Recent discoveries are reminders of living and dying in the Workhouse
Reports in the Bristol press of the excavation of 4,500 bodies during the conversion of the old Blackberry Hill Hospital in Fishponds into a modern housing estate, recalled my own discoveries about the chequered history of the site.
Originally built as a military prison, it held Dutch and Spanish sailors and others captured during the American War of Independence from 1775-1782.
During the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-15, Stapleton Prison as it was known, housed French soldiers, who had to help build its new wings to accommodate more captives.
At the time the well-being of those reduced to abject poverty had since 1696 been the responsibility of the Bristol Corporation of the Poor (BCP).
When the BCP needed an overflow for its crowded and insanitary city centre workhouse, St Peter’s Hospital in what is now Castle Park, the Poor law Guardians rented then bought the empty prison in 1837. Renamed Stapleton Workhouse, it was gradually extended, with medical facilities and its own vegetable gardens. Its unfortunate inhabitants are most likely to be those buried in unmarked gaves on the grounds.
Stapleton was a rural parish of 1,377 souls, only 84 of whom were eligible to pay tax. The rest subsisted on half-acre plots or worked for others as day labourers. By the time of the 1881 Census, the population of the parish of Stapleton had grown to more than 14,000. The Workhouse had almost 2,000 inmates and was now part of the area known as Fishponds. Local man Fred Phipps was its porter but the staff of 25 from across England and Ireland.
There was a matron and an assistant to take care of inmates’ health, with a nurse each for the fever hospital and infirmary, one for epileptics and another for infants. There were also three female and three male nurses to deal with so-called ‘imbeciles’ and ‘idiots’, the terms then used to categorise people who might now be described as having dementia or neurodiverse conditions.
There was a schoolmaster and assistant for the boys, a schoolmistresses for girls and infants. The girls also had an ‘industrial trainer’, and the boys a skill instructor, an indicator of social expectations in Victorian England,
Most inmates came from Bristol and the West Country, but 79 hailed from Ireland, 37 from Wales, and 7 from Scotland. Another 31 were Londoners. A few came from further afield, claiming America, Chile, China, France, Germany, Gibraltar, India, Italy, Newfoundland or Nova Scotia as their place of birth.
The oldest inmates were 97-year-old twins, Maria, a domestic servant, and her ‘imbecile’ sister Mary. old children, The youngest were four one year old children, three of them from Surrey.
The most common family name was Williams, shared by 41 people, from 12 year old John to 81 year old widow Ellen. There were also 16 Davises, 14 Harrises and 14 Smiths, including a Bristol cabinet-maker aged 66, one of three John Smiths on the register.
Of the 14 Harrises listed, seven were children from various parts of Bristol including three Thomases, an 11-year-old from St Augustines, an 8-year-old from St Philips, and an unmarried slater aged 66 from St Nicholas, described as an ‘imbecile’. And did the two 13-year-old lads called George Harris who came from different Bristol parishes get to know each other?
Some of the inmates had professions. Bristol bachelor Henry Phillips, 79, had been a schoolmaster. Other Bristolians included bookbinder William Baker, 61; carver and gilder William Barr, 75; father and son James Stewart, 71, a jeweller, and Charles, 44 an artist engraver; William Murch, 66, was a chemist; William Cook, 72, and Walter Fitz, 73, had been farriers, while Thomas Filer, 61, and William Otton, 72, were blacksmiths; Sam Summers, 60, was a ‘whitesmith’ working in tin, and William O’Brien, 47, a glass-blower.
Many were general labourers, but there were also miners, and men and women with valued crafts skills. Among the skilled women from Bristol were ‘tailoresses’ Louise Poole, 31, and Emma Park, 35, Maria Norris, 39, Ann Howell, 75, and Elizabeth Beck, 67. Upholsteress Mary Murphy was 53, but ‘stay-maker’ Elizabeth Hicks was only 15 years old. Martha Allen, 69, Elizabeth Aldridge, 68, Elizabeth Knowlson, 52, and Sarah Morgan, 39, were all shoebinders.
Other local boot and shoe-makers included 80-year-old William Williams, and Samuel Lewis, George Russell and James Huckman, all almost 20 years his junior. There were also cordwainers, who made shoes from new leather, a silk weaver, a glove maker, and several other weavers and dressmakers. Some had spent their lives working with wood, including sawyers John Anstey, 70, and Joseph Williams, 57; ‘timber bender’ Joseph Southcombe, a widower aged 60, had possibly worked alongside coopers George Scull, 42, and William Hunt, 69, now deeemd to have succumbed to mental infirmity.
We cannot be sure what happened to any of them. Just as we don’t know what sad circumstances had left 6-year-old Beatrice Chesty and her brother Edward, 4, all alone in the Workhouse, along with 15-year-old William Gunter, his 7-year-old brother Henry and 5 year old sister Elizabeth. Were they and the Rhodes children, Matilda, 10, Charlotte, 7, and William, 6, and the Strawbridge boys, John, 15, and Alfred, 12, all orphans when they entered the Workhouse?
Had the five Payne children Emily, 16, Emma, 10, Charlotte 7, John, 4, James, 2, become inmates because their widowed mother Eliza, 55, a domestic servant, had been declared an imbecile?
Both milliner Alice, 22, and head painter John Jarvis, 24, had employable skills so what tragedy had forced to seek shelter in the Workhouse with their 2-year-old son Jack? Having lost his wife, had mason’s labourer Edwards Stuckey, 61, no other option than to bring up his children George, 14, Ishmael, 9, Florence, 7, and Rosina, 5, in the Workhouse? Was it family or social pressure that drove 18-year-old domestic servant and unmarried mother Jane Leonard to the Workhouse with her child Amy, aged 2 in 1881?
Were plasterer James Goss and his wife Margaret, both 41, the parents of 2-year-old twins George and Maud from Stapleton, or of Annie, 9, and James, 12 from Bedminster? Was Ann Coward, 36, and her 12-year-old-son William from the Savernake Forest related to 9-year-old Thomas Coward from Swindon or Frank Coward, 8, from Bristol?
How many of the ten Bryants in the Workhouse, widows Ann, 75, and Susan, 64, both domestic servants, and spinster Sarah, 34, from the St Pauls area, ended up in the Workhouse cemetery? And what about children John, 10, and Margaret,8 from St Nicholas parish, or one-year-old Michael Bryant from London?
What had brought widow Ann Rankin, 41, from Aberdeen to Bristol with her 14-year-old son William? Was she a relative of the other Rankin children in the Workhouse, George, 13, John, 11, David, 10 and Ann 6? And were the unmarried ‘imbecile’ Mary Ann George, 44, and ‘idiot’ William George, 37, related?
The mystery of the excavated graveyard is unlikely to answer the many question posed by the census results. But not for the first time in East Bristol it was the fate of the poor to be interred with little ceremony in unmarked graves. Residents of nearby Eastville discovered and documented the remains of more than 4,000 paupers who died in the notorious Eastville Workhouse. Their story is told in 100 Fishponds Road published by Bristol Radical History Group.https://www.brh.org.uk/site/pamphleteer/100-fishponds-rd/
