Notes to go with PowerPoint Living the Poor Life- researching ancestors as inmates, governors or staff in the workhouse. This lecture in Powerpoint was originally intended to be presented at Family Tree Live, Alexandra Palace, in April 2020. The Powerpoint presentation and these notes now appear here on the BALH website, together with a leaflet called Living the Poor Life which is referred to in the lecture. If you plan to carry out research on the class of documents MH 12 at The National Archives, you will also need to buy a copy of the book with the same name, Living the Poor Life, from the BALH website (under Publications, local history books) at the great cost of £2! The lecture will also appear on the website of Family Tree magazine, with audio, in April, hence the references to listening! Slide 1 (Title Slide) Hello and thank you for listening. As you see I'm from the British Association for Local History. This is an umbrella society for local historians, which is also concerned with the overlap between local and family history. There is no need to make notes as I will also put my slides up on the BALH website, which is www.balh.org.uk . You will find the notes under Education, then Conference materials, along with lots of other sets of slides by various people from Family History events; for example, slides and notes by Alan Crosby on researching housin g from a talk at BALH’s Local History Day which is held annually. On the subject of the Poor, there are also 3 extremely good value books you can buy from the BALH website, and a downloadable guide I will tell you about. There have recently been two big projects which really open up ways to research the names and lives of ancestors in the workhouse, whether inmates or staff who included the master and mistress, schoolteacher, medical officers and nurses, and more. These projects were led by Dr Paul Carter of The National Archives. What I'm going to do today is point you towards researching possible workhouse ancestors using the results of these projects and others, but firstly I'm going to outline a little about life in the Union workhouse. I'm just touching the surface but the books and guide I mentioned give you much fuller details, and help you to carry out your own investigations. Slide 2 ‘Don’t let them send me to the workhouse, Gill’ I mentioned in my blurb for this talk the dreaded so-called Union workhouses as places where we can investigate ancestors as inmates or workers. These workhouses were built from the late 1830s by Unions or groups of parishes, and many survive today in some form. They were so feared as institutions that, even in the later 20 th century, some very elderly people could be frightened of being sent there towards the end of their lives. In the 1980s I used to pop in to visit an elderly friend from time to time; she had no relatives, and lived in social housing, in a flat next to a good friend. But in late life and with increasing frailty, she feared being sent from the flat she loved to an institution which she thought of as the workhouse- hence what she said to me, ‘Don’t let them send me to the workhouse, Gill ’ . Without relatives but with a social worker, this elderly felt the system could send her where she had no wish to go. [Left hand image www.workhouses.org.uk . Right- hand image on http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/lewisham/assets/galleries/ladywell/bermondsey-
union-workhouse (1.2.2020) -this website however appears to be mixing up Lewisham with Bermondsey, see below ]. Slide 3 Sevenoaks Union Workhouse at Sundridge, 7 miles outside the town. The building at the top was where my elderly friend feared being sent – the Sevenoaks Union workhouse. Its history was like that of many workhouses- in that it became a hospital in the 20 th Century, in this case for the elderly mentally ill, hence my friend’s fear of being sent there. In fact it had ceased to be such a hospital and my friend did not end up there but her comment illustrates the dread of the workhouse in somebody who had been born about 1900. A number of photos here and in other slides come from the website www.workhouses.org.uk. This is a marvellous and very full website by Peter Higginbotham about the history of the workhouse and with many details of the buildings all over the country, and over time, as here. Peter also made excellent use of the 19 th Century Ordnance Survey maps. I commend this website to you- do use it. I am going to concentrate on sources for the lives of inmates rather than buildings but this website is a must. http://www.workhouses.org.uk/index.html?homepage.shtml. You may also like to read Peter Higginbotham’s book, Workhouses of London and the South East (The History Press, 2019) which are widely available via public libraries, and Workhouses in the Midlands (Tempus, 2007). Slide 4 Lewisham Workhouse c. 1860, and Poor Law Board list of inmates, 1861 One reason for conversion to hospitals was that Union workhouses had in fact accommodated many very poor people who were poor by virtue of being elderly and sick. Lewisham Union Workhouse in Kent and now in SE London is a good example. This is a very brief summary. The infant poor house shown on the 1860 map was for children, who were not supposed to be separated from their mothers till age 7 but often were separated at a younger age, from 4 years, and some were orphans of course [from TNA MH 12, discussed below]. An extensive inspection of Lewisham Workhouse in 1865 was reported in the medical journal The Lancet. This noted that it was in effect a ‘pauper hospital’’ . The inspecto rs said that the ‘Sick, infirm, and able -bodied — so-called at least, but we saw none in the entire house- were placed in close approximation’. The fact that this workhouse was really a hospital with apparently no able-bodied paupers accounts for its later history and is illustrated in this table. In 1861 workhouses had to make a return of inmates who had been there more than 5 years; the years (and months, if given) in the table record the time the inmates had been there (not their ages). Some workhouses did give the months as well as years but as those at Lewisham were clearly very long-term residents, presumably number of the months was not felt relevant or even known. The return also gave the reason these inmates were there; and whether they had been to school- very few had been anywhere but the workhouse school. Infirmity was given as the main reason for their being in the workhouse, also idiocy and epilepsy, and one rather different case- the women who had been in the workhouse 16 years who had had 3 illegitimate children. Workhouses.org.uk has extracts from these 1861 returns for many workhouses across the country, which are worth checking for names and the other details. I have shown just a part of Lewisham’s, and none were recorded as having been to school but in the whole table there are one or two. Slide 5 Lewisham Workhouse c. 1860, 1895 By the late 1830s over 340 Union workhouses had been authorised to be built, by 1850 402 had been authorised, and by 1883, 554 [Living the Poor Life, below]. Lewisham Union Workhouse had a complex building history as the governors responded to changing times. This included the arrival of the railway in 1849 which transformed Lewisham from a country village to suburbia as you can see
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