Born in the workhouse. Even now over 80 years after they were abolished the image of a family member being admitted to one of these places has a powerful impact on the family historian.
They had been called Poor Law Bastilles and in the years after the Poor Law Amendment Act which reorganised the way benefits were applied they were often a target to be attacked during periods of social and class tension.
But despite the fact that they were feared and hated they were a regular and recognised part of the strategies that the poor might use when faced with unemployment or sickness.
And the Unions did help the sick. There was apparently no legal obligation to do so but the Poor Law commissioners recognised “if a man is able to provide himself and family with food, and lodging, and clothing, whilst in health, but is unable in cases of sickness to provide medical aid, he is entitled to receive medical relief at the charge of the poor rates”. However humanitarian this appeared there were sound economic reasons to do. If those who sought relief did so because they were ill the Poor Law Commissioners reasoned, it was “therefore most important to get them cured as speedily as possible” thereby saving them from “coming on the rates for maintenance.”
So the Unions employed qualified medical officers to care for those who applied for help in the infirmary. But there were no clear guidelines on who could qualify and so “in some Unions Medical Relief is withheld except where the families are large and young; in other Unions it is given to all applicants.”
It was the job of the Relieving Officer to assess the needs of the applicants, both those asking for medical help and those requesting general assistance. His assessment would be passed on to the Guardians and if he considered they were eligible for relief he issued an order to the medical officer or doctor who was employed by the Union.*
And this is how my great grandmother got to be in the Derby Workhouse in the December of 1902. Now I do not think we will ever know why she and my great grandfather separated after having had four children but it may have been partly to do with the death of their infant son in the February. My great grandfather stayed in the south and she returned to Derby with their surviving three sons and the soon to be born daughter.
Now as we all know the workhouse was the last place for the desperate, and was predicated on the idea that only those who had explored all the other possibilities would walk through its doors. It was also the case that my grandmother had to prove that neither of her parents were in a position to help and neither were. Her mother was dead and her father was himself in the workhouse. So that was where she went and that was where my great aunt was born.
Most of us who find a relative in the workhouse are moved by a mix of pity and outrage, and if the truth be known most of us will be able to track some family member to a workhouse somewhere in the country. Now I do not have any love of the workhouse. They were grim harsh places where families were separated, individuals often given menial and tiring tasks and marked you out as an outcast. Yet in a sense the workhouse is not what should anger us, it is the philiosphy underpinning the provision of poor relief.
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had ushered in the system of Poor Law Unions and the practice of less eligibility which aimed to make conditions in the workhouse worse than anything the applicant had so far experienced thereby acting as a deterrent on seeking relief. But there had already been a trend to grouping some parishes together with a super workhouse and long before 1834 the regimes in some of these places had reflected the idea that the poor must be desperate before seeking help.
In what was by any standards a wealthy country we were prepared to judge the poor as feckless and as targets for punishment. Nor can we hide behind the excuse that this was the prevailing idea and that somehow to criticise the system is to judge it by the values of a later time. There were plenty back in the 19th century who said it was wrong.
But equally it would be a distortion of what I know to blame the Derby
Workhouse for what happened to my great grandmother and her children who in the case of the three boys ran wild and loose in their early years. There was something not quite right about great grandmother Eliza, and the hints are there in the drunken brawl with the police back in the 1890s and the fact that in 1913 after having struggled to get most of children out of insititions she lost them again because she was “unfit to have control.”
Now I don’t absolve my great grandfather. His early life in the army of the old Queen suggests he too was unable to conform and was quite prepared to set up a new family unit in the south, have five more children and not make any attempt to contact his other children.
The Derby Poor Law Guardians provided for my grandfather and his siblings and did find occupations for all of them. The eldest was apprenticed to a blacksmith, my great aunt sent into service and grandfather placed in the training ship Exmouth while great uncle Roger was sent to Canada as a British Home Child. I doubt that the Guardians’ motives were any less pragmatic than the Poor Law Commissioners arguments for sick provision for poor working men but at least all were cared for.
So where does that leave the family historian who tumbles over a connection with a workhouse?
I suspect it will be a mix of feelings but above all a renewed desire to dig deep into the history of the Workhouse and also the provision of poor relief, and I would recommend http://www.workhouses.org.uk/
*From Chorlton cum Hardy A Society Transformed due out in the autumn
Pictures; inside our own workhouse, the sick ward m08952, 1900, T. Morley-Brook, and staff and inmates of our own workhouse date unknown m81238, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council
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