Chapter Six

The Sick and Aged

In the workhouse considerable resources were spent on caring for the sick, the infirm and the aged, as the elderly were then known. Indeed by the end of the nineteenth century, the inmates in most houses very largely comprised the sick and elderly.

The downside, as always with the Poor Law, was the institutional nature of the care offered, particularly for long-term patients – one pauper is known to have been kept in a bed for 11 years! The implementation of the care was erratic, depending on the willingness of the guardians to pay for the service, and the dedication of over-worked and poorly-paid staff. Conditions improved from the 1880s, with arrival of professionally trained medical staff and the election of women and working class guardians with imaginative ideas and a determination to improve the lives of the inmates.

There were charitably funded alternatives, such as voluntary hospitals and almshouses for the elderly, but in both cases they were not interested in the undeserving poor and the destitute, and they made great efforts to keep such people from their doors. In addition, the distribution of such hospitals and almshouses was patchy. In the 1860s, Richmond in Surrey, for example, had six almshouses and no hospital. The Poor Law did offer a national network, even though there were wide local variations in the quality of the service provided.

Provision for the Sick

Now almost forgotten, the greatest success of the workhouse probably lay in the care and treatment of the sick. Even today, the majority of surviving workhouse buildings and sites are still used by hospitals and related care services. In Ripon, for example, the main workhouse building now houses offices and the once notorious Strand Workhouse in central London housed the Middlesex Hospital’s outpatients unit until the end of 2005. Yet, surprisingly this was not a duty laid down in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and the Royal Commission, which preceded it, hardly mentioned the provision of medical care for paupers.

Under the Old Poor Law, this had been the responsibility of parishes. In most cases, the overseers of the poor employed elderly female paupers to nurse the sick in their homes and occasionally provided food, paid for medicines or, in rare cases, funded trips to spas in the hope that the patient would recover. If there was a local workhouse, the sick could be admitted and there they would be cared for by the matron and a team of pauper nurses.

The provision of care varied greatly. At the model workhouse at St George’s, Hanover Square, in London’s West End, built in 1725–6, the sick poor were attended daily by a doctor, apothecary and surgeon, and twice a week by a clergyman. More typical, perhaps was the house at Louth, where the ill shared the same wards as those who were well.

However, more workhouses provided separate isolation wards for victims of fever and other communicable diseases. As early as the 1720s, St Giles in London had three separate wards for the itch (scabies), ‘the foul disease’ (possibly venereal diseases) and smallpox and other malignant fevers.

It was expected that this arrangement would continue after 1834, particularly for the elderly. If however, the sick could not manage at home, it was suggested that that they might be accommodated in separate buildings away from the punitive establishments for the able-bodied. Even so, the Poor Law Commissioners stressed to the guardians that it was important to ‘prevent medical aid from generating or encouraging pauperism’. The stigma of the workhouse must have been enough to discourage many poor people from seeking the medical treatment they needed.

Medical treatment was also provided by voluntary hospitals, supported by charitable donations. Most large towns had one or more institutions, such as the London Hospital in the East End, the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and on a smaller scale the York Dispensary, which provided outpatient services. Admission generally required a letter provided by a rich subscriber. Unfortunately, voluntary hospitals were choosy about the patients they took and were not interested in the very poor or the incurably ill.

In Wakefield, the dispensary would not admit paupers. If patients on poor relief were discovered in the hospital, they were immediately despatched to the workhouse. This happened ten times in 1854 and 1855 alone. Subscribers were warned in 1858 not ‘to let their tickets of admission fall into the hands of improper objects’ and recommended that such applicants be directed to the relieving officer. This meant that the tickets only went to ‘the most deserving of the poor, and avoid[ed] the risk of them being used merely as a relief of the general poor rate’.

The numbers in voluntary hospitals were far fewer than in the workhouse. In 1861, voluntary hospitals looked after 11,000 patients, while Poor Law infirmaries cared for some 50,000. Increasingly, workhouse hospitals accommodated the bulk of the sick children, the mentally ill, those with skin conditions, epilepsy, tuberculosis and venereal diseases and those who were just sick. By 1911, just over 120,000 patients were treated in Poor Law infirmaries.

In part this increased number reflected changing medical practices. Traditionally, all but the poorest or most seriously ill were cared for at home. Even the vast majority of paupers were visited by medical officers in their homes. However, improvements in medical treatment increasingly made it better and easier for the sick to be treated in hospitals.

Care and Conditions

Initially, the sick were accommodated in the same buildings, occasionally even the same wards, as the able-bodied. In fact, conditions during the first few decades of the New Poor Law as a whole were poor. Lady Frederick Cavendish, who was a regular visitor to St Martin in the Fields Workhouse in London during the 1850s, noted that ‘the look of the sick ward certainly takes away all the romantic notions of ministration; everything most uncomely and meagre and some of the old folk repulsive enough’.

A series of investigations in the mid-1860s revealed how bad the position was. In London, the Poor Law Inspector Harry Farnall found that 13 out of the 40 workhouses were unfit for use as hospitals:

In each sick ward… there is a great deficiency of cubical space for each patient… most of those workhouses are badly constructed and are closely hemmed in on every side by other buildings; the trades carried on in some of them taint the atmosphere; there is no facility for supervision on any other; there is no room to erect sufficient bathrooms and lavatories where required … and there are no means of giving day rooms to the convalescent.

The government was finally stirred to action by a damning series of articles in The Lancet in the mid-1860s, exposing conditions in London’s sick wards.Their reports found an almost universal practice of ‘mixing up sick wards in the body of the house’. Even paupers with ‘contagious fevers of the most dangerous kind’ were found in the ordinary wards.

In Huddersfield, which had five small workhouses, the Leeds Mercury in 1848 condemned the one in the town as being in every respect: ‘wholly unfitted for a residence for the many scores that are continually crowded into it, unless it be that desire to engender endemic and fatal disease. And this Huddersfield workhouse is by far the best in the whole union’.

Little changed over the next decade. A special committee appointed by the guardians reported that the lack of classification in the hospital wards of Huddersfield Workhouse led to ‘abandoned women’ with diseases of a ‘most loathsome character’ being mixed up with idiots, young children and even lying-in cases. The hospital accommodation was crowded, damp, insanitary and ‘utterly unfit’ for lodging sick inmates. It took another 15 years before a satisfactory new building was built.

Cleanliness was another problem. The Lancet found only one workhouse in London where there was a sufficiency of bathrooms. Dr Edward Smith, the Poor Law Board’s Chief Medical Officer, came across paupers at Kensington and Paddington who washed in their own chamber pots. He was told by one medical officer that that his patients preferred to wash in this way, but he later established that they did so ‘against their will and their former habits at home’.

Few guardians provided lavatory paper, on the grounds that the inmates were not in the habit of using it. Dr Smith found numerous instances of closets being blocked with ‘old towels, dusters and dishcloths’ and pages torn from the Bible. ‘One or more Bibles and sometimes a Prayer Book were found in each ward, but in a more or less dilapidated state – a circumstance connected with the subject just discussed’.

