Back to Clippings main page

A plaque on the wall of the Wellington library – you have to be tall to read it since it is raised about eight feet high - says that the building was once a workhouse. But what were workhouses? Was this the town’s first or last? And does anyone have ancestors whose lives can shed some light?

Before he died the late Ben Price, from Trench, started recording his memories of growing up in the Wellington workhouse, and here we share them with you.

“My father was killed in the coalmines, three months before I was born in 1892,” he wrote. “My mother couldn’t manage to look after all five of us so she took us to the workhouse, where I stayed there until I was 13.”

“Breakfast in the workhouse consisted of one slice of bread and half a pint of milk, which I didn’t like. So I was always hungry before dinner time – not that there was much food then either! At school the boys from the workhouse would gang up together to illicit food from the others. Don’t blame us - hunger makes you do things that you wouldn’t do if you were well fed.”

The idea of the workhouse was to care of people like Ben, but also to take out of the labour market the poor, unemployed, mentally ill and illegitimate, all of whom were thrown together. In theory they were given help but in practice the conditions in the workhouse were kept deliberately bleak – the threat of the workhouse serving as a deterrent to encourage the average labourer into work. Ben’s start to life is not what we would want for his or our children today… but more of his memories and what happened to him later.

The origins of the workhouse date back to Queen Elizabeth, whose Poor Law Act of 1601 placed looking after the poor the responsibility of parishes – something that lasted for the next 350 years.

But the Library in Walker Street was not Wellington’s first workhouse. Back in 1748 the parish had a workhouse on Street Lane, somewhere opposite the Red Lion pub. Here, a local farmer called Thomas Hazlehurst provided work on his farm for which he was paid a quarterly sum to cover inmates' food, clothes, medical care, and burial.

It was in 1797 that the workhouse moved to what is now the library on Walker Street, where there was room for about 40-50 residents, some of who came from as far away as Newport and Berrington. These premises were gradually enlarged to take on more adults, meanwhile the former Ercall Magna parish workhouse, at Waters Upton, was used for children. And when needs rose use was also made of the former Wrockwardine parish workhouse.

The workhouses were run by volunteers that formed a ‘Vestry Committee’, or Board. Their role was to collect taxes from those who owned land and property in the area and use the funds to help ‘paupers’ - the poor, unemployed and people nobody else would care for. This might take the form of a loan (if they were lucky), getting the unemployed back to work, apprenticing children and if necessary having people moved, under what was known as Settlement Law, back to the parish where they were born.

However, the demand for labour varied between parishes, and the supply of paupers did not necessarily correspond to a parish’s labour needs. In Wellington for example there were 186 inmates in the workhouse in April 1801, but only 39 in October the following year. Soon therefore parishes were allowed to form ‘unions’ with adjoining parishes, in the hope that this would iron out the fluctuations in supply and demand.

The Wellington Poor Law Union was formed on 4th June 1836, and its operation was overseen by an elected Board of nineteen ‘guardians’. The Union, which at the 1831 census had a total population of 17,945, covered 11 parishes: Bolas Magna, Ercall Magna, Eyton-on-the-Wild-Moors, Kinnersley, Longdon-upon-Fern, Preston-on-the-Wild-Moors, Rodington, Upton Waters, Wellington, Wombridge and Wrockwardine. Hadley was added in 1898.

There were 13 other unions operating elsewhere in Shropshire, each of which also had its own institution. The largest, accommodating 550, served Atcham Parish (in Cross Houses), and the smallest, in Shifnal, looked after just 90 people. (In Oswestry and Whitchurch the workhouses were called the ‘House of Industry’.) Closer to home there was a workhouse in Madeley, on Lincoln Hill, next to Lodge Farm, which catered for people from 12 parishes, including Dawley and Much Wenlock. During 1833-35 the average annual expenditure on paupers was £6,207 (£420,000 today), which was on a par with national averages for the time and equated to 7s.11d. per head of population (£32 today).

On a day to day basis workhouses were run by a Master and Matron, who were often husband and wife, like Mr and Mrs Lewis, who ran Walker Street in the 1850s. Their workhouse had now been enlarged to accommodate 160 residents, with room for around 100 children at Waters Upton. About this time there were also about 2000 ‘out-paupers’ (not resident in the workhouse but also receiving help), on whom expenditure per head was 2s. 11d (£10). People were employed in the local pits and ironworks, and when these closed they worked on the roads, or sewing footwear.

In 1876 - presumably because of growing demand for space, and having to use several different sites - a new workhouse was erected on a similar site to the original workhouse, on Street Lane, and what is now Holyhead Road. This accommodated up to 350 residents and not long afterwards was being run by Mr and Mrs George Thomas.

But although the workhouse itself had moved, its distance from town meant that the Union continued using the Walker Street building for its offices and Board meetings. Until 1897 at least, when the guardians bought Edgbaston House, also in Walker Street, and moved their offices and boardroom there.

Members of the union’s Board made regular visits to check up on workhouse conditions. But, nationally at least, as we know from scenes in Oliver Twist, the conditions were often bleak, and the poor referred to them as ‘bastiles’. Typically, families were kept apart, visits were rarely allowed, there was regular punishing of those that did anything wrong, silence prevailed at meal times, and the people came close to starving.

“Looking back it makes you laugh to think what we went through - but some of us did well in the world,” wrote Ben Price, shortly before he died. He left the workhouse when he was 13 to work on a farm, and when he was 16 worked at a horse-shoe nail factory, setting up a home with his brothers in Trench.

By now governments realised that the workhouse model was outdated – different treatment was needed for different inmates, and unemployment was no longer seen as the fault of the poor. In 1929 therefore the government abolished Board of Guardians and transferred responsibility for workhouses to county councils. Things developed further with the advent of the welfare state after WW2, when the building on Holyhead Road became Wrekin Hospital, under the Department of Health. While some non-sick residents remained the hospital was jointly administered, but in 1950 the non-sick were taken elsewhere and the council’s involvement ceased.

In 1993 the hospital was converted into Morris Care Centre, a nursing home run by Morris’s, which is what it is today. But do not be confused by its reception. The fine nineteenth century panelling that you will see there has nothing to do with the former workhouse. Morris’s brought it here from the upstairs tearooms in their department store, that used to stand at the top of Pride Hill, Shrewsbury.

And what happened to Ben Price? Sadly, both his brothers were killed in the First World War, but Ben emigrated to Australia, got married and worked on a citrus farm. He had a son, John, who became a Priest and still lives in Australia, and several years ago John visited the UK to trace his father’s roots. Roots that had started in the Wellington workhouse all those years ago.

 Back to Clippings main page
top of page