A GRUELLING time?

Peter Higginbotham, the speaker at the Airedale Writers’ Circle meeting on September 13, said life in workhouses – the subject of his clear and well-illustrated talk – was not all bad.

The diet, for example, although originally appalling – consisting mostly of bread, gruel (watered down porridge) and cheese with only the occasional meat – was vastly improved by 1900, including, amongst other treats, stews and roly-poly puddings.

Medical care for inmates, which at one time had been very basic, also improved markedly in the late nineteenth century.

Indeed many workhouses were to morph into hospitals, mostly after the formation of the NHS in 1948.

The Poor Law of 1601 made parishes responsible for care of the poor. The 'poor rates' they collected from parishioners were to be handed over to the destitute in return for their working (if able-bodied).

Later, houses were built to accommodate those volunteering to enter and these buildings became the early workhouses. Nobody ever, Peter Higginbotham stressed, was compulsorily sent to a workhouse, albeit desperate circumstances could force such entry.

There was a boom in building and managing workhouses in the eighteenth century when many parishes sub-contracted this task out to entrepreneurs – dubbed “farming the poor”. By the 1770s there were 2,000 workhouses across the country, although that still meant six in seven parishes had none.

Rising unrest and poverty in the early nineteenth century increased demand for helping the poor, met by the amended Poor Law Act of 1834 which formed Poor Law unions of 10 to 20 parishes.

These were run by Boards of Guardians elected by their ratepayers. Instead of only receiving handout monies all those seeking aid were now required to enter the workhouse.

There they were bathed, medically examined (particularly for smallpox) and donned the uniform – a shapeless shift, often of blue and white striped cotton. Segregation into categories of male, female, elderly, and children was strictly enforced, a source of much misery to families thus split up.

The daily routine started with a 6am rise (7am in winter) and went on to include ten hours of work before an 8pm bedtime. Men worked at stone-breaking, corn-grinding and other heavy manual tasks while women undertook domestic chores.

The elderly and infirm sat around or trailed around the exercise yards in a rather monotonous existence, although at least freed from living in squalor and constant hunger.

The first workhouse in Keighley was at Exley Head, replaced in 1858 by the much larger Hillworth Lodge on Oakworth Road – now mainly a retirement 'village'. The 1881 census lists five resident staff and 218 inmates there, of which 26 were aged over 70, five deemed to be “lunatics” and two “imbeciles”.

By 1930 the Boards of Guardians were abolished and workhouses were renamed 'public assistance institutions' and later became either old peoples’ homes or hospitals once the NHS was formed in 1948.

The next meeting of the Airedale Writers’ Circle will be on October 11 at 7.30pm in the Sight Airedale building in Scott Street, immediately behind Keighley Library.