The Workhouse

Before 1834 poor relief was a parish matter, funded by a local rate and administered by local people who generally knew the applicant. It was patchy, it was inconsistent, and by the standards of what replaced it, it was humane.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 grouped parishes into unions, put an elected board of guardians over each, and built a workhouse in every one. The principle behind it was less eligibility: conditions inside had to be worse than the worst available outside, or people would choose relief over work.

That principle was designed for an industrial labour market with jobs to be had. Applied to upland Wales in an agricultural depression, it was something else.

The Powys unions

Brecon, Builth, Crickhowell, Hay, Knighton, Llanfyllin, Machynlleth, Newtown and Llanidloes, Presteigne, Rhayader and Welshpool. Every district had one, and the buildings were substantial.

The architecture is the argument made in stone. A central block for the master and matron with sightlines over everything, radiating wings segregating men from women and adults from children, walled exercise yards between the wings, a boundary wall, and a single controlled entrance.

Families were separated on admission. Husbands from wives, and children over a certain age from their mothers. That was not incidental cruelty; it was policy, intended to make the workhouse a last resort, and it is the single fact about the system that people find hardest to believe.

How it actually worked in Powys

Less like the London version than the buildings suggest.

Rural unions used outdoor relief — money or goods to people in their own homes — far more than the 1834 Act intended, because in a scattered upland district it was cheaper and because the guardians were local farmers and tradesmen who knew the families concerned.

The workhouses were rarely full. They took in the old without families, the chronically sick, unmarried mothers, orphans, people with mental illness or learning disabilities, and vagrants passing through, who were held in a separate casual ward and expected to break stone or pick oakum for a night's lodging.

That does not make the system benign. It means the threat did the work, and the building only had to exist.

Y Dolydd

The Llanfyllin union workhouse of 1838 is the most complete surviving workhouse building in Wales, and it is the best place in the county to understand the architecture.

Walk the yards rather than the frontage. The frontage is almost dignified. The yards are what the plan is actually for.

It closed as a workhouse in 1930, became a hospital and then a farm, and has been under restoration by a trust since 2004 with periodic public opening.

The records

This is the part worth shouting about.

Poor law union records survive in bulk at Powys Archives in Llandrindod Wells: guardians' minute books, admission and discharge registers, creed registers, settlement examinations, and correspondence with the Poor Law Commissioners.

They contain the names, ages, parishes, circumstances and often the whole family history of thousands of people who appear in no other record at all. Settlement examinations in particular are sworn statements in which a pauper had to account for their entire working life to establish which parish was liable for them.

For anyone tracing a family that was poor, and most families in nineteenth-century Powys were poor at some point, this is frequently the richest source available. Very little of it is digitised and very few people consult it.

The end

The unions were abolished in 1930 and their functions passed to county councils. Most workhouses became public assistance institutions and then hospitals, which is why several Powys community hospitals stand on or in workhouse buildings.

That continuity is worth knowing when visiting one. The building where a district's elderly are now cared for, kindly and free, is frequently the same building where their great-grandparents were separated from their spouses at the door.