Chapter Five

Suffer the Children …

Of the inhabitants of the workhouse, only the children growing up there inspired universal sympathy among the Victorians, although many a hypocritical tear was shed over the very old. It was not without reason that Charles Dickens chose to condemn the New Poor Law through the figure of Oliver Twist – an innocent victim to be pitied rather than condemned. Here also was a child who, like so many others, was at the mercy of an uncaring bureaucracy.

At the time that Oliver Twist was published in 1838, there were large numbers of children in workhouses. In 1839 children made up about a third of the total number of indoor paupers. Many were illegitimate. Such children posed a real problem for parochial or, from 1834, the Poor Law authorities, as they could become the responsibility of the parish or union until they reached the age of ten. Outdoor relief was not given to women with illegitimate children, nor did the child receive any such help, so mothers were forced to enter the workhouse if they were unable to support the child. Other children could also be taken into the workhouse, depending on the mother’s circumstances; they would be raised there until she could take care of them at home, as happened with Charles and Sydney Chaplin.

However, the numbers decreased as the century advanced. In the 1870s roughly 55,000 children were in the charge of workhouse guardians; about 40 per cent of these were in permanent care, having either been orphaned or deserted by their parents. Another 15 per cent were children who had one or both parents also living in the workhouse, or were the sons and daughters of widows or prisoners. The rest were the offspring of vagrants, tramps and the ‘ins and outs’ who were always coming and going from the house.

Sometimes children were brought into the workhouse because their parents had simply run out of alternatives. At Poplar, in the early 1870s, because her husband had been crippled by a work accident, Will Crooks’ mother had a small grant of three shillings and a couple of loaves of bread a week from the guardians, which was just enough to survive on. In his biography of Crooks, George Haw recalled how:

The chairman singled out Will, then eight years of age, and pointing his finger at him, remarked solemnly: ‘It’s time that boy was getting his own living.’

‘He is at work, sir,’ was the mother’s timid apology. ‘He gets up at quarter to five every morning and goes around with the milkman for sixpence a week.’

‘Well can’t he earn more than that?’

‘Well, sir, the milkman says he’s a very willing boy and always punctual, but he’s so little that he doesn’t think he can pay him more than sixpence yet.’

Because Will was working the guardians declined to continue the out-relief, but offered the family the house:

The mother said “no” at first, marching them all bravely home again. Stern want forced her to yield at last. The day came when she saw her five youngest, including Will, taken from home to the big poorhouse down by the Millwall Docks. The crippled father was admitted into the House at the same time.

The reluctance of Crooks’ mother was understandable: life for a pauper child was bleak and hard. The workhouse and its routines were not designed for children and their needs, schooling was often harsh, and there was at best erratic training for the world outside the workhouse. Even so, it was probably better than living – and possibly dying – on the streets of London or Manchester, or working for a labour-master in the fields.

The autobiographies of workhouse children contain none of the fond memories that appear in the memoirs of those who went to public or boarding school. Allowing for a layer of Victorian and Edwardian sentiment, they are all fairly brutal accounts of loneliness, pointlessness and violence. The workhouse boys who wrote them (I have been unable to find an account by a girl) were the ones who were intelligent enough to overcome their upbringing: Charles Chaplin, later the greatest of all silent film comedians; Henry Morton Stanley (John Rowlands as he was christened), a great journalist and explorer; Will Crooks, a prominent trade unionist and labour leader. Other accounts include those of Charles Shaw (in adult life a North Staffordshire potter) and an extremely honest one by an anonymous young man identified only as ‘W.H.R.’, which was published in the Local Government Board’s annual report for 1874. All except Chaplin experienced workhouses in the 20-year period after about 1842; Chaplin was first a pauper child at Lambeth Workhouse, then attended the Central London District School at Hanwell in west London in the late 1890s.

These children arrived for different reasons, none unusual among their contemporaries. Chaplin and ‘W.H.R’ entered the house with siblings because their parents could no longer look after them; Rowlands was an orphan; and unemployment forced Crooks and Shaw into the house with their parents. The shock of the transition from life outside was severe. Before ‘W.H.R’ entered, for example, he describes himself as a street urchin ‘without shoes or a cap… [I] knew all the public houses round about … [and had] never been inside a church or school’. Aged about eight (his sister was six), the children were taken to the Woolwich guardians by an uncle; eventually they ended up at a ‘union workhouse on the west side of London’. His first experience there was being made to take a hot bath: ‘I never was so afraid in my life; I thought they were going to kill me’. Chaplin was aged six when he was transferred to the Hanwell school from Lambeth Workhouse with his older brother Sydney. ‘The first few days I was lost and miserable, for at the workhouse I always felt that mother was nearby, which was comforting’. Initially, he was in the ‘infant department’ and remembered being bathed by the older girls: ‘having to submit to the ignominy of a young girl of fourteen manipulating a face cloth all over my person was my first conscious embarrassment’.

Charles Shaw’s first memory of Chell Workhouse in the Potteries was that it was all ‘so unusual and strange, and so unhomelike’. He was taken into the schoolroom, where he found ‘hungry-looking lads, with furtive glances, searching everything and everybody, and speaking in subdued whispers’. Hunger was to dominate his experience of life there. At Chell, Charles Shaw found the skilly (gruel) served for supper, with its ‘mustiness and fustiness … most revolting to any healthy taste. It might have been boiled in old clothes, which had been worn upon sweating bodies for three-score years and ten’.

Charles Dickens memorably commented in Oliver Twist on the food, and the lack of it, served to the pauper children. ‘W.H.R’ also complained of the small rations:

Four ounces of sop bread [scraps of bread mixed with milk and water] for breakfast, four ounces of bread and butter for supper and dinner in proportion is not enough… [It was] a scanty ration… Nearly every boy fortunate enough to have a halfpenny or penny would directly after breakfast hang about the stairs leading to the bed-rooms to catch the old women who used to make the beds, and ask if they had an allowance of bread for sale.

