The Andover Workhouse Scandal

The feature of the 1834 legislation that caught the attention of contemporary opinion was not the system of central administration but the threat of seeking relief, with special emphasis being paid to the workhouse test. Official records are stronger on administration that relief, but they do give more attention to the inmates of the workhouse than to those on outdoor relief. In many respects this is unfortunate since the majority of paupers were normally those in receipt of outdoor relief. The statistics of the period suggest that over 80 per cent of paupers were on outdoor relief. In 1837 11 per cent of all paupers had been workhouse inmates; by 1844 the figure was no more than 15 per cent.

The workhouse test was designed to deter the able-bodied poor, but the majority of workhouse inmates were normally the impotent; the physically and mentally disabled, the aged and a wide variety of sick. In dealing with the able-bodied the workhouse test was invariably offered to those regarded as of bad character: aged or diseased prostitutes, ex-criminals, mothers with more than one illegitimate child, known alcoholics and vagrants. Regarded as a refuge for undesirables, the workhouse gave its inmates a greater stigma than applied to those in receipt of outdoor relief.

The Victorian workhouse was faced with the impossible task of providing a refuge for the impotent while deterring the scrounger. In that the mass of the poor regarded the workhouse with considerable dread the deterrent feature had been successfully conveyed, despite the fact that the majority of the inmates were usually unsuitable for such treatment. Indeed for the Webbs, the workhouse became 'shocking to every principle of reason and every feeling of humanity'.

This dismal view corresponds to that of contemporary critics of the 1830s and 1840s such as The Times and the novelist Charles Dickens. The picture of the workhouse presented by its early opponents suggested a life of horror. For even the mildly awkward there were savage beatings and solitary confinement in the most unsuitable of cells. For the majority, existence was endured on a starvation diet, families were ruthlessly separated in the interests of classification, accommodation was overcrowded and unhealthy and daily life was a monotonous routine supervised by unsympathetic officials. Finally, for those unfortunate enough to die in the workhouse, the end was a pauper burial without dignity or respect.

For the modern historian the picture is no longer entirely a study in black. There was much variation between workhouses and those that paid most attention to the directives of the central authority probably provided better food and accommodation than was available to many of the poor who struggled to survive outside. In the case of children and the sick, foundations were being made for future progress, though developments were slow and partial up to the mid -1860s. Most historians accept the conclusions of David Roberts that the sensational stories of cruelties were either false or the result of survivals from the former regime. In a number of cases, such as the flogging of young girls at the Hoo Workhouse or the scandal at Andover, the local authority could be shown to have ignored the directives of the central authority. However, this did not entirely excuse the inadequacy of the supervision that allowed such things to take place.

The Andover scandal was not unique but it was highly publicised and used by those critical of or opposed to the new system. Bone crushing was used in some workhouses as a 'useful' occupation for paupers. Sir Robert Peel's Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, disapproved of it as a means of employing the poor but Commissioner George Nicholls was a great enthusiast and a second Commissioner, Sir George Cornewall Lewis vacillating in his attitude. Andover was regarded, from the Commissioners' point of view, as a model union. All outdoor relief was stopped as soon as the workhouse was opened and it was one of the few unions not to relax this rule during the 'great freeze' of January 1838. The Board's ruthlessness shocked even the Rev. Thomas Mozeley, a convinced opponent of the old system.

At Andover, the work was hard, the discipline strict and the diet scanty. No little indulgences were allowed to creep in. This was due to the choice of ex-sergeant Colin M'Dougal, a veteran of Waterloo, as workhouse master and his wife, Mary Ann, as matron. The local Guardians acknowledged that even this admirable couple had their faults but were only too ready to leave the management of the union's affairs to their domineering chairman. Attempts to end bone crushing at Andover in December 1844 were voted down by the chairman and his supporters. However, during the next few months ugly rumours began to circulate about what went on in the bone-yard in terms of inmates eating the marrow from the decomposing bones. The Guardians took no action, apart from suspending bone crushing during hot weather. Hugh Mundy, a local farmer frequently at odds with his colleagues whom he infuriated by paying his labourers ten shillings a week, two shillings more than his fellow landowners, went public. He turned to Thomas Wakley, who on Friday 1 August 1845, rose to ask the Home Secretary about paupers eating bone marrow at Andover. Sir James Graham replied that he could not believe this situation but promised to institute an enquiry. The following day Henry Parker, the Assistant Commissioner responsible for Andover, was dispatched to ascertain the facts.

