Chapter 1
A history of social work in Scotland
Viviene E. Cree
Introduction
Telling the story of the history of social work in Scotland is not easy, because there has, in reality, been very little written about this. Histories of UK social work tend to describe the history of English (or England and Wales) social work, with Scotland relegated to a brief mention, and while there are, of course, similarities and shared approaches, Scotland is also distinctive in terms of its legislation, policy and practice. A history of social work in Scotland must therefore locate Scottish social work as both separate from and, at the same time, connected to social work in the UK and beyond. Up until the 1707 Act of Union, Scotland and England were independent countries, each with their own systems of government, and following the Act, Scotland retained its legal, educational and religious institutions; a separate Scottish Office was then established in 1885. As a result of this arrangement, although much legislation relating to social work was UK-wide (including the Children Acts of 1908, 1932, 1948 and 1963 and the National Assistance Act of 1948), key aspects of legislation (such as the Children and Young Personsâ Act of 1937 and, of course, the Social Work (Scotland) Act of 1968) were Scottish Acts, and needed to be so, because of the different court and educational systems. This means that in exploring Scottish social work history (and indeed social work practice today), it is important to keep in mind that Scotland is both different from, and similar to, England.
But the complexity does not end there. The story of social work history in Scotland is further complicated by the sheer diversity of social work. Do we choose to consider the development of social work across different domains (for example, social work with children and families, adult services, criminal justice social work), or do we try to keep a more generalised picture in mind? Do we focus on statutory services, provided by government (local and/or national), or include all the activity that has thrived in the voluntary (also called âthirdâ) and private sectors? Where does residential care and community work fit within the story of the history of social work in Scotland? A whole book could be written about any one of these fields of practice. Given that this is only one chapter, I will focus on three key examples from social work history (poor relief, children in need and âlunacyâ), each of which, I hope, will illuminate some larger truths about Scotland and its very particular understanding of, and relationship to, social work and social care.
Poor relief
To understand Scotlandâs approach to the support and care of the most vulnerable in society, we have to go back a long way, to a very different time and place; we also, I believe, have to start with the English story, not only because this is the story that is best known, but also because most people believe that it relates to Scotland too. As will be demonstrated, this is â and is not â the case.
The historian Derek Fraser (2009) argues that it was fear of social disorder in the two and a half centuries following the Black Death that converted the maintenance of the poor from an aspect of personal Christian charity into a prime function of the state. The so-called âBlack Deathâ plague killed 1.5 million people in England (about one-third of the total population) in 1348â49. Whole towns and villages were wiped out, along with traditional feudal patterns, forcing people to roam the countryside in search of work. Legislation was passed that sought to contain the growing social problem of unemployment. For example, the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers and 1351 Statute of Labourers made it illegal to give alms (financial support or payment âin kindâ, such as food or coal) to âable-bodiedâ unemployed people. In the years that followed, problems of both rural and urban poverty escalated, as landowners enclosed what had been common land to create large, more profitable estates. The dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-1530s further exacerbated the problem, as the old and sick who had received institutional care in monastery almhouses found themselves homeless.
Pressure from a series of bad harvests and from soldiers returning from wars led the government to pass legislation authorising parishes (villages and towns) to collect money to support the âimpotent poorâ (the old, the sick, the disabled etc.) so that they would no longer have to beg on the streets. In 1601, a Poor Law Act (often referred to as the Elizabethan Poor Law Act) was passed, stating that every parish in England and Wales should be responsible for the relief of its poor; magistrates would appoint âoverseersâ who were empowered to levy poor rates on property. With this legislation, a new pattern was established underpinned by two principles: firstly, that poor relief was a matter for local government and should be paid for by local taxation; and secondly, that the poor should be divided into different categories. The 1601 Act envisaged three separate groups of poor people: the âimpotent poorâ who should receive help from local almshouses or poorhouses; the âable-bodiedâ poor (including single parents, widowed and deserted women) who were to be set to work in a âhouse of correctionâ (a workhouse by any other name); and the able-bodied poor who absconded were to be punished in the houses of correction. To be successful, this legislation would have required a massive and costly institution-building programme, and in the event, it could not be delivered on. While some poorhouses and workhouses were built, increasingly parishes found themselves delivering âout-reliefâ (also called âoutdoor reliefâ) to poor families at home in the community. In order to discourage anyone from making a call on the public purse, paupers in the community were made to wear a badge with the letter âPâ and the initial of the parish where they were based; after 1810, this was replaced by a list of paupers that was circulated among the ratepayers of the parish.
