This is just a little snippet from today’s work in the archives, specifically the Public Record’s Office of Northern Ireland where I am looking through the Minutes of the Belfast Board of Guardians from 1917. At this time the rest of Europe was engulfed in what had become a long and attritional conflict. And while most of us are aware of the thousands of Irish soldiers who fought as part of the British Forces (among others), we sometimes forget the other connections that the country had to what was happening on the continent.

This extract from the minutes was too long for a tweet, and far too fascinating not to share.

“…referring to the Nurses trained in the Belfast Infirmary… the Guardians had a list of 170 serving in connection with the War. They had Nurses in seven Hospitals in France, five Hospitals in Egypt, and some in Bombay, Mesopotamia, Salonica, Malta, and German East Africa. All the Nurses from the Belfast Infirmary joined as Staff Nurses, and in almost all cases they had been made Senior Sisters. The training they received in the Institution qualified them specially for looking after sick and wounded soldiers.” [1]

There’s not much mention of war time correspondence from the nurses but once the conflict had ended the minutes record various different letters coming from the nurses serving with the British Forces. In May 1919 the Guardians received a letter from a young woman from Killarney who had trained in Belfast between 1909 and 1913, informing them that ‘On her return from Salonica, after War Service, a few weeks ago she lost her luggage including her certs, and requests the guardians to furnish her with a copy.’[2] I wonder did she lose other precious letters, documents and perhaps even a diary in that lost luggage?

Earlier that month the guardians had received correspondence from two nurses, one in Bombay and the other in Mesopotamia. Miss B. who was on War Service in Bombay, had received demobilisation papers and was leaving India on 12^th April. She notified the Guardians that she would report for duty at the Workhouse on her arrival in Belfast. Others decided to resign their posts and remain with the troops, including Miss T., who wrote from Mesopotamia (which corresponds to parts of modern-day Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey). She too had received the Guardians’ communications regarding demobilisation. Like all serving officers of the Workhouse her position had been held open for her but she decided ‘to remain in service in Mesopotamia’ and resigned her position. [3]

The injuries suffered on the trenches and beaches of Europe required medical attention long after the Armistice had been signed and some of the Irish women trained at Belfast decided to remain with the soldiers, treating them and possibly locals, in the hospitals of the conflict zone.

It is difficult to mention this region without thinking about the current conflict engulfing that part of the world. The British and French transformed (and not for the better) the Middle East in the decade after the First World War. Today persistent tribal and sectarian divisions have brought another devastating conflict to the region.

Click on the link for more on Mesopotamia during WW1;

http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/podcasts/voices-of-the-first-world-war/podcast-18-mesopotamia

http://warletters.net/battles/mesopotamia/

 

 

by Robyn Atcheson @randomrobyn

The recent BBC series 24 Hours in the Past reached its conclusion last week, following the fates of six twenty-first century celebrities as they worked and lived in the 1840s.  After spending a day in the dust yards, another in service at a coaching inn and getting fired from jobs in a pottery, the celebs were thrown into the workhouse.  As presenter Fi Glover explained,

 

“Homeless and broke, at the bottom of the heap, there’s only one place left to turn…”

The ‘time-travellers’ were sent to Southwell workhouse, currently under the management of the National Trust.  Leaving aside the numerous mentions of Dickens’ characters and the downright bizarre behaviour of some of the celebrities, this episode actually provided a fascinating insight into life in the workhouse.

As historians of the poor, we study the minute books of the Boards of Guardians, trace the admissions of paupers through indoor registers and analyse what life was like for those within the workhouse.  To see this environment resurrected and witness that lifestyle through the modern eyes of media personalities was astounding.  The historical context of the show and the attention to detail was impressive, with concepts and context explained by Ruth Goodman for the benefit of both the celebrities and audience at home.  But how do the experiences of the nineteenth-century poor of Belfast compare to what these modern figures endured?

Several themes were highlighted by the show, the first of which was the separation of the sexes and classification of the inmates.  Men and women were separated upon entry and slept and worked apart.  As all six celebs were adults, there was little discussion of children in the workhouse but there was an interesting distinction made for the more mature Ann Widdecombe (referred to as ‘Old Woman’ by the Matron).  The remaining participants were deemed ‘able-bodied’ meaning they were expected to earn their bed and board in the workhouse, not being included in the wider ‘deserving poor’ category.

As in the episode, many of the jobs and tasks in the Belfast workhouse were for the purpose of generating an income. The women were employed in oakum picking to sell the fibres from ropes while the men were employed breaking stones and crushing bones.  In the Belfast workhouse in 1846, oakum was sold for £25 12s 0d, the real price of this commodity in today’s currency is around £2,214.00 while bones and rags sold for £2 16s 11d, or £246.10 today.

Ann Widdecombe broke the rules of the workhouse three times before being punished by the Master and sent to solitary confinement.  In December 1845 a similar punishment was received in Belfast by Sarah D. for disobedience and was she placed by the Master in the probationary ward for one night. The Board of Guardians noted that they approved ‘of the punishment given to Sarah D., who they would have discharged but her being encumbered with three children’.  Even Officers in the workhouse were expected to maintain correct conduct at all times; Schoolmistress Miss Wallace was admonished by the Belfast Guardians in June 1843 before resigning from her post.

For not fulfilling their work targets, the celebrities were reprimanded with reduced portions of food.  Food, however, seems to have been standardised in Belfast workhouse in the 1840s as it was throughout Ireland under the Poor Law.  Attempts to alter the planned dietary due to poor quality potatoes in July 1843 were not well received by the central Poor Law Commission in Dublin who advised Belfast to rethink their proposals.

