Charles Dickens made the Victorian workhouse famous, but the reality behind Oliver Twist was even worse than fiction.
This episode tells how workhouses treated Britain’s poorest people, and how pensions and the welfare state finally replaced them.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the Victorian workhouse, the 19th century institution which housed the most desperate people in Britain.
[00:00:33] We'll learn why they were created, what life was really like inside them, hear some shocking stories, and learn how they were replaced by the welfare state we have today.
[00:00:45] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:52] It is the winter of 1837.
[00:00:56] A small boy stands in a large stone hall. Around him, other children sit in rows, hunched over their bowls. The meal is gruel, which is water with a little oatmeal stirred into it.
[00:01:12] It's the same meal every day, which the boys devour out of necessity.
[00:01:19] The portions are measly, and their stomachs are again rumbling minutes after they have finished eating.
[00:01:27] One boy walks up to the master, nervously.
[00:01:31] He holds out his bowl.
[00:01:33] "Please, sir," he says. "I want some more."
[00:01:37] The master cannot believe the request. "What?", he asks, before declaring that the boy will be hanged one day.
[00:01:47] You may recognise this as the start of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.
[00:01:53] That image, this of a small, frightened, starving child asking for a little more food, became one of the most famous in English literature.
[00:02:04] The location for this scene was of course the workhouse, Victorian Britain's answer to the question of what to do with the poorest in society.
[00:02:16] Now, to understand where workhouses come from, we need to go back a few hundred years to talk about how the British state dealt with the poorest people in society.
[00:02:30] The short answer is it didn't.
[00:02:33] For much of British history, if you were unable to work and support yourself, tough luck. You'd be reduced to begging, perhaps pushed into prostitution, or to relying on the charity of others.
[00:02:49] This was improved slightly in 1601, under Elizabeth I, when a law was passed that made parishes — the groups of local churches — they were responsible for looking after the extreme poor in the local area.
[00:03:07] If you were destitute, you could apply for what was called outdoor relief, which was a small amount of money or food to help you survive in your own home.
[00:03:19] This was later expanded to even include the working poor, whereby parishes topped up the wages of underpaid workers to ensure that they had enough money to support their families.
[00:03:33] It was imperfect. It was inconsistent, and it varied from parish to parish, from one area to the next.
[00:03:43] But it allowed people to remain with their families in their own homes.
[00:03:49] The problem, as the politicians and economists of the time saw it, was it was too easy to get.
[00:03:56] It was, in their view, encouraging the poor to stay poor.
[00:04:02] If you could receive a little money without working, why would you bother working?
[00:04:08] On the other side of the coin, it was also, they said, letting employers get away with paying low wages because they knew that their workers would receive top-ups from the parish.
[00:04:20] And there was an ever increasing number of people in Britain who were forced to turn to this, either to request top-ups of their low wages, or who had fallen into destitution.
[00:04:33] By the early 19th century, Britain’s population had more than doubled, growing from six and a half million to fourteen million in just eighty years.
[00:04:45] The industrial revolution had transformed the economy. Factories had replaced cottage industries. Millions of people flooded from the countryside to the cities in search of work.
[00:05:00] In these cities, places like Manchester, Birmingham, and London, work was irregular, housing was cramped and expensive, and millions of people were just a hair's breadth away from absolute destitution.
[00:05:17] The old structures of local charity and parish relief were never designed for this, and were creaking under the demand.
[00:05:27] Between 1780 and 1831, the cost of poor relief in England and Wales had roughly quadrupled, gone up four times.
[00:05:38] The money was going out, but the problem kept growing.
[00:05:43] So, in 1832, a Royal Commission was set up to investigate.
[00:05:50] Its key architect was a man named Edwin Chadwick, who was a follower of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
[00:05:59] As such, he believed in systems, in efficiency, in the idea that human behaviour could be shaped by designing the right incentives.
[00:06:11] The Commission's report came back with a series of suggestions about what to do about poverty, which were put into law with the Poor Law Amendment of 1834.
[00:06:24] And specifically, in terms of what we're talking about today, this led directly to the institutionalisation of the workhouse.
[00:06:34] Now, workhouses were not a new invention. They had existed in various forms since the early 1700s as places where the destitute could go to receive food and shelter in exchange for work.
[00:06:50] But they were patchy. Inconsistently run. They varied enormously from one parish to the next.
[00:06:59] What the 1834 Act did was take this existing idea and transform it.
[00:07:08] Every area of England and Wales would now have a workhouse. Every workhouse would operate on the same national principles.
[00:07:18] And those principles would be deliberately, intentionally harsh.
[00:07:25] At the heart of this was a principle with a rather cold name: "less eligibility."
[00:07:32] The conditions inside a workhouse must be worse than the conditions of the lowest independent labourer outside it.
[00:07:43] In other words, however bad it might be working the worst possible job that paid you the least possible salary, life in the workhouse needed to be worse.
[00:07:56] The logic was that it needed to be a genuine deterrent, which only the truly destitute would turn to. The state would help in this case, but it would make absolutely certain you did not want to be there.
[00:08:11] It was designed like this because it had a specific target in mind: the able-bodied man who was choosing idleness over work.
