Notes to go with PowerPoint Living the Poor Life- researching - - PDF document

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 housing 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

• fficers 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 20th 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 20th

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 19th 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

• f 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 inspectors 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

• r 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

• n the maps. Lewisham Priory which is prominent on the Left map was in fact a Victorian gentry
• house. But much else around the workhouse is still not built up in c.1860. The blue arrows point to

part of the grey shaded buildings which represent the workhouse as it was in 1860, with an Infant Poor house across Lewisham High Street. By 1895 the workhouse had been much enlarged; and an infirmary had been built alongside it. There were several factors behind the New Poor Law which introduced Union workhouses: large population growth, the invention of new kinds of farm machinery, especially threshing machines which deprived agricultural labourers of winter work in

• particular. There were also rises in the price of wheat and thus of bread in the 1820s and 30s, and all

these factors resulted in unrest and sometimes violence among rural populations, specifically the Swing riots in southern England. Under the Old Poor Law, the parish had been able to provide so- called outdoor relief- small weekly payments to tide agricultural labourers over hard times, also a parish workhouse; this was just an ordinary house, often tatty, for the infirm and elderly. But under the New Poor law of 1834 all (except the aged and infirm) were forced into the Union workhouse or had to stay on the streets. it was allowed that the aged and infirm could; continue to be looked after by the parish through doles of money or payment of rent, via the relieving officer, though this did not last as we shall see. An example of this occurring from Romsey, Hampshire, is investigated in a short article in the magazine of the British Association for Local History, Local History News no.134, ‘Winter 2020’. This is entitled Outdoor Relief Lists and you can read it online on the BALH website, https://www.balh.org.uk/publication-lhn-local-history-news-number-134-winter-2020. Family historians might like to note that what was regarded as the shame or disgrace of being in the workhouse sometimes led to actions which may not make it easy to realise this was the case: ‘from 1904, to protect them from disadvantage in later life, the birth certificates for those born in the workhouse gave its address just as 390 High Street Lewisham’. Slide 6 Bermondsey Institution at Ladywell in Lewisham (built 1897-1900) St Olave’s parish in south London, a Union together with Rotherhithe and Bermondsey, built this enormous institution, the Bermondsey or St Olave’s Ladywell for the aged and infirm, near to Lewisham workhouse, . It was described as possibly the only one intended solely for the accommodation of the aged and infirm, and maybe the only such establishment of its type. This I think is a reflection of the growing demand for accommodation of all types for the vulnerable in London- St Olave's Union also had another infirmary in its own parish as well as a Union workhouse. The workers at Bermondsey in the top R photo - perhaps including some of the patients- look very content and the lower photo suggests it was taken during the Christmas preparations. During the First World War, Bermondsey [Ladywell] provided treatment for military personnel under the name

• f Bermondsey Military Hospital. After 1930, the institution was taken over by the London County

Council's welfare department and continued in use as a residential institution for the elderly. This was a typical development, as we have seen, and definitely one worth bearing in mind when investigating possible workhouse ancestry. Once again I recommend workhouses.org.uk and the books I recommended for untangling the complexities of Union and building development over time. There is another website about Bermondsey Institution which mixes it up with the Lewisham Union workhouse and has no references- a lack of references is always a bad sign on a website, just as it is in a book! Slide 7 From History to Herstory Another large category of the poor were those known as insane-paupers and some large asylums were built for these in the 19th century; this was rather than the insane-paupers being dealt with

under the Poor Laws, which could not provide the care they needed nor deal with a wide range of

• behaviours. One of these asylums in particular has had its records both very fully catalogued and

also digitised, so that you can freely look for lots of detail. The project was called from History to Herstory and the link I have put on the screen directs you to how to find the records. There are over 16 000 records from the medical casebooks of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield, Yorks, later known as Stanley Royd Hospital. The patients were mostly women and children, although there are some casebooks of male patients. The casebooks cover the period 1818 to 1902. You are able to search for records by patient name and location or address, and read about

• ccupation, length of illness, family members who have been ill, cause of illness, treatments and

