What Was Life Really Like In A Victorian Workhouse? | Secrets From The Workhouse | Absolute History

i'm alice loxton and i present documentaries over on history hit tv if you're passionate about all things history sign up to history hit tv it's like netflix but just for history we've got hours of ad-free documentaries about all aspects of the past you can get a huge discount from history hit tv make sure you check out the details below and use the code absolute history all one word when you sign up now on with the show 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 so no by the time it finally shut down in 1948 five million people had died in the workhouse today one in every ten 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 kendall 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 shame 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 age nine and in july 1898 charlie ended up here in lambeth workhouse with his mother and half brother what would have happened to charlie sidney 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 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 yeah the architecture was designed to judge people really 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 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 born identity his great-grandfather patrick mccann was just the type of person the authorities wanted to target a glasgow laborer 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 [Music] it's weird because one of my one of my greatest fears has always been poverty and that'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 caddons 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 i would 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 cadence 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 or tournament stair we all recognize this now 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 maguire 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 residents charlotte street on a stair and what that basically means is she was homeless and living on the stairs are you joking no so choking so she no 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 stairs 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 of your cameras to the right of you it's all around you you know there's despair and we're constantly applying for poor relief and 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 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 purpose 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 their 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 healthcare 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 people 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 officially physical punishment wasn't allowed although unofficially abuse was commonplace this is partly what made the workhouse such a feared institution [Music] 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 rags 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 freda 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 frieda to rip and work house 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 workhouse 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 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 um 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 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 the 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 healthcare 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 [Music] barbara taylor bradford's mother frieda was in ripon workhouse as a little girl age six [Music] 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 they're 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 1904 uh this is a birth certificate yes it is a 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 and what's that there's a cross to it name of father name a father is left blank oh wow so what we all that we know is that uh uh uh 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 her 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 9 a 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 oh dear barbara's grandmother edith came here in 1907 and again in 1910 to give birth having been shunned by her family there were over seven thousand 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 ordered herself and boyd 11th of february 1901 order granted for barn hopper house for self and samuel certified with bronchitis following month he reapplies 1902 1903 1903 it just kept going in and out but it's unbelievable and the boy this is his life poor house to puertos to poros this wee boy in out and oh and oh and oh and out doesn't make any sense it's just 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 over to 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 this look at the whole book is about that oh 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 45 000 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 uh 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 absolutely they look like a crafty little bunch yeah they do kind of got chubby faces so 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 [Music] 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 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 a pillar 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 plimsolls to go to school i think my bands are 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 i've 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 are 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 yeah always clark shoes always ladybug 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 they seem 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 hasn't eaten so many times in and out in and out yeah is that regular or was he the exception or is 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 that he's often 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 yep 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're after transferred if necessary malignant i'm a lingua do you think that was accurate probably not because what they did was at the beginning they 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 i'm not just saying it in terms of my great grandfather's life i'm saying that the system sucks big time yeah and it should not have never have happened i mean it is a terrible system i don't know appalling i mean just cruel beyond belief by classifying people into categories the workhouse treated paupers 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 they're very very hard is 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 the reference to friend having been admitted to the strude workhouse 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 carter friend there he is name 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 you know 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 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 yeah he had a proper christian berry 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 porpo yeah it's astonishing really what a marvelous man thank you you're very welcome thank you [Music] 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 oh dear 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 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 bird little boy fantastic [Music] 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 little 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 who's illegitimate oh oh my goodness me so then he would would he have thrown her up 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 on the windows the windows are just they're on the floor and little lovers would have looked out onto that exact site of the trees and the 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 which can be put in now if we have a look here we have mary little where she's down to 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 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 managed 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 all there yes oh how 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 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 barbara's 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 masters 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 laborer on 60 chillings a week he would not have been able to afford a gp now 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 you know that he was a malinger 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 it nowhere taking 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 in singapore 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 little stood accused of squandering her family security by having an extramarital 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 is it 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 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 elvistan 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 7 000 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 of 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 back because she's lost all parents right to him yes how about little albert and he was how old was he now 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 derek 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 dune valley oh this is buns we're right in there this is your bank's embrace of bonnie doon well you can see how can your broom sit fresh in fear you can see the banks and braise here very easily and this would be the suit of clothing and the 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 farms 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 forest with his father and it's taken patrick all that time to convince these people to put his boy in the care yes yes um 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 in 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's siblings would also end up in ripon workhouse here norman simpson simpson francis simpson edith four three children were admitted on the same day the 22nd of december 24. 1924 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 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 ambrabra 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 claude 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 ray just um i line them up using those headstones there it's in this area oh my goodness but they're 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 few 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 um 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 bernardos 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 the children were twice admitted to rip and work house and simpson was laid to find five pounds for their neglect in february 1925 simpson 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 ayrshire 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 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 their child was no so we imagine that when patrick said goodbye to samuel yes there was the distinct possibility in patrick's wendy 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 they sound 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 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 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 near 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 just in 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 it was his wee granddaughter she would have been two [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 a declaration for honor it's just a kind of i was there yes but it is nice to have you know 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. 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 pauper 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 ages 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 it's tragic for something 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 free frida 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 bob bert bert but i called 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 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 um 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 [Music]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 1,977,159

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

Id: 1MX_fSw8etY

Length: 90min 53sec (5453 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022