Simon Fowler > Quotes

“the Andover Workhouse scandal.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Occasionally there were complaints that pauper labour undercut commercial producers outside. In 1888 the Firewood Cutters’ Protection Association protested that their desperately poor members’ livelihoods were being taken away, as a result of cheap firewood being sold by unions in the East End. Whitechapel offered a robust response, arguing that it was not prepared to admit ‘that the fact of a man being employed in the workhouse deprives him of the right to contribute to the labour of the country the produce of which he is a consumer’.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“The workhouse was the most public face of the Poor Law. But behind them lay several layers of central and local political and administrative control.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Its early years were troubled; the original workhouse in Marylebone opened in 1752, but soon became overcrowded, as well as infested with rats from a nearby burial ground.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“To the Victorians, there were few social ills that could not be cured by a healthy dose of philanthropy. The historian Frank Prochaska has remarked: ‘No country on earth can lay claim to a greater philanthropic tradition than Great Britain. Until the twentieth century, philanthropy was widely believed to be the most wholesome and reliable remedy for the nation’s ills’.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“One inspector might be responsible for unions in half-a-dozen counties. Generally, they seem to have been a very conscientious body of men (the first women were not appointed until the 1880s, and then only to supervise the schooling of workhouse children).”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“A significant problem facing the central authorities was that the standard of food and accommodation, let alone the medical care or schooling offered to the children, varied tremendously, even between neighbouring workhouses. The British government had few real powers; officials in Whitehall might argue, persuade and on occasion embarrass but, particularly before the 1870s, they could be – and often were – ignored.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“The cause of drunkenness among the poor was twofold: firstly the ready availability of beer and spirits and secondly the appalling conditions among which people lived, which often caused them to seek escape at the bottom of a glass. Engels felt that the working class was ‘deprived of all pleasures except sexual indulgence and intoxicating liquors’. The problem was not the indolent and feckless nature of the working classes, but an economic system which resulted in both huge unemployment and underemployment. Not until the First World War was there full employment – for the first time. In such a climate it was difficult, even for the hard-working and the motivated, to earn enough to keep body and soul together.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Marylebone, in common with workhouses across London, was overwhelmed by a flood of applicants fleeing the potato famine in Ireland. The highest number accommodated on a single day was 2,264 (there were beds for 1,500), when even the workshops were pressed into service as additional dormitories.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Charles Dickens once wrote that the pauper’s alternatives were ‘of being starved by a gradual process in the house or by a quick one out of it’. Many preferred to beg, borrow, steal or simply to expire in some wretched room in the East End, as did 69-year-old William May, a former sailor. May was found dead and very emaciated in December 1842.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Anthony Trollope’s novel of 1855 The Warden, which takes place in Hiram’s Hospital, an almshouse in Barchester, was based on a contemporary scandal. But, in general, conditions were always better than in a workhouse.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“At the centre of the Andover Workhouse scandal of 1847 was the chairman of the guardians, the Reverend Christopher Dodson, rector of Gateley and Penton Mawsey. He dominated meetings of the board with his sarcastic tongue and a bullying manner. He was a popular figure locally because he kept the poor rate low, largely through economies driving workhouse inmates close to starvation. He also appointed a succession of workhouse masters who proved mostly unsuitable.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“In 1946 James Griffiths, Minister of National Insurance, then introducing proposals to establish the welfare state told the House of Commons that: to those who profess to that security will weaken the moral fibre and destroy self-respect let me say this. It is not security that destroys us, it is insecurity. It is the fear of tomorrow that paralyses the will, it is the frustration of human hopes that corrodes the soul. Security in adversity will I believe release our people from the haunting fears of yesterday and make tomorrow not a day to dread, but a day to welcome.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Despite outbreaks of fever, which came from the burial ground,”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Richard Oastler, wrote in the Northern Star in 1838 that ‘the real object of [the New Poor Law] … is to lower wages and punish poverty as a crime. Remember also that children and parents are lying frequently in the same Bastille without seeing one another or knowing the other’s fate’.