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Workhouse Life

Why Did People Enter the Workhouse

People ended-up in the workhouse for a variety of reasons. Usually, it was because they were too poor, old or ill to support themselves. This may have resulted from such things as a lack of work during periods of high unemployment, or someone having no family willing or able to provide care for them when they became elderly or sick. Unmarried pregnant women were often disowned by their families and the workhouse was the only place they could go during and after the birth of their child. Prior to the establishment of public mental asylums in the mid-nineteenth century (and in some cases even after that), the mentally ill and mentally handicapped poor were often consigned to the workhouse. Workhouses, though, were never prisons, and entry into them was generally a voluntary although often painful decision. It also carried with it a change in legal status — until 1918, receipt of poor relief meant a loss of the right to vote.

The operation of workhouses, and life and conditions inside them, varied over the centuries in the light of current legislation and economic and social conditions. The aims of many pre-1834 workhouses are well expressed in this 1776 sign above the door of Rollesby workhouse in Norfolk:

East & West Flegg workhouse, Rollesby, 2000.
© Peter Higginbotham.

The emphasis in earlier times was more towards the relief of destitution rather than deterrence of idleness which characterized many of the institutions set up under the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.

Entering the Workhouse

Whatever the regime inside the workhouse, entering it would have been a distressing experience. New inmates would often have already been through a period of severe hardship. It was for good reason that the entrance to the Birmingham union workhouse was through an arch locally known as the "Archway of Tears".

Archway of Tears at Birmingham workhouse, 2000.
© Peter Higginbotham.

The Admission Procedure

Admission into the workhouse first required an interview to establish the applicant's circumstances. This was most often undertaken by a Relieving Officer who would visit each part of the union on a regular basis. However, the workhouse Master could also interview anyone in urgent need of relief.

St Marylebone workhouse Master's admission ticket, c.1901.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Formal admission into the workhouse proper was authorised by the Board of Guardians at their weekly meetings, where an applicant could summoned to justify their application. This would no doubt have been an intimidating experience — the heroine of the 1840s novel Jessie Phillips collapsed on the board-room floor. Half a century later, however, a cartoon in Punch showed how times and attitudes had changed in the intervening years.

Before the Board (from Jessie Phillips by Frances Trollope (1844).
© Peter Higginbotham.

Guardians' Interrogation (from Punch, 1899).
© Peter Higginbotham.

Prior to their formal admission into the main workhouse, new arrivals would be placed in a receiving or probationary ward. There the workhouse medical officer would examine them to check on their state of health. Those suffering from any infectious illness would be placed in a sick ward.

Each new arrival at the workhouse would go through a fairly involved admission procedure. After all the necessary paperwork had been completed, paupers were stripped, bathed, and issued with a workhouse uniform. Children (although not adults) could be required to have their hair cut. An inmate's own clothes would be washed and disinfected and then put into store along with any other possessions they had and only returned to them when they left the workhouse.

Liverpool inmates' bathing regulations

Leaving the Workhouse

While residing in a workhouse, paupers were not allowed out without permission. Short-term absence could be granted for various reasons, such as a parent attending their child's baptism, or to visit a sick or dying relative. Able-bodied inmates could also be allowed out to seek work. Although there was often little to physically prevent a pauper from walking out of the workhouse, to do so without permission would result in a charge of the theft of union property — his workhouse uniform. Any pauper could, however, on giving "reasonable notice" — typically three hours — discharge himself from the workhouse. His clothes would then be fetched from the store and more administrative paperwork would need to be completed. In the case of a man with a family, the whole family would have to leave if he left.

Despite the lengthy admission and discharge procedures, some paupers treated the workhouse as a free lodging, leaving and departing as the fancy took them. It was not unknown for a pauper to discharge himself in the morning and then return demanding re-admission the same evening, possibly the worse for wear from drink. In 1901, one 81-year-old woman named Julia Blumsun recorded 163 separate admissions to the City of London workhouse, while a 40-year-old man in the Poplar workhouse had been in and out 593 times over the period since 1884. These were the most extreme examples of what became known as the "ins-and-outs". Because of the amount of time they took to deal with, became the bane of the workhouse staff's life. Eventually, in the early 1900s, new regulations were introduced to lengthen the amount of notice required depending on how recently an inmate had previously discharged himself.