The experience of this television constructed reality highlights the similarities and differences between the recreated Southwell workhouse in Nottinghamshire and the Belfast Union workhouse.  Southwell opened in 1824, built to hold 158 paupers and later becoming a Union under the New Poor Law in 1836, while Belfast was designed to accommodate 1000 paupers and opened in 1841.  Southwell is now a National Trust site while Belfast workhouse forms part of the Belfast City Hospital.  Both histories of these workhouses have stories to tell and 24 Hours in the Past has introduced a wider audience to the austere and demanding routine of workhouse life in the 1840s.

*All Belfast workhouse facts from Belfast Board of Guardian minute books held at PRONI BG/7/A/2 – 5

Welfare and Public Health in the Industrial City: Belfast in Comparative Contexts c. 1800-1973

A Conference sponsored by the AHRC Project: Welfare and public health in Belfast and the its region, c.1800-1973

At PRONI, 2 Titanic Boulevard, Belfast on 16-17 April 2015

Plenary speaker: Prof Bernard Harris (University of Strathclyde), ‘Public health interventions and mortality change’

The full conference programme is available by clicking on this link: QUB AHRC Conference Schedule

This conference, bringing together research carried out by the QUB-based AHRC project team on welfare and public health in Belfast, with scholarship on other British and Irish cities in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, seeks to place Belfast’s modern historical experience of poverty, ill-health and the responses to them in a comparative perspective.

The conference is free and open to all, but if you’d like to attend, please email the project manager, Dr Georgina Laragy (g.laragy@qub.ac.uk), to let us know for catering purposes, by Monday 13th April.

 

 

If your ‘poor attempt at knitting’[1] was the only record you left on the pages of history how would we expand that historical window to find a broader view of your life? How to make you significant and meaningful, not just to you, and not only in the past; but for our understanding of that past?  How could we demonstrate that as a poor knitter, you do have some genuine, albeit small, historical significance?

You left us no bonnets. There are no hole-riddled socks flattened in the pages of the book from 1905 in which I find you. You should not take this as indicative of how bad your knitting actually was; very few garments have survived into the twenty-first century, particularly those that might have clothed the poor. In the historical record, the words to describe you and your abilities are more prevalent than the wool you knitted, or the socks you yourself wore. The vision we have of your knitting is not based on the piece work itself, on that kind of primary evidence; rather the vision we have of you is conjured by the words typed out by Mrs Dickie in her report to the Local Government Board in Dublin. She had visited you, and your school-mates, on behalf of the Belfast Board of Guardians in July 1905. She was making sure you were doing well, making sure the Guardians’ and ratepayers’ money was not being wasted.

You were a ‘public child’, under the care of the state.[2] You were away from home, staying at St Mary’s Asylum for Female Blind in Dublin, because there was no one to take care of you, or at least no one who could take care of you and earn money to keep you at the same time. You were pressure on a struggling household and it is likely your parents placed you in the workhouse themselves so they could survive, one less non-working mouth to feed. That strategy meant you became a drain on the rates, and it was up to the state, through the Poor Law Guardians, to ensure that you would not be a drain on the rates for ever.

You appear in a single report, found in a volume of correspondence and taken largely out of context. But we can extrapolate a little from earlier documents found in this bound volume. It is clear from a previous report on boarded-out children made by the same Mrs Dickie that poor children created problems for government and local authorities. There are far more poor children in the historical record than middle-class or wealthy children. Swarms of disorderly, hungry, ‘street arabs’ could result in social chaos. They populate the records left behind by the clerks, inspectors, and relieving officers who worked for the Poor Law authorities.

What was to be done with these poor children? With you? How did the authorities ensure that the child, like the boots they wore, were not ‘allowed to become too much worn before being repaired’? That would be ‘extravagant in the long run’.[3] How did they ensure that the child not become indigent and lazy – pauperised essentially – before they could reach adulthood? The answer lay in industrial, technical or domestic training, and from a reasonably early age. “The greatest economy in the case of the pauper child is the expenditure upon him of whatever sum in reason is required to make him a healthy, useful member of society, fitted to earn a good living which will place him amongst the honest working classes, and for ever remove him and his family after him from being a perpetual burthen on the rates.”[4] This was not just about you, dear knitter, but about any children, grandchildren, you might have; subsequent generations would become free through your ability to knit! No pressure!

In the same school there were three other young girls who were being supported by the Belfast Guardians. You were the only ‘poor’ knitter, the rest were good. We know your name, and the names of all those Belfast girls who were in school in Dublin.  But to preserve the anonymity of your identity, and to protect and respect those who may have come after you, we will not write it here. Your names are all entered in a report, bound in a volume of papers all dating from 1905, that likely travelled on the mail carriage of the train between Dublin and Belfast, between central and local government, between the Local Government Board in Dublin and the Poor Law Guardians in Belfast. It is likely your name travelled more than you did, Mrs Dickie made her reports every year after all.

You were twelve when she wrote her report in July 1905. And you were ‘growing stronger and advancing well in [your] lessons’. But your knitting was letting you down. Despite your academic improvement, Mrs Dickie and the guardians were very concerned for your knitting. This skill might have secured you employment; working on a contract providing army socks could provide you with a means of support.[5] But if you could not knit, then you had to find something else to do with your hands. Basket-weaving was a popular skill taught to children like you then. But we don’t know if you excelled at making baskets. We only know you were a poor knitter, upon which so much might depend!

And we only know this because an adult, a local government board inspector, typed it out on a page, posted her report to the Local Government Board, who forwarded it on to the Belfast Guardians, who subsequently preserved it in their administrative records. The knitting of a young blind girl was important in that early 20^th century welfare regime for what it tells us about the poor, disability, welfare provision and institutionalisation, as well gendered training and employment opportunities.