His enquiry began on Monday 4 August 1845 and by the next day he was able to report back to London that the charges were true. On 14 August Parker was instructed to investigate any alleged 'neglect or misconduct on the part of the Master or officers of the workhouse'. M'Dougal offered his resignation on 29 September but when Parker, now summoned back to London, suggested consulting the Commission's solicitors about prosecution the lawyers advised against it. The Commission was left with a hostile press, a critical Parliament, a seriously alarmed public and no scapegoat.

Parker now found himself cast in this role. When he drafted a letter from the Board to the Andover Guardians he was accused of trying to throw the blame on the Commissioners. On 16 October Parker was called upon to resign and his only reward for years of devoted service was a suggestion that he should seek work with one of the expanding railway companies. If the Commissioners felt that they had saved themselves by dismissing Parker, they were mistaken. The former Assistant Commissioner published a long pamphlet in his own defence, which indicted his recent superiors, and his case was rapidly taken up by a group of anti-Poor Law MPs.

The public were unhappy about Parker's dismissal and the Commission compounded their error by peremptorily ordering another Assistant Commissioner, William Day, to resign after years of loyal service, nominally because he had been ill for several weeks after falling down some steps. This provided too valuable an opportunity for Edwin Chadwick, still bitter about his treatment by the Commission, who encouraged MPs to keep the issue alive. On 8 November 1845 the Poor Law Commissioners tacitly acknowledged the justice of the attacks made on bone crushing by issuing a General Order forbidding it. This came too late. Public opinion was now seriously alarmed and the government bowed to it. On 5 March 1846 a Select Committee of the House of Commons was established to investigate the Andover scandal, the conduct of the Poor Law Commissioners and the circumstances surrounding Parker's resignation. The fifteen members of the 'Andover committee' -- including three well-known opponents of the workhouse, John Fielden, Thomas Wakley and Benjamin Disraeli -- began work two weeks later. For the next three and a half months they heard evidence from witnesses and their words were reported at length in the press. The New Poor Law, the Whigs who had created it and the gentry who administered it were on trial.

The Report was published in August 1846. It filled two large volumes totalling several thousand pages and contained a scathing indictment of everyone involved. The government announced that it proposed to take no action but it had privately decided that the Commission must go, partly to placate public opinion but also because it had done its work. The poor rates had been cut; outdoor relief for the able-bodied had all but ceased and almost the whole country had been unionised. The time had come when 'the three kings of Somerset House', as the Poor Law Commissioners had been nicknamed by their critics, could safely be replaced by a body with fewer dictatorial powers and directly responsible to Parliament.

When the Act that had extended the life of the Poor Law Commission ran out in 1847 it was not renewed and the Poor Law Board Act was passed in its place. It set up a new body, the Poor Law Board, consisting in theory of four senior ministers [the Home Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord President of the Council and the Lord Privy Seal]. In practice, like the Board of Trade, it was a mere fiction and never intended to meet. The real power lay with its President, who was eligible to sit in Parliament, and his two Secretaries, one of whom could become an MP. It was expected that the President would sit in the House of Lords and the Permanent Secretary in the Commons but in practice both ministers were usually MPs.

Resisting the Poor Law

Resistance to alterations in the provision of poor relief was not uncommon in the early nineteenth century and grievances about the operation of the poor laws formed a significant feature of disturbances in southern England between 1830 and 1832. Whatever its demoralising character, the old poor law had at least provided flexible arrangements to deal with poverty and had come to be regarded by many labourers as their right in times of hardship. It was not surprising that the introduction and especially the implementation of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 provoked widespread hostility and opposition[1]. This section is divided into three parts: discussion of rural and then urban opposition and finally a documentary exercise in how opposition has been interpreted.

