Chapter Seven

Casuals in the Workhouse

The worst treated people in the workhouse were undoubtedly the vagrants or ‘casuals’, as the authorities knew them. Casual wards, or ‘spikes’ as they were nicknamed, were colder, dirtier and the food even drearier than that offered elsewhere in the workhouse. And unlike the rest of the workhouse, conditions in the casual wards largely remained unchanged during the whole 90 years of the New Poor Law.

The streets and roads of eighteenth and nineteenth century England were full of homeless men, women and children. Some were beggars and other ne’er-do-wells living on what wits they had, while others were skilled workmen out of employment and tramping the country looking for work. But most fell between the two pillars, subsisting on the results of casual earnings.

Society in general, and the Poor Law authorities in particular, were convinced that the vast majority of vagrants were worthless men and women whose sole purpose in life was to cause trouble and do as little work as possible. Most shared the views of the early nineteenth century writer, Thomas Walker, who wrote that they ‘will not have households of their own, who have but one object in all their wicked and perverse lives – to exist without work at the expense of their industrious neighbours – we are taxed to provide board and lodging’.

The term vagrant was a catch-all definition used to cover everybody who was not obviously looking for work – from the tramp who spent his life on the road and only entered the workhouse in the worst of weathers to the semi-employed and semi-criminal ‘mouchers’ who lived off their wits, for whom the workhouse was an all too familiar refuge.

The editor of Hiscoke’s Richmond Notes in 1864, divided vagrants between those ‘really in search of work, but by far the greater are a set of useless vagabonds who detest work and pick up a living by attending fairs, races etc, to whom of course anything that comes in their way is fair prize, in obtaining which they have as few morals as the Emperor of Austria or the King of Prussia’.

The 1906 committee on vagrancy identified four distinct types of vagrants: people tramping the country for work; those unable to hold down a job except in times of exceptional prosperity and who survived on a mixture of temporary work and begging; the work-shy and the criminal, who had no intention of working, but for whom the casual ward provided a convenient base. The most desperate were the ‘old and infirm persons who wander about to their own hurt; they are “unemployable” and crawl from vagrant ward to vagrant ward; only entering the workhouse infirmaries when they are compelled to do so; many of them are crazy, all of them live by begging and they give much trouble to police and magistrates’.

Because of their obsession with the ‘undeserving’, the Poor Law authorities constantly underestimated the number of men in casual wards looking for work. The Master of Potterspury Workhouse in Buckinghamshire, S.H. Hardwick thought that very few genuine jobseekers stayed in his casual wards despite it being on the main road between the Birmingham and London, and the 1906 Departmental Committee on Vagrancy estimated that less than 3 per cent of the residents of the casual wards were seriously looking for work. This was probably rather on the low side.

Perhaps a more accurate view, although based on anecdotal evidence, was that of the American Josiah Flynt, who tramped through Britain for a month in the mid-1890s. In this time, he estimated that he had met over 200 vagrants, over half of whom were looking for work. His figure tallies with a survey conducted by the Ministry of Health in the late 1920s. It found that wards were almost equally split between those seeking work and the habitual vagrants who had no intention or were incapable of working.

At Potterspury, the admission book for the early 1890s revealed that the great majority of the applicants were labourers if they were men, or charwomen if they were women. But among their number were a schoolmistress and two (female) mantle-makers, 18 cabinetmakers, five gunsmiths, three electricians, two pen-makers and two sail-makers.

The wards at Belford, which lay on the Great North Road between Newcastle and Edinburgh, were regularly visited by miners. In September 1893, the master noted that a great many Staffordshire miners had stayed at the house. Thirty years later in 1926, it was reported that a number of miners had passed through on their way back to the mines after the conclusion of the General Strike.

