Cringe or Starve: As Cold as Charity?

‘Cringe or Starve’ was an epithet for the COS or Charity Organisation Society that sought to regiment philanthropy and avoid ’indiscriminate’ charity  in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Charles Dickens immortalised the COS in his final unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as the Haven of Philanthropy with Luke Honeythunder as ‘Stipendiary Philanthropist’. Dickens described Honeythunder’s brand of philanthropy as the ‘gunpowderous sort’ and that the ‘ difference between it and animosity was hard to determine’.

Above: Artist, Henry Tonks,  unknown date, the Tate

The COS envisaged charity as a vehicle for encouraging self-help. Any gift which did not make an individual better, stronger and more independent, they felt damaged rather than helped the recipient:

‘Kind hearted persons are often perplexed when cases of apparent distress come under their notice. They would willingly give help if they knew the tale was true, and the appellant deserving, but this can only be proved by enquiry, for which busy people have not the needful time. It was partly to meet this difficulty that the COS was established – to discriminate between the honest, industrious struggling poor, and the vicious, idle, and improvident’.

Thorough investigation of the people asking for help was at the heart of the COS. This ‘casework’ approach pioneered the professionalisation of social work and took notions of the deserving and undeserving poor to new heights (or depths). In Swansea, if a ‘kind hearted person’ was approached for help, they would give the ‘appellant’ a ticket, like the one below, to present to the COS for enquiries to be made to their veracity and need, ‘instead of giving money to beggars on the street or at the doors’.

If applicants passed the stringent investigations, local COS branches would refer clients to poor law authorities, relieve clients direct or refer them to other charities. As the figures below demonstrate, the promise that Swansea COS would not’ knowingly encourage thoughtlessness and improvidence’ seemed to result in more refusals than help.

Assistance Refused 1900-01

•False statement made    9

•References unsatisfactory  23

•Otherwise undeserving  18

•Employment found but not taken    3

•Unsuitability for work or Aid sought    1

•Referred to Relatives     0

•Referred to Poor law Guardians  19

•Referred to COS other towns    0

•Other reasons including claims abandoned   19

Applications  total  92

Assistance Rendered 1900-01

•Interim Relief  5

•Direct convalescence Aid  3

•Hospital or medical Aid   6

•Convalescent Homes, Schools, &c  3

•Clothing, Blankets &c  14

•Special Railway Fares  4

•Transmission of Specific Gifts from Subscribers   3

•Labour List  1 man 4 women

•Employment Found  5

•Loans  2

•Pensions  4

 Other Aid   5  Total aid 59

The Swansea branch of the COS did appear to run a successful savings scheme or ‘thrift club’ (below), and also operated a an agency for domestic staff.

However, it is this statement from 1906 that, in my mind, emphasises  the  supreme and utter confidence of the Victorian and Edwardian ruling class:

‘We dealt with 35 cases, which proved to be unsuitable for help, but we desire to emphasize our opinion that this does not mean lost labour. As a Society for organizing Charity, a very important part of our work is to prove by our investigation what cases are suitable or unworthy, and thus protect the charitable public from unscrupulous beggars and unworthy applicants’.

They absolutely knew they were right…

A limited number of Swansea COS annual reports are available in Swansea Central Library.

For more on the COS see:

Jane Lewis, The Voluntary Sector, the State and Social Work in Britain: The Charity Organisation Society/Family Welfare Association Since 1869.  Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995.

My favourite account of the COS in London, where the society was most established, is in Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Pauper Mobility

Reblogged from Historian Interrupted:

It may come as a surprise to hear that Victorian workhouse inmates and outdoor paupers were supplied with prosthetic limbs.

In 1875, medical officers discussed whether 13 year old Dorothy Davies, whose leg had been amputated, should have a corked or a wooden leg. Most amputees appeared to have wooden legs fitted, although one was recorded as receiving  a 'bucket leg with knee joint'.

Read more… 101 more words

Profligate Women?

