West Cumberland Times Saturday April 16 1881 

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THE COCKERMOUTH WORKHOUSE.

We have been favoured with an opportunity to explore the interior of the building which has of late given rise to so much controversy. Through all its day-rooms and dormitories, work-rooms, wash-rooms, laundries, and lavatories, wards, yards, school-rooms, store-rooms, kitchens, cellars -- everywhere, throughout its labyrinthian extent, we have been enabled to penetrate, under the careful pilotage of the obliging and courteous Workhouse Master, Mr. Storey.

It was with no intention to pass judgment on the building, as to its suitability or otherwise, that we visited the place and meandered through its tortuous intricacies. That has already been done by Dr Mouat, of the Local Government Board, and Dr Dodgson, the Medical Officer of the Workhouse. They each have presented a report, in which quite different opinions are enunciated. And when doctors disagree, we shall not attempt to decide. Both of them are, indeed, right in their conclusions. We think there could be no difficulty in proving either that the house exhibits all the defects described by Dr Mouat, or that it possesses all the capabilities with which it is credited by Dr Dodgson. The Workhouse, as it stands, may be either commended or condemned, according to the special idiosyncrasies of the individual who is called upon to pronounce judgment.

We can heartily sympathise with Dr Mouat in his complaint of the difficulty of examining and describing the house, seeing that it is, as he states, "built upon a plan which is now nearly unintelligible, from the manner in which it appears to have been added to from time to time, as the need of additional accommodation arose." It is truly an eccentric, unsystematised arrangement of builders' work. From the way in which the successive architects have proceeded, and the diversified uses to which the added buildings have been applied, one would imagine that the governing motive, both in the construction of the buildings and their subsequent utilisation, was to plan a succession of surprises to the uninitiated stranger. Almost every door opens upon the unexpected. Especially in passing from one to another of the lower apartments are we struck with their heterogeneity of uses. We do not doubt that each and every section of the variform structure is put to the use to which it is most conveniently appropriate. The defects are not in the management, but in the original arrangement. Imperfections of a temporary or accidental character were mentioned by Dr Mouat; but these have been remedied in every available instance. Were he now to revisit the Workhouse he would be compelled to slightly modify his former report. He would see cleanliness everywhere, and order wherever possible.

From the chamber in which vagrants and wayfarers are nightly kennelled to the more spacious sick wards and dormitories, the most scrupulous care is taken to keep matter in its right place. Certainly there is nothing in the shape of luxury within these walls; no unnecessary furnishings; no semblance of ornamentation anywhere. All is bare, blank, and barren; tidy, but cheerless; warm, without being comfortable. Could not the sick wards be made to look less dismal? The rows of beds, where lie the victims of misfortune, "stretched in diseases' shapes abhorred," are absolutely appalling in their dreary uniformity. Is it wholly necessary that the coarse coverlets should all be of the one dingy hue, or that no cheerful pictorial representations should relieve the naked monotony of the whitened walls? Here, truly, the dying have nothing in their immediate surroundings that is at all calculated to retard their departure; nothing that will add an additional pang of regret to their final leave-taking.

As we passed through one of the yards, a couple of aged paupers crossed in front of us, bearing betwixt them a something loosely wrapped in a bed-sheet. They carried it silently into the dead-house. The incident seemed almost unnoticed by the other inmates, no one deigning to cast a look towards the unconscious clay. To the Workhouse Master it was but one less on the list of the "aged and infirm." That was all. He had eaten his last pauper ration; the last perfunctory prayer had been said for the poor soul just passing away; the last sad offices were being performed by strange and callous hands. Wrap the coarse grave-clothes round him; nail over him the nameless coverele; thrust him into the Union hearse; and "rattle his bones over the stones, he's only a pauper whom nobody owns."

Well may the honest poor have a terror of the Workhouse. It is a terribly gloomy lodging, very unlike those provided for John Bunyan's pilgrims as they approach the end of their weary journey. Some of these old men and women have had a hard fight with the world, from their cradle upwards; and their lives would have been still more embittered could they have foreseen what awaited them in their helpless age—could they have discerned the gloomy portals through which they must pass in the final stages of their pilgrimage. But if to the old and the world-weary it be a dismal place in which to sit down and patiently "shuffle off this mortal coil," how much more unsuitable must it be as the home of childhood. The buoyant hopefulness of the child-nature is stifled by the depressing atmosphere of the place, and by the artificial constraints to which the children are subjected.