The reports by Smith and Farnall exposed how bad medical care for paupers could be. Farnall, in particular, made recommendations about how matters could be improved, arguing that in London, Poor Law infirmaries should be built separately from the workhouse and paid for by a common rate across the metropolis. This proposal was taken up by Gathorne Hardy, the President of the Local Government Board, who, while introducing the Metropolitan Poor Bill into Parliament in 1867, explained:

There is one thing… which we must peremptorily insist on, namely the treatment of the sick in workhouses being conducted on an entirely different system, because of the evils complained of have mainly arisen from workhouse management, which must, to a great degree, be of a deterrent character having been applied to the sick, who are not proper objects for such a system. That is one thing I should insist on as an absolute condition.

The new Act set up the Metropolitan Asylums Board to run fever hospitals on behalf of the local boards of guardians in London and encouraged them to build new hospitals, such as the Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum (which became St Andrew’s Hospital), which opened in 1871 for 592 patients from the East End. It cost £43,000 to build, boasted electric bells and telegraphic communications, lifts to each ward, hot water heating pipes, with tubes to carry dirty linen to the steam-powered laundry in the basement. The Act was the first acknowledgement of the duty of the state to provide hospitals for the poor that would eventually lead to the National Health Service. In the following year, further legislation allowed provincial unions to establish separate hospitals if they so chose, although few unions in rural areas bothered.

In Manchester, a new workhouse infirmary at Crumpsall opened in 1878 to cater for 600 patients. It consisted of seven parallel three-storey ward blocks, four for women and children, and three for men. The wards were not plastered but colour-washed, which made it easy to repaint when necessary, and lit by gas. Mattresses were made of canvas and stuffed with straw, which were removed and burnt when a patient was discharged. There was also a dispensary (for out-patients), an operating theatre, offices for the medical staff and nurses’ quarters. On its opening, the newspapers made much of its position on the edge of the city: ‘Its elevated position site makes its peculiarly adapted for hygienic and sanitary purposes’. On fine days, patients’ beds were pushed outside so they could enjoy the fresh air and sunshine. Over the entrance to the new buildings, the inscription ‘Poor and Needy, the Lord Careth for Me’ was carved in a prominent position.

Not all the new infirmaries were as good as the one at Crumpsall. Between 1863 and 1865, a new union workhouse was erected at Marland, in Rochdale. It was designed to accommodate 260 adults and 40 children. In 1870, there were 194 paupers, none able-bodied, of which 47 were imbeciles, mostly bedridden.

The new hospitals were filled with patients who previously might have been treated at home. The authorities in Whitehall saw them as a way of forcing the poor into the workhouse, thus reducing the amount paid as out-relief, even though care in the house was more expensive And as medical officers were not paid extra for attending the poor in their homes, they naturally felt that the pauper sick would be better off in an infirmary.

A group of medical officers argued against this practice, saying: ‘Sickness, one of the most prolific and pitiable sources of pauperism, ought, we submit, to be placed upon a footing quite apart from that of ordinary causes of want and dependence of the rates. It is cheap and wise to cure the sick poor with the greatest promptitude’. This argument very largely fell on deaf ears. Over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the numbers of sick paupers helped in their own homes fell and those admitted to Poor Law infirmaries rose. Even so, of the 60,000 sick paupers recorded by the Local Government Board on 1 July 1896 as being under the care of the guardians, 36,500 were still in workhouse sick wards rather than in separate infirmaries.

This was probably because it was more expensive to run a separate establishment. For a start, infirmaries tended to cost more to fit out and maintain. But the greatest expense was in staff. It was now more difficult to use pauper labour to do the nursing, let alone cleaning or to prepare meals, because there were few able-bodied or healthy elderly paupers available. As a result, the guardians had to employ more medical staff, such as a medical superintendent at £400 with accommodation, and an assistant superintendent at perhaps £160, plus an increasing number of trained nurses.

The Medical Officers

At the heart of the new system was the medical officer. A union might employ a dozen or more such men. Unless directly employed at the workhouse, they were each assigned a district, supposedly containing about 15,000 people, or in rural areas 15,000 acres in size, although they were often much bigger. Each officer was responsible for visiting sick paupers in their homes, prescribing the appropriate medicines and recommending their admission to the union workhouse, if he thought fit. The cases dealt with generally related to minor illnesses and broken limbs.

Seeking an increase in salary in 1857, Dr Palmer, the medical officer for Mortlake and Barnes, described his duties to the Poor Law Board:

My case book informs that I have on average seldom less than fifty visits per week whom I see at my house and prescribe for as well as visit at their respective houses… This work requires the use of a horse as patients live some two, three or sometimes nearly four miles apart… My present rate of pay is not one pound per week to find knowledge, medicine, and the wear and tear incident upon these labours.

A pay rise was sanctioned, even though compared with neighbouring unions the Barnes medical officers were well paid.

The medical officer was appointed from among the local doctors. In rural areas, he may have also maintained a private practice or contracted his services to other health care bodies, such as friendly societies, or acted as the local factory doctor or police surgeon. The 1909 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, however, was told that ‘the doctor takes these positions in order to further his private practice and I am afraid the poor very often have to suffer for that reason; he takes it too cheap’.

Medical officers were often young and inexperienced, and were underpaid for their responsibilities, often paying for medicines out of their own pockets. As late as 1909, it was reported that in most unions the district medical officers ‘still have to find their own drugs and medicines and any dressings or bandages that are required, and they are paid fixed stipends which vary from as little as £10–£15 up to as much as £300 or £400, a very usual figure being £100, together with additional fees for midwifery cases and operations’. One medical officer told a journalist in 1859:

I can’t do my duty to my patients for the simple reason that I can’t afford it. The wards of my workhouse and its classification will not bear scrutiny. When I first put on harness here, I was young and enthusiastic, and tried hard to get the guardians to provide what I knew to be absolutely necessary. But I only gained ill-will for myself, and did no good for my patients, so I’ve just struggled on as well as I could…

I could tell you of instances in which a really zealous man has been worried into resigning, and a selfish drone appointed in his stead, who has been popular because he let things alone… I haven’t a doubt that deaths from medical neglect are far commoner than you’d suppose.

The low wages were a constant source of friction. It was a false economy, because medical officers either resigned after a few months or persuaded the guardians or the authorities in London of the need for a rise. After a considerable row, the salary of Dr T.R. Tatham, who was the medical officer for the Huddersfield North District (which contained 25,000 residents, as well as the workhouse) was doubled to £80 in 1847. Tatham remained in post for another 10 years.

It often meant that the guardians had to employ somebody who wasn’t satisfactory, either because he was incompetent or because he simply wasn’t qualified. In 1852, the Ripon guardians wrote to Whitehall about the appointment of one of their medical officers William Armstrong: ‘It is impossible to procure a person residing within the district… duly qualified in any of the four modes of the order of the Poor Law Board… because there is no person so qualified within the district’. A year later he was reprimanded for neglecting his patients.

It was difficult to get rid of unsatisfactory men, because there was often no other person available. In 1848, Joseph Hesslegrave, the medical officer for Marsden, within the Huddersfield Union, was dismissed by the Poor Law Board for failing to attend two paupers, one of whom subsequently died. Hesslegrave successfully reapplied for his post; supported by memorials from prominent ratepayers.

In Norfolk, when Dr R.J. Tunaley was medical officer at both Henstead and Forehoe between 1839 and 1855, there was a constant stream of complaints about his professional misconduct. In 1843, for example, he failed to visit a pauper woman who subsequently died. Three years later, there were allegations that he did not call upon paupers, despite being directed to do so by the relieving officer. As a result, three people had died and one had gone blind. In both cases, Whitehall tried to dismiss him, but he was defended by the guardians, in part because Tunaley was one of the few local medical men they could afford to employ.

