The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

By Simon Fowler

“A poignant account” of the reality behind these famous Victorian institutions where the poor resided (The Independent).
 
During the nineteenth century, the workhouse cast a shadow over the lives of the English poor. The destitute and the desperate sought refuge within its forbidding walls. And it was an ever-present threat if poor families failed to look after themselves properly.
 
In this fully updated and revised edition of his bestselling book, Simon Fowler takes a fresh look at the institution that most of us are familiar with only from Dickens novels or films, and the people who sought help from it. He looks at how the system of the Poor Law of which the workhouse was a key part was organized, and the men and women who ran the workhouses or were employed to care for the inmates. But above all this is the moving story of the tens of thousands of children, men, women and the elderly who were forced to endure grim conditions to survive in an unfeeling world.
 
“Draws powerfully on letters from The National Archives ... brings out the horror, but it is fair-minded to those struggling to be humane within an inhumane system.”—The Independent
 
“A good introduction.”—The Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781473840843

Book preview

1919–1930)

Chapter One

The World of the Workhouse

The word ‘workhouse’ has resonance: unfeeling, mean and bleak, casting a terrifying shadow over ordinary lives. It appears a deeply inhuman institution, and today we shudder at photographs of rooms full of identically dressed elderly men and women with no spark of life in their eyes. The scandal at Andover Workhouse in Hampshire was not unique, but rather the most shocking of several that erupted in the 1840s. Newspaper exposés later in the century and the writings of Jack London, Beatrice Webb and others have given a pretty bleak picture and shaped the workhouse’s legacy.

However, it often did not seem like this to practitioners. From the 1870s foreign social workers were impressed with the provision made for the poor by the British State, compared with what was available on the Continent or in the United States, where care was largely left in the hands of charities or the Church. It is also clear that the Poor Law Guardians – the men (and from the 1880s women too) who were responsible for administering and supervising the workhouse and its staff – were not always as unimaginative and penny-pinching as they have often been made out to be. In particular great efforts were made to care for children in the workhouse, to ensure that they did not repeat the mistakes made by their parents. And in many unions from the 1880s unemployment schemes were created to help the jobless.

And yet, for every enlightened union with imaginative Poor Law Guardians and dedicated staff, there were perhaps half-a-dozen places where the guardians were more concerned with keeping the rates low and, perhaps as a result, the staff were unresponsive to the conditions of those in their charge. Most workhouses, of course, fell somewhere between the two. An imaginative and a determined guardian, together with a dedicated master and matron, could make a big difference to the care offered.

A significant problem facing the central authorities was that the standard of food and accommodation, let alone the medical care or schooling offered to the children, varied tremendously, even between neighbouring workhouses. The British government had few real powers; officials in Whitehall might argue, persuade and on occasion embarrass but, particularly before the 1870s, they could be – and often were – ignored.

Poor Laws and Paupers

The greatest of all the paradoxes associated with the New Poor Law and the workhouse is that the workhouses were largely designed for able-bodied paupers, that is men and women between the ages of 16 and 60, who were judged fit enough to work for their living and therefore, should not require any assistance. There was certainly a huge pool of unemployed and semiemployed men, women and children who were casualties either of the economic downturn following the Napoleonic Wars or radically changing agricultural practices, which required fewer men on the land. Yet, within a decade of the establishment of the national system of workhouses, these people had largely ceased to be a burden on the Poor Law. Most had found work as a result of the ending of the economic depression from the mid- 1840s onwards. The workhouse thereafter became the refuge of the elderly, the sick, orphans and those who were incapable of earning a living.

To understand this paradox, we need to look at the origins of the New Poor Law. The Poor Law originated in the dying days of Elizabeth I’s reign, and it remained much the same until the early 1830s. Each parish became responsible for looking after those who were too ill, young or old to work, and the cost of so doing had to be paid for by a tax or rate on the property of the wealthier residents in the parish. Overseers of the poor were elected by the ratepayers each year to administer the system and maintain the accounts. In the more populous parishes, officials were paid to help.

