The Cruel And Unusual Punishments In The Victorian Workhouse | Historic Britain | Absolute History

this channel is part of the history hits network [Music] [Applause] from renaissance-style shadows grand country estates architectural glass masterpieces these are the remarkable homes simply breathtaking and magnificent landmarks one day my son all this will be yours at the very heart of britain's spectacular history i have never seen one like this join me i need to get there with all speed onwards driver oh and a host of celebrities oh crikey with a passion for the past wish me luck as we travel the length and breadth of the nation it is in between the walls and with unparalleled behind-the-scenes access from the highest heights now and through my blind panic to the deepest depths we'll uncover the secrets oh my goodness still hidden within these breathtaking buildings are the places that nobody else gets to see and explore the riches how spectacular and treasures of one of our most loved institutions this is an amazing story come on watch you know the end i want to know the end [Music] welcome to the secrets of the national trust [Music] today i'm visiting a dark place in social history the mere mention of which evokes fear in the collective memory of the british population [Music] and was immortalized by its most rigorous critic charles dickens one of his most memorable creations oliver twist was an inmate of such an institution this is the story of the workhouse built in 1824 suthell in nottinghamshire is the most complete example of these daunting monuments still in existence its architecture was influenced by prison design and it's now a grade two listed building the workhouse would have housed up to 158 men women and children all of whom would have come here to escape grinding poverty coming up i hear touching first-hand accounts from people who still lived a workhouse life as late as the 1970s as soon as i walk into this building or see this building i just shiver memories memories i've also been given access to a place the poor feared more than anywhere it's unseen infirmary the feeling in here must have been horrendous with that mixture not one of them helping the other the noise and smell absolutely desperate and i suffered the staple food of the workhouse my daily gruel [Music] i'll be going behind the imposing facade to see how the workhouses shaped centuries of our social history helping me to unlock the secrets is jenny bond who discovers the shocking story of a workhouse runaway that's a really unpleasant cell isn't it actor nigel havers is in birmingham uncovering the conditions for babies born into desperate poverty they'll be away from mice and other vermin just ideal isn't it really and angelica bell is in london to visit a national trust house that celebrates anarchy and unrest in more recent british history oh my goodness i was not expecting this [Music] southerl workhouse is a dark presence on the nottinghamshire landscape walking up to the workhouse gate is incredibly eerie you can almost feel the fear of the people who ended up here and looking up at that building you can see why it's stark and intimidating i'm being introduced to this harsh world by the trusts some cousins [Music] good morning hi alan welcome to the workhouse thank you very much i think yes indeed a gaunt architectural structure very imposing very important imposing and stark what must people have felt when they were coming up this path seeing that in front of them the emotions going on in the abject failure destitution the end of the world what the work has meant what it symbolised would have been absolutely terrifying families knowing that they were to be segregated when they got inside the women having to give away their children essentially the men having to do hard labour i think it would have been the absolute last resort the sense of failure that you must afford either as a man a breadwinner or as a mother of children you have failed the only thing that's open to you now is this and this is not comfortable it's not and it had a real stigma then as it does now even you were given workcast closing to wear so you were easily identifiable your shoes were taken away you were given clogs because you couldn't sell them no one wanted to buy them and they were very easily recognizable as workhouse garb as it were i think that lots of people walking up this pathway would have thought actually this is it for me and this is where i'm going to stay and this is where i'm going to die so terrifying i'm rather reluctant to go inside but go inside we must have a look workhouses were created as part of the new poor law in 1834 one of the most severe welfare programs ever implemented set up as a deterrent to those who would claim poor relief there were places of punishment with tyrannical regimes where the poor were criminalized i met inside by the trust's john overfilled shore to hear more of this living nightmare oh it's like coming into a prison yard yeah this is charles dickens meets porridge isn't it really it really is what happened to them when they came in so they're segregated children separated from mothers separated from fathers and if you were good and you're well behaved on a sunday you might get a chance of seeing your mum and dad you might you might sothel had several categories for the destitute which saw them split into deserving and undeserving poor and there were even multiple staircases built to prevent them from ever meeting each other so i come into the workhouse as a man what happens to me okay you're an able-bodied man you're put into your category in terms of the area of the workhouse that you mustn't move from what sort of things you've got an able-bodied men's day room