1. Introduction
Within the New Poor Law union workhouse, inmates depended on the poor laws for their complete subsistence: a roof, a bed, food, work and, for the young, an education. This was a ‘total institution’; the rules, routines and constant surveillance within the workhouse infiltrated every part of the paupers’ lives.Footnote 1 That the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), which fashioned the Victorian workhouse system throughout England and Wales, was a controversial piece of legislation is widely accepted by historians. The long-held rights of the poor, formalised in Elizabethan Acts, to receive relief outside of a workhouse were weakened. A new centralised national body – the Poor Law Commission, based at Somerset House in London – organised parishes into unions, directed them to build new workhouses and oversaw the implementation of relief practices. Resistance to the implementation of the Act was most notable in the north of England and Wales, although recent research has revealed smaller pockets of resistance throughout the south of England too, especially where older workhouse systems were maintained and defended.Footnote 2 Local acts of resistance were part of a large, national, anti-New Poor Law movement, made up of a web of people from a wide spectrum of society, including MPs, landowners, clergymen, magistrates, medical men, ratepayers and women, men and children of the labouring class. Key to this movement was the print media, which always reported with urgency cases of neglect and malpractice in the new system, whether true, exaggerated or ultimately false. David Roberts's analysis of reports in the anti-New Poor Law newspaper The Times between 1837 and 1842 uncovered 32 accounts of unreasonable punishments, 24 cases of inadequate diets, 16 wife and husband separations, 14 cases of overcrowding, 10 cases of diseased conditions and 7 workhouse murders. Outdoor relief was also under scrutiny, as 42 cases of inadequate outdoor relief to the aged and infirm were reported, alongside 33 emergency relief requests being refused. Roberts argues that these catalogues of abuse demonstrate the effectiveness of the anti-New Poor Law movement in bringing cases of maltreatment to a wider public attention.Footnote 3 This interpretation received a reply from Ursula Henriques, who believed the reports revealed ‘a climate of opinion in which abuses were more likely to occur’ towards the poor.Footnote 4 The core principle of the new deterrent workhouse system was ‘less eligibility’, the policy that conditions inside the workhouse would be no better than those experienced by an independent labouring class person on the outside of its walls. For instance, people were to be divided up according to sex and age akin to a prison, and food and work were designed to be dull and monotonous. The system legitimised a view that the poor deserved only a bare existence, but at times the principle was pushed to extremes. As Peter Gurney recently stressed, scandals were ‘an inevitable result of a system that depended on fine moral judgements’ about what the poor should and should not have.Footnote 5
Scandals were pivotal in the development of New Poor Law policies. This was a point I made in a chapter of my recent monograph Pauper policies. The Bridgwater Scandal of 1836–1837, for instance, where several poor were neglected in their need for medical assistance, leading to further illness and the death of a young boy, fed into debates on medical relief, and ultimately the release of the General Medical Order in 1842, a groundbreaking piece of legislation in the history of access to healthcare. Not only was it the first acknowledgement of the state's responsibility to provide medical attendance to the poorest, but it also set out an agreement between the medical officers and the unions, which ensured standards of pay and conditions for their work.Footnote 6 The Andover Scandal, where inmates were abused and found to be gnawing at bones they were meant to crush, was infamous for evoking a ‘grim symbolic feature’ of life within the workhouse and placed a final nail in the coffin of the Commission in 1847.Footnote 7 But as I reveal in this new research, this also made the Commission pay more attention to workhouse work in the final years of its operation, banning bone grinding in workhouses in 1846.Footnote 8 Although during these scandals children died and were harmed from lack of medical attendance and suffered from injury as a result of unsuitable work, the scandals were not directly concerned with children's welfare per se. Each scandal also prioritised the voices of the adult poor, those able at times to speak about their experiences, and resulted in blanket policies that applied to adults and children alike. However, from workhouse population analyses we know that between one third and 45 per cent of workhouse inmates were under 15; the Commission themselves in 1839 thought half of all inmates were under 16 years old.Footnote 9 Unlike their adult counterparts, they were considered to be vulnerable and ‘blameless’ for their poverty.Footnote 10 It is imperative, therefore, to consider whether scandals that involved children more centrally resulted in any change in the policies that impacted on their welfare. If children's experiences were influential in the development of policies, then who listened, and why?
To explore these questions, this article examines an early New Poor Law scandal that evolved in rural Hampshire from the maltreatment of three children in the Fareham Union who were considered refractory in their behaviour. Their punishments led to changes in workhouse punishment regulations. How this came about is of particular interest here. Indeed, the Commission did not separate children from adults in their initial policies, simply stating in the 26th of their Workhouse Rules that the refractory inmate ‘shall be placed in apartments provided for such offenders, or shall otherwise be distinguished in dress, and placed upon such diet as the board of guardians shall prescribe’. Rule 27 stated that masters were allowed to confine the refractory inmate for up to 24 hours, clearly in more serious cases, so they could be ‘carried before a justice of the peace, to be dealt with according to law’.Footnote 11 The New Poor Laws ran concurrently with a change in attitudes towards children in society; philanthropic reformers and parliamentarians started to question the ‘legal violence’ to which children had long been subjected.Footnote 12 By 1841 a new Order of Workhouse Rules was released, clearly drawing up separate permitted punishments for children. This article focuses more immediately on how one scandal fed into those new policies, and the vested interests of different people in the welfare system in shaping new child punishment policies.
Following the work of John Stewart and Steven King on rural Wales, Norman McCord on Tyneside, Roger Wells on Hampshire, and Ruth Newman on Salisbury, among others, this article starts with an exploration of the local-centre relationship of this scandal (section 2).Footnote 13 The children were admitted to the Fareham workhouse from the neighbouring union of Droxford, an arrangement permitted by the Assistant Commissioner, Colonel Charles Ashe A'Court. This arrangement had put children in a liminal position, and a range of union staff circumvented responsibility for their care. As such, section 2 also reveals the inter-union relationship(s) of two unions and their staff who, at least initially, tried to work together. This theme continues into section 3, which examines the investigation into the scandal and the blame the individuals involved placed on each other, as well the process of scapegoating undertaken by the Commission. Section 4 examines the development of opinions around the case, and around the methods by which children could or should be punished. A penultimate section (5) examines the Commission's new child punishment regulations and how, in the creation and implementation of these, the Commission shifted the responsibility for the maltreatment of children on to individual union staff from the Poor Law system as a whole. The conclusion examines the themes this scandal raises and the implications of this for our understanding of the workings of the New Poor Laws.