This Poor Law and its processes worked well enough in the stable conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but, as the population increased and common land was enclosed as part of agricultural reforms, it came under enormous strain. Under what was known as the Speenhamland system (after the Berkshire village where it was first introduced), local magistrates or overseers of the poor often made up the wages of labourers from the poor rate or insisted that local farmers take on the unemployed. What initially seemed like an act of social solidarity soon became a nightmare for ratepayers, as more and more men and their families sought relief.

By the 1830s it was increasingly believed that there was widespread abuse of the system. Partly as a consequence of this, the government established a Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1832, to investigate the situation and make recommendations for change. Witness after witness gave evidence of apparent abuses, which seemed to be occurring across the country. In the Essex village of Great Henny, for example, William Newport, a churchwarden, and Edward Cook, the overseer, reported that: ‘A man of bad character, on account of which he is not employed, having two children or more, applies to the parish at the end of the week for relief, through loss of time, and has the same money given him as the honest labourer receives of his master for his labour for the same week’.

In London the authorities were also overwhelmed by the numbers seeking relief, and again there was a feeling that the system was being abused. Samuel Miller, assistant overseer of the parish of St Sepulchre in the City, declared that:

With respect to the out-door relief, there must, from the very nature of it, be an immense deal of fraud. There is no industry, no inspection, no human skill, which will prevent gross impositions belonging to this mode of relief. By far the greater proportion of our new paupers are persons brought upon the parish by habits in intemperance … After relief has been received at our board, a great proportion of them proceed with the money to the palaces or gin-shops, which abound in the neighbourhood.

The solution appeared to lie in cutting the number of people seeking support from the parish. Financial concerns were complemented by a favourite moral argument of the time – that the receipt of relief was corrupting the independent nature of the poor. To illustrate this, the Commission found a number of parishes where the outdoor relief had either been cut substantially or abolished altogether – and instead there was a proud and independent workforce. One such village was Thurgarton, near Southwell in Nottinghamshire, where Assistant Commissioner Cowell noted that:

The non-intervention of the poor laws constrained them [the labourers] to be habitually provident, thrifty and industrious… I cannot help thinking that had the whole body of labourers throughout England been left alone during the last 40 years – had there been no laws of relief whatever … no scale nor other similar interventions regulating wages – their general condition would be highly flourishing.

The reason why the parish authorities were able to abolish out-relief here was because Thurgarton was both fairly prosperous (it had a long-established savings bank and every family had a garden in which to grow food) and it was located close to the rapidly growing markets of Nottingham. This was in stark contrast to many overpopulated villages in the south and south-west of Britain.

The other way to reduce the poor rate was to establish workhouses – places to which the poor would be forced to move or face having their relief cut off. They were called workhouses because the inmates would have to contribute to their upkeep. The first ones had been established in the late seventeenth century and they had a significant impact. In Beverley, East Yorkshire, for example, a new workhouse opened in 1727 which was capable of housing 100 people. A year later the overseers reported that they had given:

notice to all the Poor that the Weekly Allowances were to cease at Midsummer: that such as were not able to maintain themselves and their families must apply to the governors of the workhouse to be by them provided for. And though before the opening of the house 116 received the parish allowance, not above 8 came in at first and we have never exceeded 26 in the house all this winter.

During the eighteenth century many parishes established workhouses, although few lasted all that long. At Gressenhall in Norfolk, the unemployed from 60 local parishes were placed in a ‘house of industry’ where they could live and be employed in fruitful labour. Sir Frederick Eden, who visited in 1795, found that the men were either farming the adjoining land or combing wool, dressing flax and hemp and weaving them for use in the house. The women and children (more than half of the 530 inmates were under 14) spun worsted for manufacturers in Norwich. Such a hive of industry sounds encouraging, but the parson and diarist James Woodforde, who visited in 1781, was not impressed: ‘a very large building at present tho’ there wants another wing. About 380 Poor in it now, but they don’t look either happy or cheerful, a greater Number die there, 27 have died since Christmas last’.