and in that room you may be asked to pick oakcomb in the yard you may be asked to crush stones you're pretty demeaning stuff at one time there was a thing called the crank which was just a meaningless task what about the women who came in here they did a lot of the jobs within the workhouse so the laundry they did a lot of the scrubbing the floors they did a lot of the cooking and preparing the vegetables so they did a lot of work that that was deemed women's work as their parents toiled so too did the children whose lives were no easier they must have been heartbroken if they were mothers because they were separated from their children you can imagine there's a child in the school room over here looking out possibly and mums in the yard doing the washing and they can't actually touch each other communicate with each other and it's true that young boys and girls learned to read and write in here which they wouldn't have done out there that they did get better positions and service but a better price but as a price of losing your parents parents and your family and your connection this yard must have seen so many tears yes did many children try to escape yes children did try and run away and they didn't get very far of course if you escaped even as a child and you were in the uniform of the workhouse you'd broken the law it's got everything but arrows on it to show you virtually a convict virtually and then you would be punished when you came back the most arduous task for men was smashing stones in the yard a gruelling and soul-crushing exercise i'm being taken by jan overfilled shaw to the able-bodied day room to get hands-on experience of another futile workhouse task you've sat me in front of a pile of rope so what am i meant to be doing with this so what you've got to do is to pick that rope and thread it and shred it with your fingers pull it to pieces well it's pieces you see the bucket down there with all these bits in yeah you've got to get it to that quality so what's this called so this is called oakham an oakum picking they used to buy it at 14 pounds a ton and sell it in that state for 23 pounds of time so this is for caulking ships decks then presumably for making them watertight that's what open was for that's what i didn't realize they had to make it from rope i thought it sort of came like that oh no so prisons institutions like the workhouse they would get paid for this another way of making money out of people's penary really one of the ironies of this job was the token picking left hand's raw rough and bleeding in no state to take up jobs in the outside world what was the public's view of people who came into the workhouse and were made to do work like this well being poor yeah in poverty is seen as a crime it's seen as something you've done you've created that situation for yourself so you need to be cured or you need to be brought back into being a good upstanding member of the community who can go back to work you've been punished for being poor well you are because you're being given jobs which are by their nature uncomfortable yeah and tedious if you're breaking rock you know it's a punishment at least here you thought yeah well you're creating something with over 150 inmates here at sovill all doing this kind of unbearably monotonous work keeping control was crucial this was the job of the all-powerful master there to enforce a strict set of rules imposed by the elected and unpaid guardians oh this is a bit smarter altogether you can feel that where are we now this is the committee room and this is where the board of guardians would meet and the person running it on a daily basis is the master with the matron and how many staff another two staff so the school mistress and then possibly a porter so many of them 150 odd folk absolutely and that's the idea of the design of the building it's panopticon you can see from this central column all the way around the site workhouse design reflected the victorian attitude to the poor as undeserving of anything that would bring pleasure there were to be no slackers as from every point of the yard the inmates were under surveillance by the master of subtle was there an opportunity for the master of a workhouse to impose his own personality absolutely he did have total power day to day and who was in charge here well here we have the herrings oh gosh look at her is that misses that's matron herring yeah face that could chop wood absolutely so she looks fierce he looks relatively benign what's their rain like incredibly efficient please the board of guardians well there's not many complaints from paupers the herring's tenure ran from 1855 to 1867 and they gained a reputation for being firm but fair they were still the enforcers and if you did something wrong you would be punished a small misdemeanor you would lose your potato ration for more severe things you would be put in the solitary cell it's difficult to hear these harrowing tales of everyday punishment especially when you think of the plight of the children confined within these walls and facing similar conditions so no wonder that many at suttle made bids for freedom journalist jenny bond his journey to suffolk to discover the graphic tale of a young and vulnerable workhouse runaway i'm in lebanon one of the most beautifully preserved medieval villages in britain it was built on the wealth of cloth merchants in the 15th and 16th centuries but don't let the beauty of this place fool you it's also home to a building that's both notorious and terrifying built in the 16th century lavenham's guildhall of corpus christi was a bridewell also known as a house of correction a place to punish paupers who'd committed petty crimes [Music] i'm going to meet josh ward who