Perhaps a more typical example of the ins-and-outs is provided by seven-year-old Charlie Chaplin who in 1896 briefly became an inmate of the Lambeth union workhouse, together with his mother, Hannah, and his older half-brother Sydney. After a three-week probationary period, the two children were then transferred to the Central London District School at Hanwell. Two months later, the children were returned to the workhouse where they were met at the gate by Hannah, dressed in her own clothes. In desperation to see them, she had discharged herself from the workhouse, along with the children. After a day spent playing in Kennington park and visiting a coffee-shop, they returned to the workhouse and had to go through the whole admissions procedure once more, with the children again staying there for a probationary period before returning to Hanwell.

Many inmates were, however, to become long-term residents of the workhouse. A Parliamentary report of 1861 found that, nation-wide, over 20 percent of inmates had been in the workhouse for more than five years. These were mostly consisted of elderly, chronically sick, and mentally ill paupers. Fifteen inmates in the survey had been workhouse residents for sixty years or more. Institutionalization of inmates, particularly women, was something that was to continue right until the end of the workhouse era. In the past few years, whilst visiting a number of former workhouses that now operate as care homes for the elderly, I have been told on two separate occasions that one of the establishment's current residents had been there since the 1920s.

Workhouse Uniform

Originally, the Poor Law Commissioners anticipated that union workhouse inmates would make their own clothes and shoes, providing a useful work task and a cost saving. However, they probably failed to realise the level of skill required to perform this and uniforms were more usually bought-in. Uniforms were usually made from fairly coarse materials with the emphasis being on hard-wearing rather than on comfort and fitting.

In 1837, the Guardians of Hereford union advertised for the supply of inmates' clothing. For the men this consisted of jackets of strong 'Fernought' cloth, breeches or trousers, striped cotton shirts, cloth cap and shoes. For women and girls, there were strong 'grogram' gowns, calico shifts, petticoats of Linsey-Woolsey material, Gingham dresses, day caps, worsted stockings and woven slippers. ('Fernought' or 'Fearnought' was a stout woollen cloth, mainly used on ships as outside clothing for bad weather. Linsey-Woolsey was a fabric with a linen, or sometimes cotton, warp and a wool weft — its name came from the village of Linsey in Sussex. Grogram was a coarse fabric of silk, or of mohair and wool, or of a mixture of all these, often stiffened with gum.)

By 1900, male inmates were usually kitted out in jacket, trousers and waistcoat. Instead of a cap, the bowler hat had become the standard issue for male inmates in southern unions such as Tonbridge in Kent.

Male inmates of Tonbridge workhouse, c. 1897.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Male inmates, c.1911.
© Peter Higginbotham.

In later years, the uniform for able-bodied women was generally a shapeless, waistless, blue-and-white-striped frock reaching to the ankles, with a smock over. Old women wore a bonnet or mop-cap, shawl, and apron over.

Able-bodied female inmates' uniforms, 1920s.
© St James Hospital, Leeds.

Old women inmates' uniforms, c.1902.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Old women inmates' uniforms, c.1911.
© Peter Higginbotham.

The daughter of the matron of Ongar workhouse in the early 1900s recalls that:

For many years, certain categories of inmate were marked out by clothing or badges of a particular colour, for example, yellow for pregnant women who were unmarried. In 1839, the Poor Law Commissioners issued a minute entitled "Ignominious Dress for Unchaste Women in Workhouses" in which they deprecated these practices. However, more subtle forms of such identification often continued. At the Mitford and Launditch workhouse at Gressenhall, unmarried mothers were made to wear a 'jacket' of the same material used for other workhouse clothing. This practice, which resulted in their being referred to as 'jacket women', continued until 1866.

Classification and Segregation

Union workhouse inmates were strictly segregated into seven classes which initially comprised:

(Categories 2 and 3 were subsequently revised to bring the age-limits into line with those for females.)

Husbands, wives and older children were separated as soon as they entered the workhouse and could be punished if they even tried to speak to one another. Each class had its own area of the workhouse, with walls and doors arranged so that different classes never came into contact. The main exception to this was the dining-hall which also served as a chapel. Some dining-halls had partitions down the centre to segregate males and females although these had largely been removed by the 1870s.

From 1847, married couples over the age of sixty could request to share a separate bedroom, although little provision was made for such requests — it was often argued by Boards of Guardians that elderly couples generally preferred the separation.