Were the mothers of illegitimate children humiliated in the Victorian workhouse? Evidence would suggest that workhouse management were keen to make an example of ‘unchaste’ women by reducing their food allowance or making them wear clothes that would mark them out. However the Poor Law Commissioners in London issued a statement in 1839 outlawing this practice.

 This ruling did not appear to deter Swansea Union, as in 1850, the poor law guardians discussed whether ‘a certain class of Females’ should be made to wear a special badge and given a diet of ‘inferior description’. These women had been admitted into the workhouse from ‘profligate habits’ were either pregnant or had borne two or more children, which led the guardians to believe that they were undeterred by the threat of the workhouse.

The Poor Law Commission did not agree with these practices, however this was not because of any tolerance towards unmarried mothers. Rather, the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act had declared via the infamous ‘bastardy clauses’ that a ‘bastard should be what Providence had ordained that it should be  – a burthen on its mother’ and ‘placed such conduct in the class of crimes and simply left the mother with the consequences of vice’. Thus, the Commissioners felt that the woman, by her own ‘imprudence’, had been punished by bearing this ‘burthen’ alone and it ‘ought not to affect her treatment in the workhouse’.

In 1844, the law was changed to allow unmarried mothers to apply to magistrates for ‘affiliation’ orders which, if paternity was proved, the putative father would be obliged to maintain the child financially.

It is worth mentioning an extract from the Inquiry into the Rebecca Riots in 1844. One witness related how the ‘bastardy clauses’ in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act affected women when his female employees told him: ‘it is a bad time for the girls, Sir, the boys have their own way’.

Sources used:

Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry for South Wales, 1844, cmd. 531, 177.

Appendix to Sixth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, 1840, cmd. 253, 56.

West Glamorgan Archives Service, U/S 1/1, Guardians Minutes of Meetings, 20 June, 4 July 1850.

‘Likely to conduce to the happiness and advantage of the inmates’? – Victorian Education for Deaf Children.

‘Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent from the histories we write’ observed Douglas Baynton in 2001. Of course, since then historians have begun to fill this lacuna and disability history has burgeoned, especially here at Swansea University.

Baynton’s argument that disability is everywhere in history carries particular resonance for me as throughout my research into the poor laws between 1834 and 1910, I have encountered numerous allusions to disabilities. Women defined as prostitutes were  ‘diagnosed’ as feeble-minded and the possibility of ‘troublesome’ and ‘incorrigible’ workhouse inmates being admitted to a lunatic asylum was discussed. One child had been sent home from school because her teacher described her as ‘an idiot’ and a boy with epilepsy was removed from the poor law’s cottage homes as he required more attention than the home felt they could provide. Roman Catholic girls with physical or mental disabilities were regularly sent by Swansea Union to live in Nazareth House in Cardiff.

For the final chapter of my PhD thesis I have been exploring disability explicitly via the lives of children sent by the Swansea poor law union to the Cambrian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Swansea and South Wales Institution for the Blind.

Cambrian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb

The education of deaf children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dominated by the use of the ‘oral’ system, or training deaf children to speak and lip-read. This ‘triumph of Oralism’ had been endorsed in 1880 by the International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan and consequently sign language, also known as the manual method, was regarded as crude and inefficient. A Royal Commission in 1889 revealed that the manual system was used in 22 institutions, a combined system in 48, but the oral system was used in 507 institutions across Britain.

However, maybe because Benjamin Payne the principal of the Cambrian Institution was himself deaf, the oral system did not dominate teaching to such a degree. A report written in 1909 stated the Cambrian’s position: ‘oral teaching is given merely as an accomplishment, the authorities having no faith in its value as a means of communication’.

From the annual reports of the Cambrian Institution

In 1868, a poor law inspector said of the Cambrian: ‘I consider that the institution though limited in its sphere and unambitious in its pretentions is well conducted, well superintended and likely to conduce to the happiness and advantage of the inmates’. What sort of future could a former inmate of this establishment expect? Evidence given by Benjamin Payne to the Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf & Dumb in 1889 (below) suggests that although tailoring for boys and dressmaking for girls headed the lists of occupations, there appears to be a wider range of career possibilities. As you can see there appears to be rather more for boys than for girls, which suggests that career prospects for deaf girls were as gendered as those of hearing girls.