can give me the grizzly details of what went on in this place so i imagine that it was incredibly grim and incredibly crowded yes yes it was a mixture of males females adults children all together all in the same room yeah there are some unimaginably difficult punishments some very hard labour indeed i can show you a few examples upstairs some that can be quite upsetting though when you look at it ride wells were intended to be a short sharp shock where the inmates would learn the benefit of work he could be brought here for very little there's a chap over here he might like to come and meet by the name of william ranson as you can see there i'm afraid for soon i'll be put to death his crime he stole some tobacco and some raisins from a warehouse in lebanon so many of the people here then were what we would call minor minor offenders yes yeah petty criminals a lot of petty theft um also for crimes there's one fantastic one being idle and disorderly that i'd see you come to bridewell harsh punishments were very much the order of the day [Music] curator anna forrest takes me outside to some of the cells where prisoners were brought whilst awaiting trial this was used by the parish of avenue to incarcerate petty criminals for very short periods of time until they were taken off to court and then ultimately either let off or or um put into prison in person edmunds that's a really unpleasant seller it's not great even children were not exempt from imprisonment anna has unearthed the remarkable story of a young girl who first came to lebanon bridewell as a punishment in 1783. she was in the workhouse in a neighboring parish just down the road in sema and aged eight she escaped and ran away and they caught up with her and brought her to laven and bridewell where she was incarcerated for a short time the third time she ran away she was deemed to be an incorrigible rogue and she was sentenced to seven years transportation to australia so what was that journey like for do you think they were hugely malnourished and many of them had terrible injuries from the chains that had helped them throughout the journey she survived the voyage but a huge percentage of the convicts on that ship didn't make it there are accounts of these convicts literally crawling up the beach when they arrived in australia she ultimately managed to make a bit of a go of it there and she married another convict they bought a little farm and they had a family oh yeah well i do hope that you know her relatives come back and and see where she was and recognize the courage of that young anne [Music] i'm at southern workhouse to discover a chillingly preserved and hidden part of britain's social history set up as a last resort for the destitute its harsh conditions were infamous and designed to encourage a stronger work ethic amongst the poor but most were here through no fault of their own and they included pregnant women and deserted wives with their children these women would live on their own side of the house segregated from the men and even their own children they took responsibility for laundry for the back-breaking cleaning routine and for cooking which included the twice daily preparation of truly monstrous watery gruel and in what looks like my own oliver twist moment jan has been kind enough to let me prepare a bowl with the aid of the original and secret recipe i found this government of the workhouse book third edition and it's got a section on recipes which i'm looking at here what would they have eaten mainly potatoes bread meat three times a week but mostly gruel and what's gruel well it's porridge but very very watery porridge you see there's butter pudding cake plain gruel two ounces of oatmeal water it's mainly water with a drop of milk in so it's that very watery milk and oatmeal how much oatmeal you want half an ounce half an ounce of oatmeal it's not going to really nourish anybody is it that's probably about it you're just like mrs herring you are so if i mix that in there is that the idea oh this is appalling this is what we're expecting them to survive on how much of this do they get they're getting heated up after zero yeah breakfast supper like everything else in the workhouse food and the lack of it became a form of punishment it was even described in the rulebook of one workhouse as needing to be as dull and boring as possible and one rule i would have found very hard no talking at meal times but this is so unreasonable you're expecting grown men to break rock to pull rope apart to do heavy manual work on something like this which isn't going to give them any nutrition at all to speak of not really no oh for what we are about to receive may the lord make us truly thankful no the master amen watery tasteless meals and families split apart made the workhouse a last resort but for those who could scrape a few pennies together back-to-back houses were built across industrial birmingham providing cheap and basic accommodation three thousand were originally built and these small homes were seen as a step up from the workhouse but they couldn't have been further from luxury to find out more nigel havers has traveled to the last of these homes still in existence saved as a capsule in time by the national trust these back-to-back houses were a solution to house the poor who flocked to the city to find work they were cheap to build and rent but conditions were hard and got even worse and by the 1960s they were condemned as unfit for human habitation glassmaker herbert oldfield lived and worked here and amazingly it looks pretty much exactly the same as it did back in the 1870s charles baldwin one of the volunteers here knows a thing or two about what life was like for herbert oldfield living in this tiny