The scourge of the workhouse

JANE had been waiting almost two hours in the punishment room. Unsure of her crime, she fidgeted nervously with the edge of her apron before she heard the key turn in the lock. It was the master of the workhouse and with him was a male officer.

Jane had been born into the workhouse, entering the world on a tide of rumours. The whispers were that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Member of Parliament and it was a rumour she held close to her heart. When a baronet came to visit the workhouse one day to announce that each child would have a summer holiday, in her young mind Jane imagined that the aristocrat was her own father, come to rescue her from the institution. She had even run up to him and called him 'daddy'.

Now the master stood before her, incandescent with rage at her behaviour. He ordered the officer to strip her naked and took the leather whip from the wall.

"The first lash fell across her back, knocking all the breath out of her. Pain like fire shot through her body, and the second stroke fell before she had time to breathe. When the third fell, with excruciating pain, Jane realised what was happening..." writes Jennifer Worth.

Jennifer was working as a district midwife in the Docklands of East London when she met Jane years later at the nun's convent where they both lived. She was 45 years old when Jennifer knew her in the 1950s, a fidgety woman who could barely function for her nerves.

It was only after several years that Jennifer discovered why Jane possessed a constant look of terror in her eyes, when she learned that her spirit had been "utterly crushed" when she was a child living in the workhouse.

It is her story, and others she came across during her work in the 1950s, that has led Jennifer to write Shadows of the Workhouse, a rich social history where she has dramatised true stories such as those of Jane.

Says Jennifer, 70, who lives in Hertfordshire: "Everybody of my generation lived in the shadow of the workhouse. My grandmother would get hysterical if she had to go anywhere near one. Jane never talked about what had happened to her - I suppose she had blotted it out - but I learned about it through her friend, Peggy.

"It (the punishment Jane endured) was absolutely legal and they didn't look upon it as abuse, they looked upon it as discipline. The master had absolute right over the child and he could do whatever he liked. But it wasn't as much the conditions which were horrendous but the fact of being unwanted and unloved."

The word workhouse was enough to send a shudder of fear through any honest 19th century worker. Charles Dickens created an image of the Victorian workhouse in Oliver Twist, but the stories of brutality and horror continued well into the early early 20th century.

People ended up in the workhouse for a variety of reasons, usually because they were too poor, too ill or too old to support themselves. Once inside they would be stripped, washed and issued with a workhouse uniform. The only other possession would be a bed, usually with a wooden or iron frame and a mattress and cover. For much of the 19th century, families were torn apart as soon as they entered the building, segregated into one of seven classes.

The toilets would often be a covered cess pit shared by dozens of people. The staple diet was bread with gruel or porridge for breakfast and broth for dinner, a watery dish with turnips or onion. Work ranged from washing and cleaning for the women, to stone breaking and bone crushing (animal bones were crushed in some places to provide fertilizer for workhouse gardens). Medical care was scant.

Another reason Jennifer was inspired to write her book was through the experience of her Great Aunt Cissy, who was sent to Durham Union Workhouse as a pregnant, unmarried woman in the 1930s.

"She was in service when she became pregnant and it may have been one of the family who got her pregnant or it may have been a boyfriend," says Jennifer. "She had an illegitimate baby in the workhouse when she was about 18 or 19 and the tragedy was the baby was taken away from her as soon as it was born, while she stayed there for the rest of her life. But, after a while, she probably would have become institutionalised. Anyone who became institutionalised would have become terrified of the outside world."

Jennifer, also author of Call the Midwife, can recall going to visit her great aunt at the workhouse - which later became St Margaret's Hospital - in the late 1930s.

"I found it a very frightening experience," she says. "The workhouse was big and imposing with grey walls and a huge gate. The people inside all looked the same and they were wearing a uniform, which I thought was a nightdress at the time.

"My aunt couldn't have been more than about 45 at the most. I can remember she was very sweet - my mother had taken a box of chocolates and she gave most of them to me. My mother said afterwards she had never known her own child so she loved other children. She didn't strike me as being unhappy, but then she didn't have much to compare her life with."

Such resignation was typical among those who had very little and was a characteristic Jennifer came across in the hundreds of families she helped every day in the back street slums of London.

In her book, she writes of one man she nursed, Joe Collett, who had endured a lifetime of grinding poverty and who had lost all three children and his wife during the Second World War.

When the street where he lived was torn down by the local authority in the late 1950s, he was moved to a "nursing" home, which turned out to be on a par with the workhouses of 100 years earlier. He died having caught gangrene from untreated leg ulcers.

"It was called an old people's home but really it was a relic of a workhouse," says Jennifer. "There were all these people on the fifth floor with no lift so they couldn't get out and the dormitory had about 70 beds. Although workhouses were officially closed in 1930, many of them lingered on under other names."

But out of such tales of sorrow there did sometimes come hope. For Jane, the answer came in the form of a Chuch of England vicar who fell in love with her after visiting the convent. The pair married and moved to Sierra Leone to undertake missionary work.

"I have never in my life seen a woman so changed," says Jennifer. "She was tall and regal, her eyes were smiling and confidence seemed to spring from deep within her."

Jennifer says she has told the story of Jane, Joe Collett and other people she met working in London, in order to keep alive a social record of the poverty stricken circumstances in which many people lived.

"Today we live in such luxury and wealth, we have far too much to eat whereas people in other generations didn't have enough to eat," says Jennifer. "It is important to show people how things were. Workhouses merely changed their names and carried on much as before, but the conditions, rules and lifestyle which continued to be endured by the residents cast their shadows and shame over most of the last century."

* Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth (Merton Books, £14.99.)

* Some of the names in this article have been changed.