[00:08:22] Force him into a place unpleasant enough, so the argument went, and he would find a job.
[00:08:30] But the majority of people who actually ended up inside the workhouse were not idle young men.
[00:08:38] The majority were the elderly, who had outlived their ability to earn a living.
[00:08:44] They were the chronically sick, who could not work because of illness or disability.
[00:08:49] They were children, many of them orphans.
[00:08:52] And they were women: pregnant women, unmarried mothers, widows, or women whose husbands had abandoned them.
[00:09:01] There were about 600 workhouses across England and Wales, with an estimated 150,000 people living in them at any one point.
[00:09:13] And life inside, well, it was incredibly grim.
[00:09:17] Men and women were separate. Children were separated from parents, brothers from sisters.
[00:09:25] Their clothes would be taken away, to be replaced by a rough grey uniform.
[00:09:31] The diet inside was set by a national schedule.
[00:09:36] Breakfast was gruel, every morning. Lunch was bread and perhaps a little cheese.
[00:09:43] In the evening, a thin broth, or very occasionally a small portion of cooked meat. Suet pudding might appear once or twice a week.
[00:09:54] And as for the quantities, they were calculated to be just enough to stop you dying of hunger, but nothing more.
[00:10:03] And no, you certainly couldn't ask for a second helping.
[00:10:08] And when you weren't eating your meagre rations of food, you were working, long hours doing hard, tedious work.
[00:10:18] One of the most common tasks given to women and children was unpicking old rope, separating the fibres so it could be used again. You had to use your bare fingers, and it was slow, relentless work. Your fingertips would crack and bleed. And it never ended. Once you finished one piece of rope, there was always another to be done.
[00:10:43] Men were often set to breaking stones to lay on roads, or to grinding bones that would be used as fertiliser.
[00:10:52] Or perhaps to working the treadmill, which was a large paddle wheel that you climbed continuously for hours at a time.
[00:11:01] The treadmill had originally been used to pump water or grind grain.
[00:11:07] But by this period, in many workhouses, it served no productive purpose at all. It was used simply because it was exhausting and unpleasant.
[00:11:18] In terms of the architecture of these workhouses, many were built around the same principles of order and control that you have in prisons, where guards can stand in the centre and observe what everyone is doing.
[00:11:34] Open dormitories. Shared dining halls with long, visible sight lines.
[00:11:39] A layout built around the idea that the master and matron could see everything, and that inmates knew there was nowhere to hide.
[00:11:50] Importantly, it wasn't a prison.
[00:11:52] You could leave, in theory. But you had to give notice, and in many cases wait twenty-four hours before being discharged.
[00:12:02] And more importantly, you left with nothing: no money, no food, nothing to support you in the outside world.
[00:12:11] For the elderly, the chronically ill, and the very young, there was often nowhere else to go.
[00:12:18] They entered, they stayed, and in many cases, they died there.
[00:12:25] And the conditions inside were no secret; everyone knew what lay behind those gates, and most people did everything they possibly could to avoid it.
[00:12:37] Yet in some workhouses, the reality was worse than anyone imagined.
[00:12:44] In 1845, a small item appeared in a local Hampshire newspaper. It concerned the workhouse in the market town of Andover, in southern England.
[00:12:57] Its inmates were mostly agricultural labourers, men and women who had worked the land their whole lives and had fallen into destitution when work dried up, or when illness or injury made them unable to continue.
[00:13:14] They had been set to work grinding bones. Old animal bones, mostly horse bones, collected from farms and slaughterhouses. You reduced them to powder using a heavy metal rod, and the powder was sold as fertiliser.
[00:13:33] The newspaper report alleged that the inmates were so hungry that they were fighting over the bones before they ground them. They were biting and gnawing at them. Sucking out the marrow. Scraping off whatever scraps of rotting meat and gristle remained.
[00:13:52] The story reached London, and it was a scandal.
[00:13:57] These were not starving people outside the system. These were starving people inside it, being theoretically cared for by the state.
[00:14:08] A parliamentary committee was set up. And what it found was worse than the newspaper had suggested.
[00:14:16] The master of the Andover workhouse was a man named Colin McDougal, a former army sergeant. He had been, the committee found, habitually drunk. He had been brutal towards inmates, using physical violence against men and women, and sexually abusing the women.
[00:14:35] One witness testified that the inmates had been so hungry that when a horse died in the yard, they had been grateful, because it meant more bones to grind, and more scraps to fight over.
[00:14:49] A woman testified that she had been too frightened to report anything, because to report the master was to risk punishment, and in the workhouse, the master controlled everything: your food, your sleeping arrangements, and your ability to see your children.
[00:15:06] The workhouse master was dismissed. There were some minor changes to the law.
[00:15:12] But the men and women of the Andover workhouse went back to grinding bones.
[00:15:19] Now, almost from the creation of the workhouse laws, critics had been arguing that it was inhumane, unnecessarily predatory towards those who were already at rock bottom.
[00:15:34] The argument for it was always that it was a deterrent, that in making the workhouse so awful you would ensure a strong incentive for people to support themselves.
[00:15:47] Or to put it another way, if you made poverty easier and more comfortable, you would encourage it.
