Shocking history hidden behind modern facade (From Stroud News and Journal)

Shocking history hidden behind modern facade

The inmates of Stroud Workhouse were considered luckier than others elsewhere in the country, but conditions were still far from luxurious.

Rachel Pegg investigates why a term in the workhouse was so feared.

"THE WORKHOUSE," writes Laurie Lee, "- always a word of shame, grey shadow falling on the close of life, most feared by the old; ...abhorred more than debt, or prison, or beggary, or even the stain of madness."

The forbidding institution that Lee remembers in Cider With Rosie is the former workhouse on Bisley Road, today called Stone Manor.

Before it was converted into an attractive block of residential flats, as it now stands, Stroud News & Journal readers said the building reminded them of Dartmoor prison or Colditz POW camp.

It was an appropriate comparison.

Just like a prison, the workhouse robbed its inmates of their freedom and identity.

Stroud Union Workhouse, built in 1837 (the imposing entrance building was added in 1899), was part of a new government strategy for dealing with the huge numbers of desperately poor people across the country.

The Poor Law Amendment Act, introduced in1834, attempted to nationalise the welfare system.

It decreed that paupers should only have access to charity if they committed themselves to an institution.

All 15,000 parishes in England and Wales were to be formed into Poor Law Unions, each with its own workhouse and supervised by a local board of guardians.

The development at Stroud was intended to house 500 paupers, though the most it seems to have held is about 295 in 1851.

It replaced existing workhouses in Parliament Street, Bisley, Horsley Green, Eastington, and Randwick.

The building was designed by Painswick architect Charles Baker, who was also responsible for the British School in Slad Road, Stroud.

It was linked to Bisley Road cemetery, where the first interment was that of a workhouse pauper, William Lewis, on September 4, 1856.

The nationalised scheme that brought about the workhouse's existence was a failure not because it lacked good intentions - Earl Grey's government seems to have genuinely wanted to help the poor - but because it approached the problems of poverty by treating paupers as if they were animals, or statistics, rather than people.

The Poor Law Commission drew up strict plans for workhouses, which included dividing inmates according to status, producing a daily timetable for all their activities and specifying by half-ounces the amount of food that each should receive.

When paupers entered the workhouse they lost almost all rights as human beings.

Children were separated from their parents, wives and husbands were banned from talking to each other and all possessions were confiscated, including clothes.

In a dehumanising regime that echoes that of a twentieth century concentration camp, the inmates would be stripped, disinfected and categorised by gender, age and ability to work.

Despite the characteristic prudishness of the Victorian age, women would be undressed and bathed publicly in front of the (male) medical officer, porter, and other paupers acting as wardsmen.

Then they would be given a coarse uniform which until the 1840s was a special colour to indicate a prostitute or an unmarried pregnant woman.

Even in the following century the workhouse served as a prison for the poor and a deathbed for the sick and the old.

It was a shameful place to be sent, as Howard Beard describes in his book, Around Stroud.

'My great-grandfather suffered from the delusions which today we might associate with Alzheimer's disease." he writes.

"This contributed to his removal in the 1920s to Stroud workhouse,' writes Mr Beard.

'When he died there shortly afterwards, his death certificate gave his residence as 1, Bisley Road and the informant of his decease (one of the staff) as The Occupier, 1, Bisley Road.

'No-one, surely, was really fooled by such reluctance to acknowledge that he died in the workhouse.'

In Cider With Rosie, the elderly couple Mr and Mrs Brown, who have not been parted for 50 years, are persuaded to enter the workhouse, where they were separated into the male and female wings.

'They did not see each other again,' Lee remembers, 'for in a week they both were dead.'

In 1849 a particularly shocking incident occurred at Stroud workhouse.

A mentally disabled boy who had just been admitted was forcibly held in a boiling hot bath, causing such severe injuries that he died a few hours later.

Those washing the boy had forgotten to turn off the steam heating the water and failed to realise its dangerous temperature.

The boy's persistent screaming had been ignored because, according to the Gloucester Journal, September 8, 1849, "it was his practice to do so."

An inquiry was launched into the death, which resulted in the resignation of the boilerman and a reprimand to the nurse and laundress who were on duty at the time.

However, no serious changes were made to a system that had allowed a child to be killed in the presence of more than four members of workhouse staff.

Conditions in the workhouse gradually improved, but as Lee and Beard describe, it retained its reputation of misery and death right up until its closure in 1930.

During the Second World War the desolate property was again occupied, first by British and then by American soldiers.

Afterwards it remained derelict for almost 40 years, the property of Gloucestershe County Council, until it was bought in 1979 by P L Emms of Worcester and converted into flats, but not before, in traditional Stroud fashion, a group of residents formed the Stroud Workhouse Preservation Trust and made an offer for the building, intending to turn into into a community project or an industrial archaeological museum.

Today the modernised building reveals little of its tragic history.

*Thanks to Karen Edwards, Paul Ashton, Philip Walmsley, Peter Higginbotham, Suze Hall and Howard Beard for their help and research.