One girl who became a dressmaker was Beatrice Isaac. In January 1893, William Isaac had applied to the Swansea Guardians for a grant to enable his 9 year old daughter Beatrice to become a boarder at the Cambrian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb.

In 1891 Beatrice was one of five sisters and one brother. The family would grow over the years and by 1911 a further four daughters had been born. William Isaac was a copper smelter and his wife Eleanor did not work (apart from looking after 11 children). They were not paupers, yet Beatrice’s time at the Cambrian Institution was subsidised by the Swansea Union. This was because new legislation in the Elementary Education Act of 1893 had extended compulsory elementary education to blind and deaf children.

Adelaide Perkins, one of Swansea Union’s ‘Lady Guardians’, inspected the Cambrian Institution in 1898 when four girls funded by the guardians were living there. She wrote a very favourable report about the institution and also mentioned that Beatrice was doing well in her studies. Adelaide Perkins talked specifically about the emphasis on sewing: ‘they do all their own needlework and help make their dresses, they are also taught fancy work, knitting and weaving’, but she was also highly complementary about the academic work of the children.

Many of the annual reports of the Cambrian Institution contain compositions and letters written by the pupils, although these sources need to be read with caution and are unlikely to be unmediated, they can help us build a picture of Beatrice’s life. A composition in the 1894 annual report by a 12 year old girl talks about girls going to the park and how Annie and Beatrice went to town and took pairs of boots to a Mr Wilson, probably a cobbler. This suggests that pupils could experience life outside its walls and, for me at least, it paints a picture of two girls on an errand, but also probably enjoying window shopping and companionship as well.

A longer letter from Beatrice appears in the 1900 annual report when she was 16. This was a lovely, chatty letter which tells us a lot about her family and her future plans. She was writing to her elder sister Mary Ann and brother-in-law Tom who live in London and appear to have a younger sister, Nellie, staying with them, who I think is around four years old. Another younger sister Katie who is about two, is reported to be home from hospital. Beatrice also wrote that her mother and elder sister Jane came to visit her recently and that Jane’s baby had a bad cold. She also hinted (strongly!) that she would love to come and visit her sister and her husband in London. She was looking forward to Christmas and a prize-giving with prizes for being ‘well behaved, for being best sewer, for being good conduct, and for being the best in school’. She said that the girls go for a walk every day except Monday and Saturday and wrote that she wanted to become ‘a tailoress or dressmaker’.

Another report by Adelaide Perkins concurred with Beatrice’s hope. Mrs Perkins recommended that Beatrice and Elizabeth Phillips stay on another year as she was very pleased with the girls’ appearance and described them as looking ‘bright, happy and intelligent’. The girls’ needlework was inspected and praised and thought to be a means of earning their own livelihood.

Beatrice did become a dressmaker. As the 1911 census shows, both Beatrice and her sister were self-employed dressmakers living at home. In fact, eight of the children were still at home with their parents and little Nellie, now 15, appears to personify 20th century modernity as a typist. Were Beatrice’s expectations lowered by the Cambrian Institution? Would she have earned her living by different means if dressmaking had not been foregrounded at the school? Were dressmaking and tailoring the deaf equivalent of the ‘blind trades’? I would love to hear your comments, please get in touch.

For a very recent in-depth survey of deaf education see my colleague Mike Mantin’s, ‘Educational Experiences of Deaf Children in Wales: The Cambrian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, 1847-1914’ (Swansea University: unpublished PhD thesis, 2012).

Sources:
Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf & Dumb, &c, 1889.
Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf Children) Act 1893.
The National Archives, ED 224/18, 30 October 1909.
Cambrian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb: Annual Reports, available in Swansea Central Library.
West Glamorgan Archives Service, Swansea Guardians’ minutes of meetings. The archives also houses minutes books and letter-books from the Cambrian institution.