[00:15:55] The reality is that it was an absolute last resort for practically everyone.
[00:16:01] You might remember a lady who was forced to send her sons to the workhouse, from an episode early this year.
[00:16:09] In 1896, a music hall singer had fallen on particularly hard times, and with nobody to turn to and no way to support her sons, she made the agonising decision to send them to a workhouse.
[00:16:27] Her older son was twelve. Her younger son was seven.
[00:16:31] The woman's name was Hannah, and her younger son was Charlie, Charlie Chaplin.
[00:16:37] Charlie Chaplin would later describe that morning in his autobiography. His mother had tried to keep their spirits up on the walk to the workhouse. But the boys, he wrote, could sense her despair. And then, at the workhouse gates, they were parted.
[00:16:56] Charlie and his brother to the boys' ward. Their mother to the women's.
[00:17:02] Chaplin said later that the humiliations of those years were what made him who he was. He went on to become, by many measures, the most famous man in the world, and if you'd like to hear more about his life, episode 598 is the one for you.
[00:17:19] Now, fortunately for Charlie he didn't stay in the workhouse forever, and the entire system itself would soon start to be dismantled.
[00:17:29] Reformers had been pushing for a total abolition of the workhouse system, to be replaced with proper state services for health, unemployment, and old age.
[00:17:41] And they came eventually.
[00:17:43] Old age pensions arrived in 1908, meaning the elderly no longer had to choose between the workhouse and starvation.
[00:17:53] Then in 1911 came what was called national insurance. The idea was that workers, employers, and the government would each contribute a small amount every week to a shared fund. And if you then lost your job or fell seriously ill, you could draw from that fund.
[00:18:14] This still exists today, by the way; if you work in the UK you'll know that every month a portion of your salary is set aside for "National Insurance contributions". It's pretty much the same thing.
[00:18:28] Now, even after the introduction of pensions and of national insurance, the workhouse remained.
[00:18:35] The reason was that neither reform was universal. National insurance in 1911 only covered workers in regulated employment in specific industries. It did not cover casual labourers, domestic servants, or the self-employed. Old age pensions were only paid to those over seventy. Anyone who fell outside those categories still had no alternative to the workhouse.
[00:19:02] It was not until 1948, with the National Assistance Act and the formal creation of the welfare state, that the Poor Law, and the workhouse, were finally abolished.
[00:19:15] Today, a pregnant single mother, an orphaned child or a man too old to work is no longer forced to ring the bell outside the workhouse gates; there are systems and safeguards in place to ensure that everyone, in theory, has the right to a dignified existence.
[00:19:36] Yet the discussions about how to do that are much the same as those that were going on 200 years ago.
[00:19:43] How does a society support people who cannot support themselves, without creating a system that some politicians and taxpayers see as unfair, or that creates a disincentive to work?
[00:19:56] And how do you make that judgement when poverty is caused not only by unemployment, but by illness, old age, low wages, insecure work and high housing costs?
[00:20:10] Like the Royal Commission back in 1832, there are those who argue that it is now too easy to fall back on state support, and that state support is so great that there is often not much financial difference between working and not working.
[00:20:28] And of course there are plenty of people who say this is nonsense, and that these people want to work, but there simply aren't sufficient jobs for them.
[00:20:38] Fortunately for everyone concerned, nobody is suggesting the revival of the workhouse.
[00:20:44] That has been forever consigned to the pages of Oliver Twist.
[00:20:50] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Victorian workhouses.
[00:20:55] We've made quite a few related episodes: episode number 598 on Charlie Chaplin, there's even an episode on Jeremy Bentham, which is episode number 116.
[00:21:06] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:12] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the Victorian workhouse, the 19th century institution which housed the most desperate people in Britain.
[00:00:33] We'll learn why they were created, what life was really like inside them, hear some shocking stories, and learn how they were replaced by the welfare state we have today.
[00:00:45] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:52] It is the winter of 1837.
[00:00:56] A small boy stands in a large stone hall. Around him, other children sit in rows, hunched over their bowls. The meal is gruel, which is water with a little oatmeal stirred into it.
[00:01:12] It's the same meal every day, which the boys devour out of necessity.
[00:01:19] The portions are measly, and their stomachs are again rumbling minutes after they have finished eating.
[00:01:27] One boy walks up to the master, nervously.
[00:01:31] He holds out his bowl.
[00:01:33] "Please, sir," he says. "I want some more."
[00:01:37] The master cannot believe the request. "What?", he asks, before declaring that the boy will be hanged one day.
[00:01:47] You may recognise this as the start of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.
[00:01:53] That image, this of a small, frightened, starving child asking for a little more food, became one of the most famous in English literature.
[00:02:04] The location for this scene was of course the workhouse, Victorian Britain's answer to the question of what to do with the poorest in society.
[00:02:16] Now, to understand where workhouses come from, we need to go back a few hundred years to talk about how the British state dealt with the poorest people in society.
[00:02:30] The short answer is it didn't.
[00:02:33] For much of British history, if you were unable to work and support yourself, tough luck. You'd be reduced to begging, perhaps pushed into prostitution, or to relying on the charity of others.
