3 A grim tale of crushing hunger
The desperate plight of paupers driven to near starvation shone a harsh spotlight on Britain’s workhouses
On 1 August 1845, Thomas Wakley stood up in parliament and told his fellow MPs a terrible story of the abuse of the paupers employed to crush bones at Andover workhouse. The inmates were so hungry, Wakley revealed, that they “were in the habit of extracting the marrow and gnawing the meat” that they found on the bones.
The home secretary, James Graham, immediately launched an enquiry. A Poor Law assistant commissioner was dispatched to the Hampshire town to investigate. His interviews with staff and inmates confirmed the allegations and revealed yet further abuses. The workhouse master and matron, previously praised by Poor Law administrators for their parsimony and disciplinary regime, had been siphoning food off the prescribed diet. In doing so, they had driven desperate inmates to scavenge for scraps left on putrid bones, while also subjecting them to physical and psychological abuse.
The newspapers seized upon the story, adding yet more fuel to the fire. One journalist claimed that bones sent to the workhouse for crushing were “collected from various sources, including… occasionally some from churchyards”, a veiled suggestion that the inmates had become unwitting cannibals.
Object of dread
The home secretary ordered the abolition of bone crushing in workhouses. But it was too late – the scandal had shone a spotlight on the failings and incompetence of the Poor Law Commission, the body responsible for the implementation of the 1834 New Poor Law. In 1847, it was replaced with a new, more accountable authority: the Poor Law Board.
However, as the ideology of poverty that underpinned the workhouse system went unchallenged, the workhouse continued to be an object of dread and often a place of unnecessary cruelty.