"The man supported his own and his wife's mother in old age, but does not seem to have saved."
John Jones, Clerk to the Stepney Poor Law Guardians, 1889.1
"Why tax the food of children to provide an inadequate dole for their grandparents?"
Harold Cox, M.P., House of Commons Debate on old age pensions, 15 June 1908.2
The Background to "Strict Administration"
As we have seen in previous Chapters, old people had missed out on their full share of nineteenth and twentieth century improvements in income, health, life expectancy and in standards of living in general. The economic trends which were partly responsible for this relative decline have been more fully explored in Chapters One and Two. Broadly, nineteenth century England had undergone a rapid transformation from a primarily agrarian economy, providing some employment for the more able elderly - albeit seasonal or at reduced wages - to a primarily industrial economy with few employment opportunities for those past their prime. With modernisation, homework was drying up, as were seasonal and casual jobs, and the spread of large firms and of public sector employment further widened the gulf between those who were in full-time employment, with rising real wages, and those who were not. As survivors of poorer, more sickly generations, many old people bore the legacy of early lives of malnutrition and disease. In an increasingly healthy and better fed community, their relative health status was falling, in turn affecting their employability and their current standards of living, in a grim arabesque of the sort all too familiar to students of socioeconomic disadvantage.3
Certainly, as discussed in Chapter One, the problem of old age dependency was not new. Indeed, fluctuating population growth had, in the past, produced periods where the proportion of elderly people in the total population was higher: in the early eighteenth century, for instance, the ratio of those aged 25-59 to those aged sixty and over was as low as 4:1, compared to 5.5:1 in the mid-nineteenth century.4 However, the different position of the elderly in the pre-industrial economy means that bald statements of dependency ratios are of little value. By the late nineteenth century, the aged population was undoubtedly larger in absolute terms than ever before. In addition, as discussed in Chapter One, the shift from agricultural to industrial employment probably meant that relatively fewer old people were able to retain regular employment into their mid-sixties.
Canon Blackley, Charles Booth and others who, in the late nineteenth century, had "discovered" the problem of old age, had thus stumbled on a half-truth. The problem was not new, but both its magnitude and its manifestation were changing. The old pattern of marginal and sporadic employment for the more able elderly was shading into the modem one of complete withdrawal from the labour market at predetermined ages. Simultaneously, falling birth rates and rising life expectancies were transforming the comparatively young population of the early to mid-nineteenth century into the relatively old population of the mid-twentieth. With our longer historical perspective, we can see the sweep of demographic trends and trade cycles and shifting employment patterns across the century; but for old people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it must sometimes have seemed as if the world had turned upside down. They were perhaps the group left most vulnerable by Englands rapid transformation. Yet they were the chief target of the campaign launched in the late nineteenth century by the Local Government Board and other "strict administrators" in the Charity Organisation Society and in local Poor Law administration, to withdraw such community support as already existed. ^
The reasons for this campaign were complex, and have been most ably discussed by other authors, notably by contemporaries Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their great work on English local government.^ Basically, the mid-nineteenth century had seen the "success" of the Poor Law reformer’s efforts to remove the great bulk of the able-bodied from the scope of Poor Law assistance. In fact, this had far more to do with economics than with Poor Law policies: the early nineteenth century, like the late Elizabethan period which had given rise to the Old Poor Law, was one of those periods in history when hard times threw large numbers of employable adults and their families onto the mercies of community support. In the early nineteenth century, this crisis had combined the traditional manifestation of underemployment and below subsistence wages in rural areas with the more modern phenomenon of trade-cycle - linked mass unemployment in the towns: both costly to the
community and, like the "sturdy beggars" of Elizabeth’s times, pregnant with the danger of crime, unrest and revolt. The rural "Captain Swing" riots of 1830-31 were only one manifestation of the trouble that contemporaries felt brewing, and which later erupted into anti-Poor Law agitation and Chartism. Not surprisingly, then, Government and public attention were focused on able-bodied relief recipients almost to the exclusion of the "impotent" poor, who, except in times of economic crisis, comprised the great bulk of recipients, but who offered little threat to public order. This focus gave the 1834 Poor Law Report and some other contemporary documents their peculiar air of myopia, or failure to see what stood in front of them; it also served to distort Poor Law policy and administration with preoccupations which were totally inappropriate to the Poor Law’s primary client group.^
By the mid-century, outdoor relief rolls were again shrinking, as rising real wages and the development of alternative sources of support for those unemployed or temporarily off work - such as Trade Union and Friendly Society funds, and public relief works - kept more and more working people away from the Poor Law. Even the great agricultural depression of the 1870s and 1880s failed to curb the strong downward trend of relief to the 16-64 age group. Unemployed men and those with short term illnesses, increasingly able to keep away from the Poor Law, kept their wives and children away as well, and the great host of children previously swelling relief rolls also began urebb away.8