[00:02:49] This was improved slightly in 1601, under Elizabeth I, when a law was passed that made parishes — the groups of local churches — they were responsible for looking after the extreme poor in the local area.
[00:03:07] If you were destitute, you could apply for what was called outdoor relief, which was a small amount of money or food to help you survive in your own home.
[00:03:19] This was later expanded to even include the working poor, whereby parishes topped up the wages of underpaid workers to ensure that they had enough money to support their families.
[00:03:33] It was imperfect. It was inconsistent, and it varied from parish to parish, from one area to the next.
[00:03:43] But it allowed people to remain with their families in their own homes.
[00:03:49] The problem, as the politicians and economists of the time saw it, was it was too easy to get.
[00:03:56] It was, in their view, encouraging the poor to stay poor.
[00:04:02] If you could receive a little money without working, why would you bother working?
[00:04:08] On the other side of the coin, it was also, they said, letting employers get away with paying low wages because they knew that their workers would receive top-ups from the parish.
[00:04:20] And there was an ever increasing number of people in Britain who were forced to turn to this, either to request top-ups of their low wages, or who had fallen into destitution.
[00:04:33] By the early 19th century, Britain’s population had more than doubled, growing from six and a half million to fourteen million in just eighty years.
[00:04:45] The industrial revolution had transformed the economy. Factories had replaced cottage industries. Millions of people flooded from the countryside to the cities in search of work.
[00:05:00] In these cities, places like Manchester, Birmingham, and London, work was irregular, housing was cramped and expensive, and millions of people were just a hair's breadth away from absolute destitution.
[00:05:17] The old structures of local charity and parish relief were never designed for this, and were creaking under the demand.
[00:05:27] Between 1780 and 1831, the cost of poor relief in England and Wales had roughly quadrupled, gone up four times.
[00:05:38] The money was going out, but the problem kept growing.
[00:05:43] So, in 1832, a Royal Commission was set up to investigate.
[00:05:50] Its key architect was a man named Edwin Chadwick, who was a follower of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
[00:05:59] As such, he believed in systems, in efficiency, in the idea that human behaviour could be shaped by designing the right incentives.
[00:06:11] The Commission's report came back with a series of suggestions about what to do about poverty, which were put into law with the Poor Law Amendment of 1834.
[00:06:24] And specifically, in terms of what we're talking about today, this led directly to the institutionalisation of the workhouse.
[00:06:34] Now, workhouses were not a new invention. They had existed in various forms since the early 1700s as places where the destitute could go to receive food and shelter in exchange for work.
[00:06:50] But they were patchy. Inconsistently run. They varied enormously from one parish to the next.
[00:06:59] What the 1834 Act did was take this existing idea and transform it.
[00:07:08] Every area of England and Wales would now have a workhouse. Every workhouse would operate on the same national principles.
[00:07:18] And those principles would be deliberately, intentionally harsh.
[00:07:25] At the heart of this was a principle with a rather cold name: "less eligibility."
[00:07:32] The conditions inside a workhouse must be worse than the conditions of the lowest independent labourer outside it.
[00:07:43] In other words, however bad it might be working the worst possible job that paid you the least possible salary, life in the workhouse needed to be worse.
[00:07:56] The logic was that it needed to be a genuine deterrent, which only the truly destitute would turn to. The state would help in this case, but it would make absolutely certain you did not want to be there.
[00:08:11] It was designed like this because it had a specific target in mind: the able-bodied man who was choosing idleness over work.
[00:08:22] Force him into a place unpleasant enough, so the argument went, and he would find a job.
[00:08:30] But the majority of people who actually ended up inside the workhouse were not idle young men.
[00:08:38] The majority were the elderly, who had outlived their ability to earn a living.
[00:08:44] They were the chronically sick, who could not work because of illness or disability.
[00:08:49] They were children, many of them orphans.
[00:08:52] And they were women: pregnant women, unmarried mothers, widows, or women whose husbands had abandoned them.
[00:09:01] There were about 600 workhouses across England and Wales, with an estimated 150,000 people living in them at any one point.
[00:09:13] And life inside, well, it was incredibly grim.
[00:09:17] Men and women were separate. Children were separated from parents, brothers from sisters.
[00:09:25] Their clothes would be taken away, to be replaced by a rough grey uniform.
[00:09:31] The diet inside was set by a national schedule.
[00:09:36] Breakfast was gruel, every morning. Lunch was bread and perhaps a little cheese.
[00:09:43] In the evening, a thin broth, or very occasionally a small portion of cooked meat. Suet pudding might appear once or twice a week.
[00:09:54] And as for the quantities, they were calculated to be just enough to stop you dying of hunger, but nothing more.
[00:10:03] And no, you certainly couldn't ask for a second helping.
[00:10:08] And when you weren't eating your meagre rations of food, you were working, long hours doing hard, tedious work.
[00:10:18] One of the most common tasks given to women and children was unpicking old rope, separating the fibres so it could be used again. You had to use your bare fingers, and it was slow, relentless work. Your fingertips would crack and bleed. And it never ended. Once you finished one piece of rope, there was always another to be done.
[00:10:43] Men were often set to breaking stones to lay on roads, or to grinding bones that would be used as fertiliser.