By the 1830s most parishes had at least one such building, and the overseers of the poor managed it in their own way. Some were harshly run, but many were organised humanely, at least by later standards. The commissioners appointed in 1832 to investigate the Old Poor Law, for example, were very impressed with the standard of the beer brewed at the workhouse at St Martin’s, Reading. However, most were too small to cope with the demand. And in many places overseers of the poor preferred to support the sick and elderly outside the workhouse for humanitarian reasons and because it was actually cheaper.

Theorists such as the Rev J.T. Becher, who was behind the establishment of what became the Southwell Workhouse in Nottinghamshire, argued that workhouses should act as a deterrent to the poor. In his pamphlet The Anti-pauper System (1828) Becher wrote: ‘Let it be remembered that the advantages resulting from a workhouse must arise not from keeping the poor in the house, but from keeping them out of it’.

Influenced by Becher and others, the Commission members had made up their minds about what had to be done, even before they met. Critically, they had persuaded themselves that, by and large, those who sought work could find it. This view came not from studying the economy as a whole, but from selected parishes where rigour in the administration of the Poor Law was being practised. As early as 1798 the political theorist Jeremy Bentham in his Pauper Management Improved argued that: ‘Not one person in a hundred is incapable of all employment. Not the motion of a finger, not a step, not a wink, not a whisper, but ought to be turned to account in the way of profit’. The Commission members concluded that it was therefore relatively easy for men whose relief was withdrawn to find other work, noting that: ‘One of the most encouraging of the results of our inquiry is the degree to which the existing pauperism arises from fraud, indolence or improvidence’.

In March 1834 the Commission report recommended the abolition of out-relief and the placing of all paupers in new workhouses where conditions were intentionally worse and more humiliating than those to be found outside. This was to become known as the ‘workhouse test’. The idea was that the poor would not wish to endure such conditions, so they would either find gainful employment or turn to charities and each other for support.

The new rules were introduced on 1 June 1835. Their impact was swift. Eight days later the New Poor Law Commission, the department that administered the system, received this petition from nearly 100 bewildered agricultural labourers from Haverhill:

We the undersignants the poor inhabitants of the parish of Haverhill in the County of Suffolk are in a very low condition through the reduction of wages and for the want of employment which when having employment our wages are from 7 to 8 shillings per week which us with large families are made up to 1s 3d per head per week to support ourselves and family, which out of this small sum we have to find cloths and working tools and to pay from 3 to 4 [£] per year rent for our cottages.

Which it may be considered by you Gentlemen to be a starving condition, therefore we should be very thankful if you could grant us any further assistance, which we have made application to the Gentlemen the Guardians and [visitor of] the parish for more assistance or an order for the workhouse and they refuse us, therefore we apply to your worship to do something for us.

Their petition was ignored. It is not known what happened to the petitioners, but it is probable that most of them were soon forced to leave the land in search of work elsewhere.

Mr J. Boreham, vice-chairman of Risbridge Union (which included Haverhill), told a Select Committee of the Poor Law in 1837:

Where the great number of unemployed labourers have gone, or how employed, I cannot imagine… At this time (December) there is not an able-bodied labourer out of employ nor has there been more than one or two for several months. The parish of Steeple Bumstead had nearly 50 men and boys unemployed. Now, with what have migrated without the interference of the guardians there are not men enough to cultivate the land in that parish.

Those that remained were in a pitiable state. The Times, in December 1838, reported that a petition from the Reverend R. Roberts of Haverhill ‘and the whole of the gentry and ratepayers of the Union’ had been presented to the guardians, urging an increase in the out-relief offered to the poor. But the guardians refused, citing orders from the Commissioners in London that forbade ‘all out-door relief to the able-bodied labourer, no matter however poignant his and his family’s suffering might be’.