P.S. I found you in the 1911 Census in the same school. You were 18 and still knitting, along with 149 others from around the country! Perhaps you improved!

 

 

 

 

Our own Dr Sean Lucey has co-edited a volume with Professor Virginia Crossman of Oxford Brookes that emerged out of two workshops held in 2011 (TCD) and 2012 (CHOMI UCD). The title of the collection of essays, published by the Institute of Historical Research in London last month, is ‘Healthcare in Ireland and Britain from 1850: Voluntary, regional and comparative perspectives’. It can be ordered in hardback or for your kindle (for the techie historians among you). If you can’t wait that long for a piece of the action though, click here to read the introduction which is available on Amazon.

 

 

by Georgina Laragy

Teaching about pauper death and funerals today I went looking for an interesting alternative resource on YouTube for tomorrow’s seminar – videos of Victorian funerals, etc., but they were hard to find. However, I did come across a British Pathé video of Lady Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward which was performed by the Abbey Theatre Players and televised at some point in the 1950s. The play originally dates from the first decade of the twentieth century and relies much on the stage-Irishman motif for comedic effect. The production is broken into three ten minute videos/reels with the play beginning at 2.46 minutes after a ‘tourist advert’ for Ireland on reel one [instructions below on how to watch it]. Contained within the second reel/video is an interesting insight into the attitudes towards death in early 20^th century Ireland, and amidst the comedy it hints at darker aspects of dying in the workhouse.

The production (though not the original play) opens with Mrs Donohoe heading off to the Cloone (fictional) workhouse. She means to remove her brother (Mike McInerney) who has been there many years. Mrs Donohoe’s husband has just died and she finds the house lonely. While she knew that it was ‘no credit to her to have her brother in the workhouse’, she had not gone to visit before. She was now cynically recognising the value of another man about the house to help with some of the work of the farm etc. Indeed, removing family from workhouses and asylums often occurred for those very purposes – to help with household chores.[1] Her husband had died ‘a fine natural death’ and ‘he got a lovely funeral; it would delight you to hear the priest reading the Mass’. Dying naturally, at home, and having a priest say the mass, was all emblematic of what has been referred to in the historiography as a ‘good death’, in contrast with death by violence or very sudden death.[2] Dying in his own home largely insured against a fate considered very gruesome at this time.

If Donohoe had died in the workhouse then it is possible that the Anatomy Act of 1832 would have come into force; dying in an institution with a family that had no means to bury the body permitted the union authorities to sell the cadaver to medical schools for dissection. ‘Following the Anatomy Act, anatomists could claim bodies from workhouses and other public institutions, including voluntary hospitals.’[3] Mr Donohoe’s natural death at home offers a contrast to death in the workhouse, the likely fate for the two main characters in the play.

When we enter the eponymous ‘workhouse ward’ we hear Mike McInerney and Michael Miskell arguing, competing about who is in more pain, and the spectre of dissection is raised by McInerney. While Miskell shows the visible signs of gnarled hands and rheumatism as evidence of his infirmity and suffering, McInerney declares that his pain is internal; you would have ‘To open me, and to analyse me, …[to]… know what sort of a pain and a soreness I have in me heart and in me chest.’ Being ‘opened’ and ‘analysed’ was part of the dissection process to which paupers and criminals were subject. But we know that McInerney’s sister, Mrs Donohoe, is coming for him and such a fate is unlikely.

Before she arrives however, the competitive arguing continues, and the evidence becomes both somber and uniquely Irish, focusing on funerals past and the presence of the Banshee. Miskell declares that, ‘But for the wheat that was to be sowed, there would have been more sidecars and common cars at my father’s funeral, God rest his soul, than at any funeral ever left your own door.’ McInerney goes one step further, invoking a traditionally Irish figure; ‘And what do you say to the banshee? Isn’t she apt to have knowledge of the ancient race? Was ever she heard to screech or to cry for the Miskells? … She was not, but for the six families, the Hyneses, the Foxes, the Faheys, the Dooleys, the McInerneys. It is of the nature of the McInerneys she is I am thinking, crying for them the same as a king’s children.’ The Banshee was a mythical female figure believed to attend at the death of certain individuals and families, and as Nina Witoszek suggests was a means by which the dead ‘could still acquire social prestige’.[4] Respectability in the context of the Irish death was about the grandness of the funeral, the final fate of the dead body, and, in this ‘stage-Irish’ play, the relationship between the Banshee and the family. Such a family were akin to royalty!

While the banshee was a mythical creature, there were other very real concerns for the two workhouse paupers. Death in the workhouse even if it did not involve dissection, could involve burial in a pauper graveyard; anonymous and unmarked, the pauper grave was a sign of social failure. Despite his presence in the workhouse McInerney still believed he had some control over where he might be buried, ‘I … have one request only to be granted, and I leaving it in my will, it is what I would request, nine furrows of the field, nine ridges of the hills, nine waves of the ocean to be put between your grave and my own grave the time we will be laid in the ground! … I’d sooner than … know that my shadow and my ghost will not be knocking about with your shadow and your ghost, and the both of us waiting our time. I’d sooner be delayed in Purgatory!’ Miskell agrees, ‘Amen to that!’

These claims to control of their bodies post-mortem by McInerney and Miskell were not necessarily unfounded. Paupers might leave something to ensure burial in a graveyard, or a family member might come to claim their bodies. The Porter’s Book of the Thurles Poor Law Union reveals coffins going in and out of the workhouse, sometimes heavy with the remains of a pauper who had family with enough means, affection or pride, to ensure burial outside the workhouse grounds and beyond the pauper plot.

