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Birmingham Workhouse Dudley Road Western Road opened 1852

S

skylark

Proud to be a Brummie !!
Please note this thread is about the Workhouse located at Dudley Road/Western Road, opened in 1852. It later b4came a hospital.

There was an earlier workhouse located in the centre of Birmingham between Lichfield Street and Steelhouse Lane (around the position of Coleridge Passage) and built c1734. It was operational until the late c1850 when the new workhouse at Dudley Road was built.There's a thread about the first Birmingham Workhouse here https://birminghamhistory.co.uk/for...ingham-workhouse-lichfield-street-1734.57102/

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Has anyone done any research into B,ham workhouses? I have found a family on the 1871 census who are in an (unnamed)
workhouse. They appear to have jobs but must have been in a desperate state to have been in a workhouse.
If anyone has any info on B'ham workhouses I would appreciate hearing about it. Does anyone know how many there would have been in B'ham?
Many thanks
Margaret.
 
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Great links to the workhouses above and all the info you need but having checked through them all here are some new pics not on their sites
 
Workhouse Money
Note how in 1811....... 20 tokens needed for one pound then in 1812 ...40 tokens were needed to make the same amount
 
that workhouse photo really shocked me ,its awful,good old days,only if you had a few bob
 
Graham, the despair and resignation on the faces of those old women in the workhouse is heartbreaking, it was the worst dread of old folk to end up in the workhouse. The memories lingered on even in my grandparents in the late 40s, they must have known people who ended there. Until quite recently old people dreaded "Western Road".
 
When My Dads brother lost his wife he went to the workhouse and got a live in maid, he married her and they had a very happy life together
Here is a pic from 1878 of The Delaware Minstrels giving a concert in the Workhouse
 
My Mother's father was a Minstrel and used to black his face and sing with a group in the
Witton area playing the mandolin and singing. I would imagine it would have been around the time of this picture also. He was over 80 when he died in l944.

They are certainly sad looking people and mostly women on these pictures. They had no other course but to go to the Workhouses when their families fell apart and they were left bereft of anyone in the world.
 
What sadness rains from their faces. :(

They look old but I bet they were not THAT old
 
We are so lucky today to have all that we have!!

Cromwell do you have any idea when those photo's of the ladies were taken roughly? They look so sad - I bet we couldn't imagine being in places like that these days!! I read lots about some of the Irish workhouses etc.. the famine in Ireland where people starved to death etc.. and the lucky ones went to workhouses - but it's so sad to think of the lives these people had to endure in such places.

Shame we can't go back in time and make things better for these people!!!
 
I think we could be less sentimental about the image of workhouses which started so long ago, when there was no welfare as we used to know it, and think about what positive things they provided.
Sadly the Victorians were obsessed with 'class', and their lowest class was those who lived in a workhouse, or were buried in a pauper's grave - and these prejudices have lingered on, even to today. While some people were very lucky, others weren't, and no-one could choose their parents, or family background, or the social and economic conditions in which they grew up. Bad luck was not always their fault.
In practice the workhouse system, although it was by no means perfect, provided needy people with a roof over their heads, food and work.
We should not delude ourselves into thinking this kind of facility is not not needed today, in fact it is being provided on the quiet by various charities, while prominent politicians spout about concern and care and leave people to their cardboard boxes.
Sorry to rant a bit, but I think it should be said.
Peter
 
:angel: I agree with you Peter, although very sad it was the only means for poor relief back then and if for reason you didn't qualify well!!!.
At least until in some cases 'The Salvation Army' stepped in. Watching 'Who Do You Think You Are' when Jeremy Paxman went and saw where his Great Grandmother lived showed the poverty back then. That lady had 10 humans living, eating and sleeping in one very small room rather than have the family separated in the Workhouse... Brave or silly!  Because I'm sure if 'The Salvation Army' hadn't been around for her, she and most if not all her children would have either starved to death, or died of illness in the squalor they were forced to live in.
Yes people did die in the workhouse too, but it did give you a chance to survive and it was more likely if you were that poor you would die outside of it.
Yes they were very grim places and they were intended to be, as the attitude back then was if you were poor you should be ashamed no matter what the reason. It was not just the going into 'The Workhouse' that frightened people, but also the stigma from society that was attached to admitting you were that poor.
What annoyed me about the 'Paxman' program was, that her husband had served 22 years in the army. But after his death at a fairly young age the Army Pension was stopped and his family had too carry on the best they could.
Where was the government and crown that he had served so loyally for all those years then?

I think although there were a great number of women in "The Workhouse" the pictures show manly women, because in most workhouses men and women, husbands, wives and children and even brother and sisters were all separated into in different blocks once entering the place.

Strange how life can be ... One side of my family ran a "Workhouse" in Cheshire in the 1880's and another side of my family in the 1920's were living in one for a short while also in Cheshire.
 
