“Could be,” reflected Cynthia. “How romantic! And how tragic for poor Jane! He’s wedded to his fish.”
“Not a chance,” said Trixie, the pragmatist. “If it were a case of unrequited love, she would go to pieces with him even more than she does with other men.”
Once, after Jane had been to visit Peggy and Frank, she said wistfully, “If only I had a brother. I would be happy if I had a brother.” Later, Trixie said, acerbically, “It’s a lover she needs, not a brother.” We all had a good laugh at Jane’s expense.
It was only later that I learned the sad stories that brought these three people together. Jane, Peggy, and Frank had been brought up in the workhouse. The two girls were nearly the same age, Frank was four years older. Jane and Peggy had become best friends and shared everything. They had slept in adjacent beds in a dormitory of seventy girls. They had sat next to each other in the refectory, where meals for three hundred girls were taken. They had gone to the same school. They had shared the same household chores. Above all, they had shared each other’s thoughts and feelings and sufferings, as well as their small joys. Today, workhouses may seem like a distant memory, but for children such as Jane, Peggy, and Frank the impact of having spent their formative years in such an institution was almost unimaginable.
THE RISE OF THE WORKHOUSE
My own generation grew up in the shadow of the workhouse. Our parents and grandparents lived in constant fear that something unpredictable would happen and that they would end up in one of those terrible buildings. An accident or illness or unemployment could mean loss of wages, then eviction and homelessness; an illegitimate pregnancy or the death of parents or old age could lead to destitution. For many the dreaded workhouse became a reality.
Workhouses have now disappeared, and in the twenty-first century the memory of them has all but faded. Indeed, many young people have not even heard of them, or of the people who lived in them. But social history is preserved in the accounts of those who lived at the time. Very few personal records written by workhouse inmates exist, so the little we do know makes the stories of people such as Jane, Frank and Peggy all the more compelling.
In medieval times, convents and monasteries gave succour to the poor and needy as part of their Christian duty. But in England Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries put a stop to that in the 1530s. Queen Elizabeth I passed the Act for the Relief of the Poor in 1601, the aim being to make provision for those who could not support themselves because of age or disability. Each parish in England was encouraged to set aside a small dwelling for the shelter of the destitute. These were known as poorhouses. It was a remarkable act of an enlightened queen, and crystallised the assumption that the state was responsible for the poorest of the poor.
The 1601 Act continued in force for over two hundred years and was adequate for a rural population of around five to ten million souls. But the Industrial Revolution, which gathered pace in the latter part of the eighteenth century, changed society for ever.
One of the most remarkable features of the nineteenth century was the population explosion. In 1801, the population of England, Wales and Scotland was around 10.5 million. By 1851 it had doubled to 20 million and by 1901 it had doubled again to 45 million. Farms could neither feed such numbers nor provide them with employment. The government of the day could not cope with the problem, which was accentuated by land enclosure and the Corn Laws. Industrialisation and the lure of employment drew people from the villages into the cities in huge numbers. Overcrowding, poverty, hunger and destitution increased exponentially and the Poor Law Act of 1601 was inadequate to deal with the number of emerging poor. There can be no understanding of the poverty of the masses in the nineteenth century without taking into consideration the fact of a fourfold increase of population in one hundred years.
Victorian England was not the period of complacency and self-satisfaction that is so often portrayed in the media. It was also a time of growing awareness of the divide between the rich and the poor, and of a social conscience. Thousands of good and wealthy men and women, usually inspired by Christian ideals, were appalled by the social divide, saw that it was not acceptable, and devoted their lives to tackling the problems head on. They may not always have been successful, but they brought many evils to light and sought to remedy them.
Parliament and reformers constantly debated schemes to change and improve the old Poor Law Act. A Royal Commission was set up, and in 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed. Responsibility for relief of destitution was removed from individual parishes and handed over to unions of parishes. The small parish poorhouses were closed and the unions were required to provide large houses, each designed to accommodate several hundred people. The aim was that “the poor shall be set to work, and they shall dwell in working houses”.
And so, the union workhouses were born. Each was to be run by a master and his wife, who were responsible for day-to-day administration, together with a number of paid officers, who assisted them. Overall responsibility for each workhouse was in the hands of a local Board of Guardians and they were financed partly by the local Poor Law rates and partly through government loans that had to be repaid. Running costs were to be met by local rates, but income could also be generated through the work of the inmates.
It can be argued that the workhouse system was the first attempt at social welfare in this country. Certainly it was intended as a safety net to house and feed the very poorest of society, and it laid the foundations of our modern welfare state. In this respect it was nearly one hundred years ahead of its time, yet the implementation of the high ideals of the reformers and legislators went tragically wrong, and the workhouses came to be dreaded as places of shame, suffering and despair. People would often rather have died than go there – and some did. My grandfather knew a man who hanged himself when the guardians informed him that he must go into the workhouse. Most of the labouring poor lived on a perpetual knife-edge between subsistence and destitution. For them, the workhouse represented not a safety net, but a dark and fearsome abyss from which, should they fall, there would be no escape.
The authors of the 1834 Act proposed separate workhouses for different categories of paupers, but within a year or two, economy and ease of management dictated that mixed workhouses became the norm. These were built to house all groups of paupers – the old, the sick, the chronically infirm, children, the mentally disabled – as well as able-bodied men and women who were unemployed and therefore destitute. However, such a great diversity of people under one roof and one administration was doomed to failure.
The original policy was that the workhouse should be a “place of last resort”, therefore that conditions inside a workhouse should be less comfortable than a state of homeless destitution outside. Strict rules for admission were introduced and enforced nationwide, and these rules were intended to deter the idle and shiftless from seeking admission. But the result, in a mixed workhouse, was that all classes of paupers suffered. Nobody could come up with an answer to the question of how to deter the idle without penalising the defenceless.
In order that the workhouse really should be a “place of last resort” a rigid, inflexible system of discipline and punishment was introduced. Families were separated, not only men from women, but husbands from wives and brothers from sisters. Children over seven were taken away from their mothers. The official policy was that babies and children under seven could stay with their mothers in the women’s quarters. But policy and practice often diverge and mothers and toddlers were frequently separated. The construction of the buildings was such that there was no access from one group of paupers to another. Heating was minimal, even in the depths of winter. People had to sleep in dormitories in which anything up to seventy paupers could be accommodated. For each, an iron bedstead, a straw palliasse and a blanket were provided; inadequate protection against the cold winters. Paupers were locked into the dormitory each night and the sanitary arrangements were disgusting. A coarse rough uniform, often made of hemp, which was very harsh on the skin and offered no real warmth in the winter, was provided. Paupers’ heads were sometimes, though not always, shaved. Regulations permitted the hair of children to be forcibly shaved. This was intended for the control of lice or fleas, but was sometimes done as a punishment, especially on little girls, for whom it was a humiliation.