2. A neighbourly relationship?
The Droxford and Fareham Unions were in the heart of the southern English countryside in Hampshire, a county in which the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1832) most wanted to eliminate the ‘indiscriminate’ provision of outdoor relief. The Chairman of the Board of Guardians at Fareham, just 14 months after the establishment of the union, reported to A'Court that ‘the moral improvement of the labouring classes exceeds my expectation. They now find that their existence mainly depends upon their own exertions.’ The decrease in the poor rates, from lower applications for relief, satisfied the Guardians, as they said: the new system was ‘working remarkably well’.Footnote 14 While Fareham had opened their union workhouse in May 1836 based on the ‘cruciform’ or ‘square’ plan, emulating the Commission's sanctioned plans by architect Samuel Kempthorne, their neighbours at Droxford lagged behind.Footnote 15 As Droxford Guardians continued to develop their plans, and the Fareham Union Guardians were close to finishing theirs, the Fareham Guardians asked the Droxford Guardians whether they would like to send their paupers to the Fareham workhouse.Footnote 16 This idea was developed independently of the Commission or A'Court. Their own workhouse was ‘considerably larger than the Average number of Paupers’ they had to accommodate, a problem A'Court seemed keen to prevent in Droxford.Footnote 17 The benefits of this arrangement were obvious; helping to offset the expense of building and maintaining the workhouse for the Fareham Union and mitigating the immediate need for the Droxford Union to build their own workhouse.Footnote 18 Droxford responded positively.Footnote 19 It was an arrangement commonly entered into under the old poor law system, and was a practice which continued between many unions during the early years of the New Poor Laws.Footnote 20 At the same time as this agreement, the Fareham Guardians also asked whether Droxford would consider uniting the two unions permanently. This was also not an unusual request at the time.Footnote 21 Nevertheless, A'Court's view was that this was ‘very objectionable’ as the centre, at Fareham, would be a ‘serious distance’ from many of the parishes.Footnote 22 Only a temporary arrangement would be permitted.Footnote 23
Although the Commission sanctioned the arrangement between the unions in the April of 1836,Footnote 24 in the following month the Clerk to the Fareham Union wrote to the Commission explaining that while they agreed to receive only ‘healthy’ paupers into their workhouse, the Droxford Union instead stated they agreed that ‘able bodied’ paupers would be sent. This suggested that Droxford Guardians wanted to be able to send those who were possibly in poor health but still able, to some extent, to work. The terms, ‘far from being synonymous’, needed to be clarified, according to the Fareham Guardians.Footnote 25 Only by contacting the Commissioners did the Droxford Guardians finally concede that only ‘healthy’ paupers could be sent to the Fareham workhouse.Footnote 26 But it was not until mid-July that the Droxford and Fareham Guardians finally agreed upon a set of regulations, including that Droxford was charged the same price per person, per day, as parishes within the Fareham Union.Footnote 27 Droxford Guardians suggested they should produce medical certificates for all paupers sent to the Fareham workhouse, as proof that their health was satisfactory.Footnote 28 Fareham agreed.Footnote 29 The production of a certificate was beneficial for both unions and removed ambiguity. Fareham was safeguarding against the risk of extra expense and time incurred treating the unwell, and Droxford could reasonably expect that their paupers would return home in at least the same condition as they left. In late September 1836, the first Droxford Union paupers entered the Fareham workhouse, but they were returned shortly afterwards.Footnote 30 The Fareham Union complained that they had no medical certificates. According to the Fareham Guardians four male paupers had the ‘itch’ and they sent back two ‘insane’ female paupers, ‘one decidedly dangerous’.Footnote 31 From then on, the Droxford Union had promised again to send only paupers with medical certificates.Footnote 32
In the winter of 1836, three boys were sent to the Fareham Union workhouse: William Warren, aged 4 years, Robert Withers, also aged 4, and Jonathan Cooke, aged 5.Footnote 33 They were illegitimate and Robert and Jonathan were also orphaned. It is at this point this article turns to the evidence gathered by the Parliamentary Select Committee of 1837, and occasionally the smaller local enquiry at Fareham Union, to piece together the care and condition of the three boys. As outlined further in the next section, both of these enquiries interviewed individuals involved in the maltreatment and care of the children, but while the Select Committee was a formal, lengthy enquiry, instigated sometime after the maltreatment of the children, the local investigation was more immediate, and less thorough, to provide an initial account for the Poor Law Commission. The children initially entered the Bishop's Waltham workhouse within the Droxford Union in the autumn of 1836, a workhouse allocated for the accommodation of children aged under 13 years in April of the same year.Footnote 34 As was common practice throughout England and Wales, unions could use old parish workhouses subject to the rules of classification by sex and age. Harrison, the master, noted that, while the boys were ‘very healthy children, all of them’ they arrived ‘dirty in their habits’.Footnote 35 Harrison stressed that he had ‘corrected’ the children by assigning each child a ‘bedfellow’, a slightly older pauper, who the child woke up before visiting the privy. After one week of this treatment there was, according to him, ‘no [further] foulness’.Footnote 36
The boys’ ‘dirty habits’ had either resumed or continued in the Fareham workhouse, where their care worsened. Thomas Bourne and his wife were experienced workhouse managers, having previously held the roles of master and matron in the parish workhouses of Fareham and Titchfield.Footnote 37 Yet, in the Fareham workhouse and without the instruction of the medical officer,Footnote 38 the only person allowed to issue an alteration in diet, they ‘extensively and repeatedly’ reduced the dietary intake of the three boys.Footnote 39 According to Thomas Bourne, ‘to withhold part of the food from children for dirty habits’ was the standard ‘mode of disciplining’ in schools.Footnote 40 Indeed, it was under the influence of the schoolmistress's directions that the boys endured a meagre diet.Footnote 41 Thomas Bourne also beat the children with a rod ‘for their filthy habits’.Footnote 42 Fellow pauper Henry Shawyer witnessed Cooke being ‘flogged’ for being of ‘weak intellect’.Footnote 43 Unsurprisingly, the boys’ infant bodies were badly bruised and scarred.Footnote 44 Withers was particularly badly injured; he had one large red patch on ‘the upper part of the thigh’ that was caused by the swipe of a rod. The children told the workhouse nurse they had been beaten.Footnote 45
