It was many years later – perhaps fifteen or twenty years – when Mr Collett visited me. I was happily married, my daughters growing up, my life in full flow. I had not thought of Mr Collett for years.
I woke in the middle of the night, and he was standing at the side of my bed. He was as real as my husband sleeping beside me. He was tall, and upright, but looked younger than when I had known him, like a handsome man of about sixty or sixty-five. He was smiling, and then he said, “You know the secret of life, my dear, because you know how to love.”
And then he disappeared.
THE END
Epilogue
In 1930 the workhouses were closed by Act of Parliament – officially, that is. But in practice it was impossible to close them. They housed thousands of people who had nowhere else to live. Such people could not be turned out into the streets. Apart from that, many of them had been in the workhouses for so long, subject to the discipline and routine, that they were completely institutionalised, and could not have adjusted to the outside world. Also, the 1930s were the decade of economic depression, with massive unemployment nationwide. Thousands of workhouse inmates suddenly thrown onto the labour market would only have made matters worse.
So the workhouses were officially designated “Public Assistance Institutions” and, in order to make them more acceptable, would be locally referred to by such names as “Glebe House”, “Rose House”, and so on. But in practice they carried on much the same as before. The label “pauper” was replaced by “inmate”, and the uniform was scrapped. Comforts, such as heating, a sitting room, easy chairs and better food were introduced. Inmates were allowed out. The inhumane practice of splitting families was stopped. But still it was institutional life. The staff were the same, and the attitudes and mindset of the master and officers were stuck firmly in the nineteenth century. Discipline remained strict, sometimes inflexible, depending on the character of the master, but punishments for transgression of the rules were relaxed, and life was certainly easier for the inmates of the Institution than it had been for the paupers of the workhouse.
The buildings continued in use for many decades for a variety of purposes. Some were used as mental hospitals right up until the 1980s, when they were finally closed by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Many were used as old people’s homes, and my description of Mr Collett’s last weeks in such a place in the late 1950s is by no means unique. I was giving a talk to the East London History Society about this book when it was first published, and a lady in the audience stood up and said, “Your description is not exaggerated. In the 1980s I was with a group of people taken round an old people’s home which had formerly been a workhouse and the conditions you describe were exactly the same. This was, as far as I remember, in 1985 or 1986.”
The infirmaries continued as general hospitals for many decades. But the stigma of the old association with the workhouses was never eradicated. During my nursing career I saw many times the fear in a patient’s eyes who thought they’d been put in a workhouse, even though they were in a modern hospital. In 2005 I was giving a radio talk and I mentioned this. The interviewer said, “I know exactly what you mean. Only a few years ago, in 1998, my granny was taken to the infirmary. She begged and pleaded not to go because she thought she was being put in the workhouse. She was terrified, and I swear it was that which killed her.” The stigma lingered and most of the old infirmaries in the country have now been demolished, or converted into commercial or residential buildings
We who live comfortable, affluent lives in the twenty-first century cannot begin to imagine what it must have been like to be a pauper in a workhouse. We cannot picture relentless cold with little heating, no adequate clothing or warm bedding, and insufficient food. We cannot imagine our children being taken away from us because we are too poor to feed them, nor our liberty being curtailed for the simple crime of being poor. There are very few records left to tell us what the lives of workhouse paupers were like. Every workhouse kept meticulous records – but these were official records written by administrators; the paupers themselves kept no records. Similarly there are very few photographs of the paupers. Thousands of archive photographs of the buildings, the guardians, the masters, their wives and officers can be found in council records; but there are virtually none of the paupers themselves. The few that we do have are tragic to behold. There is a blank, hopeless look on all the faces, the same dull eyes, the same death-like despair.