A number of vagrants were ex-servicemen who could not adjust to life outside the army or were suffering from, what we know today, as post-traumatic stress disorder. In 1946, Frank Jennings talked to one man at the St Albans ‘spike’ who had won a DSO at El Alamein. On his return to ‘Blighty’, the veteran found that he was unable settle down, so he divorced his wife, sold his house and, feeling bitter and disillusioned, took to the road. This disillusionment is recorded in a piece of nineteenth century doggerel found on the walls of the casual wards at Yeovil:

The master has the meat

Inmates the bones

The men who fought for Empire

Hundredweights of stones

Casual wards swelled at harvest time, when the poor from towns sought work in the fields. Work in the hop fields was particularly popular. In 1904, the average numbers of casuals relieved in Kentish workhouses on Friday nights in September was 1,087, compared with the average for the year of 559. One tramp told Henry Mayhew: ‘In the autumn, [Vagrants] are mostly in Sussex or Kent; for they like the hop-picking. It is not hard work, and there are a great many loose girls to be found there. I believe many a boy and man goes hop-picking who never does anything else during the year but beg’.

But for jobseekers, staying at the workhouse was often the last resort. Paradoxically, although the casual wards were originally meant for the worker on the tramp, conditions were such that a stay of a more than a few nights could destroy their ability to get another post. The social reformer Mary Higgs, who stayed in several casual wards in the early 1900s, found that after being discharged, ‘one thing we could not do – we could not work for an honest living. It us physically impossible… Strength to work has gone’.

Forty years earlier Henry Mayhew was told:

I have known many an honest, industrious, working man, however, made a regular beggar and vagrant by continued use of the casual wards. They are driven there first by necessity, and then they learn that they can live in such places throughout the year without working for their livelihood. Many a hard-working man, I am convinced, is made idle and dishonest by such means: yes, that is the case… They were originally labouring men, or mechanics, and had given over all thoughts of working, finding that there was no necessity to do so in order to live.

In many places there was often no alternative place to lay one’s head, particularly if the individual had little or no money. As Jack London astutely observed: ‘The majority of these men, nay, all of them, I found, do not like the spike, and only come to it when driven in. After the ‘rest up’ they are good for two or three days and nights on the streets, when they are driven in again for another rest. Of course, this continuous hardship quickly breaks their constitutions’.

S.H. Hardwick was harsher. He described the circumstances of four jewellers who had stayed at his house: ‘Is it probable that any merchant would employ them? They, like the others, are on the road through some fault of their own, which will forever remain a secret, but to a few’.

The onset of spring saw crowds of cadgers, or mouchers, leave the cities for the countryside, intent of making a living until the onset of bad weather drove them back to the rookeries and slums.

Captain Amyatt Amyatt, the Chief Constable of Dorset in the 1860s, interviewed a number of such men, including the Devonian Thomas Washott:

This man ran away from his master at 19 years of age, commenced by offering bootlaces and matches for sale as a pretext for begging, and found the business so profitable that he said: ‘I could make enough in three days to keep comfortably for the rest of the week. My plan was to go to a common lodging house, pick up information from my pals, as to the houses in the neighbourhood, and what they were good for, and then make the round. At races I could do a good deal better. When I had worked the neighbourhood I went on to the next place. I was never in a tramp ward but once in my life.

It was not just men who took to this life. Henry Mayhew met one woman of about 22 ‘who had lost all traces of feminine beauty’. She told him: ‘I went down into the country, down into Essex, sir. I travelled all parts, and slept at the unions on the road. I met a young girl down in Town Malling, in Kent … we used to go begging together, and tramp it from one union to another’.

Families, too, were to be found on the road. Josiah Flynt was surprised by the number of couples and families he found: ‘I should far sooner have looked for a New York hobo in clergyman’s robes. But tramping with children and babies is a fad in English vagabondage’.