Little changed in subsequent years. Sydney Chaplin, who worked in the kitchen, would occasionally pass over a sliced bread roll with a big lump of butter to his brother Charles, which would be shared with another boy, ‘not that we were hungry but the generous lump of butter was an exceptional luxury’.

Night-time could also be a traumatic experience. Charles Shaw slept in a long dormitory with beds ‘hard enough for athletic discipline’, where the ‘boys there as cruel as neglect and badness could make them’ tormented the younger or more nervous children with blood-curdling tales of ghosts and murders and practical jokes. In Will Crooks’ dormitory (which he shared with his young brother) there was ‘an idiot boy, who used to ramble in his talk all through the night, keeping the others awake’. ‘W.H.R’ was very homesick and particularly missed his sister: ‘I remember putting my head right under the bed-clothes and having a quiet cry. Night after night I did this’.

Inside the workhouse, children were physically separated from their parents and from adults as a whole, although the older boys might share wards with adult males. On Sunday afternoon Charles Shaw and the other children who had parents in the house were allowed to see them, which was ‘an hour of unspeakable joy … a reminder of home and humanities outside’.

Chaplin’s mother occasionally came from Lambeth to visit her children Once, after he had had his head shaved and covered in iodine because of ringworm, his mother visited: ‘Her presence was like a bouquet of flowers; she looked so fresh and lively that I felt ashamed of my unkempt appearance and my shaved iodined head… Mother laughed, and how well I remember her endearing words and she laughed and kissed me ‘With all thy dirt I love thee still’.

John Rowlands (Stanley) was less lucky. His own mother, who had been admitted to the workhouse with her step-children, was once pointed out to him: ‘I had expected to feel a gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed as with a snap’.

Eventually they all left. Charles Shaw was at Chell for just over a month; his father managed to find work as a painter and gilder in a local toy factory and he escaped with a feeling of ‘exultant joy… All seemed sunshine and gladness.’ As Will Crooks left: ‘The boys crowded round him, wishing they were in his place. Poor miserable lads, he parted from them with feelings of the deepest pity’. Because of his mother’s mental illness, Charles and Sydney Chaplin were discharged to the care of their father, whom Charlie had met only once. And according to his autobiography, Rowlands (Stanley) fled the workhouse with a friend at the age of 15, after a blazing row with the schoolmaster James Francis, in which he knocked the master unconscious. ‘We climbed over the garden wall and dropped in Conway’s field and thence hastened through the high corn in the Bodfari direction, as though pursued by bloodhounds’. Unfortunately, the workhouse records make no mention of this dramatic incident, and it is probable that he was discharged in the normal way. Rowlands (Stanley) concluded that his treatment in the workhouse was ‘ferocious and stupid’, citing the tasks that he and his fellow inmates had to undertake, ‘such as sweeping the playground with brooms more suited to giants than little children, the washing of the slated floors when one was stiff from a caning’.

Admittedly conditions for workhouse children could be bad, but it was not all brutality and boredom. There were special meals at Christmas time and to celebrate royal events or perhaps the wedding of a prominent guardian. Visitors often brought toys, and local upper and middle class ladies, or the guardians themselves, organised treats or presents for the children. The master of Ripon Workhouse, for example, noted in his diary for 24 June 1884 that:

Miss Beckersdeth kindly sent a large quantity of toys for the children last Saturday. I made to say how much the children appreciated the thoughtful kindness of Miss Beckersdeth. I ought to have reported two or three weeks ago that Lady Ingham on visiting the house brought the nursery children toys and the aged inmates a quantity of plum cake.

The cases of bright workhouse children were sometimes taken up by local people, who would raise money to help them in their careers. Occasionally mistakes were made. At Battle in Sussex, in the mid-1840s, James Joseph Crouch showed a lively intelligence and local do-gooders encouraged him to enter the Catholic priesthood – but after three years in a seminary in Rome he was expelled for vicious behaviour. However, his training did come in handy in later life; as an imposter and conman in England, America and Australia, he invariably posed as a clerical figure.

Preparing for the Future

Inside, the workhouses physically separated children from their parents and indeed from most adults, although the older boys might share wards with adult males. The policy of separation was partly to deter families from entering the workhouse if at all possible, but it was also rooted in concerns for the children’s moral welfare. Particular care was taken to keep girls away from young women, because it was feared that the latter would spread the contagion of pauperism and immorality through their irresponsible behaviour. It proved difficult to achieve in practice, however; in 1850 a Poor Law inspector wrote that it was a ‘hopeless task to raise [children] from a state of pauperism, dependence and crime to one of honest independence and correct moral conduct in the present [workhouse] as the children were continually in contact with the adult inmates, who were generally of depraved habits’.

Nearly 40 years later, in 1887, Mrs Henry Kingsley, a guardian from Richmond, Surrey, told the Central Poor Law Conference that, despite the kindness of the staff and guardians, if she had her way not a single child would be placed in the house: ‘We take everything that is right and good away from them; we take fatherhood and motherhood away. We certainly feed and clothe them, but that is not all. We want something higher and better if we want to raise the tone of the whole of the coming nation.’

It was certainly true that all too often children were let down by their upbringing, both before they arrived at the workhouse and during their time there. This made it hard for many children to make the best of their chances – and until the 1880s and 1890s there were no agencies they could turn to for help. Young girls found it particularly difficult to adjust to life on the outside. Inevitably, a certain number kept returning to the workhouse throughout their adult life.

One of the worst aspects of the early years of the Poor Law was the policy of farming children to contractors outside the workhouse. Baby farming, as it was known, had long been a way of removing unwanted children. Orphans and bastard children were sent to carers in rural areas, where they often died unloved and forgotten. This, frankly, barbaric practice was also adopted by the Poor Law authorities.

