Henrietta Barnett & The Workhouse Children

John Walker author of Out of Sight, Out of Mind – Abuse, Neglect and Fire in a London Children’s Workhouse, 1854-1907 explores the forgotten achievements of Henrietta Barnett

Photograph by Henrietta Barnett

Aspects of the work of Samuel & Henrietta Barnett as social reformers are well-documented. Samuel is remembered for founding Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel Gallery, while Henrietta is celebrated chiefly for establishing Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Yet new evidence reveals Henrietta’s humanitarian achievements in fighting to ameliorate the plight of tens of thousands of workhouse children. Her work easily matches her husband’s in improving conditions for Whitechapel’s poor.

Henrietta Rowlands married the recently-ordained Samuel Barnett in 1873 when she was just twenty-two. They were both from comfortably middle-class backgrounds tinged with significant elements of social concern and reforming zeal. They sought a new parish, away from subrban London, where they could pursue their missionary ambitions. The Bishop of London posted them to St Jude’s, Spitalfields, which he described as “the worst parish in my diocese, inhabited largely by criminals.”

Much of the credit for their subsequent achievements is given to Samuel, his status enhanced by a two-volume biography written by Henrietta. By contrast, Henrietta’s autobiography remains incomplete, an unpublished manuscript gathering dust in the London Metropolitan Archives. If she been as assiduous in publicising her own achievements, perhaps the story that follows would have been appreciated more widely?

One of Samuel’s first actions, on arriving in Spitalfields, was to get himself appointed to the Board of Guardians which was responsible for the large workhouse on Vallance Rd. The Poor Law regime at the time, encouraged by local Guardians, offered no cushion in the form of welfare payments or ‘outdoor relief’ for those who fell on hard times. Destitution meant the workhouse and Whitechapel had one of London’s largest.

In the eighteen-fifties, Whitechapel’s Guardians built a children’s workhouse in Forest Gate to separate the youngsters from what they regarded as the feckless behaviour and bad example of their indolent parents. Many of the buildings survive today and can almost be seen beside the railway line between Forest Gate and Maryland from trains passing from Essex towards Liverpool Street.

This ‘school’ soon housed as many as nine hundred pupils from the ages of two up to fourteen or fifteen years old. Within a few years Whitechapel was subletting places to the Guardians of Hackney and Poplar to accommodate their children. In the second half of the nineteenth century, an estimated fifty thousand East End youngsters passed through.

Conditions were harsh. Children were forcibly taken from their parents and would be lucky to see them for two hours in three months. On arrival at the school, most were separated from their siblings, never to see them again until they left. They were shaven, given soulless uniforms and subsisted upon inadequate diets.

For the first fifty years, the establishment was run by ex-military personnel, whose focus was on discipline and cost-saving rather than child care. Classes of up to ninety pupils were taught largely by unqualified teachers. All activity was undertaken in silence and the dormitories were overcrowded. In modern terminology, it was a ‘total institution’ from which children were permitted no escape. In all but name it was a prison, yet the inmates’ only crime was being born into poverty.

The Forest Gate District School, as it was officially known, was an institution of the kind sometimes called industrial schools, promoted as establishments that taught children trades to keep them from poverty in adulthood. But this was one of many lies. The average age of children was a little over ten years and official reports condemned the ‘industrial’ training as inadequate. In reality, children were employed as free labour – scrubbing acres of floors, peeling tons of potatoes and mending tattered garments – to save staff wages.

After witnessing the conditions at the Forest Gate School, Samuel arranged for Henrietta to become a Poor Law Guardian, as only the second woman to do so. She was immediately appointed an unpaid governor of the school, as the first woman in England to hold such a post. And there she remained, as the only female governor, for the next twenty years.

Henrietta set out to humanise the system, particularly for girls, emphasising that a caring upbringing would have beneficial effects on their own children. Yet her pleas for reform were ignored, met with hostility and dismissed in the words of one patronising school inspector as ‘sentimental follies.’

