The Awful Reality Inside A Victorian Workhouse | Secrets From The Workhouse | Absolute History

the workhouse was a hallmark of victorian britain in an era associated with imperial pomp and industrial revolution the workhouse represented the vast underbelly of society an institution that caused misery to millions and evoked shame mean even more they were all there yes oh they're awful for them for the poor the homeless the unemployed or the ill of victorian britain there were no welfare benefits and no nhs they could starve on the streets or turn to the workhouse as a last resort when he died in the workhouse was his body chucked out with the rubbish astonishingly the workhouse survived well into the modern era until after the second world war in 100 years it was home to over 16 million people caught between poverty and destitution she was homeless and living on the stairs are you joking no by the time it finally shut down in 1948 five million people had died in the workhouse today one in every 10 britons has a family connection to this formidable institution but amongst the stories of tragedy there are also stories of triumph against overwhelming odds that is absolutely extraordinary western australian extraordinary now actress felicity candle actor brian cox presenter fern britain and best-selling author barbara taylor bradford will explore how their families were driven into the workhouse by poverty an ordeal with uncanny echoes of life in today's britain the injustice of it is astonishing it's astonishing and model and actress keira chaplin will discover how the most famous workhouse inmate of all her grandfather charlie chaplin took on the system and won after going through this he probably realized that he could get through anything [Music] victorian britain an era of rapid industrial growth but also a time of soaring population and economic upheaval the workhouse was adopted in 1834 as an ingenious solution to the spiraling problem of poverty the idea was simple humiliate the poor for asking for help shamed them into standing on their own two feet in one extraordinary case it worked charlie chaplin went from the workhouse to not only stand on his own two feet but to become a hollywood superstar and one of the wealthiest men in the world charlie's life began here in lambeth in what was once one of the poorest parts of 19th century london his granddaughter is the actress and model kira chaplin my grandfather lived here with his brother sydney and their mother hannah from what i know my grandfather grew up very poor hannah was a singer and she lost her voice they struggled to find food and i know that one of the most traumatic things that happened to my grandfather is when he had to go to the workhouse to qualify for help a poor person had to satisfy the authorities that they were truly destitute that they had no money no job and no place to live charlie chaplin's alcoholic father had deserted the family when he was aged nine and in july 1898 charlie ended up here in lambeth workhouse with his mother and half brother what would have happened to charlie cindy and hannah when they first arrived here well they would have approached the workhouse and um hannah would have made it known that she wanted to be admitted okay at which point she would have been separated from her two sons so she would have been led to the female ward which was on this side of the building okay and the two boys would have been led across the way to the children's building so as soon as they're in separation right away separation straight away segregation was at the heart of the workhouse system children from their parents wives from their husbands by isolating individual groups of paupers the authorities believed they could contain the toxic influence of poverty and stop the spread of degenerate behavior we can see from the map of the workhouse just how regimented it was not only do we have the male side and the female side but there's a further victorian designation of good and bad this was an attempt to try to make sure that good people were not somehow punished by close proximity to bad people the architecture was designed to judge people really yeah i think yeah um to make it to judge them and make them feel bad about themselves for being there and to scare everyone else from wanting to go there absolutely to this was meant to be terrifying so that you would do anything you could to avoid it when oliver twist famously asked for another bowl of gruel he was hit about the head with a ladle but dickens wasn't exaggerating the brutality of workhouse life to minimize the welfare bill the system was designed to make sure that life on the inside was worse than earning a pittance on the outside [Music] hollywood actor brian cox made his name in blockbusters like troy and the bourne identity his great-grandfather patrick mccann was just the type of person the authorities wanted to target a glasgow labourer who like one third of the city's population managed to survive on the poverty line but in 1897 patrick succumbed to the scottish version of the workhouse the poor house it's weird because one of my one of my greatest fears has always been poverty and it's something i've always had that's fear of it and when you see a history of it in the family you begin to realize it's in the dna patrick was one of thousands of irish immigrant workers who had flocked to glasgow in the hope of finding work after their own country was devastated by famine he lived in the cow caddens area one of the city's poorest districts of the time with his wife and their eight children he was living in tenements like this his family with 40 to 50 other people