Under the Old Poor Law, children had been sent from London workhouses to contractors, who were paid a sum per week to look after them. The unfortunate children were ‘educated’ and put to work by the contractors, who profited from their labour – a system that continued well after 1834. By the 1840s there was so much demand for these services from the guardians that contractors such as Peter Drouet at Tooting (once described by Dickens as ‘vile, vicious and cruel’) and Frederick Aubin at Norwood built large schools capable of housing hundreds of children. It was an extremely profitable business; they received 4s 6d a week per child and had almost a free hand to do as they wished with them.

The guardians and their staff occasionally gave these places a cursory inspection. Mr Eaton, master of the St Pancras Workhouse, thought Drouet’s ‘altogether a well conducted institution … [and] saw nothing at all objectionable with regard to the place’. He visited Tooting repeatedly, he said, not by order of the Board but ‘from his anxiety to see that the children were properly treated’. However, the system came crashing down after a cholera outbreak at Drouet’s killed 180 children out of nearly 2,000 inmates. The resulting investigation revealed horrific mistreatment of the children. One boy, Thomas Leach from Kensington, said that: ‘in one of the rooms in which he slept on the ground-floor there were five beds, and in each bed six boys slept, three at the top and three at the bottom of the bed. They had only a straw mattress to sleep on, which was covered by a sheet. The floor of the room was a stone one’.

This, and similar scandals, finally forced Parliament to act. Legislation was passed outlawing baby-farming and encouraging unions to combine to establish large district schools (sometimes referred to as ‘Industrial’, ‘Monster’ or ‘Barrack’ schools). Mr Aubin’s establishment at Norwood was bought by the new Central London School District. Others were built in the still rural areas a few miles outside London at Upper Norwood and Sutton in Surrey, in Hanwell, Middlesex, and Forest Gate in Essex. Outside London, similar schools were established in Manchester (at Swinton) and Liverpool (Kirkdale), but otherwise few were built – perhaps because they were soon criticised as being nothing but over-large regimented ‘barracks’. A few individual unions also built schools; St Pancras, for example, erected premises at Leavesden near Watford to house 700 pupils.

It was hoped that the district schools would give children a real chance in the outside world, through the provision of decent facilities, child-centred education and healthy surroundings, and sometimes the principles seem to have come close to working. A reporter for Household Words was impressed by his visit to Swinton in July 1850. He found a happy and disciplined place:

The children obeyed the summons to school with pleasing alacrity. This is owing partly to the agreeable mode of tuition adopted, and in some measure to the fact that the lessons are not allowed to become tedious and oppressive. As soon as any parties give unequivocal signs of weariness, either there is some playful relaxation introduced, or such children are sent into the play-ground. On the present occasion, as soon as the master applied his mouth to a whistle, away trouped the children in glad groups to an ante-room.

Pupils also found the district schools better, at least in comparison with the workhouse schools they had come from. In the early 1860s ‘W.H.R.’ had been dreadfully mistreated by a Mr Saltley, who taught tailoring at Woolwich District School in the early 1860s. Saltley once beat the boy insensible; ‘W.H.R.’ later wrote that the ‘blood spurted from my ears. I have never thoroughly got over it … there is never a winter goes by when I do not feel much pain in the ears and head generally’. The boy thought himself fortunate when he was transferred from Woolwich to the South Metropolitan District School at Sutton. Impressed on arrival by the size of the place, he saw it as a chance for a new start: ‘It did certainly look a magnificent place, and as I got up nearer to it … I admired it the more and resolved to do the best I could do there’. ‘W.H.R.’ ended his time at Sutton as a pupil teacher.

Reading, Writing and ’rithmetic

The schooling of children varied greatly between unions. The difference was particularly marked between the large urban unions, which educated hundreds of children in district schools, and the small rural unions, where a single schoolmistress might look after all the children or, increasingly, where the workhouse children attended local schools. The choice of approach largely depended on the guardians and their attitude to education. The Newcastle Commission on Education, which reported in 1861, commented that in all but the largest towns the guardians were ‘taken from a class generally indifferent to education, often hostile to it’.

Not every guardian, therefore, could be convinced of the need for education, particularly the teaching of reading and writing, which some thought would lead to freethinking and questioning by children of their place in society. In Pershore, Worcestershire in 1839, the guardians decided that it was ‘quite unnecessary to teach the children in the union workhouse the accomplishment of writing’ and objected to a proposal to buy pens and paper for the schoolroom.

At the same time, neighbouring Martley attracted national attention for refusing to teach their children at all. The Commissioners forced the guardians to appoint a schoolmistress, although a subsequent inspector found that she had made little headway. In the workhouse he came across a ‘nice-looking and intelligent’ 16-year-old girl, an inmate for nearly seven years, who ‘did not know how to write a word nor does she know the use of a single figure’.

Many rural unions provided three hours’ teaching every morning, apart from Sunday, followed by a few hours’ work for the older boys in the fields and vegetable patches surrounding the workhouse. The infamous schoolmaster James Francis at St Asaph was an advocate of this, arguing that it kept the children out of mischief, that it would improve their health and ‘besides that it would learn them to use their limbs and to be useful when they left the workhouse’. Before Francis arrived, all the boys did in the afternoon was pick oakum, while the older boys worked with the tailor. ‘All the exercise they had was going out walking along the road for half an hour or so’.

In the cities, school could last most of the day, leaving little time for play. At Marylebone in the 1850s, school for children between the ages of 7 and 16 lasted from 9am to 5pm, with two hours for lunch. In the morning, boys would be taught historical reading, general and mental arithmetic, grammar ‘parsing and dictation’, and the girls were taught reading, spelling, tables and arithmetic, and writing in copy books. After dinner, the boys would write in copy books, read and learn about geography ‘with maps’, while their sisters would be taught ‘needlework, knitting, learning the time of day and domestic employment’. The infants (aged between two and seven) were expected to spend two or three hours a day in reading, spelling and learning their tables. Wednesday afternoon was a half-holiday, when on fine days the children would be taken into nearby Regent’s Park.

