By Bruce Watkin:
In 1757, using the powers of a Workhouse Act of 1723, the parish of Warminster raised £500 for building a workhouse, by selling rights to inclose common land at Winehill and Daffords Wood to Lord Weymouth for £300 and borrowing another £200. It was built by Simon Coles of Warminster on a small plot of common land south of the present Brook Street and parts are still incorporated in the present Snooty Fox inn and restaurant (formerly the Globe Inn).
In January 1760 Mr and Mrs Thomas Oldfield were appointed to “take care” of the workhouse at an annual salary of £30 which was raised to £40 in the same November, but for some reason they were dismissed in 1766 and succeeded, in 1767, by Mr Evans at £28, in 1768 by Mr and Mrs Dowell at £20, and in 1776 by Mr and Mrs Coombs at an unnamed salary. The Reverend Dart (Master of the Grammar School) was paid £5 per annum for saying prayers there once a week from 1772.
It seems to have been a genuine workhouse, for both William Daniell (1850) and J.J. Daniell (1879) claim that no poor relief was paid to any able-bodied labourer at home after its foundation, while J.J. Daniell adds that “large quantities of cloth passed out of the workhouse” but gives no details. It was, as well, an asylum for orphans and the aged as is testified in a rare account of life therein by Harold Price writing 50 years later. He speaks well of its informal life, the kindness of the Master and the pleasure of the large garden (a 25 acre field inclosed for the workhouse in 1792). William Daniell, Assistant Overseer of the Poor and a champion of the local poor, says the area was hideously insanitary (which is very likely) and that the workhouse with its “90 to 100 paupers” was a “grievous concentration of every species of vice” (probably exaggeration). He adds that the weekly cost of supporting paupers was two shillings in the workhouse and one shilling in their own homes. The national ratio was about four to one.
At the end of the 18th century, due largely to the French wars, the cost of poor relief rose sharply in Warminster as elsewhere in southern England. The annual cost to Warminster went on rising even after the end of the war to reach a peak of over £6,000 in 1819. To most people in the early 19th century it appeared that the cost of such relief was now out of control and that it was also undermining the morale of agricultural and industrial workers. Ways were therefore sought of making the system more cost-effective and the days of the old workhouse were numbered.
Following other Government intervention in social reform, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which created the great Victorian workhouses, was devised and passed with little opposition. Its chief authors, Edwin Chadwick of Manchester and Nassau Senior, son of the vicar of Dunford, Wiltshire, were sincere liberal do-gooders. It was approved at a time when the poor had, by the “Swing” and other riots, shown some “ingratitude” to their “betters” (in Warminster they had destroyed the remnants of its cloth industry), but it was based largely on the authors’ misreading of some effects of the Elizabethan Poor Law. It was harsh in its attitude to the able-bodied unemployed though not to children, the sick and the aged.
The condemnation which it soon received was due to its common mal-administration by mean or brutal farmers and to its inadequate inspection by central authority. The new Act took power from the individual parishes and formed them into groups called Unions, each based on a market town. Guardians were elected by rate-payers to manage each Union and their work was to be standardised and overseen by three Poor Law Commissioners sitting in London – the “three kings of Somerset House”.
Outdoor relief (i.e. payment at home) to able-bodied paupers was to be discontinued immediately and a central workhouse for each Union was to be provided, harsh enough to deter all but the desperate from claiming relief. The arbitrary powers of the Poor Law Commissioners were later taken over by Boards responsible to Parliament and then by the Ministry of Health, but most of the system survived until 1930 and in parts till 1948.
Warminster and 20 nearby parishes were made into a new Union by the County’s Assistant Commissioner, Col. Charles a’Court of the Heytesbury family and was the basis of the later Urban and Rural Districts of Warminster. John Ravenhill, J.P., banker, of Warminster Manor House was chosen by a’Court as Chairman and from the new Board of some 33, which first met on 4th November 1835, Thomas Davis, agent of the Longleat Estate, was chosen as Vice-Chairman. There was of course a preponderance of farmers but the Warminster Board proved effective in keeping down Poor Law costs without any of the great public scandals that affected many other Unions. Their first action was to survey the cost of the former system and to note the diversion of Poor Rate funds to the making of Weymouth Street; their next was a decision to build a central workhouse for the Union. They invited Sampson Kempthorne, a founder of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and advisory architect to the Parliamentary Poor Law Commission, to design such a building. After considering a seven acre site at the junction of Hillwood Lane and Deverill Road they bought the three acre “Boot Field”, at the rear of the Boot Inn and the National School at Sambourne.
