. In addition, food was measured in front of the inmates, though few dared complain to the master, let alone the guardians, if the food provided was in short measure or unsatisfactory. In one provincial workhouse kitchen, the writer Thomas Archer found that ‘every pauper can demand to see his rations weighed; and some newcomers exercise this privilege with a morose disbelief in the probability of their obtaining their just due – a disbelief for which their previous experiences may perhaps have given some grounds’.

The only time the dullness of the diet was varied was at Christmas or the occasional royal celebration, such as a coronation or jubilee. Then a special meal was laid on, invariably with a centrepiece of roast beef, although for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 residents at Congleton Union were offered a meat tea. Officially this was frowned on by the authorities. Guardians who sought permission to organise such events were told that the funds had to come out of their own pockets. In replying to requests to commemorate the new monarch, the Poor Law Commissioners tartly replied: ‘The Commissioners feel as usual that the guardians will perceive the propriety by a degree, even in deference to so joyful occasion, the burden of those who contribute to the rates. Many of whom by the most strenuous exertion and rigid economy can only just help themselves without parish relief ’.

In Nottinghamshire, to mark the young Queen’s coronation in June 1838, Southwell guardians collected money from local well-wishers. They provided workhouse inmates with roast beef and plum pudding for dinner, plum cake and tea for supper ‘with one pint of ale for the old men each’.

A Set of Coarse Clothes

On their admission to the workhouse, paupers were placed in the receiving ward and awaited inspection by the medical officer. Here they would be searched, undressed, washed and provided with workhouse clothes. Objects such as cards, dice, ‘spirituous liquors’ and matches were confiscated. At Belford in 1864, Catherine Rogers described her admission during an inquiry: ‘I was put into the receiving ward and got washed – I was then given two petticoats, a gown and an apron – a pair of stocking legs without feet – a pair of carpet shoes down at heel and an old shift’. Entering the workhouse was a traumatic experience, vividly recounted by George Lansbury when, on his election as a guardian in Poplar in 1893, he paid a surprise visit to the workhouse. Thirty years later he could still remember it:

It was not necessary to write up the words ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’. Officials, receiving ward, hard forms, whitewashed walls, keys dangling at the waist of those who spoke to you, huge books for name, history, etc, searching and then being stripped and bathed in a communal tub, and the final crowning indignity of being dressed in clothes which had been worn by lots of other people, hideous to look at, ill fitting and course – everything possible was done to inflict mental and moral degradation. The place was clean: brass knobs and floors were polished, but of goodwill, kindliness there was none.

The unwary could find themselves victims of a scam too. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ described how, on arrival at the unidentified London workhouse he spent some months in, he had enjoyed the luxury of a dip in clean warm water and was then supplied with a flannel singlet. The pauper issuing the clothes assured him that:

this was a very great favour indeed, and therefore well worth a bit of tobacco or a copper. And he got a penny – my last… But the old fellow lied in every particular. The singlet, as it turned out, was a portion of the ordinary workhouse dress, while the clothes were so bad that the taskmaster ordered them to be exchanged for better ones, a few days later. Thus my first experience of the place was to be victimised.

Clothes and other objects were taken away and cleaned (often literally fumigated in a stove to kill the vermin) and then ticketed with their owner’s details, ready to be returned on departure. In a Lancashire workhouse early in the 1900s, temporary workhouse inmate Mary Higgs was set to sort out the storeroom full of paupers’ belongings. She discovered that many were ‘unparcelled, and some dirty and foul-smelling’. The heat provided in the workhouse was often very dry, and this could lead to infestations of moths. Mary Higgs’ closer inspection of the clothing revealed that ‘most all the bundles, which were not tightly tied, were more or less moth-eaten. It made my heart ache to see these clothes in such a state, remembering that they were all that poor people possessed’.

The new inmate might be given a distinctive, coarse and usually illfitting blue uniform to wear. This helped identify paupers, should they abscond from the workhouse, and perhaps more importantly was intended to reinforce the idea that they had lost all identity on admission. In Poplar, George Lansbury found that there was ‘plenty of corduroy and blue cloth. No under-garments of any kind for either men or women, no sanitary clothes of any sort of kind for women of any age, boots were worn until they fell off ’. In Norfolk women were issued with stays, a flannel or linsey petticoat, a striped serge or grosgrain or union chambray gown, camblet jacket or shawl, checked neckerchief, slate-coloured hose, ankle shoes and a white calico cap or cambric hat.