Douglas C. Baynton, ‘Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History’, in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, 33-57 (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

‘Saucy Harry and his Moll’ – (Workhouse) Men Behaving Badly

There is no doubt that grim tales of brutality in Victorian workhouses sell popular history books, and of course the workhouse system did generate many cases of neglect and cruelty. Most perceptions of the poor laws are defined by these incidents, but some paupers also used (and abused) the system successfully.

The horrifying scandals in the Andover workhouse in 1845, where inmates were so hungry that they took to gnawing at the rotting bones they were crushing into bone meal, are retold seemingly automatically whenever the word workhouse is used. One of the major flaws within the Andover Union was the failure of local poor law guardians to properly supervise the brutal master, Colin McDougal.

Men from Swansea Workhouse (undated, maybe 1920s) from Workhouses.org

We know so much about this scandal because of subsequent widespread press coverage and a Government Select Committee being charged to investigate and report on the incidents. This publicity and Government inquiries initiated much need changes to the poor law system.

A fascination with the ‘evils’ of the workhouse system was very apparent in the nineteenth century. From 1837 to 1842, The Times lavished more than two million words on the ‘new’ poor law’s administration and related 290 ‘horror’ stories. Many of the more sensationalist pieces proved to be untrue, but instances of cruelty and neglect to workhouse inmates were not uncommon. The Age argued that if the measures proposed by the Poor Law Commission were enacted, their opinions about ‘the united wisdom of the country’ would turn into ‘sentiments of indignation and horror’; later in the year John Bull alleged that the Poor Law Commissioners had ‘begun their reign of terror’.

However, far less publicity has been given to the graffiti reprinted by poor law inspectors in the 1866 Reports on vagrancy (cmd 3698). There are pages of comments like the ones below and also excerpts from poetry written on the walls by ‘gentlemen of the road’ or, as described by the inspectors, tramps and vagrants.

There were long, long lists of paupers just appearing to ‘sign-in’ and advertise they had stayed in a certain workhouse. Many comments complained or praised the treatment in the workhouse, which reads at times rather like a workhouse ‘trip adviser’!

One of my favourite comments is:

‘Bow Street and two other ragamuffins slept here on the night of the 12^th April, and was quite shocked at the clownish impudence of the old pauper at the lodge. The thundering old thief denied us a drink of water. So help me Bob’.  I would think he was referring to the porter.

Before I appear as an apologist for the workhouse system, some graffiti seen on a wall of Swansea Workhouse and copied by Noah Williams in his journal/diary between May 1888 and May 1890 demonstrates that the life  a ‘vagrant’ was a harsh one. With thanks to his descendent Darris Williams of Family Search.

Jesus wept and well he might
To see us poor tramps in such a plight
A can of skilly in our hand
They call it relief in a Christian land
O God! defend the tramps say I
Send the Guardians to hell as soon as they die
We lie on boards at their command
They call it relief in a Christian land

Victorian education for the blind: ‘cheer them in their affliction’?

Were blind children the ‘preferred figures of disability in the Victorian imagination’ as Martha Holmes argues? Depictions in art such as The Blind Girl by John Millais, 1856 (below) suggests that representations of blindness did generate widespread Victorian sentimentality and pity, which in turn led to the establishment of specialist institutions for blind children and adults. The Royal School for the Blind in Liverpool was the first institution of its kind in Britain when it was founded in 1791 by Edward Rushton. By the end of the nineteenth century there were over 50 such institutions, which educated, employed and relieved over 1,000 people.

Pity was not the only motivating factor; it was feared that without suitable education and employment blind children could grow up to be a drain on the poor rates and dependent on the state. This poem, written in 1887, captures these motivations well:

Lonely blindness here can meet
Kindred woes and converse sweet;
Torpid once can learn to smile
Proudly o’er its useful toil.

‘Useful toil’ for blind people in the Victorian and Edwardian period (and beyond) generally meant the ‘Blind Trades’. This included basket weaving, brush making, rug weaving and piano tuning. Former Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett was apparently told the best career he could hope for was a piano tuner. Anne Borsay argues that blind and deaf Institutions ‘depressed the expectations of all their pupils’, but I wonder whether their expectations were depressed by society before any specialised education.

