Andover workhouse scandal
The Andover workhouse scandal of the mid-1840s exposed serious defects in the administration of the English 'New Poor Law'. It led to significant changes in its central supervision and to increased parliamentary scrutiny. The scandal began with the revelation in August 1845 that inmates of the workhouse in Andover, Hampshire, England were driven by hunger to eat the marrow and gristle from bones which they were to crush to make fertilizer. The inmates' rations set by the local Poor Law guardians were less than the subsistence diet decreed by the central Poor Law Commission, and the master of the workhouse was diverting some of the funds, or the rations, for private gain. The guardians were loath to lose the services of the master, despite this and despite allegations of the master's drunkenness on duty and sexual abuse of female inmates. The commission eventually exercised its power to order dismissal of the master, after ordering two enquiries by an assistant-commissioner subject to a conflict of interest; the conduct of the second, more public inquiry drew criticism.
A replacement master was recommended by the assistant-commissioner as acceptable to the PLC, but newspapers pointed out that the new master had resigned as master of a workhouse elsewhere whilst under investigation by the PLC. The assistant commissioner was 'advised to resign' and did so but published a pamphlet giving details of his dealings with the PLC and with the Home Secretary.
The Home Secretary described the affair as merely 'a workhouse squabble' but the Commons set up a select committee in March 1846 to investigate both the Andover workhouse and the workings of the PLC more generally. The select committee found that there had been great mismanagement in the Andover board of guardians, and that their administration of the law had been marked by very unnecessary harshness. The committee found that the PLC – because of a power struggle between the commissioners and their secretary – had not conducted their business, as required by the Act establishing them, by minuted meetings as a board; nor had adequate records been kept of their decisions and the reasons for them. The committee characterised the commissioners' conduct on matters within the committee's terms of reference as "irregular and arbitrary, not in accordance with the statute under which they exercise their functions, and such as to shake public confidence in their administration of the law", going on to note that the committee had in passing heard worrying evidence on matters outside its terms of reference on which it would be improper to base findings.
As a consequence of the committee's report, the Poor Law Administration Act 1847 replaced the Poor Law Commission with a Poor Law Board upon which a number of cabinet ministers sat ex officio.
Background
The Swing Riots
Prior to 1834 the poor were provided for under the auspices of the "Old Poor Law," introduced in the Tudor period, which was funded by a parish rate levied on landowners and tenants. From this fund, each parish provided relief payments to residents who were ill or out of work. As the population grew - increasing by two thirds to almost 15 million between 1801 and 1830 - more and more people became dependent on parish relief, ratepayers began to complain about the costs, and increasingly lower levels of relief were provided. Three and a half "one gallon" bread loaves per week were considered necessary for a man in 1795. By November 1830, the ration in the Andover area had been reduced to one quarter of a loaf per day. There was also a feeling amongst the middle and upper classes that they were paying the poor to be idle and avoid work. The way in which poor law funds were disbursed led to a further reduction in agricultural wages, since farmers would pay their workers as little as possible, knowing that the parish fund would top up wages to a basic subsistence level.The introduction of mechanical threshing machines, which could do the work of many men, further threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. Following poor harvests in 1828 and 1829, farm labourers faced the approaching winter of 1830 with dread. The Swing Riots - which had begun in Kent in June 1830 - finally broke out in Andover and the surrounding parishes on 19 November 1830, coinciding with the Annual Fair when the town was full with labourers. Over the next two days gangs of labourers set fire to haystacks and destroyed threshing machines while demanding an increase in wages and a reduction in rents. On the afternoon of 20 November a mob of 300 labourers set off from the Angel Inn public house and attacked the Waterloo Ironworks in Anna Valley on the outskirts of the town, pulling down walls and part of the roof, smashing some half-made ploughs and damaging the foundry's crane and waterwheel. The town's magistrates wrote to the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne on 20 and 21 November requesting military support to restore order. By 15:00 on 21 November, The Times reported, "an immense multitude" had assembled in the town centre and, "flushed with liquor" proceeded to break down the gates of the gaol and release one of their leaders who had earlier been arrested. Armed with clubs, staves and flails they threatened to burn down the properties of anybody who refused to give them money, saying that they had been "starving with their wives and families on potatoes and bread long enough." On 22 November the 9th Lancers were deployed to Andover and the riots were quelled by 23 November. By 29 November, Winchester gaol was full to capacity with arrested labourers, and more prisoners were being held under guard by the Lancers in their barracks.
In the trials that followed, held before Mr. Baron Vaughan, Mr. Justice James Parke and Mr. Justice Alderson at a Special Commission of Assize at Winchester in December 1830, the accused were not allowed counsel to represent them, and the jury consisted entirely of magistrates, three of whom had been directly affected by property damage during the riots. The charge laid against the majority was one of "riotous assembly." Ten Andover labourers received the death sentence, subsequently commuted to transportation to Australia. Two Hampshire labourers were hanged and the other convicted men were made to watch the executions.