Workhouse uniforms were extremely unpopular and it was not uncommon for their wearers to try to destroy them. Vagrants, in particular, often tore up their clothes in the hope that they might receive new ones. So common was this practice that in some workhouses cheap, extremely uncomfortable canvas trousers were provided to those who had done so.

Until it was forbidden by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1844, Camberwell Union in south London gave casuals jackets emblazoned in large letters with the messages ‘Camberwell Parish’ and ‘Stop it’. They provoked curiosity and ribald remarks on local streets. One vagrant, Thomas King, was given three shillings by sympathetic bystanders when wearing such a jacket, before being arrested for begging and taken before Lambeth magistrates.

Not all workhouses had uniforms, however. Smaller ones saw no point in issuing uniforms; at Belford, for example, the guardians explained in 1851 that ‘persons who come into the workhouse who are likely to be permanent paupers are allowed to wear out their own clothes and are from time to time afterwards supplied with such clothing as they require’.

Divide and Rule

Once admitted, men, women and children were placed in separate wards and families were split up. They ate in separate dinning rooms and exercised and worked in separate yards. This rule was another deterrent, perhaps the most effective of them all, designed to discourage poor families from ‘seeking the house’, and workhouses built after 1836 were rigidly divided in this way. A newspaper report on the opening of the new Lambeth Workhouse in 1874 noted:

Each class has its own and distinct day-rooms, dormitories, staircases, lavatories, water closets, airing-grounds, and workrooms; the only common-place of meeting being the chapel and dining-room, where conversational intercourse is forbidden. The several classes in each sex are for aged, able-bodied of good character, and two subdivisions of able-bodied of bad character, together with accommodation for a limited number of boys and girls. There is a dining-hall for each sex leading direct from the kitchen.

However, as ‘The Indoor Pauper’ pointed out, communication was often possible. Able-bodied women paupers were always around cleaning, while men might be engaged in doing odd jobs. He describes the flirtations, and even romances, which went on behind the master’s or overseer’s back: ‘More progress in an intrigue is made in five minutes, by a pair of indoor paupers when they happen to meet, than is made in as many weeks by persons more fortunately placed’. Nevertheless, in practice the rule of separation was not universal. In the smallest workhouses such as Belford, which had room for a maximum of 30 paupers, most of whom were elderly, the rule of separation was not strictly enforced.

The workhouse operated to a strict, almost monastic, timetable, set down by the Poor Law Commissioners in London, which doesn’t seem to have been much varied or ignored by the guardians:

All paupers except the sick, the aged or infirm, and the young children shall rise, be set to work, leave off work and to bed at the appropriate times: rise 5am (summer) and 6am (winter); work 7am or 8am to 12 noon, dinner until 1pm; work 1pm to 6pm (all year) and bed 8pm (all year). They shall be allowed intervals for meals which will be announced by the ringing of a bell.

In theory the paupers were fully occupied, either locked in their dormitories or in the workshops, with short periods in the dining room, but of course they could not always be under the eye of the master or his staff. In particular, they were left very much to their own devices after lights out, even though each dormitory had a wardsman who was responsible for discipline and also for nursing any sick paupers to be found there. Most wardsmen, however, wanted a quiet life or were quite incapable of maintaining order. If ‘The Indoor Pauper’ is to be believed, Saturday nights were lively ones in the wards. He described quite a music hall atmosphere, with songs and stories aplenty to while the hours away. Each person was expected to contribute a song or a recitation, and those who didn’t, joined in the choruses.

In spite of these entertainments, in even the best-run workhouse, the routine and the conditions encouraged inmates to become indolent and apathetic. Sunday was the worst day of the week, when there was no work and almost nothing to stimulate the inmates. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ criticised the routine by which the days were conducted:

A hardening and deteriorating process is always going among them [the indoor paupers], and most rapidly when they are most unemployed, that is on Sundays … the listless and lazy become more so; the filthier grow filthier still; while those who heretofore possessed merely a lurking and uncertain inclination towards certain vices have it strengthened and confirmed here.

Apart from the chance to go to church (the larger workhouses had their own chapels), there was absolutely nothing to do and nothing to read except religious tracts or perhaps a tattered ‘penny dreadful’, an old newspaper or a cheap novel. Some men took the opportunity to write letters, although there were rarely enough pens, paper and ink to go round; most just lounged about, waiting for lunch or dinner. Sunday was perhaps worst of all for children. Will Crooks remembered: ‘[I] thought that time could not be more terrible anywhere. They had dinner at twelve and supper at six, confined during the yawning interval in the adult day room with nothing to do but look at the clock, look out of the window and then back to the clock again’.

