The Social Worker Speaks

A History of Social Workers Through the Twentieth Century

David Burnham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138245587
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317015451
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Social Worker Speaks charts the motivations, work activities and attitudes of social workers across the country from 1904 to 1989. The book is about workers in the public sector (from Poor Law to Social Services Departments), probation and workers in the voluntary field (including early century philanthropic visiting societies as well as specialist societies such as the Children's Society and the NSPCC). Where possible accounts by and the words and thoughts of social workers themselves are used. Since the war, histories of social work have concentrated on practice theory and methods, developments instigated by legislation, university training and professional status, but there has been little attention paid to who social workers were, what they believed, what they actually did, and what they thought of what they did. Also, individual social workers appearing in nearly all histories have been 'leaders' - managers, teachers or academics, with people who did the job on the front line accorded barely a mention. If part of the aim of this book is to remedy this partial coverage, another aim is to offer a more human history of social workers. There is too little celebration or humour in what has been published about the history of social workers; The Social Worker Speaks deliberately includes stories of how social workers behaved, their frustrations and triumphs, passions and occasional sins. So this is deliberately not a history of social work, but a history of social workers - the first of its kind.

Chapter 1
1904–1914: Visiting Societies, the Poor Law and Local Activists

Mary Haslam Goes to Town

On the morning of 15 June 1904 Mary Haslam made her way from her house, White Bank, into Bolton. She may have used the new tramway or a pony and trap or even walked the two miles to town. At the time around 150 textile mills dominated the town’s industry, each belching smoke. All houses used coal or coke for heating and cooking, and smoke from steam locomotives completed a toxic mix, often cloaking the town in a muggy cowl. But Mary Haslam would not have thought twice about the tang of coal smoke in her throat, motes of ash in the air, nor noticed the ammoniac odour of horse dung on the streets; all would have been too familiar (Bolton Evening News [BEN] 15 June 1904a: 3).

In the town centre carts and carriages would have been plying up and down avoiding deliverymen on bikes and messenger boys darting back and forth. The street layout she passed through, as in many towns in Britain, would have been familiar to twenty-first century eyes, but the life in it was very different. If chimneys ruled the skyline, the backdrop at ground level was jerry-built terraced streets with thin walls and one source of heating – the kitchen range. Toilets were outside, by the back yard gate, though water was piped to a single tap in the house and gas was used to light fragile gas mantles. Floors were stone-flagged and usually bare and a two up, two down terrace was the limit of ambition for a cotton worker or miner, no matter that families of six or more children were commonplace (Foley 1973, Hamer 1938).

These houses were small, cold and crowded and were treated like dormitories, with people leaving the house for things we regard as domestic activities. Many used public baths to wash, bakery ovens to cook, or bought plated up meals or fish and chips to eat at home. People went out to pubs, music halls, choirs, missions and societies. Drunkenness was rife, aided by only limited restrictions on pub opening hours, and in 1904 the town had 126 pubs and 225 ale houses, for a population of barely 200,000 (Bolton Directory 1904). Syphilis was common especially in the armed forces, but tuberculosis (TB) was the big killer, taking off tens of thousands of Britons each year. Tens of thousands more died of opportunistic infections such as pneumonia, whooping cough or diphtheria – all of which thrived in conditions where people were undernourished and worn out. And while epidemics of cholera were long past, large-scale infections of smallpox were still a threat. Even the relatively well-off fell prey to such threats as typhus and TB (BHC GBO/28/50, BHC GBO/28/4).

Half the working men in industrial towns were in mass occupations in factories, mills and mines, 36,000 men and women working in mills in Bolton alone. Nearly a million men worked on the railways and a million in mines. An eleven-hour day was the norm; hours often of mind-flattening repetition and constant noise. And the workplace was dangerous, there being a steady procession of fatal and crippling accidents in mills, factories and mines and the occasional disaster such as the Pretoria pit disaster of 1911, when an explosion in a mine five miles from Bolton killed 320 men and boys. Childbirth was probably a bigger killer, with some parts of industrial towns having each family lose one child for every five born. The high death rate of women in childbirth contributed to the considerable number of one-parent families and step-parents, a constant feature in accounts of social workers at the time (Thompson 1992).