Education of workhouse children was the responsibility of the chaplain – who with few exceptions had no educational qualifications nor any interest in teaching children. Yet the chaplain was often the best paid of all workhouse staff – and the least busy – generally combining his duties in the workhouse with his position as curate in a local Anglican parish. The appointment of such men reflected the desire of the 1834 Royal Commission to bring the solace of the established church to a godless section of the population and, perhaps, in the minds of the more romantically inclined, to try to recreate the idealised medieval communities of monastic communities carrying for the poor.

The chaplain’s contribution was often to give a weekly lesson on religious instruction and to insist on using totally unsuitable religious books as textbooks and to stock the workhouse library. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ said that the religious tracts produced every Sabbath and the Bible which lay on one of the window sills were generally ignored unless a ‘hypocrite of a certain class’ picked them up and appeared to study them ‘in order to make an impression on somebody and to secure a selfish end’. The staunchly Methodist Charles Shaw remembered the Anglican chaplain visiting Chell to say grace over Sunday lunch; it went on and on:

as long as the sermon he had said in church… We were told … of the great mercies we enjoyed, the good food provided, of the comfortable clothing we had, and how we were cared for by those all around us. All this was said, while before us on the table lay a small hunk of bread, a small plate with a small slice of very thin cheese and some jugs of water.

Far more important for real education were the schoolmasters and mistresses. In all but the smallest places, workhouses were required to appoint at least a schoolmistress. In some houses they might be the son, daughter or relative of the master and matron, but generally they were recruited from young men and women of a reasonable education but with few prospects. In July 1848 Ludlow Union placed an advertisement in The Times for a schoolmistress at £20 per annum. She was required to instruct the children in reading, writing and arithmetic, ‘the principles of Christian religion, as well as training them in habits of usefulness and industry’. Candidates were requested to supply their application in their own handwriting, stating ‘residence and occupation in previous life’, as well as testimonials.

Most schoolmasters and mistresses came from lower middle class backgrounds. It was one of the very few career opportunities open to young women, and for intelligent girls it was almost the only alternative to domestic service. Some had been former pupil teachers (sometimes known as monitors), bright pupils who were used to teach the younger children, such as ‘W.H.R’ did at Sutton. William Rush, aged 13, had taken over teaching his fellow pupils at Gressenhall in Norfolk when the schoolmaster was taken ill. When the school inspector James Kay visited in 1837, he was impressed to find ‘the whole discipline and routine of the garden workshop and class instruction went on unbroken’. At Swinton, Household Words found the monitor system in operation:

It was a pleasing sight to see half-a-dozen children seated or kneeling in a circle round the same book, their heads almost meeting in the centre, in their earnestness to see and hear, while the monitor pointed quickly with the finger to the word which each in succession was to pronounce. All seemed alert, and the eyes of the monitors kindled with intelligence.

Few schoolmistresses and masters, at least initially, had any formal training, although there was a short-lived training college for workhouse teachers at Kneller Hall in Twickenham in the 1840s and 1850s. An alternative was one of the religious-based training colleges that came into existence in the 1840s and 1850s.

Schoolmasters and mistresses had one of the most difficult jobs in the workhouse, which may explain why they rarely lasted for more than a few months. They were woefully underpaid and very overworked, teaching large classes of unruly boys and girls who were often uninterested in learning (or unable to) and subject to the petty interference of the guardians over what and how they taught. The rapid turnover of staff inevitably had an effect on the children, particularly in smaller rural unions, where there might be a gap of several months between the departure of one teacher and the arrival of a successor.

Other factors also encouraged swift departures. A number of schoolmasters were dismissed for having affairs with the older female pupils or other pauper women in the house, while schoolmistresses were all too often tempted by the male staff. The teachers could themselves be troublesome; many of the disputes and much of the fractiousness that all too often disturbed the atmosphere at workhouses involved the teaching staff in some way.

However, a small number made a career of teaching. Robert Bradfield at Gressenhall retired in 1874 after 34 years’ service. On his retirement, the guardians minuted that he had ‘conducted himself in a manner most satisfactory … while his general character and conduct has been unimpeachable’, despite, on at least one occasion, having been accused of fathering a baby by a pauper woman in the workhouse Others transferred to better-paid teaching posts at larger schools or found other jobs elsewhere in the Poor Law service. Teachers could also rise within the system. Several of the workhouse masters at Belford, such as Samuel Rose and Robert Guthrie, had been schoolmasters, while the schoolmaster and mistress at Gressenhall, Frank Roach and Elizabeth Skinner, were successful in their joint application to run Fakenham Workhouse in 1879.

Surprisingly, before the introduction of compulsory education in the 1870s, the teaching provided by the workhouse could be better than that offered to working class children elsewhere. At Atcham, in Shropshire, the Poor Law Inspector Andrew Doyle was able to claim in 1850 that the children there received ‘an education beyond all comparison better than is within the reach of the labourers in any part of the county’. Indeed, legislation in 1845 insisted that pauper apprentices be able to read their indenture documents and to write their signature on it. This requirement was used by Whitehall to force recalcitrant unions to provide at least a basic level of education. In 1846 Reverend H. Mozely, an inspector of workhouse schools, found that workhouse children were better than pupils in the national schools (that is the Anglican sponsored parish schools) at reading, writing and arithmetic, while those in the national schools were better at grammar, geography and history.

Unfortunately, the tuition was desperately dull, even by the low standards of the day. When HM Inspector of Schools Henry Bowyer visited workhouse schools in the Midlands in the mid-1840s, he found a shortage of secular reading books, maps and blackboards. Instead, children were expected to learn to read using the Bible and other holy works, whose language even then was archaic and bore little connection to their own lives and experiences. One old boy at least was thankful for this; the explorer Henry Stanley (John Rowlands) wrote that ‘without this teaching I should have been little superior to the African savage’. But for the majority such reading material must have been almost meaningless. Too often the lessons were unimaginative, and classes were taught by rote or by copying words into copybooks. When the HM Inspectors of Schools asked pupils questions, they found that the children did not understand what they were being taught. At Stourbridge in 1864 the students were said to ‘read too slowly and monotonously … [and they] do not understand the words in their books that they are in the habit of using themselves and hearing’.

