Treated little better than prison inmates, entire families were placed in the workhouses and fed bread and gruel.
The houses were filled with orphans and the old, the crippled and the mentally ill. Conditions were unsanitary and degrading.
The work was brutal, including eight-hour shifts of step after trudging step on a paddle wheel that provided power to corn mills. The treadmill.
This is what Ebenezer Scrooge is talking about when he's asked to "make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute" in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"
"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not."
"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" said Scrooge.
"Both very busy, sir."
Scrooge sent them away, of course. Christmas in the workhouse wasn't just a rare day off from work. It was a celebration that, depending on the largesse of the board of guardians (the local authorities who administered the Poor Law), might mean a single, glorious glass of beer.
In 1885, for example, records show that the 363 inmates at the Basford Workhouse enjoyed roast beef and plum pudding for Christmas. The local brewery came through with 36 gallons of beer.
When the director of the workhouse at Stratford-on-Avon died in the 1930s, his obituary praised him as "considerate and kind to a degree" because the Christmas menu included beer.
"The idea of celebrating the yuletide about a table unadorned by flowing steins is abhorrent to almost any Englishman, and particularly so to those who dwell in almshouses," one news story reported in the 1920s.
