Hello, my name is Paul Carter and I’m the Principal Records Specialist for Collaborative Projects here at The National Archives. Now today we’re going to look at a small number of documents, four in fact from the Ministry of Health or MH collections.
Now the Ministry of Health wasn’t formed until just after World War I, but the ministry inherited the records of several earlier predecessor departments including the Poor Law commission later the Poor Law Board and later still the Local Government Board, in which the Poor Law Department sat. So so what were the Poor Law Commission, Poor Law Board, etc. exactly? Well, for our purposes they were different iterations of a central Poor Law authority, which had been established initially under the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which oversaw the period of the new Poor Law. And it was there to oversee the Poor Law and to create or impose national uniformity in regard to poor relief, kind of 19th century welfarism.
The Poor Law Union correspondence in MH 12, which is the record series from which our documents are drawn from, contains all the correspondence between local unions, local Poor Law authorities and the central authority. The letters within this correspondence were mainly written by the union clerks and often includes attachments, for example other letters, reports, memos, plans, maps, etc. although as we’re going to see other writers are represented in this collection. Now, in order that these letters and their contents were not lost, the Poor Law Commission invested in a boundary and the letters, attachments, and draft responses were bound up union by union and in rough chronological order into these large volumes, similar to the one that in front of me at the moment. Now, the subgroup of documents that we’re going to focus on in this Spotlight were all written by members of the 19th century poor, bar one which will become apparent. Now some of these writers as we will see were in receipt of relief categorised as paupers, while others were part of the wider class of poor, not in receipt of relief, technically not paupers but very much near that line. Now some of these people wrote complaining that their relief was too little or that they’ve suffered verbal or physical abuse at the hands of local Poor Law officers or that medical care was poor or it was unforthcoming.
So as a whole their letters cover a multitude of issues and because they understood that context might be essential in pursuing those complaints they would add contextual details about their ages, their family members, access to employment, access to wages, details of their health and so on. Others wrote that they had claimed relief but their applications for help had been refused or that relief in the workhouse had been offered but that they were unwilling to accept it as that would mean losing their homes, losing family connections perhaps or future work opportunities.
The reason that most of this material is in this Poor Law Union correspondence collection is because the 19th century poor often regarded the central authority as a court of last resort in regard to their complaints and they wrote to that authority in their thousands. The letters then represent a truly unique window on the not so distant past, anything from four to maybe eight generations ago, regarding the poorest in English and Welsh Society. “Unique” might sometimes be an overused word in archives or history but not on this occasion.
So what kind of document is our first document? Well, the first item I’ve selected is a straightforward common single-sided letter. And what about the appearance of it? Well, it is noticeably a letter. It conforms easily to what we would consider a classic letter style to be. So at the top we have the place in which the writer was writing from, the date, and a simple salutation and introductory text, so “Gentlemen, I beg leave to most humbly submit my case to you for your consideration”. And at the end of the letter is a formal close or sign-off: “Your humble servant” and then the name of the writer. So it conforms to that classic letter style. So when does it date from and who is it that’s produced this letter that I’m going to show you? Well, the letter was written on the 5th of February 1842 by Thomas Henshaw. Now, Henshaw was a framework knitter, lived in Ilkeston in Derbyshire. Ilkeston was in the basic Poor Law Union which spanned Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
What does it say though and who is it for, and what was the purpose of this document that he’s written? Well, Henshaw writes that he’s “to submit my case to you for your consideration and pray that you will afford me that redress in my most distressing case”. Now, without simply reading the letter out, Henshaw claims that he was an unemployed framework knitter with a wife and children and that they were quote, “completely destitute of food since February the first to the present time” – and remember he’s writing on the fifth here. That his applications for relief are being turned down by local Poor Law officials even though according to law they should be eligible. in fact he quotes the section of the law to the Poor Law Commission to make sure that they understand that he is claiming his right, not charity.
Our second item focuses on an old age and debility. The letter covers common ground, we find very similar content in hundreds of such letters from the poor. So what’s the day and who produced this? So the letter dates from January 1847 and was written by David Jenkins Sawyer living at boat house number 24 in Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire, currently Ceredigion. What does it say and who’s this letter for and what’s the purpose? Jenkins explains to the Poor Law Commission that he is from Llanidloes, some 27 miles east from Aberystwyth, but he’s worked in Aberystwyth for the last 15 years. He writes that quote “in consequence of the advanced ages of my wife and myself added to infirmity, myself 76 and wife 74,” they’d applied for relief and they had until recently received two shillings and sixpence per week, but that money had now been stopped and it had been stopped some weeks or months as Jenkins wrote and he writes to the commission to intercede on their behalf to reinstate their relief. Now he adds that the local Poor Law authority had not not offered them relief, but the relief offered was the workhouse.