house just one room deep with his wife and ten children so this room was was was what the living room yeah uh the kitchen living room kitchen rooms bathroom study work room work room everything else herbert oldfield came to this area in about 1860 and he came here with his wife and his children and lived in this house and as you can see when you look around he lived pretty healthily really yeah i mean you can see they've got fresh vegetables eggs they were even eating these things which is quite surprising oh these are oyster oysters was a very cheap food so it was the main form of protein for the for the working class people you buy bucket loads of those for pennies herbert would work from the desk over here what did he actually do well herbert was a glass maker he made glass eyes for the taxidermy industry and believe it or not he got so good at making eyes for the taxidermy industry he graduated on what do you think he was able to make i have no idea well we were going through the industrial revolution and a lot of people are losing their eyes at factories and factory full size so we've made full size you could come here and you could get yourself an eye fitted all different colors you can see i think there's even one with a little bit of bloodshot in the corner of it birmingham was called the city of a thousand trades and this is one of the thousand trades that birmingham had well it was a step up from the workhouse but up to 65 people would share two communal wash houses and just three toilets 12 people lived in this house you get some sort of perspective about how cramped it all was let's just hope they all got along together now tell me is this room pretty much as it was well yes i mean it is pretty much as it would have been in that time so even to the extent that the wallpaper on the wall is authentic wallpaper to that period but actually wallpaper did create a problem you know what they were using for paste they were using flour and water and flour and water basically it was food for bugs sometimes they said you know you could see the wall moving with the bugs in the wallpaper great for health no not great for health it's like a dormitory yes it is isn't it i mean this is um the parents bedroom so herbert and anne his wife would have slept in this bed and their two daughters were just slept in this bed here and upstairs were the boys but there is one person we haven't found a bedford yet and that's baby alfred they had a baby while they was here and there's no room for a cot no so where the baby slept was believe it or not in the draw perfect well i mean it made a lot of sense because the baby was off the floor so it would be away from drafts it'd be away from mice and other vermin and of course it's fairly well confined as well in herbert's time the fire upstairs was only it if someone was ill but downstairs the flames would be heating the house all day as in the workhouse at suthell girls would have learned household tasks to become maids in service if the opportunity arose so we need to fuel where is it kept we have to go down in the basement where the coals kept because the coal used to be delivered by the coal man it tipped the coal down into the basement below the public is not allowed down in the coal cellar which looks pretty much as it would have done over 150 years ago [Music] in this house because they had children and some of the children were quite old i think one of the older boys would have probably lit the fire there we go so that was a good bucketful great find the heads as we go up yep [Music] the big fire downstairs was the main source of heat for the entire house as well as a means of getting hot water cooking and heating herbert's tools for his business if you've heard of it you've got your day's work done yep you've had your evening meal you're going to pull up a chair now chair and you're going to enjoy the fire maybe have a cup of tea that's better isn't it that's lovely but even after a lifetime of hard work there was no escape from the clutches of the workhouse and once herbert had retired there was no welfare state to step in and he ended his days in the workhouse infirmary [Music] part of the workhouse story that's often overlooked is that of the infirmaries that stood next door to them these were to house the paupers who didn't fit into the system and that meant being unable to work at suttle their infirmary ferbeck house still stands built in 1871 it was the most dreaded destination in the workhouse and has never been seen by the public but the trust's sam cousins is giving me exclusive access to explore this brutal place from our own history gosh this is gloomy in the extreme it really is and the smell as well the smell and the noise would be over yeah absolutely just one room after another astonishing isn't it so who would have come here those who who essentially couldn't work were were put over here so you have a mixture in this one house here of pregnant mothers mothers giving birth people with disease mentally ill people why why weren't the mentally ill put in what would in those days called lunatic asylums well the sorry's date of affairs was it was cheaper to put them here this must have been an absolute vision of hell if you've got all those kinds of people mixed together absolutely a real mishmash and that would have included the elderly too it would have done yes indeed so they would have been institutionalized over there and they'd come here to die so their entire latter after their life was in these rooms absolutely they may have been in the workhouse for some time um as as workers and they would they would have come here when they become unable to work yeah the feeling in here must have been horrendous with that mixture not