Harriet Crouch, the Fareham Union schoolmistress, tried to cope with the children through both supervision and punishments.Footnote 46 She placed the boys under the ‘special and separate charge of an older Girl, who took them out on the calls of nature from the School from time to time’. On coming back into the schoolroom, however, the boys ‘frequently immediately after would wet or dirty themselves’.Footnote 47 She made the children wear fools’ caps with the word ‘Dirty’ on them.Footnote 48 Crouch also brought a set of ankle stocks into the classroom ‘from her former private school’.Footnote 49 This was authorised by Bourne.Footnote 50 It was within these stocks, lined with green baize to prevent their ankles from chafing, that children were constrained for significant periods of time. Bourne said he saw children sat or standing in these stocks, but did not know the exact length of time first-hand, and was only able to say he was ‘told’ children were in them ‘from meal to meal’.Footnote 51 Crouch also whipped Withers, and possibly Cooke too, with what she described as a ‘twig birch’; she also heard the girl in charge of Cooke, Susan Axford, ‘slap him’ although subsequently ‘forbade her doing so’.Footnote 52
On 7 February 1837, midway through the usual weekly meeting of the Droxford Union Board of Guardians at the White Horse Inn, the clerk read a letter from the Fareham Union that noted that the medical officer of the Fareham Union workhouse, John Blatherwick, ‘certified that three boys … belonging to this Union were incontinent of urine, and that they were in that state when sent there’.Footnote 53 The Fareham Guardians had heard from Master Bourne how the children had ‘constant trouble to obtain anything approaching to cleanliness’, and wanted them removed back into the care of the Droxford Union.Footnote 54 A letter was sent to the Droxford Guardians asking the boys to be sent for and therefore ‘discharged from this House’ but they did not reply, ignoring the fact that they had, once again, gone against the agreement and sent unwell people to the Fareham workhouse.Footnote 55 The Fareham Guardians’ next letter asked them to ‘remove the dirty Boys of their Union’.Footnote 56 The Fareham Union lost their patience and, on the same day as their letter 10 February 1837, pre-emptively arranged for the children to be moved back to the Bishop's Waltham workhouse.Footnote 57 Carried in a covered cart (‘an act of kindness’ according to Bourne), the children were moved seven miles and left outside the workhouse, in the cold, in fustian dresses, without coats.Footnote 58 The children were found by the parish Reverend, William Brock, who questioned the driver before he left and accompanied the children into the workhouse.Footnote 59
Harrison found the children propped up ‘against the wall in a passage’, but did not mention the presence of Brock.Footnote 60 He thought they were ‘in a very reduced state’, and ‘so weak that they were not able to walk between the front door and the room that I wished them to go to’.Footnote 61 After having been lifted upstairs to bed by fellow paupers the children were fed, but they did not eat much of the food and Warren started to throw up ‘violently’.Footnote 62 Harrison, concerned, immediately sent for the workhouse medical man Louis James Lovekin to attend the children, yet as he was not in the parish he did not arrive until two-and-a-half hours later.Footnote 63 In his panic, Harrison left the workhouse to find some of the Guardians, the likelihood of which was high on a market night.Footnote 64 ‘I was apprehensive for the children’, he claimed, ‘I wished somebody to see them.’Footnote 65 While Harrison managed to find two Guardians, before they arrived back at the workhouse the medical man had already been and gone. On the following morning Harrison visited the children who were lying in bed. He states how they were ‘taking no notice of any thing’ and had barely swallowed any food.Footnote 66 They all had ‘the itch’ too.Footnote 67 Harrison claimed they were in a ‘filthy state’, and he had never seen ‘anybody's bowels in such a state as they all three were’.Footnote 68
The Droxford Guardians clearly disliked the terms upon which they agreed to send their poor to the Fareham Union workhouse. The lack of medical certificates was a demonstration of this, as was the sending of the three unwell children. This arrangement was under the distant supervision of the Commission and A'Court, but it required the communication and cooperation of two unions, and their staff, at the local level in order to function. The fractious Droxford Guardians ignored repeated requests to collect the children, leading to a frustrated set of Guardians at Fareham abandoning unwell children with force rather than care. Of the two tense unions, it was the Droxford Guardians who demanded that the Fareham Guardians ‘will cause an immediate and strict enquiry’ into the children's treatment in the Fareham workhouse.Footnote 69 Fareham Union questioned five people about the young boys’ time in the workhouse, including Blatherwick, Bourne, Crouch and two fellow paupers. This was a brief local enquiry, offering little more than a rough outline of how the boys had been treated. Consequently, the Droxford Guardians demanded the opinion of the medical officer for the Bishop's Waltham poorhouse, Lovekin, at the next board meeting.Footnote 70 Lovekin stated ‘they were haggard and [the] very pictures of distress’ and noted that ‘none of them could walk – not even stand without assistance’. He was genuinely ‘shocked’ by the state of their appearance. Cooke's health was particularly bad and Lovekin believed his mistreatment under the care of the Fareham Union had ‘endangered’ his life.Footnote 71
3. Investigations, blame and scapegoating
The wider public knew of the case at the end of February 1837. The Tory MP for Berkshire John Walter stood in the House of Commons on the 24th of that month to announce a variety of abuses and cruelties that had occurred in the new welfare system. The information he received and would duly read to the House ‘respecting the Union of Droxford’ acted as further fuel for his anti-New Poor Law cause. At first the statement portrayed the general distress within the union caused by the decisions of the Guardians, such as the reduction of the Relieving Officers from three to one, and how his and the Medical Officer's infrequent attendance of the poor in large parishes such as Hambledon caused distress among the poor.Footnote 72 The statement ended with a brief description of the three children, transported in a cart over seven miles, and arriving at Bishop's Waltham unable to stand. He noted that ‘“two have marks on their bodies of having been severely beaten”’, and ‘“there appears no disease in the children, but prostration of strength from want of food”’ – ‘“they look beyond description