Poverty
Our family history includes
experiences of high infant mortality in Victorian times, often extreme poverty,
and struggle
Risk
A
worldwide economic recession began in about in 1873 and continued to the end of
the 1870s, with its effect continuing to the end of the century. It was particularly severely felt in Europe
following a period of strong economic growth fuelled by the new efficiencies of
Industrial
Revolution. At the time it was called the Great Depression, though later
was renamed the Lond Depression. There was a longer recession in the agricultural sector caused by a
significant fall in grain prices which followed the cultivation of the American
prairies in the 1870s and cheaper transportation with the rise of steamships,
from which rural Britain would not fully recover until after the Second World
War. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the importation
of wheat and flour increased by 90%, and by 300% for meat. The price of wheat
in Britain declined from 56 shillings a quarter in the early 1870s to 22
shillings at the end of the century. The amount of land growing cereals
declined from 9.5 million to 7.5 million acres by the end of the century. The
depression accelerated Britain's rural depopulation.
William Farndale was a farmer
at a small coastal farm of 35 acres, near Old
Saltburn, called Ladgates. William and his wife Jane had three
daughters, Mary Jane Farndale, Hannah Farndale and Sarah Ann Farndale. All three were married,
but all three, with their children, lived with their parents. All three of the
girls died young in their late twenties in the early 1870s. William died
on 20 February 1876 in Saltburn, by which time he had been working as
a cartman. He seems to have lost his farm, perhaps due to ill health, to
struggle on with what work he could get. Later that year his wife Jane seems to
have started a grocery business, but it went into liquidation. The young
children were left to be brought up by their now widowed grandmother, who
struggled to keep her family afloat by working as a laundress. This was a
family with little support, left to their own devices and they suffered badly
during the depressing decade of the 1870s.
The
extended family at Kilton, living together
in a large rural community for seven generations, faired better during
difficult times. George Farndale
had farmed in Easby near Stokesley after his marriage in 1816 until about 1825,
a farm taken for him by his father. He then moved to Marton, near Ormesby and
Great Ayton, before moving back to Kilton
by 1841, by which time he was working as a labourer. When his father died in
1846 he left £100 at interest for board, lodging clothing and medical
attendance for the benefit of George Farndale under
the management of George’s brothers, John Farndale, Matthew Farndale and Martin Farndale.
He seems to have fallen ill and needed support
while the Kilton farm
passed to George’s younger brother Martin Farndale,
and later to John Farndale’s
son, Charles Farndale. George’s son, Robert Farndale continued
to live at Kilton Hall Farm with his grandfather William Farndale until
1841 who seems to have been favoured by his grandfather who bequeathed his
silver watch and £20 to pay for his apprenticeship when William died in 1846.
By 1851 Robert left Kilton for Loftus, where he
was an apprentice joiner and cartwright with John Walker. By 1861, he was a
cordwainer in Stockton. Large
extended families in rural communities provided a degree of mutual support to
see those struggling through the more difficult times.
The rural
idyll portrayed by John Farndale, was not
always kind to those who continued to live there. Periods of plenty were
punctuated by plague, bad weather and poor harvests throughout our family
history, back to medieval times and the ages that preceded. There was
unavoidable risk in rural living, and circumstances could change very rapidly.
Yet the new
opportunities provided by technological change and new lives awaiting in towns,
were also risky ventures that could go wrong just as quickly.
George Farndale became a druggist and
grocer in Stockton in the 1860s. In 1873 George, like
his father, was forced to petition for bankruptcy and his chemist, druggist and
grocery business went into liquidation. In 1875 George served on a jury in
Northallerton, by which time he had restarted a chemist business. However he
seems to have been made bankrupt again in 1878. George and his wife Catherine
had suffered further tragedy when their three
daughters, Mary Frances
Farndale, Catherine Wiley
Farndale, and Annie Louisa
Farndale, all died aged 7, 4 and 3 within nine days
of each other at Christmas, between 17 and 26 December 1874. There was a
smallpox pandemic in 1870 to 1874, which originated in France. There was also a
cholera epidemic at the time. When the last of the three girls died in such
short succession, an sad notice on 2 January 1875 seemed to summarise the ill
fortune that the family had met, Death on
the 26th Dec, at Newport Road, Middlesbrough, Annie Louisa, aged
three years, the beloved and last surviving daughter of Mr Geo Farndale.
The 1870s was the Stockton
Farndales decennium horribilis.