Rural opposition

The Act was intended to solve the problem of rising poor rates and the maladministration of existing workhouses by an application of market principles. Making unlawful any relief to able-bodied people outside the workhouse was intended to discourage all but the genuinely needy. The Act also grouped hitherto independent parishes into poor law unions governed by an elected board of guardians under the supervision of three centrally appointed Poor Law Commissioners. The Act had a relatively easy passage through Parliament but even so there was some opposition. William Cobbett saw it, in his pamphlet The Legacy to Labourers, as an attack on the 'right' to relief and an assault on the traditional 'social compact' between the propertied and the poor. Other saw it as an attack on the independence of local government. Working class radicals saw it as part of the attack on the livelihood of the poor by a penny-pinching government.

• The first reaction to the implementation of the Act came in agricultural areas. From 1835 there were numerous disturbances in East Anglia and the southern counties, a situation aggravated by a hard winter that forced many unemployed labourers to apply for relief.
• Announcements of the implementation of the Act were greeted with hostility. In May 1835 a crowd assembled at Ampthill demanding 'Blood or bread', 'All money' and 'No bread' and was dispersed only after the Riot Act was read.
• In other places labourers occupied the workhouses demanding their customary rights.
• Attempts to separate male and female paupers under the new regulations were seen as part of a Malthusian plot to stop the poor from breeding; this was elaborated by rumours that workhouse food was laced with an anti-fertility substance or even poisoned.
• The most serious disturbances took place in Suffolk. Anglican clergymen openly opposed to the new law and strong local feeling was more evident than in many other parts of the country.

The disturbances in southern England demonstrated the sensitivity of the population to changes in customary arrangements for poor relief. Reactions varied from locality to locality but there was little serious violence other than some property being damaged and a few people assaulted. There was often considerable local sympathy for the rioters and many gentry and parsons petitioned against the Act. However, the disturbances did little to disturb the implementation of the Act and by mid 1836 the new system was operating across the agricultural south. The anti-poor law movement never gained the support and partial success it was to achieve when the system was applied to the North.

Urban opposition: the North

Initially the Act was received favourably by the powerful provincial northern press because it was felt to be irrelevant to the industrial areas where poor rates were much lower than in the south and parochial relief had often already been organised. Implementation in the north from the end of 1836 aroused serious and sometimes violent opposition, much of it organised by Tory radicals such as Michael Sadler and Richard Oastler. These middle class reformers, already prominent in campaigning for factory reform, provided an organisation against the new Act that the resistance in the south had not had.

1. The campaign orchestrated by the anti-poor law movement stressed the Christian duty of the rich to assist the poor and accepted Cobbett's argument that the Act denied basic rights.
2. The timing of implementation in the north was also unfortunate and occurred just at the time that trade depression was beginning to affect many of the textile districts, greatly adding to the fears of the manufacturing population, especially the increasingly vulnerable handloom workers.
3. The arrival of the commissioners often led to violence though the leaders of the movement preferred to maintain control over their followers and direct the campaign in a peaceful direction without causing outright violence. This was not always possible. In June 1837 a crowd of people wrecked the workhouse in Huddersfield. This led to implementation being put off until the following year.
4. By the end of 1838 the violent phase of resistance had died down as the unions were gradually established and the poor law commissioners made concessions that allowed boards of guardians to give relief in Lancashire and Yorkshire on the traditional basis of the old poor law if the situation required it. By 1839 the campaign began to disintegrate as working class resentment was appeased by the continued use of outdoor relief and rivalries between middle class and working class elements of the movement began to come to the fore. Increasingly Chartism attracted the more radical supporters of the agitation.

The anti-poor law movement in the North represented a temporary alliance between working and middle classes against what was widely regarded as an unjust and intrusive measure; in a sense it was also a local reaction against centralisation that cut across class lines. Eventually differences in emphasis and ideas between Tory radicals, who emphasised the value of paternalism, and the emerging Chartist leaders, with their belief in universal suffrage, ruptured the alliance.

Opposition to the 1834 Act did little to delay its implementation in southern England but in the north it was more effective. It delayed effective implementation until 1838 and even then local concessions meant that outdoor relief still continued to play an important role. The northern campaign demonstrated that exerting pressure through press, pamphlets and meetings was far more influential that the 'language of menace'. This stands in contrast to the more traditional, less organised and less effective reactions in the agricultural areas.

Anti-poor law agitation: some sources

Source 1: William Cobbett

This bill will totally abrogate all the local government of the kingdom: the gentlemen and the magistrates will be totally divested of all power, tending to uphold their character, and to secure their property, and their personal safety in the country. I have talked to twenty gentlemen, farmers and attorneys; every man of them has said: “If this bill be attempted to be put into execution, there will be a revolution in England”; and I am so firmly persuaded of the soundness of their opinion, that I should look upon such result as something inevitable.

