It is Wednesday 22 June 1836 and angry workers are streaming onto Royston Heath.
Newspapers will report 1,500 have come, but others claim six times that number.
A single figure in a dog collar draws the people like iron filings to a magnet.
‘Horrible system!’ He is shouting, ‘And inhuman of beings that would enforce it.’
In the newly completed building on the opposite-side of Baldock Road the Earl of Hardwicke and local magistrates hole up.
The workhouse is due to open for business in three days’ time.
With the earl are twenty policemen rapidly coached in from London on the Home Secretary’s orders.
From their vantage point, they can easily make out the angry crowd. Luckily, they are too far away to catch the Reverend gentleman’s diatribe.
I leave you, my friends, to estimate their deserts, but I think they are nothing short of imprisonment in THEIR OWN BASTILLES. Away with such fellows – such pretended friends of the poor!“
Fanning the flames
In the southeast, the decade has been ushered in with riots and farm fires. Politicians know that the ground is shifting beneath their feet.
When the House of Lords blocks the Reform Bill, Britain erupts with anger. City centres burn.
The Bill only passes after the king is coerced into creating a bunch of new pro-reform peers. When it does become law, the workers will still be denied the right to vote.
The following June, an uprising in Paris – immortalised in Les Misérables – further rattles the ruling classes.
Britain is close to bankruptcy and the government is looking to make cuts.
The long-established system of parish-based welfare – a system first introduced by good Queen Bess back in 1601 – is to be scrapped. ‘Out relief’ (which topped up a worker’s wages when there was no work to be had and put bread on the table when times were hard) will be cut. This move may save the ratepayers money but is deeply unsettling for those who rely on it.
The small paternalistic parish workhouses will be swept away and their place will be taken by ‘Poor Law Unions’, responsible for the poor of multiple parishes.
Each will have a Board of Guardians tasked with the building and running of its own mega-workhouse.
The Royston Poor Law Union covers a population of nearly 16,000 spread across nine parishes in Hertfordshire (Ashwell, Barkway, Barley, Hinxworth, Kelshall, Nuthampstead, Reed, Royston and Therfield), seventeen parishes in Cambridgeshire (Abbington Pigotts, Barrington, Bassingbourn, Fowlmere, Foxton, Kneesworth, Litlington, Melbourn, Meldreth, Guilden Morden, Royston, Shepreth, Shingay, Thriplow and Wendy, Whaddon), and three in Essex (Heydon, Great Chishill and Little Chishill).
It will spend a whopping £6,400 on building a workhouse that can accommodate 350 paupers.
Sited opposite the heath, on what is now Downlands, it will be by far the largest building in the town.
To many it looks like a prison and as the building rises, resentment also builds.
Ampthill
The previous year, a small crowd had gathered outside another new workhouse, this time at Ampthill, just 25 miles from Royston.
That May the Board of Guardians management meeting had been rudely interrupted by ‘a most desperate attack upon the windows with stones, brick-bats, cabbage-stalks, and every missile that could be found.’
When the Riot Act was read, the crowd faltered allowing the guardians to escape into town where ‘a regular fight’ took place ‘between the special constables and the mob’.
Only once twenty-two Peelers of the newly-formed Metropolitan Police arrive next morning can the ringleaders finally be rounded up.
Of the Ampthill rioters, four are found guilty and sentenced to transportation for life.
With the new Royston workhouse still in the planning stages, later that summer one of Royston’s Poor Law Relieving Officers is also attacked.
My best toggery
To ensure there is not a repeat of the riot, the guardians in Royston resort to novel tactics. If the agricultural labourers need reassurance, they shall have it.
Come September 1835, a lengthy letter signed by a ‘fellow-labourer, WILLIAM HIGGINS’, appears posted around the neighbourhood.
Sage old William – who apparently has money enough to print this handbill – has been fretting about how things stand and has decided to find out exactly what is what.
I gets up one morning, puts on my best toggery, and goes to two or three gentlefolk, who I was told knew all about what was going on…
…Some women I hear, like my poor old wife, are mortally afraid of being parted from their husbands if they go to the workhouse; this is all nonsense; for you may be sure that no married folk will there, unless the husband is a sad idle dog…“
William calls on the poor to be ‘civil and obliging, honest and industrious’ and is convinced that in return the rich will be ‘kind and charitable’.
