The Tragic Stories Of Victorian England's Workhouses | Secrets From The Workhouse | Absolute History

the workhouse was one of the hallmarks of victorian britain in an era before the welfare state it was home to the poor and unemployed who had nowhere else to turn but to stop it being used as an easy option the workhouse was designed to be an experience people dreaded anyway mary thank you for being such a brave woman this much-feared institution didn't finally shut its gates until 1948. in just over a hundred years 16 million people had passed through its doors these were the mast ranks of britain's underclass the unemployed and homeless segregated and stigmatized by a society which regarded poverty as a crime it's really bad it's really bad one in every 10 people in britain today has a family connection to this notorious institution through a direct relative i think a lot of things were not told to me because she was either ashamed or embarrassed to keep out the undeserving poor in today's terms benefit scroungers workhouse life was made so harsh that only the desperate would consider going there within four years they're sending these people in front of machine guns to fight a war for them on their behalf but as the workhouse moved into the 20th century its original mission to punish the poor was replaced by new ideas about social welfare workhouse inmates now had the chance to start afresh with renewed hope and meaning my mother would have been two right so you would have seen his granddaughter yes actor brian cox a novelist barbara taylor bradford will discover how their families eventually escaped the workhouse and actress felicity kendall will trace her family's workhouse secret from tragedy to triumph in the face of overwhelming odds that's mind-bending well done bert little boy fantastic the victorians were people of high moral principle god fearing and christian to them the workhouse was not just a place for the poor and the helpless it was also where social outcasts ended up when they fell foul of this highly ordered society [Music] [Applause] [Music] actress felicity kendall's great-grandmother mary little had little choice but to go to the workhouse when she broke this strict moral code i believe this house has something to do with my great grandmother of whom i know nothing yes your great-grandmother mary little did in fact live here and she would have actually been in this very room at some point where we are now sat well we do know that she married in 1880 to a chap called john liddle yes the only photograph that i have of my great grandparents is of john felicity's great grandparents john and mary set up home in the cumbrian town of dalton in furnace during 18 years of marriage they successfully raised nine children together but in 1898 at the age of 41 mary gave birth to a tenth child albert and everything changed 1898 albert edward little you can see where he was born in the workhouse why why would you go from a family where you had all those children and a lovely husband called john to suddenly having your baby on the floor in the workhouse or not necessarily in the floor i think the answer lies in this box which tells us the name and surname of the father it's blank he's illegitimate oh oh my goodness me so then he would would he have thrown her out then probably it would appear that john was not happy having become pregnant by an extra marital affair mary joined the thousands of other disgraced women forced to give birth in the workhouse because of the social stigma of illegitimacy some workhouses even had special uniforms for these women waspish yellow and black stripes calculated to shame them and to warn others to avoid them albert was one of seven thousand children born illegitimately every year in workhouses people who would forever have to live with the stigma of starting life on the lowest rung of society but soon after albert was born mary managed to escape the workhouse and get a job as a maid here at high force forge she and little albert shared the attic dormitory with five other staff goodness gracious there's no space at all and the windows the windows are just they're on the floor and little albert would have looked out onto that exact site of the trees and and the snow at some point and this would have been his first home it must have been absolutely magical it's like a little doll's house for a boy who all he knew was the workhouse to come here it must have been a little bit like a sanctuary in a sense you know a sanctuary of escape and his mother must have thought okay now there is hope but this sanctuary would be all too short soon after albert's third birthday there was a knock on the door and government officials arrived to take the 1901 census now sometimes the mistakes on a census can tell us even more information than the information that's been put in now if we have a look here we have mary little where she's down to seven age 44 and we look at her condition of marriage now there's a very big capital m there which means married but beneath that there is w i d widow widow now it would appear that she initially told somebody she was a widow why being a woman on her own with quite obviously an illegitimate child would have had great social stigma what sometimes happened is the women pass themselves off as widows or my husband died that's why he's not with me the rather horrifying possibility is that