in one tenement 40 to 50. yes so massively overcrowded compared to the present day obviously so how would they be divided up where you would have one room a fireplace and one bed and that was it for a whole family no heating drafty damp by the late 19th century cow caddons had one of the highest infant mortality rates in europe one in every five children died of poverty related illnesses including five of patrick's own children so this is your classic clothes stair we all recognize this stuff we do know this very well annie has a record which shows just how desperate things got for patrick's family before they turn to the workhouse i have this document to show you which is actually for sarah mcguire who was patrick's mother-in-law this is my great great great grandmother yes now you see the bit i want to point out to you is residence charlotte street on a stair and what that basically means is she was homeless and living on the stairs are you joking no so she was living sleeping if you like on these hard stone stairs we talked about patrick and his family living in these very overcrowded rooms but plural sarah was on the stair i mean did they not take her in the mccanns were having their own major difficulties at this time and they couldn't support her at the turn of the century there were over 100 000 people in glasgow alone living in conditions similar to the mccanns family structure seems to have been destroyed it seems to have been eradicated it seems to have been because you know there's cannons to the left if you count us to the right of you it's all around you you know there's despair and we're constantly applying for poor reason constantly trying to keep ahead of the game and you know i talked earlier about my own fear of poverty but i now know where it lies and it's a reality it's it's right in the system it's there because what they went through and and just it just leaves you um it's really bad you know it's really bad by 1900 economic expansion had made britain the richest nation on the planet and yet almost one-third of the country's urban population lived in poverty to control the number of poor becoming dependent on what would be called welfare benefits today paupers had to pass what was known as the workhouse test in order to qualify for help they had to be prepared to work 10 hours a day six days a week on mind-numbing tedious labor like breaking rocks or picking apart old rope inmates were treated like prisoners but the workhouse wasn't a prison the door was always open and people were free to leave if they wanted but for one in every ten who came in the only way out was in a coffin this is what happened in presenter fern britain's family now i have got a copy of the death certificate of my great great great grandfather and he has the most marvelous christian name of friend he's called friend carter and he died in the workhouse and whatever he did he did well because we're all all right now that lovely name friend like a quarter of the population of victorian britain friend scraped a living working on the land the upheaval of industrialization and rural unemployment led to riots throughout his home county of kent but despite this turmoil friend was a model worker and managed to stay out of the workhouse even in old age right so here we have the 1871 census yes um can you see who we've got on there oh yes there's friend carter and can you see what he's doing so he's still working at the age of 64. and it's hard work it wouldn't have been easy for him an extraordinary man and he's living with his daughter harriet at this time people relied on each other then especially in the family that the family unit was was very very important because there was no backup really there's no other pensions no income no that's right to the victorians the family unit was sacred by threatening to break up families the workhouse played on the worst fears of society but even the strongest families were defeated sometimes by poverty in 1879 the youngest of friends 10 children jesse was taken ill with angina a heart condition the workhouse was one of the few places the poor could get free health care and although conditions inside were dire friend had no choice but to take his son there as a last resort oh my goodness yes so that's when he was january 1879 carter jesse age 23 dates of discharge april so january very much april so he said three or four months yes well that's good he didn't go there any longer then oh yes but then we found him in the 1881 census and he is in hospital in london oh gosh a friend must have been worried about him jesse's medical condition was so serious he was transferred to a london hospital but what friend didn't know was that this would turn out to be a fate worse than death [Music] the earliest workhouses appeared in the 17th century but it was the victorians who first used them as the basis of a national welfare strategy at its peak there were 700 workhouses in england housing over a quarter of a million people each was run by a master and matron and the largest ones like lambeth held over a thousand inmates at a time charlie chaplin came here as a child with his mother hannah and his half-brother sydney today the building has been converted into a cinema museum in charlie's honor in this very room now used for screening films charlie and his brother met up with their mother one week after they first arrived charlie gave an account of that reunion in his autobiography how well i remember the poignant sadness of that first visiting day the shock of seeing mother enter the visiting room garbed in workhouse clothes how forlorn and embarrassed she looked in one week she had