Tramps generally supported themselves by scrounging, begging and wheedling, doing best at fairs, markets and race courses. They were often known as cadgers, particularly by the authorities who grumbled bitterly about the money they made from the generosity or gullibility of ordinary people. Josiah Flynt said that mouchers had innumerable ‘lurks’, that is tricks to extract money from the gullible. ‘One day he is a “shallow cove” or “shivering Jimmy”; another is a “crocus” (sham beggar); but not very often is he a successful mendicant pure and simple. He begs all the time to be sure, but continually relies on some trick or other for success’. W.H. Davies spent time with one cadger whose lurk was to sing hymns badly out of tune until he was paid by annoyed householders to shut up. But they never seemed to earn very much; Flynt thought that they might make two shillings a day.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, ‘mouching’ was dying out, and had largely disappeared by the Second World War. Even so, Susan Lawrence, Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Health, found a moucher staying at Newmarket Workhouse during a tour of inspection of East Anglian workhouses in 1931: ‘He was going down to London for races at Newmarket… lives in London – and went about the country to race meetings. Looked a professional tough’.

Tramps were a relatively rare sight in casual wards, particularly in urban areas, as they usually preferred to sleep rough and to avoid the towns where possible. The 1930 Committee on the Casual Poor was told: ‘The men you meet in the casual ward in a town and men you meet in the country are two different classes altogether. There is a class of man whom I have met roaming around the country that will not go inside a town to live, they keep on going circulating round the country casual wards year in, year out’. Indeed there were specific routes between casual wards. The most popular went between Bedford and London, via Luton, St Albans and Watford unions.

Many seem to have had psychiatric problems or experienced a traumatic event in their lives which forced them to tramp the roads. Josiah Flynt thought in general they were a ‘trifle insane’ and wrote about walking with one for an hour, who said nothing but constantly wetted his cheek with a finger. An investigation by a psychologist in the late 1920s of inmates of casual wards identified over a quarter with some sort of mental instability; others were chronic alcoholics.

A few came from well-to-do families: men who had fallen on hard times as the result of drink or foolish investments. The Revd Frank Jennings, who ministered to tramps on the road between the 1920s and 1950s, met a well-educated man, who had been a successful accountant, at the spike in Bishop’s Stortford. Bad speculation and loose living had naturally been the cause of his downfall. ‘“I went through £5,000,” he said bitterly, “Life has no evil left to inflict on me”’.

The tramp could easily be identified by his clothing: usually layers of dirty and partly decayed garments, which according to S.H. Hardwick ‘was generally in shreds and tied with pieces of string or lace’. Another thing that commentators remarked upon was the smell, particularly in the summer when men often spent nights sleeping in barns or in open fields. The only time they had a bath was before they were admitted to the casual ward.

During the 1950s, Frank Jennings met one vagrant:

garbed in a wondrous assortment of clothes that, seemingly, had not left his body for many a long day, who grumbled about being made to take a bath: “That’s all they blurry-well fink of! ‘Ave a bath, ‘ave a bath! Gets on your bleedin’ nerves! An’ when yer catches a blurry cold, wodder they care? It’s a bleedin’ cruelty, that’s wot it is!”

The Casual Wards

The casual wards provided extremely basic accommodation for vagrants of all kinds. They were generally about 20 miles apart, which was a fairly easy day’s tramp. Those on the main routes between the industrial north and London (for example, near the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh) attracted more vagrants than those that were not.

Despite some pressure from Whitehall, guardians and masters had little incentive to improve conditions for the casuals. In particular, workhouses where facilities were better than average were likely to get more than their fair share of visitors. When news emerged that oakum had run out at North Witchford Union in rural Cambridgeshire, there was a surge in applicants from 20 a week to 75 within three weeks. Conversely, when conditions suddenly worsened, numbers could fall dramatically. At St Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1842, the introduction of compulsory stone breaking reduced numbers considerably. In the three weeks before the task was introduced, some 11,111 persons were relieved; in the three weeks afterwards, it was 776.

Eighty years later, George Orwell came across tramps who knew the merits and faults of spikes up and down the country. The one in Chelsea was particularly praised for its blankets. Tramps would find out about the better casual wards by word of mouth or even from graffiti on casual ward walls. In 1866, the Poor Law Inspector Andrew Doyle noted down graffiti he had found in workhouses he had visited. In one ward, he found comments about the Seisdon Union Workhouse in Staffordshire:

Dry bread in the morning, ditto at night

Keep up your pecker make it all right.