Infant
Mortality
There were
on average 274 infant deaths per 1000 births due to the lack of sanitation,
medical care and public health measures. In city slums the figure was 509 per
1000. Over half of all children of Farmers, Labourers, Artisans and Servants
died before reaching their fifth birthday, compared to one in eleven among the
Landed Gentry. With no vaccinations for diseases, no water treatment and only
primitive methods of food preservation, children suffered from multiple
influenza outbreaks, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, food
poisoning, polio, tetanus and typhoid. One death in three was attributed to an
infectious disease. It had always been this way, or worse, and it was only in
the second half of the nineteenth century that improvements in living
conditions began. And the population explosion, the final results of which have
yet to be experienced. (Mitchell’s
Victorian Britain)
The death of three daughters, Mary Frances Farndale, Catherine Wiley Farndale, and Annie Louisa Farndale, aged 7, 4 and 3, within
nine days of each other at Christmas, between 17 and 26 December 1874 reflects
all too frequent tragedy in our family story.
…
The risk of early death continued after
childhood. The three sisters Mary Jane Farndale, Hannah Farndale and Sarah Ann Farndale were married, with children
but only in their late twenties when they died in the early 1870s. The
consequences for the rest of the family, left to pick up the pieces could be
devastating.
…
Poor Laws
Following
changes that slowly evolved after the Peasant’s Revolt in the fourteenth
century, there was some limited recognition of the need to support the poor.
Before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the source of help tended to be the
church.
The Poor
Law Act 1601 consolidated previous legislative provisions for the relief of
the poor and made it compulsory for parishes to levy a poor rate to fund
financial support for those who could not work. Assistance depended on the
residential qualification of living locally. The role of overseer was
established by the Act. There were two in each parish to administer relief and
collect poor rates from property owners. Outdoor relief was designed to support
people in the community and took the form of financial support or non-monetary
relief in the form of food and clothing. Indoor relief included taking the poor
to local almshouses, admitting the mentally ill to
hospitals and sending orphans to orphanages. There was a distinction between the
impotent poor, such as lame and blind people, and the idle poor, who
were likely to be placed in houses of correction, which later became
workhouses.
Ordinary men
of the local community took turns in the parish as Overseers of the Poor, with
responsibility to help the needy, with the cost being met from the poor rate,
levied on the wealthiest of the community.
In 1837, the
Board of Guardians for the Whitby Union
came to the conclusion that the rateable values that they had been using prior
to that date was out of date. They requested permission from the Poor Law
Commission to conduct a new valuation. When this was granted, in order to
record the annual rateable value of each property, the Board of Guardians
appointed a valuer. He wrote a list of properties with their owners, occupiers
and their rateable values, presumably by walking around the town and
interviewing people. This list was published by a local printer so that people
could check that their rateable value was correct and also that no-one else was
being charged too low a rate. A copy of the list was sent to the Poor Law
Commission. The valuation of Whitby was a
list of every property in the township of Whitby in the year 1837. It listed
2,435 houses, tenements, shops, offices and other places. The valuation
included the occupier of the property, its owner, a description and its
rateable value. The record therefore showed the type of house a person was
living in.
The poor
laws, and Britain’s wealth by the eighteenth century, meant that relative to
other nations, the poor did receive better assistance than France for instance,
where the equivalent help in 1790 was no
more than emergency handout amounting to 2s or 3s a year.
Farmers were
sometimes asked by magistrates to take on jobless labourers on a minimum wage,
though this often resulted in them being given demeaning and meaningless tasks.
In Yorkshire there was a system of grants to set up small businesses, such as
provision of tools and machinery.
By the late
eighteenth century, the Old Poor Law had developed into a unique welfare
system, but it was felt though to have become unsustainable. Total spending
increased from £2M in 1784 to £6M in 1815. About 15% of the population were
receiving aid. The rise in population and Napoleonic wartime inflation meant
that the old system of local financing was becoming untenable. In Newburgh in
Yorkshire in the Parish of Coxwold, home of the Ampleforth Farndales, the
annual cost to thirteen ratepayers rose from £34 in 1817 to 1818 to £130 in
1836 to 1837.
It was not so
much that there was greater poverty in Britain, but as a richer society grew,
the needs of the poor increased, and individuals were more alert to
opportunities to appeal to Overseers of the Poor or magistrates. The French
liberal Alexis de
Tocqueville wrote about unblushing appearances before JPs and the
evolution of a dependency culture.
Grey’s
government appointed a Royal Commission and in 1834, a New
Poor Law came into operation in England and Wales. Parishes were grouped
into Poor Law Unions. These were administered locally by a Board of Guardians,
elected by each parish or township. Boards of Guardians were answerable to a
central Poor Law Commission, based in London.
Poor relief
dropped from £6M to £4M and the percentage of the population in receipt of
relief from 10.2% to 5.4%.
Many local
authorities did not comply with the new strict regime and continued to give
outdoor relief. It was impractical in industrial towns. The Bradford workhouse had space for 260, but
over 130,000 claimed benefits in 1848. Yet the stigma of the workhouse was a
strain on respectable claimants, often elderly or children, lumped together
with drunks and vagrants. In time there was some attempt to provide
alternatives, such as infirmaries and cottage hospitals, which did not carry
the same stigma.