Childbirth apart, women’s work was safer than men’s, with a third of all women who worked outside the home employed in domestic service. Safe perhaps, but their constant task was to defer to their masters. Deference to elders was rigid too, and where children shared space with adults – school, home or workplace – the adults frequently used humiliation, intimidation or the strap to control them. And while the affluent were often condescending about the crudities of those obliged to defer to them, working class women had to develop immense capabilities in managing all the washing, cooking, cleaning, child-rearing and budgeting – often working out of the home as well, or taking in needlework or other outwork. At the same time middle and upper class women in the same station as Mary Haslam did nothing for themselves and, as one historian put it, were almost useless (Marwick 1967, Roberts 1976, Thompson 1975).

As she made her way to her business in town the far from useless Mary Haslam may have pondered these things. She was one of a number of active affluent local women who worked in the Poor Law Union and in voluntary organisations, lobbied for improvements and visited poor families in distress.

Local Activists

Mary Haslam was one of a distinct group of women in Bolton, but there were thousands of such women across the nation whose activities had been supported and stimulated by the Local Government Act of 1894. This extended the franchise, allowing women candidates for Councils and Poor Law Boards. The franchise-widening coincided with the impact of several Education Acts from 1870 onwards, which resulted in a huge increase in literacy amongst working people. At the same time, the reduction in the general working week to around 55 hours and the appearance and popularity of mass circulation newspapers in the 1890s meant that increasing numbers of working class men were both readers and writers – and interested, informed and able to take part in local politics and administration.

All this stimulated debate about the role of the Poor Law, local government and the traditional attitudes which had dominated local affairs. Affluent women came forward as candidates; in some places facing jeers at meetings and in the columns of local newspapers. But a trickle of working men and affluent women were elected to Councils and Poor Law Unions, joining the ranks of professional men, retailers and industrialists who traditionally peopled such bodies. The new members often had a different attitude to poverty and to the role of women than their established male colleagues. In Bolton in 1894 no less than five women had been elected to the Board of Poor Law Guardians, supported by a cross party alliance of clergymen, employers and worker’s interests. Of this class of 1894 the most significant figure was Mary Haslam (King 2006).

Mary Heywood was born in 1851 into an affluent Liberal and Unitarian family. She married William Haslam, a mill owner and prominent local Liberal, in 1872. Once her four children were growing, she embarked on a career in public service which spanned a quarter of a century. The 1901 census reveals that, in White Bank, the Haslams had five live-in servants so she had ample time to devote to her wide range of social and political interests. She joined the Bolton Workhouse Visiting Committee (BWHVC) in 1885. Such committees, traditionally made up of the wives of local professionals, visited infirm and older paupers, taking flowers and other petty comforts, laying on treats and days out. Mary Haslam was involved in that kind of work but, from the beginning, she championed a more ambitious agenda. The Guardians accepted BWHVC suggestions such as the classification of mental patients so they could be offered separate care, payment for workhouse inmates who worked in the laundry and the establishment of a halfway house for young women leaving the workhouse as a means of re-establishing friendship groups in the outside world. Steven King suggests that Mary Haslam had an impact because she did her homework, consulted with staff, lobbied Guardians individually and knew how to propose reforms which gave the other Guardians room to manoeuvre (King 2004). Once a Guardian, Mary and her colleagues established a workhouse library, introduced individual ovens to the Cottage Homes for children (hot food previously having been brought over from the workhouse), brought in ordinary clothing for workhouse children and persuaded the Guardians to employ more paid staff in the workhouse, replacing inmate labour. She also proposed, and had accepted, the employment of a married couple as foster parents in one of the Union cottage homes to replace care attendants for children and replicate something closer to family life for them. But like other female Guardians this formal role was far from Mary Haslam’s only welfare activity. She was a member of the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) committee and the Bolton Poor Protection Society (BPPS) – a long-standing local charity for which she herself undertook visits and befriended families.