Kempthorne had a series of standard plans available and here a scaled down version of his Y plan was adopted. Work started in the spring of 1836 and was completed by December though, due to the death of the contractor John Ralphs, at the end of the year, it was not handed over till late January.
Carson and Miller provided heating stoves and kitchen equipment and were severely criticised for delays in completing their contract but the whole works, including alterations and additions to the original design were carried out remarkably quickly. The main wards and day rooms, to accommodate 130 paupers, were provided in a three storey Y-shaped block with a hexagonal ring of stores and workshops, which also incorporated a Classical-style two-storey building housing the official entrance and screening the end of the Ward block at the rear. The adjoining Ward block housed the chapel and dining room on its ground floor; the kitchen and Master’s rooms were in the hub of the Y, women and girls were housed in the left wing of the Y, men in the right and boys over the chapel. The total cost was about £7,000 which was higher than the average of such new houses. It is noticeable that the other Wiltshire Unions all adopted more conventional cruciform plans such as that at Semington.
Like most clients the Guardians took more interest in small details. They spent considerable time on the choice of a kitchen clock, eventually bought from a Mr Saunders for £7, a price to include repairs for seven years. Meanwhile they paid Warminster parish the sum of £7 10 shillings for the use of its old workhouse and another £3 15 shillings to Corsley parish for the use of their poor-house – a thatched building at Upper Whitbourne which could house 30 paupers.
It is worth recording that both old houses are still standing. The Brook Street workhouse was almost immediately taken by George Ward of Bull Mill, Crockerton, for silk-spinning and his machinery survived there long after his business closed. The main house was converted in the later 19th century to the Globe Inn [now the Snooty Fox]. The two wings which housed the workshops were demolished in the mid 20th century. The garden at the rear was still pleasant in 1986 and its “allotment” was incorporated in the Bradley Road allotments. The poor-house at Corsley was sold in 1839 for £117 and is now three dwellings (Nos. 21, 21a and 22 Corsley).
In 1836, the last year at the old Warminster house in Brook Street, the 96 inmates were listed as coming from the following parishes: Warminster 51; Heytesbury 16; Corsley 8; Codford St Mary 6; Longbridge Deverill 5; Chitterne All Saints 3; Boyton 2; and one each from Bishopstrow, Horningsham, Norton Bavant, Sutton Veny and Upton Scudamore. Minutes show the average stay was about 70 days. The parishes shown are more likely to have been their birth-places (to show which parish had to foot the bill) than their normal place of residence, which might have given some idea of the distribution of acute poverty. In February the paupers and the Master were moved to the new workhouse where at the first Guardians’ meeting the Master complained of continued shortages of water (blamed on Carson and Miller’s plumbing) and the Guardians ordered strong oak gates to be put across the entrance. As the three acre plot was now walled round in stone its prison-like nature was complete.
Harold Price, whose diary contains reminiscences of both old and new workhouses, was committed as a boy of 16 and had been sent to the U.S.A. when 18, where he had prospered. His recollections of the old workhouse were probably softened by time when he said that “these old poor houses were very good homes,” as William Daniell tells of an old pauper found dead outside after swearing that “he would rather the Devil would fetch him than that he should die” in the workhouse. Even so, Price recalls a wall being built to keep the girls and boys apart in the last days of the old workhouse. His memories of the new house are far sharper and confirm the grim nature of life there, the issue of uniforms, the strict segregation by age and sex, so that children only saw their mothers at evening prayers, the prison-like walls cutting off views of the fields and, above all, the awful and insufficient diet. The diet was a standard one laid down by the Poor Law Commissioners and allowed few variations in providing about 178 ounces of solid food a week for an adult male. The Warminster diet consisted of gruel every day for breakfast, four bread and cheese dinners, two meat and vegetable dinners and one soup dinner a week.
But the Poor Law Commissioners were not concerned with the quality of the food and here as elsewhere the Guardians’ urge for economy resulted, even without corruption, in the poorest quality being supplied by local traders. One piece of bacon, says Price, was so tough it could not be eaten and was kicked around their yard like a dirty tennis ball. In September 1837 the male paupers refused to attend chapel, as a protest against the insufficiency of their diet. The Guardians saw no grounds for their complaint, and John Parker (presumably a ring-leader) was locked up for a day. As late as 1904 an aged tramp was sent to a month’s imprisonment for refusing to break three-quarters of a ton of stone at the workhouse because the food was so scant.