one of them helping the other the noise and smell yeah dreadful and if you're giving birth here yeah desperate absolutely desperate but then if you were an unmarried mother coming to the workhouse you were in a pretty desperate position it's terribly depressing isn't it it's like cells yeah yeah it's pretty frightening isn't it yeah conditions in both workhouse and infirmary were set to a nationwide standard overseen by the guardians but in reality they were dependent on the goodwill and management of the man in charge and by the time the infirmary was built in the early 1870s there'd been a change at the top at sothel which would have devastating consequences so who was the master of the workhouse at this time it was master george shaw who inherited the position from master herring after he died and how was george shaw perceived well it wasn't a success his tenure was seen as quite a catastrophe actually what kind of things was he doing that weren't right he's seen to be a character who enjoys the local nightlife shall we say enjoyed the local pubs there were allegations of inappropriate behaviour there were knives seen where they shouldn't have been there was allegations that the place was dirty and being an infirmary obviously one of the really key elements of that is cleanliness so this is a period of disaster it really really was and it was such a shame after the uh herring's tenure that it kind of went into rack and ruin but george shaw was not liked so the consequences of what master shaw is dismissed so the history of this place ferbeck is not a happy one it is not but in the 1940s radical changes were made to the welfare state the dark days of the workhouse were seemingly over with many of them becoming nhs hospitals but the new welfare state didn't solve all of britain's social problems and by the late 20th century one tudor property with a long history of political turmoil had become a melting pot for the poor the homeless and a growing sense of anarchy angelica bell has traveled to sutton house to discover how the national trust has preserved this snapshot of more recent social unrest nestled in the streets of hackney this modern urban location is the setting for 500 years of agitators revolutionaries and anti-establishment occupiers who left their mark on the building i'm about to see and the community around it i'm meeting chris cleave to find out more about the first in a long line of its rebellious inhabitants so southern house has a real unusual history tell us about the man who built it so it's a guy called sir ralph sadler he was an apprentice to thomas cromwell at a really young age he raised prominence in the court in his twenties so he must have been a real high flyer possibly through his connection with thomas cromwell so ralph became a courtier of henry viii his fortune in jeopardy when his mentor thomas cromwell lost favor in 1540 when thomas cromwell was arrested so was so ralph because of their connection but luckily he was one of the few people who escaped the tower and then even after cromwell had been executed he managed to stay in favor he seems to have crossed so many boundaries yeah absolutely he managed to get through four true demonics without losing his head which to be at that level of court is quite a feat so you are expecting the unexpected now i'm not sure what i'm expecting jumping forward from tudor times to the modern day chris has some striking evidence of sutton house's previous inhabitants in what is a very unlikely national trust preservation story oh my goodness i was not expecting this the house was suddenly empty in 1982 and the squatters got in they lived in here for a few years they would have used these rooms upstairs for their bedrooms and then downstairs they had gigs in the courtyard and in the big room at the back they were really political in the 1980s about changing society and all of those slogans are really resonant to people today this is one of the most popular rooms that we have in the house as graffiti goes that's absolutely incredible isn't it yeah it's really iconic and it's it's something that we're really proud of at sutton house because it's a really important layer the history of the house and so we try and protect it as much as we protect all the other parts of the historic fabric it was never intended to be something that lasted here for a really long time so the way it's been created means it's quite vulnerable so how do you go about preserving this we've got a special conservator coming in today in fact i'm impressed that for the national trust this graffiti art from the 1980s is on par with the fine tudor paintings from 450 years ago the major challenge with looking after something like this though is the paint used is very soluble so conservator polly westlake uses a sponge to absorb modern day grime so trying to do the least amount that we have to just to keep it in its present condition so what do you mean like basically because there's like holes up here you wouldn't say right we're going to patch those holes up you just want to make sure everything is as it is and stays as it is the national trust took the decision to keep things not to do a lot of reintegration not to restore and make it look perfect but to keep it in this in this state it's great to see the stereotypes you might associate with an old property being replaced by something more inclusive unexpected and radical by the national trust i wonder what the owners of the workhouse would have made of all this anarchy and rule breaking i'm not sure the punks would have cared either way with punks running riot in britain sovell had also taken on a new lease of life in the 70s becoming emergency social housing but even then the damaging stigma