In 1852, Frederick Chapman was appointed medical officer for the Richmond Workhouse at the salary of £50 per annum. He was expectedto inspect each new pauper admitted into the house and to care for the sick and infirm ones already there, as well as inspecting the sanitary provisions. Often the paupers were seriously ill. In 1857, he described his work: ‘The cases coming under my charge are not mere illnesses of short duration andtrifling character, but as such as cannot be properly treated at their own homes and require long, anxious and assiduous attention’.

Edward Smith reported that ‘the usual routine is for the medical officer to attend at or before midday for his principal visit, andthen he visits the infirmary or sick wards and speaks to all the more important cases. He also walks into each infirm ward where there are some sick persons and asks if any wishes to see him’. Often the sick were not seen daily, perhaps three or four times a week depending on the severity of the caseand the numbers in the workhouse. He thought that on average they spent between two and three hours a day in the workhouse.

In rural workhouses, it could be much less. A Parliamentary enquiry in 1902 heard that in Wiltshire some medical officers spent just five minutes a day in the house, leaving the work largely to the paid nurses.

The medical officer had to report to the relieving officer and the guardians. The relieving officer directed him to the patients he saw outside the house and the guardians had to approve his orders for medicines and additional food. By the 1870s, Whitehall had laid down that the medical officer’s requests should be approved, but it still led to grumbling among the guardians.

The relationship with the master in particular was vital, for, as we have seen in the case of George Catch who ran several London workhouses in the 1860s, the master could and did interfere in medical treatments. Catch certainly resented the medical officers’ social superiority and, in a very class-conscious age, this could be a source of friction. The Lancet found this could lead to ‘the most vexatious and mischievous interference by the master with the purely medical order of the surgeon’.

Relations with the board of guardians could also be difficult. The medical officer was responsible for suggesting improvements in the workhouse and requesting special diets for sick inmates. Unsympathetic to the needs of the paupers and aware of the need to keep the rates as low as possible, the medical officers’ reports caused a great deal of grumbling among the guardians. In particular, there was much discussion about the amount of spirituous liquors dispensed. It was widely believed that alcohol in moderation stimulated the system and was thus good for the sick. Patients might be prescribed a half pint of porter beer or wine. At Belford, in the early 1890s, the medical officer, Dr Balfour, prescribed four tablespoons of whisky to Isabella Watson, an elderly lady with a heart condition. He had tried stopping the whisky, but restored it when she seemed to be dying. Another patient, James Elliott, was given three tablespoons to help him sleep. Temperance guardians on the board protested, one complained that ‘the most eminent doctors of the day had pronounced it a useless thing’.

In an experiment, Dr Edward Davies, the medical officer for Wrexham, had replaced alcohol with beef tea, eggs and milk. Not unsurprisingly, the result was a general increase in the health of the paupers. Medical science eventually confirmed that alcohol was not the stimulant that had been thought and its use gradually declined.

Although historians have criticised the skills and qualities of these medical men – and it is true that some were poor doctors – most of them did an adequate job in often very difficult circumstances.

The Nurses

Initially, there were very few paid nurses. In 1866, the 40 London workhouses employed just 142 nurses to care for roughly 21,150 sick and infirm patients. There were just three paid night nurses across the whole of the metropolis. Outside the capital, very few guardians employed staff. Chorlton in Manchester employed a few Protestant sisters, while in larger towns, such as Derby, nurses might be hired occasionally.

At Congleton, a couple of nurses were taken on during the typhus epidemic of 1848, but they did not stay in post long and were not replaced. In 1856, the Poor Law Inspector recommended that the guardians employ ‘an educated and good woman as general nurse for the whole establishment, to be paid a good and sufficient salary and to be under the attention of the medical officer’. This recommendation was initially ignored, but following pressure from Whitehall, the appropriately named Mary Coffin was appointed in February 1858. She had previously been a pauper in the house and before that a dressmaker. Like subsequent appointments, she did not stay long. Only in 1864, when they appointed Elizabeth Shaw, a nurse from Manchester at a salary of £20, was there any real continuity: she stayed for 12 years. Her successor, Mary Bennett, had been the workhouse cook with, presumably, no nursing experience at all.

Well into the 1860s and, in many places, much later, nursing was generally undertaken by the paupers, both women and men who had only the barest of training, under the supervision of the nursing staff (where it existed), the matron or the medical officer. They undoubtedly helped keep the wages bill low, which appealed to the guardians and ratepayers, but the care they offered was often worse than useless and in many cases actively endangered their patients’ lives. As the Poor Law Inspector Herbert Preston-Thomas pointed out, they: ‘had nothing to gain if they did the duty assigned to them well, nothing to lose if they did it badly; the fact that being able-bodied women, they were workhouse inmates proved prima facie, that they were not of high character’.

The nurses were usually semi-literate at best, so had difficulties reading medicine bottles, and had a fatal weakness for alcohol. Drunkenness was common, encouraged by ‘the daily allowance of one pint, or a pint and a half of strong porter daily… with one or two more glasses of gin for night duty or disagreeable work’.

Matilda Beeton had four such nurses under her control at the Rotherhithe Workhouse in 1864:

All of whom were old and inexperienced; two could read but neither could write. I had no night nurses or scrubbers; if patients were very ill I had to watch them at night myself or make the pauper nurse do so, who, perhaps, had been working or scrubbing hard all day. Under such circumstances, what attention could I expect the sick paupers to get? Of the four nurses allowed me, three were all I could expect them to be, drunk only when they had the means or the chance of getting anything to drink; the fourth was a confirmed drunkard, so much so, that I was in constant fear of her doing bodily harm to the sick patients; she would beat them until they were black with bruises, more especially those who were unable to help themselves and friendless.

Just occasionally, the care they offered could be surprisingly good. The Lancet thought the nurses at Islington ‘zealous and well-managed, conscious that they are thoroughly looked after and anxious to deserve good opinion’. John Burnett, a guardian at Paddington, told an Parliamentary enquiry in 1866 that he thought that pauper nurses were nine-tenths as efficient as paid nurses, although he felt that the standard of paid nursing was very low.

The younger ones were often enthusiastic, possibly because it was the first time they had a chance to learn a trade, but often left before they could be properly trained. Older pauper nurses, however, could not cope with the long hours and physical hard work. Many were in their fifties or sixties and had already endured a lifetime of hardship.

The Poor Law Board and its successor, the Local Government Board, tried to clamp down on the practice of employing pauper nurses, but with mixed success. As late as the 1890s, it was claimed that ‘almost all provincial infirmaries are nursed by paupers under the control – or not under the control – of one paid nurse’. In London, one matron of a Poor Law infirmary said that she ‘did not expect nurses to do the nursing themselves, but only to superintend the paupers’.

Florence Nightingale was already showing the way forward in the nursing of sick paupers. In 1864, in response to an approach by William Rathbone, a Liverpool merchant and philanthropist, she sent one of her assistants, Agnes Jones, and eight nurses to run the Brownlow Hill Institution in Liverpool. Within a month, Miss Jones had sacked 35 pauper nurses and quarrelled with both the master and the guardians, but over the next four years she introduced many improvements before dying of typhoid, almost certainly picked up at the infirmary.

