The Girl Who Survived the Workhouse, Cholera and Surrey Hall

This is the story of a London workhouse girl who in the ordinary course of things would never have had a story. But for her the course of things was far from ordinary. For she was caught up, quite by chance, in a calamitous turn of events that proved to be one of the darkest moments in the history of the Victorian poor.

Her name was Sarah Skittlethorpe and she was born in about 1834. Very little is known about her earliest years. It is possible that she was the Sarah Skittlethorpe who would marry Edward Coomes in 1861, and if so, then her father was called John. But other questions about her family — who her mother was, for example, and whether she had brothers and sisters — still remain unanswered.

However, at some point Sarah must have lived in Holborn, because in 1841 she was listed in the census as an inmate of the workhouse in Gray’s Inn Lane. Since no other Skittlethorpe was in the workhouse at the time, it is likely that Sarah had been abandoned, or orphaned, but once again we just do not know. What we do know, on the other hand, was what the workhouse itself was like, and so it is here that Sarah’s story properly begins.

The horrors of the workhouse

In 1841 there were almost six hundred inmates in the workhouse, classified by age and gender so that men and women, and boys and girls, occupied separate areas. About ninety of the children were under the age of ten. Sarah was only seven but others were even younger. One child, who was too young, or too unwanted, even to have a name, was only three weeks old.

We have some idea of conditions in this establishment thanks to a letter written to the editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian by the social reformer Charles Cochrane. He visited one evening in the middle of December 1847, and was horrified at the human misery he encountered, beginning with the huddle of women and children who were lying on the pavement outside the workhouse in the hope of being taken inside.

Accompanied by the porter, Cochrane went into the male casual ward, an underground room with no illumination other than the light filtering down from the courtyard. There were no beds, and the occupants had no option but to lie on tables or benches, or on the cold stone ground. Since the rugs they lay under were infested with vermin, they had stripped off their clothes, finding that this made it easier to scrape off the infestations from their tormented limbs.

She could have been Sarah

Now and then, to his distress, Cochrane encountered inmates who bore the mark of respectability. In one of the male wards a boy with gentle features was sharing a bed with two men. One of the men was the boy’s father, a stationer’s clerk, who had fallen on hard times. He had taken up residency in the workhouse on what he hoped would be a temporary basis.

However, the inmate who especially affected Cochrane was a girl in the female casual ward, who could not have been all that different from Sarah Skittlethorpe, and might even have been her. When he quizzed her, she told him that she was thirteen or thereabouts, and that she had been in service for a year but had run away from a master who treated her unkindly. Previously she had worked in a household in Richmond, until, that is, it was decided that she was surplus to requirements. She had been deserted by her parents and was alone in the world.

From Gray’s Inn Lane …

Whether Sarah was a long-term or only an intermittent resident of the Holborn workhouse is not clear, but it is on record that she was there in 1848 as well as in 1841, and that in 1848 her life took a dramatic new turn. She was fourteen or so, and on 21 April, which was Good Friday, she was one of many children who were put on board a horse-drawn vehicle and taken to an establishment south of the river and far from their old home in Gray’s Inn Lane.

There are two reasons why children were removed in this way. One was overcrowding, and it is evident that the London workhouses, where the problem was chronic, were happy to move young inmates out in order to free up space in the wards. The other reason was that taking children away from workhouses protected them from undesirable adult influences, and, it was hoped, prevented them becoming institutionalised paupers.

… to Lower Tooting

Relocating workhouse children meant in practice paying for them to be accommodated in infant or juvenile pauper establishments. These asylums, as they were often called, were dotted around the fringes of the city and were operated, very profitably, by private contractors. The asylum Sarah was sent to, along with other children from the Holborn workhouse, was in Lower Tooting, which at the time was a village in Surrey.

The asylum was in fact a collection of buildings, but the centre of operations was an old house called, predictably enough, Surrey Hall. The proprietor was a contractor with long experience of pauper management, having previously held positions of authority at union workhouses in Alverstoke and Lambeth, as well as running a private establishment in Brixton. His name was Bartholomew Peter Drouet, and he, and Surrey Hall, became the focus of intense public scrutiny in the early weeks of 1849, only months after Sarah arrived.