Yet, for Government officials and many middle-class contemporaries, this apparent triumph of the New Poor Law was marred. In England and Wales in the mid-nineteenth century, the aged and infirm and their dependents had probably comprised about one third of all paupers; by the early 1870s, they were nearly 45 per cent, not including children. By 1892, those aged over sixty-five alone comprised over 36 per cent of paupers at the 1 January day count, and by 1906, they were 39 per cent at the 31 March day count. None of these figures, nor those given subsequently, include lunatics and vagrants. The ebbing tide of able-bodied recipients had left exposed a vast standing pool of the aged and infirm, widows and their children and others unable to provide for themselves however buoyant the economy: these were, after all, the "true poor" of Elizabethan times, and the biblical poor who are always with us. As C.S. Loch observed in 1892,
formerly in the throng of paupers, you did not notice the old. Now, the throng is less ... naturally the chief group is the aged. This is the group that catches the eye in England now.9
The prominence of the aged was emphasised by their highly visible and disproportionate presence in workhouses. From its very inception, the workhouse test had been patently impracticable as a means of dealing with the urban unemployed, and it had thus rarely been enforced against this group. The main potential source of able-bodied workhouse inmates was thus largely redirected to Poor Law Labour Yards and, later, public relief works and Distress Committees. Thus, in England and Wales from the 1870s until 1905, only between 13 and 18 per cent of indoor relief recipients were able-bodied. As discussed in Chapter Four, these able-bodied inmates were overwhelmingly elderly or permanently disabled. Workhouses remained, as Dr Edward Smith wrote in 1868, "asylums and infirmaries", accommodating "almost solely ... the aged and infirm, the destitute sick and children". In the late nineteenth century, there was a growing trend, especially in urban areas, to remove children to schools and the mentally disabled to lunatic asylums and special institutions. Workhouse infirmary wards had always functioned as hospitals, especially in rural areas and for chronic and "uninteresting" patients in the towns; from the 1860s, many of the urban workhouse infirmaries grew into separate hospital-type institutions, drawing off a large proportion of sick paupers from the workhouse proper. Together, these developments left many mixed workhouse wards as vast empty spaces with a motley crew of inmates rattling around in them: and these consisted largely of more or less ambulant old people.^
As we have seen in Chapter Four, more than 8 per cent of The population over sixty-five were in Poor Law institutions in England and Wales during the year 1892. Charles Booth calculated that, over the year, they comprised 25 per cent of inmates; day counts in 1890 and 1892 give a figure of around 30 per cent, with a further 8 per cent aged 60-65. In general workhouses, especially in rural areas, the proportions were usually much higher. It was no wonder that, as David Thomson has said, contemporaries had an impression of "the mass institutionalisation of the elderly". H
By 1895, the Rev. T. Bridge could declare that workhouses were "rapidly changing then- character and becoming hospitals for the sick and refuges for the infirm aged instead of workhouses for the able-bodied". He complained that 81 per cent of Macclesfield Workhouse inmates were aged over sixty and that there were not enough able-bodied to do the work: indeed, the question of how to get workhouse maintenance done by the aged and infirm became a topic of consuming interest to the Poor Law Conferences of the 1890s. In 1898, W.A. Bailward had a swift answer for those who wished to give preferential treatment to aged inmates: as the "vast majority" of inmates were aged, he declared smugly, this was clearly impossible.^
The non-able-bodied, with the aged and sick most prominent among them, had not been untouched by the New Poor Law: sporadic outbreaks of workhouse-testing and other forms of administrative cruelty had undoubtedly caused much suffering for elderly people in various Unions between the 1830s and the 1870s. However, most of the hardship occasioned probably had more to do with the often niggardly and mean spirit of local administration than with the central authority or the tenets of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. As Ursula Henriques observes, the harshness of local administration was often quite independent of central policies, and "in methods of administration ... the main feature of the new Poor Law was continuity with the old". 13 Because the attention of the Poor Law Reformers had been focused on the able-bodied, there had been no systematic or consistent efforts to drive the aged into the workhouse or away from the Poor Law altogether. While there was some increase in the proportions of old people in Poor Law institutions, at least from 1851, this was probably mainly due to the greater numbers receiving infirmary treatment. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the relative numbers of old people receiving outdoor relief remained fairly stable until the 1870s. 14
This was the background to the decision of G.J. Goschen, President of the then Poor Law Board in 1869, to begin a campaign to tighten Poor Law administration: this had been foreshadowed at the local level by conferences of metropolitan Guardians earlier that year. It is worth discussing the nature of this campaign in some detail, as it was central to the events which marked the so-called "birth of the welfare state”; and because, as David Thomson has complained, many welfare histories tend to gloss over or ignore it altogether. 15