Earning Their Supper

Provided they were not bedridden or elderly, paupers were expected to contribute to the costs of their upkeep by undertaking work as directed by the master or the taskmaster. Women cleaned, cooked, and helped in the sick wards. Men helped to maintain the buildings and garden.

Most rural and suburban workhouses had a large garden or even a farm, such as those found at Southwell and Gressinghall. At Caersws the guardians’ minutes for September 1844 noted that in the previous quarter five hundredweight of early potatoes and sundry vegetables had been grown. Often the vegetables were sold to help towards the cost of the poor law. An elderly agricultural labourer in Richmond Workhouse in Surrey wrote to the Poor Law Board lamenting the fact that the inmates’ efforts did not result in their ever having fresh vegetables.

The most prized jobs were within the house itself. First of all, paupers could be paid a small gratuity. At Marylebone, in 1846 one shilling a week each was given to the 53 pauper women who acted as nurses, 20 laundrywomen, two blind men who taught the school children singing, one driver and horse-keeper, one cutter-out (of cloth for uniforms), three assistants to the master and clerk, four pauper bearers and two chairmen (who carried the sick inmates). Two shillings a week were paid to the cook and barber, and 1s 6d was received by a pauper who taught handwriting in the school and the woman who laid out the dead.

Kitchen work was particularly prized for the extra food it offered and the opportunity for graft. Fred Copeman was befriended by Maggie, a cook in the master’s kitchen. Unlike the other paupers, she

was round and fat with a perpetual smile. One of my jobs was to turn the butter churn in the dairy, and as this was attached to the Master’s kitchen and pantry, Maggie would leave me something nice to eat, hidden behind the churn – an apple, a handful of raisins or some other luxury, which the inmates never saw in the main hall.

It was also possible to steal goods and sell them either to fellow paupers or outside the house. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ complained about a meal he had just had: ‘The soup too, was about as poor as soup could be; and yet immediately after dinner the pantry-men were selling basins, full to the brim, and anything rather than thin, to those who could afford to buy. It was shameful. But I regret to say such things are the rule’.

But most men and women had menial and dreary tasks, such as picking oakum, which was done with a large metal nail, known as a spike (which may be where casual wards and flophouses got their nicknames), and was very hard on the fingers. Paupers were supposed to pick three pounds of oakum a day, but few achieved that target. A petition to the Poor Law Board from James Shrimpton and other paupers at Stepney in 1850 complained that, ‘we are kept locked in the cell yard to break stones and kept on bread and water every other 24 hours because we cannot break five bushels of stone per day, being mechanics and never broke any before’.

But in most places the tasks were often done badly or very slowly to eke out the time available. Margaret Harkness, who described London’s Whitechapel Workhouse in her novel Captain Lobe, said:

The Whitechapel Union allows no man to remain idle from the time he gets up until he goes to bed again. A sodden look has settled on the faces of the older men and they apparently thought little of what they were doing … not a voice was to be heard in the workshops, the men did not whistle or sing; they looked like schoolboys in disgrace rather than free-born Englishmen.

The tasks they had to perform (in theory at least) to earn their keep were generally pointless, such as picking oakum, or removing hemp from telegraph wires (a task given to ‘The Indoor Pauper’, and performed in desultory fashion):

There was no hurry over the work – very much to the contrary – but plenty of chatter and larking when the taskmaster was out of sight… Skulking … I found was common all over the place, most of the inmates vying with one another, as to which should do the least possible work, and with much success I must confess.

Other workhouse tasks, such as nursing the sick, were often beyond the inmates’ capabilities. And almost no assistance was provided to those paupers who were genuinely seeking work, in fact hindrances were put in place, such as the rule that those in the casual wards could not be discharged until 11am, by which time almost all casual jobs had long since been taken.

The Ones Who Got Away

Few able-bodied paupers held down any sort of permanent work – if they had, they would not have been in the position they were. Or if they had been employed in the past, it was now beyond them. The exception was during times of economic slump, particularly during the 1830s and 1840s, when unemployment drove many more people into the workhouse. A large proportion of men in Victorian and Edwardian England were casual labourers in the fields and factories, in the docks and building sites, often holding down several jobs in an attempt to make ends meet. Women were domestic servants and labourers, no doubt in a lot of cases combining this with prostitution. Many were admitted because they had been deserted by husbands or lovers and left with small children they could not feed.