The funds to
pay for the relief of the poor were collected from the population of the
township or parish, according to the value of the property they occupied. The
value of each property, or more particularly, the rent it would fetch if rented
for a year, was assessed. The local Board of Guardians would decide how much
they needed in each year and each householder was liable for a proportion of
this, depending on the annual rateable value of the property.
The
Workhouse
The heart of
the 1834 reforms was to introduce a test of genuine need. Traditional payments
of cash or in kind were to cease. Assistance would be provided within
workhouses, the Whig Bastilles, which were intended to be a deliberate
deterrent, with a monotonous, though sufficient diet; unpleasant work;
regimentation; unforms; and mixing of ‘respectable’ poor with ‘unrespectable’,
and the splitting of families.
In Dickens’
imagination, Mr. Bumble was a cruel and self-important parish official, who
oversaw the parish workhouse and orphanage of Mudfog,
a country town seventy five miles from London where the orphaned Oliver Twist
was brought up. A fat man, and a choleric, Mr. Bumble had a great idea of
his oratorical powers and his importance. “Meat, ma’am, meat,” he
scalded. “You’ve overfed him, ma’am. You’ve raised an artificial soul and
spirit in him, ma’am unbecoming a person of his condition: as the board, Mrs. Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you.
What have paupers to do with soul or spirit either? It’s quite enough that we
let ’em have bodies." (Oliver
Twist, Chapter 7).
The
workhouse was segregated by sex and the inmates were expected to perform
laborious tasks in return for their food and lodging, so this was an option
that the poor avoided whenever possible.
Henry Farndale
was born in 1861 and lived with his uncle, Christopher King, a brickmaker in
York aged 9. By 1881, he was a brickmaker himself, but residing in the York
Union Workhouse in York. On 30 April 1885 he was described as a tramp, and
fined 5d for having
lighted a fire in the centre of the high road at Sheriff Hutton during the
previous night. His
cousin was Joseph Farndale who at that time was Chief Constable of Birmingham,
so the dividing line between utter poverty and desperation and high ranking
success was not far apart.
Robert Farndale
(1863 to 1933) was a butler in Wales and worked for the Piercy family at Marchweil House, but he was an inmate at the workhouse near
Wrexham in Wales in 1911, though by 1913 he married Sarah Samuels and they had
a large family.
By 1908, William
George Farndale, was struggling when at Guisborough he was fined 21s, with
the alternative of a month’s imprisonment for obtaining food and lodgings by
false pretences from Catherine Cogan, of West Dyke, Redcar. The evidence showed
that he obtained board and lodgings by representing that he was employed by Mr
F Senior in asphalting in connection with the new school at Redcar. He came to
her house on March 28th, and Mr Senior was today called to prove that he left
his service on March 21st, and that he had no authority to say that he was
working for him at Redcar schools. Inspector Hall stated that when Farndale was
charged with false pretences he replied, “It is alright, she will be paid.”
Superintendent Rose said the defendant was a joiner by trade, and a native of
East Cleveland, but he had lived a roaming life. By 1911, he was working as
a butcher in Marske, but he died aged 57 in 1915 in the workhouse at Guisborough.
Guisborough
appears to have been regarded as a model Workhouse by the Assistant Poor Law
Commissioners who visited it. It had water closets, which were then a novelty
and a slipper bath. It had a piggery, a garden field, and a small orchard, and
the inmates grew and sold large amounts of potatoes and cabbages. The Workhouse
was well maintained and the inmates, who slept on coconut fibre beds, were
regularly shaved, shorn, and provided with Bibles, Prayer books and literature
from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. When it came to work,
able-bodied men were required to break half of ton of stone a day in winter,
and three-quarters of a ton in summer. Boys aged 10 to 16 broke a quarter of a
ton. Females were occupied in domestic work or oakum picking. Boys in the
Workhouse attended the local Providence School when they were old enough.
Before the first, unqualified, schoolmistress was appointed in 1846, the girls
were taught by a female vagrant. A local clergyman conducted services in the
workhouse dining-hall.
Male and
female vagrant wards were erected at the Guisborough
Workhouse, first built in 1838. In these wards, inmates were given a night’s
lodging and then required to perform 3 hours work to pay for it. 2 hours before
breakfast and 1 hour afterwards. Women did oakum-picking and men
stone-breaking.
Edith Farndale,
born in Loftus and baptised on 31 January 1886, though her birth date not known
to her when she was an inmate at the Poor Law Institution in Stokesley in 1939, aged 53. Her father had
been the deputy in the ironstone mine at Loftus.