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“But was every workhouse as bad? In these sentimental days the paupers who ground the bones are presented as the innocent victims of a cruel and misguided policy, forced into dreadful workhouses where the children were beaten and their parents neglected. Is this really the case? One thing is clear from any study of welfare history, that, although the terminology changes, the problems and the solutions largely remain the same. Basically, how do you match up limited resources with the desire to help fellow citizens in need? How generous do you make the support offered to the destitute, the aged and the infirm? If it is too generous, then the taxpayer will complain of the financial burden and you risk the possibility of welfare dependency, that is people preferring to remain on financial support rather than find a job.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Conversely, if the financial support is not generous enough then the genuinely deserving will suffer and there will be scandals, and possibly even protests from claimants. There are striking parallels with scandals in social services and the National Health Service today. The Mid Staffordshire Hospital scandal between 2007 and 2009 could easily have occurred in workhouses 150 years ago.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Much of what we know about life inside the workhouse, particularly the casual wards which housed the vagrants, comes from articles and books written by journalists and social reformers who spent a few nights there. Most only spent a night or two in the workhouse before returning to respectable life. The best-known account is undoubtedly Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London,”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“For many ambitious young men and women, serving as a guardian became a convenient way to learn the political ropes before moving on to greater things. The Royal Commission, which investigated the Poor Laws between 1905 and 1909 was told: ‘Many men simply become guardians as a stepping stone to the town council; they wish to gain confidence in speaking and use the boardroom as a practising ground… They are often ignorant and indifferent and stand for other reasons than their knowledge or interest in the poor’.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Theorists such as the Rev J.T. Becher, who was behind the establishment of what became the Southwell Workhouse in Nottinghamshire, argued that workhouses should act as a deterrent to the poor. In his pamphlet The Anti-pauper System (1828) Becher wrote: ‘Let it be remembered that the advantages resulting from a workhouse must arise not from keeping the poor in the house, but from keeping them out of it’.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Friedrich Engels was undoubtedly right when, in 1844, he described the authors of the 1834 Poor Law report as wishing ‘to force the poor into the Procrustean bed of their preconceived doctrines. To do this they treated the poor with incredible savagery’.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Who you were in Victorian and Edwardian society depended on your social class. It was possible to move between classes, although their erstwhile social equals treated those on a downward path with pity, while those making their way were regarded as vulgar nouveau riche. Your status was most obviously indicated by the clothes you wore.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“But it is now forgotten that the workhouse was there to cope when people could not or would not. It was the last port of call for the destitute and the dying.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“The Poor Law was not the only help available to the destitute; it was designed to be the last resort. There were alternatives for men and women in temporary difficulties, or for those regarded as respectable (for it was almost as easy for the middle classes to drift into financial difficulties as their poorer cousins).”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Where the union chose to ignore the inspector, there was little he could do about”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“Many observers agreed with Friedrich Engels, who, in the 1840s, said that ‘although workers cannot afford to give to charity on the same scale as the middle class, they are nevertheless more charitable in every way’. Sixty years later, the Reverend William Conybeare claimed that it was ‘largely the kindness of poor to poor which stands between our current civilisation and revolution’.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“from the mid- 1840s onwards. The workhouse thereafter became the refuge of the elderly, the sick, orphans and those who were incapable of earning a living.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“bowdlerised”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors

“New Poor Law. The Poor Law originated in the dying days of Elizabeth I’s reign, and it remained much the same until the early 1830s. Each parish became responsible for looking after those who were too ill, young or old to work, and the cost of so doing had to be paid for by a tax or rate on the property of the wealthier residents in the parish. Overseers of the poor were elected by the ratepayers each year to administer the system and maintain the accounts. In the more populous parishes, officials were paid to help. This Poor Law and its processes worked well enough in the stable conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but, as the population increased and common land was enclosed as part of agricultural reforms, it came under enormous strain.”
― Simon Fowler, The Workhouse: The People, the Places, the Life Behind Doors