aged and grown thin but her face lit up when she saw us sydney and i began to weep which made mother weep eventually she regained her composure and we sat together our hands in her lap while she gently patted them she smiled at our cropped heads and stroked them consolingly telling us that we would soon be all together again but the family's moment of reunion was to be all too brief after eight days charlie and sydney were sent to a pauper school on the edge of london leaving hannah alone in the workhouse a week or two later hannah ended up in the infirmary with what's described as dermatitis and bruises all over her body she's somehow been victimized picked on um hit we don't know whether it's by staff or by other but she's she's physically suffered some kind of abuse in the workhouse infirmary hannah would have had her wounds cleaned and dressed for her pain she would have been given opium how many days did hannah spend in the infirmary it seems she spent about nine days here and then after a couple of months she was transferred from the workhouse to cane hill lunatic asylum well so basically seven weeks after being here ends up in the insane asylum this place sounds like hell horrifying [Music] officially physical punishment wasn't allowed although unofficially abuse was commonplace this is partly what made the workhouse such a feared institution but the torment of life inside wasn't just physical it was also psychological as inmates were stripped of their dignity [Music] barbara taylor bradford is one of britain's highest earning novelists she is best known for her ranks to riches saga a woman of substance the first of a series of books featuring illicit affairs and skeletons in family closets recently research for her biography revealed that barbara's own family history concealed a secret from her mother's past that could have come straight off the pages of one of her novels i first found out that my grandmother edith walker and my mother frieda walker had been in the workhouse and i never knew any of this but i received the manuscript of my biography and i couldn't believe it i actually burst into tears this is the only photograph my mother had of my grandmother edith walker and she looks like quite a young madam there with a hand on her hip and the lace collars and cuffs and she doesn't look like somebody who's poor edith took barbara's mother freda to rip and workhouse in yorkshire when frieda was six years old i really cried one day because i couldn't imagine my mother who was a very sweet and rather reserved woman as a little girl put in the work house and then it leads to that awful question why the workhouse was so hated that many poor families stuck together through thick and thin to avoid its clutches this was the case with fern britain's family until a heart condition forced one member jesse carter into a kent workhouse for treatment jesse's condition became so bad that he was transferred to a london teaching hospital i don't like the idea that we're in this operating theatre was he alive or dead what happened he was alive when he came here but he was a very sick person when he came here and unfortunately then he dies on the 1st of may and given the amount of pain that he's in it was probably a relief actually that he'd gone now the hospital is very keen at this point to obviously find out why a young man like that would have died of course because we're in a period when there's a limiting absolutely and all these people are standing around here oh yeah he was here being well yes he was he'd be oh yeah and it's at this point that he could go for further medical work and it really depends on the family so if they've got enough money then his body will go back to them and they will take care of it if not then he'll go off for dissection and in fact many medical students in this room would have paid extra money in order to dissect someone like jess so poor jesse he's died the message gets down to kent and what do the family do we know they're on the bread line from their point of view this is a huge question for them because it's not just about the body but it's also about jess's afterlife because that's the belief at the time and what they were most frightened of was the sort of things that would happen in these photographs because as you can see dissection doesn't just mean slightly cutting the body it means cutting it a lot because obviously you're learning from it where are these photos well this photograph is in cambridge and this is exactly the sort of dissection room that he would have gone to it just seemed so strange that paupers presumably had no civil rights over their own bodies and what would happen to them afterwards no there's a there's a piece of legislation it's called the anatomy act of 1832 and it basically says that for the crime of poverty and it was regarded as a crime at the time you will be dissected it was your fault that you'd not climbed up out of this situation and the way to repay your welfare debt for jess is to go for dissection so we'll care for you in life provided that you repay your welfare debt to society in death i always think of the victorians as philanthropic very religious god-fearing charitable kind and yet if you were living on the poverty line you were considered scum you were a criminal because you never made it up to the next rung of the ladder and because of that you were penalized so much so that you've gave your body when you died that was it and what happened to friend we know he was 92 when he died in the workhouse was his body chucked out with a rubbish [Music] by the beginning of the 20th century britain was accelerating into the modern