In Christ Church, Warminster, The First 150 Years, a booklet published in October 1980, to celebrate the 150th birthday of Christ Church, the Rev. John C. Day (Vicar) wrote:
The Workhouse [at Warminster] is best described by an eye-witness who lived there for three years. Recently there was discovered in Islington Public Library records, the diary of one Henry Edward Price, a Warminster man returned from America and who died shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. He had been born in 1824 and when about fourteen became very ill with smallpox. He was then living with his grandmother who could ill afford to support him. So, like many another young unfortunate of the time, he landed up in the Workhouse on the Common.
He describes the buildings as occupying three sides of a square, the further side being open and leading into a garden. The front was occupied by the Master and Mistress; on the right were four or five rooms set apart for the old men and boys and opposite was similar accommodation for women and young children.
Telling of life in the Workhouse for the older children, he says “There were three boys 16 to 18 employed on a farm called Lush’s Farm, these lads took their food with them, had their dinners when they came home, they never received any wages.”
Henry Price goes on to tell of other fellow inmates.
“First there was old John Poore 70 or 80 years old. He was a man apart by himself. He looked after the garden and pigs. He used to make the holes for the potatoes and I followed after him with an apronful of setts and dropped them in. He never came near the fire. His dinner was always off the Master’s table. In the evenings he went out and had his glass of ale and his pipe, then home to bed.”
“Next came Dummy, another very old man, deaf and dumb and blind. He could tell his way about the house and garden. He had some very odd ways and whims. He had a dozen or more walking sticks, he made his own bed, then placed his sticks all manner of ways across his bed, never placing them the same way two days alike. Then if fine, going up to the garden. Always he went straight to bed, he knew whether anyone had been there and there would be a jolly row if his sticks had been shifted.”
“Then there was George Brown who was demented and of course made a butt of and tormented by the boys. I had a fight with one of them, I could never stand anything of that sort. There were several more who could not read or write.”
“Last but not least was poor Godfiz. Poor Goff, affliction laid its heavy hand on him early in life, he might have been about 30 years of age and was working in a Foundry in London as a moulder when rheumatism seized him and crippled him for life. Godfrey was somewhat of a scholar for those times. He could read and write but not ‘grammatically’. He knew the three Rs and that was about all. He was set to teach us boys and girls, not five per cent at that time could read or write, so Godfrey was often requested to write and answer the letters of his illiterate neighbours. But Godfrey’s main task was to teach the boys and girls to read and write and cipher. I fancy I see him now in a nook by the fire, his crutches by his side and his cane very handy. His practice was to set our task for the day in this wise. One of Dr. Watts hymns, eight verses of the New Testament, one of the Psalms and a sum to copy into the writing book. I generally got through mine alright. But it was rather hard lines to repeat each time what you had previously learnt. Likewise with tables and hymns. Many a time did he keep me without my dinner, sometimes till next day.”
Mentioning the work he was sent out to do, Henry Price says “Some of us older boys were sent out to work at an old factory in Die House Lane where they manufactured chair seating and webbing. My job was to assist in making horse hair seating. We boys of the Poor House never got any money.”
But he does go on to say that in those early days, “The Poor Houses were good homes, we were all happy there, well fed, nursed and doctored, went in and out just as we pleased, dress like others. We fattened our own pigs, made our own bread, brewed our own beer. The old men had their bit of baccy and the old women their bit of snuff. We gathered around the fire at night, the old soldiers sang their songs and the old salts their ditties.”
“These were merry days,” he says, “the merry days of no pence.”
But a change was pending. The Poor Law Act was passed and a Poor Law Board established. “The first intimation we had was the arrival of some bricks and mortar and bricklayers who soon built up a wall partition parting the males from the females. Previous to this the girls and boys mingled and played together. The old men and women met and gossiped about old times in the garden without thought of care or woe. Soon after, a Union Workhouse was built (at Sambourne) and most of the old people were removed to it, the children also went to the new house. Confined in a large area bounded by four brick walls too high to allow a view of the fields outside, women and girls on one side of the house, men and boys on the other. Times must have been bad then, for as the winter came on the house began to fill. Man and wife were separated, the children parted parted from their parents, a uniform provided, their own clothing being put away until they went out which was generally not until spring. Then there was the diet, so much skilly, about one pint and a slice of bread every morning, the gruel often spoiled the bread and not half enough. Bread and cheese four days for dinner and the water tap; Monday. potatoes and beef, Wednesday, pea soup, Friday, bacon and vegetables. Every evening bread and cheese. This might have been alright if it had been sufficient for growing boys and young men but it was semi-starvation. Some of the boys after eating their own, begged of others, promising to give half of theirs next day. This went on for some time, until one of the porters, noticing how thin one of the boys looked, said ‘What is the matter with Smith?’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘He’s starving, the other boys get all his food.’ “
“The food being supplied by contract, it was generally of the poorest. I remember on a bacon day, the bacon was so hard and tough that we kicked it round the yard, and then it was something like a dirty tennis ball.”
Describing the work done by the inmates at the new Workhouse (opened in 1836), Henry Price had this to say: “While some were set o work in the garden and some quarrying stone for the road that led to the house, others were employed pounding bones for manure, which the farmers bought. So many pounds per day. In a square box with an iron bottom, an iron bar with a heavy knob at one end, this was my task. Strong men winced over the job and poor Harry who had never handled such a tool before soon broke down, his hands became so blistered that the Porter (who had always been his friend) got him out into the garden.”
“The House was very full in the winter, whole families came in. Children were parted from their parents, husbands from their wives, just getting a look at each other in chapel in the evening. The little ones sadly missed their mothers, I remember several dying.”
“My services were often requisitioned while they were in chapel, one wanted a bit of snuff, another a bit of bacon. Getting one of them to answer my name, I was over the wall and into Pound Street to a little shop and back again, during the half hour of prayers.”
Henry Price’s story has a happier ending than many of those early inmates at the Workhouse. Through the good offices of several local worthies, he was supplied with a sovereign, a new outfit and passage from Bristol to New York. He relates setting out in April 1842 and arriving on the other side of the Atlantic after a terrible voyage of seven whole weeks.
Henry did well, later returning to England and ending his days among his children and grandchildren in London. We are grateful to him and his diary for telling us something of what life was like for such as he 150 years ago.