But before we condemn the workhouses as an example of nineteenth-century exploitation and hypocrisy we must remember that the mores of the time were completely different from the standards of today. For the working class, life was nasty, brutish and short. Hunger and hardship were expected. Men were old at forty, women worn out at thirty-five. The death of children was taken for granted. Poverty was frankly regarded as a moral defect. Social Darwinism (the strong adapt and survive, the weak are crushed) was borrowed and distorted from the
Origin of Species
(1858) and applied to human organisation. These were the standards of society, accepted by rich and poor alike, and the workhouses merely reflected this.
Is there anything good that can be said about the old workhouse system? I think there is. Thousands of children who would have died of starvation on the streets were housed and reared – brutally, perhaps, by modern standards, but they survived, and after the 1870 Education Act, they were also educated. Mass illiteracy became history, and within a couple of generations the population of Great Britain could read and write.
I recall one woman who was over eighty when I met her in the year 2000. She was an illegitimate child of a servant girl and her master. His wife discovered the girl’s pregnancy and dismissed her. The girl went to the workhouse – that was in 1915. The old lady said to me, “I am grateful to the workhouse. I learned the value of discipline and good behaviour. I learned to read and write. No, I never knew my mother, but none of us did. When I was fourteen I went into service. But I bettered myself, and learned secretarial work in night classes, and became a secretary. I am very proud of what I have achieved. I don’t like to think what might have happened to me had it not been for the workhouse.”
Further Reading
Mayhew’s London
, by Henry Mayhew, edited by Peter Quennell. (Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1969)
The Scandal of the Andover Workhouse
, by Ian Anstruther (Alan Sutton, 1984)
The Workhouse System 1834-1929
, by M. A. Crowther (Batsford, 1981)
The People of the Abyss
, by Jack London (London, 1903)
The Poor Law
, by S. Styles (Macmillan, 1985)
Outcast London
, by G. Jones, edited by G. Steadman (Oxford, 1971)
In Darkest London
, by William Booth (London, 1890)
The Life and Labour of the Poor (nine vols.)
, by Charles Booth (London, 1880-1892)
Pauper Palaces
, by Ann Digby (Routledge, 1978)
The Workhouse
, by Norman Longmate (Maurice Temple-Smith, 1974)
Down and Out in Paris and London
, by George Orwell
The Victorian Workhouse
, by Trevor May (Shire Publication, 1997)
The English Poor Law 1780-1930
, by Michael Rose (David and Charles, 1971)
Into Unknown England 1866-1913
, edited by Peter Keating (Fontana/ Collins, 1976)
‘The Homeless’ from
In Darkest England and the Way Out
(William Booth, 1890)
‘On the Verge of the Abyss’ from
In Darkest England and the Way Out
(William Booth, 1890)
‘The Submerged Tenth’ from
In Darkest England and the Way Out
(William Booth, 1890)
‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’, by Andrew Mearns (first published in
The Pall Mall Gazette
, 1883)
‘A Night in a Workhouse’, by James Greenwood (first published in
The Pall Mall Gazette
, 1866)
Workhouses of the North
, by Peter Higginbotham (Tempus Publications, 1999)
Jennifer Worth trained as a nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, and was later ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in London, then the Marie Curie Hospital, also in London. Music had always been her passion, and in 1973 she left nursing in order to study music intensively, teaching piano and singing for about twenty-five years. Jennifer died in May 2011 after a short illness, leaving her husband Philip, two daughters and three grandchildren. Her books have all been bestsellers.
By Jennifer Worth
Eczema and Food Allergy
Call the Midwife
Shadows of the Workhouse
Farewell to the East End
In the Midst of Life
A PHOENIX EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Merton Books
First published in ebook in 2009 by Phoenix, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Copyright © Jennifer Worth 2005
The right of Jennifer Worth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 2978 5609 2
Orion Books
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
1
The Midwives of St Raymund Nonnatus is a pseudonym. I have taken the name from St Raymund Nonnatus, the patron saint of midwives, obstetricians, pregnant women, childbirth and newborn babies. He was delivered by Caesarean section (‘
non natus
’ is the Latin for “not born”) in Catalonia, Spain, in 1204. His mother, not surprisingly, died at his birth. He became a priest and died in 1240.