Click on the image above ‘The Workhouse Ward’ to watch the first reel. The second and third reels are here and here. I won’t give away the ending!

by Olwen Purdue

Last week Justin Welby, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, called on the British government to confront the “simple but devastating fact that hunger stalks this country”. The context for his words was the launch of a new report into the phenomenon of dependency on food banks among families across the UK. So rapidly is this form of poverty growing that there are few in our society today that have not come across it in some form or another. I am currently involved in setting up a food bank in my local town of Ballyclare in Co. Antrim and in the process have become aware of similar schemes that have apparently been running for some time now in neighbouring areas such as Antrim, Newtownabbey, Larne – seemingly prosperous towns, yet towns in which many are living with the daily reality of not being able to feed themselves or their families. In Belfast, organisations such as Storehouse and the Trussell Trust are involved in providing emergency provision for hundreds of families across the city. Belfast Storehouse, alone, has provided for over 5,000 families since it was first established in 2008. These are families who have to make very tough decisions on a daily basis, decisions about whether to pay for kids’ school meals or use the money to heat the house for a while. Food banks provide a buffer when the options run out, a means of feeding the family, even for a brief period, at those times when there is simply no means of buying food.

Looking back to the poverty that existed in Belfast a hundred years ago we have to ask if anything has really changed? Belfast in the opening years of the twentieth century was a prosperous city, its economic success and civic pride manifest in its newly-constructed wide streets, the luxurious department stores that were springing up across the city centre and, of course, the grandiose City Hall that was in the process of being constructed in Donegall Square. Yet behind the façade of wealth and success lay the hard reality of severe poverty for a significant proportion of the population. Yes, there was no shortage of employment in the huge linen mills, in the city’s two shipyards, or in one of the many other manufacturing firms in the city; but what happened if you were unable to work whether through age, infirmity, pregnancy or many other reasons? In ‘nineteen-teens’ Belfast, the answer was very often the workhouse. In those pre-Welfare State days, statutory welfare was the responsibility of the Irish Poor Law, paid for by local rates and managed by the elected Poor Law Guardians. For many, the workhouse, hated and shameful as it might have been, was the stop-gap that prevented many from literally starving. When all other options dried up, difficult choices had to be made and for many there really was no choice but to seek refuge within the workhouse walls.

The economic success of early twentieth-century Belfast evaporated in the wake of the First World War as the industrial economy on which it was based collapsed. As the world slid into economic crisis following the end of war, Belfast found itself facing a welfare crisis such as it likely hadn’t seen since the Great Potato Famine (1845-50) almost a century earlier. Male unemployment, in particular, soared, and families that once had secure incomes now founds themselves facing the reality of hunger, even starvation. Public Works schemes were established to provide manual labour that would generate a basic income for many across the city, but these were totally inadequate to meet the needs of the people. So what options did they have? Unlike other parts of Ireland or the United Kingdom, by the 1930s the poor law remained on the statute books in Northern Ireland as the principal form of welfare available; and in Belfast, where poor law guardians remained wedded to the idea of indoor relief, that still meant admission to the workhouse. On 1 January 1932, 85 people turned up at Belfast workhouse seeking to be admitted. Of these, the majority were young single men, men who during better times would have been employed building ships in shipyards that had now all but disappeared. By the 1930s, the idea of a workhouse to feed and shelter the hungry and destitute surely must have seemed like a throw-back to the darker aspects of the Victorian age. But in Belfast it represented for many the difference between starving and surviving.

Today we might feel able to look back and congratulate ourselves on the progress we have made since then with the introduction of a welfare state designed to erase the shame of ‘pauperism’ and the construction of a non-pauperising system of safeguards for those that find themselves unable to fend for themselves. But can we, really? Have we really come on that far if in our society today we are surrounded by poverty, by homelessness and by real hunger? Has anything changed? The causes of food poverty certainly do seem to have changed. In late nineteenth and very early twentieth-century Belfast food poverty was often brought about by a person’s inability to work through old age, sickness or life-cycle events. By the 1930s, certain safeguards had been introduced to prevent some of this type of poverty, but by then the big problem was unemployment. Today the causes of food poverty are different again. There are many more safeguards in place for a much larger proportion of the population but statistics seem to suggest that there are serious flaws in those safeguards, leaving many to fall between the cracks. Administrative hold-ups in welfare payments leave some families with no income at all for periods of days, weeks, maybe even months. Research recently conducted by a working-group on food poverty has shown that almost half of those who have to resort to food banks are driven to do so because of problems in accessing welfare. The other major problem that seems to face people in our society today is the problem of in-work poverty: where people are working but still not making enough to cover the cost of basic subsistence. People who work very hard to earn a minimum wage still have to face the shame of asking for food to feed themselves and their families.

Robert McElborough, writing his memoirs of life in Belfast in the opening years of the twentieth century, writes ‘My experience of living in rooms with nothing to eat only what friends gave us is engraved on my memory’. That is still the experience of people living in our city a hundred year later. The form of stop-gap relief that people are forced to turn to may have changed but in twenty-first century Belfast, absence of food is still a harsh reality for many.

Further Reading and Links:

• Turn2Us
• The Trussell Trust
• North Belfast Food Bank
• Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom – Food Poverty and Health Briefing Paper
• A Girl Called Jack Blog

 

 

Workshop Title:

Understanding Institutional and Residential Welfare and Public Health in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Britain

Friday 28 November 2014

Convenor: Dr Seán Lucey (AHRC Research Fellow, QUB, School of History & Anthropology)

All welcome but space is limited and booking with Dr Seán Lucey is essential. Email: d.s.lucey@qub.ac.uk. See below for abstracts.