[00:10:52] Or perhaps to working the treadmill, which was a large paddle wheel that you climbed continuously for hours at a time.
[00:11:01] The treadmill had originally been used to pump water or grind grain.
[00:11:07] But by this period, in many workhouses, it served no productive purpose at all. It was used simply because it was exhausting and unpleasant.
[00:11:18] In terms of the architecture of these workhouses, many were built around the same principles of order and control that you have in prisons, where guards can stand in the centre and observe what everyone is doing.
[00:11:34] Open dormitories. Shared dining halls with long, visible sight lines.
[00:11:39] A layout built around the idea that the master and matron could see everything, and that inmates knew there was nowhere to hide.
[00:11:50] Importantly, it wasn't a prison.
[00:11:52] You could leave, in theory. But you had to give notice, and in many cases wait twenty-four hours before being discharged.
[00:12:02] And more importantly, you left with nothing: no money, no food, nothing to support you in the outside world.
[00:12:11] For the elderly, the chronically ill, and the very young, there was often nowhere else to go.
[00:12:18] They entered, they stayed, and in many cases, they died there.
[00:12:25] And the conditions inside were no secret; everyone knew what lay behind those gates, and most people did everything they possibly could to avoid it.
[00:12:37] Yet in some workhouses, the reality was worse than anyone imagined.
[00:12:44] In 1845, a small item appeared in a local Hampshire newspaper. It concerned the workhouse in the market town of Andover, in southern England.
[00:12:57] Its inmates were mostly agricultural labourers, men and women who had worked the land their whole lives and had fallen into destitution when work dried up, or when illness or injury made them unable to continue.
[00:13:14] They had been set to work grinding bones. Old animal bones, mostly horse bones, collected from farms and slaughterhouses. You reduced them to powder using a heavy metal rod, and the powder was sold as fertiliser.
[00:13:33] The newspaper report alleged that the inmates were so hungry that they were fighting over the bones before they ground them. They were biting and gnawing at them. Sucking out the marrow. Scraping off whatever scraps of rotting meat and gristle remained.
[00:13:52] The story reached London, and it was a scandal.
[00:13:57] These were not starving people outside the system. These were starving people inside it, being theoretically cared for by the state.
[00:14:08] A parliamentary committee was set up. And what it found was worse than the newspaper had suggested.
[00:14:16] The master of the Andover workhouse was a man named Colin McDougal, a former army sergeant. He had been, the committee found, habitually drunk. He had been brutal towards inmates, using physical violence against men and women, and sexually abusing the women.
[00:14:35] One witness testified that the inmates had been so hungry that when a horse died in the yard, they had been grateful, because it meant more bones to grind, and more scraps to fight over.
[00:14:49] A woman testified that she had been too frightened to report anything, because to report the master was to risk punishment, and in the workhouse, the master controlled everything: your food, your sleeping arrangements, and your ability to see your children.
[00:15:06] The workhouse master was dismissed. There were some minor changes to the law.
[00:15:12] But the men and women of the Andover workhouse went back to grinding bones.
[00:15:19] Now, almost from the creation of the workhouse laws, critics had been arguing that it was inhumane, unnecessarily predatory towards those who were already at rock bottom.
[00:15:34] The argument for it was always that it was a deterrent, that in making the workhouse so awful you would ensure a strong incentive for people to support themselves.
[00:15:47] Or to put it another way, if you made poverty easier and more comfortable, you would encourage it.
[00:15:55] The reality is that it was an absolute last resort for practically everyone.
[00:16:01] You might remember a lady who was forced to send her sons to the workhouse, from an episode early this year.
[00:16:09] In 1896, a music hall singer had fallen on particularly hard times, and with nobody to turn to and no way to support her sons, she made the agonising decision to send them to a workhouse.
[00:16:27] Her older son was twelve. Her younger son was seven.
[00:16:31] The woman's name was Hannah, and her younger son was Charlie, Charlie Chaplin.
[00:16:37] Charlie Chaplin would later describe that morning in his autobiography. His mother had tried to keep their spirits up on the walk to the workhouse. But the boys, he wrote, could sense her despair. And then, at the workhouse gates, they were parted.
[00:16:56] Charlie and his brother to the boys' ward. Their mother to the women's.
[00:17:02] Chaplin said later that the humiliations of those years were what made him who he was. He went on to become, by many measures, the most famous man in the world, and if you'd like to hear more about his life, episode 598 is the one for you.
[00:17:19] Now, fortunately for Charlie he didn't stay in the workhouse forever, and the entire system itself would soon start to be dismantled.
[00:17:29] Reformers had been pushing for a total abolition of the workhouse system, to be replaced with proper state services for health, unemployment, and old age.
[00:17:41] And they came eventually.
[00:17:43] Old age pensions arrived in 1908, meaning the elderly no longer had to choose between the workhouse and starvation.
[00:17:53] Then in 1911 came what was called national insurance. The idea was that workers, employers, and the government would each contribute a small amount every week to a shared fund. And if you then lost your job or fell seriously ill, you could draw from that fund.
[00:18:14] This still exists today, by the way; if you work in the UK you'll know that every month a portion of your salary is set aside for "National Insurance contributions". It's pretty much the same thing.