Children under seven could be placed (if the Guardians thought fit) in the female wards and, from 1842, their mothers could have access to them "at all reasonable times". Parents could also have an "interview" with their children "at some time in each day".

As well as the main categories specified by the Poor Law Commissioners, some workhouses added their own additional classifications. In 1886, the plans for the new Wandsworth and Clapham workhouse included separate areas for inmates of "good" and "bad" character. At Birmingham "merit" wards provided more comfortable conditions for inmates judged to be sufficiently deserving.

Birmingham workhouse male merit ward, c.1910.
© Peter Higginbotham.

As well as being given a basic classification as to male/female, infirm/able-bodied, new inmates were also allocated to a specific dietary class — for more details see the section on workhouse food.

Inside the Workhouse

Workhouses varied enormously in size, with the smallest such as Belford in Northumberland housing fifty inmates, while the largest such as Liverpool could be home for several thousand. However, all workhouses were essentially a self-contained — and often largely self-supporting — community. Apart from the basic rooms such as a dining-hall for eating, day-rooms for the elderly, and dormitories for sleeping, workhouses often had their own bakery, laundry, tailor's and shoe-maker's, vegetable gardens and orchards, and even a piggery for rearing pigs. There would also be school-rooms, workshops, nurseries, infirmary and fever wards for the sick, a chapel, and a dead-room or mortuary. Workhouses were also highly compartmentalised to separate the various classes of inmates, with the yards between the various buildings being divided up by eight-foot-high walls.

You can get a good idea of the complexity of a workhouse from old maps or plans. You can see examples of these on some of the pages for individual institutions such as Manchester or Oxford. For more detail on the different styles and layouts of workhouse buildings, see the architecture section. The workhouse tour section of the web-site will also show you what many of the buildings actually looked like.

Once inside the workhouse, an inmate's only possessions were their uniform and the bed they had in their own dormitory. Beds were simply constructed with an wooden or iron-frame, and could be as little as two feet across. Bedding, in the 1830s and 1840s at least, was generally a mattress and cover, both filled with straw, although blankets and sheets were later introduced. Bed-sharing, particularly amongst children, was common although it became prohibited for adult paupers.

Early iron beds from Gressenhall workhouse.
© Peter Higginbotham.

St Marylebone workhouse dormitory, 1900.

For vagrants and casuals, the 'bed' could be a wooden box rather like a coffin, or even just be a raised wooden platform, or the bare floor. In some places, metal rails provided a support for low-slung hammocks.

Casuals ward at Whitechapel workhouse c.1900.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Irish workhouses were particularly cramped, with the narrow attic space pressed into service as sleeping space for children as shown here at Londonderry.

Londonderry attic ward.
© Peter Higginbotham.

The inmates' toilet facilities were often a simple privy — a cess-pit with a simple cover having a hole in it on which to sit — shared perhaps by as many as 100 inmates. Dormitories were usually provided with chamber pots, or a communal 'tub'. After 1860, some workhouses experimented with earth closets — boxes containing dry soil which could afterwards be used as fertiliser. They were mostly used by rural workhouses where there was a ready supply of soil and there the spent soil could be usefully disposed of.

Once a week, the inmates were bathed (usually superintended — another assault on their dignity) and the men shaved.

St Marylebone women's day room, c.1902.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Meals were usually eaten in a large communal dining-hall which often doubled-up as a chapel. Some dining-halls had religious mottoes on the wall, reminding inmates that they should be grateful for the care they were being given.

Workhouse dining hall
© Peter Higginbotham

The addition of separate chapels, often funded by charitable contributions, became more common from the 1860s onwards. As elsewhere in the workhouse, men and women were segregated. The chapel at the Tonbridge workhouse had separate entrances for men and women.

Tonbridge chapel from the east, 2001.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Tonbridge chapel interior, 2001.
© Peter Higginbotham.

The Daily Routine

The daily routine for workhouse inmates prescribed by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1835 was as follows:

Half an hour after the workhouse bell was rung for rising, the Master or Matron performed a roll-call in each section of the workhouse. The bell also announced meal breaks during which the rules required that "silence, order and decorum shall be maintained" although from 1842 the word "silence" was dropped.

The Stourbridge workhouse bell.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Communal prayers were read before breakfast and after supper every day and 'Divine Service' performed every Sunday, Good Friday and Christmas Day. These were also the days when no work, except the necessary household work and cooking, was performed by the inmates.