These employment patterns were reflected in the fluctuating numbers admitted to the workhouse. The winter months were almost always busier, largely because more casual work was available in the summer. Cold or wet days made work difficult for those employed outdoors selling goods on the street or labouring in the fields, while a prolonged cold snap could force thousands of poor people into the workhouse. In London, and to a lesser extent in other fashionable centres, trades were subject to the vagaries of the Season, which lasted from March to the end of July, when the wealthy came to the metropolis. This created an increased demand for servants, builders, dressmakers and workers in various luxury trades.

George Bartley noted that workhouses emptied during the summer, as the harvest and market gardens demanded labour: ‘Old women are very much on the move at these times of year. Many want to go weeding in the market gardens, where they can pick up a few pence a day even when quite infirm’. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ said that during the hopping season in August and September, many people left the workhouses in London. He found that, despite a strict ban on the sexes mixing with each other: ‘Each man must have a female companion – “a hopping wife” as she is termed – selected from the females on the other side. As I write (middle of August), not less than a dozen negotiations tending in this direction are in progress, literally within earshot’.

Some of the most troublesome paupers were known as the ‘ins and outs’ because they were constantly discharging themselves and seeking readmission, either on the same day or a short time after. The authorities had no real redress, for inmates – other than those in the casual wards – could ask to be discharged at will – it was one of the few differences separating the workhouse from a prison.

One man at St George Hanover Square Workhouse in London discharged himself 93 times in 1889, almost always being readmitted on the same night. His only lengthy absence from the house was when he was in prison for 21 days. Robert Hedley, Poor Law Inspector for London, thought this case was ‘an abuse of Poor Law Relief ’.

‘The Indoor Pauper’ explained that:

some of these fellows go out on a job, keep at it as long as it lasts, lay in good stores of tobacco at the end, and then spend every farthing left of their earnings in a ‘topping spree’, lasting one to three days, according to the amount received. Then hey for the workhouse, or ‘spike’ once again! Here the blackguards recover from their debauch, and drown away the days, until they are ripe for another job and another ‘topping spree’.

Among the ‘in and outs’ were beggars and professional thieves: ‘These are fellows at the bottom of the professions, as a rule’, wrote ‘The Indoor Pauper’, ‘low footpads who waylay children, and rob them of their school pence – who snatch articles from passing carts or who steal from street-stalls or on the displays in front of shops’.

Any pauper could discharge him or herself at any time, provided he or she gave reasonable notice. This was generally accepted to be three hours. If they had brought their family into the house, they were discharged at the same time to prevent parents from abandoning their children. Sometimes men and women left for very short periods, just because they wanted a breath of fresh air and a change of scene. Charlie Chaplin, who was briefly a child pauper at Lambeth and then the Central Poor Law School at Hanwell, recalled in his autobiography that, after two months at the school, he and his half-brother were returned to Lambeth, where they were met at the gate by his mother Hannah, dressed in her own clothes. Desperate to see them, she had discharged herself and her sons from the workhouse. After a day spent playing in Kennington Park and visiting a coffee shop, they returned to the workhouse where they were readmitted.

Others left determined never to return. It was often possible for the more deserving of paupers to persuade the guardians to give them a small grant of money or clothes when they left the workhouse, in the hope that this would be enough for them to find a job and so no longer remain a burden on the poor rate. George Bartley said that, at his board of guardians, the workhouse master announced all those who were leaving the house, ‘and they generally appear before the board hoping to get “a trifle to leave the house”. If they have behaved well this request is granted, and a shilling or two and some loaves, according to the family, are given to them’.

Occasionally, a pauper was more generously treated. One was Thomas James, who impressed the guardians at Caersws. The minutes for November 1846 note that he ‘has not only made himself useful in the gardens and stables of the workhouse but has on a number of occasions been entrusted with and carried out the duties of porter when the post was vacant, be allowed £2 and clothes suitable for an independent labourer as he intends to take his discharge’.

Although it was possible for the guardians to discharge inmates if they considered that they were capable of supporting themselves, it was unusual. A former naval pensioner, John Thomas Wimble, was discharged by Hackney guardians in 1896 and complained bitterly to the Local Government Board: ‘As a consequence I walked about destitute for two days’. The guardians claimed that Wimble had been told to go to the Hadleigh Farm work colony in Essex, where he would be taught a new trade. The Board admonished the guardians saying that ‘they would not be justified in adopting this course unless they had satisfied themselves that the able-bodied person is not destitute or has been offered work and declined it’.