when she applied this job here she told them she was a widow then when the census comes to be filled in somebody said well actually she's not a widow her husband lives down the road this might have been her undoing because we do know some point after 1901 she ended up back in the workhouse again and that little m there might have caused it oh my goodness me [Music] in 1901 queen victoria died and the edwardian era began the victorian workhouse had become an institution with a toxic reputation like ex-prisoners former workhouse inmates faced prejudice and mistrust when they came out and tried to get on with their lives in ripon north yorkshire barbara taylor bradford's grandmother edith walker was an inmate of the local workhouse like mary liddle she also went in to give birth illegitimately now barbara is trying to find out how edith and her children including barbara's mother freda manage to get out she's examining the workhouse registers they record when individuals and when families were admitted into the workhouse and also when they left so many names so many people i know passed into that place it makes you realize doesn't it oh oh oh oh walker frieda my mother oh my barbara has found her mother's name along with those of her mother's siblings edith freda fred and mary they were all there before that yes oh they're awful for them and how long were they to find out when they left we have to look at the pages on this side yes here walker edith october the 15th saturday last meal before discharge would be be for breakfast that's right what's this observation here it says to be married to jay john simpson jay simpson and that's why she came out of the workhouse right right it's very touching he must have been a good man he took on three children as well as my grandmother well that really solves the problem doesn't it grandmother edith and her illegitimate children left the workhouse on october the 15th 1910. that very day they all walked around the corner to ripon cathedral where edith married john simpson but this wasn't quite the happy ending it appeared to be and before long barbara's family would find themselves back at the workhouse gates the workhouse was designed to provide food shelter and basic health care for the innocent poor whilst putting off the idol poor from using it as a soft option but by the beginning of the 20th century it had become a victim of its own success the pauper inmates were now almost exclusively the old the young and the sick [Music] actor brian cox's great grandfather patrick mccann was an unskilled labourer an irish immigrant fleeing from the famine he had come to glasgow to find work but an accident left him disabled and unemployed patrick also suffering from bronchitis became a familiar face at the workhouse gates however the authorities doubted his integrity and branded him a malingerer someone who was trying to cheat the system malingerers and others of questionable character [Music] living in glasgow's poorest districts patrick's health got worse and worse until he eventually ended up here at garth lock asylum outside the city brian wants to know how patrick's problems spiraled out of control before he was finally declared insane if you look at the illnesses they're fairly typical uh bronchitis chronic bronchitis he has hernia as well but that's being a labourer on 60 chillings a week he would not have been able to afford a gp nor would have been insured for gp care so the poor house was basically his general practitioner care so that was like going to the doctors yeah yeah so every time he went in the process it was because he needed some kind of treatment that's right i mean if he was ill and they could see they could diagnose he was illness why did they give him this thing of you know that he was a malingerer they felt that individuals such as patrick should have been able to look after themselves better what do you think highly unlikely highly impossible specialized medical treatment had to be privately paid for but in the 1880s the workhouse introduced professional nursing and separate infirmaries for the poor developments that formed the bedrock of the modern nhs but patrick wasn't seeking help just for himself his wife had died making him a single parent in sole charge of his six-year-old son brian's great uncle samuel he applied to have samuel taken into care but from the records it cleared that they refused in the first instance why would they refuse it was not normal to take up a parent's request like that at the time because that would seem to be that you were giving in to the parent if they accepted samuel and they would probably have thousands of parents trying to bring their children in uh to be fostered out which was not their policy is it nowhere taken into account that this boy has lost his mother his mother's died and that his father is a single parent not at that time because there would be many children with with other mothers or fathers looking after them eins in so who was expected to look after them his father was expected to look after him and also work and also work he's just emblematic my great grandfather emblematic of an epidemic of poverty and he's trying to give validity to his life you see that you see that he's trying to deal with his son he's trying to deal with and his own dignity you know this endless attack on your dignity he just fought the system he said no no i'm i'm