wretched”’.Footnote 73 The author of the statement may have revealed his identity, a churchman: ‘“I can mention the names of several clergymen in this neighbourhood who, though at first decidedly in favour of the Poor-law Act have declared to me, that many families in their parishes have been reduced to the greatest state of destitution”’.Footnote 74 The Reverend William Brock was very interested in the condition and removal of the children and, as Lovekin noted, he asked ‘an old Man who was sent to me from the Poorhouse … a great many questions’.Footnote 75 However, while Brock may have gathered some of the evidence about the children, it was the magistrate and ex-officio Guardian of Hambledon Mr Butler who pressed for this piece to be written, but not by himself as this would potentially risk his professional reputation in representing and acting according to law. It was, in fact, written by his son Reverend Stephen Butler, the curate of the neighbouring parish of Soberton.Footnote 76 Although Mr Butler was not a frequent attendee of the Guardians’ meetings, in his role as magistrate he would have met with and relieved the poor in distress.Footnote 77
As James L. Newell states: ‘scandals cannot occur unless breaches are publicised’.Footnote 78 Indeed, here Walter's speech was swiftly printed up in the national newspaper he founded and edited, The Times.Footnote 79 The article was quickly leapt upon by the Commission who prepared an urgent letter to A'Court, but in his reply A'Court denied any knowledge of any problems with the children at Fareham. He also suspiciously went overboard, writing that the Fareham workhouse food was ‘abundant’ and that he ‘never saw a more healthy lot of children [than] there are there congregated’.Footnote 80 The letter from Somerset House, however, spurred A'Court into action. His task was to take evidence and investigate the claims of the allegations. In Hampshire A'Court placed some blame on Bourne and Crouch, but they were not dismissed. Bourne ‘has greatly exceeded his authority, and has neglected his duty, in sanctioning such an extent of punishment without the cognizance and previous approval of the Guardians’ and Crouch had caused ‘great inhumanity’ to the children. However, as Shulamith Shahar has noted, albeit in a family environment, particular physical or emotional needs could make ‘almost intolerable demands’, and therefore ‘emotional demands on the parent’.Footnote 81 The demands of these children were substantial, and A'Court believed the behaviour of staff towards the children to be deviations away from their usual standards of care. For instance, good overall character testimonies of Bourne and the matron had clearly been sought from the ‘assembled Paupers in the Workhouse’, A'Court himself acknowledging their ‘general kindness, [and] humanity’.Footnote 82 The Guardians were not to blame either. ‘In consequence of the late painful enquiry’ the Guardians had received accusations about their conduct, which A'Court did not think they deserved.Footnote 83 A'Court's blame was to rest solely on the Fareham workhouse medical officer Blatherwick, who he believed failed to recognise that the children were so unwell.Footnote 84 His services must be ‘dispensed with’ A'Court argued; ‘He clearly has neglected his duty.’Footnote 85 In his evidence to the Committee, A'Court claimed Blatherwick had made a number of omissions, claiming he:
knew them to be in a filthy state, but made no inquiry as to the cause of their infirmities; never asked as to their diet, or general health, and never afforded them any professional assistance whatever.Footnote 86
In the meantime, the newspapers reported the proceedings of the House of Commons, specifically the desire for the Select Committee on the Operation of the Poor Laws of 1837 to include an investigation into the relief administration practices of the Fareham and Droxford Unions.Footnote 87 Indeed, the Committee was already underway, and would run from 1837 to 1838, owing to imminent expiration of the Commission, and a general election of 1837 in which the Whigs lost 23 seats. According to Anthony Brundage, ‘ardent Tories made poor law opposition a rallying cry’, but had to accept the compromise of ‘favourable’ Select Committee investigations, hinting at improvements to be made, because in general ‘the lopsided parliamentary majorities’ desired a continuation of the Commission's work.Footnote 88 The Select Committee consisted of a majority of pro-New Poor Law MPs and several anti, including Walter. By 6 March the Select Committee was organised, and witnesses were called to give evidence on the Droxford-Fareham case between 10 April and 10 May. As Wells notes, some witnesses were called twice or, in the case of Harrison, three times ‘usually to challenge subsequent claims of later witnesses’. This gave the Committee's hearings a somewhat ‘convoluting’ and ‘repetitive element’, but one where of the 6,896 questions asked of the witnesses, Walter and his allies managed to ask almost two thirds.Footnote 89
A'Court found his scapegoat very soon after news of the cruelties reached him – Blatherwick, the Fareham workhouse medical officer. As Kim Price has detailed, this practice of scapegoating was commonly used by the Commission to de-escalate scandals. Easily dismissible, fairly independent and part-time employees took the blame for both genuine and false cases of malpractice.Footnote 90 A'Court held this line, even when the early Fareham and Droxford investigations, and the Select Committee interviews, revealed other people may have been culpable. Crouch, for instance, did not notify the Board of Guardians of her modes of punishment, supporting the Guardians’ claim that they did not know of the punishments.Footnote 91 Also, the stocks that Crouch brought in from her private school were unreported to the Guardians by the workhouse visiting committee, a group of selected guardians and ex-officio guardians whose duty it was to notice irregularities and suggest improvements.Footnote 92 But those involved in the scandal tried to place the blame elsewhere. For instance, Henry Shawyer, a bedfellow to Cooke in the Fareham workhouse said that he had slept next to him for two weeks and ‘found him on one occasion dirty, and repeatedly wet’.Footnote 93 So the corrective work carried out by Harrison was either undone or had never been effective.Footnote 94 And Harrison himself also tried to place the blame on Lovekin, who apparently had visited the children some time after their return to the Droxford workhouse. According to the matron he claimed ‘that there was no particular complaint about them that he could find’,Footnote 95 consequently the boys were not administered any medicines.Footnote 96 This contradicts the evidence Lovekin himself gave, within the initial union and Select Committee investigations. Although we are not sure where the truth sits in this instance, it does illustrate once again the desire of those involved in scandals to place the blame with medical officers rather than core union staff.