This event is funded by QUB’s Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities’ Poverty and Famine in Ireland Research Group. The event is also supported by the Institute’s Health Humanities Research Group and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Description

Institutional and residential care in twentieth-century Ireland and Britain remains highly controversial. Inquiries into allegations of historic abuses ensure that the legacy of institutional/residential care remains to the fore of modern-day debates. Provision was often marked by punitive, abusive and disciplinary regimes. It is also evident, however, that institutions held a complex place in society and often provided much needed welfare and public health. This workshop aims to draw out nuanced understandings on the historical development of institutional and residential provision. Speakers focus on different institutional settings across Ireland and Britain including workhouses, prisons, hospitals, mental institutions, Magdalene Laundries and homes for mothers and children. The workshop also addresses the legacy of historic institutional/residential abuse from multidisciplinary perspectives. Papers critique inquiries and legal mechanisms that deal with abuse allegations through legal and social justice frameworks. The workshop includes social policy perspectives and addresses the past’s impact on future services.

Venue (NB: Note different am and pm locations)

9.00 am – 12.40 pm Irish Studies Seminar Room (Fitzwilliam Street, 6-8)

1.40 pm – 4.50 pm McClay Library (Training Room 2)

A map of QUB’s campus may be downloaded here

Programme

9.00 – 9.30: Registration

9.30 – 9.45: Introductory remarks: Dr Seán Lucey (QUB)

9.45 – 11.05: Inter-war workhouses: Slow erosion of the poor law

Dr Olwen Purdue (QUB) ‘A humiliating last resort? The role of the Union Workhouse in inter-war Belfast’
Prof Barry Doyle (University of Huddersfield) ‘Little more than a change of sign above the door? The development of non-acute medicine in provincial poor law hospitals, 1925-45’

11.05 – 11.20: Coffee

11.20 – 12.40: Prisons and Mental Institutions

Dr Ian Miller (Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, University of Ulster) ‘“I Would Have Gone on with the Hunger Strike, but Force Feeding I could not Take”: Hunger striking and prison welfare in English Prisons, c.1913-72

Dr Damien Brennan (Trinity College Dublin, School of Nursing and Midwifery), ‘From asylum to community health care: The migration of institutional structures and professional practice’

12.40 – 1.40: Lunch

1.40 – 3.00: Institutions and Women

Dr Leanne McCormick (University of Ulster) ‘In Trouble’: Managing maternity cases in early C20th Belfast’

Dr John Welshman (University of Lancaster) ‘Wardens, letter writing, and the early Welfare State’

3.00 – 4.20: Dealing with the Past and Institutional Abuse

Dr Anne-Marie McAlinden (QUB, School of Law) ‘Institutional Abuse in Ireland and Beyond: Public Inquiries, Truth Recovery and Restorative Justice’

Dr Katherine O’Donnell (University College Dublin, School of Social Justice) ‘“I believe the women”: Justice for Magdalenes and epistemic injustice’

4.20 – 4.50: Roundtable discussion and End

Abstracts

Dr Damien Brennan (Trinity College Dublin) From Asylum to Community Mental Health Care: The migration of institutional structures and professional practice

During the 1950’s the level of mental hospital usage in the Republic Ireland was the highest internationally with a rate of 710 beds per 100,000.  These institutions provided ‘care’ to those categorised as ‘insane’, ‘mentally ill’ or having ‘mental health problems’ as it is now described.  However, they also developed into locations of substantive social and economic importance to the communities in which they were situated.

This paper will demonstrate that this spectacular growth of mental hospital usage had little to do with the mental state of the individuals who were institutionalised.  As such there was no epidemic of ‘mental illness’ in Ireland, rather this institutional confinement occurred in response to social forces (such as legislation, systems of admission and discharge, diagnostic criteria, social deprivation and family dynamics), along with the actions of the individuals, families and professional groups who directly carried out the act of committal.

This paper will also observe that the professional bodies who directly oversaw and enacted this enduring and wide scale programme of institutional detention have now secured the most predominant positions of control within contemporary mental health services.  It will be argued that we must move beyond the legacy and professional structures of the old mental hospitals to ensure the achievement of quality Mental Health Services that are fit for purpose for contemporary society.

Prof Barry Doyle (University of Huddersfield) Little more than a change of sign above the door? The development of non-acute medicine in provincial poor law hospitals, 1925-45

In the early 1920s the majority of hospital beds in England were to be found in the sick wards and infirmaries of the poor law. Although originally intended to be institutions of last resort, by the late 19^th century many workhouses were home to the aged, infirm and chronically ill – categories of patient eschewed by the voluntary hospitals. In the aftermath of the First World War these medical inmates came to dominate such institutions, a process accelerated by changes in welfare, life expectancy and attitudes to hospital treatment. Yet historians of health and medicine have paid relatively little attention to this provision, tending to focus on the few that developed as acute general hospitals in the years after the 1929 Local Government Act – especially in and around London – while seeing those that didn’t as failures. In particular, some municipal authorities – like Sheffield – have been criticized for adopting the name hospital without broadening the range of acute services. Yet such an approach ignores the fact that the chronic, aged and infirm were a major part of those in need of institutional care yet meeting their needs still fell almost entirely on the local authority services.

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the ways in which services for the long term sick developed in the poor law and former poor law institutions of northern England in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Focusing on Leeds, Sheffield and Middlesbrough, it will examine the increasing classification of inmates/patients even before 1929; the development of specialties, especially during the Second World War; joint working with the voluntary sector in areas like cancer treatment; the use of follow-up and outpatient clinics; and the expansion and professionalization of medical and nursing staff. It was also show, however, that even the most ambitious authorities were locked into a cycle of bed-blocking, care over cure and residual services right up until 1948, in the main because someone had to look after these patients and the local state had acquired that role. Yet faced with this situation some authorities were expanding not just their acute services but also their non-acute medicine – especially where they had more than one institution – and this positive attitude to longer stay patients needs to be recognized for what is was and not be seen as a pale imitation of the voluntary sector.