In 1879, Louisa Twining founded the Workhouse Nursing Association to promote the training of nurses at workhouse infirmaries. By 1890, the Association had trained almost 100 probationers and appointed almost 300 staff. Even so, demand for their nurses outstripped supply. Each year they received requests for 200 or more nurses, but could only supply 70 or 80.

In many infirmaries, the working conditions for nurses were far from attractive. At the Central London Sick Asylum in the early 1890s, for example, 17 day and 7 night nurses were responsible for 264 beds. They commonly worked a 13-hour day. In the provinces, one untrained nurse could be struggling with up to eight beds. One nurse told Miss Twining that she had struggled to keep up the traditions of her training, but she had been defeated by her own fatigue. She had to look after 120 beds with the help of a 61-year old pauper assistant.

In the smallest unions, the workhouse matron continued to nurse paupers where necessary. In 1868, Belford’s medical officer, Mr Hunt, praised the matron, Jane Smith, for her care of children with cholera during an outbreak in the district: ‘I believe all my treatment would have been futile but for the zealous and fearless way in which the matron washed and kept the Children keen, indeed she herself frequently suffered from nasty sores on her fingers clearly showing how communicable it is by contact’. Thirty years later, the current and former matrons received a gratuity from a local brewery, after they nursed a drayman who had been seriously injured in an accident.

Because Belford Union was so small – there were no more than two or three patients in the sick wards – the guardians found it difficult to recruit a nurse for the workhouse. Mr Dawson, the Poor Law Inspector who visited the house in 1895 noted: ‘The medical officer has reported that a nurse is greatly needed for the sick, but it would be useless to engage one permanently for this small primitive place’. The solution was to hire nurses when necessary from an agency in Newcastle.

Care in rural workhouses was usually poor. In 1900, Miss Chapman, a guardian in Tisbury, Wiltshire, estimated 9 of Dorset’s 12 workhouses had less than 100 inmates in them; the only able-bodied women were the retarded, who had to be entrusted with the housework, nursing and the care of the new-born. Scalded babies were common. It is perhaps not surprising that one nurse wrote to Louisa Twining: ‘Surely in no other branch of the nursing profession can the work be so unsatisfactory and discouraging as in a lone country union’.

The Patients

In 1866, the workhouse nurse, Matilda Beeton, told a committee of inquiry about her experiences at Rotherhithe. She had charge of 50 sick and infirm patients ‘which is as much as one paid nurse can do with satisfaction to herself or those who employ her’. (Miss Nightingale recommended the maximum of 12 patients per nurse). She found that there was an ‘insufficiency of everything throughout the infirmary’. In particular, ‘there was a bad supply of towels, the same used for wiping the patients on had to serve for a teacloth and every clean and dirty purpose’.

She remembered that she once had an old man sent to her from one of the wards:

On my going to the bedside one of the patients called out ‘don’t go too near that bed, nurse as he’ meaning the patient, ‘is swarming with vermin’; and on my removing his clothes. I found his body covered with them; his hair and whiskers were matted and he looked the picture of distress and misery. I at once reported the case to the master, when he said ‘Dirty old Irishman; he is not fit to be down here; I shall have him brought back’.

Miss Beeton washed the man and cut his hair and whiskers – he ‘did not forget to thank me a hundred times over for what I had done’.

Although conditions in the new infirmaries were considerably better than in the sick wards, they were still soulless places and little attempt was made to entertain the patients. A journalist, who visited the Crumpsall Infirmary in 1898, found: ‘In the ward itself the patients can do little than sit in company with their own reflections. The view of the painted wall opposite is not cheerful… As regards reading, taste appears to incline principally towards newspapers and plain tales’. He suggested that readers might like to donate pictures and books to enliven the stay of the inmates.

It is difficult to know how effective the care of the sick in the workhouse was. It was probably not much worse than that available in the charitably funded voluntary hospitals. It is important to remember that for most of the nineteenth century medical knowledge was still very primitive – it was only in the 1850s, for example, that anaesthetics were widely introduced – and most medicines were only one step away from folk remedies. And inevitably it took a considerable length of time for new or improved techniques to trickle down to workhouse infirmary staff.

For most patients, the enforced rest and perhaps better diet was a more effective cure than any amount of medical care. The journalist, James Grant, reported in the late 1830s, that:

the best regulated workhouses are conducive to health rather than otherwise… A guardian in one of the workhouses in the centre of the metropolis, lately mentioned to me some singular cases of paupers having entered these establishments in a very poor state of health, brought on by irregularity of living, and of their complete restoration to health after being a short time there.

Conditions in the infirmaries improved from the 1870s to such as extent that they began to attract non-pauper patients. They were asked to pay something towards their treatment, the maximum being 10s 6d a week, rather less than might be charged in a private hospital. One witness told the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of 1909, that ‘a great many people go into sick asylums now who would not have gone into them in the old days’. Indeed at Camberwell, it was alleged that ‘that the ordinary ‘infirm’ cases have largely been driven out of it [the infirmary]… in order to make room for the better off patients’. The popularity of the Camberwell infirmary may, however, have been because it was the only hospital in a densely populated area.

Poor Law infirmaries also had to admit accident cases. Mr Manton of the Birmingham Union described to the Commission how his hospital was in the centre of an industrial area, ‘for in the midst of great works and street risks, casualties cannot be refused admittance, though the interests of ratepayers are safeguarded as much as possible’.

One commissioner visiting a rural union was told that their matron ‘recently had the pleasure of nursing a Member of Parliament who happened to have an accident of a serious nature while motoring in the district. He was exceedingly well pleased with the attention he received. He sent a cheque to the clerk for his maintenance and £10 to the master to be spent on the inmates at the master’s discretion’.

But the stigma remained. Women refused to enter the house to have their babies because the child would be registered as having been born in the workhouse, with the attendant shame this brought. In 1911, the Registrar-General insisted that workhouse infirmaries change their names to something more pleasant. The workhouse at Gressenhall, for example, was renamed as New Beech House.

Adults with Learning Difficulties

Almost every workhouse had a number of mentally disabled paupers among the inmates, who were, for the most part, harmless both to themselves and to their fellows. Nathaniel Hawthorne describes a visit to a Merseyside workhouse in the mid 1850s:

A character came under our notice which I have met with in all almshouses, whether of the city or village, or in England or America. It was the familiar simpleton, who shuffled across the court-yard, clattering his wooden-soled shoes, to greet us with a howl or a laugh, I hardly know which, holding out his hand for a penny, and chuckling grossly when it was given him.

They were treated much the same as the other adult paupers, and expected to work as much as they could. Dr Nairne, a Commissioner in Lunacy, visited the workhouse at Walsall in June 1863, and found that lunatics ‘associated with the other inmates…all were quiet and orderly, and several of them were occupied; they were well clad; five of them have extra diet, and all have tea and bread and butter for supper. All of whom who are able attend Divine service and all walk out regularly twice a week beyond the premises’.

A goodly number spent many years in the house, often because there was nobody able to care for them outside the house. In 1890, the master of Ripon reported the death of Ellen Spencely: ‘The poor idiot woman who had been an inmate of this House for 34 years died this morning aged 55 years’. Further north at Belford, Mary McDougal spent over 50 years in the workhouse. In 1875, her situation was described by the local Commissioner in Lunacy, thus: ‘She has been here for more than 30 years, and is quite harmless, fairly intelligent and makes herself very useful’.

