Shadows of the Workhouse

be kept sedated all night, and telling me to ring in the morning.
    Before breakfast, I rang the hospital, and was told that Mr Collett had died peacefully at 3.30 a.m.

    There was no last post for the old soldier; no solemn drum roll; no final salute; no lowering of the colours. There was just a contract funeral, arranged by the hospital, leaving from a hidden area next to the morgue. A priest and one mourner followed the coffin, and we travelled in the hearse, next to the driver. I had not thought of flowers until nearly at the hospital gate, so I had bought a bunch of Michaelmas daisies from a street flower-seller. We were driven to a cemetery somewhere in North London. I don’t remember where it was. I only remember a cold, bleak November day, as we stood on either side of the open grave, the priest and I, reciting the office for the burial of the dead: “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.” The men shovelled the soil over the coffin, and I laid the purple daisies on the rich brown earth.

CODA

    It was many years later – perhaps fifteen or twenty years – when Mr Collett visited me. I was happily married, my daughters growing up, my life in full flow. I had not thought of Mr Collett for years.
    I woke in the middle of the night, and he was standing at the side of my bed. He was as real as my husband sleeping beside me. He was tall, and upright, but looked younger than when I had known him, like a handsome man of about sixty or sixty-five. He was smiling, and then he said, “You know the secret of life, my dear, because you know how to love.”
    And then he disappeared.

    THE END

Epilogue

    In 1930 the workhouses were closed by Act of Parliament – officially, that is. But in practice it was impossible to close them. They housed thousands of people who had nowhere else to live. Such people could not be turned out into the streets. Apart from that, many of them had been in the workhouses for so long, subject to the discipline and routine, that they were completely institutionalised, and could not have adjusted to the outside world. Also, the 1930s were the decade of economic depression, with massive unemployment nationwide. Thousands of workhouse inmates suddenly thrown onto the labour market would only have made matters worse.
    So the workhouses were officially designated “Public Assistance Institutions” and, in order to make them more acceptable, would be locally referred to by such names as “Glebe House”, “Rose House”, and so on. But in practice they carried on much the same as before. The label “pauper” was replaced by “inmate”, and the uniform was scrapped. Comforts, such as heating, a sitting room, easy chairs and better food were introduced. Inmates were allowed out. The inhumane practice of splitting families was stopped. But still it was institutional life. The staff were the same, and the attitudes and mindset of the master and officers were stuck firmly in the nineteenth century. Discipline remained strict, sometimes inflexible, depending on the character of the master, but punishments for transgression of the rules were relaxed, and life was certainly easier for the inmates of the Institution than it had been for the paupers of the workhouse.
    The buildings continued in use for many decades for a variety of purposes. Some were used as mental hospitals right up until the 1980s, when they were finally closed by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Many were used as old people’s homes, and my description of Mr Collett’s last weeks in such a place in the late 1950s is by no means unique. I was giving a talk to the East London History Society about this book when it was first published, and a lady in the audience stood up and said, “Your description is not exaggerated. In the 1980s I was with a group of people taken round an old people’s home which had formerly been a workhouse and the conditions you describe were exactly the same. This was, as far as I remember, in 1985 or 1986.”
    The infirmaries continued as general hospitals for many decades. But the stigma of the old association with the workhouses was never eradicated. During my nursing career I saw many times the fear in a patient’s eyes who thought they’d been put in a workhouse, even though they were in a modern hospital. In 2005 I was giving a radio talk and I mentioned this. The interviewer said, “I know exactly what you mean. Only a few years ago, in 1998, my granny was taken to the infirmary. She begged