Spurred on by high unemployment in the late 1860s and what Anne Digby calls the consequent "temporary collapse" of the Poor Law in Lancashire and London, the campaign gained momentum until, in its Circular of 2 December 1871, the Local Government Board enjoined the enforcement of workhouse-testing for the able-bodied and the general "strict administration" of relief. This Circular contained what the Webbs described as "quite a new stress ... on getting contributions from relatives", and an implication that the offer of the workhouse might be used to encourage relatives to keep the aged and infirm off the rates. The 1871 Circular was interpreted by the Inspectors as a licence to enforce the workhouse test against the non-able-bodied and to restrict outdoor relief for all, and although they did so without the explicit backing of the Board, its tacit consent enabled this policy to remain in force until 1895.16
The results were immediate, with a reduction of 194,000 or 18.5 per cent in the number of relief recipients from 1870 to 1873 alone. Between 1872 and 1892, the mean numbers
receiving relief in England and Wales, rounded to the nearest thousand, fell from 977,000 to 744,000, or from 4.3 per cent of population to 2.6 per cent: outdoor relief fell from 828,000 to 558,000, although indoor relief rose by 37,000. At first, the new austerity hit hardest against the unemployed and the outdoor sick. To quote F.B. Smith,
It is not surprising, although contemporaries seem not to have noticed it, that this savage reduction in Poor Law relief coincided with the new pressure on the out-patient wards at hospitals, new pressure on private charities and the rise of monitoring bodies such as the Charity Organisation Society. 17
Within the next twenty years, private charity came to provide unofficial relief on an enormous scale particularly to unemployed and underemployed urban workers, for instance through the Salvation Army and other charitable enterprises such as Medland Hall. Huge sums were disbursed through the Mansion House Fund in London and other semi-official collections, and organised charity descended on some poorer urban districts in the form of the Charity Organisation Society, the University Settlements and an army of more or less "scientific" almsgivers: sometimes, as with the Charity Organisation Society and the lady rent-collectors such as Beatrice Webb and Octavia Hill, the "science" was a good deal more in evidence than the alms. To quote one lady, on witnessing the touching deathbed scene of an old man she was visiting, "These little incidents make 'slumming' a real pleasure. One can give so much happiness with so little tro u b le."^
However, despite the fond fancies of the Charity Organisation Society, private charity was simply not a viable means of dealing with mass unemployment. This was soon proved by the next great cyclical depression of 1884-87. Great distress and rioting, along with the gaping inadequacy of existing Poor Law and charitable provision, prompted the new President of the Local Government Board, Joseph Chamberlain, to take decisive action. In his famous Circular of 15 March 1886, he launched the policy of provision of public relief works for the unemployed outside the Poor Law, which was to lead to the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905, the Distress Committees and ultimately to Unemployment Insurance. The previous year, in 1885, the Medical Relief Act had removed the pauper disqualification from those receiving such relief only: a very humble beginning to the public acknowledgement that national efficiency required a health service in which deterrence, and hence the Poor Law, played no part. Thus began the dismantling of the Poor Law, less than two decades after "strict administration" commenced. Of course, as we have seen in Chapter Two, poor relief remained the last or only resort for many unemployed people, especially the elderly and long-term unemployed. Nonetheless, the
raison d'etre of a deterrent poor law, the masses of truly able-bodied, were slipping from its grasp.19
Thus a vast and cumbersome administration, based firmly on the principle of less eligibility, was left to deal with a population which became progressively older and sicker and more helpless. Apart from the shifting numbers of residual unemployed, recipients comprised mainly a small group of the elderly and disabled - who, though often technically "able - bodied", were not so much unemployed as outside the workforce - a few thousand vagrants, and large numbers of widows and children, the sick and the aged. This development might have been a major embarrassment to the officials of the Local Government Board, had its implications then been realised. They were, however, sustained by the belief, then apparently general amongst the middle and upper classes at least in London, that the genuine unemployed workman was a temporary aberration, quite distinct from the "pauper classes": as Chamberlain stated in his Circular, "it is not desirable that the working classes should be familiarised with Poor Law R elief'.20
The immediate result of this important development was that the brunt of a generation of "strict administration" and the deterrent principles of 1834 was borne by the large majority of paupers who had hitherto absorbed comparatively little of the central authority's time and attention. From 1 January 1872 to 1 January 1892, the number of non-able-bodied adult paupers in England and Wales dropped from 434,400 to 350,838: a fall of almost 20 per cent.21
The impact of "strict administration" varied sharply for different groups of recipients. Poor Law and Local Government Board officials had long accepted that the necessity of adequate medical treatment for the indoor sick precluded the application of less eligibility to this group; and most now also accepted that the principle was inapplicable to workhouse children, if they were to be trained to lives of independence from the Poor Law.22
This left three main groups for the imaginative exercise of deterrence. "Able-bodied" widows, as the last large group of able-bodied left within the Poor Law, were for the first time to be subjected to a policy of workhouse-testing and/or separation from their children: as the Chairman of the St Pancras Guardians, J.H. Allen, explained in 1895, this provided "just that measure of inconvenience and sorrow sufficient to give strength to providential considerations ...".22 Relief to the outdoor sick was to be restricted to short term cases where possible: to quote a Board Memorandum in 1892, "the sick poor can usually be