There was generally a shortage of books and other equipment. Although the Poor Law Board allowed unions to buy textbooks at a substantial discount, few unions took up this offer. Among the titles available were The Child’s First Reader (price: one halfpenny), Singing Tables for Elementary Schools, and Reading Disentangled.

All the children endured discipline, which meant beatings, whether in the schoolroom or elsewhere. It took Henry Stanley (John Rowlands) time, at St Asaph, to learn the unimportance of tears, as he and his fellows endured sadistic treatment from the

heavy masterful hand of James Francis … soured by misfortune, brutal of temper and callous of heart… The ready back-slap in the face, the stunning clout over the ear, the strong blow with the open palm on alternate cheeks, which knocked our senses into confusion, were so frequent that it is a marvel we ever recovered from them.

The quality of instruction was poor, and teachers were generally known for their brutality rather than their pedagogical skills. Charles Shaw felt that ‘hardly a boy escaped some form of it, and it was usually a merciless form’. At Hanwell, punishments were meted out, military style, in the gymnasium on Friday mornings, when the children were lined up to witness them. They were administered with a cane by Captain Hindrum, a retired naval officer: ‘Slowly and dramatically he would lift it high and with a swish bring it down across the boy’s bottom. The spectacle was terrifying and invariably a boy would fall out of rank in a faint’.

‘W.H.R.’ was a rebel but, as he later admitted, more out of loneliness and fear than as a result of innate badness. When first he had his hand caned by a master, ‘I yelled and flew at him and, before he was aware, had given him one or two good kicks’. He was rarely out of trouble with his teachers and regularly received beatings. Once he settled down, he began to progress academically, but he still maintained a reputation for bad behaviour. ‘W.H.R.’ was often thrashed for no reason by Mr Allen, the tailor, so ‘it was quite a common thing for the boys to examine the marks about my body every Saturday when we went to the bath’. In later life he recognised that, for all the brutality, the workhouse school had given him some prospects. When he went to the South Metropolitan District School at Sutton aged 13, ‘W.H.R’ ‘knew how to read, write and calculate pretty fairly, [and] had learned that God’s name was sometimes mentioned without an oath’.

Even the brutal school at St Asaph had its supporters. Andrew Doyle, who inspected the institution in 1850 while Stanley was a young pupil there, noted that the ‘boys’ school was one of the best managed in the district. The children are remarkably intelligent’. Many children left workhouse schools able to read and write (at least after a fashion) and do simple arithmetic; most important of all, as far as the guardians were concerned, they were aware of the fundamental aspects of the Christian faith. Underlying all this was the intention to inculcate habits of industry and docility and, in various ways (deliberate as well as innocent), a hatred of the workhouse and the Poor Law system.

Yet officials were also aware of the limitations of the schooling provided for the children in their care. In 1873 the Local Government Board commissioned Jane Nassau Senior (the first woman Poor Law inspector) to report on the suitability of metropolitan workhouse education for girls. Her findings were damning. She found that formal educational standards were higher than those which prevailed at board (local authority) schools, but in almost every other way the district schools were as damaging as the workhouse itself, producing ‘a type of character peculiarly hard, helpless and apathetic, incapable of adapting itself to persons and circumstances, and presenting a remarkable degree of stubbornness and violence in a large number of instances’. She talked of the ‘most absolute monotony, both of sight and sound – only it is called order and regularity – and there is intense dullness under the name of method and discipline. White walls, dull rooms, the same dinner (and the same quantity to eat) on a given day of the week’.

Mrs Nassau Senior called for them to be closed down and replaced by smaller workhouse or ‘separate’ schools; but she really wanted them to be abolished. Instead, she argued that children could be ‘boarded out’ - fostered with working-class families, where they could have a reasonably normal upbringing.

Improvements were made to the industrial schools, but they were too useful (and economical) to abandon altogether. In the late 1890s Charles Chaplin was at Central District School at Hanwell and later wrote that: ‘Although … we were well looked after, it was a forlorn existence. Sadness was in the air’. A Select Committee on Pauper Education of 1896 unanimously condemned industrial schools, both on account of the dangers of disease, especially eye and skin infections, which were common when so many children were crowded together, and because of the emotional damage resulting from isolating children from the community and depriving them of individual care and affection.

In East London both Will Crooks and George Lansbury did their best to improve the Forest Gate District School in east London, where pauper children from Poplar and the local unions were sent. In his memoirs Lansbury wrote of his first visit in 1894:

long dormitories for scores of children to sleep in, very little accommodation for recreation, and at the time I first saw it the children were dressed in the old, hideous Poor Law garb, corduroy and hard blue serge, and the girls with their hair almost shaved off, with nothing at all to make them look attractive in any sort of way. The food was quite coarse and I should think at times insufficient. It was apparent that the place was organised and controlled as a barracks. I daresay the superintendent, who had been a military man, was, according to his light, quite a decent person, but then his light was deficient.

Within a decade an inspector of schools felt able to report of Forest Gate that there ‘is very little (if any) of the institution mark among the children’ and that the teaching and conditions compared favourably with the best elementary schools. In 1907 the Forest Gate school moved to a former farm at Shenfield in rural Essex, where children were housed in cottages with a dining hall, laundry (for the girls), swimming pool and an assembly hall. The move was strongly encouraged by George Lansbury, who became a much-loved figure among the children there. The story is told that when Queen Mary visited the school with Lansbury in 1919, the children forgot all their lessons, broke rank and surged forward, shrilly crying, ‘Good old George! Good old George!’