I live right by what was the Workhouse, here in Penzance and still today it is a sad place :'(

It has been a slaughter house for the past 30 odd years.(death on a daily basis) :'(

Our allotment was part of the growing grounds for the workhouse and we often dig up bits

of blue and white pottery and pieces of clay pipes.

The workhouse was STILL in use up to the 60's according to th locals and still today the folk

talk about "so and so was raised in the workhouse" :(
 
Before the workhouse system was set up 
First pic is the Womens quarters in a home for the destitute 1860's
Second pic the mens quarters
Third pic At a soup kitchen 1860
Forth pic Tramps and Beggars being fed by the Salvation army
 
any idea of the average age of death as everybody LOOKS old but was that just the conditions ,today would be about 70 or 80 wouldnt it
 
One of my male rellies died in Birmingham Workhouse in 1907. Anyone got any pictures of male residents at about that time?
 
The Lady in the wheel chair was the oldest lady in Birmingham when this photo was taken in 1909 and died a few months later at 109 in the Female Ward of the Birmingham Infirmary
And Quoting from "Our Birmingham" for every 3 people who died in the Central Wards only 2 died in the Outer Wards. and in.....
1860 27,000 people a year died
1898 21,000
1928 till 1948 12.000 a year died
I have skipped the War years
So you see how poverty dramatically alters the death rate and without the workhouses a lot more would have died, and the workhouse was the right way as you may or may not argue about as it was a start to put you back on your feet till you could find a way out of the poverty you were in, and if you was not able to you had food and a bed
 
Crom, were the earlier death-rate figures you quote due only to poverty? There were people who earned a lot of money doing lethal jobs in those days, long before Health & Safety regs came out. Water supply and drainage were improving all the time, health care was more widely available, and people were learning more about health and hygiene. Surely people were being looked after better than ever before. You might not need a lot of money to survive if you were careful.
Just a thought.
Peter
 
Peter, It did not give the causes of death but said as conditions improved so  heath improved, where people were earning large sums of money doing unspeakable jobs it was still killing them,the sanitation men who emptied cess pits were paid a a rate but also got extra money and a pint of brandy an hour for the jobs they did (and I bet a few of them fell in after drinking that) the little back street cottage industries that were up every entry cause a lot of deaths even though it earned  them money making buttons,chains, plating, etc. it led to early deaths in most cases and it was not till all these were swept away that conditions improved and the death rate levelled out but that went hand in hand with Chamberlains refoms
 
Would I be right to assume that not all those in the infirmary were inmates from the workhouse? I understand that the records are none existant and have only come across them on Census Returns
 
I made an enquiry a few months ago as I had a relative in 1881 in Western rd Birmingham Workhouse.I asked a the Birmingham Library Archives.The only records that survived are the Infirmary and Finances records.I was told they keep very good records of the costs of running the institution.
Denny
 
I meant to say Census Returns of the Workhouse but not listed as Infirmary as such.
I did read somewhere that there were " Such goings on between inmates and staff that records were destroyed".
 
cromwell said:
....even though it earned them money making buttons....
Click to expand...
My great-grandmother, Bridgette, was a button maker, as revealed by the 1881 census. She was also the mother of 3 young children then, as well as caring for her husband's elderly widowed mother.
So, whether she did it at home or not, I don't know.
Their address, then, was Summer Lane Court 4 House 6 which I think was somewhere a lot of poorer people lived, as with their address 10 years later in Staniforth St. when one of her daughters, then 15, was a 'Glove Button Closer,' and Bridgette was then described as a 'Button Cutter' (and had 2 more children).
 
Mazbeth I have done quite a bit of research into the button trade as my wife's relative from 1600 till 1900 were buttonmakers and had a large factory in town.(Very lucky cause I got all the Quaker records)
Growing up in Nechells and playing on the bomb pecks you always saw traces of the pearl buttons and the shells they were cut from, if you tried to drill a shell they are very hard and take forever with a hand drill but the Buttons were not drilled out they where punched out, using a punch and die and as you might know to work bone it is put in boiling water to bend it or work it, the same applied to the large shells that were punched.It was to stop them cracking and you could get 100 pearl buttons from one 6 inch shell
It was doing jobs like this that kept a lot of the folk out of the workhouse, up our yard a bloke use to plate cheap jewellery in the brewhouse one day a week as it was a shared brewhouse for 4 families thats all he could manage
 
I belong to the Shard End Local History Group and some time ago we had a talk by George Hook who is I believe the last pearl worker left in Birmingham. We later went on a visit to his factory at Pope Street, Smethwick (not quite Birmingham) and he demonstrated his skills, showing us the different type of shellls he worked with. He makes jewellery and other items. His website is www.hook-motherofpearl.co.uk and phone no., 0121 558 2186 if anyone is interested in visiting this interesting place. George is a very good speaker, but I strongly advise you to make an appointment as he is out a lot giving talks and at fairs selling his wares.
 
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