Behind the walls
Llew Gardner
The Workhouse Norman Longmate (Temple Smith E4.00) To be poor is to be degraded, sometimes by accident often by design. The degradation of poverty is as true today as it was in Victorian times but then the design was rather more deliberate. The' sun might never set on the British Empire but for the native poor it never so much as rose. If they did raise their eyes from the contemplation of their wretchedness they saw not the paradise promised by the clergy but the workhouse wall. It was on one such wall that a young writer, James Craven, found these words in 1887: Dirty days hath September, April, June and November; From January up to May, The rain it raineth every day; From May again until July, There's not a dry cloud in the sky; All the rest have thirty-one Without a blessed ray of sun: And if any of them had two-and-thirty They'd be just as wet and quite as dirty.
It is the strength of Norman Longmate's finely researched book that it is filled with such human reminders that the people who lived out meagre lives behind the high walls were living beings and that although poverty might, as the poet Edwin Markham put it, have stamped "the emptiness of ages" on their faces it had not dulled them to all suffering. They knew they were being degraded and they knew that society at large regarded that
degradation as a punishment for being poor.
For this was the awful thing about the workhouse. It was a deliberate attempt to cure poverty by making the alternative so grim that the poor would go to any lengths rather than throw themselves on the nation's stern mercy. It replaced a system of out-relief which was not unlike the modern supplementary benefit and had at least been based on a decent concern for misfortune. But concern for those who could not make their own way in the exciting new world was not the Victorian's strong point. Perhaps things haven't changed that much. It is only necessary to go into any home county saloon bar to know that there are still plenty in the land who believe that the poor and workless (other than the widows of army officers) have only themselves to blame. In Victorian times this was the prevailing attitude.
It w as a sentiment given, respectable philosophical and economic backing by the • thinking of Thomas Malthus, who argued that not only was there insufficient wealth in the land to make redistribution a practical policy but that poor relief was the slippery path to a nation's ruin because it encouraged the poor to procreate. A rigged Royal Commission came up with the kind of findings required of it and the Poor Law Amendment Bill of 1834 sailed through both houses. Few raised a voice against it. Many of the nineteenth century radicals were seduced by the beautiful simplicity of the proposed cure. Among them only William Cobbett, with his unerring instinct for the unjust, saw the Bill for what it was: "the poor man robbery Bill."
Parliament was in no mood to have its conscience pricked. It had taken its cue from one George Nichols, self-made man and GodFearer, who became one of the three Poor Law Commissioners entrusted with the supervision of the new Act's workings:
. . . Let the poor see and feel that their parish, although it will not allow them to perish through absolute want, is yet the hardest taskmaster, the closest paymaster and the most harsh and unkind friend they can apply to.
That was how it was envisaged and that was how it was. Mr Longmate lists from contemporary documents the major and minor indignities inflicted on the poor. They ranged from the pettiness born of boredom and drunkenness of the underpaid master to out and out sadism.
But whatever humanitarians might think of the system, it worked. The population was rising but in the ten years from 1834 to 1844 the coat of poor relief to the nation fell from £6,300,000 to £4,900,000. Money was being saved. One way or the other, in whatever awful misery, the poor were fending for themselves. The system might have its shortcomings, here a master might go too far in exercising his brutish authority, there a matron might preen, but the book-keeping was good and all was right with the world.
And so things might have remained had it not been for the Andover scandal. Even the bible-bound Victorian conscience was shocked by the news that the inmates of Andover, set to crushing bones to make fertiliser, had been eating the gristle and marrow of the bones. The workhouse was to survive for a good many years yet but the events of Andover and the publicity they received brought about a shake-up in the system.
The workhouse as such survived until 1930. George Lansbury, among others, helped to remove its curse from the poor. Some, Mr Longmate reminds us, are still in use as old folks' homes. Most have been torn down or rebuilt beyond recognition. Mr Longmate suggests that it would be "a tragedy if at least one is not preserved as a reminder of how the wealthier part of the British people once treated their less-fortunate fellow countrymen."
Llew Gardner is the presenter of the Thames Television programme, People and Politics.
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