battling on so there's something heroic in his story in there i'm sorry it's very upsettingly the man the man was trying to make sense of it and i think that's that's the legacy that he leaves his great-grandchildren is trying to make sense of it as the 20th century unfolded the workhouse began to take on a more caring role especially with regard to the welfare of the young the victorian image of oliver twist and child labour was replaced by the edwardian ideal of peter pan a model of childhood innocence we would all recognize today the workhouse was given new powers to adopt children it deemed at risk from unsuitable parents even if that meant breaking up the family unit felicity kendall's great-grandmother mary liddle stood accused of squandering her family security by having an extra-marital affair after giving birth to albert in the workhouse and a brief period of employment mary was about to end up there a second time at the age of 45. well i'm quietly dreading the next bit actually because i don't know how going back to the workhouse twice can end happily i don't think the dice are going to roll in her favor quite frankly mary's workhouse records are kept at the cumbria archives in barrow in furnace we have a record for her from 1902. and and that's in here this is in here little claude who's who's claude well if you follow along born in the house mary little illegitimate and she's had another one she had another one yes do you know there's this woman is an extraordinary creature and at her age jesus she's a goer isn't she but where's albert isn't what shouldn't he be here he should so where is he well if we go to the minutes of the board of guardians medical officers report recommendation albert edward little aged 4 be under the control of the guardians until he attained the age of 18 years he's taken into the control of the guardians this this this is too is too much to bear it's a new practice that has come in the board of guardians is allowed to adopt children that they feel are in danger children whose parents have died children whose parents are in prison or children whose parents are of a low moral standing and i really think that they would have tarnished mary with that brush whether or not she deserved it and it's this victorian ideal that if a woman has an illegitimate child or a child that's the result of adultery the woman is responsible for the sin it's heartbreaking [Music] in 1902 albert was taken into the custody of the workhouse in elviston in cumbria previously only orphans and abandoned children had been adopted by the guardians now any vulnerable child could be forcibly removed from its parents and taken into care that year there were over seven thousand children like albert in workhouses across the country the earliest examples of a child welfare policy we still have today at ulverston albert was housed in a special children's block and segregated from the adult inmates including his mother 12 months after he was taken into care mary applied to the guardians to try to take albert back this is july 1903 so this is a year after albert's been adopted the application mary little for her son albert who had been adopted by the guardian be not granted oh dear oh dear this is getting grimmer by the minute isn't it so albert at this point she cannot have because she's lost all parents right to him yes oh but little albert and he was how old was he not then he's been for almost five almost five in scotland a different type of child care scheme was being tried rather than raising poorer children inside the workhouse they were fostered out to new families far away offering them the chance of a new life [Music] brian cox's great grandfather patrick mccann sought to have his son samuel fostered out he was initially refused when samuel was 10 the authorities relented and agreed to send him to a family in airshow the farmstead samuel lived in is now derelict so where have you brought me now this is where samuel would have been boarded out fostered out to this farm's dead here as you can see it's a far cry from glasgow and the crocodiles and barn hills you can actually see the sky here a wee bit well this is actually the duna valley uh oh this is buns we're right in there there's your banks and braids of bonnie dune well you can see how can your broom sit fresh in fear you can see the banks and greys here very easily and this would be the suit of clothing and a set of suits of clothing he'd be issued with and then each year he was here to get another new set of clothing and it would enable him to be otherwise indistinguishable from any local boy the last thing they would want to do would be to make him appear a pauper in this particular area and perhaps because after that there's quite a bit of care has gone into this yes just when you're about to write somebody off you just suddenly see something like this which is very dear so would these be the dwelling houses yes these would be the farm their dwelling houses where farm servants and their families would live and he would be with a farm servant he would be with a farm servant yes by coming here samuel could start a new life very distant from his life in the slums we've spent four years since he first went into the house with his father and it's taken patrick all that time to convince these people to put his boy in the care yes um it's it's the fact that he just persisted he just went