William, of course, does not exist. He has sprung from the imagination of Henry Thurnall, the 33-year-old local clerk to the Royston Board of Governors.
To modern ears William’s words may sound like those uttered by a panellist on ‘Have I Got News For You’ but back then one newspaper congratulated Thurnall for adapting his own language to help ‘the comprehension of the uneducated.’
However misguided, the letter is designed to calm the fears of the poor and, as such, is reprinted in the national Evening Chronicle, and the Hertford Mercury and Reformer, whose editor thinks ‘it worthy of more extended circulation.’
The workhouse test
Many of William’s intended readers – illiterate as most of them are – already have a good understanding of the ‘workhouse test’
They know that once you enter the workhouse you will enjoy a worse life than the lowest labourer will have beyond its gate.
Thomas Malthus has persuaded those in power that men are ‘inert, sluggish, and averse from labour, unless compelled by necessity.’
It follows then that you are only poor because you are lazy. Fear of the workhouse will teach you to change your ways and encourage you to contribute to society by becoming a diligent worker.
To fail this test and enter the workhouse you must be desperate.
This is plainly spelt out in the official instructions to Boards of Guardians which dictate that ‘confinement, frugal fare, strict discipline, seclusion, and other irksome circumstances …should be so enforced as to deter the idle, the dissolute, the worthless…the dread of being driven to shelter within its walls thus serving as a stimulant to exertion and to the observance of thrifty and provident habits.’
Once through the gate you will be issued with a uniform, your own clothes will be deloused and taken from you, your head shaved, and you will be separated from your spouse and your children.
Brothers will be separated from their sisters and only allowed to see each other and you, their mother, briefly on Sundays.
Your smallest children (under 7-years-old) may be allowed to stay with you on the female ward, but this is purely at the guardians’ discretion.
One ten-year-old wrote his own account of entering a workhouse:
Doors were unlocked by keys belonging to bunches, and the sound of keys and locks and bars, and doors banging, froze the blood within us. It was all so unusual and strange, and so unhomelike.
We youngsters were roughly disrobed, roughly and coldly washed, and roughly attired in rough clothes, our under garments being all covered up by a rough linen pinafore. Then we parted amid bitter cries, the young ones being taken one way and the parents (separated too) taken to different regions in that establishment.
Supper time came. It brought…bread and a jug of skilly…It might have been boiled in old clothes, which had been worn upon sweating bodies for three-score years and ten…
Sunday afternoon brought an hour of unspeakable joy. The children who had mothers were permitted to go to the women’s room. Bedlam was let loose for an hour. Wild joy, frantic exclamations.“
Arson
That winter, in nearby Saffron Walden and Bishops Stortford fires break out in the newly-occupied workhouses of the neighbouring Poor Law Unions. Arson is suspected.
In Royston, come December, Henry Thurnall can be found writing to the Home Secretary, seeking government money to top-up a reward for information on who has dared torch Mrs Walby’s barley and oat ricks in Barkway.
What is most worrying is that Walby is generally respected by her workers.
Such desperate acts – rooted in fear and hunger – deeply unsettle the Royston guardians.
So dangerous an agitator
The 50-year-old curate of Bourn and Kingston in Cambridgeshire is also desperately concerned.
Having publicly called for the Prime Minister’s impeachment, Reverend Frederick Herbert Maberly is already on the authorities’ radar. His name is noted in the Home Office files of ‘seditious’ activities.
Maberly is adamant that the poor should be supported out of Christian charity, not under the diktat of central government.
In his view, the New Poor Law Commissioners are a law unto themselves, and the Act itself directly contradicts Biblical teaching.
He is committed to forcing its repeal and has called a series of mass meetings throughout East Anglia, meetings that will lead his boss (the Bishop of Ely) to label him ‘so dangerous an agitator’ and eventually see him dismissed from his curacy.
When the guardians at Royston catch wind that Maberly has leafleted the area calling a mass meeting on the edge of the town, they hastily convene in the Red Lion, close to what is now Angel Pavement.
Thurnall is part of the delegation that calls on the Home Secretary to secure men from the Metropolitan Police to protect Royston’s guardians and their new workhouse.
Legally, the Peelers have no jurisdiction outside the capital, so they are sworn in as local Special Constables.
They join the Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire (the Earl of Hardwicke), local magistrates and at least three of the guardians (including Thurnall) in the yet-to-be opened workhouse opposite the heath.
