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Section 13: The Poor Law

It was not difficult to find misery in Liverpool. There was an immense workhouse containing at that time, it was said, 5,000 persons – a little town in itself. There were extensive special wards, where unhappy girls drifted like autumn leaves when the winter approached, many of them to die of consumption. On the ground floor a Bridewell for women, consisting of huge cellars, bare and unfurnished, with damp stone floors. These were called the "oakum sheds" where they came, driven by hunger, destitution or vice, begging for a few nights’ shelter and a piece of bread, in return for which they picked their allotted portion of oakum…. I went down to the oakum sheds and begged admission. I was taken into an immense gloomy vault filled with women and girls – more than two hundred at that time. I sat on the floor among them and picked oakum… Many of them… earned a scanty living by selling sand in the streets (for cleaning floors).

A few months later, encouraged by the help offered by a certain number of generous Liverpool merchants and other friends, we took a very large and solid house, with some ground round it, to serve as an industrial home for the healthy and the active, the barefooted sand girls, and other friendless waifs and strays.

Many who are willing to work cannot find employment; in most of our important branches of industry there has been great over-production; every trade and every profession is over-crowded. Difficult as it is for men to obtain a livelihood, it is ten times more difficult for women to do so; partly on account of unjust laws, and partly because of the tyranny of society, they are shut out from many employments.

They call our deaths by many names – it is said to be consumption or heart-complaint or low-fever that is responsible… and people make it their boast that no one need die of starvation in England. But I should like to ask the doctors what is the cause of the consumption, the low-fever? In nine cases out of ten it is want – want that presses upon us day after day, year after year…. Two meals a day – sometimes only one – dry bread and tea, tea and dry bread… a straw mattress and bare boards at night with a thin sheet for covering. Stitch, stitch, for thirteen, fourteen, sixteen hours out of twenty-four. Headache, heartache, sickness, rheumatism, but no rest, for a day without earnings means the rent unpaid and the children crying for food. Is it a wonder that it kills?

Mr. Ayles permits the bread and water diet to be inflicted on persons (aged and weak women, the last about whom I enquired is 74) who are wholly unfit to bear it, and in fact would not bear it did not others supply them with part of their own food. I cannot, moreover, feel comfortable in leaving this matter in the hands of the Master, Mr. Ayles, a man not at all gifted as an administrator, and to my mind too young for the important and onerous post.

My sister women, those struggling with social problems, and those who slave all their lives long for a community – shop, factory and domestic slaves, earning barely a subsistence, and thrown aside to death or the parish when they are no longer profitable – mothers, bearing and rearing children, seeing them go forth… and spending their own last years, lonely and unconsidered in the cheerless wards of the workhouse.

My mother visited the local Uckfield Workhouse and was appalled by the conditions in which orphaned and abandoned children were living in wards with the old and mentally afflicted. She stood for election as Poor Law Guardian, and became one of the first women in the country to be Guardian and Rural District Councillor. She reformed conditions in the workhouse, and gradually removed all the children, whom she boarded out with village families… When she had emptied Uckfield Workhouse, she took children from Eastbourne Workhouse and from a London borough. When she died, many of these former inhabitants of the workhouse wrote to me… and they all used the same phrase: "She was my best friend."

At the risk of being described ungallant, we have to ask the electors of Nelson to see to it that the three men candidates are elected Guardians… We hold that the interests of women are not neglected by administrative bodies consisting entirely of men… The three male candidates the ratepayers can elect… have the leisure – without the domestic duties, which embarrass women.

There is a feeling that women should not enter Guardian’s elections. Their mission, people say, is to scrub floors; and I have had many insults to take during this fight. I shall, however, continue to devote a portion of my time to the Labour movement and at the same time do the scrubbing of floors.

The leaders of the Liberal Party advised women to prove their fitness for the Parliamentary franchise by serving in municipal offices, especially the unsalaried offices. A large number of women had availed themselves of this advice, and were serving on Boards of Guardians, on school boards, and in other capacities. My children now being old enough for me to leave them with competent nurses, I was free to join these ranks. A year after my return to Manchester in 1894 I became a candidate for the Board of Poor Law Guardians... I was elected, heading the poll by a very large majority.