on you know it's heartening he got his lad out of it samuel was one of over 6 000 children to be fostered out to families in scotland every year with the strong tradition of community welfare scottish children were able to start new lives free from the weight of poverty the success of bringing up children in crofters cottages like these led to the scheme being adopted in england at the end of the 19th century paving the way for the modern foster home system meanwhile an even more radical child welfare policy was gaining momentum to send poor children to the other side of the world ripon north yorkshire barbara taylor bradford is in the town hall trying to find out what happened to her family after they left the workhouse her grandmother edith married john simpson in 1910 and they went on to have three children together fourteen years later those same children barbara's mother siblings would also end up in ripon workhouse here norman simpson francis simpson edith four three children were admitted on the same day the 22nd of december 24. 1924 yes my grandmother was dead so what happened to mr simpson was he dead or alive or no mention of him coming in simpson here we go simpson norman simpson francis simpson edith and they all left at the same time discharged into care of nspcc what does that say it says foreign yes the national society for the prevention of cruelty to children had been given statutory powers in 1889 which allowed them to take vulnerable children into care using these powers they plucked the simpson children from ripon workhouse and placed them in the custody of dr bernardo's a private charity established to look after orphaned and abandoned children and barbara is writing to see if they can shed any light on what happened to her mother's brothers and sisters in cumbria felicity kendall's great-grandmother mary little had to give up her son albert to the workhouse when she was pregnant with another child having lost albert to the system mary then lost claude when he died of diarrhoea aged 18 months a common cause of infant death amongst the poor claude would have been felicity's great uncle he is buried in alveston cemetery is that the number of the great the grave numbers 344 right here just um i line them up using those headstones there it's in this area oh my goodness with there not being a headstone it's difficult to identify it precisely on the ground can i leave you at the left side yes yes i wouldn't do flowers because i'm jewish so i'm just going to lay some stones and that's your view little claude oh dear oh yeah well i think the thing about mary one of the things that i'm taking away from her story is that she was it was tragic and this obviously is the ultimate tragedy but having buried little claude she may have been grateful that at least albert was safe and that he would be looked after but i don't know you know the other way you would react as a mother is oh my goodness what if he's ill and i can't be there to hold his hand and mop his bra the authorities prevented mary from seeing albert again she moved to another workhouse and disappeared from his life albert stayed in elveston workhouse until he was 16 years old with no known family to go to he faced the issue of what to do with the rest of his life the stigma of the workhouse meant that albert had limited job opportunities in the world outside so in 1915 he followed the example of thousands of other workhouse boys and enlisted to join the army back in yorkshire barbara taylor bradford is with her husband bob dr barnardos have responded to her letter of inquiry oh well this is interesting it's from dr bernardo's let me see what is here i can't work oh it's all about i saw names of my mother's brothers and sisters all right go ahead frieda's mother married john thomas simpson and he is stated in the records to be often unemployed under drunk well she didn't obviously have good taste in men following the mother's death the children were grossly neglected when an nspcc inspector visited the family they found the children to be in a dirty and verminous condition their children were twice admitted to ripon workhouse and simpson was laid to find five pounds for their neglect in february 1925 was serving a three-month prison sentence for their further neglect not a happy story at all no wonder i was never told this story by my mother following their admission to bernardo's on 30th of may 1923 they were migrated to new south wales in australia barbara's aunts and uncles were sent to the colonies as part of a wider scheme that dated back to the 1700s to resettle poor children thousands of miles away from their parents and the roots of poverty in scotland patrick mccann's youngest son samuel was living with foster parents in airship almost a hundred miles away from his father and home city of glasgow patrick also had two grown up sons they too had left glasgow and moved to dundee on the east coast of scotland leaving patrick alone in his battle against chronic illness and poverty as a disabled man with no family support patrick had not only given his last child samuel over to care he'd also given up his rights as a parent glasgow liked to foster well away from glasgow city itself and the reason for that was quite simple it did not want the parent to suddenly turn up and in fact it would not tell the parent where their foster where their child was fostered they didn't