The Times also cited the case of Edmund Basham (one of the signatories of the petition of 1835) who was forced through illness to enter with his wife into Haverhill Workhouse. His cottage was taken and given to a pauper family with seven children, under decidedly questionable motives. ‘A happy thought seemed to strike [the guardians]: we will put them into Basham’s cottage and force Basham in here and this man and his family will be off our hands’. The correspondent noted that Basham had worked hard for 30 years and had never received any parish assistance.

Charles Dickens once wrote that the pauper’s alternatives were ‘of being starved by a gradual process in the house or by a quick one out of it’. Many preferred to beg, borrow, steal or simply to expire in some wretched room in the East End, as did 69-year-old William May, a former sailor. May was found dead and very emaciated in December 1842. He had recently fled a workhouse, shouting: ‘They want to kill me’. Asked to return, he had replied, ‘No, it is of no use, as I should have nothing but porridge, porridge for breakfast, porridge for drink’.

Respectable artisans such as Joseph Gutteridge, a silk weaver and freethinker from Coventry, refused to have anything to do with the Poor Law and the shame it brought. Thrown out of work, he and his young family were close to starvation: ‘I was severely blamed that I did not apply to the parish for relief, but I would rather have died from sheer starvation than, being so young, have degraded myself by making such an application’.

A decade after the introduction of the New Poor Law, The Times continued to report outbreaks of the burning of ricks and other property belonging to farmers in Norfolk and Suffolk, which its correspondent attributed to the workhouse. He asked a labourer what was the cause of the fires, and he replied: ‘If there had been no Union, in my opinion there would have been no fires, and everybody says the same that I hear. The Union distresses people and drives them mad’. Many out-of-work labourers refused to enter the workhouse, and those who tried were defeated by the need to get a ticket signed by local farmers indicating that they could not employ the individual.

Friedrich Engels was undoubtedly right when, in 1844, he described the authors of the 1834 Poor Law report as wishing ‘to force the poor into the Procrustean bed of their preconceived doctrines. To do this they treated the poor with incredible savagery’. And the historian David Green, among others, has suggested that the new system was designed to solve the problems of chronic underemployment in rural southern England rather than the needs of the manufacturing areas.

Unions in Northern England, in particular, were seen by many as an attack on the poor and their rights. Various parishes had already adopted the workhouse as a deterrent to the idle and dissolute. Others made relief to the able-bodied dependent on the performance of tasks; in Huddersfield, for example, paupers in the workhouse were employed in street cleaning. One of the radical leaders of the protests, Richard Oastler, wrote in the Northern Star in 1838 that ‘the real object of [the New Poor Law] … is to lower wages and punish poverty as a crime. Remember also that children and parents are lying frequently in the same Bastille without seeing one another or knowing the other’s fate’.

There were also regional differences in social conditions: the poor in the north were more independent and relatively wealthy compared with their cousins in the south and the Midlands. The poor rate was also lower in the north. The academic Hilary Marland suggests that this was due, in part, to the large number of voluntary organisations and friendly societies (which supported men out of employment), and a greater tendency for the poor to rely on druggists and quacks for medical treatment rather than seek help from Poor Law infirmaries.

Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief

The Victorian middle and upper classes were fond of quoting the biblical phrase that the ‘poor are always with us’. And indeed they were. Labourers toiled in every field and every factory and the streets teemed with men and women with no visible means of support.

Who you were in Victorian and Edwardian society depended on your social class. It was possible to move between classes, although their erstwhile social equals treated those on a downward path with pity, while those making their way were regarded as vulgar nouveau riche. Your status was most obviously indicated by the clothes you wore. Before exploring the slums of the East End, the American writer Jack London had to change into tattered clothing:

No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the difference in status effected by my clothes. All servility vanished from the demeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact… My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class, which was their class.

