Workhouse Tales is a series of funny, touching, sad and riotous vignettes based on workhouse and poor law life and lives in 19th and 20th century Britain.
I am a historian and former lecturer at Swansea University and my research interests include histories of disability, children, gender and sexualities, especially 19th and 20th-century prostitution, and also voluntary action and popular culture.
email: lesleyhulonce@outlook.com
Twitter: @LesleyHulonce
Some other online ramblings:
Introduction to Welsh Women’s History Month, Western Mail 2017 https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/lifestyle-opinion/role-welsh-women-diverse-history-12416820
The Recipes Project, 2016
Workhouse Diets: Paucity or Plenty? Part I https://recipes.hypotheses.org/7871
Part 2 https://recipes.hypotheses.org/7871
‘What has the history of medicine ever done for us?’, Medical History Workshop Community, 2016. http://medicalhistworkshop.org/community/medhist/what-has-the-history-of-medicine-ever-done-for-us/
Harvard University, Remedia Network Blog,
‘Abilities first? Institutions for disabled children in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, October 2014. http://remedianetwork.net/2014/10/21/abilities-first-institutions-for-disabled-children-in-victorian-and-edwardian-britain/
Western Mail, ‘Aging’, Welsh History Month, October 2014. http://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/welsh-history-month-studies-conducted-7914524
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/welsh-history-month-lady-personification-7914525
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/welsh-history-month-scenes-remembered-7914526
British Library, Untold Lives Blog, ‘King Silence – the lives of Victorian deaf children’, September 2014. http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/untoldlives/2014/09/king-silence-the-lives-of-victorian-deaf-children.html
Western Mail, ‘Gruel’, Welsh History Month, 10 May 2013. http://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/welsh-history-month-gruelling-conditions-3569280
‘The Elephant in the Room: questioning the absence of paedophilia in children’s histories’, Journal of Victorian Culture Online, January 2013. http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2013/01/03/the-elephant-in-the-room-questioning-the-absence-of-paedophilia-in-children%E2%80%99s-histories/
Workhouse Tales 
My paternal grandmother was taken from the Gravesend and Milton Workhouse in 1903 by Lady Julia Llewellyn to train in the kitchens. She lived in Swansea from the ages of 6 to 11 years old. I am extremely happy to have some account of the program that rescued my grandmother from the horrible living and working conditions that killed her parents when she was very young.
How lovely of you to tell me. What was her name, maybe I have some records of her, Lesley
The workhouse had an equivalent in the Industrial School in San Francisco. Please read about a fence nicknamed Fagin and the original Hoodlum Gang at http://www.frederickbee.com/hoodlum.html .