The use of the time between 7pm and 8pm was unspecified and was no doubt often used as an informal recreation period. From the 1860s, most workhouses received donations of books and magazines for the inmates' use. Workhouses also started to host occasional talks and musical entertainments, often performed by visiting groups such the one illustrated below by the "Delaware Minstrels" (a group of local bank clerks) at the Bethnal Green workhouse in 1867.

The Delaware Minstrels at Bethnal Green workhouse, 1867.
© Peter Higginbotham

In 1901, the "National Sunday League" put on a Sunday concert for the inmates of Holborn's City Road workhouse.

Holborn City Road workhouse Sunday concert, c.1901.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Rules and Punishment

One source of insight into life in the workhouse comes from the lists of rules under which workhouse operated. These were often printed and prominently displayed in the workhouse, and also read out aloud each week so that the illiterate could have no excuse for disobeying them. The rules for Aylesbury parish workhouse from 1831 outline the daily regime:

Aylesbury parish workhouse rules, 1831

After 1834, the Poor Law Commissioners issued detailed orders about every aspect of the running of a poor law union and its workhouse. In 1847, 233 separate regulations or 'articles' were brought together as part of the Consolidated General Order which governed workhouse operation and administration for the next sixty years. For example:

ART. 119.—No written or printed paper of an improper tendency, or which may be likely to produce insubordination, shall be allowed to circulate, or be read aloud, among the inmates of the Workhouse.
ART. 120.—No pauper shall play at cards, or at any game of chance, in the Workhouse ; and the Master may take from any pauper, and keep until his departure from the Workhouse, any cards, dice, or other articles applicable to games of chance, which may be in his possession.
ART. 121.—No pauper shall smoke in any room of the Workhouse, except by the special direction of the Medical Officer, or shall have any matches or other articles of a highly combustible nature in his possession, and the Master may take from any person any articles of such a nature.

After 1834, the breaking of workhouse rules fell into two categories: Disorderly conduct, which could be punished by a withdrawal for food "luxuries" such as cheese or tea, or the more serious Refractory conduct, which could result in a period of solitary confinement. The workhouse dining hall was required to display a poster which spelt out these rules:

Toxteth Park rules poster, c.1900

Workhouse punishment books record the severity of punishments meted out to inmates. Some chilling examples of this can be seen in the "Pauper Offence Book" from Beaminster Union in Dorset. Offences against property, for example breaking a window, received particularly harsh punishment:

Being "lock'd up" might well mean a spell in the "refractory cell" — this was often underground in one of the workhouse cellars, such as the one at Keighley workhouse:

The subterranean cell at Keighley, 2000.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Workhouse Food

For an in-depth exploration of workhouse food, cooking, and every other aspect of workhouse life, look out for The Workhouse Cookbook by Peter Higginbotham. Published August 2008 by Tempus Publishing at £12.99. ISBN 978-0-7524-4730-8 — Place an advance order with your local bookseller or online from Amazon UK.

Food in the Parish Workhouse

The diet fed to workhouse inmates was often laid down in great detail. For example, the rules for the parish workhouse of of St John at Hackney in the 1750s stipulated a daily allowance of:

Weak or "small" beer was widely consumed by both adults and children, both for its flavour and also as an alternative to water whose quality could be very variable. Many workhouses made their own beer and had a brewhouse specifically for this purpose.

More often than not, meals followed a weekly rota, with meat featuring on only a limited number of "meat days". The weekly menu at Hertford in 1729 comprised:

Workhouse diets are often thought of as being very plain and meagre but this was often far from the truth. At Brighton in 1834, the 336 workhouse inmates were provided with three meals a day with no limits on quantity. Men received two pints of beer a day, children one pint, and women a pint of beer and a pint of tea. There were six meat dinners in the week and the inmates were served at table with the governor carving for the men and boys, and the matron for the women and girls. The full diet is shown below.

Food in the Union Workhouse

In 1835, the Poor Law Commissioners issued six sample dietary tables for use in union workhouses. Each Board of Guardians then used one of these tables as the basis for the particular diet in their own workhouse, with any variations subject to the agreement of the Commissioners. Here is the dietary used at Abingdon workhouse:

Abingdon workhouse dietary, 1836

Children and the aged or infirm had a slightly different diet, usually with more meat-based meals, and with inclusion of milk or tea. From 1856, special diets could also provided for children aged from two to five, and from five to nine. Special or medical cases might require extra or alternative food. Thus, each workhouse had to cope with at least seven classes of diet for the various categories of inmate, each carefully measured to comply with the regulations.