of the workhouse remained dramatically affecting the lives of people who stayed there i'm meeting two people who remember that era and have bravely agreed to tell their unique accounts of their very different experiences sue swinton lived in this very room for three years after a family breakdown in 1971 made them homeless now tell me how big your family was and who are you here with i was here with my mum i got an older sister but my older sister spent a lot of time with a friend living in newark she couldn't cope with living here but then i had two brothers who i used to have to look after because unfortunately because of the circumstances of coming here my mum turned alcoholic so obviously it's like being mother to two brothers so you became mum in effect yes so we've got five beds range behind us here your mum your elder sister when she was here your two brothers and you all ranged in a row yeah all in the road yes the only good thing about that was we tended to start at the end bed and jump all the way across the other beds and jump off the end it was rather naughty for that so yeah we used it as a playroom everything was done in this room what was it like then living in one room small room so many of you with an alcoholic mum very bad very bad i was sort of like stigmatized for that no one ever came nervous it was the place if you lived there then you was kept well away from the lowest of them yeah never ever anybody visited us here it was very much like the victorian times so what does it feel like coming back here to the room that you lived in as soon as i walk into this building or see this building i just shiver because of what happened to you memories very strong memories of the place [Music] katrina burup was part of a very different family at seville her father ran the part of the workhouse buildings that were used as a home for the elderly [Music] this is our dining room so this is where we had our big family dinners and our christmas tree was in here and yeah it was lovely so it was a happy time for you incredibly happy no bad memories it's a magical time living here did you know then it's history yes because there was still an awful lot of the history in the house so there were still ledgers in the office i was used to look for the names of children and try and imagine what they were like when you see children coming in and then dying and you just think they must have just had just just nothing what about now when you look back now it's hard now because not only do i obviously know about the victorian history of the building but i'm now aware of the social history of the 60s 70s the people that were living in the bedsits at the other end of the building i was living this wonderful life and now i know that there were children my age living in cramped accommodation with a tiny little gated yard that they weren't allowed at and they had to just look out on everything that i had yeah it makes me feel awful we was allowed to go out of the door just down the passageway there is a green door and if we went through there then we was in serious trucks that was the private part of the building the only place we was allowed to go is into the courtyard it was just a little small courtyard and that was a very much as it must have been in the video in victorian times yeah it's slightly saying when you're reading books and things themselves people used to be frightened of the workhouse if they went in there they never got out again that's that's actually true when you came in here you never thought you would get out it's very easy isn't it when you're thinking of dickensian britain to put the workhouse in that bit of history and it's something divorced from us when as you experienced it in the late 60s and early 70s which is not long ago at all it didn't end with the victorians it carried on there's a lot of hatred in me for the place to always be there always be there with me never leave me never [Music] when it began to dawn on you as a grown-up that it wasn't actually quite like that it must have been a strange feeling sorry to have those special memories you know all my magical adventures here that's my experience of the workhouse and although i know that it there is more to it i still feel i'm entitled to my experience when i come in now i can't imagine i we actually could have coped so long with it you know because it's i used to stumble over the window and i'd look out the window for hours just looking and wondering what was gonna happen you know when was that person going to come down that road and just take us away from here but it never happened has this become therapeutic putting this back together kind of laying the ghost very much very much so so when you come in here now it must be a mixture of emotions it is terrorists but gratitude that you're not living here anymore very much so very much so i welcome you and thank you for sharing it yes pleasure it's been a real eye-opener meeting katrina and sue but their memories of this place had left me shocked and saddened that such recent history still meant suffering and despair within these walls it was only 20 years ago that sovill was finally considered unsuitable for habitation and the last of its residents were moved this closed the chapter on the workhouse system and with that we consigned the harsh and cruel victorian attitudes toward the poor and disadvantaged to history in 1997 sovell workhouse was passed to the national trust to be preserved and to act as a stark reminder of a brutally unjust period in british history [Music] you

Channel: Absolute History

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Id: 9cSURMVPLK0

Length: 39min 30sec (2370 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2022