By the early 1830s, it was self-evident that the poor law was not working: poverty had not decreased, and on the contrary, even more people were seeking help in spite of the disincentives to doing so. The Poor Law Commission of 1832 made three specific recommendations: firstly, that any help offered must be less than what could be earned by the lowest-paid industrial worker (the principle of âless eligibilityâ); secondly, that all outdoor relief should be abolished, so that the only help available to the fit, unemployed labourer would be the workhouse (the so-called âworkhouse testâ); and thirdly, that there should be no local discretion and no local variations (parishes were to come together to form unions of a viable size). The Poor Law (Amendment) Act of 1834 led to a new regime, and with it, a new distinction between the âdeservingâ and âundeservingâ poor; the former were to be the concern of voluntary, charitable agencies (where they would receive some financial and care support in a less stigmatising manner) while the latter had to resort to workhouses managed by local parochial boards (these later became local government councils).
The story of the development of Scotlandâs poor relief is both similar and in crucial ways, a very different one. Scotland also suffered from the Black Death, though a slightly smaller proportion of people died in the outbreak of 1350 and in subsequent plagues. The first Scottish Poor Law Act was passed in 1424, and, just as in England, it was concerned mainly with controlling the problem of unemployed labourers and vagrants. Although Scotland subsequently passed a Poor Law Act of 1579, which encouraged parishes to compile a list of their poor and permitted them to raise taxes to pay for poor relief through rates, few did, and the preferred means of support remained the church or the estate, as we will explore in more detail below (Levitt, 1988). The consensus at this time was that public relief should be targeted at those who could not work (that is, orphans, older and disabled people, those with serious mental illness), not those who could work (adults who were temporarily or longer-term unemployed, the so-called âable-bodiedâ poor). Financial support for the âable-bodiedâ, either from voluntary or public agencies, was to be discouraged. This approach was totally at odds with the poor law system as it operated in England and Wales, where, as we have seen, local taxation paid for the creation of public workhouses to house the unemployed and cash payments were given to relieve the poverty of those living in the community.
Scotland resisted statutory measures well into the nineteenth century. Although the 1845 Poor Law (Amendment) Act, in common with the English and Welsh legislation, created a new centralised system and local parochial boards, and encouraged the building of poorhouses (not workhouses), it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that significant numbers of parishes extracted rates to pay for social welfare (Paterson, 1976), and from then on, poorhouses gradually appeared in most towns and cities in Scotland. The Local Government Act 1929 (England and Wales) and its companion Local Government (Scotland) Act 1929 came together to transfer the administration of poor laws from parish councils to new county, city and burgh councils.
The question inevitably arises â why was Scotlandâs approach so different? Social geography and religion undoubtedly both played a part. Writing about Scotland as late as 1840, Knox (2014 pp1â2) states:
Over two-thirds of the population lived and worked on the land, or in small industrial villages making a living from handloom weaving. Highly religious and reasonably well-educated in the socially mixed parish schools, Scots in the countryside lived a narrow and insular lifestyle, but one which was of a tolerable standard.
Traditional obligations between landowner (or clan chief in the Highlands and Islands) and tenant meant that Scottish workers were much less likely to be wholly paid in cash than their English counterparts; they worked in return for accommodation and a share of the produce from the land or an allowance of food (meal, milk and potatoes) and sometimes coal; they were often described as âservantsâ rather than âlabourersâ. In times of a bad harvest or illness, help was provided, albeit at a very low level, by the estate. Historians have noted that this situation pertained in Scotland, Ireland and much of Europe until well into the nineteenth century; Patriquin (2006) argues that it was England that was the exception within Europe in having a developed wage-labour economy at this time, and with it, a greater acceptance of the idea of taxation and hence a system of centralised poor relief.
Scottish religion is also significant in this account. The Scottish Reformation of 1560, unlike that of England, was strongly doctrinal, based on Calvinist principles (Smith, 2013). Although socially authoritarian, it was built on egalitarian ideas that everyone should have access to the Bible, and hence, to education. A school was established in every parish, and the Kirk assumed responsibility for education. The Reformation placed the onus of providing social welfare onto parish communities, which assumed responsibility for the care of the sick, orphans and the indigent poor. Money from church collections, from weddings and funerals, and from payment of fines for minor misdemeanours was distributed by members of the Kirk session to those in need, either in cash or âin kindâ. Scotland remained, at least until the twentieth century, a country that was reluctant to raise public funds to pay for provision of statutory (public) services. Rapid urbanisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth century changed the Scottish landscape forever and led to the ultimate breakdown of traditional ties, obligations and duties. Between the years of 1801 and 1851, the Scottish population almost doubled, and most of the growth in population was experienced in the growing towns and cities. At the same time as problems of urban (and rural) poverty grew, so did pressures on the established church. After the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, 40% of ministers left to form the new Free Church of Scotland. Money was needed to support the new congregations and to pay for the 800 new churches and 500 new schools that were built; the Church of Scotland found its own coffers drastically reduced, and hence its ability to provide relief diminished. Two very different approaches emerged in response to the social and economic crisis: the first looked to philanthropy to rekindle a perceived golden age of Christian shared responsibility; the second embraced statutory measures and instigated public institutions to manage this.
