Tag: Poor Law Guardians

‘The stench was horrible, and seemed as if from burnt bones or flesh’: the Spa Fields scandal of 1845

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Clerkenwell Police court was crowded on the morning of the 25 February 1845 and the magistrate must have quickly realized that local passions were running high. Most of those present either lived or worked in the near vicinity of Exmouth Street, close by the Spa Fields burial ground.

Burials no longer take place in Spa Fields and nowadays the gardens are an inner-city paradise on summer days as visitors eat their lunch, walk their dogs, or sunbathe on the grass. The London Metropolitan Archives is nearby and in Exmouth Market gourmands can enjoy a wide variety of food from the stalls and cafés that trade there.

The crowd in Mr Combe’s courtroom were represented by a pawnbroker and silversmith called Watts. He stepped forward to explain that he and his fellow ratepayers were there to seek an end to ‘practices of an abominable nature’ that had been taken place in the graveyard.

What exactly were these ‘abominable practices’?

The magistrate listened as  Mr Watts told him that while the burial ground was less than two acres in size and was estimated to be able to hold 3,000 bodies. In reality however, in the 50 years of its existence on average some 1,500 internments were taking place annually. In sum then, something like 75,000 people had been buried in a space for 3,000 and more and more burials were taking place, indeed there had recently been 36 in one day the pawnbroker said.

However, while the graveyard was crowded and this would have meant digging into extant graves and disturbing them, ‘not a bone was seen on the surface’. He (Mr Watts) would provide his Worship with evidence that the bodies of interned persons were routinely being dug up and burned to make room for fresh burials. Moreover many of those coffins removed were new, the wood ‘was fresh’ he added, and witnesses had seen human body parts hacked off by diggers.

The desecration of graves was one thing but the root of the complaint was actually the effect that this practice had on local people and their businesses. According to Watts:

‘The stench proceeding from what was called the “bone-house” in the graveyard was so intolerable that many of the residents in Exmouth–street, which abutted on the place, had been obliged to leave it altogether’.

Surely, the magistrate asked him, a prosecution could be brought against the parochial authorities that had responsibility for the place? Mr Watts said that the parish of St James’ was well aware of what was happening but were doing nothing to stop it.

‘The custom is’ he explained, ‘to disinter the bodies after they have been three or four days buried, chop them up, and burn them in this bone-house’.

Then he should certainly bring a charge against them Mr Combe advised. The clerk to the local Board of Poor Law Guardians was less sure however; since the burial ground was not subject to rates he didn’t think the parochial authorities could be held liable for it. The magistrate said that if the Guardians couldn’t interfere the matter should go to the Poor Law Commissioners and, if they didn’t not help, he would apply directly to the Homes Secretary (who, in February 1845, was Sir James Graham – a politician who, by his own admission, is only remembered by history as ‘the man who opened the letters of the Italians’ in the Mazzini case).

Police Inspector Penny (G Division) testified that he had visited the bone house after being presented with a petition signed by 150 locals.

He found ‘a large quantity of coffins, broken up and some of them burning…the smell was shocking, intolerable. There were coffins of every size there, children’s and men’s’.

The court heard from Reuben Room, a former gravedigger who’d left two year’s previously after ‘a dispute’. He said he’d often been asked to disinter bodies after a couple of days to make room for fresh burials. John Walters, who kept the Clerkenwell fire engine, gave evidence that he had twice had to attend fires at the bone house. He had found it hard to gain admission (suggesting that the authorities there were not keen for people to see what was going on inside) but when he had he’d seen ‘as many coffins as three men could convey, and a great deal of pitch was fastened to the chimney’ [i.e. blackening it], resulting from the burning of coffins.

The smell, he agreed, was ‘horrible, and seemed as if from burnt bones or flesh’. A large crowd had gathered that night and were ready to pull the place to the ground.

More witnesses came forward to testify to the horror of the bone house and the ‘abominable practices’ carried out there. Catherine Murphy, who lived in a house which overlooked the graveyard had seen grave diggers chop up a body with their shovels, and had intervened to admonish them when one of the men had lifted the ‘upper part of a corpse by the hair of the head’.

