Church & Social Work Ils 181

M. Penelope Hall, Ismene V Howes, Hall & Howes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136260278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

This is Volume I in a series of eighteen on Public Policy, Welfare and Social Work. Originally published in 1965, this is a study of moral welfare work undertaken by the Church of England.

PART ONE

Historical Development

1
RESCUE AND REFORM

I

FEW existing diocesan and local moral welfare associations were started before the closing years of the nineteenth century, but the work itself has a much longer history. There are indications that both homes for ‘fallen women’ and institutes for the care of foundling children¹ were in existence in France and Italy as early as the seventh and eighth centuries, and during the middle ages communities of ‘Magdalens’, the majority of whose members seem to have been women reclaimed from a life of prostitution, were to be found in a number of European countries. There is no evidence that any such communities existed in mediaeval Britain, but the record of a lay attempt to shelter and care for unmarried mothers has survived, namely that of London's famous Lord Mayor, Richard Whytyngdon, who in St. Thomas's Hospital, Southwark, in which he was interested, ‘made a newe chambyr with VIII beddys for young women that had done amysse in trust for a good mendement.’²

At this time there seems to have been no general rejection of the illegitimate child,³ and ‘in the community obligations of mediaeval society a way could be found to provide for him’.⁴ Where such care was lacking he might be sheltered in one of the religious houses, or in the school or hospital attached to it.⁵ If not adequately cared for either in the community or by the Church, it was all too easy for the destitute child, whether legitimate or illegitimate, should he survive at all, to grow up into a vagrant or became a habitual beggar or thief.

Beggars and vagrants were common enough in the middle ages, but the economic and social changes which took place during the Tudor period added to their numbers. It was to deal with the pressing problem of destitution, and the vagrancy which accompanied it, that the Tudor Parliaments passed the succession of Acts known collectively as the Poor Laws, and the unmarried mother and illegitimate child with no one else to care for them became the responsibility of the Poor Law authorities, at that time the parish officers.

Under the laws of Settlement, children born out of wedlock were chargeable to the parish of their birth. This ruling caused great hardship to their mothers, as women ‘big with bastard child’ were often harried from parish to parish by overseers trying by all means in their power to evade the cost of rearing the children when born.⁶ The unwillingness of the parish overseers to carry the ‘great burden’ of maintaining these children, a burden which, it was alleged, was ‘defrauding of the relief of the impotent and aged, true poor of the same parish’,⁷ was also responsible for the passing, in 1576, of what proved to be the first of a succession of Bastardy Acts, and its even harsher successor in 1610. The Acts condemned ‘lewdness’ and asserted that it should be punished, but their main purpose appears to have been to force parents of illegitimate children to pay for their upbringing,⁸ since ‘great charge ariseth upon many places within this realm by reason of bastardy, besides the great dishonour of Almighty God’, as the 1610 Act phrases it, putting first things first.

The maintenance of the illegitimate child was at that time evidently regarded as the joint responsibility of the two parents, and in the eighteenth century so determined were the authorities that the putative father should be made to pay his share that legislation was enacted which made it possible for a single woman to charge a man with being the father of her child, where-upon, unless he could prove the contrary, he became liable to indemnify the parish for the cost of the child's upbringing. In default of this he could be committed to the common gaol or house of correction.⁹ An alternative to being apprehended, and perhaps imprisoned, was to marry the girl, the resultant marriage being founded, according to the Commissioners appointed in 1832 to enquire into the administration of the Poor Law, ‘on fear on one side and vice on both.’¹⁰

