IT MAY surprise readers, but the workhouse, the grim symbol of Dickensian misery, was only finally abolished in 1930, with some locally controlled establishments still receiving “clients” until 1948. 

There’s a fair few of these buildings still surviving (obviously for other usage); so, at this merry time of year, let’s have a look at the history of the workhouse — and those Tories who have unsurprisingly expressed a keen desire to see them return.

“And the Union workhouses,” demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"
“Both very busy, sir…”
“Those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843) 

Story of  the Workhouse Blues

The workhouse began with, I guess, good intentions, way back in 1388, with the Statute of Cambridge, designed to combat labour shortages due to the devastation of Black Death, giving support to the so-called “impotent poor,” those incapable of work due to age or infirmity.

But thereafter, things took a turn for the worse, as early capitalism took hold, and in 1601 “houses of correction” were established where “persistent idlers” were punished. The Georgians took matters a stage further with the Workhouse Test Act 1723 (unpaid work now on the menu) and the Relief of the Poor Act 1782, whose measures apparently didn’t cover those wives and children auctioned by husbands (a la The Mayor of Casterbridge) to prevent them becoming an imposition on the county workhouse.

By the Victorian era, the workhouse was in its prime, as entire families, as well as the homeless, old and others were interred in the wave of buildings initiated by the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 — 500 of these establishments were built during the next 50 years, most by 1840.

A number of these were named “pauper bastilles,” where the unfortunate occupants were housed in four groups: the aged and “impotent,” children, able-bodied males, and able-bodied females.

Uniforms were issued, tedious, repetitive work such as picking oakum assigned, personal possessions confiscated until release, and a strict daily timetable adhered to. Children below two years of age were generously allowed to remain with their mums, but the mere fact of entering a workhouse was taken as a forfeiture of family responsibility, now firmly in the hands of the authorities.

Booze was of course banned and discipline strict, enforced by workhouse guardians via corporal punishment, restriction of diet, solitary confinement and other methods.

As public education improved, unions organised, pensions introduced, wages increased and socialism began to spread, workhouse conditions became less harsh.

Despite this, having to seek refuge in one was still seen as a social disgrace, but now in the first three decades of the 20th century they were mainly the province of elderly paupers, the sick and helpless derelicts rather than able-bodied indigents.

Ebeneezer Raab and pals

Our friends in the Tory Party have always appeared to have missed the institution, and in recent years, the likes of ex-deputy PM Dominic Raab and former Tory MP Henry Smith were members of the Facebook group “British Ultra Liberal Youth – The Ultras” who stated their aims included, the ”privatisation of healthcare, the sale of all council housing at market value and workhouses for debtors.”

In May 2019, a UN report likened the Tory “welfare” regime to the harsh institutions immortalised in fiction by Arnold Bennett, Orwell, George Elliot, Hardy and, of course, Dickens: 

“It might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nineteenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens, rather than seeking to respond creatively and compassionately to the real needs of those facing widespread economic insecurity in an age of deep and rapid transformation brought about by automation, zero-hour contracts and rapidly growing inequality."

The sewage-infested rivers and coasts, plus the re-emergence of diseases including scabies, rickets, scurvy, cholera, measles, TB (aka consumption, the “white death”) and whooping cough under the Conservatives all signalled a conscious/unconscious desire to return to the days before public health was an issue. See also the Tory government’s Brexit-enabled craving for severely diminished Victorian-era workers “rights.”

Indeed, it’s more than easy to imagine TV “star” Jacob Rees-Mogg as a swaggering workhouse beadle, assisted by strict-but-boozy nurse Liz Truss, a shambling Boris Johnson cosplaying a leering inspector, on the prowl for younger female inmates to “take under his wing,” and Kemi Badenoch as an “overseer of the poor,” gleefully exhorting the masses to pull their collective socks up.

Send your kids to the workhouse – today

If you wish to instruct friends and family about the iniquities of the workhouse system, there are still many surviving buildings to visit, many conforming to the forbidding images of film, TV and literature, but others surprisingly attractive.

London has a wealth of extant former workhouses, including Gordon Road Workhouse (Peckham), St Matthew’s Bethnal Green Workhouse, Holborn Union Workhouse, West Ham Union Workhouse, Leytonstone, Havil Street Workhouse (Camberwell) and Cleveland Street Workhouse in Marylebone, the earliest still existing in the capital, and the likely inspiration for the site of Oliver Twist’s meagre gruel consumption.

Outside the capital, workhouses can be seen in Winchelsea (East Sussex), the Glasgow Industrial School for Girls, Nantwich (Cheshire), Albro Castle (Pembrokeshire), Stow Lodge (Suffolk), Wordsley Hospital (West Midlands), Clifton House in Belfast, and Southwell (Notts) which is now a museum dedicated to the history of the institution.

All very instructive.

As we are approaching Yuletide, I’ll leave readers on a happier note with a cheery excerpt from Garrison Keillor’s 2001 parody, Twas Christmas Day in the Poorhouse:

Don’t marry and do not have children,
Drink the $3 rose,
Collect all the pats of butter
They bring you at the cafe.
Invest in blue-chips and municipals
And avoid technology stocks
And never put money in the basket,
The collection plate or the poorbox.
And when you are old and senile
And you think that your niece is your aunt,
My friends, you’ll be rolling in money,
You’ll have all the money you want.