‘Oh, you villain’, she cried, ‘to treat the corpse so!’

Mr Combe  again advised Mr Watts and his fellow petitioners to make a full statement of their complaint to the board of guardians so that they could take action against whomsoever was to blame. Satisfied with this, the crowd emptied out of the courtroom.

Even by early 1800s the pressure on London’s graveyards was acute. The small parish burial grounds simply were not designed to cope with the huge numbers of burials that a rapidly growing population required. The local authorities recognised that larger cemeteries needed to be laid out so that room could be found for new internments. In 1824 a campaign began to build large municipal cemeteries on the edge of London, away from crowded housing and the danger of disease.

From 1837 to 1841 Parliament agreed to ‘the building of seven commercial cemeteries’ at Kensal Green, West Norwood, Highgate, Nunhead, Abney Park, Brompton and Tower Hamlets. By mid century (not long after the horror of Spa Fields) these were already filling up.* Acts in the 1850s caused most of the old seventeenth century burial grounds to be formally closed, some of these are now public gardens.

So the next time you take a stroll in Spa Fields enjoying your lunch or coffee, and taking in the antics of the local canines, you might try to imagine what this place smelled like when the bone house’s fires were in full operation.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Wednesday, February 26, 1845]

*Weinrebb & Hibbert, The London Encyclopædia (p.129)

for other posts about the problems of London’s dead see:

Knocked down in the street a week before her wedding.

A grave legal dispute in Essex

Child cruelty or a single parent who simply couldn’t cope?

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Children in the St Pancras workhouse school at Leavesden

I think it would be quite easy to look at this next case and judge the man in the dock quite harshly. Perhaps that would be correct as William Everett’s supposed neglect of his three children had brought them almost to the point of starvation and most people would condemn him for that cruelty.

Moreover William Everett, a ‘jobbing gardener’ in full time work, liked a drink and the inference drawn here is that he preferred to spend money on alcohol than on his children.

But before we are as quick to judge him as the editor of the Standard was in September 1877, let’s look at the context and see if we might read between the lines.

Everett was charged at Clerkenwell Police court with ‘neglecting to maintain his children’. As a result of this neglect they had fallen chargeable on the parish of St Pancras and had thus become a burden on the ratepayers. The prosecution was brought, therefore, by the local Poor Law Guardians and one of the relieving officers, a Mr Stevens, gave evidence.

He told the magistrate, Mr Hosack, that he’d been called to the prisoner’s home at 16 Bertam Street, Highgate New Town, after some neighbours expressed their concerns. He found the children in a half starved state:

‘They were very scantily clothed and in want of food’. He gave some funds for them and told Everett to look after them better in future.

Some weeks later however, on the 24 May 1877, he was again called to the property by worried locals.

‘He found the children in the most deplorable condition. They had no food, and when food was given to them they ate ravenously. There was no bed for them to lie upon, and they scarcely had a particle of clothing’.

The officer took the children to the workhouse and they had since been sent (by the guardians) to an industrial school at Leavesden (which had began to built in 1868). They were safe then, but their care was being met by local people through the rates and not by their father.

Mr Hosack thought this was one of the worst cases of child neglect he’d seen as a magistrate and said so. How much did Everett earn? He was paid 21s a week the deputy relieving officer told him, which should have been sufficient, it was felt, to provide home, heat and food for his family of four. However, as he ‘was given to drinking’ perhaps he squandered much of it.

In his defence William Everett said he did his best, but as he was out all day working he could hardly care for them as well. He had no wife, either she’d died or had left them, but her absence from court suggests the former.

The children were Rosina Jane (11), Emily (8) and Thomas (7) so only Rosina was really of an age where she could be expected to help out. His landlady at Bertram Street said that William went out very early leaving the children a 1lb of bread to eat and didn’t come home till very late. She often took them in herself and washed them, She said ‘it was quite a relief to neighbourhood when the children were removed to the workhouse’.

I bet it was. It must have been hard to see three small children virtually starving and living in dire poverty while their father either spent his days working every hour he could, and/or the evenings drinking himself into oblivion in the pub.