Dr Anne-Marie McAlinden (School of Law, QUB)  ‘Institutional Child Abuse in Ireland and Beyond: Public Inquiries, Truth Recovery and Restorative Justice

Public inquiries have been a front and centre political response to allegations of historic institutional child abuse in a number of jurisdictions including the Republic of Ireland and more recently Northern Ireland and Australia.  This paper seeks to examine the use of the public inquiry model as a response to institutional child abuse in the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere. It will draw out the benefits as well as the limitations of public inquiries as mechanisms for providing truth recovery, and ‘justice’ for victims of historic abuse primarily in the form of giving victims a ‘voice’ in the proceedings and promoting offender and institutional accountability. Given the failures and criticisms of legalistic judge-led inquiries along these lines, the paper also seeks to examine the potential role of restorative justice in the aftermath of institutional child abuse. In particular it considers whether an appropriately modified public inquiry model with a restorative component might offer a more effective and viable means of moving on from the legacy of an abusive past.

Dr Leanne McCormick (University of Ulster) In Trouble’: Managing maternity cases in early C20th Belfast’

This paper will focus on unmarried mothers in Belfast in the early C20th in rescue and refuge homes.  It will have a particular focus on the Salvation Army home in Belfast and will consider how unmarried mothers were treated within this institution and how their cases were managed.  It will discuss how this management and attitudes towards unmarried mothers and illegitimacy changed over time.  The wider context of illegitimacy and being pregnant outside wedlock will be considered and the limited options available for women who found themselves in this situation.

Dr Ian Miller (University of Ulster) “I Would Have Gone on with the Hunger Strike, but Force Feeding I could not Take”: Hunger Striking and Prison Welfare in English Prisons, c.1913-72

In 1913, the Prison Commissioners of England and Wales began to maintain a register of prison hunger strikes. They recorded motivations for hunger striking and how doctors dealt with food refusal. Between 1913 and 1940, 834 prisoners initiated hunger strikes. Collectively, they staged 1,188 hunger strikes. The overwhelming majority had no obvious political affiliation. Evidently, hunger striking maintained a notable presence in 20^th-century prisons as a form of remonstration that disrupted disciplinary norms and challenged established power relations. Post-war journalism demonstrates that prisoners continued to refuse food throughout the century. This points to an important legacy left by the suffragettes and Irish republicans: their demonstration of the potency of food refusal as a strategy of prison rebellion.

Why did convict prisoners go on hunger strike? This paper maintains that the erosion of individual rights that was intrinsic to the disciplinary prison – starkly characterised by silence, solitude and discipline – created a milieu in which prison staff disregarded prisoner complaints and denied inmates the capacity to protest against institutional conditions. Decisions to protest were often predicated upon re-asserting individual rights in a setting that hinged upon conformity, reform and strict behavioural control. Many protested against poor diet and lack of access to healthcare (e.g. the provision of dentures or removal to hospital for an operation).

Yet the modern prison discouraged prisoner input into the conditions of incarceration. This paper demonstrates that medical staff typically resorted to force feeding rather than addressing prisoner concerns. Force feeding is most commonly associated with the suffragettes and, in Ireland, with Thomas Ashe. Nonetheless, force feeding remained in play as a coercive disciplinary technique. Between 1913 and 1940, the Commissioners recorded 7,734 force feedings. In the post-war period, newspapers published accounts of force feeding with rising frequency. As this paper demonstrates, the history of forcible feeding needs to be radically reassessed to account for the sustained use of feeding technologies on a plethora of convict prisoners.

Dr Katherine O’Donnell (University College Dublin) “I believe the women”: Justice for Magdalenes and Epistemic Injustice

In the second week of February 2013, Irish parliamentarians from all parties on the opposition benches stood to read testimony by former Magdalene women into the record of the parliament (Dáil). This testimony had been gathered (under ethical approval from University College Dublin) by the Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) campaign group and had been presented (and summarily ignored) by the Irish Government’s enquiry into State involvement in the Magdalene Institutions. The politicians read excerpts of the testimony which gave witness to the traumatic experiences of vulnerable girls and women being held under lock and key and forced to work at laundries run for profit by religious orders. As they concluded reading the horrific accounts to the Dáil chamber the parliamentarians declared: “I believe the women”. This was to be the final week of the long campaign conducted by Justice for Magdalenes for a State apology to the girls and women of the Magdalene Laundries. On February 19^th 2013 the Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Enda Kenny gave a tearful apology to the former Magdalenes.

Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) comprised a group of five who pooled their academic and activist expertise to build what proved to be incontrovertible evidence of the Irish State’s involvement in the Magdalene Institutions, and from this base (of archival documents and oral histories) to make legal arguments which demonstrated how the Irish State had breached its own laws as well as the country’s constitution and in addition breaching international human rights treaties it had formally ratified. These legal arguments were to be found persuasive by the Irish Human Rights Commission (IHRC) and the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT).

This paper focuses on my initial motivations for joining JFM. I use Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (OUP 2007) to illustrate what I believe are the ethical obligations of academics to address the silence of shamed communities. I extend and modify Fricker’s theses in a number of ways and also draw on the work of Veena Das (e.g Violence and Descent into the Ordinary UCal Press, 2006) as I reflect on some of the ethical issues I encountered in working with JFM. The issues on which I will reflect include: the ethical tensions resulting from speaking on behalf of a group where I have not been mandated by that group; my skill set and academic training initially proved inadequate and I needed to undergo sharp learning curves with the worry that I would always prove unable for the tasks to hand; I could not claim a disinterested altruism as my academic thinking and career was benefiting from my involvement with JFM and  I still have unresolved conflicts of duty and loyalty arising from my allegiance to and formation by Catholic education and upbringing.