Although we might not, in the twenty-first century, describe Mary Haslam as a social worker it is clear that, at the time, she was regarded as just that, being referred to in the local newspaper on her death as a zealous social worker (BEN 1922: 4). She was, like many others with time, aptitude and determination, what we might call a ‘full spectrum’ social worker – someone who saw a need, gathered supporters, pulled together a plan, raised money, managed the initiative and was personally involved in supporting the individuals or families who were the focus of the plan. Another ‘full spectrum’ social worker in Bolton at the time was Mrs Greg, another affluent woman and a Poor Law Guardian. Her primary commitment was to support the local workshop for the blind, which she had set up, taking the longstanding workshop in Liverpool as her model. She found out by chance the plight of blind children:

I paid the first visit I think I ever made to the Education Offices … to secure a pair of spectacles for a child … Mr Hilton, the … then Superintendent Attendance Officer, pointed out to me how the table was scattered with papers about the deaf and dumb. Each individual case when about to be returned from school was notified to Mr Ayliffe and he undertook to … make provision for them (Bolton Journal and Guardian 1913a).

Mr Hilton pointed out that nothing was done for blind children and Mrs Greg was horrified. ‘They were allowed to sink into the abysmal depths … simply allowed to degenerate into hopeless wrecks.’

She learned of 172 such children who had left school in the previous two years. Mrs Greg called together a committee of like-minded women and put in place arrangements to help the children fend for themselves and prevent them from becoming street singers or helpless. The committee investigated practice in Manchester and Nottingham and put in place a training school teaching the children to type, to weave and make clogs and jerseys. The committee also arranged evening classes and free concert tickets. But the core of the work, according to Mrs Greg, was to assure that ‘no child was allowed to depart from school unwatched’. Her ambition was ‘that there shall be continuity of care from birth to the time when they shall have been taught to earn their own independence followed by reasonable supervision.’

The breadth of her commitment is revealed by Mrs Greg’s purchase of a building as the centre for activities, her involvement in visiting many families herself and chasing up employment opportunities for individual children (Bolton Journal and Guardian 1913a).

There were several other such women in Bolton: Mrs Mothersole, Mrs Barnes, Miss Barlow and Miss Reddish, who initiated many schemes to improve the welfare of the poor and sick. There were thousands like them across the land. They each had their own specialism and most were involved in the women’s suffrage movement. Mary Haslam’s special concern was TB and she sponsored what became an annual health week in Bolton, which took place for several years before the Great War.

But her journey into Bolton that June morning in 1904 lay at the heart of her activities. She was travelling to attend the meeting of the Board of Guardians which met every other Wednesday. She tried to contribute to every meeting, save for a month off in August and a winter break in St. Moritz. There were two items on the agenda that morning with which she was particularly concerned. She had recently persuaded the BPPS to appoint ladies to its committee. As Hayworth puts it:

The most useful work it was felt they could do was to bring to bear their womanly sympathy … to their poorer sisters in distress. A lady was invariably a more welcome visitor to the homes of the poor … where the clumsier efforts of a man could be fatal (Hayworth 2007: 17).