On admission, each inmate was assigned to a particular class of diet. The designations varied over the years — from 1900, the following scheme was used:

The main constituent of the workhouse diet was bread. At breakfast it was supplemented by gruel or porridge — both made from water and oatmeal (or occasionally a mixture of flour and oatmeal). Workhouse broth was usually the water used for boiling the dinner meat, perhaps with a few onions or turnips added. Tea — often without milk — was often provided for the aged and infirm at breakfast, together with a small amount of butter. Supper was usually similar to breakfast.

The mid-day dinner was the meal that varied most, although on several days a week this could just be bread and cheese. Other dinner fare included:

• pudding — either rice-pudding or steamed suet pudding. These would be served plain. In later years, suet-pudding might be served with gravy, or sultanas added to make plum pudding particularly when served to children or the infirm.
• meat and potatoes — the potatoes might be grown in the workhouses own garden; the meat was usually cheap cuts of beef or mutton, with occasional pork or bacon. Meat was usually boiled, although by the 1880s, some workhouses served roast meat. There was some scope for local variation, for example some unions in Cornwall were allowed to substitute fish for meat. From 1883, all workhouses could if they wished serve a fish dinner once a week.
• soup — this would usually be broth, with a few vegetables added and thickened with barley, rice or oatmeal.

Although healthy in some respects, for example sugar was rare in the workhouse diet until the 1870s, it was often created from the cheapest ingredients. Milk was often diluted with water. Fruit was a rarely included.

Workhouse Kitchens

The kitchen in a parish workhouse would be a fairly typical domestic affair, perhaps with an open range over which pots were hung.

By the 1830s, however, the new generation of union workhouse buildings would normally be fitted with a closed range or 'kitchener' where an enclosed fire heated a hotplate above and one or more ovens to each side which could be used for baking bread or roasting meat.

For workhouses with large numbers of inmates, fairly elaborate kitchen facilities were required. A visitor to Manchester's Chorlton union workhouse in 1881 recorded:

The technology used in workhouse kitchens also evolved. The coal and wood used to fire the traditional kitchen range were joined by gas and steam which both offered clean and efficient sources of heat. Steam was particularly versatile — not only did it provide heat for cooking and for warming the building, but could also power mechanical devices such as pumps, laundry equipment, and dynamos. By the 1860s, the Victorian talent for mechanical and engineering inventiveness was beginning to make its mark on institutional kitchens such as those found in larger workhouses. All manner of novel machines for preparing and cooking industrial quantities of food were devised and heavily advertised in the trade press of the day.

Kitchen equipment advertisement, c.1870.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Benham & Sons advertisement, c.1901.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Workhouse Recipes

Research by the Poor Law Board's Medical Officer, Dr Edward Smith, found wide differences in the the recipes used by workhouses for even basic foods such as gruel. In an effort to increase standardization, Smith published "formulae" for a number of common dishes. The examples below are from around 1870, by which time more milk and sugar and even luxuries such as "sweet dip" were included.

By the 1890s, there were increasing complaints about the fixed-ration dietary system. By this time, most workhouse inmates were the elderly or sick who were found the food difficult to eat. Bread, in particular, was being thrown away in large quantities since the regulations required that each inmate had to be given their full serving, whether they wanted it or not.

In 1900, the Local Government Board conducted a major overhaul of the workhouse dietary. It enabled unions to compile their own weekly menus from a range of about fifty dishes or "rations". In 1901, an official workhouse cookery book was compiled by the National Training School of Cookery to show workhouse cooks how to produce the new dishes to a uniform standard. The new recipes included dishes such as batter pudding, bread pudding, plain cake, seed cake, dumplings, fish pie, fruit pudding, golden pudding, pasties, potato pie, pease pudding, rice pudding, roly-poly pudding, sago pudding, semolina pudding, sea pie, shepherd's pie, haricot soup, lentil soup, pea soup, and... gruel.

Workhouse cookery book, 1901.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Haricot soup recipe, 1901.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Workhouse Dining Halls

In larger workhouses, inmates commonly sat in rows all facing the same way, in some cases with separate men's and women's dining halls.

St Marylebone men's dining room, 1900.
© Peter Higginbotham.