Michael Frederick Halliday, The Blind Basket Maker and his First Child, 1856

My research into pauper children in Swansea has revealed that the guardians of the poor paid for many blind pauper children to attend the Swansea and South Wales Institute for the Blind. Founded in 1865 as a society for teaching and helping adult blind people, a permanent home was established in Swansea in 1873. By 1884, the annual report related that there were 37 men, women and children either ‘learning some handicraft, working at their trade, or being educated in the schoolroom’.

Swansea and South Wales Institute for the Blind

Moses Rees – ‘a foundling’

Moses Rees was born blind, around 1873, and was abandoned by his mother as a baby. However, unlike many other orphans at that time he was not brought up in the workhouse or in cottage homes. The Swansea Guardians paid for him to be ‘boarded out’ or fostered with the Heffron family in Landore, a working-class area of Swansea. Happily, in the 1881 census, he was described as an ‘adopted son’ and his name was recorded as Moses Heffron Rees. He was one of eight children (5 boys and 3 girls) living at home ranging in ages from 26 down to 6. His adopted father was an engine driver in the nearby Hafod Copperworks.

Two years later in 1883, he became a boarder at the Swansea and South Wales Blind Institution. The Swansea Union paying for the necessary clothes and all tuition and boarding fees. An inspection of 1900 by Swansea guardians said that ‘too much cannot be said as to the necessities of this institution and we trust it will receive the support and encouragement that it merits. The public can help by buying baskets and mats. We may mention that we always buy for the Union’.

 Below, from the Report of the Royal Commission on the Blind, the
Deaf and Dumb, &c., of the United Kingdom. 1889
Trades employed by institutions for the blind across the UK

  

Apart from his studies it is difficult to ‘reconstruct’ the life Moses would have led. I hope he would have enjoyed the annual picnic, when the children would join those from the Cambrian Institution for the Deaf (To be featured in a future post). In 1879, The Cambrian newspaper recorded that around 80 children were taken to the Gower Inn in Parkmill where they enjoyed a break from what was rather patronisingly described as their ‘somewhat monotonous life’. Music and singing were apparently popular pastimes in the institution for both children and adults. It was also thought that memorising hymns in particular would ‘cheer them in their affliction’. It is possible that Moses was a member of the choir as he must have shown some musical aptitude as in 1892 the Swansea guardians were asked to increase their contribution for Moses from 7 shillings to 11 shillings a week, to enable him to complete his musical training at another specialised institution.

Moses was sent to the Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind in Upper Norwood, South London. As the fees for the college were £60 a year it is likely that he was awarded a scholarship. In 1899 it was reported that several pupils had won scholarships to Norwood, leading to one becoming a teacher in South Shields and another teaching in the Swansea Institution. Moses went to Norwood to train as a piano tuner.

I’m not really sure whether Moses did earn his living as a piano tuner. Although both the 1901 and 1911 census gave his occupation as a pianoforte tuner, the annual reports for the Institution record him as being employed there as a basket maker and still living in Landore in 1912. At an inspection of the institution by the guardians in 1900, they reported that he was consumptive and was unable to earn much; his pay at that time was 3 shillings week and he also received four shillings a week from Swansea Union. This was increased to 6 shillings in 1907 after he had broken his leg.

Was Moses a ‘passive and grateful recipient’ of education for the blind as John Oliphant argues? He appears to have been offered opportunities, albeit ‘blind trades’ ones. He travelled to and spent time in London learning a new skill and he seems to have been considered as a son by his ‘adopted’ family. Unfortunately, his health was not too good, but he does appear to be among family when at home and with friends in the institution, while also earning money on his own account.

Swansea and South Wales Institute for the Blind Annual Reports can be consulted at Swansea Central Library.
Swansea Guardians’ minutes of meetings are available to consult at West Glamorgan Archives Service, Swansea.