Interest in the case was also growing within the House of Lords. The Fareham Guardians panicked and agreed on a series of workhouse rules, probably under the direction of A'Court. They agreed that a diminution in food could not be used as a form of punishment without ‘special authority’. The master should also keep a better record of punishments. While separate punishment books were not compulsory, the Guardians asked the master to start one immediately.Footnote 97 Later in that month, the negligent visiting committee notified the Board they had established several ‘Rules of Workhouse management’. As well as containing some sparse details about exercise and employment for the paupers of the workhouse, the majority of the rules were concerned with punishments and rewards rather than standards of treatment. From these rules it is clear that children were not be punished with a reduction in their diet.Footnote 98 Boys were to be punished only by ‘whipping them with a Birch Rod not exceeding four stripes’, and every case of such punishment had subsequently to be reported to the Board. Crouch effectively lost all powers of punishment under these stipulations, as now her only task was to ‘observe, that the school children are healthy, clean in their persons and clothing, and orderly in their behaviour’.Footnote 99 This fast, local policy creation suggested that the Guardians feared the scrutiny of the Commission.
The swift actions of the central and local welfare authorities were praised in the Committee's final report on the investigations, published in the summer of 1837. They did not pinpoint the blame as A'Court had, instead stating ‘The master of the workhouse, the schoolmistress, and the medical officer, appear to have been in different degrees to blame’ and were ‘severely censured’ by the Fareham Guardians and Commissioners.Footnote 100 Which medical officer they referred to is unclear, although this was probably Blatherwick who was under the charge of the Fareham Guardians. The purpose of the Committee's report, though, was to think about the longer-term outcomes of their investigations. The ‘children were treated with great neglect and inhumanity, their food improperly reduced, and their health for a time impaired’.Footnote 101 They noted, ‘that in no case should children have any reduction made in the amount of their food, by way of punishment’.Footnote 102 Of course, a number of other recommendations came up, as other cases were looked into. One pointed to the benefits of books for visitors to make comments as seemingly a ‘useful check on mismanagement’.Footnote 103 Regardless of the abuses they investigated, though, they put the new system, the workhouses, and their management, in a good light, concluding that ‘the operation of the new Poor Law is satisfactory, and that it ought to be maintained’.Footnote 104 The voice of Walter and other anti-New Poor Law Committee members was suppressed.
4. Opinions
On the 22 July, the Poor Law Commissioner Thomas Frankland Lewis wrote a letter to the other Poor Law Commissioners, John George Shaw Lefevre and George Nicholls. Within it he asked them to draw their attention to the Committee’s report as requested by the Home Secretary, Lord John Russell. Interestingly he states ‘I did not understand him to mean that anything was recommended to be done by us.’Footnote 105 Yet, regardless of Frankland Lewis's disinclination, within three days the Commission acknowledged Russell's report and took into ‘consideration the steps to be taken thereon’.Footnote 106 Indeed, an annotated copy of the report demonstrates the Commission's attention to detail in highlighting key sections that suggest the creation of new, or the alteration of old, policies.Footnote 107 As was customary, the Commission drew upon their best source of knowledge on the practical operation of the New Poor Laws: the Assistant Commissioners. The Commission wrote in their Circular Letter, ‘you will report to them such facts and observations as you may have to offer’.Footnote 108 The first point to consider referred directly to the treatment of the Droxford boys in the Fareham workhouse: the punishment of children by the reduction in their food. The other highlighted points derived from the other cases under the Select Committee investigation. One topic of inquiry, about the number, qualifications, appointment processes and remuneration of medical officers, were all issues that the simmering Bridgwater Scandal would very soon bring to the fore.Footnote 109 The Home Office was keen to hear what the Commission proposed to change in light of Russell's Report, sending two letters, the first of which appears to have been lost, maybe even thrown away.Footnote 110 Edwin Chadwick, the Commission's secretary, proudly sent copies of the circular letter to the Assistant Commissioners to the Home Office, demonstrating something had been done.Footnote 111
The delayed response of the Commission, of almost a week, gave them time to draft the circular carefully. The Assistant Commissioners were asked to consider: ‘As to the expediency of adopting a Regulation for the purpose of preventing Children in Workhouses from being punished by a reduction of their Diet.’Footnote 112 However, this was not what the clerk initially wrote. The original query posed was: ‘Whether in any and what cases other than the one cited in the Evidence before the Committee it has come to your knowledge that Children have had by way of punishment, a reduction made in their diet without the sanction of the Guardians?’ A thick black line was drawn vertically though this draft by one of the Commissioners.Footnote 113 The explicit link to the Droxford-Fareham Scandal was removed probably in a bid to de-escalate the attention surrounding this particular case. Unearthing further maltreatments by way of asking the Assistant Commissioners for accounts of similar cases was also thought not to be a wise step; they did not want to gather more fuel for a fire that they hoped was diminishing.
The Assistants’ responses varied and reinforced the view that union staff should continue to have some autonomy regarding the punishment of children. A'Court, in a defensive tone, stated that a reduction in diet for refractory children ‘was most improperly introduced at Fareham; but, as I am informed no where else’.Footnote 114 Robert Weale, Alfred Power and William Day also put their trust in the union staff, but did want their actions recorded. Weale wrote ‘an Offence and Punishment Book is generally kept’, a book seen by the Guardians and Visiting Committee.Footnote 115 Day stated that any change in diet needed to be ‘ordered by the Medical Officer who will prescribe both its nature and duration’, and ‘where extreme punishment is resorted to a report should be laid before the Guardians’.Footnote 116 Probably the strongest advocate for the independence of staff was Power who argued that a regulation would be ‘depriving the Master of the power to stop a simple meal with reference to any class of inmates’.Footnote 117 Two other Assistants, William John Gilbert and Thomas Wade, stated that some regulation was required, but again reinforced the independence of the union staff.Footnote 118 Wade, for instance, wanted the Master to record more fully his punishments, but to continue to use his ‘discretion’ in each case.Footnote 119 Many believed that an alteration, rather than a reduction in diet was safe, and that was what Workhouse Rules 26 and 27 had implied. William Hawley Toovey Hawley, Assistant Commissioner of Sussex, believed that bread and water, instead of meat and soup worked well, and would avoid the ‘emaciating’ effects seen at Droxford.Footnote 120 According to Edmund Head, it was only when this rule was ‘injudiciously’ applied that ‘it would be expedient to prohibit punishment of any pauper under 14 by such means’.Footnote 121
There was a general concern for the health of children among the Assistants, and even those who did not want specific legislation believed some broad parameters could be conceived. Power gave an example: ‘The Master of the Workhouse shall not punish any of the inmates in such a manner as to risk consequences injurious to their bodily health.’Footnote 122 Day, in a similar mode, wanted to prohibit any type of punishment ‘either unnatural in its character, or inordinate in its extent’. There should be a ban on constrained postures, the use of stocks and any ‘attempt to operate upon their fears or the imagination as by solitary or dark confinement’.Footnote 123 Day's response is interesting because, while favouring the independence of the union staff to know best, he criticised workhouse schools for producing ill-behaved children. Should a ‘proper system of education’ be in place, he added, ‘corporal punishment need not and ought not to be resorted to’.Footnote 124
This was also the line that former medic James Phillip Kay took in his response.Footnote 125 Celebrated for his work establishing the national school system of education in Victorian Britain, Kay initially acted as an Assistant Commissioner in the East of England where he took a particular interest in the education of children in workhouses. Better schooling systems, such as those he was trialling in his district, would do away with the need for any punishment ‘except in extreme cases’. As such, he thought there was little need for the regulation suggested.Footnote 126 Kay advocated a fixed routine of activities – including lessons of an academic and practical nature, such as music and exercise – to forge discipline and moral virtue.Footnote 127 In the following year, the Commission published a report outlining this system, the same year Kay was appointed the Assistant Commissioner for the Central London Metropolitan District and the Secretary of the new Committee of Council on Education.Footnote 128 In his second report, in 1839, he maintained this position, arguing that with the right regime ‘corporeal punishment should at an early period fall into disuse’ and if it was resorted to, clearly the teacher was ineffectual at their job.Footnote 129 That the individual schoolmistress or schoolmaster was responsible for severe punishments, rather than it being the consequence of schools within a workhouse system, based on deterrence and less eligibility, was a perspective that influenced the Commission's ultimate policymaking.