By the 1880s and 1890s alternatives to the industrial school were increasingly being adopted by the guardians. The boarding-out system, whereby children were fostered with working-class families, had proved very popular in Scotland, where 90 per cent of pauper children were cared for in this way. It was much less common in England, where guardians found it hard to find suitable couples who would do it for love rather than the money. In a speech in 1903 Will Crooks argued that ‘in some villages I found “boarding-out” a staple industry. Boarding-out is all right in good homes; the difficulty is to find good homes’. Nonetheless, by 1914 some 12,000 children were cared for in this way. Pauper children from Richmond for example were boarded with agricultural labourers in the Essex village of Old Harlow, where they were inspected twice a year by female guardians who checked on how well the children were treated and, as important, the cleanliness of their hosts’ houses.

From the 1870s the more enlightened urban unions (such as Bolton, Dewsbury, Wolverhampton and West Ham) chose to place their children in cottage homes. Under this system, groups of about 30 boys and girls lived with a house parent or a couple, although it was sometimes difficult to find the adults. Those who volunteered could prove inappropriate. Nine of the first 23 in Sheffield, for example, were sacked, in some cases because they were suspected of being involved in prostitution. Often the houses were sited around a green, with boys’ houses on one side and the girls on the other. The Kensington and Chelsea School District, which erected homes at Banstead between 1878 and 1880, gave the impression of being a ‘well-designed model village’.

A variant was the scattered home, whereby small groups of children lived in homes on residential streets; this enabled them to become part of the local community and attend local schools. In 1893 Sheffield bought a number of such houses and filled them with groups of boys and girls of mixed ages, carefully separating Catholics from Protestants. Bath and other unions soon followed suit, and by 1903 Camberwell in east London owned no fewer than 18 separate homes in the area. In many ways this was a good solution; the children liked them and they were easy to manage, as well as being relatively inexpensive.

With the establishment of local elementary (board) schools after 1870, many smaller unions stopped employing schoolmasters and mistresses and sent children to these schools instead. This had the added advantage of allowing pauper children to mix with other boys and girls of the same age, something that the government in Whitehall was increasingly keen on. Occasionally disputes broke out between the school authorities and the guardians – usually over the fees paid to educate the workhouse children – and the students would be returned to be taught in the workhouse again.

Attending such schools could be traumatic for children who had known only the strange world of the workhouse. On his first day at the school in Wangford in Suffolk, Fred Copeman was greeted with a roar of laughter from his fellow pupils and burst into tears. He ran away, but was eventually forced back. There he found out the reason for the initial reaction: ‘I was the only boy in the school with long trousers and his hair shaved off. I must have looked to them like a funny old man’. He found it difficult to make friends with his classmates; only a little girl called Mary took pity on him.

Because of their upbringing, workhouse children could be a disruptive influence on village schools, and many were sometimes made scapegoats for the misbehaviour of a few. In 1887 Gressenhall in Norfolk was advised to take all the workhouse children out of the village school because the bad behaviour of two brothers, William and George Farrer, had severely provoked the schoolmaster.

Learning for Life

Boys and girls were often given training for industry and agriculture within the Poor Law system, in the hope that the skills that they learned would be of use to future employers. Those workhouses who ran their own schools often provided basic tuition for the older boys and girls in work-related trades. At Maidstone, Kent, in the early 1860s Mr Pigott, a Poor Law inspector, reported that the ‘Guardians have taken pains to have the pupils industrially trained. A number of boys are taught shoemaking. Girls are taught housework and laundry work’. In many rural workhouses, the boys were set to work in the fields, learning the skills that they would need when they left the house. The income from the crops they produced was also a useful addition to the workhouse budget.

At Atcham in 1850 the children learned a variety of tasks, including knitting, netting and plaiting straw. Thomas Everett, clerk to the union, reported that ‘it became a natural habit in the children to be doing something that was useful, so that when fatigued with heavier toils the child sat down to rest, it was … an instinctive feeling that led him to take his straws or needles in his hand’. Everett recommended that boys between the ages of 9 and 14 be allowed two acres of clear ground to be exclusively theirs. In 1850 they grew potatoes, turnips, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, beans and onions, which were sold to local traders for £61 12s 6d.

Also in Shropshire, the Quatt school at Bridgnorth provided training for boys and girls from various unions in the county. In the morning they were taught the three Rs and the principles of the Christian religion. Boys spent the rest of the day ‘employed in the cultivation of four acres and a half of good turnip and barley land, and in the management of cows and pigs’, while the girls were ‘instructed in house and dairy work, baking, washing, ironing and in sewing’.

It was difficult for many smaller unions to provide any real form of industrial training, partly because they did not have the resources, but also because there were very few child inmates. In some places, staff (usually the porter) were required to have skills such as cobbling to impart to the few children in the workhouse. By contrast, in the industrial schools a tailor might have to teach a class of a hundred or more. It is little wonder that when, in 1867, Poor Law Inspector T.B. Browne asked a tailor whether he would take a boy who had received some training in preference to one who had none, the answer he received was that he preferred an apprentice whom he could instruct himself.

Because of the nature of Victorian society, it was easier to train boys for the variety of trades and occupations which they could adopt. The choices for girls were much more limited – the overwhelming majority ended up as domestic servants, for which they received little formal training. It is hardly surprising that about a quarter of girls ended up back at the workhouse, either through misconduct (in other words, prostitution) or other causes (generally pregnancy), while the proportion for boys was lower, at 15 per cent.

It is safe to say that the vast majority of girls who entered service were totally unsuited to – and almost untrained for – the work. William Lancey, a former butler, wrote in his memoirs: ‘I never knew a servant from an orphanage or institution shine in my time’. Their experience in the workhouse was totally different from the routines found in a middle class home. Much of their previous work consisted of the never-ending scrubbing of dormitory floors, the preparation of vast amounts of vegetables and mending hundreds of clothes. Henrietta Synnot made this point when describing dinner at a district school in the 1860s:

A large hall capable of holding 1,500 children. A smell as of laundry and kitchen combined, and a great deal of steam. Enter four men bearing two enormous wooden washing tubs, containing a stew of Australian meat. Then it is ladled out into small basins, and placed by boys on the tables. The sound of martial music is heard in the distance and presently a thousand little paupers, headed by the brass band, file in and take their places. After singing a grace they fall to… When the girl who has assisted at this meal goes to service, she has not, as far as I know, to serve out soup from a washing tub, or to sing a grace, or to throw away what she sees on the plates … nearly everything which a girl sees and does at school is absolutely opposed to what she sees and does at service.

