You may think that these scavenging jobs, cigar end collecting, mud larking, bone picking, were the worst. And sure, they were terrible, but they weren't the poorest. Below them were the very worst jobs. Because the really destitute ended up here. House.
There were workhouses before the Victorian period, but the Victorians took them a stage further. The new poor laws of 1834 made them even nastier than they had been. The whole point about the workhouse was that the jobs you did there had to be worse than anything outside. Even so, in the 1850s there were 200,000 people in workhouses all over the country.
For these people, this was about as low as you could go. Once in, it was very difficult to get out. Men were separated from women, the able-bodied from those less fit. And all the jobs were intended to punish you for being poor.
So the first job is what? First job is stone breaking. Pretty nasty.
That's like an archetypal punishment job, isn't it? It really is, yes. I can't imagine that they would have had these in the workhouse. They wouldn't have had those at the time, no.
So what do I have to do? Just hit the stone? You've got to hit that and you've got to break it into really, really small pieces because the stone would have been used for mending roads.
Right. Well, it didn't do anything really, did it? It just smoked. No, keep going.
Wouldn't everybody have had to do this job? No, not everybody. It was such an awful job. Hey! Well done.
Only the casuals and tramps were given that. Oh, I can understand. They wouldn't want you to stay very long, would they?
No. They would have done this for a day. A day?
Yep, just for one day's work. And what would they get for having done it? Well, they'd get a bed for the night and a meal. Woo!
Are they small enough? You need to get them all about this size. Why's that? Because you've got to pass them through a mesh in the wall, a metal mesh in the wall of the stone breaking cell.
Why's that? They've got to be small enough to be able to use in road building. And if you couldn't get them through the mesh then you had to break it again. So I've got to get all this lot that size? Yeah.
I think I've got the hang of this now. What's next? Next is oakum picking. Over here.
What's oakum Des, and how do you pick it? Well... to start with you've got a bit of rope or cable that you then have to break up right the way down this is a piece of rope and you're breaking it down into the strands yeah and then having got the strand you break it right down into the yarn and then you've got to break that yarn down into the actual fibers of the hemp so what's the oakum this the oakum is the raw fiber it's sort of the unmaking of the old rope and what's the point of it what happens to this because then it goes back to the shipyards and to the vessels where it's rolled together to form a thin sausage that is then banged into the joints in the planking to stop it leaking.
Who are the people who did this? Well, able-bodied inmates in the workhouse that have been given this job to do, but their fingers just used to bleed at the end of a couple of hours of doing this. When you first start doing this, it seems pretty easy.
It's money for old rope. but the more that you have to get your fingers into these tiny, clagged-up little threads, the harder it gets, and it just cuts in to your fingers and your thumbs. And a bit like that, which looks like you could do in no time at all, by the time you've pulled it out into its constituent parts, there's just loads and loads and loads of it, and if you'd have been having to produce pounds of this stuff a day, you'd have had to be going for hour after hour. I suppose the thing about this job is that if you were in a workhouse you had to do it. Yes you did, yes.
You had to do whatever jobs they gave you. You had no choice in the matter. So in a way, however awful some of the other jobs were, at least it was your choice.
But here they took away your dignity. They did indeed, yeah. And some of the jobs that they had to do were so bad, like this. This was given to workhouse inmates to do, but they didn't necessarily give it to prisoners in countries'jails to do.
You're not picking very fast. I was thinking. No room for thinking. You don't come to the workhouse to think, you come to the workhouse to work.