Dr Olwen Purdue (Queen’s University Belfast) ‘A humiliating last resort? The role of the Union Workhouse in inter-war Belfast’

The Irish workhouse, established under the Irish Poor Law of 1838 and popularly regarded as a harsh and alien institution, was abolished in the Irish Free State within just a few years of its establishment. In Northern Ireland, by contrast, the poor law remained the body responsible for statutory welfare up until the introduction of the Welfare State in 1948. While rural unions saw a softening of the workhouse’s role in society, with a steady reduction in the number of workhouse inmates and the amalgamation and conversion of workhouses into district hospitals, this was far from the case in Belfast. The city’s poor law guardians remained committed to indoor relief as the default form of welfare available. As the economic crisis of the 1920s and 30s deepened and unemployment soared, Belfast workhouse remained the only option for thousands of the city’s poor, thus continuing its association with shame and despair and intensifying popular antagonism to it as an institution. This paper will explore the complex place of the workhouse in the context of inter-war Belfast both as an important provider of welfare and as the subject of social and political protest.

Dr John Welshman (University of Lancaster) ‘Wardens, letter writing, and the early Welfare State’

This paper surveys studies of Wardens in a range of settings and then focuses upon an archive of letters, running from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, that were written by one Warden and mothers following the stay of the latter in a residential institution, the Brentwood Recuperation Centre for Mothers and Children, which was located near Stockport, south of Manchester.  Some historians have argued that smaller institutions were not necessarily more caring.  However the themes that emerge from the letters examined here are those of friendship; advice and reassurance; information and news; material assistance; and advocacy.  In contrast to work that has for too long concentrated on controlling practices and notions of shared stigma, the paper demonstrates that the regime of such residential institutions might not necessarily be unpleasant or punitive, and that the Warden, despite possessing only basic qualifications, could act as an important source of information, advice, and reassurance.

Participant Biographies

Dr Damien Brennan trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse in Dublin.  He undertook his PhD at the Department of Sociology Trinity College Dublin, which detailed and critiqued mental hospital use in Ireland. He is Assistant Professor at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin where his teaching and research are focused on the Sociology of Health and Illness, particularly Mental Health. His recent publication Irish Insanity 1800-2000 (Routledge 2014), demonstrates that by the 1950’s the Republic of Ireland had the world’s highest rate of mental hospital residency.  Dr Brennan proposes that there was no epidemic of mental illness in Ireland; rather asylum/mental hospital institutional confinement occurred in response to social forces.

Prof Barry Doyle is Professor of Health History in the University of Huddersfield. His research interests cover the medical, political, social and economic history of urban Britain in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His latest book is The Politics of Hospital Provision in Early Twentieth Century Britain (Studies for the Social History of Medicine: Pickering and Chatto London, 2014)

Dr Seán Lucey is an AHRC Research Fellow in Queen’s University Belfast. He has expertise in the history of welfare and social history of medicine in Ireland and Britain and is currently writing a book on public health in twentieth-century Belfast. He is the co-editor of Healthcare in Ireland and Britain 1850-1970: Voluntary, Regional and Comparative Perspectives (Institute of Historical Research, London, 2014). His other publications include The End of the Irish Poor Law?: Welfare and Healthcare Reform in Revolutionary and Independent Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2015).

Dr Anne-Marie McAlinden is a Reader in the School of Law at Queen’s with a primary degree in law and a Master’s and a PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice. She has written widely on aspects of sexual offending concerning children, including institutional child abuse, ‘grooming’ and restorative justice. Her publications include two books, ‘The Shaming of Sexual Offenders’ (Hart Publishing, 2007) which was awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize 2008, and ‘”Grooming” and the Sexual Abuse of Children’ (OUP, 2012). She is currently principal investigator on an ESRC funded study on ‘Desistance from Sexual Offending,’

Dr Leanne McCormick is a Lecturer in Modern Irish Social History and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland at the University of Ulster. Leanne’s research interests include women’s history, history of sexuality and history of medicine in Ireland and more specifically twentieth century Northern Ireland. She has recently been working on abortion in twentieth century Northern Ireland and on Irish women in late C19th and early C20th New York. In 2010 she published Regulating Sexuality: Women in Twentieth Century Northern Ireland (MUP).

Dr Ian Miller is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Medical Humanities at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University of Ulster. His current research focuses on the medical ethical issues that have surrounded hunger strike management (in Britain, Ireland and Northern Ireland) since 1909 when militant suffragettes were first force-fed. His publications include Reforming Food in Post-Famine Ireland: Medicine, Science and Improvement, 1845-1922 (Manchester University Press, 2014) and A Modern History of the Stomach: Gastric Illness, Medicine and British Society (Pickering and Chatto, 2011). He is the co-editor of Medicine, Health and Irish Experiences of Conflict, 1914-45 (Manchester University Press, 2015).

Dr Katherine O’Donnell lectures in feminist theory in University College Dublin (UCD). She is Director of UCD Women’s Studies Centre and is a member of Justice for Magdalenes Research which seeks to further develop research and educational materials on all matters relating to the Magdalene institutions in Ireland, particularly the fate of children born out of wedlock and their mothers.