5. Shifting responsibilities
The general opinion of the Assistant Commissioners not to produce any regulations on child punishments prevailed. Instead a period of ‘soft’ policymaking ensued whereby the Commission asked unions to review their regulations, giving them autonomy but at the same time intervening on matters of interpretation. This was the approach used in the aftermath of the medical relief scandal at Bridgwater. Aware of the scandal, and the great attention being paid to medical relief arrangements across England and Wales by the government, the Commission and their Assistants, the hope was that unions themselves would resolve and prevent their own medical relief problems.Footnote 130 This pattern was repeated in the aftermath of the Droxford-Fareham Scandal. When the South Stoneham Guardians near Southampton asked the Commission whether ‘personal correction’ could be inflicted on the refractory workhouse boys, for instance, the Commission's response was firm, but not dictatorial. It was not necessary to inflict corporal punishment regularly and reliance on the method indicated the impotence of the master (who was also the schoolmaster). It was the role of the Guardians, they wrote, to ‘lay down directions for the master as to the occasions and mode of corporeal punishment as applicable to the Boys’.Footnote 131 Guardians also formed sets of rules, and again the Commission issued corrective advice. Not seeming to have learned from the scandal in which they had been involved, the Droxford Union produced a ‘byelaws’ booklet in early 1837, which stipulated that any pauper could be punished by a reduction in the ‘quantity of provisions’.Footnote 132 The Commissioners replied that only ‘quality rather than the quantity of food’ should be reduced.Footnote 133
The Assistant Commissioner Edward Carleton Tufnell mentioned the continuing abuse of children in his report on the education of pauper children for the Commission's special continuance report in 1840.Footnote 134 He wrote, ‘I have reason to believe great cruelties are practised at times, on the children, which probably do not always come to light.’ He explained that schoolmasters who had previously worked in village schools were the cruellest, noting how one had tied his handkerchief around the jaws of those about to be punished, to muffle their screams.Footnote 135 The report showed no desire to develop policies to prevent the abuse, per se, but rather to promote the formation of ‘District Schools’ for the education of children from multiple unions.Footnote 136 At the same time, Guardians and Assistant Commissioners continued to notify the Commission with cases of the harsh punishment of children, particularly by matrons, masters, schoolmistresses or schoolmasters. In a ledger, kept by the Commission to record a sample of this correspondence received in the year 1840, cases of ‘undue severity’ were reported in the unions of Eastry and Medway (Kent), Morpeth (Northumberland), Shipston-on-Stour (Worcestershire) and South Molton (Devon).Footnote 137
Unions were seemingly unable to make sufficient changes to their local practices and policies, resulting in the passage of blanket and compulsory national policies. Again, this was also the case in the aftermath of the Bridgwater Scandal.Footnote 138 Released in January 1841, the Commission produced a raft of rules on the topic of ‘Workhouse Discipline’, as part of a broad set of ‘General Workhouse Regulations’. The circular letter that accompanied the regulations put forward the case for a clear Order, a legally binding set of policies, on the punishments of all inmates. As they stated:
Up to the present time, it has been left to different Boards of Guardians to make detailed regulations, in pursuance of the rules of the Commissioners, according to the circumstances of each Union, and to the general and specific orders with respect to the confinement or alteration of diet to which paupers might be subjected.Footnote 139
As they wrote, though, many Boards of Guardians were unable to give specific directions to their union staff, and being careful not to name any particular cases of cruelties, ‘it is to be regretted that in several instances, and especially in some recent cases’ some workhouse masters ‘abused the discretion left to them’.Footnote 140
A thorough list of inmate offences and adult punishments was given in the order. By way of clearing up any ambiguity around the Workhouse Rules 26 and 27, as noted earlier, the Commission stated it was also lawful to alter the inmates’ food by way of punishment, removing all except an allowance of bread or potatoes, but crucially still feeding the inmate.Footnote 141 As Crowther noted, withdrawing ‘privileges’ was to become a primary method of discipline for both adults and children by the end of the nineteenth century, including luxury foods such as tea and permission to leave the workhouse in the daytime.Footnote 142 Child punishments were also outlined: no corporal punishment was to be inflicted on any female child whatsoever, and no punishment on any male child 14 years old or over. Younger male children could receive punishments from the schoolmaster or master of the workhouse with a ‘rod or instrument’, which ‘shall have been seen and approved of by the Board of Guardians, or the visiting committee’. The differentiation between punishments for boys and girls was made based on an idea that the latter needed understanding ‘by gentle means’, reinforcing the gender assumptions of the time about the weakness or fragility of young women.Footnote 143 A six-hour break between the offence and the punishment of male children would have to be adhered to, to prevent severe punishments in frustration. Indeed, they stated ‘Warmth of temper and passionate conduct generally betray a consciousness of want of firmness.’ Another article suggested that the schoolmaster and, if possible, the master should be present during a punishment. And another stipulated that no child under 12 years was to be ‘confined in a dark room, or during the night’.Footnote 144 These were complemented with strict rules around the recording of punishments, with an article stipulating that the workhouse master entered all corporal punishments on children into a book, and another directing the book to be inspected by the Board of Guardians at every meeting and the entries read out by the Clerk. Each punishment and the opinions of the Guardians on this had to be recorded in their minute book, and if the Guardians deem ‘the master or other officer has in any case acted illegally or improperly’ the details should be presented to the Commission. Punished children above the age of seven would also have the chance to speak of any undue charge and punishment in front of the Guardians or the next visiting committee.Footnote 145
These specific regulations, and the general sentiment of the regulations as a whole, directly and deliberately placed the responsibility for the punishment of children, as well as adult inmates, on individuals within the union. Rather than the union or Poor Law Commission, and therefore the welfare system as a whole, shouldering blame for the severe treatment of inmates, it was down to the skill and responsibility of staff, such as schoolmistresses and schoolmasters. Reflecting on their reforms to child punishments, the Commissioners paraphrased Kay's and Tufnell's words: ‘good temper, joined to firmness and self-command, will enable a skilful teacher to manage children with little or no corporal punishment’. The Commission also referred to the experimental District School at Norwood where ‘the use of corporal punishment has been almost entirely discontinued’.Footnote 146 With the latter point the Commission did not necessarily advocate a change in the pauper education system, but instead used it to highlight how skilled teachers reduced the use of punishments.
