A 2 hour workshop for one class of KS2 pupils, investigating Victorian Workhouses, including Fareham Workhouse.

Organisation

During this session you will need to divide pupils into 4 groups, with an adult for each group.

It is helpful if your pupils are wearing name stickers.

This session supports Local History, Victorians (including what life was like for children in Victorian Britain) and helps to develop thinking and communication skills.

Objectives

• To encourage enquiry and research skills using evidence from the past
• To investigate the harsh realities of the workhouse system in Victorian Britain
• To further develop thinking and communication skills

Session Outline – Investigating the Evidence

Introduction

Welcome to museum, purpose, H& S.

Discussion about what the class already know about workhouses/poor people in Victorian times.

Why go to the Workhouse? Short game in small groups using character cards. Pupils decide who should be allowed into the workhouse and why.

Discussion about the game, including finding out who really went into the workhouse, and explanation about the Workhouse being the last resort.

Activities

Pupils split into 4 groups and rotate around four activities, using real objects, photographs, sounds, reports from Victorian times and census records to investigate life in the workhouse.

Who lived at the Workhouse?

Using the 1881 Census record of Fareham Workhouse, the group will search for clues about the kind of people who lived and worked in a workhouse, and why they ended up there.

Working at the Workhouse

Pupils must match the objects, sounds and photos to the description of the type of work adults and children did everyday. They will also visit the workhouse display area and workhouse gates in the museum.

Workhouse Views

The group sorts a set of workhouse photos into 4 categories, then impairs, pupils select a photo and think about questions they would like to ask about it.

Food, Glorious Food

Pupils handle real and replica Victorian workhouse kitchen objects and decide what they are, then select one to sketch. They then choose the correct ingredients to make gruel from 12 different foodstuffs.

Plenary

The Workhouse – Good or Bad?

The class gather together for a short plenary activity. Two groups develop arguments for the workhouse system, and two groups argue against the workhouse, using what they have discovered during their investigations to inform those arguments.

All four groups must then use their arguments to persuade a Victorian workhouse ‘governor’ to see their point of view. The ‘governor’ will make their decision, i.e. whether the workhouse system should be shut down or not, at the end of their arguments!

Health and Safety

• Westbury Manor Museum will remain open to the public during the session. This means that sometimes there might be other people visiting the same room as the children. For their own safety, please make sure that children are accompanied at all times by an adult and don’t let them wander off alone.
• As Westbury Manor is a small local museum, there is only one toilet available for use by the pupils. If children need to use the toilet, please make sure they are accompanied by an adult. Where possible, please try to make sure that children have been to the toilet at school before your visit.
• No food and drink is allowed in the museum during the sessions, to protect the collections.
• Please note the Fire Exit Routes in the Museum building. If there is a fire, a bell will sound, please take the children to the nearest exit and meet outside McDonalds, across West Street.

Your Session

Your session will be led by a trained session leader. Children and adults are encouraged to look at and touch photographs, documents and real objects. If you have any questions during the session, please ask the session leader.

Your role

• To supervise the children closely for their own safety and to prevent damage to the collections
• To read the handling guidelines on the object table(s) to the children before they touch the objects
• To help the children to concentrate on one thing at a time, and to make sure they are not rushing about
• Adults often need to lead a group around different activities, reading instruction cards and making sure the children know what to do. There are answer cards to help you, and if you are not sure of anything, please ask the session leader for help. The session leader will also explain activities at the session start.

It would be helpful if any mobile phones are switched off during the workshop or onto silent if you need to be contacted. Thank you.

You can use these ideas to further develop work started at the Museum, or as follow up activities to investigate/ develop thinking about Life in Victorian Workhouses.

Using the Web for further investigation

• For almost everything you want to know about workhouses, please see www.workhouses.org.uk, an excellent website by Peter Higginbotham. Although this is for adults, it has lots of sections that are easy to read, good photographs, and the section called Workhouse Life covers food, clothing, etc.
• http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/Homework/victorians/workhouses.html  An excellent Victorians website written by a UK primary school with a homework help section on workhouses.

Using paintings

• Using a copy of the painting ‘Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward’ by Luke Fildes (see workhouse website), ask the children to imagine a conversation between two of the characters, and develop this into a short role play. This could also be written down.
• Again, using the painting ‘Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward’ by Luke Fildes, in small groups children prepare a frozen tableaux of the picture and bring it to life, using narrators and mime.