Dr Olwen Purdue is a Lecturer in Irish Social and Economic History in Queen’s University Belfast. She is Co-Investigator of the AHRC ‘Welfare and Public Health in Belfast and the north of Ireland, c. 1800-1973’ project. Her current research focusses on questions of poverty and empowerment: in the ways in which the poor increasingly utilised the welfare system as part of their ‘economy of makeshifts’; in the ways in which the administration of the poor law became increasingly contested by social and economic elites and political movements.

Dr John Welshman’s research interests are at the interface of contemporary history, social policy, and public health. His current work falls into five main areas: the use of autobiographical material in the writing of history; the history of the debate over transmitted deprivation in the period 1972-82, and its links with current policy on child poverty and social exclusion; the history of the concepts of unemployability and worklessness; the history of tuberculosis, medical examination, and migration, in both the UK and Australia; and the history of care in the community since 1948, especially for people with learning disabilities. John’s publications include Underclass: A History of the Excluded since 1880 (Bloomsbury, 2013, 2^nd ed.)

 

by Virginia Crossman, Oxford Brookes University

Workhouses are an immensely important part of Irish heritage. The campaign to restore Carrickmacross workhouse (featured in a recent post) is one of a number of community projects currently seeking to preserve, restore and utilize workhouse buildings. Reading about Carrickmacross campaign on the project website got me thinking about popular perceptions of the workhouse system and how these continue to be dominated by the long shadow of the Famine. The section on the history of Carrickmacross workhouse describes the establishment of the poor law system and the situation in and around the workhouse during the Famine. Focusing on that traumatic period, however, leaves little space to remember inmates who entered the workhouse in the decades after the Famine. The institution continued to give shelter to people until the 1920s, and these people also deserve attention. This omission highlights the very strong link between the Famine and the workhouse in popular history, and the general lack of awareness of developments in the post-Famine period, a gap which has only really begun to be addressed by professional historians in the last ten years.

The Famine was of course hugely important and it is absolutely right that emphasis should be placed on the experience of those who suffered and died in the workhouse during those terrible years. What happened during the Famine destroyed lives and families and devastated the local community. The events of the Famine were, moreover, felt long after the crisis was past, shaping how people thought about the workhouse and the poor law system more generally, and changing the way poor relief was administered. The poor law was never the same after the Famine. The introduction of outdoor relief as an alternative to indoor (or workhouse) relief meant that in the post-Famine period the workhouse became less central to the relief system. People could now receive assistance in their own homes in the form of either money or food without having to enter the workhouse. As a result many people who were unable to work such as the sick or disabled received regular cash allowances to support them.

By the end of the nineteenth century the workhouse had become a very different kind of institution from the one people had resorted to during the Famine. In fact almost everything that we think we know about the workhouse is wrong in the post-Famine period. We think of workhouses being desperately overcrowded but from the 1860s many workhouses were half empty leading to growing calls for some workhouses to be closed and others amalgamated. Carrickmacross workhouse, for example, was a medium-sized workhouse built to accommodate 500 people. The average daily number in the workhouse in the 1890s and 1900s was 125. We think of workhouses being full of family groups, and we imagine the torment of parents being separated from their children. But outside the major cities, workhouses contained very few families. Inmates were mainly single people, or women with children who were either permanently or temporarily separated from their husbands. We think of people entering the workhouse as if they were entering a prison, spending years incarcerated behind the grim walls and eventually dying there friendless and alone. Yet the vast majority of people admitted to workhouses stayed for short periods; days or weeks rather than months or years. These included the growing numbers who used workhouses as overnight accommodation while travelling the country in search of work. There were long-term residents but these tended to be elderly and infirm people who had no-one to care for them, single mothers, or children without families. Workhouse inmates were for the most part the marginalized and excluded; people who fallen through the cracks in society, easily ignored and easily forgotten. (More information on admission to and life in the workhouse can be found in my recent book, Poverty and the Poor Law in Ireland 1850-1914 published by Liverpool University Press, 2013).

So while I welcome the plans both to restore Carrickmacross workhouse along with others around the country (Lisanaskea, Bawnboy etc.,) and to memorialize the Famine dead, and I wish those campaigns every success, I hope that the organizers will remember all the people admitted to those workhouses, and not just those forced to take shelter there during the Famine.

Next week (from 29^th October) the Linen Hall Library in Belfast are hosting an exhibition that displays photographs of the Belfast poor and the work of the Belfast Central Mission from the early 20^th century. These fascinating images taken by one of Belfast’s most prominent early photographers A.R. Hogg make real the poverty of earlier generations. Hogg photographed the streets and people of Belfast between 1880 and 1939 and his work for Belfast Central Mission shows a sympathetic and campaigning eye, by drawing the attention of the viewer towards some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens. In this way the images are in the tradition of Jacob Riis, whose photographs of nineteenth century New York poverty got him the reputation of being a ‘muckraking’ journalist! (See here and here for links about ‘muckrakers’!)

Many of the charities that operate today emerged in the nineteenth century, such as National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (N.S.P.C.C.) and the Soldiers and Sailors Families Association (now the S.S.A.F.A). A number of those 19th century charities emerged from the efforts of churches and Christian organizations including St Vincent de Paul and the Belfast Central Mission. The BCM was established in 1889 and emerged from within the Methodist Church in Belfast. Today its activities include a wide range of charitable endeavors including housing support for vulnerable young and old people, as well as providing assistance to families coping with autism diagnoses.

Its early incarnation tried to alleviate the sufferings of the poor in inner-city Belfast. This involved feeding the homeless, and bringing inner-city children to the seaside; a perfect antidote to the slums of the industrial city.

For more information on this FREE exhibition read the Belfast Telegraph article from yesterday’s paper. For more on the Linen Hall Library and Belfast Central Mission just click on the links.