A few boards were aware of the problem and a training school was established in Norwich, but this closed in 1874. The guardians at Shepton Mallet, Somerset opened a cooking kitchen in 1880 for the purpose of teaching the older girls. Unfortunately, only two girls could use it at a time.

At worst, there is a suspicion that in some places the available training amounted to little more than using the girls to clean the house and help cook the inmates’ food. In one unidentified workhouse, the matron had formed groups of girls over 14, ‘whom she instructs thoroughly in all branches of domestic service, and by them, and them alone, the whole of the cooking, washing, and ironing of the Union is carried out’. They also waited upon the master and matron, ‘laying their table and washing their china’.

There were a number of reported cases of cruelty to young pauper servants. Jane Wilbred, a 14-year-old orphan, had been placed out with a Mr and Mrs Sloane by the West London Union in 1849. At first she was well treated, but the situation changed when Mrs Sloane’s pet bird died and Jane was accused of frightening it to death. From then on she was subjected to a regime of starvation and beating, and her condition became visibly worse to neighbours. She was eventually rescued in November 1850, debilitated and marked from the beatings. The Sloanes were tried and sentenced to two years in prison. The trial caused a sensation and led to a change in the law, forcing guardians and relieving officers to monitor children until they were 16 years old.

Of the 51 girls who left London district schools in 1868 and who were traced by Mrs Nassau Senior five years later, only 18 were ‘doing well or fairly well’ and another seven had ‘dropped out of sight, of whom last tidings were satisfactory’. The rest had had unsatisfactory reports or, for one reason or another, were no longer servants. In 26 cases complaints had been made about the girls’ bad temper, 21 were in bad health, and nine ‘were beset by bad relations’. So the girls went from position to position and, without good references, many inevitably ended up on the streets. Henry Mayhew claimed that in the 1850s half of the girls from Marylebone Workhouse who had been placed in service ended up as prostitutes.

From the 1880s, however, two charities – the Girls Friendly Society and the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (MABYS) – began to help young women find decent situations, and provided training as well as safe and clean hostels. By 1898 there were over 200 training homes in England and Wales to which girls from workhouses and orphanages could turn. Through their efforts, workhouse girls gradually became sought after as servants.

In the early years of the New Poor Law, many boys (but fewer girls) were indentured or apprenticed to a master in order to learn a trade. By the 1850s apprenticeships had rapidly fallen away, because of the decline in traditional craft occupations, such as shoe and boot-making, as a result of the arrival of mass-produced goods and clothing. In 1845 the Leicester guardians resolved not to send any more boys to be apprenticed as framework knitters, ‘as the trade is so over-handed already that it is only apprenticing a boy to learn pauperism under another name’.

Apprenticeships were first introduced under the Old Poor Law. Many local charities were also established to apprentice children in what were known as ‘proper trades’. In 1719, for example, money was left in the will of William Harding, a wealthy local farmer in Aylesbury, to establish such a charity. Although children supported by charities were generally apprenticed to respectable masters and learned a good trade, workhouse children rarely had these opportunities. In urban areas they were often dispatched at a very young age to work in factories or up chimneys. Chimney sweeps, in particular, were always looking for thin young boys to climb up awkward chimneys and clean them. One such figure of dread appears in Oliver Twist: ‘Mr Gamfield [a sweep looking for an apprentice] knowing what the dietary of the workhouse was, well knew that he would be a nice small pattern, just the thing for register stoves’. It was appallingly hard work, and it is small wonder that Oliver Twist begged the parish beadle to ‘starve him – beat – kill him’ rather than abandon him to Mr Gamfield.

Initially the Poor Law Commissioners tried to ban apprenticeships altogether, but this proved impractical. Legislation in 1844 abolished compulsory apprenticeships and gave Whitehall the power to prescribe the duties of masters and the terms and conditions of indentures (the agreement between the master and the apprentice). No child under 9 or who could not read and write his own name was to be bound; no one over 14 was to be bound without their own consent. Further legislation in 1851 provided for the prosecution of cases of neglect or ill treatment. In addition, apprentices were to be visited twice a year.

Workhouse children tended to be apprenticed to local trades, where they existed. In places such as Norfolk and Northamptonshire, this was likely to be shoemaking; there were many small workshops and plenty of vacancies for apprentices. In Bromsgrove, however, many children were apprenticed to the needle and fishhook makers of neighbouring Redditch. In smaller unions, such as Belford, on the Northumbrian coast, where there were far fewer children, efforts were made to match individuals to a chosen career. Here, for example, in 1907 the 14-year-old William Cameron was offered the chance to join the training ship Wellesley, but he preferred to become a carpenter and was duly apprenticed to a local joiner.

The sea was indeed an option for some. The Wellesley was moored offshore at Newcastle and trained boys (workhouse children as well those from local orphanages) for the sea. As well as instruction in seamanship, climbing masts, weapons training, fencing and first aid, they received strict religious training. The boys slept in hammocks on the ship and were rarely allowed on shore, except for training purposes. Exceptional good behaviour was rewarded with a couple of days’ leave so that the boys could visit their families. In London the Metropolitan Asylum Board maintained a former wooden battleship, the Exmouth, in the Thames estuary at Grays in Essex, which accommodated over 600 boys. Between 1876 and 1929, over 16,000 workhouse boys were trained on board; of these over 4,500 joined the Royal Navy, 6,400 joined the merchant marines and 1,600 became army musicians.

