"A gentleman who had served the office said to me: 'I am really unfit to be a poor-law guardian; I have some vestige of humanity left in me!' Under these guardians, and in immediate contact with the poor, are a master and a matron, who keep the accounts, distribute food and clothing, and keep order. Among them some are respected and loved, others hated or feared; some are kindly and intelligent, others of the lowest grade. In one workhouse the master had been a policeman, in another the keeper of a small public-house, in another he had served in the same workhouse as porter. The subordinates are not of a higher grade, except occasionally the school-master and school-mistress, whom I have sometimes found struggling to perform their duties, sometimes quite unfitted for them, and sometimes resigned to routine and despair.
"In the wards for the old and the sick, the intense vulgarity, the melancholy dulness, mingled with a strange license and levity, are dreadful. I attribute both to the utter absence of the religious and feminine element.
"But is there not always a chaplain? The chaplain has seemed to me in such places rather a religious accident than a religious element. When he visits a ward to read and pray once a week, perhaps there is a decorum in his presence; the oaths, the curses, the vile language cease; the vulgar strife is silenced, to recommence the moment his back is turned. I remember one instance in which the chaplain had requested that the poor, profligate women might be kept out of his way. They had, indeed, shown themselves somewhat obstreperous and irreverent. I saw another chaplain of a great workhouse so shabby that I should have mistaken him for one of the paupers. In doing his duty, he would fling a surplice over his dirty, torn coat, kneel down at the entrance of a ward, hurry over two or three prayers, heard from the few beds nearest to him, and then off to another ward. The salary for this minister for the sick and poor was twenty pounds a year. This, then, is the religious element; as if religion were not the necessary, inseparable, ever-present, informing spirit of a Christian charitable institution, but rather something extraneous and accidental, to be taken in set doses at set times. This is what our workhouses provide to awaken the faith, rouse the conscience, heal the broken spirit, and light up the stupefied faculties of a thousand unhappy, ignorant, debased human beings congregated together.
"Then as to the feminine element in a great and well-ordered workhouse, under conscientious management, (to take a favorable specimen,) I visited sixteen wards, in each ward from fifteen to twenty-five sick, aged, bedridden, or helpless poor. In each ward all the assistance given and all the supervision were in the hands of one nurse and a helper, both chosen from among the pauper women supposed to be the least immoral and drunken. The ages of the nurses might be from sixty-five to eighty years; the assistants were younger.
"The number of inmates under medical treatment in the year 1854 in the London workhouses was over 50,000, (omitting one, the Marylebone.) To these there were 70 paid nurses and 500 pauper nurses and assistants, (not more than one fifth of the number requisite for effective nursing, even if they were all able nurses.)
"As the unpaid pauper nurses have some additional allowance of tea or beer, it is not unusual for the medical attendant to send such poor feeble old women as require some little indulgence to be nurses in the sick wards."
Such is the standard of qualification, and as for their assistants, Mrs. Jameson found some of them nearly blind and others maimed of a limb. She remembers no cheerful faces; their features and deportment were melancholy, or sullen, or bloated, or harsh, and these are the nurses to whom the sick poor are confided!
"In one workhouse the nurses had a penny a week and extra beer; in another the allowance had been a shilling a month, but recently withdrawn by the guardians from motives of economy. The matron told me that while this allowance continued, she could exercise some control over the nurses, she could stop their allowance if they did not behave well; now she has no hold on them! They all drink. Whenever it is their turn to go out for a few hours, they come back intoxicated, and have to be put to bed in the wards they are set over!"
Mrs. Jameson speaks of bribery as the only means by which some of the bedridden patients could obtain help.