An appalling place

No one would have been under any illusions about the state of the children taken from Holborn down to Lower Tooting. They were passed as ‘fit’ by a workhouse medical officer, but Drouet knew full well that many would be suffering from highly communicable skin diseases, such as itch. If they were not already malnourished on arrival at the asylum, they soon would be, for Drouet’s aim was minimise expenditure while taking in as many children as the workhouses were inclined to send him.

The workhouses, for their part, were happy to have the children off their hands. There were routine inspections, but the visiting guardians must have walked round the premises with their eyes closed, for Surrey Hall was an appalling place. Quite apart from being underfed, the children were poorly clothed and exposed to the violence of cruel adults, two of whom, both schoolmasters, were borderline sadists.

It is remarkable that Drouet got away with it, given that he was accountable to the workhouses and by extension to the Poor Law Board, but he did a lot of ducking and diving, notably over the size of the asylum’s population. When Sarah arrived in April 1848 the premises were already crowded, but Drouet defied all government recommendations, and by the end of the year there would be nearly fourteen hundred children in buildings that could safely accommodate only about half this number.

An education of sorts

When in 1849 Surrey Hall became the scene of a terrible human tragedy, which I touch on below, Sarah was a witness at one of the subsequent official inquiries. There she was described as ‘an intellectual looking girl’ by a sympathetic reporter, and indeed, as she herself said, she could read and write and recite the catechism, which would certainly not have been universal accomplishments among children of her background.

A report by a Poor Law Commission inspector in 1846 commented on the ‘general backwardness’ of the girls, who, under Drouet’s dispensation, were given only four and a half hours of education a week. On average a hundred and fifty would be crammed into the schoolroom shoulder to shoulder at any one time. They were supervised by a schoolmistress and her assistant with the support of a gaggle of pupil monitors, and although the monitors were higher achieving than the other girls, they received little in the way of instruction in classroom skills.

It is a sobering fact, and one that was not lost on the inspector, that girls spent five times longer on needlework than on formal learning. A team of four could make a shirt in two hours, or in one if they were quick workers, and while those who stitched the wristbands and the more complicated parts received fourpence a week, Sarah, who only worked at the bodies of the garments, received nothing. Drouet sold the finished items to London shops, but he claimed that he made only a modest profit, and that his real aim was to give the girls useful employment.

She dared not complain

The plight of the boys was broadly similar, their day divided between being taught in crowded classrooms, being trained in shoemaking, tailoring and other trades, and working as garden or farm labourers. In the matter of punishment, though, their experiences differed sharply from those of the girls, who might have their ears boxed from time to time but were protected by law from severer forms of adult retribution.

Boys had no such protection, and there are grim accounts of the schoolmasters kicking, punching and flogging their male charges with abandon. A particularly chilling incident took place early in May 1848, only a few weeks after Sarah’s arrival, when the Holborn guardians sent a visiting committee to inspect Surrey Hall. A boy who complained to them in front of Drouet and members of his staff was brutally beaten the following day.

The complaint was that the inmates were not given enough to eat, and Sarah herself bore witness to the starvation diet, and to the risk children took when hunger drove them to speak out of turn. ‘I did not like to complain,’ she said, ‘because we used to be scolded so — them that told anything to the guardians. We had not enough at any meal.’ Other young witnesses remembered the black markets in food, the black and rotten potatoes, and the desperate boys snaffling grub from the pigs’ troughs in the yard.

Tragedy in Surrey Hall

As if Sarah’s life was not hard enough, at the end of December 1848, seven months after she had come to Lower Tooting, cholera broke out in Surrey Hall. It was not entirely clear what the source of the outbreak was, and although the talk of ‘atmospheric poisoning’ in the ill-ventilated buildings was misguided, conditions in the asylum undoubtedly contributed to the rapid spread of the disease.