There were so many of the poor. The Victorian philanthropist and social reformer Seebohm Rowntree found that 30 per cent of the population of York at the end of the nineteenth century lived below what he called the ‘poverty line’. He divided them into those who were in: ‘primary poverty’, (that is, ‘families whose total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency’), and ‘secondary poverty’, (that is ‘families whose total earnings would be sufficient for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency were it not that some expenditure of it is absorbed by other expenditure either useful or wasteful’). A decade earlier Charles Booth had also found in the East End of London that about third of local people had great difficulty in making ends meet.

In explaining why a country as rich as England should have so much poverty, the Victorians tended to ignore economic reasons in favour of psychological ones. The Socialist writer G.D.H. Cole argued that the Victorian philanthropist’s weakness (and it applied just as much to Poor Law theorists) lay in a tendency to look ‘much less at the causes than the effects’. The poor were poor, it was argued, because of character defects. Those who wanted to improve could do so by following the examples of the men in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, whose chief object was ‘to stimulate youths to apply themselves diligently to the right pursuits … and to rely upon their own efforts in life, rather than depend upon the help or patronage of others’.

Such a view permeates the whole debate about the poor, who they were and what could – or should – be done with them. As early as 1788 one of the local guardians, Edward Parry, wrote about Gressenhall Workhouse for the Society for Bettering the Conditions of the Poor. He believed the adult inmates to be ‘profligate men who through idleness and debauchery … [had] reduced their families to depend on the establishment for their support’. Little had changed a hundred years later, when Charles Booth, in his 1889 survey of admissions to the Stepney Workhouse, blamed drink (13 per cent of admissions), immorality and laziness, as well as old age and sickness, as causes. He added: ‘Unwillingness to work is closely connected with selfindulgence in other ways and there is no known cure except the pressure of neither shall he eat’.

In 1902 the Reverend Joseph Anderson of Liverpool was adamant that the chief cause of poverty was the ‘great lack of want of the spirit and gospel of Jesus’. If everyone acted as Christians should, he argued, the drink problem would be solved, those incapable of fending for themselves would be cared for, and the unemployed would be found work, even if it was only poorly paid.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries social reformers increasingly pointed out the damage that drink did to working class families. In 1844 the German writer Friedrich Engels noted that on Saturday nights in Manchester: ‘I have seldom gone home without seeing many drunkards staggering in the road or lying helpless in the gutter’. And according to the charity worker William Grisewood in the 1890s: ‘Chief amongst the destroyers of home and family happiness is drink. Other causes have slain their thousands, but drink its tens of thousands’.

The cause of drunkenness among the poor was twofold: firstly the ready availability of beer and spirits and secondly the appalling conditions among which people lived, which often caused them to seek escape at the bottom of a glass. Engels felt that the working class was ‘deprived of all pleasures except sexual indulgence and intoxicating liquors’. The problem was not the indolent and feckless nature of the working classes, but an economic system which resulted in both huge unemployment and underemployment. Not until the First World War was there full employment – for the first time. In such a climate it was difficult, even for the hard-working and the motivated, to earn enough to keep body and soul together. Men could be thrown out of work through no fault of their own or suffer some other calamity, such as illness in the family, starting the downward spiral towards the workhouse. And once there, it became very difficult to return to normal life.

Equally important was underemployment. Labouring work, whether on the land or in towns, was irregular and depended on the seasons and the fickleness of the British weather. A bad winter would throw thousands on to the street, as women could no longer work picking vegetables in the fields and men were unable to find temporary labouring jobs. As Henry Mayhew realised: ‘In almost all occupations there is … a superfluity of labourers and this alone would tend to render the employment of a vast number of the hands of a casual rather than a regular character’.

Even in a normal year there was a huge pool of men who could be employed on a casual basis, day by day, in the ports of Liverpool and London or in factories elsewhere. On good days adequate money might be earned, but for most families bad weeks were the norm. As a result, city streets were full of shabby men looking for work, referred to as ‘loafers’ or ‘shirkers’ by middle class observers. Many were too weak – through near starvation or the ill-effects of drink – to

Reviews for The Workhouse

[davidgnp · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this simply because a passing reference to workhouses in a TV documentary pricked an interest which I was keen to follow. The book does not disappoint - its descriptions of conditions in many workhouses are more powerful for being presented in an unfussy and unsentimental way, with judicious use of quotations from primary sources. I imagine a serious researcher would have been happier with footnotes and detailed references, but these were unnecessary for my purposes. I would have liked a more extensive treatment of the twentieth century workhouse experience, but I'm sure I'll find this by following some of the useful suggestions for further reading.Reviewer David Williams writes a regular blog as Writer in the North.