age cars were appearing on the roads the telephone was becoming widely used and the first x-ray machines were being installed in london's private hospitals the workhouse too was modernizing the standard of food education and health care inside was now better than the conditions a porpo could expect outside but despite the material improvements workhouse inmates remained tainted by the stigma of failure barbara taylor bradford's mother freda was in ripon workhouse as a little girl age six it's a bit of a shock because [Music] well people look down on families that went into the work house barbara's biographer piers dudgeon has found a clue as to why barbara's family ended up in the workhouse their meeting outside the ripon house where barbara's mother freda was born what are these papers you're holding now come on show them they've got a secret i'm sure well this tells us uh this is in fact [Music] 1904 uh this is a birth certificate yes it is the birth certificate of a little girl called frieda frieda my mother let me see the date yes third of june 1904 mother edith walker domestic servant living at 9 a water skull gate ribbon and what's that there's a cross to it name of father name a father is left blank so what we all that we know is that uh uh uh are you telling me my mother was illegitimate yes uh that seems to be without a doubt a very interesting situation we have frieda the first born with no father on the birth certificate and then we have the name of the second child she has again illegitimately fred so frieda and fred and then we have a third child yes name a father missed off so she is having these children now at regular intervals well it was the same man but the only difference that we have between these three uh birth certificates yes is that edith had her first child at 9a yes a room there and the next two she had at this place 75 all hallow gate whose house was that 75 all hallow gate isn't a private residence at all it's the address of ripon workhouse barbara's grandmother edith came here in 1907 and again in 1910 to give birth having been shunned by her family there were over 7 000 illegitimate births a year in workhouses all over the country as the institution was increasingly being used by the poor for free health care in glasgow brian cox's great grandfather patrick mccann suffered a serious injury rendering him disabled and unemployed at the age of 40. his wife had died making him a single parent bringing up his son samuel age six by himself [Music] patrick and samuel were familiar faces at the poorhouse gates 24th of july 1899 another application from patrick got bronchitis grant order for self and boyd 11th of february 1901 order granted for bonhoeffer has for self and samuel certified with bronchitis following month he reapplies 1902 1903 1903 1903 it just kept going in and out it's unbelievable and the boy this is his life poor house to put house to poor house this wee boy in out and out and out and out doesn't make any sense it's just uh it's just it's just appalling patrick was a sick man when he went into the poor house but the moment he was well enough to work he was thrown out he would then fall sick again go in to be patched up only to end up back on the streets for 14 years patrick was put through this ordeal time and time again as his health became forever worse he's a statistic my great grandfather all related to poverty already how we don't take care of people it's this assault on human dignity this endless assault on human dignity we've got to rub their faces in it you know but let's look at it the whole book is about that you know are they close and then oh my god the 19th of june the 19th of june 1911 patrick mccann is declared insane by dr thomas oh it's just awful i mean it's just down this you know this spiral into the abyss and finally he goes nuts from christ patrick was 54 years old when he was sent to gatlock asylum at the time he was one of forty five thousand old and infirm paupers who were moved from workhouses to asylums around the country because the authorities didn't know what else to do with them by today's standards the treatment they received was primitive physical exercise for therapy and opium for sedation charlie chaplin's mother hannah was also committed to an asylum after she was separated from him in lambeth workhouse charlie was sent to live in a school for poor children miles away from the life he'd known he was one of over 800 pupils here at hanwell industrial school alongside literacy and numeracy children were also taught trades like carpentry metalwork and tailoring to set them up for future employment today charlie's old school is a community and sports center i can imagine most children when they got here including my grandfather they must have been extremely malnourished frail yeah children who came from centre of town which is where charlie came from would have been some of the poorest children in london in fact probably some of the poorest children in the country actually they have physical activity sports they did i mean they were taught how to swim and running jumping tumbling jumping over ropes skipping sports were quite important it makes me wonder because my grandfather and his work he was very physical he was his own stuntman he would he knew how to walk on a tightrope he knew how to roll a skate he knew how to to fall and roll so i wonder if this is the place where he learns a lot of physical activity yeah absolutely here's a picture and this is uh it's actually got charlie down there yeah they look like a crafty little bunch yeah they do though they kind of got chubby faces so yeah it has to be you know pretty well fed