When I came into office I found that the law was being very harshly administered. The old board had been made up of the kind of men who are known as rate savers. They were guardians, not of the poor but of the rates… For instance, the inmates were being very poorly fed…

I found the old folks in the workhouse sitting on backless forms, or benches. They had no privacy, no possessions, not even a locker… After I took office I gave the old people comfortable Windsor chairs to sit in, and in a number of ways we managed to make their existence more endurable.

The first time I went into the place I was horrified to see little girls seven and eight years on their knees scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors. These little girls were clad, summer and winter, in thin cotton frocks, low in the neck and short sleeved. At night they wore nothing at all, night dresses being considered too good for paupers. The fact that bronchitis was epidemic among them most of the time had not suggested to the guardians any change in the fashion of their clothes.

I also found pregnant women in the workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world. Many of them were unmarried women, very, very young, mere girls. These poor mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital after confinement for a short two weeks. Then they had to make a choice of staying in the workhouse and earning their living by scrubbing and other work, in which case they were separated from their babies. They could stay and be paupers, or they could leave – leave with a two-week-old baby in their arms, without hope, without home, without money, without anywhere to go. What became of those girls, and what became of their hapless infants? I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women’s hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.

The State keeps 22,483 children in workhouses. Here is a description of a Government nursery: "Often found under the charge of a person actually certified as of unsound mind, the bottles sour, the babies wet, cold and dirty. The Commission on the Care and Control of the Feebleminded draws attention to an episode in connection with one feeble-minded woman who was set to wash a baby; she did so in boiling water, and it died."

"We were shocked," continues the Report, "to discover that infants in the nursery of the establishments in London and other large towns seldom or never get into the open air. "We found the nursery frequently on the third or fourth story of a gigantic block often without balconies, whence the only means of access even to the workhouse yard was a flight of stone steps down which it was impossible to wheel a baby-carriage of any kind. There was no staff of nurses adequate to carrying fifty or sixty infants out for an airing. In some of these workhouses it was frankly admitted that these babies never left their own quarters (the stench was intolerable) and never got into the open air during the whole period of their residence in the workhouse nursery. In some workhouses 40% of the babies die within the year."

I doubt if there exists in print a better plea for the urgency of Woman’s Suffrage that that embodied in this Report of the latest English Poor Law Commission… What it reveals is an incompetence and legalised cruelty in the treatment of the poor… that thousands of innocent children are shut up with tramps and prostitutes; that there are workhouses which have no separate sick ward for children, in spite of the ravages of measles, whooping-cough, etc. Men have talked about these evils for seventy-five years. We see now that until the portion of the community standing closest to the problems presented by care of the old and broken, the young children and the afflicted, until women have a voice in mending the laws on this subject, the inadequacy of the laws will continue to be merely discussed.

When I was living in Sally’s home, one of the male boarders who called himself a Socialist showed me some articles in a Sunday paper written by Robert Blatchford, dealing with slums and sweated industries. These articles excited much interest, and many were the arguments in the house as to the rights or wrongs of the matter. Later on, when Blatchford and his friends founded the Socialist weekly, The Clarion, I began to read it and became deeply interested in the theories put forward. Feeling very lonely at the time I began to hang round the Socialist meetings in the public square… One of the male boarders was a convinced and keen Socialist who was always ready to talk or argue on the subject… The friendship developed into an attachment, which led to our marriage about two years later… We both joined the Independent Labour Party and began to attend meetings.

Early in 1904 there came a vacancy on the Ashton-under-Lyne Board of Guardians… When Miss Bertha Mason, daughter of a local millowner… resigned the local Independent Labour Party decided to nominate a woman in her place, and asked me to become a candidate. After some hesitation I agreed and I became a Poor Law Guardian in May 1904… I soon acquired a fair knowledge of the Poor Law; the local relief scales were very low; three shillings each per week for man and wife, two shillings for the first child, one-and-sixpence for the second, and for the rest, one shilling each.

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