Inevitably they were mocked and teased by the other inmates. The ‘Indoor Pauper’ found that ‘it is a common amusement of the jokers to excite the idiotic temper as often as possible’. He cited the examples of ‘Jack Queedom’ with ‘his extreme credulity on the one side and his capacity in the extreme for recounting every single incident in his life exactly as it occurred’. and ‘General Booth’ who, when teased, ‘bursts out into a roar, reciting a series of hymns and passages of Scripture mixed up with canting ejaculations. He utters these pious scraps in exactly the same order on every occasion’.

A much more serious problem concerned those paupers who were violent. It is safe to say that a large proportion of the trouble caused in the house was by people in a mentally unstable state. Some were casuals, whom it was possible to get rid of after a day or two, but others eventually ended up being transferred to the county asylum. The guardians were often reluctant to do this because of the additional charge to the rates.

One such at Belford was Sarah Taylor, who on her brother’s death in June 1888, was found in his house, dirty and unable to walk. Miss Taylor was admitted to the workhouse, where she began to complain to the Local Government Board that she was being held against her will. The guardians, however, advised her that ‘she was much better there (in the workhouse) than she could be outside’. However, she chose to leave and soon began to bombard relatives for demands for money. Eventually, she entered the county lunatic asylum at Morpeth.

A rather more serious case was Harriet Kettle, who was in and out of Gressenhall for many years and spent some time in the Norfolk County Asylum. She was a difficult inmate and was sent to prison several times. Aged just 14, she was sentenced to 42 days imprisonment along with several other girls in January 1853 for ‘destroying the food and property of the Guardians and by wilfully disobeying the orders of the Master and by making a great noise and disturbance and by using obscene and violent language’. In 1856, she spent a year at the Thorpe Asylum near Norwich, before returning to the workhouse.

In 1858, she was accused of setting fire to the house, and was sent back to Thorpe, having told the magistrates that she had not meant to burn the building down, but to kill herself. However, the authorities could not agree whether she was insane or not – the master at Thorpe thought she was not insane, but subject to violent fits of passion when thwarted, but the prison authorities argued that she should be in the asylum. Eventually she was sent to the government asylum for the criminal insane at St George’s in the Fields in London. Harriet Kettle only spent a couple of months there, before returning to Norfolk. She again entered the workhouse in January 1863, and soon fell out with the assistant matron, Mrs Butcher. Indeed the antagonism was so great that Mrs Butcher’s husband, Thomas, felt he had to accompany his wife to protect her from Harriet when she did her rounds at night. A year later she married a William Head, an agricultural labourer in Dereham. Marriage seems to have agreed with her, and she subsequently disappears from the records, presumably much to the relief of the guardians.

The Aged Poor

There was a far greater mismatch between the harsh reality of the experience of the elderly and the vision propagated by the authorities than for any other class of pauper. The poor were very well aware of this, which is why their response was overwhelmingly hostile to the suggestion of spending their declining years in the house.

During his survey of the Aged Poor (as the elderly were called) published in 1894, Charles Booth talked to many poor people about their experiences of the Poor Law. In the Cambridgeshire village of Oxham, he found ‘intense abhorrence of the workhouse. The old people do not feel that they have done anything to deserve being “locked up”’. One person told him: ‘I would rather be hung than go in again’.

Robert Roberts remembered his parents telling him about a man with a large family struggling to look after his sick father. ‘At last the old man insisted that he be taken to the workhouse… En route, they stopped to rest a while on a stone seat. “It was here”, said the old man, “I too rested carrying my father to the workhouse.” The son rose, took the burden on his back again and turned with his wife for home. “We’ll manage somehow,” he said’.

In his evidence to the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor in 1893, Major Frank Ballantine, the master of Crumsall, North Manchester, said that he had spoken to many people as they were admitted to the house: ‘I have sometimes heard them very much regret very much that they have been allowed or compelled by circumstance to come to the workhouse; they have repeatedly told me’.

If they could, aged paupers preferred to die at home. Mrs Fordham, a guardian in Royston, described one old man of 80 who had been persuaded to enter the workhouse: ‘He was well looked after there, but the dreariness and the routine of the place together with immense homesickness drove him almost crazy’. In despair, he discharged himself, and although frail and almost lame, walked the six miles home, ‘wishing for nothing better for his old life to flicker away there in sight of the trees and surroundings which were so much part of his life, that it was impossible for him to live away from them’.

It did not help that the late Victorians had a romanticised view of the elderly poor, of rosy-cheeked old ladies and proud old men bent after decades of selfless and deferential labour, resting comfortably in the twilight of their years in the comfortable surrounds of the workhouse. Yet the reality was very different.

A not untypical account of a visit to Marylebone in about 1903 is recorded by T.W. Wilkinson for London Lives, in which he describes the 200 octogenarians, the majority of whom were women: ‘Veritable dear old creatures many of them are! The feeling they produce must needs be one of sadness and yet there is something pleasing in the spectacle they present when hob-nobbing over their tea in the afternoon’. Yet on the opposite page of the book is a photograph of the dining room at the workhouse, showing row upon row elderly men staring blankly at the camera.

In 1834, the Poor Law Report recommended that the regime under the New Poor Law for the elderly and infirm should be less rigorous than for the able bodied; the workhouse should be a place where ‘the old might be indulged without torment from the boisterous’. Claims were soon made that conditions inside the house were better than those experienced by the elderly outside. The Commissioners noted in 1838 that ‘the warmth and cleanliness of the workhouse, as well as the regularity of the diet, could scarcely fail to be manifested in the general health of the aged and infirm’.

Nearly 60 years later, Herbert Preston-Thomas told the Commission on the Aged:

When one sees knots of old men gossiping by the fire or basking in the sun; when one finds the bed-ridden old women carefully nursed and appropriately fed; it is difficult to help contrasting their condition with some of the out-door poor who, failing under the weight of years and infirmity, pass almost solitary lives in miserable dwellings and are half starved on the pittance on which they obtain from their scanty earnings or from private charity… It is common to hear an old inmate say that he could bear the notion of entering the house, but that had he known it was so comfortable he would have come there long ago.

In the 1890s, theorists liked to separate the elderly into two categories, replicating the wider division between the deserving and the undeserving. In his evidence to the Commission, George Bartley divided the destitute into those whose earnings enable them to provide, but who have not done so; and those whose earnings render it impossible, or nearly impossible for them to provide sufficient in old age. For those who had failed to save, he urged that they be left to the mercy of a deterrent Poor Law, while those who had been unable to save should receive a small state pension.

Again the reality was rather different. Henry Broadhurst, a member of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, concluded: ‘There are without doubt a certain number of deserving aged persons who are in workhouses for reasons other than sickness or infirmity; but the general effect of the evidence we have received distinctly tends to the conclusion that they are few in number’.

Mrs Fuller, a London guardian in the 1890s, argued that few respectable paupers would seek admission, because of the monotony of workhouse life, the abrasiveness of its discipline, the uncaring staff, and the unwelcome association with the rough and retarded. But she stressed that the worst aspect was the loss of individuality: respectable elderly women who had managed their own homes for decades found it especially demeaning to enter a workhouse where one was a ‘nobody’.