Who was to blame however? A society that allowed such desperate poverty to exist in the richest city in the world or the neglectful gardener who enjoyed one too many drinks at the end of a hard day and perhaps couldn’t face returning to a family home he had once shared with his wife. Each day he was reminded of his loss as he looked own on the plaintive faces of his children, all three of whom probably resembled their mother. As for the money he earned, well that was, at 21s a week, about £65 today, how far would that go?

But perhaps I’m guilty of misplaced sympathy for William Everett, perhaps he was simply a drunk and neglectful parent who wasn’t prepared to take responsibility for his own family. That’s clearly what the magistrate thought: he sent him to prison for a month, with hard labour. The parish rates would continue to support his kids.

[from The Standard, Thursday, September 06, 1877]

Two ‘ungovernable’ girls smash up the workhouse to get a change of scenery.

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Over Easter I’ve been enjoying bingeing on the BBC’s Dickensian series (via Netflix). While Inspector Bucket hunts for the killer of Jacob Marley, a variety of characters created by Dickens interact with act other in a  number of subplots. 1842 was the year the Detective Department was created (and Bucket presumably is meant to represent them when he refers to himself as ‘the detective’).

One of the subplots in Dickensian is the attempt by Mrs Bumble (the workhouse keeper’s wife) to ingratiate herself and her husband with the Board of Guardians of the Poor so they can secure a better paid position running a workhouse in ‘the Midlands’. She forces the inept and overweight Bumble to apply with a mixture of threats and false promises and we know, of course, they’ll eventually succeed because that is how Bumble comes to feature in Oliver Twist’s early life.

The Bumbles run the local workhouse (which we rarely see) with little care for the young charges trapped within. At his interview before the Guardians Bumble promises to thrash each and every one of them to instil the ‘Christian discipline’ they so badly require.

Dickens drew on real life. As a journalist his attention to detail gives his characters – even the gross parodies like Mr and Mrs Bumble – genuine authority. Life in the workhouse was very hard for all inmates, no less so for the children of the poor, orphans like young Oliver. There was little food, a basic education and the only family they had was each other. So it would be surprising if the children of the workhouse didn’t rebel from time to time.

Sarah Shaddock and Mary Tighe were two young women on a mission. The mission  they had, it seems, was to infuriate the keeper and matron of the Bishopsgate workhouse in the City of London. The girls (now 18 years old) had been born in the workhouse – they had known no other home outside. Growing up in the institution they had not only rebelled, they had tried to make it impossible for the matron and keeper to control them.

This was the only freedom they had of course; the only ‘agency’ available to them was to refuse to do as they were told. This choice however, had consequences, and in early April 1842 they found themselves standing in the dock at Mansion House Police Court facing Alderman Gibbs, the sitting magistrate, charged with theft.

The assistant matron explained that the pair had only just returned to the workhouse, having been previously confined in the bridewell for damaging property and being disorderly. On their return they’d robbed an elderly pauper of her entire savings (which amounted to just a few pennies).

The alderman was told that the girls, who stood at the bar ‘as quiet as mice’ had ‘frequently distinguished themselves by breaking windows and pelting the elderly residents with bread’. Mr Booker, one of the parish officers, added that when the pair were bored of the workhouse they:

‘committed violence of some kind, and the contrived to have a little variety to their taste’, adding that ‘they had been for a length of time ungovernable’.

What was the alderman to do with these two ‘ungovernable’ girls? Sanctions were clearly having little effect on them. He decided to give them two months in prison at hard labour but with the following stipulations as to their regime.

The pair were ‘to be locked up locked up every alternate week during that period in a solitary cell’. In addition, he said, care should be taken that ‘the diet of the prisoners should be as low as could be consistent with the preservation of their health’.

In other words, he was putting them on a starvation/subsistence diet which would serve both to break their spirit and weaken any attempt at resistance, and remind them that life in the workhouse – however awful – was much preferable to gaol.