Certainly the meals are paltry and mean

But the beds are nice and clean.

Men don’t tear these beds, sheets or rugs

For there are neither lice, fleas or bugs

At this clean little union at Trysull…

New instructions were occasionally issued by Whitehall to toughen the regime offered, particularly at times of high unemployment, to act as a disincentive to potential vagrants. This meant that the genuine work seeker was penalised, while the ‘loafers’ and ‘shirkers’ were hardly affected.

Wherever possible, the casual wards were kept physically separate to prevent contamination from potentially disease-carrying applicants. Separate wards were provided for men and women. Often the wards were situated to one side of the main gate and close to the porter’s office, the porter being responsible for admitting the tramps to the house.

There were few women vagrants. In 1845, women made up roughly 15 per cent of people staying in casual wards. Of the 9,768 vagrants in the casual wards on the night of 1 January 1906, only 886 were women. The numbers were so small that the 1906 Departmental Committee on Vagrancy recommended that women and their children, where appropriate, be accommodated in the female wards in the main workhouse. Why this number was so low is difficult to understand. It may be that women had more domestic responsibilities which tied them down. Women’s work was also more readily available. And, as the campaigner for improved conditions for female tramps, Mary Higgs, suggested, women could always fall back on prostitution if desperate.

In 1840, the typical casual accommodation was described as being single-storey buildings attached to the back yard. One observer found:

In general they have brick floors and guardroom beds, with loose straw and rugs for the males and iron bedsteads with straw ties for the females. They are generally badly ventilated and unprovided with any means of producing warmth. All holes for ventilation in reach of the occupants are sure to be stuffed with rags and straws; so that the [e]ffluvia of these places is at best most disgustingly offensive.

Initially, the casual ward was one large room, with rudimentary beds and bedding, perhaps with a bucket in the middle. In the mid-1840s the authorities in Richmond provided straw and rags for bedding, although beds and bedding were made available for the sick. Such conditions helped the spread of disease, which all too often, the vagrants brought with them. The most common disease was the itch (scabies). Occasionally the diseases they carried were more serious. In 1842, 14 children died when tramps introduced measles into the workhouse at Thirsk. By the end of the century, hygiene had generally improved: vagrants were made to bathe on arrival and some provision was made to treat those who were obviously ill.

In 1865, the Poor Law Board laid down regulations for the design and layout of tramp wards, although they were slow to be adopted. Separate wards for men and women were to be provided, together with a yard ‘containing a bathroom and a water closet attached to each apartment and a shed provided for the vagrants to work in’. Each ward ‘should be fitted up with a sleeping platform or barrack bed of adequate depth along each side of it with a convenient gangway down the middle. The platform should be divided by means of boards and the space allocated to each person should be at least two feet three inches wide’.

These regulations were not often followed. Arriving just before 9pm at Lambeth Workhouse in January 1866, the journalist James Greenwood was shown to a shed:

a space of about 30ft. by 30ft. enclosed on three sides by a dingy whitewashed wall, and roofed with naked tiles which were furred with the damp and filth that reeked within. As for the fourth side of the shed, it was boarded in for (say) a third of its breadth; the remaining space being hung with flimsy canvas, in which was a gap 2ft. wide at top, widening to at least 4ft. at bottom. This far too airy shed was paved with stone, the flags so thickly encrusted with filth that I mistook it first for a floor of natural earth.

A decade later, Whitehall recommended the introduction of the cell system, whereby the inmates would sleep, and ideally work, in one or two person cells. In introducing the new regulations in 1874, the Local Government Board argued that the traditional casual ward had ‘afforded the opportunity for the interchange of information and for the communication of plans for evading the operation of the law’.

