In Victorian society the workhouse represented the underbelly of society. However, its exploration of the workhouse experiences of the ancestors of not one, but four celebrities guaranteed heartbreak and regular celebrity tears throughout. Episode One (of two) looked at the family histories of Brian Cox’s antecedents in Glasgow, Fern Britton’s in rural Kent and the experience of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s mother and grandmother in Ripon. Kiera Chaplin, the granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin and the only participant less famous than their ancestor, traced her grandfather’s experiences of London workhouses. To borrow a phrase from peerless John Motson this programme was indeed a game of two halves. One half saw leading historians such as David Green, Elizabeth Hurran and Allannah Tomkins offering articulate and knowledgeable commentary which was often bowdlerised by narration provided by Mr Carson, the butler from Downton Abbey (Jim Carter), whose script oscillated between reasonable historical rationalisations and rather hysterical (and often untrue) pronouncements. The workhouse as a medical treatment centre for the poor connected all the family histories. Fern Britton’s ancestor was treated in the local workhouse infirmary and later transferred to a London teaching hospital when his condition worsened and where he subsequently died. Rather than foreground the fact that the poor were able to obtain medical treatment, the programme concentrated upon the more sensational detail that his body was later used for dissection by medical students. Thus, gruesome photographs and Carson provided melodrama and cautionary tale, the eminent historian relayed the historical context and relevant legislation and Fern Britton delivered the tears and moral outrage. Some of the statistics presented, such as ‘1 in 10 died’ in the workhouse’, implied that the deprivation, cruelty and humiliation of being ‘sent’ to the workhouse was responsible for these deaths. As the programme itself later demonstrated, workhouses always contained a large proportion of the old and the sick. There were indeed scandals in workhouse across Britain, but although these were in the minority, they were often disseminated widely via the Victorian press. Similarly, the impression given by the programme was that the destitute either accepted the workhouse or starved on the streets. This again was not true. Apart from London, where outdoor relief (or relief in their own homes), was less common until the twentieth century, the numbers of paupers in Wales and England receiving out-door relief outnumbered those in workhouses by a considerable margin. In 1873, discounting the metropolis, the ratio of outdoor to indoor paupers was six to one. In Scotland, David Englander argues that ‘there was no attempt to abolish outdoor relief’ although the unemployed were excluded from a legal right to poor relief. This kind of poor relief was ignored completely by the programme and, even taking into account that the focus of the show was workhouses, it was rather disingenuous to overlook the primary form of Victorian poor relief. The experiences of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s mother as a child appeared to be similar to a sizeable group of children who, with their parents, entered and left the workhouse on many occasions, and the children were known as ins-and-outs. It was thought that ins-and-outs were deprived of education, and child welfare campaigner, Florence Davenport Hill, argued that they came ‘in and out from all sorts of horrible places and scenes of vice, and mix with the children in the schools and are constantly turning their moral filth on them’. Barbara Taylor Bradford’s mother was the eldest of three illegitimate children and the programme focussed on this and how the youngest two were born in Ripon Workhouse. Many women used workhouse infirmaries to give birth to illegitimate children, rather to the dismay of workhouse management and the central poor law authorities. Some workhouses wanted these ‘profligate’ women to be marked out by different dress, badges or inferior rations but the central authorities tried to curtail this practice.

• published: 09 Nov 2014
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