The Commission's Orders were legal treatises, and each and every union had to act in accordance with them. Yet the letters received by the Commission indicate that unions struggled to understand and apply the new rules. The Kidderminster Union (Worcestershire) asked whether they could hit children's hands with rods, and the Abingdon Union (Oxfordshire), finding their female children ‘exceedingly refractory and ungovernable’ in the workhouse school, asked if the schoolmistress could use some mode of corporal punishment to control their behaviour.Footnote 147 In the first case, the Commission responded that this was an ‘infringement of the rules’, and in the latter that it was the individual responsibility of the schoolmistress to acquire decorum without resorting to such punishment.Footnote 148 Unions also struggled to understand how to record permitted punishments, the method by which masters and other union employees would now be held individually accountable for their actions. The Weardale Union (County Durham) wondered whether the punishment book was just for recording the inflictions of the Master or those ordered by the Guardians. The book was for both, the Commission stated, and the Clerk should initial the record in cases where the Guardians ordered the punishment.Footnote 149
The release of policies protected the Commission when severe punishments were unduly meted out. In the Berwick-upon-Tweed Union (Northumberland) the master of the workhouse, George Logan, hit children across the back of their hands with a cane. In his resignation letter to the Commission, albeit a letter of forced resignation, Logan detailed how he had been told he had been ‘punishing the children contrary to the provisions of the “General Workhouse Rules”’. In a vexed state, he wrote ‘Now, I would ask, why was I not furnished with a Copy of these rules?’. He then provided an example of another illegal corporal punishment, which he claimed the Guardians made him undertake on three young boys.Footnote 150 The release of policies protected the Commission, and even the Guardians in this case, and punishments were now the responsibility of individual staff. This is demonstrated in a court case at the end of 1844, where a schoolmistress in the Bethnal Green workhouse was tried and found guilty of striking Jane Kingston's hand several times. The ten-year-old's mother, Jane Dowling, and step-father William Dowling took the case to a local police office, a move that infuriated the workhouse master who threatened to confine them in a workhouse cell.Footnote 151 The case reached The Times and even generated a public meeting of 200 people.Footnote 152 There was no sentence of imprisonment given by the Middlesex Sessions judge, only a tokenistic fine of five shillings.Footnote 153 Nevertheless, this was a warning from the Court to the schoolmistress and, by way of printing the case in an Official Circular, from the Commission to all Guardians and workhouse staff: that while all unauthorised punishments might not receive a heavy punishment in return, they would be looked into and individuals, rather than the system, would be to blame.
6. Conclusions
The Droxford-Fareham Scandal shares a number of similarities with other early New Poor Law scandals. It created tension between local and national welfare authorities, and highlights the power of a wilful union – the Boards of Guardians and union staff – and a complicit and even perhaps complacent Poor Law Commission. As Philip Harling has argued, it would be ‘misleading to argue that … limited central intervention made no difference to poor-law administration’ in the early years of the New Poor Laws. Indeed, the Commission ‘created a modicum of authority where previously it held none’.Footnote 154 We see this replicated here – in the intervention of A'Court in establishing an arrangement between the two unions for the accommodation of the Droxford poor and in the eventual passage and enforcement of the new workhouse rules from 1841. The Commission directed, through their assistants, the procedures they wanted unions to follow as the scandal reached the Commons and newspapers. Depositions were taken from the inmates and union staff involved and an assistant visited the union, attending a Board meeting. It was here that an easily identifiable and dismissible scapegoat was identified. Medical officers were the target of blame for apparently not noticing maltreatments, even in cases where they claimed they had, adding another angle to the dismissal of medical officers studied by Price.Footnote 155 The Commission showed their ultimate powers in surprisingly quiet ways, though. This was illustrated in both the suppression of the scandal, and their careful wording of circulars, which were clearly designed to prevent similar cases of child abuse coming to light. Their initial reluctance, and then slow response to the report of the Select Committee, also shows the Commission in a powerful position. Their independence, notably challenged at the end of the Commission's life in 1847, allowed them to develop policies slowly, ignoring the suffering that children and adult inmates may have endured in the meantime.