details of progress; some records include photographs of patients. The Asylum building was H shaped and cost over £36,000 to construct. It was the sixth asylum to open in the whole of the country and one Dr Ellis was the first Superintendent, with his wife acting as matron. It was initially built for 150 patients; by 1900 there were 1469 patients from all over West Yorkshire. The medical record and photo you can see here is of the child is Ellen Craven aged 5, who had epilepsy. Her case regarded as ‘Hopeless’. The digitised case books are much clearer to read than what I have been able to put on the screen- you get a better impression in the next slide. Slide 8 From History to Herstory (second one) 63 women (people) were admitted to this asylum in the late 19th century with ‘religious anxiety’ including Julia Lawton, who was admitted on 22 October 1883. Previously she had been in domestic service in Chapel Allerton but was brought into the asylum with what was called "religious excitement". A steady, hard-working woman, she had started attending Salvation Army services and become "unduly… boisterous". On 24 October she was described as restless and constantly singing Salvation Army hymns. This continued for the next two months until she was given a cannabis and bromide mixture which had the effect of calming her and making her more ‘manageable’. By July 1885 she was working in the laundry ward and on 10 August she was discharged, at which time her medical/nursing notes described her as behaving "quite rationally" and having a "sane demeanour and appearance". [This a photo of Ada Annie wood] Slide 9 Living the Poor Life: A Guide to the Poor Law Union Correspondence, c.1834 to 1871, held at The National Archives More specialised but equally interesting to family historians is a recent project at TNA, and a guide resulting from it in the form of a booklet. Volunteers representing places all over the country (England and Wales) digitised and catalogued the central records of 22 Poor Law Unions which are in the National Archives; in so doing they made 4.6 million words available to search online, including people-names and place-names, and subjects. The National Archives made the documents themselves downloadable for free from its website, and you can continue do this. If your ancestor was an inmate or a worker in one of these Poor Law union workhouses, you may be able find them amongst this free material. BALH has produced a booklet which tells you how to do this. Accompanying that is a paper guide on finding and downloading the material from The National Archives using its catalogue, Discovery. It is easy enough but the booklet and paper guide are

• helpful. The booklet costs only £2 from the BALH website https://www.balh.org.uk/shop/book-

living-the-poor-life-a-guide-to-the-poor-law-union-correspondence-c-1834-1871 . The correspondence which has been catalogued and digitised consists of the letters and forms sent between the central organisation, the Poor law Commission or Board, and the guardians of the individual Union Workhouses, from the time they were set up. This may sound dull but it is in fact

full of human interest. As you can see maps, posters and notices, often included with the correspondence as evidence of local views on the introduction of the New Poor Law- one of my favourites is the poster on Glorious Defeat of the friends of the New Poor law for Keighley Union. On the right you see some of the other matters about which there was correspondence and we come to several more specifically about people. Slide 10 Mitford and Launditch Union (Norfolk) subjects in the correspondence in document class MH 12 (as categorised in The National Archives Discovery catalogue) So the Discovery catalogue has the correspondence under these Subjects listed here, and you can see the number of letters in relation to each subject in this Union in Norfolk: labour, migration, democracy, farming, road transport, children, medicine, pay and pensions , poverty, and local government i.e. the administration of the workhouses . If we take the subject of labour, that might not sound especially interesting but it actually was. For example, there were 5 letters in 1854 in which the governors’ clerk wrote to the Poor Law Board asking permission for able-bodied men, and a few months later women also, to be allowed to be ‘employed’, as they put it, in picking oakum. This went against the governors’ original decision not to set this practice in motion, and so the Poor Law Board asked for a copy of the governors’ resolution before they made a decision whether to allow it. This was because picking oakum was a form of hard labour which was not even imposed in all prisons (reference TNA MH 12/8480/13). However along with stone breaking, picking oakum became an occupation typically enforced on workhouse inmates. They ‘were given quantities of old rope, which they had to untwist into many corkscrew strands. They then had to take these individual strands and unroll them, usually by rolling them on their knee using their hands until the mesh became loose’. The unpicking was slow and painful and caused the inmates’ hands to bleed within an hour or two of starting, yet they had to do it for full days, day after day’. Hence the correspondence between the Board and governors of this Union as to whether it was to be

• permitted. http://rovingcrafters.com/2016/02/01/prisoners-poverty-and-picking-oakum/ Text

Image- https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/prisoner4099/historical- background/enlarge-oakum.htm Slide 11 A coroner’s letter about Joyce Bryant after the introduction of the Poor Removal Act, and a Poor Law Commissioner’s opinion on the Act Here on the left is one letter from the extensive correspondence between the coroner, the Poor Law commission and the guardians of the Clutton workhouse about the life and death of Joyce Bryant – you will remember that the coroner found that this aged pauper had died of starvation and want of food, and this had kicked off the whole investigation. I have chosen what is just a short letter in that

• correspondence. We might note that the coroner is acknowledging his fee for a copy of depositions

i.e. witness statements in the case. His fee was two guineas, £2 2s, and I find this a reminder of the huge inequality between the financial worlds of professional men and the poor they dealt with (agricultural labourers in a week in which they actually had work might earn 12 or 13s at this time). On the R hand side is a view on the controversy over the Poor Removal act which forced the aged and inform into the workhouse. Many men gave informed opinion to a discussion in Parliament. One Mr Gulson had appointed an assistant poor-law commissioner in 1834 and dealt with 15 or 16 counties in England and Wales. 13 years later, giving evidence to Parliament, he was asked to give his opinion on the Act of 1846 removing the vestiges of out relief : ‘I have no hesitation in giving my