• Read some examples of workhouse poetry (See attached Workhouse Poetry page). Ask pupils to imagine they have been in a workhouse and then, using lots of descriptive words,  to write a short poem about their experience.

Speaking & Listening

• Hold a whole class debate ‘for’ or ‘against’ workhouses either as adults from the 1800s (maybe ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ arguing each side) or as modern historians considering whether workhouses should be re-introduced now.
• Listen to the Story of Oliver Twist in the Workhouse (Chapter II). Discuss how the description compares with what children have discovered on trip/through research. How do you think Charles Dickens knew so much about workhouses? (Answer – he visited lots and wrote about his visits).

More ideas for writing

Imagine you are a newspaper reporter working undercover to investigate how life in workhouses really is. Use the information you have already discovered to write a newspaper report about life in Fareham Workhouse. For examples of Victorian Newspaper articles about life in the Workhouse, see the www.workhouses.org.uk website and search under Arts & Literature section for ‘Journalism’ (Charles Dickens articles can be found here).Write a diary entry of a person entering or leaving the workhousePlan and create a PowerPoint Presentation to teach other children about workhouses. Read Berlie Doherty’s book ‘Street Child’ to your class (available Amazon). As well as the story, this book also contains some follow up writing activities.Using real adverts for workhouse staff (workhouses.org website), ask children to develop their own job advert for a workhouse master and matron or schoolmistress.

Workhouse Poetry

Written From Newmarket Union

Since I cannot, dear sister, with you hold communion,
I'll give you a sketch of our life in the union.
But how to begin I don't know, I declare:
Let me see: well, the first is our grand bill of fare.
We've skilly for breakfast; at night bread and cheese,
And we eat it and then go to bed if you please.
Two days in the week we have puddings for dinner,
And two, we have broth, so like water but thinner;
Two, meat and potatoes, of this none to spare;
One day, bread and cheese - and this is our fare.

And now then my clothes I will try to portray;
They're made of coarse cloth and the colour is grey,
My jacket and waistcoat don't fit me at all;
My shirt is too short, or I am too tall;
My shoes are not pairs, though of course I have two,
They are down at heel and my stockings are blue...
A sort of Scotch bonnet we wear on our heads,
And I sleep in a room where there are just fourteen beds.
Some are sleeping, some are snoring, some talking, some playing,
Some fighting, some swearing, but very few praying.

Here are nine at a time who work on the mill;
We take it in turns so it never stands still:
A half hour each gang, so 'tis not very hard,
And when we are off we can walk in the yard...

I sometimes look up at the bit of blue sky
High over my head, with a tear in my eye.
Surrounded by walls that are too high to climb,
Confined like a felon without any crime,
Not a field nor a house nor a hedge I can see -
Not a plant, not a flower, nor a bush nor a tree...
But I'm getting, I find, too pathetic by half,
And my object was only to cause you to laugh;
So my love to yourself, your husband and daughter,
I'll drink to your health with a tin of cold water:
Of course, we've no wine, not porter, nor beer,
So you see that we all are teetotallers here.

James Withers Reynolds

Reynolds was an unsuccessful shoemaker from a village in Cambridgeshire. He and his family were inmates in Newmarket workhouse in 1846 from where the above verse letter to his sister was written in 1846. He later came to the attention of literary society and was fashionable for a while but died in poverty.

Workhouse Poem

"By day I must dwell where there's many a wheel,
And female employed to sit down and reel,
A post with two ringles is fixed in the wall,
Where orphans, when lasted, loud for mercy do call,
Deprived of fresh air, I must there commence spinner,
If I fail of my task I lose a hot dinner;
Perhaps at the whipping post then shall I be flogged,
And lest I escape my leg must be clogged.
While tyrants oppress I must still be their slave,
And cruelly used, tho' well I behave:
Midst Swearing and brawling my days I must spend,
In sorrow and anguish my days I must end."

James Chambers, workhouse inmate

Workhouse Song

Hush a bye baby on a tree top,
When you grow old your wages will stop.
When you have spent the little you made,
First to the poorhouse and then to the grave.

Workhouse song, Ripon, Yorkshire