This is unusual, I’ve not encountered such detailed sentencing from the court reports but it reveals the limits of the system to really effect change in the persons brought before them. As they had reached 18 both Mary and Sarah could presumably also expect to be able to leave the workhouse at some point soon and make their own way in the world. Given that they had been institutionalised since birth I doubt that transition was going to be easy and we may find both women appearing before the London Police Courts in the future.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Saturday, April 2, 1842]

A feckless husband and father is brought to book

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Today I start my third year classes at the University of Northampton teaching and working with students on a module entitled ‘Crime and Popular Culture in the late Victorian City’. The City in question is London and we concentrate on the last quarter of the 1800s. In particular the module uses the Whitechapel murders of 1888 as a prism through which to explore crime, poverty, and a variety of other topics, using different sorts of popular culture along the way.

Naturally this aligns quite neatly with this blog that looks at the work of the Victorian Police Courts. As is evident to anyone who regularly dips into these stories, ‘all human life is here’.

Poverty is one of the fundamental defining characteristics of many of those that ended up before a police magistrate in the nineteenth century. Poverty was a prime cause of criminal activity; poverty often went hand-in-hand with alcohol abuse and gambling; poverty and domestic spousal abuse were also strongly interlinked. In addition many (if not most) of those seeking advice from the Police Courts were poor, vulnerable, or elderly.

Poverty and the police courts then, were inseparable.

Walter Crump was described by the court reporter as an ‘able-bodied young man’ when he was examined before the magistrate at Westminster Police court on 11 January 1888. He was brought in by the guardians of the poor at St George’s, Hanover Square, for deserting his wife and children. His absence had left them in poverty and had meant they had turned to the parish for support, meaning their upkeep fell on the ratepayers.

They had been in the Fulham Road workhouse since July when Crump had left them and the parish officials had tried, and failed, to get him to take responsibility for them. They had written to him, the magistrate was told, warning him that a prosecution would follow if he did nothing to help them, but he:

‘took no heed of this, but went to races and hopping [as many Londoners did in the late summer], returning to Westminster and living in lodging houses as a single man’.

Walter denied trying to evade the authorities and said that previously he had been unable to support his family. Now, with some improvement in his condition, he might be able to ‘pay something weekly’.

Mr Eyncourt, the sitting magistrate at Westminster, was unimpressed. He had cost the ratepayers the sum of £30 by neglecting his familial duties (perhaps as much as £1,800 in today’s money). He had only offered to do anything about it when ‘he was in custody’. he added, and it had taken a great deal of time and effort to track him down. As a result he was sent to prison for a month at hard labour, just how useful that was in supporting the family is less clear but I presume it was intended as a message to others.

[from The Standard, Thursday, January 12, 1888]

You can use this site to search for specific crimes or use the Themes link in the menu on the left to look for areas or topics that interest you. If you are interested in a particular court (such as Bow Street or Marylebone) you can also limit your search to one court in particular. Please feel free to comment on anything you read and if something in particular interests you then please get in touch. You can email me at drew.gray@northampton.ac.uk

An insurance man ignores the risks to his child and earns the condemnation of the Hampstead bench

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an anti-vaccination pamphlet from the USA (c.1894)

Thomas Williamson was clearly frustrated at finding himself before the magistrate at the Hampstead Police Court. As a member of London’s growing middle-class the insurance agent (who must have known a thing or to about risk) was summoned by the local vaccination officer for not allowing his daughter to be inoculated against small pox.

The officer, Charles Weekley, stated that Louise Elizabeth Williamson, who had be born a year earlier in October 1882, had still not be vaccinated as the law required. The family had been sent several notices but all of them had been ignored, moreover Weekley had himself visited the Williamsons only to be told that they refused to vaccinate Louise because they ‘did not approve of it’.

Weekley had informed the local Board of Guardians and they applied for the summons; Williamson had then been given a further six weeks grace to comply with the injunction to have his child vaccinated but had still steadfastly refused. The result was this very public appearance before Major-General Agnew and Mr Gotto, the presiding magistrates at Hampstead.

In his defence Mr Williamson said that it was not him who objected but his wife. He argued that until the child reached the age of seven she was Mrs Williamson’s responsibility and he was unable to persuade his spouse to agree to something she so was  set against.