The new arrangements were obviously too luxurious for ‘A Lambeth Guardian’, who wrote in a pamphlet published in 1875, that he had recently visited the new casual wards at Plumstead, where everyone ‘who wishes for a night’s lodging is provided with a warm bath, and with a clean shirt and a clean bed, in a room heated by hot water and with a gaslight all to himself, disturbed by no neighbour. Should he want anything in the night, there is a bell in a room, by which he may ring a valet appointed to attend upon him’.

Fifty years later, in 1929, George Orwell has a very different experience in an East London workhouse:

The cell measured eight feet by five by eight high, was made of stone, and had a tiny barred window high in the wall and a spy-hole in the door, just like a cell in a prison. In it was six blankets, a chamber pot, a hot-water pipe, and nothing else whatever. I looked round the cell with a vague feeling that something was missing. Then, with a shock of surprise, I realised what it was and exclaimed: ‘But I say, damn it, where are the beds?’ ‘Beds?’ said the other man, surprised. ‘There aren’t no beds! What yer expect? This one of them spikes where you sleep on the floor. Christ! Ain’t got you used to that yet?’

Casuals had a reputation for being troublesome. Small, rural houses, in particular, lived in fear of gangs of vagrants descending upon them, because the master and his staff had no effective way of controlling them. Even in the large metropolitan wards, tramps were a constant source of trouble. It did not help that conditions in prisons were often better than at the workhouse: food was certainly more generous and the beds better. A report prepared for Lincolnshire Quarter Sessions in 1903 found:

tramps in the casual ward when threatened with prosecution before the Magistrates… have openly avowed their preference for prison life, and cases are also noted where, after sentence, the prisoners have made a similar statement as to their having no dislike for prison… Prison conditions indeed, to persons with so low a standard of physical comfort as the average vagrant, must be extremely comfortable and even attractive.

The Daily Routine

Although the experiences of the casuals varied greatly depending on the workhouse and when they were admitted, the procedure for their admission and treatment seems to have been much the same. Admission was by ticket, which could be obtained from a workhouse official (usually the relieving officer or his assistant) or in some places from the local police station.

However, most applicants preferred to turn up at the workhouse itself, if for no other reason than they were less likely to undergo searching questions. Even so the porter, responsible for admitting vagrants, was obliged to complete a register of entrants and ask about where an individual had come from, where he was going to, and his occupation.

The porter was a key figure. In 1903, outside the Whitechapel Workhouse, Jack London found ‘a most woeful picture, men and women waiting in the cold grey end of the day for a pauper’s shelter for the night’. At Poplar, Jack London’s companions were nervous about ringing the workhouse door for fear of upsetting the official:

The Carpenter stealthily advanced a timid forefinger to the button, and gave it the faintest, shortest push. I have looked at waiting men where life or death was in the issue; but anxious suspense showed less plainly on their faces than it showed on the faces of these two men as they waited on the coming of the porter. He came. He barely looked at us. “Full up,” he said and shut the door.”

Women vagrants were most at risk. Mary Higgs, who spent a week with a friend staying in lodging houses and workhouses, was shocked by her reception at a Northern house:

[the porter] kept me inside his lodge, and began to take the details. He talked to me in what he supposed was a very agreeable manner, telling me he wished I had come alone earlier, and he would have given me a cup of tea. I thanked him, wondering if this was usual, and finding I was a married woman (I must use his exact words), he said, ‘Just the right age for a bit of funning; come down to me later in the evening.’ I was too horror struck to reply; besides I was in his power with no one within to call but my friend and all the conditions unknown and strange.

At another workhouse, she and her fellow applicants had to undergo a barrage of insults before they were admitted: ‘If the unfortunate applicant stated the facts in a meek and ordinary voice, this official asked ‘‘have you been here before?’’ If the reply was ‘‘no’’ ‘‘See that you don’t come here again’’ ‘‘Sponging upon the rates!’’ and various other expressions not to be repeated were used in a hectoring tone of voice. If the reply was ‘‘yes’’ he became threatening and violent in language’.