She proposed to ask the Guardians to offer a grant to the BPPS which was having difficulty raising funds for its applicants. The agenda that day also included consideration of a proposal by Mrs Barnes to introduce the Case Paper system – a recording arrangement where each applicant for out-relief had an individual record, a case paper, completed on application and updated as and when necessary. The proposal was to replace the old ledgers, in which the details of each applicant for out-relief were recorded chronologically; necessitating a search through the previous pages of the ledger should the same family or individual apply for help again. The members of the Union agreed to consider this and Mary Haslam was appointed to a sub-committee to look at it in detail (Bolton Chronicle 1904: 3). Support for this clear, helpful change was typical of the sort of move Mary Haslam and her progressive group championed. The proposal to introduce individual case papers was of immense significance. Like the payment to inmates for working in the laundry, closing the workhouse school and sending the children to local schools, it was one of the small changes that shifted the perception of the Guardians. The grand leather-bound ledgers – and they were very grand indeed – were one of the aspects of the Poor Law which implied that people applying for out-relief (payment or cash) were an anonymous mass, an endless, undifferentiated stream of need to be assuaged; the Poor. A separate buff folder about each applicant, a case paper, on the other hand confirmed their status as individuals. It also challenged the informal practice knowledge held by the Guardian and the relieving officer (RO), as a case paper could be used to confirm or deny opinions of the officials. And it required the RO to keep a record of their contacts with families and individuals, necessitating something different of them. As tiny as this proposed change was, it epitomised a shift in the official attitude to those seeking help from the Poor Law.

Philanthropic Visiting Societies and Settlements

What Mary Haslam’s and Mrs Greg’s activities demonstrate, Jane Lewis identifies as the Edwardian ‘mixed economy of welfare’. Local authority, Poor Law and charitable organisations not only worked together as a matter of course but were often led by the same people (Haldane 1911, Lewis 1995, 1996, Burt 2008). But this day-to-day collaboration masked a politically fraught debate nationally about emerging state intervention into the lives of poor people which confronted the powerful philanthropic tradition of poor visiting. In order to place the emerging role of social workers in both spheres, we’ll consider Poor Law functions and charitable efforts to help the poor. Charity first.

In 1876 J.R. Green wrote a skit on charitable work, which still had force at the turn of the century. Green, a Church of England clergyman, was for a while in Stepney, a warren of grim courts populated by earnest dockers as well as drunkards, prostitutes and thieves. So he knew poverty and the poor. In The District Visitor (1892) he identifies three sorts of charitable work:

1. General visiting of the poor. Green has in mind here the lady parish visitor, asked by the vicar or his wife to spend, say, an afternoon a week visiting the poor of the parish.

2. Personal efforts of an individual. Committed, romantic young men are Green’s model here. Fellows in ones and twos would descend on some dark court, live there and encourage the poor to live decent lives using direct teaching, advocacy and setting an example. Sustainable vehicles for such personal commitment were established when residential settlements were set up in the dingy parts of our great cities. The first, Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, London, was established by Samuel Barnett in 1884. Most, set up over the next two decades, were associated with and populated by universities.

3. Organised, recorded district visiting with the clear aim of offering help, encouragement, advice and relief, but only to those who demonstrated that they could use it to better themselves. Here Green speaks of the Charity Organisation Society and its ilk.

To these types of activity may be added two more:

4. Immediate time-limited relief in response to some natural disaster. The most common natural disaster in Victorian Britain was winter and time limited Distress Committees were ubiquitous up and down England. They distributed food, cash, blankets and so on more or less indiscriminately because the need was immediate and pressing.

5. Finally came precisely targeted charitable activity for specific categories of vulnerable people: abandoned children, the blind, the feeble-minded, fallen women and so on. Prime examples of organisations which developed from these responses include Dr Barnardo’s Homes, Thomas Bowman Stephenson’s National Children’s Homes, the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society, the Church Penitentiary Association and the NSPCC.

The tradition of Christian alms giving was beating strongly in nineteenth-century Britain and money distributed by charity in mid century outstripped that distributed via the Poor Law (Young and Ashton 1956). The evangelical revival of the early century encouraged such activity and the emancipation of Catholics in 1829 and the strength of non-conformist churches added rivalry to the charitable efforts of different sects. More than this, with the industrialisation of Britain, the emergence of cities, the size of which were unprecedented, and which were teeming with people introduced a new phenomenon. The census of religious worship of 1851 revealed low attendances in cities, especially amongst the poor and of course their numbers and degradation overwhelmed what religious infrastructure there was (Mann 1853). It was in these circumstances that the general duties of the vicar’s wife and her lady friends to visit the sick and needy developed into something more determined and, in the form of organised visiting charities, something new.