Occasionally the master or guardians would attempt to dissuade a pauper who was in no fit state to leave. In 1856 The Times reported the suicide of Elizabeth Mann and four of her children. Mrs Mann, who was clearly very mentally disturbed, had been in Marylebone Workhouse several times and repeatedly sought her discharge. On the last occasion, one of the guardians, Mr Potter, spent a quarter of an hour trying to persuade her to stay but without success.

Many cases cited by Charles Booth in London involved generations of the same family. Perhaps the most extreme example was the family of Martin Rooney (not his real name) who, Booth suggests, were ‘prolific paupers’. The relieving officer said that he did not know a more drunken, disreputable family than the Rooneys. In 1889 Rooney had been resident in the Bromley by Bow Workhouse since 1878 and was aged 86 and blind. At the same time his wife, Eliza, was also an inmate; the relieving officer said that he had seen her ‘beastly drunk’ at all times of the day. She occasionally left the house, working sometimes at the lead works and sleeping either with her sons or rough.

The couple had three children. The eldest son, Patrick, had been a Royal Marine but was discharged in 1885 for striking a petty officer. He had then become a docker, receiving several short prison sentences for stealing from the docks, but at the time of writing was in Poplar Workhouse, suffering from a bad leg. James, the other son, did not trouble the authorities. The daughter, Bridget, had married a bricklayer’s labourer, John Murdock, and borne him four boys. Murdock had deserted her on several occasions and been sent to prison. She, in turn, had left him for another man and as a result, he had spent some time at Bromley with the children. The two eldest Murdock children ‘were emigrated to Canada’. Murdock’s brother, George, lived with a prostitute, Anna Peel, whose parents were at that time in West Ham Workhouse. She had been admitted to Bromley, suffering from syphilis, in 1885.

Rooney’s sister-in-law Mary had also been admitted to the house, after she had been deserted by her husband in 1867, and she had been in and out of the workhouse ever since. Her married daughter, Mrs Wilson, and grandson, Michael, had also received support over the years.

Eliza’s sister Jane, too, was very familiar to the relieving officers. Jane married Thomas Milward, who died in 1879 and was noted as a ‘notorious drunkard’. By 1882 she was living with a carpenter, Robert Belton, who had been in the workhouse in 1879 with a bad leg and later died in the sick asylum in 1885. Having sold up Belton’s home and spent the money on drink, she was admitted to Poplar Workhouse in 1887. Since then she had been in and out several times, as had all her grown-up children.

The Punishment Books

There is no doubt that discipline was strict, with a long list of offences ranging from swearing and smuggling food out of the dining room to breaking windows and assaults on workhouse staff. Particularly in the early years of the New Poor Law, when buildings were overcrowded and the conditions were appalling, many masters and their staff experienced difficulties in maintaining order. The problem was greatest within the large metropolitan workhouses, where conditions were worst. In January 1846 alone The Times reported that at least 57 paupers from several workhouses had been prosecuted for various misdemeanours, including 27 casuals who had been involved in a riot at Christchurch Workhouse in Spitalfields.

Young women could be particularly troublesome. At Holborn, for example, in the early 1840s, a gang of four or five girls caused mayhem. Their leaders, Margaret Callaghan and Elizabeth Burgess, came and went from the workhouse at will and, when refused readmission, broke windows, scaled the walls and generally misbehaved. In March 1841 Hannah Foley, Mary Curran and Elizabeth Allen were sentenced to 14 days for fighting and disorderly conduct and later that year were convicted of stealing another inmate’s shawl.

In The Uncommercial Traveller, Charles Dickens recalls being shown around Wapping Workhouse by the matron, where they came across a group of girls who were being punished for their bad behaviour by picking oakum:

They sat in line on a form, with their backs to a window; before them, a table, and their work. The oldest Refractory was, say twenty; youngest Refractory, say sixteen…

‘A pretty Ouse this is, matron, ain’t it?’ said Refractory Two, ‘where a pleeseman’s called in, if a gal says a word!’

‘And wen you’re sent to prison for nothink or less!’ said the Chief, tugging at her oakum as if it were the matron’s hair. ‘But any place is better than this; that’s one thing, and be thankful!’’

A laugh of Refractories led by Oakum Head with folded arms – who originated nothing, but who was in command of the skirmishers outside the conversation.

‘If any place is better than this,’ said my brisk guide, in the calmest manner, ‘it is a pity you left a good place when you had one.’

Because of their sex, women were likely to be more gently treated, particularly by the magistrates, and there was legislation forbidding the corporal chastisement of women in workhouses. Despite this, in 1850 the Poor Law Board had to remind unions that they could not discipline nursing mothers in the same way as other inmates.

