What is a workhouse?
The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, known as the New Poor Law, established the Victorian workhouse system. It intended to abolish ‘out relief’, or the giving of aid to poor families in the parish, and require the poor to live in the workhouse. It created new administrative areas – groupings of parishes known as Poor Law Unions – each with its own workhouse and run by a locally elected Board of Guardians. A central body, the Poor Law Commissioners (PLC), oversaw the operation of the new system.
The workhouse was intended to be so unpleasant that only the truly desperate would go there, to encourage the poor to work instead of seeking aid. Over the years, the homeless, the unemployed, the sick, the physically and mentally incapacitated, parentless children and single mothers all came to the workhouse. For poor people in Victorian Britain, workhouse infirmaries often provided the only available form of medical care, so people may have sought treatment there even if they weren’t workhouse residents.
What was life like in the workhouse?
Workhouses varied widely in size from the 50 places at Belford in Northumberland to the massive 3,500 at England’s largest workhouse, on Brownlow Hill, Liverpool.
Males and female workhouse residents were housed in different areas, with each further divided into elderly and infirm, able-bodied adults, and boys and girls. This separation of families was the feature of the workhouse that many inmates found the most difficult. In theory, a parent could request a daily ‘interview’ with their children. In practice, however, meetings between children and one or other parent typically took place on a Sunday afternoon in the workhouse dining hall.
Daily life in a workhouse followed a rigid routine. For the able-bodied, it typically began at 6am with washing, dressing and roll-call. Breakfast was at 6.30am and would be followed by work from 7am till 12 noon. After an hour’s break for dinner came five more hours work, with supper at 6pm then bedtime at 8pm. Work for women revolved around cleaning, sewing, cooking and laundry work, while for men it could include stone breaking, oakum picking, water pumping and corn grinding. The time from 7 to 8pm provided an opportunity for recreation. From the 1860s, most workhouses received donations of books or magazines, and might also host occasional talks or entertainment.
Children always formed a large part of the workhouse population. From the 1840s onwards, there were increasing efforts to house them in their own separate accommodation. Apart from providing a more healthy environment, they would not be ‘tainted’ by contact with adult inmates. The first efforts in this direction were the district schools set up by unions in Leeds, London, Liverpool and Manchester. These took the form of large buildings housing hundreds of children, leading them to be sometimes referred to as ‘barrack’ schools.
As a reaction against these monolithic and impersonal establishments, the 1870s saw the introduction of ‘cottage homes’ where groups of 15 to 30 children lived in family-style groups in domestic-scale houses, usually in a rural village-style setting, complete with a school, chapel, hospital and so on. Twenty years later, the family-group idea was translated into ‘scattered homes’ – ordinary houses in city suburbs, where the children attended neighbourhood schools.
What was food like in the workhouse?
Workhouse food was plain and repetitive, typically bread and gruel for breakfast, bread and cheese or broth for dinner and supper, with meat and vegetables two or three times a week. A major overhaul of inmates’ diets in 1900 introduced a much wider range of fare such as Irish stew, fish pie and roly-poly pudding.
When did the last workhouse close?
The 1929 Local Government Act abolished the workhouse system. Many workhouses, renamed Public Assistance Institutions, continued under the control of local county councils. The 1948 National Assistance Act abolished the last vestiges of the New Poor Law and the workhouses. Some workhouses survived but were converted into retirement homes, homeless shelters or temporary accommodation.