We were introduced into the boys' school-room, where sat the schoolmaster, Mr Hudson, in the midst of about fifty juveniles, laboriously engaged in the customary didactic exercises. The nephew of the Railway King has a difficult, but withal congenial task. Apparently it yields him some enjoyment, else he could not throw into his work such conspicuous energy as characterises it from day to day, with the exceptional results that are noted by Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools at each annually-recurring examination. His pupils are by no means remarkable for natural aptness and docility. They are brought to him at various ages, and in all stages of neglect. Fresh comers at the age of ten or twelve years are frequently found unable to name a single letter of the alphabet, proving that the compulsory system which has been introduced of late years is not everywhere duly enforced. Then, possibly, just as he has succeeded, after great labour, in enlightening them in the abecedarian mysteries, they are suddenly removed from the Workhouse and from beneath his training hand.

Most of the children, however, have no other home. There are bright boys among them, too, unpromising as was their original condition, and unadapted as are all their present surroundings for opening and enlarging the juvenile mind. The crowded school-room, the great blank day-room, the paved yard, circumscribed and shelterless, are miserable substitutes for the natural home life, the family circle, and the freedom which is the natural heritage of the poorest. Within a space just 30ft. by 15ft. ground measurement, and 10ft. in height, there are sometimes about seventy children congregated during several hours of each school day. The girls' school-room was unoccupied at the time of our visit, owing to the temporary indisposition of the schoolmistress. Her illness need not be wondered at, if the like insalubrious conditions exist in her department as in that of Mr Hudson. How he manages to preserve his health and robust appearance under such conditions, combined with the wearying, worrying nature of his daily occupation, is more than we can at present understand. True, as we have already observed, his heart appears to be in his work; his sympathies are with his boys. When he is not teaching them their lessons he is assisting them in their play. Thus their young lives are not only made endurable, but enjoyable.

Every other part of the building is pervaded by a mournful apathy, a lugubrious listlessness, as though it were eternally overshadowed by Poe's inexorable raven; but where the children are, the shadow is occasionally dispelled under the recurrent gleams of natural cheerfulness and vivacity. Mr Hudson is the Coryphaeus of Workhouse schoolmasters. His vocation is somewhat different to that of his uncle of railway notoriety, and somewhat differently remunerated. He has never cleared his £100,000 in a day, as is said to have once been done by his relative and namesake; but he is nevertheless doing a more worthy work in the world than was ever done by the great dealer in scrip and dictator of railway speculations.

The Workhouse is by no means crowded at the present time. On the day of our visit it contained 253 inmates—80 men and 76 women of all classes, and 97 children of both sexes, including the "motherless and deserted infants and the very young children" mentioned in Dr Dodgson's report as occupying a ward in the detached portion of the building located at the foot of the garden. In the winter season there are necessarily more extensive demands on the accommodation. As is well known, the Guardians propose to increase the domiciliary space by projecting a bridge from the south front of the building across the railway into the adjoining potato field, and erecting at the outward end of the bridge a series of buildings to be used as schools, day-rooms, and dormitories for the boys and girls. The proposal is endorsed by Dr Dodgson, who would add an hospital for their lodgment when requiring the special attention of the Medical Officer. On the other hand, Dr Mouat affirms that the proposed removal of the juvenile cantonment "is not desirable in itself, and would not afford the relief intended and anticipated."

For our own part we think the accommodation is capable of very considerable extension without extending it across the railway. A great deal of the space within the existing boundaries is only imperfectly utilised. Along the interior of the south wall is a large area of ground that might be occupied with more useful buildings than those by which it is now encumbered. The colony of pigs, for instance, located near the south-east entrance, might be removed elsewhere, with advantage to the human denizens, and their removal would leave nearly as much clear ground as is required for the additional buildings. Might not portions of the south wall be extended a few feet nearer to the railway, or even built plumb from the bottom of the cutting? This plan of extension is much more preferable than the erection of a costly bridge, with a detached supplementary building in the midst of a potato field, and its adoption by the Guardians and the Local Government Board would put an end to the Workhouse question for our time at least.