know what that child was no so we imagine that when patrick said goodbye to samuel yes there was the distinct possibility in patrick's wedding he was never going to see him again that's right yes he might he might never see him again because and equally the little boy would feel the same probably feel the same if you knew what really what was happening you probably feel well that might be the last time i see my father and my brothers the assumptions are scary the assumption was that he'd stay with his foster parents until he became of age 14. do you know what happened to him we know that he went to reside with his brothers in dundee so he went to dundee yeah see i never i and more than that we know that his father turned up in dundee and that's the last recorded occasion we have patrick senior actually got to dundee yes we know that all three brothers were residing in dundee 1908 and their father came to see him that's the last recorded occasion when we've seen these records the family being together and the father with these three boys 1908 1908 for at least a month clearly they made an effort to get back together as a family but nay women you see that's the problem except 1908 yes oh my god my mother would have been two right so you would have seen his granddaughter yes yes so do you see his daughter-in-law and his granddaughter and you can see they're all residing at the same address in lucky dundee that's incredible because i i had in my mind that he was on his own and he yeah yeah you see my mum his wee granddaughter she would have been too [Music] three years after being reunited with his sons and meeting his baby granddaughter patrick died of pneumonia he was just 54 years old it's an amazing story but it's also a testimony to a whole time and period and a group of people who are who are not taken care of and have never been taken care of we've never really dealt with our poor from generation to generation these situations teach you that the only only way is this sense of our responsibility for one another that's the only way and if we don't have that sense of responsibility for one another our world is chaos [Music] by 1914 the workhouse authorities had succeeded in creating a generation of fit and healthy young men out of pauper children stigmatized and unwanted the obvious place for boys brought up in one institution was another one the army now the moment had arrived for them to come forward in their country's hour of need as they volunteered in their thousands to fight in the first world war amongst these workhouse recruits was felicity kendall's great uncle albert liddle so we know he enlisted in 1915 and in 1916 he was sent to the front and he was sent to eep just on the eve of the second big battle there which was slaughter he was very lucky he had just come from training in the uk and he didn't see action straight away but then he did see a lot of very significant action after that so i mean he he must have had a bit of a charmed life to get through all of that just extraordinary but that's a miracle that he wasn't wounded he's he's extraordinarily lucky and what is this that's just the record of his service he shows that he got the british war medal [ __ ] victory medal it's not the declaration for honor it's just a kind of i was there yes but it it is nice to have i mean that's huge that is huge that is huge to have something written down yeah that says this is what you've achieved that must have given him quite a yeah yeah i mean for a poor pose a poor per child from the workhouse to have served to have survived to have received a medal having a medal this must have been the first time in albert's life that anyone had ever said to him you're special and it might have meant that when he came home people saw him differently i think that would have made all the difference in the world to him yeah yeah extraordinary after the first world war the government offered albert and all other returning soldiers free passage to australia the post-war economy in britain was in recession and for a workhouse child emigration offered the chance to build a new life free from the stigma of pauperism seventeen thousand ex-soldiers took up the offer to establish themselves as colonists and pioneers albert left for australia in 1922. [Music] barbara taylor bradford's mother's siblings all ended up in the colonies as well but they didn't volunteer they were sent there by dr bernardos having originally been taken into the care of the workhouse bernardo's was one of a number of charitable organizations who backed by the british government took poorer children and forced them to migrate to the other side of the world the last one of barbara's family to leave england was the youngest of her aunts and uncles little edith by now barbara's mother freda was married and working as a nurse in leeds bob now look this is from my mother dr bernardos have sent copies of letters they exchanged with frieda dear madam she's writing to bernardos i write to you to ask you if you can give me any information concerning my youngest sister by name edith simpson she was taken into one of your homes when she was a small child between five and seven years oh how sad she didn't know where her sister's little sister was now here is the reply dear madam your sister edith went out to australia with one of our parties in april 1928 and edis is extremely happy and is getting on