[atticusfinch1048 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Workhouse – A trip into the harshness of Victorian England.The Workhouse by Simon Fowler is one of the best and well researched books on The Workhouse something that hung over the poor like Damacles Sword and sent fear through the massed ranks of the poor. The publication of this book is well timed especially when people are researching their family tree’s and find that ancestors were sent to the workhouse, many want to know what the workhouse was. If one was to look at the former workhouse in Hampstead Workhouse now you would never understand what passed as life there looking at the expensive apartments that have been converted from the building.Today as we look back at what the Workhouse was we can think of Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist or the stories of the past of a harsh and unforgiving place. Whether we can ever understand how the workhouse was able to strike fear in to the poor and poverty striken this book goes someway to break down those barriers to our understanding.The chapters are broken down in to easy to use, easy to understand the workings of the workhouse and where possible evidence is given to back up the statement on life or the lives of the inmates. One of the first things that Fowler does is explain how Britain and especially Victorian Britain ends up with the workhouse system under the Poor Laws of the 19th Century when there were Poor Law Guardians appointed to protect the Parishes with the poor and poverty stricken. It must be remember that at the time Britain was going through acute change from Industrial and agraian revolutions which meant there were more people than the work that was available.It was also clear of the thinking of the Christians of the time when there was no welfare state, the rich expected the poor to stand on their own two feet and that they were responsible for being poor and could work their way out of their situation. Fowler again uses the evidence of the Poor Law Guardians of their thoughts on the poor and that relief was corrupting the independant nature of the poor.Fowler provides examples of what life was like behind the doors of the workhouse and he does not pull any punches and gives examples of the various workhouses that covered the country. He explains the hierarchy of the workhouses with the masters and matrons and how they dealt with the people in their care. Fowler also explains how the inmates were treated within the walls and that entering the workhouse was meant to be humiliating and that they would be accepting humiliation on them by the authorities.In two chapters explains the attitudes to children and those sick and elderly. What must be remember that children made up one third of the workhouse population. They were also the only set of workhouse inmates that the Victorians had any sympathy with. By the end of the ninteenth century the workhouse population comprised the sick and the elderly and their care was very insitutionalised even though harsh had quite a success rate in their treatment, which is often forgotten again something that Fowler highlights.Simon Fowler has written an excellent account of life in the workhouse and he does not hold back any punches, he shows both the good and the bad so we get a fair account of the Workhouse. I know from this account I would not like to go back to that provision and its harshness which comes across at best as unChristian response by Christians to caring for the poor. I am sure the Bible says something about the poor, the rich and heaven as well as taking care of neighbours. An excellent book well worth reading if you require understanding of being poor and in the poorhouse.

[huberk-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

THE WORKHOUSE by Simon FowlerIn the nineteenth century, if you were poor, had given birth to an illegitimate child, or were unable to take care of yourself, you could be placed in a workhouse or voluntarily go there. It was not a pleasant place to be. Corruption ran rampant among the wardens and people in charge of the inmates. They would siphon off funds and even food or clothing meant for the most destitute of the population and sell off the products so that they would be able to live a gluttonous life or in order to leave tidy sums to leave to their heirs when they passed on.The inmates toiled for ten hours a day for a few crumbs and no creature comforts. They were abused, beaten, molested, and otherwise humiliated.It is good to read about the horrors of these poor people's experiences, so that these are remembered and never allowed to occur again.Thank you to #netgalley for the complimentary copy of #theworkhouse I was under no obligation to post a review.