Working-class men and women continued to work as long as they could, because they had no savings and, until 1908, there was no such thing as a state pension. It was easier to find employment in rural areas, where men could continue to do a little gardening or work on the roads, and women did charring or washing. In Ely, Charles Booth was told that the average labourer ‘works until he can work no longer, i.e. to 70 or 75. Some take light work, or do odd jobs, earning small pittance. If quite broken down or worn out, they go to the workhouse’. In towns, however, work was increasingly skilled and mechanised and unskilled labour was more successfully performed by the young. In York, Booth found that ‘masters grow less willing to employ any but young men’.

In the 1850s, Henry Mayhew found ‘the aged… often pretend to sell small articles in the street – such as boot-laces, tracts, cabbage-nets, lucifer-matches, kettle-holders, and the like; and that such matters are carried by them partly to keep clear of the law, and partly to evince a disposition to the public that they are willing to do something for their livelihood’.

In his Life and Labour of the Poor, published between 1889 and 1891, Charles Booth found many widows residing in cramped rooms in the worst slums. In one London district, described as being ‘almost solid poverty’, Booth describes the various, but poorly paid, occupations they pursued: hawker, brush drawer, paper kite-maker, watercress-seller, coster, washerwomen and mangler. At their most abject, widows could be found ‘begging or picking up odds and ends in the street’.

Most of the elderly poor who received out-relief from the guardians remained outside the workhouse: only about a third entered the house. For those who could continue to work, out-relief was often used to supplement earnings or support from their families. In rural areas, they seem to have received about 2s 6d per week, with more sometimes being offered in urban areas.

The introduction of Old Age Pensions in 1908, for men and women over 70, transformed the life of the very old. They received five shillings a week of right. It was collected from post offices and administered by Customs and Excise in order to remove the stigma of the Poor Law. Initially, however, applicants were to be turned down if they had ever received support from the guardians. In practice this was widely ignored by the local committees that administered the new system. Between 1908 and 1912, the number of elderly people receiving out-relief fell by a quarter, as they preferred to rely on the new pension, although numbers in the workhouse remained constant because the pension was not large enough to enable the infirm to support themselves.

Despite their reluctance, for the very old and the very poor there was an inevitability about entering the house. As a verse from Yorkshire put it:

Hush-a-bye baby, on the tree top,

When you grow old, your wages will stop,

When you have spent the little you made,

First to the Poorhouse and then to the grave.

In 1900, about 30 per cent of the population over the age of 70 were in the workhouse. Indeed the older the individual was, the more likely they would be cared for by the Poor Law authorities. In 1906, about 6 per cent of the population between 60 and 65 received some sort of assistance, and this rose to 35 per cent for the men and women who were over 85.

Elderly men and women entered the workhouse mainly because they could no longer look after themselves, were not respectable enough to secure election to a charity-run almshouse, and had nobody either willing or able to care for them. Charles Booth gives a number of examples taken from the St Pancras admission register for 1889: ‘Old Woman. Age 90. Had outdoor relief for many years; friends and relatives very kind to her, but in consequence of severe illness she had to go in. A very respectable old lady. Married man. Age 70. Formerly a horse-keeper. His wife has 2s 6d out-relief. Admitted through paralysis. Respectable old man’.

If the guardians discovered that an aged pauper had children, they tried to make them pay for the care of their elderly parents. The guardians’ minute books for Whitechapel, for example, contain details of many orders made for the care of elderly people. On 4 February 1888 alone, the sons of Elizabeth Young were ordered to pay 2s 5d each and the two sons of Sarah Langleben were ordered to pay 3s 5d each for the maintenance of their respective mothers in the infirmary, and John Newman and his son were ordered to pay 1s each for the care of John’s wife, Elizabeth.

In his guide for new guardians, George Bartley grumbled that he had ‘seen well-to-do women, keeping large shops and public houses, allowing their old parents to get the parish half-crown and refusing all aid. “For why,” they say, “should we save the rates?”’ He also complained that his fellow guardians and the magistrates, before whom enforcement cases came, took a sentimental view of the elderly and failed to enforce the rules, allowing out-relief when the individual could earn enough or be supported by their family.

Bartley believed that ‘married daughters, grandchildren and even nephews and nieces, should, if they are in good circumstances and their own natural feelings do not prompt them to do what is right, be compelled by law to help to support their flesh and blood’. And if they did not wish to help their elderly relations, the solution was ‘to firmly offer the [aged pauper the] house and decline outdoor relief ’ in the hope of shaming them into making a contribution. In practice, the families of the old men and women who entered the house were too poor or too indifferent to make any such contribution.

Robert Roberts notes the depths to which the guardians might go to make aged paupers and their families pay towards their upkeep. He quotes from a local newspaper in Salford, about the case of an elderly lady inmate who had received letters from a daughter containing small amounts of money:

‘She refuses’, the clerk told the board, ‘to let the workhouse master see the letters.’ Mr Brownrigg, of the board, said that ‘if the master believed an inmate had money he should have a search made.’ Mr Simmons stated that ‘if the master found an inmate with money he should turn out that inmate. The old woman, who is paralysed on one side said that she had been in the workhouse for two years.

Chairman: ‘Can’t you see that it is your duty to give up the money to the workhouse people for your maintenance here?’

Old woman: ‘No, I can’t see that’

The guardians ordered a search to be made and said she could ask the workhouse master for a shilling or two from time to time.

A few old people voluntarily went into the workhouse and paid towards their stay. One such man was James Hammett, the only one of the famous Tolpuddle martyrs to return to the Dorset village. As his sight deteriorated, he chose to go into Dorchester Workhouse so as not to be a burden on his family. He died there in 1891, and was buried in the churchyard at Tolpuddle. One elderly miner entered the house at Ashby de la Zouche because he ‘could not stand the noise made by his grandchildren and wanted peace and quiet’.

Conditions on the Aged Wards

In 1850, Charles Dickens visited the aged wards of a London workhouse:

In all of these Long Walks of aged and infirm, some old people were bedridden, and had been for a long time; some were sitting on their beds half-naked; some dying in their beds; some out of bed, and sitting at a table near the fire. A sullen or lethargic indifference to what was asked, a blunted sensibility to everything but warmth and food, a moody absence of complaint as being of no use, a dogged silence and resentful desire to be left alone again, I thought were generally apparent. On our walking into the midst of one of these dreary perspectives of old men, nearly the following little dialogue took place … ‘All well here?’

No answer. An old man in a Scotch cap sitting among others on a form at the table, eating out of a tin porringer, pushes back his cap a little to look at us, claps it down on his forehead again with the palm of his hand, and goes on eating…

‘How are YOU to-day?’ To the last old man. That old man says nothing; but another old man, a tall old man of very good address, speaking with perfect correctness, comes forward from somewhere, and volunteers an answer.

‘We are very old, sir,’ in a mild, distinct voice. ‘We can’t expect to be well, most of us.’ ‘Are you comfortable?’

‘I have no complaint to make, sir.’ With a half shake of his head, a half shrug of his shoulders, and a kind of apologetic smile.

His visit was not untypical. When Mrs Fuller, visited the aged wards in the early 1890s, she found them ‘more like a prison for criminals than a lasting home for aged men and women’. The inmates sat, clothed in ill-fitting workhouse dress on hard benches around the walls.