the school wasn't only concerned with the child's physical welfare but also its moral discipline the gym used to double up as the punishment room penalties included reduced food rations regular beatings and being locked up in a windowless cell for up to 24 hours every thursday the names of the kids that have misbehaved were read out in the playground and on friday they um they were punished all the boys would be brought in here and there'd be a desk like this and they would be lined up it was only the boys the girls weren't weren't beaten and it was only the boys aged over seven charlie's name was read out and he was accused of selling fire to the toilet block and actually charlie didn't do it but he decided you know that he was going to say something different so this is what happens are you guilty or not guilty he asked nervous and impelled by a force beyond my control i blurted out guilty i felt neither resentment nor injustice but a sense of frightening adventure as they led me to the desk and administered three strokes across my bottom the pain was so excruciating that it took my breath away but i did not cry out and although paralyzed with pain and carried to the mattress to recover i felt violently triumphant [Music] being an actress myself i can kind of see the joy of having the whole room staring at you and getting the punishment being able to control your emotions and feeling triumphant i think my grandfather learned a lot of discipline here mostly he learned how to become a stronger person and a more independent person and i think after going through this he probably realized that he could get through anything in 1913 charlie moved to hollywood where he turned his experience of poverty into cinema gold with his classic comic persona the little [ __ ] two years later age 26 he was earning the equivalent of eight million dollars a year making him one of the highest paid people in the world he went on to co-found united artists still one of the most famous studios in hollywood today but charlie never forgot his mother and rescued hannah from the asylum in 1921. she spent her last seven years in luxury in california a world away from the workhouse charlie's success may be unique but the resistance he showed against all the odds is shared by other workhouse inmates people who took on the system and left a legacy of courage and defiance for future generations barbara taylor bradford's grandmother came to ripon workhouse twice as an unmarried woman to have illegitimate children each time she was accompanied by her eldest child barbara's mother freda the workhouse has been conserved as a museum and this is the first time barbara has set foot in the building now she will see for herself the place that her mother kept secret all her life my mother was sick very young to be in the workhouse and i'm sure there was that feeling of of embarrassment and shame this is the bathroom of course you see your mother would have had to be bathed when she came in and searched anything private was all taken away why all private things were taken away because you were put into a public workhouse uniform and even your clothes clothes were taken away and what is this oh now this is the disinfestation of their clothing too oh take any lights out or anything i see everything was bundled up and they fumigated it your mother would have been dressed oh a brown dress and a little well a pinafore really it's pinnacle yes over 30 000 children ended up in workhouses every year the only toys there were had to be shared amongst everybody all inmates were given three meals a day a watery porridge called gruel bread and occasionally meat life was ruled by a strict timetable of work and sleep with little free time those who entered the workhouse were often determined never to return alma scafe came here in 1942 she was just six the same age as barbara's mother when she was here what are your memories of of this workhouse just the frightenness no very unhappy bad memories yeah cardboard in your plim souls to go to school i think my bends were going like that no way is that how you went just yes we did with cardboard in your your tennis shoes you're not proud of it i hate to say have lived there but i'm proud of how what i've become when i was growing up and i was about 16 or 17 my mother said i want you to have a better life than i had did you ever think that or say that to your children yes yes they're the best of everything everything my children didn't have a hand down like i had everything i wore was given my children if i had anything given it went in the bin so you did give them a better life oh yes always clark shoes always ladybird clothes they've had everything my children [Music] my mother did say to me many times i want you to have the kind of life i should have had and i often wondered what she meant and i would think isn't she happy with my father and they seemed to be and i think what she was thinking of is this place i think being in written workhouse actually gave her that determination and that toughness and that will to make me have a different life to give me the opportunities that she didn't have basically to be a lady frieda's success in bringing barbara up can be seen as a triumph for the workhouse as a deterrent but it was also a system that could be devastatingly cruel especially to those who fell foul of the authorities [Music] in glasgow brian cox is trying to find out why his sick and disabled great-grandfather patrick mccann was never given the level of health care he needed in the poor house irene hi nice to meet you nice to meet you so what a saga it doesn't eat so many times in and out in and out yeah