The same diet was being administered in 1867 when a Lunacy Commissioner (there were always a few “lunatics” in the Warminster Workhouse during the 19th century) said it was insufficient and the Medical Officer thought “it might be remedied by an additional allowance of tea and bread and butter.” At Amesbury the Lunacy Commissioners were told by the Guardians “that however low this dietary might be in the Visiting Commissioners’ opinion, it was higher than the able-bodied labourers in the neighbourhood were able to obtain for themselves.” Even on Christmas Day there was little change; the Poor Law Commissioners had frowned on any special favours to paupers, however provided, and may well have criticised the Amesbury Union Guardians who spent two pounds ten shillings and two and a half pence on a special dinner for inmates at their first Christmas in the new house in 1837. Warminster appears to have ignored Christmas altogether for nearly 30 years, and it was not till December 1864 that the Guardians “ordered that the paupers in the workhouse be supplied with plum pudding and ale in addition to their usual rations on Christmas Day” and this was the standard formula at Christmas time from then on.
Most of the “out-relief” to paupers in their own homes was now given in kind rather than money and was confined to the aged and the sick though occasional and increasingly frequent payments were made to all kinds of paupers on the grounds of sickness. One of the first actions of the
Guardians was to authorise the distribution of loaves supplied by contract: 350 a week throughout the Union: 4 lb. loaves supplied at a cost of five and a half pence in Warminster and five and three-quarters pence in the outer parishes in 1881 and 8 lb. loaves at ten and a quarter pence for the workhouse itself.
It is difficult to say what the inmates of the workhouse did. There was a ring of workshops round the yard, and in the early days use was also made of the garden. Price records men and boys being set to pounding bones to make agricultural fertiliser, a damaging and disgusting job from which he was saved by a kindly porter. The garden seems to have been abandoned before the end of the century, but stone breaking for men and boys continued as one of the main occupations. Corn grinding was used at many workhouses and endless cleaning of floors, benches and walls was almost universal. Most of the paupers’ time was evidently spent in mindless inactivity made worse by pointless regulations, such as the one under which John Parker, in December 1837, was punished for receiving, and then hiding under his bed, a pack of cards.
The education of pauper children was certainly intended but became the biggest source of complaints reaching the Poor Law Commissioners. Price’s experience at Warminster is typical of many. He was sent for some weeks to the adjoining National School, but the parents of other children objected to paupers sitting alongside their own and the paupers were withdrawn. The Guardians then appointed what Price describes as ‘a shoemaker who could not do a rule of 3 sum’, but within a year ‘had brought disgrace on himself and ruin on another’, and ‘had to leave for Paris the other side of the world’. We have no knowledge of their competence, but a schoolmaster or mistress is recorded as resident in the Censuses for 1841, 1851, 1861 and 1871. After this the pauper children joined others at the National or British Schools in the area.
The workhouse was built to accommodate 130. It is however difficult to say much about its fluctuating population as admission books have been lost and there are only sparse references in the Guardians’ Minute Books. Some spring or summer counts are available in the census figures but they show no relationships for paupers and sometimes not even names. In 1841 there were 47 male and 39 female paupers in the house; in 1851, 84 and 65 (which must have strained its capacity); in 1861, 40 and 52; in 1871, 67 and 59; and in 1881 (the last census for which such details are yet public) 47 and 49. Warminster figures are only of interest, compared with other Wiltshire Unions, for the preponderance of females at two of these five counts (the usual ratio of men to women was two to one). In 1903 the number of inmates was about 70 with an addition of about 40 ‘casuals’ during an average week.
Tantalising details of the ‘Common Charges’ have survived for one financial year, 1858 – 1859. These list all the cases of outdoor relief given in cash, eg. £12 to John Miles aged 72 of Chapel Street ‘Blind’ and 5s. 9d. to Fanny Coward aged 23 of Crockerton ‘confined of bastard and
coffin’, but none of those relieved in kind. Details of 42 persons given ‘indoor relief’ i.e. lodged in the workhouse, are also listed. These include only two children (presumably orphans) maintained for the whole year and 23 ‘tramps’ who are kept for two to four days, with or without
children. This is obviously not the whole story for that year.
Census returns usually list former occupations. The largest class was always that of ‘farm labourers’ which included a number of women. The next largest was ‘domestic servants’. In 1851 there were several young women who had been ‘silk throwsters’ (presumably made destitute by the collapse of George Ward’s business at Crockerton) and one old man who had been a ‘shearer’. Harold Price’s grandmother kept herself out of the workhouse by ‘spurtling [sprinkling] dung’ and spinning silk.