We can find evidence for the first approach in the local visiting societies that proliferated in nineteenth-century Scotland. A notable example was the visiting scheme that Dr Thomas Chalmers set up in the poor district of St Johnâs in Glasgow in 1820. Chalmers approached the Town Council and asked for the money that would have been given to support the poor in St Johnâs to be given to him. He then divided up the parish of 10,000 people into small areas and appointed elders and deacons to take on the role of visiting and supporting the residents in their areas. He described this as an investigation to discover to what degree the âfountain of charityâ might flow from the âspringsâ of relatives and neighbourhood (Chalmers, 1856). The success or failure of the St Johnâs experiment has been debated ever since. Suffice to say, after Chalmers left to become a Professor at the University of St Andrews, poverty was still a major problem in St Johnâs and the Town Council took back responsibility for providing poor relief.
In 1844, Chalmers set about repeating the St Johnâs experiment in the West Port district in Edinburgh, a place that was notorious for its physical squalor and moral degradation. As a commentator at the time wrote:
The district selected was of the worst description â a fourth part of the population being paupers, and another fourth street beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. The population amounted to upward of 400 families, of whom 300 had no connection with any church. Of 411 children of school age, 290 were growing up without any education.
(Blaikie, 1896 p142)
Volunteers were organised to visit the different families, a school was opened in the tenement that had been the scene of Burke and Hareâs murders, and an old tannery loft was opened for worship on Sundays. Later a church was built, along with a library, savings bank, wash-house and female industrial school. Chalmers died in 1867. However, his scheme remained a source of inspiration to others, and in the 1860s and 1870s, similar projects emerged throughout Britain. For example, the larger-scale Edinburgh Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor was founded in 1868. The Association divided the city into 28 districts, each with visitors to pursue enquiries about the needs of families and individuals (Checkland, 1980). The territorial approach was also replicated in the Elberfeld system of German municipal poor relief, and in the establishment of the Charity Organisation Society (COS), which attempted to use this community-based approach to regulate charitable effort across the UK, and in other parts of the world.
A very different approach to poverty and poor relief looked for solutions not in charity and in individuals, but in the state. Although Scotland was, as already stated, reluctant to go down the road of statutory measures, as the extent of the social and economic problems became obvious, so the appetite for public welfare grew; it became a necessity, because voluntary effort, no matter how well-meaning, could never be enough. This reality was mirrored across the border in England. The 1844 Royal Commission on the Poor Law had painted what Levitt has called âan appalling picture of how Scotland treated its poorâ (1988: xv). He continues:
In many areas, especially in the South-West and the North, the Poor Law was virtually non-existent. Allowances, where they existed, were often a pittance and were assumed to supplement begging and charity.
(Levitt, 1988 ibid.)
The subsequent 1905â1909 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, and the Majority and Minority reports that emerged from this, are clear illustrations of the continuing lack of consensus about how best to provide for the poor and needy in society. Both workhouses and poorhouses had sought to separate out those who were genuinely needy from those who were lazy or feckless â the âskiversâ and the âscroungersâ who should be forced to âstand on their own feetâ â to distinguish between the so-called âdeservingâ and âundeservingâ poor. The Majority Report confirmed that the origins of poverty were moral, not social or economic, and argued that the poor law should remain, and be strengthened, with even tighter application of the rules and sanctions that went with it. In contrast, the Minority Report argued instead for an âextension ladderâ principle; the state should provide the basic minimum and voluntary agencies should provide extra services to âtop upâ this provision. Although this idea received little support at the time, it became the model for welfare across the UK that emerged after 1945. As the welfare state took off, with education and health services free at the point of delivery and a social security safety net available for all, so social work (and especially voluntary social services) became a residual service â something that was there for the causalities of the welfare state.
We live with the repercussions of this today. Statutory social work is not funded as a universal service; much social care in Scotland and across the UK is provided by voluntary agencies, which have themselves become professionalised to the point that volunteer effort is limited. Thomas Chalmers and his followers would be sorry to see this; th...