Refractory paupers could depend on a certain amount of public support from the press (particularly The Times) and the magistrates, many of whom were unsympathetic to the meanness of Poor Law officials. And although it is possible to make too much of this, they often had the support of local people; many of whom would have had direct or indirect experience of the house and the more affluent would have been sympathetic to the plight of paupers. The ill-treatment meted out to Ann Dowling and her 10-year-old daughter Jane Kingston by the master at Bethnal Green in 1844 led to letters in The Times, a public meeting attended by 200 people and a collection in order to pay the legal costs of prosecuting the guardians.

Initial punishment was usually a reduced diet, such as bread and water, rather than the usual dietary. However, if an inmate repeatedly offended or damaged the building, the guardians could order them to be put in solitary confinement for a few hours.

In more severe cases, usually relating to the theft of workhouse property or an assault on another inmate, paupers could be taken before the magistrates and sentenced to a term in prison. Between 1837 and 1842 there were over 10,500 committals for breaches of workhouse discipline, nearly a fifth of which had occurred in London. And as late as 1873 some 1,200 paupers were still being sent to prison each year. Even in peaceful rural areas there could be trouble. In March 1888 the Belford Advertiser reported that ‘Robert Rogers, a deformed pauper, was sent to prison for 14 days … for wilfully breaking four panes of glass in the Receiving Ward the previous evening’.

The punishments meted out by the master and his staff were recorded in punishment books, which were regularly presented to the guardians for their inspection. The surviving volume for Southwell for 1864 gives an idea of the offences and how they were punished. On 1 February Mary Anne Cox was taken before magistrates for ‘striking the inmates’; on 14 May Ann Morrison and Sarah Slater were found fighting (‘Morrison had 2 very bad black eyes’) and taken before the board; on 9 October Hannah Hickling spent five hours in the refractory cell for ‘using obscene and profane language and annoying the other inmates’; on 14 November John Fox and William Crooks had their ‘meat stopped at dinner’ for fighting, and finally on 19 November Sarah Watkins and Ann Morrison also had their meat stopped at dinner for ‘quarrelling and persisting in making a great noise when ordered to be silent by the Master’. He added that they were ‘two very disagreeable women’.

However, judging by the number of scandals involving the inappropriate punishment of paupers by workhouse masters and their staff, it was clearly very easy to get round the rules, as the staff were likely to have the support of the guardians.

The best masters and their staff avoided punishing the paupers unless absolutely necessary. Daniel Pickett, who was master at Stratford-upon- Avon Workhouse for 32 years, told a newspaper reporter on his retirement:

‘Really, I don’t think I have punished half-a-dozen people, or taken more than two before the guardians, during my 40 years in poor law service. I don’t believe in too much power being allotted to one man. I’ll show you my punishment book.’ He did – it took ten minutes to find it. When he did produce the book, it was covered with dust, so rarely was it used!’

‘To go to bed after tea each day for a week’, was the harshest chastisement that the pressman found as he looked through it.

What the Paupers Thought

The views of the paupers themselves are hard to determine, since most of what we know about them has come to us through the Poor Law authorities. The paupers are, as the academic David Englander suggests, ‘ephemeral figures’ in their history, as very few left memoirs or wrote letters; for the most part, they were incapable of doing so. One exception is John Rutherford, ‘The Indoor Pauper’, whose book was published in 1885. In addition there are the accounts of the middle class ‘social explorers’ who spent time in workhouses either to write books about their experiences or as part of their campaign to understand and improve the lot of the poor. The best known of these books are by George Orwell and Jack London and they remain powerful condemnations of the workhouse system.

Another source of paupers’ views is the numerous letters of complaint from pauper inmates sent to the authorities in London. Some of these are deranged and pathetic, but others make serious points about the organisation and conduct of the workhouse. A group of Spitalfield silk weavers, for example, petitioned the Poor Law Commissioners in the mid-1840s about having to break stones, which would wreck their sensitive hands and thus prevent them from getting weaving jobs again. Surprisingly, the letters to the authorities in Whitehall were often taken seriously and led to investigations into the behaviour of staff and conditions in the wards.

However, it was much harder for inmates to complain about conditions within the workhouse itself. Few had the necessary education, confidence or social skills, and neither the master nor the guardians were much disposed to listen. And although they grumbled, not many paupers were prepared to do anything more.