Casuals were admitted between 4pm (5pm in summer) and 8 or 9pm. It was not unknown, however, for the wards to close earlier because they were full or open late on the whim of the workhouse porter on the door. Men and women were, in general, admitted for one night, although in 1881, regulations were imposed which stated that they had to stay for two nights (three nights if admitted on a Friday or Saturday night). In practice this was often unworkable, since most workhouse masters were keen to get rid of troublesome inmates, and so this regulation was widely ignored, although under pressure from Whitehall, more and more unions adopted it.

Many men welcomed the new arrangements, because it gave them a few nights’ shelter. Jack London tried to persuade a fellow inmate at Poplar to run off without undertaking his task, but was told ‘Aw, I came ‘ere for a rest… An’ another night’s kip won’t ‘hurt me none’. Mary Higgs, admittedly from a middle class background and unused to the vagrant’s life, was less sure. After her short stay, she ‘felt a mere wreck. Only two days ago I was in full health and vigour. It was not absolute cruelty, only the cruel system, the meagre and uneatable diet, the lack of sufficient moisture to make up for loss by perspiration, two almost sleepless nights, ‘hard labour’ under any circumstances’.

Each person admitted was thoroughly searched and possessions were taken from him or her. Tramps made a great deal of being able to hide a wad of tobacco or a penny from the prying eyes of the workhouse staff, either in their boots (which traditionally were never searched) or in nooks and crannies outside the house. If they were caught they could be turned out of the workhouse or even imprisoned. In August 1868, the Berwick Advertiser, reported the case of George Williams who was caught with 1s 3d when seeking admission to Belford Workhouse and was sentenced to a week in Alnwick Prison.

Vagrants were made to undress and take a bath, usually in dirty tepid water that had previously been used by other residents. George Orwell described the scene at ‘Romton’ spike:

Fifty stark-naked men elbowing each other in a room twenty feet square, with only two bath-tubs and two slimy roller towels between them all. I shall never forget the reek of dirty feet. Less than half the tramps actually bathed… When my time came for the bath, I asked if I might swill out the tub, which was streaked with dirt before using it. [The porter] answered simple ‘shut yer f- mouth and get on with yer bath!’ That set the social tone of the place and I did not speak again.

A few years earlier at Cannock, an inspector found ‘one bath only in use, men who may have skin diseases dry themselves on the one and only towel provided’.

Their clothes would be taken from them and fumigated by being heated in an oven, or ‘stoved’, as the phrase was, or possibly disinfected by chlorine, and stored to be collected the following morning. Mary Higgs pointed out that, particularly for women, having crumpled and unironed clothes made it even harder to find work, as it marked out applicants as having just come from the workhouse. Men and women were supposed to be issued with blue nightshirts made of a coarse material. Often they were very worn as the result of many months’ wear and tear. At smaller rural workhouses, vagrants might well sleep in their clothes, despite the disapproval of the authorities in London.

Eventually, the casual would be given eight ounces of dried bread (Jack London thought it was a brick) and perhaps a bowl of skilly (gruel), before being shown to the ward itself. An Irish tramp told George Orwell that skilly was nothing more than ‘a can o’ hot water wid some bloody oatmeal at de bottom’. Food was important for half-starved casuals: even skilly. James Greenwood recorded this conversation: ‘“You was too late for skilly. K. There’s skilly now, nights as well as mornins.” “Don’t you tell no bleeding lies,” K. answered, incredulously. “Blind me, it’s true! Ain’t it, Punch?” “Right you are!” said Punch, “and spoons to eat it with, that’s more!”’

Few unions provided spoons and it was quite an art to drink skilly from a large bowl without wasting any. Naturally there could be lively debates about which spike did the best skilly. According to people Jack London met: ‘“You do get good skilly at ‘ackney,” said the Carter. “Oh, wonderful skilly, that,” praised the Carpenter, and each looked eloquently at each other.’

Middle class visitors often remarked on the noise made by the sleeping casuals, the loud snores and the talking in the sleep, which kept them awake. Occasionally there might be a group which disturbed the others by talking, singing and rough-housing.