[00:18:28] Now, even after the introduction of pensions and of national insurance, the workhouse remained.
[00:18:35] The reason was that neither reform was universal. National insurance in 1911 only covered workers in regulated employment in specific industries. It did not cover casual labourers, domestic servants, or the self-employed. Old age pensions were only paid to those over seventy. Anyone who fell outside those categories still had no alternative to the workhouse.
[00:19:02] It was not until 1948, with the National Assistance Act and the formal creation of the welfare state, that the Poor Law, and the workhouse, were finally abolished.
[00:19:15] Today, a pregnant single mother, an orphaned child or a man too old to work is no longer forced to ring the bell outside the workhouse gates; there are systems and safeguards in place to ensure that everyone, in theory, has the right to a dignified existence.
[00:19:36] Yet the discussions about how to do that are much the same as those that were going on 200 years ago.
[00:19:43] How does a society support people who cannot support themselves, without creating a system that some politicians and taxpayers see as unfair, or that creates a disincentive to work?
[00:19:56] And how do you make that judgement when poverty is caused not only by unemployment, but by illness, old age, low wages, insecure work and high housing costs?
[00:20:10] Like the Royal Commission back in 1832, there are those who argue that it is now too easy to fall back on state support, and that state support is so great that there is often not much financial difference between working and not working.
[00:20:28] And of course there are plenty of people who say this is nonsense, and that these people want to work, but there simply aren't sufficient jobs for them.
[00:20:38] Fortunately for everyone concerned, nobody is suggesting the revival of the workhouse.
[00:20:44] That has been forever consigned to the pages of Oliver Twist.
[00:20:50] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Victorian workhouses.
[00:20:55] We've made quite a few related episodes: episode number 598 on Charlie Chaplin, there's even an episode on Jeremy Bentham, which is episode number 116.
[00:21:06] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:12] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the Victorian workhouse, the 19th century institution which housed the most desperate people in Britain.
[00:00:33] We'll learn why they were created, what life was really like inside them, hear some shocking stories, and learn how they were replaced by the welfare state we have today.
[00:00:45] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:52] It is the winter of 1837.
[00:00:56] A small boy stands in a large stone hall. Around him, other children sit in rows, hunched over their bowls. The meal is gruel, which is water with a little oatmeal stirred into it.
[00:01:12] It's the same meal every day, which the boys devour out of necessity.
[00:01:19] The portions are measly, and their stomachs are again rumbling minutes after they have finished eating.
[00:01:27] One boy walks up to the master, nervously.
[00:01:31] He holds out his bowl.
[00:01:33] "Please, sir," he says. "I want some more."
[00:01:37] The master cannot believe the request. "What?", he asks, before declaring that the boy will be hanged one day.
[00:01:47] You may recognise this as the start of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.
[00:01:53] That image, this of a small, frightened, starving child asking for a little more food, became one of the most famous in English literature.
[00:02:04] The location for this scene was of course the workhouse, Victorian Britain's answer to the question of what to do with the poorest in society.
[00:02:16] Now, to understand where workhouses come from, we need to go back a few hundred years to talk about how the British state dealt with the poorest people in society.
[00:02:30] The short answer is it didn't.
[00:02:33] For much of British history, if you were unable to work and support yourself, tough luck. You'd be reduced to begging, perhaps pushed into prostitution, or to relying on the charity of others.
[00:02:49] This was improved slightly in 1601, under Elizabeth I, when a law was passed that made parishes — the groups of local churches — they were responsible for looking after the extreme poor in the local area.
[00:03:07] If you were destitute, you could apply for what was called outdoor relief, which was a small amount of money or food to help you survive in your own home.
[00:03:19] This was later expanded to even include the working poor, whereby parishes topped up the wages of underpaid workers to ensure that they had enough money to support their families.
[00:03:33] It was imperfect. It was inconsistent, and it varied from parish to parish, from one area to the next.
[00:03:43] But it allowed people to remain with their families in their own homes.
[00:03:49] The problem, as the politicians and economists of the time saw it, was it was too easy to get.
[00:03:56] It was, in their view, encouraging the poor to stay poor.
[00:04:02] If you could receive a little money without working, why would you bother working?
[00:04:08] On the other side of the coin, it was also, they said, letting employers get away with paying low wages because they knew that their workers would receive top-ups from the parish.
[00:04:20] And there was an ever increasing number of people in Britain who were forced to turn to this, either to request top-ups of their low wages, or who had fallen into destitution.
[00:04:33] By the early 19th century, Britain’s population had more than doubled, growing from six and a half million to fourteen million in just eighty years.
[00:04:45] The industrial revolution had transformed the economy. Factories had replaced cottage industries. Millions of people flooded from the countryside to the cities in search of work.
[00:05:00] In these cities, places like Manchester, Birmingham, and London, work was irregular, housing was cramped and expensive, and millions of people were just a hair's breadth away from absolute destitution.
[00:05:17] The old structures of local charity and parish relief were never designed for this, and were creaking under the demand.
[00:05:27] Between 1780 and 1831, the cost of poor relief in England and Wales had roughly quadrupled, gone up four times.
[00:05:38] The money was going out, but the problem kept growing.
[00:05:43] So, in 1832, a Royal Commission was set up to investigate.