nicely out there the principal says that edith has good reports all around dear miss pigton turboville she now has a name it has taken a great load off my mind to know little edith is still alive and doing so well i am so glad to know that oh she may have thought she was dead but now i am happily married and have a nice cottage of my own in a nice part of the city i have been hoping that i might be allowed to bring edith to live with me as i could take good care of her now oh she wanted a sister i want to ask this one favor of you do you think she would be allowed to come home and let me have her to live with me oh she wanted her little sister didn't she please don't think me selfish sorry please don't make me selfish wishing to have her now when you have cared for her and educated her and brought her up to be such a good girl but it is just a longing for my own people my mother must have longed she says it my own people yes dear mrs taylor i right to say that i'm afraid we could not bear the expense of bringing edith back to england even if it were decided it would be well for her to return i am not quite clear from your letter when you say that you would like to bring her back whether it would be possible for you to pay the expense involved now this is going to throw you which would be from 32 pounds to 36 pounds but they the expense but they didn't have it mommy and daddy i mean they'd have didn't have that kind of money to spare she was a good woman well well that i knew she really was in total 150 000 children were sent overseas under the scheme the last of them left britain as recently as 1967. since then there has been official acknowledgement of the cruelty of this forcible migration policy in 2010 prime minister gordon brown formally apologized to all those families who had been affected freda died without ever seeing her sister again bernardo's last known record of edith was that she was still living in western australia in 1937. felicity kendall's great uncle albert made the most of his opportunity in australia and ended up owning his own farm the first record we have is this one his certificate of marriage he married rachel an australian woman rachel my favorite name what i'd love to know is he called billy billy he was called bert but i called him bert oh bert and he's listed as a farmer [Applause] and mary is there as his mother and father oh my goodness he's got john little there it's amazing isn't it john little was mary's husband the man who threw her out when she became pregnant illegitimately with albert he lists john little as his father that's mind-bending he has joined his family together he's got john and he's got his mother on the same piece of paper that he is on and he sort of legitimized himself and i think that is one of the incredibly important things in this story is that he's come from nothing totally legitimate and and bottom of the heap and not respectable and he ends up with respectability yeah there is one other thing that we know about his relationship with the the family back in england and this is his will oh my goodness oh he had an awful lot of money four thousand to janet janet little wearing usually known as jenny little wearing but who who is who's that so this is his half niece we don't know what kind of relationship there was here but clearly he knew his family and he knew the next generation he must have made contact with john and his family now we don't know how that happened i suspect it might have been when he comes back from the war because the war really did change things maybe his family had decided that you know after the horrors of war albert or bert meant something different to the family now because he he was a decorated war veteran you know he'd come back with the victory medal and he had served and survived maybe they felt that they could now acknowledge him after all this this history of secrecy and you know lies infidelity betrayal you know albert had made peace with it that he had made peace with his family he died a successful man really what a wonderful emotionally and financially [Music] yes well done bert little boy fantastic the early victorian pioneers of the workhouse viewed poverty as a crime but as the 20th century unfolded there was a growing sense that it was a social problem which could only be treated by showing greater compassion in this new world order the idea of a deterrent workhouse looked increasingly outdated over time many of its functions had been discharged to specialized institutions like pauper schools and free hospitals for the poor as a new model of social welfare began to take shape in 1929 the workhouse was formally abolished by an act of parliament although it took almost 20 years to phase out altogether with the introduction of the nhs in 1948 the last workhouse shut up shop as its remaining functions were absorbed into the welfare state [Music] today almost all physical traces of the institution have been covered up or erased but its shadow nonetheless falls over millions of people whose lives have been touched by their families secrets from the workhouse

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 220,509

Rating: 4.8907976 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, absolute history, world history, ridiculous history, quirky history

Id: zQy7fFlLlxY

Length: 45min 33sec (2733 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021