In the meantime, the local magistrates have circulated their own leaflet warning that anyone who goes to Maberly’s meeting will be prosecuted if there is even the slightest disturbance.
One local newspaper reports ‘the upper and middling classes of society’ are deeply worried of an ‘imminent danger to the public peace.’
The meeting
The Hertford Mercury and Reformer reports: ‘The labourers, with a large proportion of women and children, continued to arrive in wagons, carts, and on foot, all through the morning, and they sat down opposite the workhouse on the road side, and on being asked by an official person what was their object, they answered, that “they expected they had come to pull down the workhouse, but they were waiting for the gentlemen who called the meeting.”’
As they gather in their hundreds, some lounge on the heath while other remain standing.
At around midday Maberly and the curate of Guilden Morden appear on a wagon that will serve as their makeshift stage.
At least two thirds of the crowd are women and children. It is harvest time and the men cannot afford to give up a day’s pay.
Maberly is certain that there are darker forces at play. He says, ‘poor men and their families are turned upon the wide world and left to starve, merely for coming forward in defence of their own rights.’
According to Maberly, labourers such as John Fortune (who worked in Bassingbourn), John Lawrence (of Shingay), John Giddings (of Orwell) and Joseph Bird have been ‘turned out of their employment’ just because they have attended his meetings.
In God’s eyes this is not right, for ‘the slaves in the west Indies have magistrates to protect them, and the poor children in the manufacturing districts have the like, yet the agricultural labourer has no magistrate to whom he can appeal.’
Maberly rails against how families are being forced into the workhouse now that out-relief is being cut, and how they are wrenched apart once within its walls.
As his diatribe rumbles on, it becomes apparent that there will be no call to action, no assault on the loathsome building that occupies the crowd’s nightmares.
After the speeches finish, those people who remain draw ‘the rev. gentlemen in the wagon from which they spoke through some of the streets of Royston.’
It has the air of a triumphal parade, but the Hertford Mercury crows, ‘the whole was the completest failure ever experienced as to any public meeting.’
Maberly, however, is satisfied.
No-one has been arrested, and he has the agreement of the protestors for Lord Stanhope to deliver a petition on their behalf to the House of Lords which will call for the law to be scrapped.
Royston Workhouse
The Royston workhouse opens without a fanfare that Saturday. By September, it is reported in the national press that it has proved so successful that Chishill is now ‘a parish without a pauper.’
In February 1837 Thurnall writes to the Home Secretary that many inmates ‘declare that they are now better taken care of than they have been for many years.’
He also reports that since the advent of workhouse, the Union has cut welfare expenditure by £3,145, a massive 31%.
In six out of the ten subsequent years the union will also manage to cut year-on-year expenditure.
By May 1838, this is too much for one whistle-blower. ‘Every saving…has been scrupulously sought for and adopted… with a heartlessness of feeling that disgraces a country.’
So claims Mr Ellis (the Guardian for Meldreth) in a letter to the Cambridge Chronicle.
The Board has declared the workhouse diet ‘too gluttonous’ and changed it to reduce costs while at the same time increasing Thurnall’s salary and that of the Relieving Officers.
Clearly ‘economy in the salaries of friends and relatives…is a very different thing from economy in the allowance and food for paupers.’
New Year’s Day 1840 provides shocking evidence of just how successful the ‘workhouse test’ has become.
A couple and their 6-month-old child have been travelling from village to village, surviving on the charity of friends.
When they arrive in town on 1 January they are in such a ‘deplorable state’ that no-one will take them in.
Rather than entering the workhouse, they choose to bed down in the ‘cage’ (the parish lock-up on Market Hill). By the morning, the baby is dead. The coroner records a verdict of ‘Died by the Visitation of God.’
The Titchmarsh children
When a census is taken the following year, it reveals that the Royston workhouse has become the last resort for the old, the ill and the orphaned. The able-bodied men, whom the system was meant to reform, make up just 8% of its inmates. Instead 55% of those incarcerated are children under 14 years of age. Of the 26 families present, 12 have no parent or adult carer to look out for them.
Three of these children are the orphaned brothers William (aged 13), David (11) and James Titchmarsh (7).
Their parents had been unable to read or write, but the basic education the workhouse offers will give the boys a leg-up when they eventually escape its walls.
