Food was minimal and meals frequently had to be eaten in silence, the paupers sitting in serried rows. The quantity of food for a workhouse pauper in the middle of the nineteenth century was less than that provided for a prisoner in jail, although this improved towards the end of the century.
Paupers were only allowed to go outside the workhouse walls with the permission of the master, to look for work, or for special reasons such as attending a baptism, funeral or wedding. In theory a pauper could discharge him- or herself from the workhouse, but in practice this seldom happened because of their abject poverty and the limitations of available work.
All these rules, and many more, had to be obeyed on pain of harsh punishments, which included flogging, birching, withholding food, and solitary confinement. Complaints about the daily living conditions were usually dealt with by punishment. Deference to the master, his wife and the officers was required at all times.
It is easy at this distance of time to be critical, and to sneer at what we call “Victorian hypocrisy”. But we should remember that this was the first attempt at a form of social welfare, and mistakes will always be made in any pioneering venture. Numerous reports were commissioned and published during the century of workhouse existence and many attempts at reform and improvement were made.
These evils had been designed to deter the indolent from entering the workhouse. The tragedy was that in a mixed workhouse with one administration, one central building and one staff, the rules, regulations, and punishments applied universally, with the result that old people, the sick, the crippled, the mentally disabled, and children, suffered dreadfully. The atmosphere inside a workhouse was not only stifling to the human soul, but destroyed the last shreds of human dignity.
Another great problem that led to the ill repute of workhouses was the staff. In the early years none of them had any training or qualifications. This could not be expected, because there was no precedent, but the unfortunate result was that it opened the floodgates to all sorts of petty dictators who enjoyed wielding power. The masters had unlimited authority, and their character determined the lives of the paupers, for good or ill. Rules had to be obeyed, and the Master could be a good and humane man, or he could be harsh and tyrannical. The “deterrent rules” ensured that the only qualification required of applicants for the posts of Workhouse Master and officers was the ability to enforce discipline. Many came from the armed forces, reflecting the controlling and disciplinary role that was expected of them.
The “work” aspect of the system rapidly became an acute and intractable problem. The sale of goods was not the primary purpose of the Poor Law Act, but to generate some income for the day-to-day running of the workhouse items and produce made by the paupers were sometimes sold in the open market. This led to protests from employers in the private sector, on two counts: firstly, that goods produced in the workhouses by cheap labour and sold in the marketplace would seriously undercut them; secondly, that the resulting loss of business would affect their employees, who would either have to accept reduced wages or even lose their jobs. This would be a dire outcome when, in most cases, and unlike their workhouse counterparts, they had families to support. On top of these difficulties there was, of course, the problem (still alive and well in the twenty-first century) that in a free-market system work cannot be created out of thin air. Although the British industrial economy was booming throughout the nineteenth century, it was subject to periodic recessions that threw unskilled labourers out of work in their thousands, thus swelling the workhouse population. So pointless, profitless work was introduced to keep the paupers busy. For example, stone-breaking was required of the men. Industrial England could break stones using machinery, but the paupers had to break granite with a mallet. Animal bones could be ground into powder for fertiliser by machine, but paupers had to grind bones by hand. In one workhouse there was a corn mill for men to push round and round for hours on end, but it had no function; it was grinding nothing.
The women did all the cooking and laundry for their fellow inmates. “Scrubbing” is a word I have encountered frequently in this context. Hours of scrubbing vast lengths of stone floors, corridors and stairs was a daily requirement. Sewing sails for sailing boats, by hand, and picking oakum for caulking ships were further tasks that fell to the women and children. Oakum was old rope, frequently impregnated with tar or sea salt, which had to be unpicked by hand and tore the skin and nails. The fibres were then used for filling in the cracks between the wooden planks of ships.
The 1834 Poor Law Act required elementary education (basic numeracy and literacy) for children three hours per day, and a schoolmaster was employed by each Board of Guardians. When the Education Act of 1870 was passed, children were removed from the mixed workhouses and placed in separate establishments and had to attend the local Board School.
Under the 1834 Act a qualified medical officer was required to attend the sick, but nursing was carried out by untrained female inmates. In large groups of enclosed people who were not allowed out, infectious diseases spread like wildfire. For example, in the 1880s in a workhouse in Kent, it was found that in a child population of one hundred and fifty-four, only three children did not have tuberculosis.
One hears about “the insane” crowded into workhouses. I think workhouse life bred and fostered its own insanity. I once heard, in the 1950s, what used to be called “the workhouse howl” emitted from the throat of a woman who had been a workhouse inmate for about twenty years in the early twentieth century. It was a noise to make your blood run cold.
Medical infirmaries were also available for the hospital treatment of the poor who could not afford to pay a doctor or to go to hospital. But the infirmaries came to be feared almost as much as the workhouses themselves, and were regarded as places of disease, insanity, neglect and death. Medical and nursing staff were of the lowest order, and were frequently brutal and ignorant – it was work which no doctor who valued his career would undertake. The attitudes of medical and nursing staff, who were careless of the lives of paupers, reflected the mores of the time.
The stigma of illegitimacy has destroyed the lives of millions of unfortunate young women and blighted those of their children. If a girl’s lover deserted her, and her parents could not, or would not, support her and the child, the workhouse was often the only form of relief available. The baby would be born in the infirmary. After weaning, the girl would be encouraged to leave the workhouse with her baby to seek employment. But this was usually impossible to find because of the limited labour market for women, further restricted because of the presence of a baby. The girl would also be encouraged to give her baby up for adoption. Many girls were medically certified as “hysterical” or “of unsound mind” or even “morally degenerate”, and the baby would be forcibly removed and brought up in the workhouse. The young mother would be expected to leave, find work outside and contribute to the poor rates to offset the cost of keeping and educating the child. If she could not find work, she would have to return to the women’s section of the workhouse. The system was heartless and stupid, but those were the rules, and they reflected the social attitude that a “fallen woman” should be punished.