St Pancras women's dining room, 1897.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Poplar workhouse dining hall, c.1903.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Holborn Mitcham workhouse old women dining, 1896.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Map of Manchester workhouse dining room, 1848

Dining halls were equipped with scales so that inmates could get their food weighed in front of witnesses if they thought it was below the regulation weight. Inmates who took advantage of this provision were presumably not too popular with the workhouse staff.

The Quality of the Food

The quality and quantity of food in the workhouse diet was the subject of regular comment and debate. In 1841, Baxter condemned the workhouse diet as being inferior to that given to transported convicts. He also criticized the variability in the diets of different Unions, for example men in the Cirencester workhouse received a much smaller weekly allowance than men in the London workhouses.

Will Crooks, a workhouse inmate in his childhood, later rose to become Chairman of the Poplar Board of Guardians. In 1906, he recounted his first visit as a Guardian to the Poplar workhouse:

It was not only the inmates who criticised the food. A local surgeon visiting the kitchens of the Sheffield union workhouse in 1896 was bold enough to sample the day's menu:

The horror of the food provided in some workhouse came to public attention in 1845 when inmates at Andover workhouse were discovered to have been fighting over scraps of decaying meat on the bones they were meant to be crushing.

Work

Workhouse inmates — at least those who were capable of it — were given a variety of work to perform, much of which was involved in running the workhouse. The women mostly did domestic jobs such as cleaning, or helping in the kitchen or laundry. Some workhouses had workshops for sewing, spinning and weaving or other local trades. Others had their own vegetable gardens where the inmates worked to provide food for the workhouse.

Holborn union's Mitcham workhouse laundry, 1896.
© Peter Higginbotham.

In 1888, a report on the Macclesfield workhouse found that amongst the able-bodied females there were 21 washers, 22 sewers and knitters, 12 scrubbers, 12 assisting women, 4 in the kitchen, 4 in the nursery, and 4 stocking darners. On the men's side were 2 joiners, 1 slater, 1 upholsterer, 1 blacksmith, 3 assisting the porter the tramps, 6 men attending the boilers, 3 attending the stone-shed men, 4 whitewashers, 4 attending the pigs, 2 looking after sanitary matters, 1 regulating the coal supply, 18 potato peelers, 1 messenger, 26 ward men, 2 doorkeepers. There were also 12 boys at work in the tailor's shop.

In rural areas, inmates were sometimes used for agricultural labour. Other more menial work included:

• Stone-breaking — the results being saleable for road-making
• Corn-grinding — heavy mill-stones were rotated by four or more men turning a capstan (the resulting flour was usually of very poor quality)
• Bone-crushing — this was abolished after the Andover scandal)
• Gypsum-crushing — for use in plaster-making
• Oakum-picking
• Wood-chopping

Oakum-picking involved teasing out the fibres from old hemp ropes — the resulting material was sold to the navy or other ship-builders — it was mixed with tar and used to seal the lining of wooden ships.

Women picking oakum, c.1906.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Stone-breaking was a task often given to male inmates. It was physically demanding, the amount performed could be readily measured, and the results could be sold for road-mending.

Hackney workhouse stone yard c.1900
© London Borough of Hackney Archives Dept.

Stone-breaking was also a favourite task to be given to vagrants staying overnight in the workhouse tramp wards. From the 1880s, these often had special cells where the men were detained until they had broken the required weight of stone into pieces small enough to fall through a grid to the outside.

A stone-breaking cell, 1887.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Bone-crushing, where old bones were pounded into dust for use as fertilizer, was a hard and particularly unpleasant task. Its use was banned after a scandal in 1845 when it was discovered that inmates of Andover workhouse had been so hungry that they had resorted to eating the rotting scraps of flesh and marrow on the old bones they were crushing.

Wood chopping at Pontefract, 1920s
courtesy of Edwin Pickett

By the end of the nineteenth century a few unions however, such as Holborn, were attempting to provide 'useful' work for their inmates such as shoemaking, tailoring, bricklaying, painting, or plumbing.

Holborn union's Mitcham workhouse shoemaking shop, 1896.
© Peter Higginbotham.

No work, except necessary household work and cooking, was performed by inmates on Sunday, Good Friday, and Christmas Day.