In response, Henrietta abandoned governors’ meetings and sought to effect change by direct action. She took great delight in ensuring that the matron – the inappropriately named ‘Miss Perfect’ – address all the girls by their first names, rather than by numbers or the all-purpose ‘girl.’ She knew that subjecting girls to whole days polishing a floor or washing uniforms was not adequate training for the occupation most would face on leaving – domestic service. She and Samuel opened another home in Hampstead, where they took a dozen girls at a time and trained them in domestic service skills, in preparation for future employment.

Henrietta acknowledged the hazards girls might face when placed into service as young as fourteen. She was at the forefront in establishing the Metropolitan Association for the Befriending of Young Servants in the eighteen-seventies. Girls were visited annually in their places of employment, until the age of twenty-one, to ensure they were not physically or sexually abused or exploited, and were assisted in moving to new positions if necessary.

She led Sunday walks across Wanstead Flats and encourage her middle-class friends to visit and read with the children, bringing books to the library and supplying toys. She promoted a London-wide scheme to fund pictures for the bare walls of District Schools. She established the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, obtaining royal patronage in order to raise funds to send children on camping holidays in Essex.

Incrementally and almost by stealth, Henrietta Barnett humanised the conditions, particularly for girls, during her first fifteen years as a governor. But it was in the final five years of her governorship that she was to have her greatest impact on the school and the conditions of all workhouse children.

On New Year’s Eve 1890, twenty-six boys died in a fire in the school and the incident drew national condemnation, leading to changes in fire regulations for workhouses. Henrietta befriended one of the heroes of the fire, Henry Elliott, a porter who rescued other boys from the smoke-filled dormitories.

Although there was an inquest at which the superintendent of the school was praised for his swift action in minimising fatalities, it only later transpired – revealed in Henrietta’s writings – that the children had been locked in their dormitories so the staff could go out to celebrate New Year.

Worse followed three years later when an outbreak of food poisoning swept through the school, killing two children and seriously affecting up to a hundred-and-fifty others. At the inquest, Henry Elliott, hero of the fire, condemned the management for substituting fresh meat with the maggot-ridden meat which caused the poisoning. The governors suspended him as a trouble-maker and, even though his whistle-blowing was proven to be accurate, they fired him.

When the corrupt behaviour of the management which led to both the fire and food poisoning went unpunished, Henrietta Barnett drew upon her personal connections to effect change. Her brother-in-law, Ernest Hart, was editor of the British Medical Journal. Working with Henrietta, he undertook a two-year campaign against what became known as Barrack Schools, and the Forest Gate establishment in particular, which gained traction and attention in decision-making circles.

As her second line of attack, Henrietta provoked a Parliamentary Inquiry into Barrack Schools, led by former Liberal Minister, Anthony Mundella. His 1896 report was condemning, calling for closure and replacement with more child-centric, parent-led institutions. The force of the accumulated evidence was such that the President of the Local Government Board, the government department with oversight of Poor Law establishments, had no choice but to accept the recommendations.

Henrietta’s governorship at the school ended when the Mundella Report was published. But as she left, two of the country’s first working-class guardians and workhouse school governors arrived to complete her work.

They were Poplar’s Will Crooks, a former workhouse boy, and George Lansbury. Both later became Labour MPs but each cut his public service teeth, battling locally and nationally to get the Forest Gate District School shut down. Their plan was to move the children to more suitable accommodation in separate houses run by houseparents in Brentwood. Although cricitised for their extravagance, the homes they established later gained acclaim and royal patronage, becoming the model for twentieth-century children’s homes.

Henrietta Barnett deserves to be credited for this change. Frustrated by years of slow reform, she realised that the abolition of Barrack Schools was the only solution. She pursed the cause with a dedication and determination that changed the lives of tens of thousands of children for the better in East London and far beyond.

In a collection of essays published in 1933, Henrietta summarised what she found at Forest Gate and why it had to change.

“Children in the schools soon develop a stigma. … The whole life is too much like that of a prison or a convent. … the children who are brought up in such dread and artificial surroundings are ill-prepared to fit into a world where growth and change are universal laws.”

The abolition legacy is hers.

Photograph of boys at the Forest Gate District School in the eighteen-eighties by Henrietta Barnett

The Forest Gate District School

Images of the fire at the school from the Illustrated London News, 1891

Hutton Poplars, the replacement for the Forest Gate District School

Henrietta Barnett

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