It should not come as a surprise that parents were occasionally (or even frequently) reluctant to have their children vaccinated in the late 1800s. There had been widespread resistance earlier in the century when Edward Jenner had first proposed infecting people with ‘cowpox’ to prevent smallpox. The treatment itself may have deterred some while others thought it ‘unchristian’ and abhorrent to introduce animal germs into a human child. We should remember that many Victorians distrusted doctors and had much less faith in science than we do today.

But it was also a question of personal liberty and many people felt it was simply not the business of the state to interfere in family life. Today we are well-used to politicians bemoaning the so-called ‘nanny state’ and for calls for greater freedom from regulations  even if this is not now generally applied to healthcare.

That said there has been a long running campaign against the MMR vaccination which was based on false rumours that the injection was linked to colitis and autism. The campaign was founded on a fraudulent science paper (published in the Lancet in 1998) which was later retracted. It has been described as “perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years” and since the retraction the government have been trying to reboot the vaccination programme.  Sadly, it appears not everyone has got the message: Donald Trump (that well-known authority on all things medical) has linked back to the the now discredited research to make links between vaccination and autism.

Back at Hampstead Police Court poor Mr Williamson was rebuked by one of the magistrates for his inability to rule his own roost. ‘You are the father of the child, and master in your own house’, Major-General Agnew told him.

‘I can’t take the child out of her arms, or use force. No act of parliament will allow me to do that.’ protested the insurance man.

‘That argument, I’m afraid will not hold water’ replied the Major-General.

Mr Gotto was a little more conciliatory: ‘Surely your wife would prefer it [the vaccination] being done to you being fined, or sent to prison?’ he asked.

Mr Williamson agreed that he had already had his elder children vaccinated in compliance with the law but both ‘had suffered from it’. The bench ignored this last plea and fined him 10s including costs, warning him that he must comply or be summoned again. The man left court to bring the unhappy news back to his wife, I wonder how that conversation went.

[from The Morning Post (London, England), Thursday, October 25, 1883]

for other blogs on this subject see:

A parent is unconvinced by the theory of vaccination

Smallpox brings death and difficult decisions to the Westminster Police Court

A poor woman pleads not to be sent to ‘a country which was foreign to her’

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1848 was a tumultuous year in Europe. There were revolutions in Italy, Germany,  Denmark and the Habsburg Empire (in Hungary). Louis-Phillips was forced from his throne in France and fled to England, while there was rioting in Sweden and a short civil war in Switzerland. Britain didn’t escape trouble as Chartists assembled across the country in large numbers including a ‘monster’ rally in Kennington Park in April when tens of thousands demanded the vote.

Over in Ireland the ‘great famine’ was forcing thousands to flee the island and leaving almost  million dead; reducing the population overall by 20-25%. Many of these travelled to England finding their way to London or one of the other other large urban areas of Victorian Britain.

So 1848 saw political unrest, nationalism, poverty, and the mass migration of peoples fleeing all these events. We get an inclining of how this might have impacted society in a brief report of business from the Thames Police Court in October of that year.

‘THAMES – Complaints are almost daily made by aged natives of Ireland, whose necessities compel them to apply for parochial relief, of the hardship of being sent back to Ireland after a long stay in England’.

One case in particular was brought to the attention of the Thames Police Court magistrate, Mr Yardley. A ‘poor Irish widow’ who had been resident in England for 40 years applied to the Stepney Poor Law Union for relief only to be refused help and told to go home to Ireland. She explained to Mr Yardley that she had been away so long she ‘did not know a soul there. She hoped the magistrate would interpose , and prevent her being sent to a country which was foreign to her’.

The woman had been before him to ask for help a week earlier and he had directed a letter to the union on her behalf, so he asked what had happened in the interim. A police officer attached to the court confirmed that the letter had been delivered but one of the reliving officers said they were only following the instructions handed down to them by the board of guardians of the poor.