Medical Care in the Workhouse

Virtually all workhouses had a small infirmary room or block for the care of sick inmates. Poor Law unions were also obliged to employ one or more suitably qualified medical officers to minister to the union's sick poor, both inside and outside the workhouse. The post of medical officer was not always a particularly attractive one. Until 1842, posts could be put out to competitive tender, with the appointment usually being made to whoever demanded the lowest salary. This meant that applicants were often the least experienced members of the profession, or ones with private practice where the physician's priorities would invariably lie. Apart from attending patients, medical officers often had to pay for any drugs they prescribed.

Early nursing care in the union workhouse was invariably in the hands of female inmates who would often not be able to read — a serious problem when dealing with labels on medicine bottles. Before 1863, not a single trained nurse existed in any workhouse infirmary outside London.

In the 1860s, pressure began for improvements in workhouse medical care. Some of the most notable campaigners were Louisa Twining — a prominent figure in the Workhouse Visiting Society, Joseph Rogers — medical officer (and severe critic) of the Strand workhouse, Florence Nightingale, and the medical journal The Lancet. In 1865, The Lancet began a serious of detailed reports about conditions in London's workhouse infirmaries. Its description of St George the Martyr in Southwark was typical of what it uncovered:

Joseph Rogers

As a result of such reports, the government was forced into action and in 1867 the Metropolitan Poor Act was passed, requiring London workhouses to locate their hospital facilities on separate sites from the workhouse. The Act also led to the creation of the Metropolitan Asylums Board which took over the provision of care for the sick poor across the whole of the capital. It set up its own institutions for the treatment of smallpox, fever, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases, effectively laying the foundations for the National Health Service.

Florence Nightingale's campaigning also led to improvements in the standard of nursing care, particularly with the founding in 1860 of the Nightingale Fund School at St Thomas's Hospital.

Florence Nightingale
© Peter Higginbotham.

Outside of London, Liverpool pioneered the use of trained nurses through an experiment in 1865 funded by local philanthropist William Rathbone. He financed the placement in the workhouse infirmary of twelve nurses trained at the Nightingale School. These were assisted by eighteen probationers and fifty-four able-bodied female inmates who received a small salary. Although the experiment had mixed results — the pauper assistants needed constant supervision and obtained intoxicants at the slightest opportunity — it was generally perceived overall to have been a success, in large part due to the efforts of the infirmary superintendent, Agnes Jones. Eventually a skilled nursing system spread to all union infirmaries in the country.

Agnes Jones
© Peter Higginbotham.

Despite the gradual improvement in medical care, standards in smaller provincial workhouses often lagged behind the larger establishments in London and other urban areas. In 1894, the British Medical Journal began a campaign to expose the poor conditions that still existed in many workhouses. Over the following two years, workhouses across England and Wales, and then Ireland, were visited by a BMJ "commission" and their — often shocking — inspection reports published in the Journal. The BMJ's efforts undoubtedly resulted in further improvements in the standard of care, particularly for the elderly, sick and infirm, that was provided in the nation's workhouses.

One particular burden that workhouse infirmaries had to bear was that of patients with venereal diseases, sometimes known as "lock" cases. Such cases were often refused admission to charitable and subscription hospitals, or would be offered only one course of treatment. Many workhouse infirmaries had special sections — the foul wards — set aside for this type of patient.

Death in the Workhouse

If an inmate died in the workhouse, the death was notified to their family who could, if they wished, organize a funeral themselves. If this did not happen, which was often the case because of the expense, the Guardians arranged a burial in a local cemetery or burial ground — this was originally required to be in the parish where the workhouse stood, but later rules allowed it to be the deceased's own parish if they or their relatives had expressed such a wish. A few workhouses had their own burial ground on or adjacent to the workhouse site.

The burial would be in the cheapest possible coffin and in an unmarked grave, into which several coffins might be placed on the same occasion. Under the terms of the 1832 Anatomy Act, bodies unclaimed for forty-eight hours could also be disposed of by donating them for use in medical research and training — this was not specific to workhouses, but applied to any institution whose inmates died while in its care. Deaths were, however, always registered in the normal way.

Stourbridge Death Notice, 1907.
Courtesy of Robert L Clarke.

In some places, the workhouse had a special coffin for transporting bodies to the cemetery. This one at Londonderry had a hole on top where a warning flag would be placed when the coffin contained a body.