Breakfast was more bread and skilly. James Greenwood found that:

I was glad to get mine, because the basin that contained it was warm and my hands were numb with cold. I tasted a spoonful, as in duty bound, and wondered more than ever at the esteem in which it was held by my confrères… But it was hot, and on that account, perhaps, was so highly relished, that I had no difficulty in persuading one of the decent men to accept my share.

Mary Higgs was pleased to be offered a mug of coffee at a workhouse, where she was staying. A few workhouses provided tea or coffee instead of gruel, although it was contrary to regulations. She was told that ‘the tramps never eat the gruel and frequently throw it about, and even at each other, making a great mess! Also, being made in summer overnight, it turns sour and “is not fit for pigs”’. In general she complained about the lack of water, let alone coffee or tea, to wash down the food.

Every day vagrants had to undertake three or four hours of work, known as ‘the task’, before they could leave the workhouse. Most unions wanted inmates to contribute to their upkeep, and it was supposed to be a deterrent for the indolent. It was made compulsory in 1873, although most casual wards already required inmates to undertake such work. For men this was often breaking stones, for women cleaning and tidying. Either sex could be required to pick oakum. The worst task was stone-pounding, using four-foot bars with square ends. The journalist Everard Wyrall said that ‘only men in good health can use them properly’. No protection was given for the eyes, and after half-an-hour he was exhausted with sore and bleeding hands.

In Lambeth, however, James Greenwood was required to turn a crank. It is ‘like turning a windlass. The task is not a severe one. Four measures of corn… have to be ground every morning by the night’s batch of casuals. Close up by the ceiling hangs a bell connected with the machinery, and as each measure is ground the bell rings, so that the grinders may know how they are going on’.

There were complaints about the pointlessness of many of these tasks. In the 1840s, Henry Mayhew pointed out:

for what was easy work to an agricultural labourer, a railway excavator, a quarryman, or to any one used to wield a hammer, was painful and blistering to a starving tailor. Nor was the test enforced by the overseers or regarded by the paupers as a proof of willingness to work, but simply as a punishment for poverty, and as a means of deterring the needy from applying for relief. To make labour a punishment, however, is not to destroy, but really to confirm, idle habits; it is to give a deeper root to the vagrant‘s settled aversion to work. “Well, I always thought it was unpleasant,” the vagabond will say to himself “that working for one’s bread, and now I‘m convinced of it!”

Nearly 100 years later, a witness told the Committee on the Casual Poor in 1930: ‘The work I saw in the casual wards was a farce. I was only in one ward where the work was well organised. We chopped firewood like the Church Army – that seemed to be entirely good – but as a rule it was loitering about waiting to get out. It was simply being bored stiff, waiting and waiting and waiting’. By 1925, the picking of oakum had ended and few places were insisting in stone-breaking, largely because there was a falling demand for stone chippings for roads.

Mary Higgs and her friend found that ‘all this rough hard work naturally made our clothes dirty and would soon wear them out. We were, after only two nights in the workhouse tramp wards far more dirty and disreputable in our clothing than when we left home… We felt completely tired out’.

At about 11am, the casuals were released to look for work or to make their way to the next workhouse where the whole experience would be repeated. Often it was too late for serious jobseekers to find employment, and in any case the tasks they had to perform had exhausted them. Workhouse masters had the discretion to release serious jobseekers early, but few did.

The casual ward was an example of the Poor Law authorities’ misjudgement. Convinced that the majority of casuals were shiftless and feckless, they constructed a system that made them so. Mary Higgs called the casual wards ‘National Tramp Manufactories’. As so often with the Poor Law, prejudice overcame objectivity.

Alternatives to the Casual Ward

By no means all vagrants spent time in casual wards; indeed conditions were generally so bad that entering the house was usually the last resort. Even a night or two in a prison cell could be preferable: it was generally more comfortable and the food was usually better. It was easy enough for a tramp to break a window or cause an affray and be sentenced by a magistrate to a few days inside. It was only the fear over their loss of freedom that kept many a vagrant out of prison.