Mary Windser, a pauper nurse and laundrywoman at Paddington Workhouse, told a parliamentary investigation into conditions at the infirmary that the guardians regularly visited the wards and spoke to the inmates, usually without the workhouse master being present:

I never heard of any of the patients complain to the guardians, but they would talk as soon as the guardians were gone; they would say what they might have told the guardians, but did not; I used to say ‘Why did you not?’, but they used to turn it off; sometimes they complained to me, but I did not tell the guardians.

Even at Andover, where paupers lived close to starvation in desperate conditions, there is just one solitary entry in the guardian’s minute book: ‘A complaint by William Brown, an inmate of the Union House was heard as to not having sufficient food and wishing to leave the house and says he might as well live out with little food as in’.

There were a small number of paupers who knew enough about the law and their rights to cause trouble, or put their complaints in a cogent way. They wrote letters to the authorities in London or gathered petitions from their fellow inmates about unfair or pointless regulations or how they were treated by particular members of staff. The residents of Stepney Workhouse submitted a petition in 1850 complaining about the drunkenness and brutality of the taskmaster. They particularly resented the lack of respect they were shown and the fact that they were constantly being called ‘old buggers’ and ‘old sods’.

Some complainants were largely harmless, such as the gentleman met by Charles Dickens:

“Sir, I have a complaint to make against the master.”

“I have no power here, I assure you. And if I had –”

“But, allow me, sir, to mention it, as between yourself and a man who has seen better days, sir. The master and myself are both masons, sir, and I make him the sign continually; but, because I am in this unfortunate position, sir, he won’t give me the countersign!”

The schoolmaster Thomas King submitted a number of detailed complaints to the Poor Law Commissioners in 1844 about conditions at Woodbridge Workhouse near Ipswich. He alleged that, as a patient in one of the sick wards, he had ‘witnessed the most heart-rending acts of cruelty, oppression, and neglect, towards the sick and other inmates of that establishment, whereby the poor were left to die in the darkness of the night’. He further alleged that he had witnesses who would attest to ‘the disgusting conduct of the matron whilst in a state of drunkenness, furiously driving through the streets and in some instances vomiting over the side of the cart’.

The Commissioners were concerned enough to send Sir John Walsham, Poor Law Inspector for East Anglia, to investigate; he later published his findings in a parliamentary paper. Although Sir John found some minor infractions, they were nothing as great as had been alleged by Thomas King, who, in turn, was systematically exposed as being a natural troublemaker. At Barham, in Suffolk, he had been dismissed from his post as the union schoolmaster ‘for having been guilty of very improper conduct in interfering with the duties of the governor and setting forth various falsehoods’. A witness who knew him there described King as being a ‘gross and shameless liar’. Even a fellow pauper, Mary Harvey, remembered that ‘he was the most disagreeable man on the sick ward, and that neither she nor her husband could bear him, because he was always a breeding of mischief and lies’.

The most difficult pauper of all was probably Daniel Thompson, who over a 20-year period between the 1850s and 1870s bombarded the Home Secretary, the Poor Law Commissioners, the Lord Mayor of London and others with complaints about his treatment in the City of London Workhouse. Taking into account his time in gaol, by his own reckoning he had been in and out of the workhouse at least 300 times. He appeared regularly before the courts and was quite capable of conducting his own defence. In 1857 he called the workhouse master and porter before the Guildhall magistrates for confiscating his papers and refusing relief. In his defence the master said that Thompson was exceptionally troublesome and had already been committed on at least 21 occasions for being refractory. More importantly, by reading newspapers aloud and encouraging his fellow paupers to send petitions to the Commissioners, he had managed to ‘render the paupers dissatisfied and to create a great deal of insubordination’.

Thompson also objected to work and in 1863 he was prosecuted for refusing to pick oakum. He argued in his defence that he ‘objected to the tyranny and oppression of the menials in the Union House, as a violation of the rights and liberties of a British subject. He protested against being compelled to pick oakum. It was felon’s work, and had so been described by Mr Selfe before a committee of the House of Commons’. He lost his case and was sentenced to 21 days in prison, but this did not diminish his ardour. In 1868 he was again prosecuted for refusal to work – the fiftieth time that he had been charged with refractory conduct – and in the following year appeared in court for a similar offence.

On rare occasions grumbling led to riots, particularly when there was overcrowding or a sudden worsening of conditions. The most serious disturbances seem to have occurred when discipline collapsed because the workhouse master was either too severe or unable to impose his will on a gang of unruly paupers. Urban workhouses, with their wards of semi-brutalised young women from the streets, seem to have been particularly prone to riots. It is sometimes easy to read too much into this. For the most part, paupers were apathetic recipients of what was on offer. The conditions at the Andover workhouse, for example, were not exposed as a result of protests by the inmates (they were either too cowed or too enfeebled), but by a guardian who was disgusted by the conditions he found, and by detailed reporting in The Times.