is that regular or was he the exception was he the rule well he goes into the poor house and they are looking to diagnose his health problems and they have decided he's well enough to come out the poor house after four days and five days each time he's never in very long which suggests his health is not chronic in the sense is all from one sometimes people been there for months that's not the case in terms of patrick and then in 1905 he's classified as a c10 what does that mean there's a description in that book here can i just get this volume this one yeah thank you there you go now this is what they thought he was um so if you want to look at that category 10 there 10th class there bastards malingerers and others of questionable character to be sent to barnhill for thorough diagnosis probationary treatment they were after transferred if necessary malignant a malignant do you think that was accurate probably not because what they did was at the beginning we had this injury he had an injury and he was he suffered from bronchitis but they don't feel that his illness is genuine they decided about who was the deserving and the undeserving power and they decided in this case he was undeserving he was undeserving i mean it is a very harsh system there's no doubt about it it's a horrible system it's horrible and the man's a victim yeah i mean it's just it's just atrocious i mean times are really harsh and what you get is lots of cases of drunkenness criminality but what it is about most is grinding poverty within four years they're sending these people in front of machine guns to fight a war for them on their behalf you know i mean the injustice of it is astonishing it's astonishing and it's an outrage it's an absolute outrage of what they did to these people sadly that's a lot of people's life i know that's what i mean i mean i'm not just saying it in terms of my great grandfather's life i'm saying that the system sucks big time and it should not have never have happened i mean it is a terrible system i don't think it's appalling i mean just cruel beyond belief by classifying people into categories the workhouse treated purpose according to how deserving they were of help it was a ruthless system designed to judge the poor without ever addressing the problem of how to deal with poverty itself for my family who had nothing but appear to be very good people and they were trying the very very hardest to do what they could they were trying not to be a drain on society and yet the odds were totally stacked against them they would never have been able to get out of where they are now never how does one climb out of the gloom how do you do it fern britain's ancestor jesse carter was in all likelihood dissected for medical science because his family were too poor to pay for his funeral jesse's father friend worked all his life to avoid the shame of the workhouse but the records show he ended up dying there you can see their reference to friend having been admitted um to the strude work house when he was about 91 years old he kept out for 91 years incredible yes yep so i'll just um if we have a look through here it's it's it's quite amazing that someone should live that long anyway at this time especially someone who had probably done sort of a lot of manual labor during his working life and on this page here you can see got a friend there he is of informant self friend managed to bring himself in on the next page you've got the actual oh i can see the word yeah dead gosh i don't know why 120 years later that is so now you sort of hope that things would have improved for him but it didn't is the possibility that he had to give his body to medical science too or what did they do with him i can shed a little bit more light on on what happened to to friend um carter friend age 91 the parish of cliff where buried walden who would have paid for that burial can you see those letters it says f family family yeah yeah really yeah so they did they came to collect him looks that way and they buried him even though they had nothing oh my goodness and he must have been very well thought of so he did get a burial somewhere he had a proper christian barrier wow one-third of all workhouse inmates were over 65 years old like thousands of other paupers friend had been using the workhouse as a retirement home and remarkably after he died it was discovered that he'd even managed to squirrel away a nest egg i suspect that it might have been his money put by for his funeral his funeral fund yeah yeah because so he would still not be a drain on the family yes even though at the age of 91 finally he had to relinquish himself to the workhouse nonetheless he was still fighting that whole issue of being a pauper yeah it's astonishing really what a marvelous man thank you you're very welcome thank you next time felicity kendall discovers the workhouse secret in her family born in the house she's a girl brian cox eventually finds hope in the tragic story of his great-grandfather patrick oh my god my mother would have been too right so you would have seen his granddaughter yes yes and barbara taylor bradford discovers how her mother's siblings were sent from the workhouse to the other side of the world i just feel a terrible sadness at this moment

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 251,074

Rating: 4.8653092 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, absolute history, world history, ridiculous history, quirky history, victorian, queen victoria, workhouse, victorian workhouse, brian cox, secrets of the workhouse

Id: V4fl4ome-mM

Length: 45min 36sec (2736 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021