Teasing out individual experiences through new poor law scandals: policy, practice and subjugation

Within the past decade research from the 'welfare from below' perspective has increasingly sought to uncover the experiences and strategies of the poor in eking out their existence (Hitchcock 2004). Such work has moved beyond past understandings which related the support of the poor exclusively to the poor laws to a much broader consideration of a variety of overlapping practices of self- and community-help, including mutual aid, criminal activities and the support provided through kinship networks. Hitherto studies have however neglected paupers' experiences during the early years of the New Poor Law. In part this has perhaps been a function of the fact that the lives of individuals tended to be obscured by the record-keeping practices of individual unions - and the Poor Law Commission in London – and in part due to the prevailing historical orthodoxy which suggests that all powers of policy innovation were removed from the local level (Eastwood 1994). This paper attempts to critically address these two assumptions through the lens of New Poor Law scandals, the 'one-off' events in poor law history which, somewhat paradoxically, occurred with shocking regularity during the implementation of the new centralized system. Scandals despite their one-off nature generated huge amounts of documents which were concerned with detailing the everyday decision-making processes and practices of individual unions and their impact upon welfare recipients. Indeed, somewhat unusually under the New Poor Law, these documents contain the transcriptions of in-depth semi-structured interviews with the very 'individuals' whose experiences in this period remain obscure. In particular this paper utilises the documents created before, during and after two scandals which were critical to the early evolution of the New Poor Law: the Droxford and Fareham Unions scandal in which three young children were severely punished for their 'dirty habits' and a scandal in the Bridgwater Union whereby a young woman was denied outdoor medical relief during a fraught pregnancy. It is shown that not only were local Boards of Guardians responsible for determining much New Poor Law policy but also that their union officers had immense powers to dictate the form of these important social policies, policies which had a huge impact upon the lives of many dependent and vulnerable people. As such, inconsistencies from officer to officer and a system in which there were few formal checks and feedback mechanisms created a culture in which abuses and maltreatments could occur and endure. The obsession of the Poor Law Commission with the 'problem' of able-bodied male labourers and the subsequent lack of central policy directed towards women and children meant that these were extremely vulnerable to the whims of their welfare providers and the vicissitudes of local policy