Poor Law Amendment Act 1834
In the wake of the Swing Riots which had swept the South of England between June and November 1830, the Prime Minister, Earl Grey, established the Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws 1832 to decide how to change the Poor Law systems in England and Wales. The Commission took a year to write its report, which proposed a "New Poor Law" governed by two overarching principles:- the "workhouse test" - that relief for the able-bodied should only be available in the workhouse.
- "less eligibility" - that the pauper should have to enter a workhouse with conditions worse than those of the poorest 'free' labourer outside of the workhouse.
The Poor Law Commission required that the diet of able-bodied workhouse inmates be worse than that of the working poor locally; since the latter varied across the country, the PLC had a number of standard 'dietaries' and specified for each workhouse the appropriate dietary: the specified dietary was the most generous the PLC would permit, but local guardians were free to feed their paupers less. Able-bodied inmates had to perform work to earn their rations; the work should not compete with that which could be done commercially, not should it be degrading or essentially penal.
Following the introduction of the new poor law regime in the South of England, the poor-rate fell by twenty per cent and the system was credited with having achieved this. However, the introduction of the new regime had coincided with a "surge of prosperity" nationally; this ended about 1837 and a series of poor harvests together with the European Potato Failure due to potato blight that struck Northern Europe in the mid-1840s led to "the Hungry Forties", a period much more testing of the provisions for poor relief.
Andover Poor Law Union and its workhouse
The new poor law encouraged the formation of Poor Law Unions combining individual parishes to give an administrative unit large enough to support the provision of segregated accommodation to house the various categories of paupers. On 11 July 1835 at the first meeting of the Board of Guardians of the newly formed Andover Union, it was decided to commission the construction of a new workhouse "calculated to contain 400 persons." on the outskirts of Andover. Although the parliamentary borough constituency of Andover returned two Members of Parliament, one an 'independent Reformer' opposed to the new Poor Law as too harsh, only five of the guardians were from Andover itself; thirty two surrounding parishes were each entitled to elect one guardian and their views prevailed. The cost of burying paupers dying in the workhouse was charged to the ratepayers of Andover, not to the parish from which the pauper had come. Repeated attempts by the Andover guardians and other prominent citizens to have a relieving officer resident in the town were rejected. Attendance at board meetings was low, especially when difficult decisions were to be taken; much was left to the chairman and his deputy.The official 'clerk to the board' was Thomas Lamb, an Andover solicitor, but the actual duties were carried out by one of his clerks, in whom both Lamb and the board had the utmost confidence. In 1842, suspicions having been voiced by the overseer of the poor for Andover, where the clerk had been appointed collector of the poor rates, the clerk fled, subsequent investigation showing a deficiency of some £1,380 in the union's accounts. A public meeting in Andover then petitioned Parliament to be allowed to secede from the Andover Union, which would allow poor relief in Andover to be administered more cheaply, more efficiently, and more humanely: Etwall wrote to the Poor Law Commission asking for an investigation of the affairs of the Andover union. The sureties for the clerk were not called in, Lamb making up the shortfall from his own pocket: the Poor Law Commission ordered that the Union's auditor be replaced. When the clerk was caught and charged, his defence counsel spoke of a young man led astray by a general laxity and lack of supervision of the Union's money: he did not have to develop this theme because the charges against his client required proof that when he had been given money as an agent of the Union he had already formed the intent to embezzle it, and the prosecution had failed to produce evidence on that point.
Andover's new workhouse was designed by architect Sampson Kempthorne, using his standard "cruciform" plan which provided an entrance and administrative block at the east "containing the board-room, porter's quarters, a nursery and stores. To the rear, four wings radiated from a central supervisory hub which contained the kitchens, with the master's quarters above. Females were accommodated at the north side and males at the south. The west of these wings contained the dining-hall which was also used as a chapel. Girls and boys school-rooms and dormitories lay down the west side with exercise yards beyond. Along the north side of the workhouse were casual wards and female sick wards. Male sick wards were at the south." At the 1841 census, the workhouse held twelve men, nineteen women, thirty-two boys, and thirty-four girls, in addition to nine resident staff. The master of the workhouse, Colin McDougal, was a Chelsea Pensioner and veteran of Waterloo with nearly thirty years service in the Royal Horse Artillery, ending as a staff sergeant: his wife was matron.
One of the standard workhouse tasks was the reduction of animal bones to bone meal; at Andover this was done not by milling or grinding, but by crushing: a heavy rammer was lifted and dropped in order to pound the pieces of bone in an open trough. Bone-crushing had been recommended by an assistant commissioner overseeing the Andover Union, and the Andover workhouse medical officer had endorsed the practice as carried out there. Although the Home Secretary Sir James Graham had repeatedly expressed his 'dislike' of the practice 'which he did not think was suitable to a workhouse', the PLC had not considered they had the power to forbid it.