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From: "Jan" <>
Subject: [UK-W&H] History Part I
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 15:36:38 +0100


WORKHOUSE CHILDREN AND EDUCATION

The report of 1834 took for granted that workhouse Children would be
educated.
After the age of 9 they would be apprenticed, whereby the Guardians would
pay
a premium with each child to encourage employers to take them.
Further legislation in 1844 and 1851 restricted the terms of apprenticeship.

Longmate cites Sir James Kay Shuttleworth who began his career as Assisstant
Commissioner, "to teach a pauper child to write was regarded by some Boards
as not merely preposterous but dangerous. It was to many of the Guardians
like putting the torch of knowledge into the hands of rickburners ... what
had the hedger and ditcher, the team driver, the shepherd, the ploughman to
do with letters except to read incendiary prints about Bastilles and the
oppression of the new Poor Law?"
(The Life and work of Sir James Kay Shuttleworth; Frank Smith 1923)

In many of the workhouse schools the other inmates acted as Teachers, many
of whom could not read or write themselves. The accommodation and atmosphere
of the workhouse schoolroom made it almost impossible to learn. Cruelty and
Punishment were the norm rather than the exception.

Regulations regarding corporal punishment were set out in a Poor Law Board
General Order in July 1847, which banned it for Girls and Older Boys. Boys
under 14 could be beaten but only by the school master or workhouse Governor
and "with a rod or other instrument .... approved by the Guardians".
Article 136 specified that no child under 12 years of age shall be punished
by confinement in a dark room or during the night. Rules which were commonly
and frequently found to be broken.

Longmate states that cruelty is the dominant theme in the sole account of
life in a workhouse school which has survived, written by the most famous
"Old Boy" of such an establishment, the explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley,
who in 1871 achieved international fame when he presumed to discover Dr
Livingstone.
Stanley, originally christened John Rowlands, was the illegitimate son of a
Welsh Girl who had run off to London, leaving him with her parents, who
handed him over to another elderly couple to whom his Mothers Brother paid
2s 6d a week for his keep.
Then, Having married again, they stopped the allowance and one Saturday
morning in 1847 the 6 year old John was taken for a walk by the grown up son
of his foster parents, supposedly to visit an Aunt ......

To be continued.......
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