[00:05:50] Its key architect was a man named Edwin Chadwick, who was a follower of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
[00:05:59] As such, he believed in systems, in efficiency, in the idea that human behaviour could be shaped by designing the right incentives.
[00:06:11] The Commission's report came back with a series of suggestions about what to do about poverty, which were put into law with the Poor Law Amendment of 1834.
[00:06:24] And specifically, in terms of what we're talking about today, this led directly to the institutionalisation of the workhouse.
[00:06:34] Now, workhouses were not a new invention. They had existed in various forms since the early 1700s as places where the destitute could go to receive food and shelter in exchange for work.
[00:06:50] But they were patchy. Inconsistently run. They varied enormously from one parish to the next.
[00:06:59] What the 1834 Act did was take this existing idea and transform it.
[00:07:08] Every area of England and Wales would now have a workhouse. Every workhouse would operate on the same national principles.
[00:07:18] And those principles would be deliberately, intentionally harsh.
[00:07:25] At the heart of this was a principle with a rather cold name: "less eligibility."
[00:07:32] The conditions inside a workhouse must be worse than the conditions of the lowest independent labourer outside it.
[00:07:43] In other words, however bad it might be working the worst possible job that paid you the least possible salary, life in the workhouse needed to be worse.
[00:07:56] The logic was that it needed to be a genuine deterrent, which only the truly destitute would turn to. The state would help in this case, but it would make absolutely certain you did not want to be there.
[00:08:11] It was designed like this because it had a specific target in mind: the able-bodied man who was choosing idleness over work.
[00:08:22] Force him into a place unpleasant enough, so the argument went, and he would find a job.
[00:08:30] But the majority of people who actually ended up inside the workhouse were not idle young men.
[00:08:38] The majority were the elderly, who had outlived their ability to earn a living.
[00:08:44] They were the chronically sick, who could not work because of illness or disability.
[00:08:49] They were children, many of them orphans.
[00:08:52] And they were women: pregnant women, unmarried mothers, widows, or women whose husbands had abandoned them.
[00:09:01] There were about 600 workhouses across England and Wales, with an estimated 150,000 people living in them at any one point.
[00:09:13] And life inside, well, it was incredibly grim.
[00:09:17] Men and women were separate. Children were separated from parents, brothers from sisters.
[00:09:25] Their clothes would be taken away, to be replaced by a rough grey uniform.
[00:09:31] The diet inside was set by a national schedule.
[00:09:36] Breakfast was gruel, every morning. Lunch was bread and perhaps a little cheese.
[00:09:43] In the evening, a thin broth, or very occasionally a small portion of cooked meat. Suet pudding might appear once or twice a week.
[00:09:54] And as for the quantities, they were calculated to be just enough to stop you dying of hunger, but nothing more.
[00:10:03] And no, you certainly couldn't ask for a second helping.
[00:10:08] And when you weren't eating your meagre rations of food, you were working, long hours doing hard, tedious work.
[00:10:18] One of the most common tasks given to women and children was unpicking old rope, separating the fibres so it could be used again. You had to use your bare fingers, and it was slow, relentless work. Your fingertips would crack and bleed. And it never ended. Once you finished one piece of rope, there was always another to be done.
[00:10:43] Men were often set to breaking stones to lay on roads, or to grinding bones that would be used as fertiliser.
[00:10:52] Or perhaps to working the treadmill, which was a large paddle wheel that you climbed continuously for hours at a time.
[00:11:01] The treadmill had originally been used to pump water or grind grain.
[00:11:07] But by this period, in many workhouses, it served no productive purpose at all. It was used simply because it was exhausting and unpleasant.
[00:11:18] In terms of the architecture of these workhouses, many were built around the same principles of order and control that you have in prisons, where guards can stand in the centre and observe what everyone is doing.
[00:11:34] Open dormitories. Shared dining halls with long, visible sight lines.
[00:11:39] A layout built around the idea that the master and matron could see everything, and that inmates knew there was nowhere to hide.
[00:11:50] Importantly, it wasn't a prison.
[00:11:52] You could leave, in theory. But you had to give notice, and in many cases wait twenty-four hours before being discharged.
[00:12:02] And more importantly, you left with nothing: no money, no food, nothing to support you in the outside world.
[00:12:11] For the elderly, the chronically ill, and the very young, there was often nowhere else to go.
[00:12:18] They entered, they stayed, and in many cases, they died there.
[00:12:25] And the conditions inside were no secret; everyone knew what lay behind those gates, and most people did everything they possibly could to avoid it.
[00:12:37] Yet in some workhouses, the reality was worse than anyone imagined.
[00:12:44] In 1845, a small item appeared in a local Hampshire newspaper. It concerned the workhouse in the market town of Andover, in southern England.
[00:12:57] Its inmates were mostly agricultural labourers, men and women who had worked the land their whole lives and had fallen into destitution when work dried up, or when illness or injury made them unable to continue.
[00:13:14] They had been set to work grinding bones. Old animal bones, mostly horse bones, collected from farms and slaughterhouses. You reduced them to powder using a heavy metal rod, and the powder was sold as fertiliser.