The policy in a time of huge pressure on the parish purse was, it seems, to try and get rid of as many unwanted paupers as possible. The court was told that while this woman  claimed she had lived in England for 40 years her ‘residence was a broken one, and not continued for five years in any one parish’. In short she had moved around and so did not ‘belong’ anywhere.

Mr Yardley was sympathetic to the woman’s plight but could only assure her that he would intercede on her behalf and hope the guardians relented. She thanked him for his time and left the court.

I think this reveals some of the problems facing the authorities in mid Victorian Britain but also the callous lack of care for the people of the wider empire. Stepney was poor, as was most of the East End in the 1800s. Poor relief fell on the parish rather than the national purse. So it was individual ratepayers who were supporting the huge numbers of impoverished East Londoners whose ranks were undoubtedly swollen by migrants from Ireland (and perhaps from further afield in such a troubled decade).

Poverty, war and famine always lead to migration and this inevitably puts pressure onto communities that are themselves often struggling to survive. Whether migration is fuelled by economic necessity, or by persecution, or simply a desire to get away to a ‘better place’, it is part of the human condition. Human beings have always migrated in search of better land, greater resources, improved living conditions, or a more tolerant society. Whether it was the Irish in the 1840s or Polish Jews in the 1880s, or South Asian Kenyans in the 1970s, or indeed Syrians in the last decade; all of these people have left their homes, sometimes their families, everything they know and love, to find a refuge overseas.

That this puts pressure on the country and community that receives them is self-evident. Tensions flare, xenophobia rears its ugly head, and people make political capital out of the situation. But the answer is not to close the borders, to turn one’s back on people in need, to refuse to help. The attempt of the Stepney guardians to send a poor Irish woman back to her country of birth and therefore into a situation where thousands were dying every week was simply wrong. It was wrong in 1848 and it remains wrong today.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Tuesday, October 24, 1848]

A cheesemonger runs, but he can’t hide

Ludgate Hill by Camille Pissarro, 1890

John Alfred Smith worked for a cheesemonger in the City of London (who had premises on Ludgate Hill), but in October 1890 Smith was summoned before Mr Denham at Wandsworth Police Court, to answer a charge that he had deserted his wife and family.

The prosecution was brought by the Poor law Guardians of Clapham and Wandsworth and therefore fell under Denham’s jurisdiction. Prosecuting, Mr Charter explained that Smith’s wife and her five children had applied for relief on the 30th August of that year.The circumstances of her application are not made clear, but it would seem that at some Smith simply didn’t come home.

What was established was that Smith had run his own business in Battersea but this seems to have collapsed and forced him to seek work elsewhere. With his business in tatters it the man appears to have decided his family was just too much for his pocket to maintain, and he abandoned them to the parish. However, there may have been another reason for his flight: in short, another woman.

Answering the summons before the magistrate Smith made the bold move of denying that he was married to the woman at all. He said no proper marriage had taken place and added that they had never lived together long enough for the relationship to be established as such. One wonders then how she managed to produce no less than five children.

Mrs Smith’s sister was called to give evidence and she described how Smith had taken her sibling, aged just 16, to Brighton ‘on the pretense of marrying her’. While no record of the marriage could be found it seems that there was at least anecdotal evidence of the union. Smith had, his sister-in-law swore, declared on their return that they were married. Mrs Smith also appeared in court to confirm that she was indeed married to the man in dock.

This was good enough for Mr Denham. Regardless of the veracity of her statement or that of her sister he thought it appalling that a woman and five children could be abandoned  in such a way. Smith ‘was morally guilty, whether she were his wife or not’. Moreover now it emerged that Smith had taken a new wife since his desertion, ‘a young woman who was suffering from nervous prostration brought about by his arrest’.

So it would seem that Smith had simply had enough of his former life. Abandoning Battersea, his failing business and its debts, and his wife and kids he relocated to the City and found work and a new (and younger) partner. Unfortunately for his attempt to disappear completely failed just as his business had, the state (in the person of the Clapham and Wandsworth Poor Law Union) caught up with him. The magistrate, angered both by Smith callousness towards his family and his blatant disregard for his responsibilities sent him to prison for six weeks at hard labour.