Seven years on, David may well have spotted a newspaper advert for free passage to his dreams. The colonies desperately needed workers. He later wrote home to his brother William about the life he had made for himself:
I was in Cape Town three weeks, after which [I] let myself to a cotton company at Port Natal. I am to have £20 a year and my board and a house to live in for the first year; I shall get more next year. I let myself as a ploughman. I might have let myself as a tailor in Cape Town. I might have been apprenticed to a confectioner and baker in the Cape, and he would have given me one pound a month, board, washing and lodgings, but I wanted to go further up the country. It would have suited brother James, such lads as he would do well out here…I am not sorry I came to the colony.“
Those left behind
The petitions Maberly has gathered at his meetings are rejected by the Lords. He is deprived of his curacy by the bishop but goes on to be granted a rectorship in Suffolk. He dies destitute, apparently having given away all he has to the local needy.
Chartism is on the rise, demanding the vote be granted to all men including labourers (a demand which will not be met for another seventy years).
Flaming with frustration, in the late 1840s the countryside surrounding Royston sees a resurgence in stack burnings and arson.
In 1848 a blaze threatens buildings at Smyth End Farm in Barley and, at Chrishall, Mr Downham’s farm burns along with two labourers’ cottages.
The following year Bassingbourn suffers five fires, one of which spreads to the girls’ school, and at Noons Folly Farm near the Burloes estate a barn-fire is doused.
Moses Whitmore, who works on the farm, later finds himself in court accused of arson, incriminated by ‘a quantity of tinder, wrapped up in an old piece of rag’ found burning in the thatch.
The final days of the Bastille
Royston’s Poor Law Bastille will outlast the Titchmarshes and Whitmores and go on to witness two world wars.
Despite is ugliness, it will still seed some beauty.
While the composer Vaughan Williams is holidaying in Meldreth in July 1907 he visits the institution and mines the inmates for folk tunes.
Mr Wiltshire of Fowlmere provides him with four, including Green Bushes which Williams goes on to incorporate into the second movement of his English Folk Song Suite.
The Poor Law System is eventually abolished in 1948 and many workhouses find new roles as old people’s homes and hospitals.
In the 1960s, Royston’ workhouse ends its life as a hostel for the homeless and is eventually sold to a developer.
A columnist for the Cambridge Daily News comments…
If he had been alive, Reverend Maberly would have breathed a sigh of relief.
Want to read more about how the countryside around Royston rebelled in the early 1830s? Visit Revolting Royston (1): The Swing Riots.
REFERENCES
Royston’s Bastille: Hertford Mercury and Reformer, 28 June 1836; Speeches by the Rev. F.H. Maberly (1836)
Ampthill: Weekly True Sun, 24 May 1835; Chester Chronicle, 31 July 1835; TNA MH 12.4639, Royston Poor Law Union
My best toggery: Evening Chronicle, 19 September 1835; Hertford Mercury and Reformer, 22 September 1835
The workhouse test: An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus (1798); TNA MH10/1, ‘To the Assistant Commissioners, Preliminary Considerations and memorandum of Essentials with references to Workhouses’; When I was a child, Charles Shaw (1903); Morning Post, 7 January 1836, 5 March 1836; Essex Standard, 22 January 1836; TNA HO 64/5/119, Henry Thurnell to Lord John Russell, 9 December 1835
So dangerous and agitator: University of Southampton MS61/WP1/1008/12; TNA HO 40/22/3; Weekly True Sun, 20 November 1836; HALS, DE/V/O64, Royston Poor Law Guardians to James Grimston, 1st Earl of Verulam (Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire), 21 June 1836
The meeting: Hertford Mercury and Reformer, 28 June 1836 (Kingston’s Fragments of Two Centuries mistakes this with the Cambridge Chronicle)
Royston Workhouse: The Scotsman, 17 September 1836; Hertford Mercury and Reformer, 7 February 1837; The Implementation and Administration of the New Poor Law in Hertfordshire c1830-1847, Karen Rothery (PhD thesis), University of Hertfordshire, 2016; Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, 5 May 1838; Cambridge General Advertiser, 8 January 1840
The Titchmarsh children: 1841 census, Royston; Hertford Mercury and Reformer, 10 February 1849
Those left behind: Hertford Mercury and Reformer, 12 February 1848, 27 May 1848, 18 August 1849, 22 December 1849
The final days of the Bastille: https://www.eatmt.org.uk/vaughan-williams-in-cambridgeshire/; Cambridge Daily News, 18 January 1972