Weekly Political Register, 3 May 1834

Source2: Account from W.J. Gilbert from Devon

The leaders of the opposition are to be found amongst the constant overseers (gentlemen accustomed to accept the office for £5 a year, and quit it with a well-furnished purse); the little shopkeeper, at whose house the poor were paid, and who received the amount for old debts and encouraged new, from which the pauper never got free; the beer-shop keeper, at whose house great part of the relief was expended; and the little farmer or the lime-kiln owner, whose influence at the vestry enabled him to pay one half hid labour from the parish funds, under the name of relief in aid of wages, or to speak correctly, relief in aid of vestrymen. Wherever disturbances have taken place, they have been traced to the instigation of some or one of these parties. In the north of the county, where there were some disturbances, we found that the poor people were acting under the grossest deception…

Poor Law Commission Second Annual Report, Appendix B, No. 9, 1836

Source 3: Reverend J.R. Stephens

The people were not going to stand this, and he would say, that sooner than wife and husband, and father and son, should be sundered and dungeoned, and fed on “skillee” – sooner than wife or daughter should wear the prison dress – sooner than that – Newcastle ought to be, and should be --- one blaze of fire, with only one way to put it out, and that with the blood of all who supported this abominable measure…

Extract from a speech January 1838 printed in R.G.Gammage History of the Chartist Movement, 1854, page 64.

Source 4: Richard Oastler

Christian Reader.

Be not alarmed at the sound of the Title. I can not bless that, which GOD and NATURE CURSE. The Bible being true, the Poor Law Amendment Act is false! The Bible containing the will of God, --- this accursed Act of Parliament embodies the will of Lucifer. It is the Sceptre of Belial, establishing its sway in the Land of Bibles!! DAMNATION; ETERNAL DAMNATION to the accursed Fiend!!

Richard Oastler Damnation, Eternal Damnation, 1837, frontispiece.

Source 5: John Knott

The 1834 Poor Law was a focus for popular discontent, rather than its sole cause. When the popular radicals of Bradford drew up A Petition to Parliament Against the New Poor Law Act in early 1835, they did not confine themselves to criticising the Act’s poor relief policy: they also mentioned the hardship and suffering caused by the use of steam power and machinery in factories, and of the failure of the 1832 Reform Act to extend the franchise to the labouring population…..Boom and depression punctuated their lives; they were frightened by the 1832 Anatomy Act and the introduction of the New Police; the 1832 Reform Act and the 1833 Factory Act fell well short of their demands; and now the 1834 Poor Law held out the spectre of lower wages and possible starvation. It was hard to escape the conclusion that all these things were part of an orchestrated attempt to grind the labouring population down even further.

John Knott Popular Opposition to the 1834 Poor Law, Croom Helm, 1986, page 247.

Source 6: Nicholas Edsall

The emergence of spontaneous resistance early in 1837 revived the opposition’s hopes, but not their realistic prospects. Only something approaching a national movement with effective representation in Parliament would have been sufficient to check let alone reverse the progress of the Poor Law Commissioners, and there was never the slightest chance of these conditions being fulfilled…..This did not mean, however, that the popular resistance movement was pointless or that its importance lay solely in its legacy to northern Chartism. It failed only in terms of its own over-ambitious goals; judged by any less exacting standards it was a success. Without popular resistance the administrative machinery of the New Poor Law would have been introduced long before the end of 1837…The most that the anti-Poor Law movement could realistically hope to achieve was what had been achieved by 1844, delay, a demonstration of the inadequacy of the Law, and some modification of its rigors. Anything more substantial would have to wait until a positive alternative to the New Poor Law was put forward, and that was not to happen for more than half a century.

Nicholas C. Edsall The Anti-Poor Law movement 1834-44, Manchester University Press, 1971, pp. 258, 262.

---

[1] Opposition to the introduction of the 1834 Act can be found in N. Edsall The Anti-Poor Law Movement 1833-1844, Manchester U.P., 1971 and J. Knott Popular Opposition to the 1834 Poor Law, Croom Helm, 1985.