The exact number of children who died in Surrey Hall, or back in the parishes following their removal by the workhouses, is hard to determine. However, over a hundred were buried in the Tooting churchyard alone, and Sarah should probably be thought of as having had a lucky escape. She was one of the Holborn evacuees taken to the Royal Free Hospital in Gray’s Inn Road — this was at the end of the first week of the outbreak — and placed in an isolation ward.

The Surrey Hall cholera crisis was of momentous significance, and I give a full account of it in my book The Tooting Tragedy, details of which can be accessed here. For Sarah, though, the aftershock of the crisis, with its parish inquests and pursuit of Drouet through the courts, and its attacks on a complacent poor law establishment by Charles Dickens and assorted newspaper editors, would have been little more than noises off. The trauma of those chaotic days in a disease-ridden asylum would have simply been the worst of many bad experiences in her time in Lower Tooting.

Further ordeals

The Holborn children had mixed experiences after their removal from Surrey Hall. Many were ill and there were deaths. Some spent time in the hospital’s former premises in Greville Street to relieve pressure on the Gray’s Inn Road wards. All the girls had been returned to the workhouse by the end of February, and all the boys by the end of March, and Sarah, with the added ordeal of the parish inquest, would have found these to be confusing times.

The inquest ran to five separate sessions, and at the fourth, which was held in the Globe Inn in Derby Street, Sarah was one of six children questioned about Surrey Hall. She spoke only briefly, but the experience must have been intensely nerve-racking, not least because Drouet himself was sitting in the room with his lawyer. As a matter of historical interest, the coroner at the inquest was the distinguished surgeon and social reformer Thomas Wakley, although this would have meant nothing to a London workhouse girl.

And now Lucy Ann

We do not know what happened to Sarah in the immediate aftermath of the Surrey Hall debacle. However, it is a fair guess that she went from the workhouse straight into employment, and in the 1851 census there is a seventeen-year-old Sarah Skittlethorpe, the only servant in the home of Lucy Ann Esmond, who was fifty years old, unmarried and living alone.

Miss Esmond was a woman of independent means, whose income came from property built by her maternal grandfather, William Woolcott. She lived in Coronation Row on the east side of Stoke Newington High Street, a short distance from the Greek revival West Hackney Church, and within sight of extensive market gardens and fields. Sarah was probably already working for her when in 1850, aged about fifteen, she was baptised.

A second tragedy

Why Sarah underwent adult baptism is not clear. However, when she married in 1861 she gave as her full name Lucy Ann Sarah Skittlethorpe. Thereafter, at least for official purposes, she dropped the Sarah. Whether she was paying tribute to Miss Esmond, or attempting to expunge her workhouse past, she became Lucy Ann.

The man she married, Edward Coomes, was a farmer and later a general labourer. He was not much older than Sarah, and as both were living in Turnham Green in Middlesex at the time of their marriage, it is possible that she had been working for the Coomes family as a servant. What is clear is that theirs was a fruitful marriage, for Lucy Ann gave birth to seven children. However, there were sadnesses too, for two daughters died in infancy, and a son died at the age of twenty.

The last of these deaths, early in August 1888, was a tragic accident. William Coomes, who was a plumber’s mate, was swimming one morning in the River Brent at Perivale. An unusually wet summer had created dangerous conditions, with deep water and a fast current, and William got into difficulty in the middle of the stream. He cried out for help and might have been saved when a man dashed along the bank to a nearby boat, but the boat was chained to a tree, and William soon sank out of sight.

Looking back

William’s father, Edward Coomes, would live with memories of his son’s tragic death for another ten years, dying in 1898 at the age of seventy-two. Lucy Ann, however, had died five years before her husband, in 1893. She was fifty-nine, and, at the end, one wonders what she would have thought of her life with its twists and turns and its many trials.

It had certainly been an extraordinary life, and it might so easily have ended all those years ago in 1849, in the juvenile pauper establishment of the awful Bartholomew Peter Drouet.