In the countryside, a vagrant could sleep in barns or woods, and beg food from sympathetic locals or work a few hours for a night’s accommodation. Details of householders who could be relied upon to help tramps were spread by word of mouth, occasionally marked on maps passed from beggar to beggar, or scrawled on the walls in casual wards.

Another alternative was the lodging or ‘doss’ house, where for a penny or two you could lay your head and perhaps share a meal in a communal kitchen. The Medical Officer of Health for London claimed in 1905, without much evidence, that only failed thieves were to be found in the casual wards, for the successful ones used lodging houses.

Originally known as ‘netherskens’, low lodging houses, were at their peak in the half century or so before the 1860s, when the authorities began to close down the most foul and licence the rest. In their defence, they provided very cheap accommodation, but the police regarded them as being sinks of depravity and criminality. They were extremely widespread. The small Lancashire market town of Ormskirk had 60 such premises in 1849. In Old Buildings Yard, off Burscough Street, alone there were six such houses, which were described as being ‘wretched beyond description’, with a sickening smell, both inside and out.

Although conditions improved during the last years of the nineteenth century, as late as 1910 the Revd Zachary Edwards described the cheapest lodging house in Preston, where for a penny, 30 to 60 men slept each night in a room, 25 by 18 feet: there were no washing, heating or cooking facilities. Each man was assigned a space on the floor with a wooden block as a head rest. Twenty years later, George Orwell spent a night in a doss-house off the Waterloo Road which cost him a shilling: ‘It had a sweetish reek of paregoric and foul linen: the windows seemed to be shut tight and the air was almost suffocating at first… the sheets stank so horribly of sweat that I could not bear them near my nose’.

Charities, notably the Salvation and the Church armies from the 1880s, increasingly provided an alternative, but they were not popular because the tramps found them dreary and oppressively religious. One vagrant, W.A. Gape, recalled enduring a sermon for an hour and ten minutes on the evils of gambling, drink and idleness. The walls of ‘Sally Ann’ homes were adorned with gloomy, religious homilies, which were lost on the weary derelicts. Both George Orwell and W.H. Davies severely criticised the Salvation Army hostels. Around 1900, Davies spent many months at the Salvation Army hostel in Southwark Street, known as ‘The Ark’: ‘I have nothing to say in its favour… Certainly the food was cheap, but such food was not fit for a human being’.

However, these charitable hostels seem to have had more appeal to the more respectable people on the tramp, with a few pence spare for a bed, but who did not want to spend a night in a nethersken or workhouse. Mary Higgs was impressed by her stay in a women’s hostel run by the Salvation Army. On her way to it, she met several women who had stayed there: ‘One said “it was right enough,” another said, “I should think it was better than going into the common lodging house among a lot of ‘riff-raff ’; you can put up with it for a night anyhow.” A third, with a child in her arms, said that she had lived there some time and “was very comfortable”’.

Others, without even the penny or two for a bed, slept rough. In London, the Embankment was a popular destination. In 1910, at least 1,500 vagrants were gathered each night in the search of a hot meal and this attracted dozens of different charities, who offered soup or a bed for the night in return for an hour’s work. It was claimed that scroungers slept during the day and arrived at night for a hand-out, that meal tickets were being sold by those who had already fed, and that left-wing agitators were causing trouble among the disaffected. John Burns, President of the Local Government Board, visited one night and was offered a meal by an undiscriminating charity worker.

If conditions slowly improved for the other pauper inmates, they hardly changed at all for the casuals who spent a night or two in the casual wards. The authorities thought that vagrancy was impossible to solve, feeling that the vagrants and tramps were almost an irredeemable underclass, to whom no sympathy should be shown. Yet, as so often with the New Poor Law, they ignored the evidence before their eyes. Many, perhaps most, casuals tramped the roads looking for work, but instead of helping them find employment the authorities actively made it as difficult as possible. This made it almost inevitable that the honest work-seeker would be forced on a downward spiral to complete destitution