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Poverty
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Introduction
Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.
Headlines are in brown.
References and citations are in turquoise.
Contextual history is in purple.
Poverty
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise,
I, Poor People’s Houses, 'Poverty's
no disgrace, but 'tis a great inconvenience' was a common saying among the Lark
Rise people; but that put the case too mildly, for their poverty was no less
than a hampering drag upon them.
Chronology
1601
The Old Poor Law
The Poor
Law Act 1601 meant that even the poorest had certain legal rights,
including for economic assistance. The Poor Law 1601 sought to consolidate all
previous legislative provisions for the relief of 'the poor'. The Poor Law made
it compulsory for parishes to levy a 'poor rate' to fund financial support
('public assistance') for those who could not work. Assistance depended on the
residential qualification of living locally (leading Poor Law guardians to
repatriate paupers elsewhere). 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' and 'indoor' relief was available. 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
(the lame, blind, etc) and the 'idle poor',
who were likely to be placed in houses of correction (later 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.
Eighteenth century
The poor laws and Britain’s wealth meant
that relative to other nations, the poor did receive better assistance. In
France for instance the equivalent help in 1790 was no more than emergency
handout amounting to 2s or 3s a year.
Farmers might be required by magistrates
to take on jobless labourers on a minimum wage, though this often resulted in
them being given demeaning or meaningless tasks. In Yorkshire there was a
system of grants to set up small businesses, such as provision of tools and
machinery.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 328-329).
1834
The Old Poor Law
had developed into a unique welfare system. 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 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 as elsewhere, but as a richer
society grew, the needs of the poor increased. Folk were
more reported to stand up for their rights, applying to Overseers of the Poor,
appealing to 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.
The
New Poor Law
In 1834, the 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.
The heart of
the reforms was to introduce a test of genuine need. Traditional payments of
cash or in kind were to cease. Assistance would only be provided within
workhouses, the Whig Bastilles, which were intended to be a deliberate
deterrent, with monotonous, thoughj sufficient, fiet; unpleasant work; regimentation; unforms; mixing with
of ‘respectable’ poor with ‘unrespectable’, and the splitting of families.
Poor relief
dropped from £6M to £4M and the percentage of the population in receipt of
relief from 10.2% to 5.4%.
New characters
arose:
·
When
Dickens’ story was first serialised in the English literary magazine, Bentley's
Miscellany in 1837, Mr.
Bumble was a cruel and self-important beadle, a minor parish official, who
oversaw the parish workhouse and orphanage of Mudfog,
a country town 75 miles from London where the orphaned Oliver Twist was brought
up. He was described as "A fat man, and a choleric ... Mr. Bumble had a
great idea of his oratorical powers and his importance.". " “Meat,
ma’am, meat,” replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. “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).
·
Thomas
Gradgrind was the notorious school board Superintendent in Dickens's 1854 novel
Hard Times who was dedicated to the pursuit of profitable enterprise.
His name is now used generically to refer to someone who is hard and only
concerned with cold facts and numbers
However 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.
The stigma of the workhouse though
remained a feature, especially a horrendous 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.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 439 to 442).
Those families who could not fend for
themselves were either given money or food to sustain themselves
(known as out-relief) or were taken into a Union Workhouse. 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.
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.
There is an In Our Time podcast on Charles
Booth and the Labour Survey,
to discover how many people in late Victorian London were living in poverty,
and understand why.
Poverty in Whitby
The 1837 valuation of Whitby is a list of every property
in the township of Whitby in the year 1837, that is 2,435 houses, tenements,
shops, offices and other places. The valuation
includes the occupier of the property, its owner, a description
and its rateable value. The record therefore shows the type of house a person
was living in.
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 original
record is at The National Archives at Kew, in
reference MH12/14656.
The Workhouse
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.
Guisborough
appears to have been regarded as a model Workhouse by the Assistant Poor Law
Commissioners who visited it. It had water closets (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.
Flora Thompson, Lark
Rise, V,
Survivals: 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, Candleford Green, XXXII, The Green: 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.
Bankrupcy