[00:13:33] The newspaper report alleged that the inmates were so hungry that they were fighting over the bones before they ground them. They were biting and gnawing at them. Sucking out the marrow. Scraping off whatever scraps of rotting meat and gristle remained.
[00:13:52] The story reached London, and it was a scandal.
[00:13:57] These were not starving people outside the system. These were starving people inside it, being theoretically cared for by the state.
[00:14:08] A parliamentary committee was set up. And what it found was worse than the newspaper had suggested.
[00:14:16] The master of the Andover workhouse was a man named Colin McDougal, a former army sergeant. He had been, the committee found, habitually drunk. He had been brutal towards inmates, using physical violence against men and women, and sexually abusing the women.
[00:14:35] One witness testified that the inmates had been so hungry that when a horse died in the yard, they had been grateful, because it meant more bones to grind, and more scraps to fight over.
[00:14:49] A woman testified that she had been too frightened to report anything, because to report the master was to risk punishment, and in the workhouse, the master controlled everything: your food, your sleeping arrangements, and your ability to see your children.
[00:15:06] The workhouse master was dismissed. There were some minor changes to the law.
[00:15:12] But the men and women of the Andover workhouse went back to grinding bones.
[00:15:19] Now, almost from the creation of the workhouse laws, critics had been arguing that it was inhumane, unnecessarily predatory towards those who were already at rock bottom.
[00:15:34] The argument for it was always that it was a deterrent, that in making the workhouse so awful you would ensure a strong incentive for people to support themselves.
[00:15:47] Or to put it another way, if you made poverty easier and more comfortable, you would encourage it.
[00:15:55] The reality is that it was an absolute last resort for practically everyone.
[00:16:01] You might remember a lady who was forced to send her sons to the workhouse, from an episode early this year.
[00:16:09] In 1896, a music hall singer had fallen on particularly hard times, and with nobody to turn to and no way to support her sons, she made the agonising decision to send them to a workhouse.
[00:16:27] Her older son was twelve. Her younger son was seven.
[00:16:31] The woman's name was Hannah, and her younger son was Charlie, Charlie Chaplin.
[00:16:37] Charlie Chaplin would later describe that morning in his autobiography. His mother had tried to keep their spirits up on the walk to the workhouse. But the boys, he wrote, could sense her despair. And then, at the workhouse gates, they were parted.
[00:16:56] Charlie and his brother to the boys' ward. Their mother to the women's.
[00:17:02] Chaplin said later that the humiliations of those years were what made him who he was. He went on to become, by many measures, the most famous man in the world, and if you'd like to hear more about his life, episode 598 is the one for you.
[00:17:19] Now, fortunately for Charlie he didn't stay in the workhouse forever, and the entire system itself would soon start to be dismantled.
[00:17:29] Reformers had been pushing for a total abolition of the workhouse system, to be replaced with proper state services for health, unemployment, and old age.
[00:17:41] And they came eventually.
[00:17:43] Old age pensions arrived in 1908, meaning the elderly no longer had to choose between the workhouse and starvation.
[00:17:53] Then in 1911 came what was called national insurance. The idea was that workers, employers, and the government would each contribute a small amount every week to a shared fund. And if you then lost your job or fell seriously ill, you could draw from that fund.
[00:18:14] This still exists today, by the way; if you work in the UK you'll know that every month a portion of your salary is set aside for "National Insurance contributions". It's pretty much the same thing.
[00:18:28] Now, even after the introduction of pensions and of national insurance, the workhouse remained.
[00:18:35] The reason was that neither reform was universal. National insurance in 1911 only covered workers in regulated employment in specific industries. It did not cover casual labourers, domestic servants, or the self-employed. Old age pensions were only paid to those over seventy. Anyone who fell outside those categories still had no alternative to the workhouse.
[00:19:02] It was not until 1948, with the National Assistance Act and the formal creation of the welfare state, that the Poor Law, and the workhouse, were finally abolished.
[00:19:15] Today, a pregnant single mother, an orphaned child or a man too old to work is no longer forced to ring the bell outside the workhouse gates; there are systems and safeguards in place to ensure that everyone, in theory, has the right to a dignified existence.
[00:19:36] Yet the discussions about how to do that are much the same as those that were going on 200 years ago.
[00:19:43] How does a society support people who cannot support themselves, without creating a system that some politicians and taxpayers see as unfair, or that creates a disincentive to work?
[00:19:56] And how do you make that judgement when poverty is caused not only by unemployment, but by illness, old age, low wages, insecure work and high housing costs?
[00:20:10] Like the Royal Commission back in 1832, there are those who argue that it is now too easy to fall back on state support, and that state support is so great that there is often not much financial difference between working and not working.
[00:20:28] And of course there are plenty of people who say this is nonsense, and that these people want to work, but there simply aren't sufficient jobs for them.
[00:20:38] Fortunately for everyone concerned, nobody is suggesting the revival of the workhouse.
[00:20:44] That has been forever consigned to the pages of Oliver Twist.
[00:20:50] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Victorian workhouses.
[00:20:55] We've made quite a few related episodes: episode number 598 on Charlie Chaplin, there's even an episode on Jeremy Bentham, which is episode number 116.
[00:21:06] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:12] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