[from The Standard, Friday, October 17, 1890]

A morbid request for a reward reminds London of the Princess Alice disaster

 

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For those of you following this blog regularly and especially this week I hope you can see that I have tried to follow the ‘doings’ of the Thames Police Court for a whole week. Due the selective reporting of the courts however, this has not proved possible. I had hoped to be able to follow a couple of remanded cases, to see them reappear with some conclusion reached, but sadly this hasn’t happened. It all helps me understand though, just how selective the reportage was and suggest readers were more interested in a variety of ‘titbits’ about the courts than they were in finding out exactly what occurs in each court on a regular basis.

Historical research is always problematic and we can learn from what we can’t find almost as much as we learn from what we do. There is also the unexpected gobbets of information that the newspapers offer, that can open up new avenues for research and understanding, there were two of these today.

On the 66th anniversary of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo the Standard newspaper chose to concentrate on two cases from the Woolwich Police Court. In the first a ‘reputed lunatic’, James Peacock, was sent for trial by jury for allegedly stealing rockets from the Royal Arsenal.

The other case concerned a boy who had summoned the overseers of the poor at Woolwich for non-payment of a reward he was due. The reward was for recovering a dead body from the Thames and this linked the police courts to a tragedy that had occurred three years earlier, in September 1878.

On the evening of the 3 September the Princess Alice, a pleasure steamer loaded with passengers, was passing the shore at Tipcock Point, North Woolwich, when it collided with another vessel, a collier barge, the Bywell Castle. The Alice went down in just four minutes, dragging its terrified passengers into the polluted river. Over 650 people, men , women and children, drowned in the river and the loss of life was shocking.

The tragedy lasted long in local and national memory and must have impacted Londoners in particular. Liz Stride, one of the victims of ‘Jack the Ripper’ even claimed she had lost her husband on the Princess Alice, a claim that doesn’t seem to have much substance.  Stride might have been trying to get some charitable relief following the disaster, as several institutions, including the Lord Mayor’s Mansion House Fund, paid out to victims’ families.

Appearing in Woolwich on behalf of the Overseers of the poor, Mr Moore a relieving officer, said that the Overseers or the Guardians were normally quite happy to pay out for the recovery of bodies from the river. The boy also had a certificate from a coroner saying he was entitled to the money, so that seemed settled, but it wasn’t.

Mr Moore  told the court that a recent ruling at the Court of Queen’s Bench that in the case of the Princess Alice there was no actual law that gave authority for the paying of rewards. The Thames, he explained, was not included as part of “the sea”, which was what the original reward referred to. The magistrate, Mr Marsham grumbled that he couldn’t see how the two were not connected; after all the Thames was a tidal river which seemed to bring it within the act. Nevertheless he was bound to abide by the superior courts’ ruling and he dismissed the summons.

However, apparently the case was being discussed in parliament he was told, and so the lad (not named in the report) was advised to hang onto his certificate in the hope that the situation was eventually resolved to his benefit.

[from The Standard, Saturday, June 18, 1881]

As this was the 66th anniversary of Waterloo several papers mentioned the battle. The Daily News dedicated a small column to 200th anniversary of the Scots Greys, the ‘oldest dragoon corps’ in the British Army.  The ‘Greys’ had served with distinction in the Crimea at the battle of Balaclava, where they ‘tore through the Russians as acrobats go through a paper hoop’ (as the reporter described it). Their charge at Waterloo, which was more brave than effectual (if military historians are to be believed), was forever immortalised in Lady Elizabeth Butler’s Scotland Forever which was painted in 1881, to celebrate the anniversary. 

[from Daily News, Saturday, June 18, 1881]

Austerity, benefits and a lack of compassion: the application of the ‘hard labour test’ in 1840s London

Historical work on the role of the eighteenth-century justice of the peace (by Peter King, and myself) has revealed the important work they did in mediating claims for poor relief. As well as dealing with all sorts of offending and advising on a range of local matters JPs (later termed magistrates) sometimes intervened to assist the poor when they were refused help by the Poor Law officials in their parish.