Works consulted:
Anne Borsay, Disability and Social Policy in Britain Since 1750: A History of Exclusion, Houndmills; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Martha Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
John Oliphant, ‘Empowerment and Debilitation in the Educational Experience of the Blind in Nineteenth-Century England and Scotland’, History of Education, 35: 1 (2006), 47-68.
Gordon Phillips The Blind in British Society: Charity, State and Community, c.1780-1930, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

‘A d_m cock eyed b_’ Wayward Workhouse Women

Many female workhouse inmates did not conform to the popular imagining of submissive downtrodden pauper, but instead resisted and sometimes undermined the power of workhouse authorities. Contemporary representation of the inmates of poor law workhouses in the nineteenth century was that of a submissive underclass, humbled by the wretchedness of their circumstances. This perception has been propagated by historians and continues to stimulate a genre of pity and outrage surrounding the real and imagined harshness of the post-1834 poor laws.

At its inception, the ‘new’ poor law intended that the workhouse should be the last resort of poverty. Paupers were classified rigorously according to age, sex and health, and all aspects of their lives such as eating, working, washing, sleeping, interaction and recreation were to be ordered in accordance with exacting guidelines. Women formed a substantial proportion of workhouse inmates throughout the nineteenth century. Whilst those let down by the alleged weakness of their husbands were perceived more sympathetically, mothers of illegitimate children and women defined as ‘fallen’ incited the strongest condemnation.

Workhouse management was empowered to impose punishments on inmates who broke the rules of obedience and compliance.  This ranged from a change of diet to a spell of isolation in the ‘refractory cell’ or, in more serious cases, being taken before a magistrate. The representation of a workhouse as an isolated ‘total institution’ proves to be unrealistic both in theory and practice. Inmates could leave the workhouse for Sunday worship, personal business or to find employment. Going out with or without permission and returning drunk was a popular enterprise for both sexes. The phrase ‘over the wall’ was frequently used.

My research is derived primarily from newspapers and the Swansea workhouse punishment book, and while not a complete record of misdemeanours, it demonstrates how women inmates disregarded workhouse rules and appeared to remain impervious to punishments and at times manipulated the pauper system with great success.

The most common ‘offences’ were swearing, quarrelling and fighting. In 1864, Ellen Macarthey and Mary Brown ‘quarrelled and fought, abusing each other in the most savage manner like brute beasts, and after being parted would not give over their abusive language to each other’. For some women, disruption of workhouse life appeared to be a regular pastime.  Between November 1866 and March 1868, Mary Ann Daniels was charged with breaking windows in the workhouse, for which she was sent to gaol for 14 days, quarrelling, fighting, threatening and obscene language, ‘going to bed in the day time’, disobedience, impertinence and ‘threatening to do for the cook’.

Another inmate who troubled the authorities repeatedly was Harriet Nichols. As well as a string of offences similar to Mary Ann Daniels above, she enjoyed a drunken evening in the workhouse in 1863 which included shouting and singing obscene songs and dancing around the bedroom. This culminated in her and Mary Rees ‘exposing their persons at the windows in a state of nudity’.

One woman’s resistance to the conventions of control was so successful that she publicly overturned the power and authority of the poor law establishment. Miriam Jackson was taken before the magistrates for breaking a window in the refractory cell where she had been confined for the night.  Her performance in the dock resulted not only in an acquittal but also censure for the workhouse management from the Bench. While being escorted back to the workhouse she apparently ‘abused the master with the most filthy language’, and boasted that she had the magistrates on her side. Similarly, The Cambrian newspaper later commented on her incarceration in the refractory cell as ‘such a state of things is not only a disgrace, it is cruel, it is monstrous!’

When I first read the punishment book, I laughed out loud throughout at the sheer, glorious, bloody-minded anarchy and disruption these women (and men) caused to those in authority. Their experience and conduct is a stimulating area of women’s history and their behaviour should not be sanitised and neither should they be categorised solely as victims.  They were active agents – of their own downfall perhaps – and I have no doubt they were replicated in workhouses all over Britain.

The Swansea workhouse punishment book (U/S 24) is available to consult at West Glamorgan Archives Service, Swansea.