Children In Care
Rosemary Steer looks at how different institutions sought to provide for destitute children in the 19th and 20th centuries
Rosemary Steer looks at how different institutions tried to help destitute children in the 19th and 20th centuries
Winifred Price, born in London’s East End, arrived at a children’s home run by the Waifs and Strays Society in Norfolk in 1908. She had said goodbye to her tearful mother in London, before being put on a train at Liverpool Street station, unaccompanied, and sent off to a new life in the countryside. She was just six years old.
She later recalled, “I can remember the bewilderment and misery of that long journey with strange people. We eventually arrived… and I was met by a (to me) grim bespectacled person with a little bonnet on her head, and was lifted up on to a high dog cart between the ‘ogre’ and the driver, to say I was terrified was putting it mildly…”
Winifred was one of thousands of children who were unable to remain with their birth parents and were taken into the care of the state, charities, other families or employers, temporarily or permanently. Poverty was a given for these children, but there was often an additional reason that pushed the family over the edge. Many children, like Winifred, came into care when one or both of their parents died, although others were deserted, abused or had criminal parents.
Mention the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and we immediately think of the workhouse – that grim, bleak
‘Many came into care when one or both parents died’
refuge for the destitute and desperate, managed by elected guardians of the poor and funded through the poor rates. Outdoor relief – monetary allowances or payments in kind such as clothing or flour – was abolished for the able-bodied by the Act (in theory, if not always in practice), leaving many families with a stark choice: enter the workhouse or starve.
Actor Charlie Chaplin wrote in My Early Years (1964) of the impact of the workhouse’s segregation system. Upon
entering Lambeth Workhouse in South London with his mother and half-brother, “the forlorn bewilderment of it struck me; for there we were made to separate, Mother going in one direction to the women’s ward and we in another to the children’s”. He described the “poignant sadness” of the first visiting day, “the shock of seeing Mother enter the visiting-room garbed in workhouse clothes… her face lit up when she saw us. Sydney and I began to weep which made Mother weep, and large tears began to run down her cheeks.”
Christian Principles
From 1835, workhouses were required to appoint teachers to ensure child inmates received a minimum of three hours’ schooling each day. They were to be taught “reading, writing, arithmetic and the principles of Christian religion, and… other instruction to train them to habits of usefulness, industry and virtue”, according to the First Annual Report of the
Poor Law Commissioners for England and Wales (1835). This was more than many children of the labouring classes received outside the workhouse before the introduction of compulsory, free, universal elementary education. Indeed, workhouse schools are sometimes seen as the first state schools in England and Wales.
As the century progressed, there was a growing awareness that the workhouse was no place for a child, although this was sometimes less about child welfare and more about concerns that they would be drawn into the dependency culture of the Poor Law system in the workhouse. Social reformer Florence Davenport Hill, a champion of the deprived child, wrote in her book Children of the State (2nd edition, 1889) about the children housed in the Stepney Workhouse in the East End: “the girls… displayed, equally with the lads, selfishness, stubbornness, and great coarseness of language and behaviour, together with the lack of any spirit of self-dependence.”
Breaking The Cycle
Some of the larger unions built separate residential school blocks on the workhouse site or provided schools away from the workhouse altogether, trying to break the cycle of poverty by offering better training facilities and removing children from contact with adult paupers. A few unions combined to establish residential district schools, mainly in urban areas. However, with as many as 1,800 children crammed together in one institution, disease was often rife, and the children became anonymous and institutionalised. Mrs Nassau Senior wrote in an 1874 report for the Local Government Board, “One of
the greatest objections to the plan of bringing up girls in large schools is that they are unable to get the cherishing care and individual attention that is of far more importance in the formation of a girl’s character than anything else in the world… what is wanted in the education of the girls is more mothering.”
‘Grouped homes’ provided children in care with something more akin to family life, with groups of up to 30 living in individual houses as a community, sometimes in the countryside, and cared for by ‘house parents’. The children may have had more individual attention and a place to play, even a swimming pool, but many grouped homes were completely self-sufficient. This meant that the children were unable to mix with their peers outside the Poor Law system in school or at play, and met no adults other than those who taught or cared for them.
By the second half of the 19th century, things might be a little less grim for some children in care, although others languished in Poor Law institutions even into the early 20th century. Philanthropists such as Thomas Coram, who established the Foundling Hospital (now the children’s charity Coram) in London in 1739, Thomas
Barnardo, Edward Rudolf and Bowman Stephenson opened homes to take in destitute and abandoned children. Some established ‘boarding out’ (what we would now call fostering) schemes, with working-class families receiving a weekly allowance for each child they cared for. Boarded-out children, and those in smaller children’s homes, usually attended local schools so were able to mix with children in the local community.
The charities, large and small, were funded by donations and regular subscriptions, and fundraising was often a large part of their work. From small beginnings, some became charities which still exist today, such as Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society and Action for Children. Many of the larger charities created case files for their children, which may provide family historians with an insight into the lives of some of our least-regarded ancestors.
Union Funding
By the 1870s, Poor Law unions were able to send some children in their care to charity-run residential homes and boardingout schemes. In either case, the child’s care was still funded by the union. Fostering and small homes helped to provide destitute children with more personalised care, even substitute parents. The Christmas festivities in a children’s home, described in the magazine of the Waifs and Strays Society, shows that the children could have fun: “Great was the excitement and pleasure depicted on all the faces as dolls and toys were distributed… each child received no less than four gifts.” Some received real affection from their foster parents, as one former foster child explained: “We were cared for and loved, often more than a real mother could do.”
Adoption was not regulated by law until the 1926 Adoption of Children Act, but many adoptions were arranged by both the Poor Law unions and charities in the century before that. Some might be adopted within the family, like twins Harry and Leonard Leeder who, as shown in Poor Law correspondence at Norfolk Record Office, were adopted by their grandparents after they were deserted by their single mother. Others were adopted by strangers, such as Isabella Timperley, whose adoption by a Suffolk family was arranged by the Waifs and Strays Society. Family historians beware though – within three years of her adoption all evidence of Isabella’s origins had disappeared. She had taken her adoptive parents’
surname, was noted as their “daughter”, and her birthplace was given as Lowestoft instead of the true location Manchester.
Juvenile emigration was perhaps the most contentious form of provision for pauper children. Between 1869 and 1967, thousands were sent, by both charities and Poor Law unions, to start new lives in far-flung parts of the Empire, especially Canada and Australia. Many were abused or treated like skivvies, but others received genuine love and seized the chance of a new life away from poverty. However, all of them must have felt the loneliness of being transported far from familiar surroundings, friends and even family, like Edith Stiff who, in a letter on her case file, wrote in ungrammatical English to her former children’s home: “It is so lonesome out here. it makes me think of England how I do wish I had never left you I often think it was my best home I had.”
Progress in providing suitable care for destitute children in the 19th century was slow and stumbling, and there was little understanding of their emotional needs until well into the 20th century. However, fostering, adoption and small children’s homes, the main forms of
the ‘Juvenile emigration was perhaps most contentious form of provision’
provision today, have all been around for 150 years or so. The workhouse was grim, but the alternative could be worse, as ‘WHR’ wrote in a government report in 1874: “Before going there, I had roamed unchecked about Woolwich, learning all kinds of wickedness and vice. Had that life continued… I believe I must eventually have been sent to prison, and perhaps as a transport[ed criminal].”