It’s like watching an image emerge on photographic paper. The first evidence you find out gives you a ghostly outline and then the more you uncover adds definition and finally you have a real person staring out at you. Of course, you rarely find out everything so, much like pre-digital photos, some bits are permanently out of focus. My person was a 6 year old girl called Ann E. Cundall. Ann was the only Husthwaite-born pauper inmate in Easingwold Workhouse at the time of the 1881 census.
First I should explain my interest. I’m new to Husthwaite and happily retired, but in my previous remunerated life I worked at a Workhouse Museum. During our early days in the village, on an emergency dash for milk and bread to Easingwold Coop I drove past what was unmistakably a former workhouse building. I wondered idly how many Hustwaitians had ended up there and that thought led me to Ann and the 1881 census.
At first I thought she might be in there with her grandfather as a William Cundall (age 89) was also listed, a comforting thought because, although they wouldn’t have been allowed much contact in a strictly segregated workhouse, at least she would have known that someone from her family was close. Just being in that huge building would have been scary for a little girl brought up in village cottages. However, William was not her grandfather. Looking at the workhouse records I found out that by the time of the census Ann had already been at the workhouse for two years. Before that she and her mother and father had been living with her grandma in Husthwaite. 1878 had been a bad year for the family; Ann’s mum, Rebecca had died in February and now her grandmother (Hannah Ward) was ill and unable to look after a 4 year old toddler. Her father John, a farm labourer, working long hours away from the house, must have been at his wit’s end. He signed Ann into the workhouse on 21st October 1878, about the same time that her grandmother died.
Ann’s life changed completely. Her home clothes were taken away. Under Matron’s supervision she would have undergone a thorough scrubbing with carbolic soap, her head shaved and then an inspection to make sure no lice, fleas and bedbugs remained before being issued with her workhouse uniform and allowed into the receiving ward. This was the workhouse quarantine procedure. New inmates were held in the receiving ward, away from the main building, until all were sure that no infectious diseases would be carried with them into main block. You would hope that someone would have shown Ann some kindness and reassurance during this time but that depended on the tone set by the Master and Matron of the workhouse and its Board of Guardians. Victorians were not given to public displays of affection.
One parenting guide from the time suggested that shaking hands was preferable to “softening” your children with hugs and kisses.
Children up to the age of 7 were allowed to sleep with their mothers (if they had them) then they were sent to the girls’ or boys’ dormitory. Ann slept in the girls dormitory, several girls to a bed. The workhouse bell got them up at 6am in the summer, there was roll call, prayers and breakfast followed by lessons and work. Female inmates were responsible for doing all the laundry, cleaning and cooking for the workhouse. Three meals each day for up to 130 paupers. Ann would have worked with them, learning the skills to enable her to become a domestic servant from fellow paupers who had been former servants, seamstresses, cooks, even shopkeepers before their luck changed.
Mary Brown was the schoolmistress. Her job was to teach the children to read, write, do sums, and respect God, the Queen and their betters. Some workhouse schoolteachers were more successful at this than others. In an 1856 version of OFSTED for workhouse teachers Mr. T.B. Browne found:
Great Ouseburn: 5 Boys, 5 Girls, 0 infants
The children at this workhouse were unacquainted with thesimplest truths of Christianity. Not one could read. The Lord’s prayer was repeated, but not understood
Pateley Bridge: 6 Boys, 7 Girls, 0 infants
The children here, as on former occasions, were deplorablyignorant. None could tell what country they lived in, or work a sum of any kind.
Workhouse children were the “hope” of the workhouse system. The idea was that, taken away from the possibly feckless influence of their parents, given the moral example of the Master, Matron and Schoolteacher’s behaviour and an education/training of sorts the children would grow into independent wage-earning adults who would bring up sober and industrious families of their own. So how did Ann get on?
I picked her up in a volume of workhouse Guardians’ Notes in March 1888. She’s 13 years old and starting life as a workhouse apprentice. The workhouse acted as an employment agency for their older children. They would arrange work and keep in touch with their employer to check their progress. The wages they earned were paid to the workhouse which in turn provided the clothing required for their service. Ann was hired as a domestic servant by Mrs Elizabeth Robinson of Easingwold for a year. Her wages were set at £4 per annum however five months into her service she was sent back to the workhouse for “not being a suitable servant”. Possibly there was a personality clash with Mrs Robinson or it could be that her manner was not refined enough for serving Easingwolds polite society. Another employer was found within two months and Ann was sent to Huby to join Thomas Barron’s (farmer) household as a domestic servant. This time the relationship must have worked as she’s still there at 16 years old for the 1891 census. Her census entry uses her real name, the one used on her baptism entry at Husthwaite parish church – Hannah Elizabeth Cundall. Leaving the workhouse behind, perhaps?
I’m going to carry on researching Hannah. I’d like to know whether she started her own family or if the workhouse stunted her emotional development. In 1901, she’s living in as a domestic servant on Spring Street in Easingwold, very near the workhouse. She’s listed as Annie E. Cundall, using her workhouse identity ….
CARRIE PHILIP