Practicable Socialism, New Series

by S. A. Barnett; Mrs. S. A. Barnett

Why, then, has not the Local Government Board removed the children from the workhouses? Why, indeed?

(c) The Ins and Outs.—In 1896 the Departmental Committee quoted the evidence of Mr. Lockwood, the Local Government Board Inspector, who referred to “cases of children who are constantly in and out of the workhouse, dragged about the streets by their parents, and who practically get no education at all,” and he puts in a table of “particulars of eleven families representing the more prominent ‘ins and outs’” of one Metropolitan West-end workhouse of whom “one family of three children had been admitted and discharged sixty-two times in thirteen months.” Other cases were given, for instance:—

“D——, a general labourer, who has three boys and a girl, who come in and out on an average once a week.

“A family named W——. The husband drunken, and has been in an asylum; the wife unable to live with him. He would take his boys out in the early morning, leave them somewhere, meet them again at night, and bring them back to the workhouse; they had had nothing to eat, and had wandered about in the cold all day.”

“This state of things is cruel and disastrous in every respect,” writes the Committee in 1896, appointed, be it remembered, by the Department to elicit facts and “to advise as to any changes that may be desirable”. Yet we find that in 1909 the same conditions exist. To quote the Report:—

“Out of twenty special cases of which details have been obtained, twelve families have been in and out ten or more times; one child had been admitted thirty-nine times in eleven years; another twenty-three times in six years. The Wandsworth Union has a large number of dissolute persons in the workhouse with children in the intermediate schools. The parents never go out without taking the children, and seem to hold the threat of doing so as a rod over the heads of the Guardians. One mother frequently had her child brought out of his bed to go out into the cold winter night. One boy who had been admitted twenty-five times in ten years had been sent more than once to Banstead Schools, but had never stayed there long. Whenever he knew he was to go there he used to write to his mother in the workhouse, when she would apply for her discharge and go out with him.”

In the thirteen years which have passed since the issue of the two Reports, what has the Local Government Board done? It has induced some of the Boards to establish receiving or intermediary houses at the cost, in the Metropolis, of about £200,000, but that is but attacking the symptom and leaving the disease untouched. Without an ideal for child-life or appreciation of child-nature, it has been content to let this hideous state of things go on. Again to quote the Report:—

“It has done nothing to prevent the children from being dragged in and out of the workhouse as it suits their parents’ whim or convenience. The man or woman may take the children to a succession of casual wards or the lowest common lodging-houses. They may go out with the intention of using the children, half-clad and blue with cold, as a means of begging from the soft-hearted, or they may go out simply to enjoy a day’s liberty, and find the children only encumbrances, to be neglected and half-starved.... The unfortunate boys and girls who are dragged backwards and forwards by parents of the ‘in-and-out’ class practically escape supervision. They pass the whole period of school age alternately being cleansed and ‘fed up’ in this or that Poor Law institution, or starving on scraps and blows amid filth and vice in their periodical excursions in the outer world, exactly as it suits the caprice or convenience of their reckless and irresponsible parents.”

And the Local Government Board has stood it for years and stands by still and lets the evils go on. Meanwhile it is the children who suffer and die; it is the children who are being robbed of their birthright of joy as they pass a miserable childhood in poverty in workhouses or in huge institutions; it is the children whose potentialities for good, and strength, and usefulness are being allowed to wither and waste and turn into evil and pain. It is the children who are needed for the nation; it is the nation who supports them; and it is the nation who must decide their future.

Speaking for myself (not in any official capacity), twenty-two years’ experience as manager of a barrack school, two years’ membership of the Departmental Committee, twelve years’ work as the honorary secretary of the State Children’s Association have brought me to the well-grounded opinion that the children should be removed altogether from the care of the Local Government Board and placed under the Board of Education. This Board’s one concern is children. Its inspectors have to consider nothing beyond the children’s welfare, and its organization admits the latest development in the art of training, both in day and boarding schools.