Colonel a’Court, Commissioner for Wiltshire, suggested that the new Act in the first two years of its operation had had a magical effect, ‘solving the unemployment problem, stiffening the character of the agricultural labourer, reducing the number of improvident marriages and improving the cultivation out of all recognition’. At least it reduced the number of marriages and the cost of poor relief, which showed a general downward trend after the 1840s (though with temporary rises). But it achieved this by increasing the poor’s horror of the workhouse system. In fact the New Poor Law and its Union Workhouse were powerful deterrents to anyone seeking public assistance in the lifetime of Queen Victoria, and the resentment caused in the poor, which the Act was ostensibly designed to help, was immense and was not eradicated, at least in towns like Warminster, until some 20 years after Ernest Bevin had claimed, in 1948, that the Poor Law had ‘at last been buried’.
The system did not die with Queen Victoria though it was, very slowly, being softened and dismantled, so that by 1910, Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice, a Wiltshire Guardian and County Councillor, was talking if the ‘enormous increase …. of what may be called the humanitarian aspect of the treatment of the poor in the workhouse’ and reflecting that it would ‘gradually become a sort of district hospital’. All this would have happened earlier, for the system was hardly popular, if Parliament could have agreed on what was to take its place. The most helpful reform was probably the National Insurance Act of 1911 which began the provision of social insurance for workers and reduced the number of potential ‘able-bodied paupers’. The next was the Local Government Act of 1929 under which County Councils took over most of the Poor Law’s functions and started on its more radical reform.
The Warminster workhouse was closed in that year, and arrangements were made with Frome to receive vagrants and with Westbury for some of the aged poor. Improved infirmary accommodation was then provided at Warminster, and also at Chippenham, Devizes, Marlborough, Salisbury, Semington and Stratton St. Margaret, and the old workhouses at Calne, Malmesbury, Tisbury and Westbury were closed. The 17 former Unions were replaced by seven new ‘Areas’. Warminster re-opened under the administration of the County Council’s Poor Assistance Committee – workhouses were now called ‘Poor Assistance Institutions’ – and of a local Committee for the Warminster and Westbury areas chaired by Thomas Rivers, then Longleat Agent and farmer at Horningsham. Some provision was still made at Warminster for vagrants but administered by the South West Vagrancy Committee at Bristol. John J. Marshall, previously Assistant Master at Marlborough and Master at Westbury workhouses, was put in charge of Warminster Poor Assistance Institution; his wife, who had been a nurse at the Poor Law Victoria Infirmary, Manchester, was appointed Matron. In 1938 a two-storey brick block to the north-west of the site was built to give separate accommodation for vagrants.
The house gardens were now used to provide fresh vegetables, but not for the poor inmates; they were still given roots and dried peas, and much of the old system continued until the National Insurance Act of 1946 and the National Assistance Act of 1948. The 1948 Act, making social insurance universal, greatly reduced the number of vagrants but Dr. Bartholomew who was appointed Medical Officer to the Warminster Institute in that year, records that vagrants were still frequent and that there were often angry scenes at the Porter’s lodge when late-comers were refused entry (intake was reduced to about nine every night), even though they were then offered travel vouchers to other vagrant wards such as Bath and Salisbury. The main Institution was then a mixed old people’s home and hospital with 102 beds, but employed only one State Registered Nurse qualified to dispense such medicines as might be prescribed by the Medical Officer.
On 5th January 1948 the Institution was re-named ‘Sambourne Hospital’ and its beds were shared, as need arose, between the County’s ‘welfare’ requirement for old people and those of the new Regional Hospital Authority, usually on a 40 to 60 basis. A few vagrants were still admitted to side wards on the old haxagonal periphery and the former vagrants’ ward was converted to hospital use and became the Physiotherapy Department. Thanks to the 1948 National Assistance Act, vagrants slowly faded away, while the welfare inmates were transferred in 1962 to the new County Council home at Woodmead in Portway and the Institution became a full hospital for the first time.
Some old attitudes still died hard. Until 1948, when the differentiation was stopped, local butchers supplied “officers’ joints” and inferior “house joints” for inmates. Turkey for inmates was first ordered for Christmas 1948 though the old Master objected that “they wouldn’t know the difference”; the Administrator retorted “Let them try.” Dr Bartholomew estimates that it was nearly 20 years before old people lost their horror of being sent to die “up the hill” in what was [in 1986] the most esteemed institution in Warminster.