The World Beyond the Walls

Long-term paupers were entitled to the occasional period outside the house, normally one half-day a month. The elderly, in particular, looked forward to this break in the tedium. Margaret Harkness described how in the the Whitechapel Workhouse the younger paupers were not allowed out at all, but ‘the old ones only get one holiday in the month. Then the aged paupers may be seen skipping like lambkins outside the doors of the Bastille, while they jabber to their friends and relations’.

On a visit to an old persons’ ward, Dickens met one ‘hoarse old man in a flannel gown’, who told him:

‘I am greatly better in my health, sir; but what I want, to get me quite round,’ with his hand on his throat, ‘is a little fresh air, sir. It has always done my complaint so much good, sir. The regular leave for going out, comes round so seldom, that if the gentlemen, next Friday, would give me leave to go out walking, now and then – for only an hour or so, sir!’

Who could wonder, looking through those weary vistas of bed and infirmity, that it should do him good to meet with some other scenes, and assure himself that there was something else on earth? Who could help wondering why the old men lived on as they did; what grasp they had on life; what crumbs of interest or occupation they could pick up from its bare board.

Guardians also regularly granted leave to inmates to visit children or look for work. This privilege could be stopped if it was abused. Minute books are full of examples where the guardians’ trust was not repaid. At Richmond, Surrey, for example, the volume for 1851 noted that ‘Elizabeth Taylor having been allowed to go the school for see her child and having drink on the way home, she returned to the house drunk – that she be imprisoned for four hours each day with spare diet’.

Visitors were permitted at certain times of the month. At Congleton the published hours in 1858 were between 2pm and 4pm on Tuesdays and Fridays. They were forbidden to bring in provisions or articles of any kind for the use of the inmates, but their visits were much welcomed, particularly by the elderly.

In large unions there were also more formal visits from groups of women workhouse visitors, who brought with them flowers and improving books to brighten up the wards of the young and the elderly; they also kept an eye on the sick. Initially these visits were arranged by Louisa Twining through her Workhouse Visiting Society, which was established in 1858. Within a few years the Society had 340 women members who regularly visited workhouses. The reaction of guardians was initially generally hostile. In Richmond it took a concerted campaign by the women members and the local churches to persuade the guardians to change their minds.

It took workhouse visitors, usually middle class ladies, and then, from the 1880s, the election of women and working class guardians to introduce a more human face. Initially, visitors provided flowers and books, but the rising generation of guardians made more fundamental improvements to conditions, from painting rooms in bright colours to introducing diets appropriate for old people lacking teeth.

Although less well documented, it is clear that working class communities also had great sympathy for those in the house, particularly when the authorities did not abide by what was regarded as acceptable behaviour. They deplored the failure of receiving officers and guardians to help genuine applicants, especially when they neglected to provide a proper burial for paupers. The scandal in Tadcaster, for example, began as a result of a torchlit procession protesting at the failure to give the pauper inmate Elizabeth Daniel an appropriate funeral. Their concern is understandable because everybody knew people who were or had been inmates, and it was a fate that could befall any family who fell upon hard times.

Although the able-bodied paupers of either sex soon became relatively uncommon, the system largely remained focused on them, acting firstly as a deterrent to their admission in the first place and then making life uncomfortable for those who choose to enter the house. The elderly and the children were penalised because the food provided was often not suitable for them and the routines they had to follow were almost meaningless. Conditions for them, however, improved from the 1880s. But the worst treated of all were the single mothers, who were doubly humiliated first by the morality of the period, which regarded sex outside marriage as taboo, and then by their reception from the Poor Law authorities.

Conditions for the paupers were only one step removed from prisons – indeed the comparison was often made between the two institutions. Initially the sole advantage that the workhouse had was the inmates were free to come and go more or less as they liked, yet many destitute people preferred to commit petty crimes rather than enter the workhouse. It is perhaps little wonder, as the food was dull and meagre, the uniforms uncomfortable, the tasks paupers had to perform were either difficult to achieve or pointless. But above all it was the faceless institutionalism that people objected to: paupers lost their identity. The best example of this is the famous photograph of the dining room at Marylebone with row upon row of men, sitting without any spark of life about them. This is the real legacy of the workhouse.