The placement of blame in this scandal illustrates both the inter-union tension and the vacuum of care that could develop – even for the most vulnerable poor traditionally thought to be in poverty through no fault of their own – under the New Poor Laws. Contracting-out practices were at the root of this problem. During the old poor laws, such arrangements were common, but we lack the documents to explore the quality of care the vulnerable obtained in these circumstances. This New Poor Law scandal, though, shows us that when a financial arrangement such as this was made, responsibility for moved parishioners could be overlooked, or more actively and strategically avoided altogether. We have instances of both in this scandal. The Droxford ‘Guardians of the poor’ experienced both a physical and personal distance from the poor they had sent away, so the welfare of the latter could easily go unnoticed. However, these Guardians’ lack of interest in and respect for the policies and procedures agreed upon with the Fareham Union and developed in tandem with A'Court, demonstrates a more wilful disinclination to consider the health and therefore well-being of the poor they moved. Evidently, the most demanding, in terms of care, and therefore the most vulnerable of inmates, were deliberately placed into this gap of responsibility. And because the children did not ‘belong’ to any parish of the Fareham Union, they did not ‘belong’ within that institution, and their needs in the eyes of Fareham workhouse staff were peripheral to those of the majority of workhouse inmates. We get a sense of the low priority child welfare took through the detail of the scandal: not raising concerns about their health, constraining them within stocks, and moving them in the winter in thin clothing, as well as restricting their diet, are all decisions that demonstrate the place these children assumed in the minds of the Fareham master, matron, medical officer, visiting committee and schoolmistress in the day-to-day running of a workhouse. How many times this gap of responsibility opened up during the poor laws, and how many times vulnerable inmates faced maltreatment, neglect and abuse within it, is yet to be the subject of significant research.
What is noticeably different about this scandal, compared to the early New Poor Law scandals at Bridgwater and Andover, for instance, is the lack of support for those maltreated within the system. In the case of the Bridgwater Scandal, the medical scandal impacted upon the pay and conditions of medical officers, and was taken up by key national medical groups, and with the support of MPs there was significant pressure for medical relief policy development. The bone-crushing ban was only accelerated by the Andover Scandal. In previous years, there was a growing campaign among Chartist and anti-New Poor Law MPs, to ban the work practice due to the severe health impacts it had on inmates. There was no particular interest group outside of the formal welfare and governmental structures campaigning for the needs of these ‘little helpless children’, as A'Court described them, and limited support within them.Footnote 156 We saw in the case of Jane Kingston how families could, at times, bring cases to justice. But without kinship, who was going to care? No pamphlets were produced on the treatment of the three children, no pressure groups took up the case and lobbied for reform, and even George Robert Wythen Baxter's infamous anti-New Poor Law publication, The book of the Bastilles, a compendium of abuses and neglect from national and local newspapers, omitted the case.Footnote 157 Kay was an exception as he had particular interests in pauper education, but interests that the Commission encouraged him to pursue. He was on the Committee of Council on Education, and both he and Tufnell were periodically asked to make special reports on the topic, all before they started experimenting with new education systems. The lack of interest in the welfare of children could have something to do with the timing of this scandal. It arose in the late 1830s, at a time when there was no significant concern or, as Ian Butler and Mark Drakeford put it, ‘policy strain’ within government or the Commission surrounding the welfare of children.Footnote 158 In the 1840s, the Commission was more receptive to criticisms of Kay and others, and also the Children's Employment Commission started to debate what children could be expected to do within the workplace. As such, there was a surge in interest in both the role and treatment of working-class children, in terms of both their education and employment. As Peter Kirby states, the mid-nineteenth century was a ‘crucial period of economic, social and epidemiological transition’.Footnote 159 There is little wonder that the Workhouse Rules, providing separate stipulations for the treatment for refractory children, were developed and enforced within this context, and not before.
These children's experiences did not reach official channels through their own voices. They reached the Commons, national newspapers, and then Somerset House, via clergymen and a magistrate. The relationships between the magistracy and the labouring poor has been well researched, especially during the old poor laws, finding the magistrates in the role of both protectors and persecutors of the poor depending on the personality and politics of the individual.Footnote 160 The relationships between local clergy and local poor has yet to receive significant attention. How and why they were concerned with the conditions of the poorest, and the implications of the New Poor Law workhouse system, are yet to be explored. To what extent did they assume responsibility for the poorest, and on what other occasions did they act as a moral megaphone in their communities, bringing cases of maltreatment to the foreground?
As I have highlighted elsewhere, scandals ‘acted as an important feedback mechanism between policy implementation and policy-making during the early years of the New Poor Law’.Footnote 161 The anti-New Poor Law stance, among MPs and others, helped the system to identify areas of policy strain, and the policies created in the shadow of scandals ‘extended the powers’ of the Commission and Boards of Guardians, ultimately ensuring their longevity.Footnote 162 Indeed, the Commission made general policies in response to scandals, and the Guardians adapted to them, at times reluctantly and often slowly. But such action gave validity – or at least an impression of this – to the new workhouse-based welfare system. This case study gives an insight into the context and creation of an extra layer of self-protection on the part of the Commission, however. The Workhouse Rules of 1841 made individual employees of the workhouse system, rather than the system itself, accountable for their excessive punishments. By setting parameters for acceptable modes of punishment, and enforcing a system of recording of these punishments, the Commission made the master, matron, schoolmistress, schoolmaster, porters, nurses and other union staff individually responsible for their actions. When they strayed beyond set parameters they either entered a place where they could be dismissed easily, or a courtroom. In both contexts their conduct was questioned, not the legitimacy of the system as a whole. Then the die was cast. The Poor Law Board, created to replace the Commission in 1847, established centralised union staff ledgers which, as well as the names and salaries of staff, recorded when and how employees’ roles came to an end in a bid to trace and control the whereabouts of dismissed staff.Footnote 163
Finally, there is a debate to be had among welfare historians about how effective these policies and practices were. The 1841 Rules may have, as Lesley Hulonce suggests, led to more uniformity in punishment styles, bodily harm such as the ‘pulling or “clipping” of ears … survived long into the twentieth century’.Footnote 164 Indeed, debates around what forms of punishment were acceptable or unacceptable were very complex in the Victorian era. As Judith Rowbotham has examined, for organisations in loco parentis these boundaries were shifting and corporal punishment, in particular of children, was often made on moral grounds.Footnote 165 The continuance of bodily punishment is well known, regardless of the ‘official record’ and stance of the Local Government Board in the 1870s, which claimed that the majority of unions across Britain implemented little or none whatsoever.Footnote 166 From new research on autobiographies and memoirs we learn that such severe punishments continued with regularity under the New Poor Laws, leaving people with lasting, harrowing memories.Footnote 167
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Tom Akehurst, Bernard Harris, Alannah Tomkins, the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. The author would also like to thank everyone working in the field of welfare and poor law history who support each other in the pursuit of understanding the treatment and lives of people in the past.