The parish was the local authority with responsibility for helping those that could not work through ill-health, age or legitimate unemployment. But one’s entitlement to benefits (as we might term them) was limited and conditional. The laws of settlement were complicated but, in essence, a person had to be born in a parish to be entitled to poor relief there, or to have settled there through work or marriage.

Being ‘settled’ might meant paying a local tax for a year or something akin to that and, because the costs of poor relief fell on the ratepayers not the state, local authorities were not keen to attract new mouths to feed and equally vigorous in evicting anyone who looked like they might become a burden on the population.

JPs were therefore frequently called upon to hear settlement claims and counter-claims.

In 1834 parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act which set in place a new, harsh, form of poor relief designed to deter all but the genuinely impoverished from seeking help from the rates. Thereafter anyone requesting poor relief was supposed to be offered the workhouse and all the horrors that entailed if they wanted help from the parish. This meant the breakup of the family (men and women and children were housed in separate wings), a barely sufficient diet (see Oliver Twist) and backbreaking hard labour (picking oakum or breaking rocks were typical).

In short in the nineteenth century pauperism was seen as a personal failing, and if you asked for poor relief you faced an experience almost as bad as being sent to prison.

In 1847 a poor woman, whose name was not recorded by the Morning Chronicle‘s reporter, appeared at the Marlborough Street Police Court to ask for the magistrate’s help. She told Mr Hardwicke that because her ‘children were starving, her husband in an infirm state of health, and out of work’ she had approached the relieving officer at St. James’ workhouse to admit them temporarily.

However, the officer told her that he could only do so on the condition that her husband would agree to be set to hard labour, breaking stones.

She said that she was sure that if he ‘was put to such work as this, in this inclement season, in his present state of health, that it would kill him, and and she therefore said it was impossible to accept the condition’.

The officer, a Mr Dore, then said that the alternative was for the whole family to be passed (effectively evicted from the parish) to Ireland where her husband had been born. This too was unacceptable to her; she complained that while he had been born in Ireland he’d not been there for years, that she and her children were English born, they had no home in Ireland. Moreover, she continued:

‘Her husband was a journeyman tailor, had acquired a settlement in St. James’ parish, and had never applied for parish assistance’. She added that she ‘had begged a loaf a bread from the receiving officer, to feed her famishing children with, as they had nothing to eat all day. This was refused, and if it had not been for the humanity of a neighbour, her children must have passed another day without food’.

Mr Hardwicke sent for Dore, who confirmed the woman’s story but said his hands were tied; he had his instructions from the workhouse Board of Guardians. The magistrate suggested that there were times when a little discretion was in order. The hard labour ‘test’ might be appropriate in ‘cases in which the parish authorities had reason to believe that an able-bodied applicant only desired to lead an idea life in the workhouse’ but in cases such as this, he ‘thought the general rule ought to be relaxed’.

Mr Gore said he only had the one sort of work available but if saw someone really struggling the policy was to offer them medical help and some respite. This was usually evidenced it seems, by seeing that their hands had become ‘badly blistered’ and other signs of ‘bodily weakness’. In this case of course, by the time that was apparent the poor old man might have been well on his way to the grave.

The magistrate sent the relieving officer away to see what he could do for the family but that was as much the court did for them. This would not have been an isolated incident in a society without universal benefits.

But before we get too complacent and say how awful the Victorians were to their poor we should take a look at the reality that in 2015/16 the Tressell Trust donated over 1,000,000 three day emergency food parcels to vulnerable people in the UK.  Tressell are the biggest but not the only provider so the figure is larger than this. Barnardo’s estimates that there are 3.7 million children living in poverty, 1.7 million in ‘severe poverty’. The majority of these (63%) are living in families where at least one parent is in employment, not unemployed or ‘workshop’.

This is the reality of austerity Britain; the reality of the fallout from the banking scandal, the gap between rich and poor, the continued campaign to demonise those on benefits and the harsh reality of global capitalism. As in the 1840s it is the poorest that suffer while the richest are protected and indeed prosper and grow richer.

And we wonder why people commit crime…

[from The Morning Chronicle, Monday, January 25, 1847]