Now we could if time allowed us turn the spotlight on literally thousands of these kinds of letters and explore the many subjects that the poor wish to address, but I want to end on two slightly different types of items that give us the voice of the English and Welsh poor in full. Now the first is a letter from a Liverpool workhouse inmate, pauper inmate. So the letter is dated the 18th of February 1895. It’s much later than our first two examples and it’s written by John Joseph McDonald who signed off as quote “inmate of the Liverpool workhouse”. Now what does it say then? What is it for and what’s the purpose of this particular letter? Now in answering those kind of questions I have to start by saying that the letter is different from our first examples in a number of ways. Firstly it was written not to the central Poor Law authority but to a Mr Joseph Moss, a member of the Liverpool Select Vestry. Liverpool was not a formal Poor Law union. Now the letter was printed in the Daily Chronicle newspaper, the best selling newspaper of the 1890s, and a copy of this was either sent or collected by the central authority. Moreover, McDonald gives his address as quote “the Subterranean Department Liverpool Workhouse”. Now of course there was no such Department. What McDonald was doing, he was using sarcasm as a tool to further his complaint to which we now turn.
It appears that elderly paupers were provided with a change of underclothes each week. The garments were given out in the workhouse cellars and the elderly poor were to change there in the cold. Now we should recollect that the winter of 1894-5 was particular particularly cold. Reports of severe frost and heavy snow were reported across the country, temperatures fell to an average of -12.7 in Wakefield in Yorkshire in early mid-February ’94. Canals, rivers, lakes, ponds froze over. The Manchester ship canal froze. Ice flows were recorded in the river Thames. The whole country froze that winter. And that is the context of his letter. Complaints in Liverpool concerning the paupers “disrobing, discomforting, demoralising, and debasing underground chamber”, which is how McDonald phrases this, were widespread indeed. Several newspaper reports were made on the subject both locally and nationally to the embarrassment of the local officials, who found that paupers’ words could easily be picked up and amplified through press reports.
Now our fourth and final item touches on vagrancy, anonymity, and like the third example, the amplification of the pauper voice. It also touches on pauper poetry. So who’s produced this and from what period is this particular item? Well, the words date from September 1871 and it was written anonymously by a pauper on the walls of the vagrant ward in the Holywell Union Workhouse in Flintshire. So the document that this comes from is Andrew Doyle’s – who was one of the Poor Law inspectors – inspection report forms for the Holywell Workhouse that’s in Flintshire in North Wales. It’s written in September 1871. Doyle states that, “I copy the following – the latest contribution to tramp poetic literature from the wall of the vagrant ward”. And that’s interesting in its own right, because what he’s suggesting is that this isn’t particularly unusual. It’s simply the latest contribution. The words written on the wall were this, this is what he writes into his report. He writes: “Jesus wept and well he might / to see us poor mumpers in such a plight. / A can of skillie in our hand. / They call it relief in a Christian land. / Oh God defend the tramps say I / Send the guardians to hell as soon as they die / We lie on boards at their command / Nice treatment in a Christian land. / Oh sweet spirit hear my prayer / Cut them from salvation rare / and feed them on straw and sand / They will call it relief in a Christian land.” And it’s signed off “Yankee sailor”, and that’s kind of got me speculating that perhaps this is a sailor that does the Atlantic run.
Now interestingly when we look through further instances of this, we find that these words, this piece of poetry, finds itself in the Welsh Flag and Times, the North Wales Chronicle, the Caernarvon & Denbigh Herald, the Shrewsbury Chronicle, the Bristol Mercury, the North Devon Journal, the Oxford Chronicle & Reading Gazette. It’s getting around within the press and that voice is getting amplified. We even find that it’s in the press in New Zealand, it’s in The Colonist in April 1873, and the comment there is is that the poet is still in the workhouse and should any publisher wish to employ him they could contact him there. An amplified voice if ever there was one.
Taken collectively, not just these four but the thousands of such letters in this collection, these documents, they’re not just useful for understanding poverty in the Victorian period; they’re essential. Most surviving records created during the Victorian New Poor Law period were produced by the legislature, the central or local Poor Law officials, and the law courts at petty and quarter sessions. Now of course Parliament, the central Poor Law authority, local poor law unions, local sessions and individual magistrates tended to create, organise and retain their records, many of which (not all) might be found in various archive repositories. Now the poor had none of this. They had no administrative infrastructure, so their archive so to speak was mainly thought not to exist. Now, we know it does. So these are just four of the many thousands of such items to be found in our MH 12 collection, which can be used to find out so much more about poverty in Victorian England and Wales. If you want to know more about the voices, letters of the poor, see our book: King, Carter, Carter, Jones & Beardmore, “In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law 1834 -1900” and have a look at the resources linked in the video description here.