More problematic were the apprenticeships on board fishing trawlers at Brixham, Grimsby and Hull. Three-quarters of the apprentices at Brixham in 1882 came from local workhouses in south Devon, particularly Exeter, Totnes, Honiton and Brixham itself. At Hull they came from the nearby industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, as well as from Holborn in London. By the mid-1870s over 300 apprentices a year were being taken on. The authorities thought that this was an ideal solution for ‘disposing of the rougher classes of pauper boys’, that is those aged 14 or 15 ‘who from having been brought up among vicious surroundings or from some defect of character are not fit for domestic service’ and for whom ‘an apprenticeship to the fishing trade is their last chance’.

A few took to the trade and prospered at it. There was always a shortage of skilled labour and once the indenture expired, normally at the age of 21, it was possible to make good money. One old boy from Hackney Workhouse, James Plastow, told a parliamentary inquiry into labour conditions in 1882 that he now owned several smacks and had an extensive trade as a fish salesman: ‘I believe every lad in the fishing trade has the same chance of a successful life as I have had, providing he saves his money instead of spending it’.

In 1897 the guardians at Bromsgrove apprenticed Frederick Broadley to the International Steam Trawling Company at Grimsby. He wrote to the board ‘stating that he liked the sea and would rather be on the sea than on land’, the first of several such letters that the board received from him. Most, however, found work at sea too hard and uncongenial and ran away. A third of the boys at Grimsby absconded between 1881 and 1893; and in Hull as many absconded as had been recruited. William Chance said that this was because the boys resented being paid only a pittance, while the other deckhands received a decent wage, without realising the investment that was being made in them by their masters. A more likely reason was that the boys had little supervision when they were on shore – because of their bad behaviour, masters were generally unwilling to have them staying with their families. There was also no support available for the apprentices onshore, let alone training or any attempt to impose discipline – except through the courts.

New Lives in the Colonies

During the nineteenth century, many perceived emigration as a solution to the overcrowded cities and countryside, as well as making the colonies strong and thus able to buy British exports and contribute to imperial defence. In the words of the guardians at Petworth in the Sussex weald in the 1830s, it is ‘only a removal from one part of the British Empire where there are more workmen than there is work to another fertile, healthful and in everyway delightful portion of the same empire, where the contrary is the case’. A trickle of pauper families had long been sent by parishes to the colonies, where it was hoped they would take the opportunity to start fresh lives without the taint of pauperism. Some guardians were keen on this idea, although Whitehall was much less enthusiastic, fearing a waste of public money and scandals in the making. Between 1835 and 1837, however, some 5,000 individuals were sent to Canada and Australia, with particularly high numbers coming from Norfolk and Suffolk. At the same time, Petworth Union sent several hundred labourers and their families to Canada, although the scheme depended on support from the Wyndham family, the major local landowners. Few parties of children were sent out. The Philanthropic Farm School at Redhill in Surrey (which took a number of boys from workhouses) sent just over a thousand boys abroad between 1850 and 1871, mainly to Canada and Australia.

In 1869 two spinster ladies of strong resolve, Maria Rye and Annie Macpherson, began taking parties of workhouse and orphan children to Canada. They received a small bounty for each child from the Canadian government, although most of the funds came from charities or fees paid by the Poor Law Unions. By 1874 just over 600 such children had arrived in Canada, mainly being settled with farming families in Ontario.

In the same year Poor Law Inspector Andrew Doyle was sent out to investigate. His report was highly critical, pointing out deficiencies in the training of children before they crossed the Atlantic and subsequently in the inspection of their new homes to prevent abuses. These were to be the worries expressed about the emigration of children throughout the existence of the scheme. Although wounded by Doyle’s report, Miss Rye continued to send out parties of girls to Ontario. In a newspaper interview in 1894 she said that:

My children are not fitted for the refinement of the cities. They are better suited to the farm. We do not rescue them from the cities to return them to the same temptations. My aim is to find them good homes with farmers’ wives, with whom they can grow up, working side by side, into honest smart capable girls, fit to be the wives of thrifty young farmers.

It was up to individual boards of guardians to approach Miss Rye, Miss Macpherson and the others who took parties of children to Canada. The boys and girls had to be under 16 and have signed a written agreement that they wanted to leave England. In 1873, for example, Hereford agreed to send with Maria Rye a small party of six girls aged between seven and twelve at a cost of £8 per child (including an outfit and ‘free delivery at Liverpool’). According to the Hereford Times:

The little girls now present [before the guardians] appeared highly pleased at the prospect before them. They were all smiling and cheerful and appeared healthy looking children, and did credit to their fare. The Master said he had left a number of little girls in the workhouse crying because they had not been chosen to go.

The colonial authorities were always very concerned that pauper children were being dumped upon them. They wanted children of good character, untainted by crime or connected with any criminal institution, who had received some training before emigration and who would be supervised until they had reached adulthood. But, as Will Crooks and others pointed out, these were the children who were equally likely to do well in England. It must have been quite a temptation for the guardians to get rid of their most difficult (and thus likely to be the most expensive) children overseas. In 1887 the immigration agent at Winnipeg, W.C.B Grahame, complained to the authorities in Ottawa about a boy ‘part negro … who was smuggled on board by the Croydon Union authorities… There are two other boys of the same stamp here, quite incorrigible, who are rambling about the country like wild beasts’.

It would be too easy to condemn the treatment of children by the workhouse. For every scandal that came to light, such as the appalling conditions of Drouet’s School at Tooting, there were imaginative schemes to foster children and real attempts to provide a proper education and subsequently a secure job away from the poverty line. Above all, the workhouse authorities were determined to ensure that these children did not repeat the mistakes of their parents. They did this in several ways: through education and training for the outside world; through separation from the parents’ ‘baleful influences’; and later, in the 1880s and 1890s, through attempts to create a happy family life outside the workhouse. In the 1890s the Local Government Board laid down that no new workhouse should provide accommodation for children, and in 1913 it banned keeping children over three years of age in any institution containing adults. By the First World War almost every pauper child was looked after well away from the workhouse, and from the taint that it bestowed on those who entered its doors.