Old Age
The world
which went very well for some people in those days was a harsh one for the poor
and afflicted. For the old and poor, too. That was long before the day of the
Old Age Pension, and for many who had worked hard all their lives and had
preserved their self-respect, so far, the only refuge in old age was the
Workhouse. There old couples were separated, the men going to the men's side
and the women to that of the women, and the effect of this separation on some
faithful old hearts can be imagined. With the help of a few shillings a week,
parish relief, and the still fewer shillings their children—mostly poor, like
themselves—could spare, some old couples contrived to keep their own roof over
their heads. In Candleford Green, XXXII, The Green, Flora Thompson
The old
people who were not in comfortable circumstances had no homes at all worth
mentioning, for, as soon as they got past work, they had either to go to the
workhouse or find accommodation in the already overcrowded cottages of their
children.
Then
there were one or two poorer couples, just holding on to their homes, but in
daily fear of the workhouse. The Poor Law authorities allowed old people past
work a small weekly sum as outdoor relief; but it was not sufficient to live
upon, and, unless they had more than usually prosperous children to help
support them, there came a time when the home had to be broken up. When, twenty
years later, the Old Age Pensions began, life was transformed for such aged
cottagers. They were relieved of anxiety. (Flora Thompson in Lark
Rise, V, Survivals)
Bankruptcy
George
Farndale, son of John
and Elizabeth Farndale of the
Stockton 1 Line, became a druggist and grocer in Stockton. George married Catherine Wemyss
Leng at Stockton in 1865. In 1873 George was forced to petition for bankruptcy
and his chemist, druggist and grocery business went into liquidation. In 1875
George served on a jury in Northallerton, by which time he had restarted a
chemist business. However he seems to have been made bankrupt again in 1878.
After his second bankruptcy, he moved to 22 Great Oxford Street, Liverpool,
where he was a druggist’s assistant. He died aged 52 in Gateshead.
George and
Catherine suffered further tragedy when their three daughters, Mary Frances
Farndale, Catherine
Wiley Farndale, and Annie Louisa
Farndale, all died aged 7, 4 and 3 within nine days of each other at
Christmas, between 17 and 26 December 1874. There was a smallpox pandemic in
1870 to 1874, which originated in France. The Vaccination Act 1853 helped to
mitigate its effect in England, but perhaps this was the cause of three sisters
dying the same year. There was also a cholera epidemic at the time. This was at
the time when George’s grocery business was struggling. When the last of the
three girls died in such short succession, an unspeakably sad notice on 2
January 1875 seemed to summarise the ill fortune that the family had met, Death
on the 26th Dec, at Newport Road, Middlesbrough, Annie Louisa, aged three
years, the beloved and last surviving daughter of Mr Geo Farndale. The
1870s was the Stockton Farndales decennium horribilis.
In 1850, in The
Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger, Charles
Dickens, reflected on the hardships of Victorian bankruptcy. Mr Micawber was
waiting for me within the gate, and he went up to his room (top storey but
one), and cried very much. He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning
of his fate; and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year for his
income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be
happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one, he would be miserable.
As Mr
Micawber declared, Copperfield, you perceive before you, the shattered
fragments of a temple once call Man. The blossom is blighted. The leaf is
withered. The God of Day goes down upon the dreary scene. In short, I am
forever floored.
John Farndale,
the author, also became bankrupt in Stockton
and in the London Gazette 1851 there was an advertisement of a Petition of
John Farndale , formerly of Coatham Stob farm, in the Parish of Long Newton, in
the County of Durham, farmer, afterwards of Mount Leven farm, in the Parish of
Yarm, in the County of York, farmer, afterwards of Hunley Hall Farm, in the
Township of Brotton, in the same county, farmer, late of the Township of
Middlesbrough, in the said County of York, farmer, and now in lodgings at the
House of James Watson, at Middlesbrough, in the said County of York, labourer
and merchant, an insolvent debtor, having been filed in the County Court of
Durham, at Stockton, and an interim order
for protection from process having been given to the said John farndale, under
the provisions of these statutes in that case made and provided, the said John
Farndale is hereby required to appear before the said court, on the 15th day of
April next, at ten in the forenoon precisely, for his first examination
touching his debts, state, and effects, and to be further dealt with according
to the provisions of the said Statutes; And the choice of the creditors’
assignees is to take place at the time so appointed. All persons indebted to
the said John Farndale, or that have any of his effects, are not to pay or
deliver the same but to Mr John Edwin Marshall, Clerk at the said Court, at his
office, at Stockton, the Official Assignee of the estate and effects of the
said insolvent.
An entry in
1860 records that he was sent to Durham Prison for a period of time, for debt.
Yet for John, bankruptcy seems to have been part of the cycle of life and he
quickly recovered, returning to business very quickly, and even exchanging his
poems and written works with the royal court of Queen Victoria.
There is an
In Our Time podcast on Charles
Booth and the Labour Survey, of those living in poverty in late Victorian
London.