Londonderry workhouse coffin.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Pauper funerals were often without mourners. At Bourne in 1901, the workhouse master reported that despite repeated invitations, workhouse inmates always declined to attend funerals. This was perhaps a testimony to the old saying: 'rattle his bones, over the stones, he's only a pauper whom nobody owns.'

Changing Times?

Despite the picture that is often painted, life in the workhouse was not entirely bad and slowly got more tolerable as time went on. Some of the changes were brought about by the efforts of of organisation such as the Workhouse Visiting Society and the election of female and working-class members to the Boards of Guardians which ran each union.

Relaxations very gradually began to creep in from the 1880s including the allowance of books, newspapers and snuff for the elderly, toys for the children, and tea-brewing facilities for deserving inmates. Living conditions were often healthier than existed in much poor housing of the time. Although monotonous, the food was regular and reasonably wholesome and improved considerably after the dietary reforms in 1900. The staff in many institutions were kindly, and the brutal treatment that was sensationalized in the press was probably much the exception. The treatment of elderly inmates in particular had become much more relaxed. From the 1890s, elderly inmates at the Macclesfield workhouse could wear their own clothes, leave the workhouse for daily afternoon walks, have friends to visit in the afternoon, and even keep their own pets. In Abingdon, in the late 1920s, the inmates had a wireless in their day room, and supervised weekly excursions to the local cinema.

Swansea workhouse inmates, date unknown.
© Peter Higginbotham.

St Marylebone men's yard, c.1901.
© Peter Higginbotham.

At many workhouses, children and aged inmates had occasional outings to the country or the sea, although these were not always the sedate affairs that might be expected. From 1891, inmates from Camberwell's Gordon Road and Constance Road workhouses had an annual summer excursion to the seaside. For their 1896 day out to Bognor Regis, a special 650-seat train was chartered and at around 9a.m. the party set off. The group consisted mostly of elderly inmates aged 60 to 90, together with a number of young children from the workhouse. Dinner and tea were provided at the Bognor Town Hall after which the men were given tobacco, and the women and children sweets. However, many of the group had apparently obtained money from their friends and after being liberated from the workhouse had headed straight for the nearest public house before boarding the train. On arrival at Bognor, they had continued drinking and had then gone for their dinner at which beer was also served. After dinner, there were more visits to the local public houses. It was later reported that a number of cases had occurred of disorderly conduct and indecent behaviour on secluded parts of the beach. A photograph of the inmates at their official dinner shows that beer was indeed served.

Camberwell workhouse inmates' outing to Bognor Regis, 1896.
© Peter Higginbotham

After 1930, when Boards of Guardians were officially abolished, many former workhouses became "Public Assistance Institutions" — continued to provide care for the elderly and infirm and the destitute. Such establishments were often given idyllic-sounding names such as "The Laurels" but continued to be referred to by local people as "the workhouse" for several decades and still carried the same stigma. The fact that PAIs invariably inherited their premises, staff and inmates from the workhouse era meant that real change was slow to come. For many years, the "superintendent" of the Institution would still be referred to as "Master" by the former "inmates", now called "residents". Internal changes often meant little more than the supposed abolition of uniforms (now replaced by "suitable clothing") and a little more freedom to come and go.

One highly visible change that did often take place was the removal of the walls that had divided the external yards for the different classes of workhouse inmate. The two views below of the Woolwich workhouse show the same area before and after the removal of these walls.

Woolwich rear of main block from the east, late 1920s.
© Peter Higginbotham.

Woolwich rear of main block from the east, 1930s.
© Peter Higginbotham.

The few changes that did take place were often as a result of pressures from outside such as the campaign led by Olive Matthews to give elderly PAI inmates a weekly pocket money allowance. As a result, the 1938 Poor law Amendment Act enabled local authorities to give each inmate up to two shillings a week to spend as they wished. However, the fact that this was an option rather than an obligation meant that not all local authorities made this payment.

In some respects, the elderly poor were actually worse off in the years after 1930. Many former workhouse infirmaries were "appropriated" by local authority public health committees. Although facilities in these hospitals often benefited from their new role as public health hospitals, the change in status meant that the sick poor no longer had a right of entry as had previously been the case. The resulting shortage of beds for the elderly sick meant that many had to be be admitted to the remaining and increasinly overcrowded PAI infirmaries, or even occupy non-hospital beds and so lose their pension rights.

"Man by Fire" - Wantage, 1946
© Oxfordshire Photographic Archive.

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