Most observers agreed that the worst aspect of this life was the boredom and the air of hopelessness. Fred Copeman. who grew up in the workhouse at Wangford, Suffolk, during the First World War, remembered: ‘Most of the two or three hundred inmates were very old, and many were treated as hospital patients. Looking back through memory’s years, I see an atmosphere of hopelessness which gave me, surrounded as I was by the old, the infirm and even the insane, the feeling that all had come here to die. Life was a continuous repetition of work, sleep and funerals’.

Conditions varied greatly between workhouses. In most places, the old men and women had separate wards, with perhaps a sitting room, but in the smaller unions, or at times of overcrowding, they might have to share the same wards as the able-bodied men. The elderly were granted small privileges in terms of diet. The Poor Law Commissioners, for example, allowed local guardians to provide each week ‘one ounce of tea, five ounces of butter and seven ounces of sugar per week in lieu of gruel for breakfast… if deemed expedient to make this change’. Few unions did. Indeed, sugar or milk were rarely provided. Even then, as one pauper John Law found at Whitechapel, tea might not be served until supper and the bread scraped with the merest suspicion of butter.

Although the majority of aged paupers were in declining or poor health, there were many for whom the dietary was not sufficient. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ said: ‘I have known ‘old men’ beg and pray to be restored to the ‘young men’s’ dietary, and to congratulate themselves when the request was granted, and for no better reasons than because they had a better chance of filling their stomachs’.

Where possible, the elderly were expected to undertake tasks in the same way that the younger men and women did. Allowances, however, were made for their frailty. At Crumpsall, in Manchester, the Master, Major Frank Ballantine, told the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor that half of the inmates:

were fit for work of a very light description, such as picking beaten oakum, something which requires very little moving about, and which can be done while they are sitting in their seats. Then the remainder of them do work, such as chopping and sawing firewood, some of them carrying coals, cleaning up their wards, running as messengers from one part of the house to another for the men; and the women sewing and doing domestic work of any kind which may be required.

By 1900, some 180 workhouses adopted the Brabazon scheme of occupational therapy, where lady visitors helped the aged and infirm make wickerwork baskets, rugs and quilts and even wrought ironwork. The scheme was designed to encourage the inmates to be creative and to stop their constant grumbling. It proved so successful that it was soon extended to children as well.

Many unions tried to moderate the effect of the Poor Law on the elderly inhabitants, at least informally. As early as 1836, the guardians at Aylsham in Norfolk, for example, agreed to provide long waistcoats for the old men, because the existing ones were not long enough to protect them from the cold. Others provided beer and tobacco or privileged access to the workhouse garden.

A blind eye was turned to the more stringent of the regulations, too. In his report for 1892, George Douglas, the master of Marylebone Workhouse, revealed:

At least twenty years ago I quietly permitted the old women to have a private teapot and make their own tea, conditionally that it was done at the same time, four o’clock, and that the pot and the tea was supplied by friends’. He added: ‘A cup of tea is a wonderful comfort to an old woman who, in the ordinary way, would have to wait until the evening meal at six for it.

In a sentimental exception to the strict rule which separated the sexes, aged couples who had been married for many years could ask to share a room. At Marylebone, T.W. Wilkinson found ten rooms, one per couple, with ‘brightly-painted walls, the pictures, the official furniture… the photographs and the knick-knacks belonging to the inmates who are allowed to bring in such property as they choose…. If an old couple must spend their last days in the workhouse one could wish them no brighter or more healthy quarters’.

Where there were no rooms where couples could live, the strict rule of separation was occasionally broken if either the husband or the wife was dying. At Andover, of all places, 76-year-old-pauper William Norris told the Parliamentary inquiry into the scandal in 1846 that he and his wife had entered the house together:

My wife was ill and died here. I was allowed by the master to go and sit by my wife … whenever I liked. I went to see her at dinnertime twice, whilst she was in the day hall. I cannot tell you when she was removed into the sick. I went to see her there… When I left the house … I said to him: “Good Bye God bless you; I shall always be thankful to you for my wife.” He behaved very well to me…

The rise of women and working class guardians in the 1880s and 1890s led to a general improvement in conditions for sick and aged paupers. Previously bleak rooms were decorated, more comfortable furniture provided, the diet improved and the Brabazon scheme introduced. Within six months of her election as a Poor Law Guardian at Chorlton (Manchester) in 1894, Emmeline Pankhurst had comfortable Windsor chairs with high backs introduced for the elderly to sit on and changed both diet and dress. The bread was cut into slices and buttered with margarine, each person being allowed to eat as much as they desired, the surplus being made into puddings with milk and currants.

But not everything was sweetness and light. A reasonable number of elderly paupers were troublesome individuals, who had to be handled with care and could cause trouble for the staff. ‘The Indoor Pauper’ attested to the aggressive nature of many of the old men, who ‘are some of the most irritable and cross-grained beings in existence. They are perpetually on the watch for the slightest invasion, of what they consider any infringement of “their rights” and as perpetually vindicating the rights by growl and snarl and venomous remark’.

Nonetheless, they were much better behaved than the old men and women whom John Sutton, Master of Barham Workhouse in Suffolk and former Master of Covent Garden, had to deal with. He told the Poor Law Commissioners, that his experience:

would lead me to say that the character of the aged paupers maintained in the old workhouses was generally vicious; and the aged inmates of Barham workhouse when I arrived were in no respect better. When I first arrived at Covent Garden workhouse, the aged paupers were permitted to go out on Sunday, and it was no common thing, at the hour when they ought to have returned, for me to be summoned to have some aged male or female paupers removed from the street, having fallen down in a state of great intoxication … It was common for me to call in the assistance of three or four policemen to quell the riotous state of the house, in consequence of the intoxication of those who had been out on Sunday.

By the 1890s, behaviour of this kind seems to have largely died out. At Crumpsall, Frank Ballantine said that fewer than a dozen paupers returned in a drunken state each year, out of the hundreds allowed leave each week. They were punished by not being allowed out for two months. As leave, and indeed any contact with the outside world, was highly prized this must have been a particularly effective punishment.

There seem to have been relatively few cases of deliberate mistreatment of aged paupers. Even at Andover, although the elderly paupers were underfed, they suffered no more than the rest of the inmates.

The Poor Law Commissioners investigated a number of cases. In June 1846, at the height of the Andover Scandal, an inspector was sent to investigate the death of James Jarvis, a 75-year-old pauper at Barrow-upon-Soar, Leicestershire. He had been put on ‘a short diet’ of bread and water for refusing to pump water, and subsequently died. Jarvis was described by the witnesses as being of an ‘irritable disposition’ and difficult to manage. The master and matron, Joshua and Eliza Derry, were sacked for the infringement of the rules which said that paupers who had previously been ill could not be put on a reduced diet, although a number of witnesses, including the Board of Guardians, testified to their long service and ‘their humanity and attention to the duties of their office’.

Yet they did not care to investigate a case reported in The Times in October the same year, of a pauper lunatic John Webb, aged 74, at Risbridge, Suffolk. His daughter told Haverhill Coroner’s Court that when she visited him in the workhouse, she found him

lying on the bed on his back. He appeared senseless and blood was trickling down his face. She asked Slater [a male pauper nurse] what he had been doing to her father? Slater said, nothing. She then asked how it was that blood was trickling down his (her father’s) face? Slater said ‘You are a d-d sight worse fool than your brother’. She went and told the mistress. Her father was quite helpless. He had received several injuries on different parts of his body and was very filthy.