• pinion that it operates most harshly on the class of poor who are most entitled to our

commiseration, the old and infirm’; and ‘I have no hesitation in saying that the universal opinion is

that this Act must be altered’. Despite the controversy this did not happen. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1847/mar/02/poor-removal-act 10.2.20 Bryant Title: Content: Copy of letter from Robert Uphill, Coroner, Old Down, near... Order number: 1949756 Catalogue reference: TNA MH 12/10322/250, Folio 409. Slide 12 The story of Joyce Bryant of Clutton, Somerset, from correspondence in MH 12 I take one example of my own, which comes from a notably important time when another major Act was passed, concerning the aged and infirm poor, who under the 1834 act had still been allowed to receive outrelief (doles and rent payments at home) and not been obliged to go into the workhouse. However in 1846 a new Act removed this provision and the only relief even the aged and infirm could get was to go into the workhouse. This was controversial and the life- or rather death- of Joyce Bryant illustrates it. What I am giving you is a is a summary from the letters which are now catalogued and digitised- Summarised the bullet points. There was a riot at a general election hustings in the village of Clutton in 1852 which was reported in the local paper, the Sherborne Mercury J[ohn] Rees Mogg, Esq,” it notes, “was beaten by the rioters and escaped into a nearby house.” The rioters took the hats off the heads of the Conservatives at this hustings and threw them in their faces. I haven’t read the whole newspaper report but it appears there was ongoing animosity between the poor and local landowners, who here as everywhere formed part of the administration

• f the new Poor Law. There is a Times Online article on it written in 2018 and designed I think to

point up parallels on welfare, rich and poor, between the 19th Century and now- something historians often do and on which you will want to make up your own minds. Note that Rev. George Cornwall can be likely identified in Clergy of the Church of England database (a website) although this only runs to 1835. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mogg-was-a-riot-in-the-19th-century- g9b7nmz58 Roland White ‘Mogg was a riot in the 19th century’. 35]. Slide 13 The duties of the ‘dairy woman’ at the workhouse school of Brighton Union Here is just another tiny snippet of the lives of families and individual revealed by this

• correspondence. There is a great deal in the correspondence about Union workhouse staff: I've

already mentioned that among them were the master and mistress, school master or mistress, medical officers and nurses- the correspondence shows for example that the master and mistress were often married to each other, and that the job of teacher was often taken by people who could not get a better one in the variety of schools which existed outside the workhouse. Certainly school masters and mistresses in the workhouse were generally more badly paid, although they did receive board and lodging there -not necessarily a treat! It is possible to follow the careers of many of the staff of the workhouses as they moved around between workhouses, often after just a year or two. So there is plenty of potential for researching ancestors. I like this quote from the dairy woman at Brighton because it gives an insight into the working life of another member of staff, of whom there must have been a number but of whom we do not hear so much. The book Pauper Prisons, Pauper Palaces is a set of short and interesting studies by local and family historians drawing on the Poor Law correspondence. It includes subjects such as hard labour which was sometimes ‘useless work’ such as the hand-crank of Southwell and Mansfield workhouse in the 1840s. Another study is entitled ‘shovelling out paupers’, that is encouraging or forcing them to emigrate; Another is on death, dirt and the diseased, and those who cared for these latter. Pauper Prisons, Pauper Palaces is available from the BALH website, under the local history books section of Publications, https://www.balh.org.uk/shop/book-pauper-prisons

Slide 14 The Living the Poor Life guide: what it does for you Read the points on the screen. In addition to the Living the Poor Life guide as seen here, there is a paper leaflet which goes with it on using these records via the Discovery catalogue (also on the BALH website) Slide 15 Books, guides, pdfs and websites opening up workhouse records for family history I want to finish by putting up the details of books, guides and weblinks on the poor and workhouse

• records. I have mentioned the first 2 already. As an alternative there is a pdf which you can

download- as in the fourth bullet point- However it runs to 74 pages and may be more detailed than you want. It is a pdf downloadable from the BALH website under Education, Educational records. The National Archives’ own guides are also helpful. Lastly, I would like to point out Internet Sites for Local Historians: a directory again available on the BALH website. This contains the details of 797 websites of use to both local and family historians and nearly all of them are free. So, for instance it points you to 3 which I have mentioned briefly, Clergy of the Chruch of England, Hansard Online and From History to Herstory. Furthermore, Internet Sites has indexes by people, place and subject. These enable you to find websites with content you may find useful but with names which would not necessarily draw your attention (or that of a search engine like google or bing) to the fact they deal with the poor and workhouse- e.g. From History to Herstory. I briefly showed the use of 19th Century Ordnance Survey maps for workhouse history, and the Internet Sites Directory here reveals that the National Library of Scotland website is the place to go to use, for free, both the first and second editions of these maps, including for England and Wales. I use this website all the time! There is also advice on choosing good websites and a number of reviews of very important websites such as workhouses.org.uk which tell you more than I have been able to say today.