Although the evils of drink, gambling and immorality fired much charitable effort, a more subtle and pervasive threat was pauperism – a word which in nineteenth-century Britain carried a precise meaning. Paupers were thought to choose a way of life which depended on handouts, either from gullible lady visitors, as Green describes, or from the Poor Law. If people were pauperised by handouts, it was thought, they would not take responsibility for themselves. Pauperism was not so much a description of poverty as state of mind that middle and upper class interests thought many of the poor aspired to. This social analysis underpinned the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, whose aim was to make help from the state so unpalatable, in the form of stigmatising, regimented workhouses, that only the meanest and most desperate would accept it. This unpleasant strategy was described as ‘less eligibility’. But it was also the logic underpinning the work of many voluntary visiting societies which sprang up across England in the latter third of the nineteenth century (Young and Ashton 1956).

The accusation that the charitable activities of the middle classes were a means of policing and controlling the poor, has validity. Many of the philanthropic leaders were open about wanting to educate and civilise the poor, to make poor people accept their lot with genteel acquiescence. And some affluent charitable visitors were sometimes baffled or disgusted by the people they worked with (Lewis 1991). But some contemporary observers regularly criticised what they saw as oppressive attitudes and hypocrisy in organised charity (Green 1876, Attlee 1920). And as early as 1860 Ruskin, in Unto This Last, offered an analysis of society which honoured poor people. However most people at the time, rich or poor, active or complacent, did not have imagination wistful enough to envisage the majority of people being able to gain access to decent housing, good sanitation, regular well-paid employment and an expectation of good health. That being the case, it is understandable that religiously motivated charity workers, understanding that in this world the poor were condemned to an uncomfortable lot, should do their best to ensure the poor took up the offer of better things to come, and therefore be encouraged to make their own efforts to seek both spiritual salvation and economic independence.

One tactic used by charitable workers from the 1860s onwards was the use of practical relief – money, bread, a roof – as a way of getting alongside the poor person so that her soul could be saved. Such activity was accompanied by the fear that the helper’s good will might be abused by deliberate fraud on behalf of the poor, or what became known as overlapping – giving money or relief twice over, or giving it where it was not necessary. The corollary of these anxieties was the practice of many of the poor: to get as much out of this process as they could. This is encapsulated in a petty but precise way by the tale in William Woodruff’s memoir of a poor upbringing in 1920s Blackburn, The Road to Nab End (2000). Woodruff describes Sundays when he and his pals would sit through Sunday school sessions of three different sects just to get the bun on offer at the end of each. The instrumental approach adopted by many of the would-be saviours and the instrumental response of many of the would-be-saved was neat if nothing ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 1904–1914: Visiting Societies, the Poor Law and Local Activists
• 2 1904–1914: Missionaries, Inspectors, Lady Visitors and Mr Cramp the Almoner
• 3 1914–1930: The Great War and After: A New Breed
• 4 1919–1939: Public Assistance: New Ideas, Old Attitudes?
• 5 1939–1948: The Impact of the Second World War
• 6 1948–1971: Social Workers: Public Servants
• 7 1948–1971: Training, Outsiders and Themes
• 8 1971–1979: Seebohmising
• 9 1980–1989: This is Alright
• Afterword
• Appendix 1 Chronology of Circumstances and Events Relating to the Activities of Social Workers During the Twentieth Century
• Appendix 2 List of Applicants for the Post of Child Welfare Visitor Advertised by Bolton Poor Law Union in 1925
• Bibliography
• Index