Witnesses attested to Slater’s mistreatment of Webb. The coroner’s jury recorded a verdict of natural death but they noted ‘their horror and detestation of the cruel and inhuman treatment’ provided by Slater, and criticised the ‘highly reprehensible’ actions of the guardians ‘for employing a pauper nurse for the sake of paltry economy… instead of an efficient and responsible female nurse’.

Pauper Funerals

For the Victorian poor, the worst fate of all was to receive a pauper funeral ‘on the parish’, with the minimum expense. Indeed under the Anatomy Act of 1832, an unclaimed pauper’s body could be denied a decent Christian burial and handed over to the medical school for dissection by students. Always hard-hearted, the Brixworth guardians once suggested that if they sold the cadavers of recently deceased paupers to anatomy schools, such as the one at Downing College, Cambridge, then the poor who had claimed welfare could be made to pay their financial debts to society even after death. The idea was rejected out of hand by Whitehall.

Even the poorest person aspired to a decent end. All but the very poor contributed a penny or two to a funeral club, which would ensure that they and their families would receive a decent burial and have enough to pay for the wake. And for those who did not have such insurance, there might be a whip round. Robert Roberts remembered his mother would often give a sheet to make a shroud, and women went from door to door collecting for a wreath.

The social investigator Maud Pember Reeves found in the early 1910s that the poor in Lambeth were also determined to do well by the dead, particularly the children. They would scrimp and save from an already meagre budget to pay for the funeral, the expense of which roughly equated to a week’s pay for the father, rather than turn to the Poor Law. She noted:

The pauper funeral carries with it the pauperisation of the father of the child – a humiliation which adds disgrace to the natural grief of the parents. More than that, they declare that the pauper funeral is wanting in dignity and in respect to their dead. One woman expressed the feeling of many more when she would as soon as have the dust-cart call for the body of her child than that ‘there Black Mariar’.

The poem ‘The Pauper’s Funeral’ by Thomas Hood, written in the early 1840s, is a graphic condemnation:

There’s a grim [one-]horse hearse in a jolly round trot,

To the church yard a pauper is going, I wot,

The road it is rough, and the hearse has no springs,

And, hark! to the dirge the sad driver sings.

Rattle his bones, his bones, his bones,

Over the stones, the stones, the stones,

He’s only a pauper, who nobody owns,

Nobody owns, nobody owns.

                   …

Oh! Where are the mourners? Alas, there are none,

He has left not a gap in the world, now he’s gone;

Not a tear in the eye of child, woman or man,

To the grave with his carcase as fast as you can.

Rattle his bones, his bones, his bones,

Over the stones, the stones, the stones,

He’s only a pauper, who nobody owns,

Nobody owns, nobody owns.

Hood’s poem was soon set to music and became a popular favourite with audiences. The Manchester Guardian reviewed one recital in November 1845, where ‘The words, “Rattle his bones, over the stones,” are sung by three of the vocalists, and there is a sort of sepulchral response on the words “his bones” and “the stones,” by the bass voice, which is quite new and thrilling in its effect’.

Few unions spent much on pauper funerals. Yet they were obliged by convention and the fear of popular reaction to provide a modicum of respect. The guardians at Brixworth were roundly criticised in 1888 for failing to bury a respectable pauper, Elizabeth Simons. They rejected pleas from her unemployed 74-year-old husband and their family. While they wrangled, the body festered at Simons’ home and became a public nuisance. Eventually, two guardians paid for a pauper funeral from their own pockets.

When, in the eyes of the public, the minimum respect was not shown to the deceased, there could be protests in the papers and occasionally on the streets. In February 1864, the workhouse matron at Tadcaster, Catherine Leivers, decided to humiliate for one last time a pauper women, Elizabeth Daniel, by ignoring most of the funeral conventions. The Tadcaster Post reported:

The matron of this institution, not content with making her feel in a ten-fold degree that she was a pauper determined to inter her in a manner she thought fitting of a pauper’s grave.

The poor woman (a native of Tadcaster) had been in the workhouse twelve months or thereabouts and on the day appointed for her internment a number of poor women offered to carry her to her grave. But no! This was too good for a pauper! Her body was placed in a rough unplaned, deal coffin blackened over without either tire or handles and was pushed head foremost into a sweep’s donkey cart, tied in with a rope and driven by one of the lads belonging to the workhouse, who was nearly as black as the cart in which the remains were conveyed.

At the church-yard gates, the corpse was met by the undertaker’s apprentices in their working clothes, with their white aprons on, who, ashamed of the proceedings, had come by some other route and was carried by them into the church followed by the father of the deceased (a very old man who inhabits one of the Bede Houses) and a large congregation of people who denounced the proceedings in unmeasured terms.

Mrs Leivers had over-stepped the mark and she was forced to resign.

Coffins were generally cheaply made by a local joiner under contract. In 1888, at Mile End, there were complaints about the funeral of ‘an old man named Young’ who had been ‘buried in a roughly marked ‘box’, the bottom of which was not even painted black’.

The union might maintain a hearse to take the body to his or her home parish when there was no graveyard attached to the workhouse or when the pauper’s family paid for the body to be brought home. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy tells of how the bodies of Fanny Robin and her illegitimate child was taken from Casterbridge Workhouse:

Whilst the chimes were yet stammering out a shattered form of “Malbrook,” Joseph Poorgrass rang the bell, and received directions to back his waggon against the high door under the gable. The door then opened, and a plain elm coffin was slowly thrust forth, and laid by two men in fustian along the middle of the vehicle.

One of the men then stepped up beside it, took from his pocket a lump of chalk, and wrote upon the cover the name and a few other wordsin a large scrawling hand. (We believe that they do these things more tenderly now, and provide a plate.) He covered the whole with a black cloth, threadbare, but decent, the tailboard of the waggon was returned to its place, one of the men handed a certificate of registry to Poorgrass, and both entered the door, closing it behind them. Their connection with her, short as it had been, was over for ever.

The clothes worn by the driver and any bearers were likely to be secondhand, if not threadbare. There was rarely a tombstone: the family could not afford one and the guardians would not commemorate an individual brought to the workhouse.

Things could be rather different at the larger unions. As if to try to combat the negative publicity of pauper funerals, Frank Ballantine boasted that at Crumpsall there were ‘four inmates who wear distinctive black dress, which is furnished to them, to act as bearers or carriers. The coffin is provided with a pall, and there is a coffin painted with the name and age and date of death of every person interred and the name is also sewn on the shroud inside… All our internments are conducted with the very greatest decorum’.

If there was a success story within the Poor Law it was the care of the sick and elderly. The 1834 Act made almost no mention of the treatment of the sick and infirm – the Poor Law Commissioners assuming that the new boards of guardians would take over the duties of the parish overseers in these matters. However, it took 30 years for matters to improve A number of well-publicised investigations into conditions in the mid-1860s forced Whitehall to act. By 1900, in London and the larger cities at least, workhouse infirmaries were as almost as good as voluntary hospitals supported by charitable donations and certainly cared for many more patients.

Conditions for the elderly also improved, although whenever they entered the house, the final years of most aged paupers must have been bleak and exceedingly boring. And although we know little about conditions in almshouses or other institutions for the deserving elderly poor it is unlikely that they were much different. The main difference in both the treatment of the sick and the aged was that anybody who entered the infirmary or the aged wards was inevitably tainted with the workhouse stain.