Whether the undesired consequence of a casual connection, or deliberately sought by a courting couple in order to expedite the wedding, since marriages were often long delayed by the economic and social circumstances of the time, pre-marital pregnancy was common throughout this period. In many instances the wedding took place before the child was born, but this did not always happen, and should the woman be left destitute, the parish overseers, reluctant as they might be to help, were bound to make some provision for her. When once it became clear that all efforts to bring about a marriage, or to secure maintenance from the putative father, or to remove the woman to another parish had failed, the treatment meted out to unmarried mothers and their children does not seem to have been unduly harsh by the standards of the time. According to the Poor Law Commissioners the amount of the order made on the father in respect of his bastard child varied from 7s. or 8s. a week to IS., the average being about 3s. or 2s. 6d. in the towns and 2s. in the country, and should he fail to pay it was secured to the mother by the parish. As witnesses to the Poor Law Commission were at pains to point out, this meant that she might be better off than a respectable widow, whose allowance was commonly only IS. 6d. a week. Whether legitimate or illegitimate, children with no one to care for them were usually boarded out with local families. Their treatment naturally varied from family to family and parish to parish, but in rural parishes, at any rate, they ‘do not seem to have suffered from deliberate ill-treatment or neglect’.¹¹

In London, however, the lot of the orphaned or deserted child left to the care of the parish was a sorry one, and few of those who came into public care under the age of three survived to reach adolescence.¹² But even this slender chance of life was denied to those infants whose mothers, in their shame and despair, left to perish by the roadside or on a dunghill. It was the plight of these infants that so aroused the pity and indignation of the retired sea captain, Thomas Coram, that he embarked upon his arduous and unremitting campaign to establish a hospital for their reception and care.

Thomas Coram was by no means the first, even in this country, to envisage the founding of an institution for the care of homeless children. Christ's Hospital, founded in 1552, was intended to provide for ‘fatherless children, orphaned or illegitimate’, but by the middle of the seventeenth century it had become respectable, and would only accept legitimate children. In 1713 Joseph Addison printed an article in the Guardian (No. 105) which urged that provision should be made for foundlings, for, he lamented, ‘what multitudes of infants have been made away with by those who brought them into the world and were afterwards either ashamed or unable to provide for them’.¹³ It was, however, Coram who displayed the zeal and persistence necessary to overcome apathy and even hostility and bring the scheme to fruition.

The Royal Charter for the incorporation of the ‘Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children’, the Foundling Hospital's legal title, was received in November 1739, and the first batch of thirty children were admitted in March 1741. The institution quickly justified its existence. By March 1756, 1,384 children had been received, rather more than one-third of whom survived, a mortality record which, poor as it may seem by modern standards, compared favourably with that of the poor law authorities.¹⁴ But, in the words of Coram's contemporary and friend, Jonas Hanway, ‘What were 1,384 infants to the thousands still drooping and dying in the hands of the parish nurses?,’ or, for that matter, still being left on the dunghills by their desperate mothers, some of whom might have tried to get them admitted to the Foundling Hospital and failed. Demands for admission quickly outran accommodation, and early in the Hospital's career its governors encountered one of the most painful and difficult problems of social policy, for they had to decide whether to succour a few with some chance of success but leave the remainder to perish, or, on the other hand, to attempt to give assistance to many knowing that this might endanger the well-being of all.

The first attempt to deal with the situation was to introduce a system of balloting for places, a method of selection which, at a time when it was believed that no questions should be asked of the mother, was probably the fairest available. By 1756, however, the finances of the hospital were in a parlous condition and the governors petitioned Parliament for help. They were granted a subsidy of £10,000, but with the condition attached that all children under a certain age brought to the doors of the hospital must be admitted. This was the origin of the disastrous experiment of indiscriminate admission which, during the five years it continued, led to a great deal of abuse and seriously threatened the hospital's standards of child care. It was discontinued in 1761, and methods of admission which took into account the circumstances of the case were slowly introduced.

Not only the care, but also the training of foundling children, and their eventual apprenticeship were regarded as being among the prime objectives of the charity, for its founders and governors were businessmen as well as philanthropists and, well aware of the shortage of labour both in England and in the ‘illimitable and untouched areas of the New World’, they were indignant at the economic wastage as well as the moral iniquity of leaving infants to perish. This consciousness of the long-term benefits to be derived from the rescue and training of children who would otherwise probably grow up into thieves and vagabonds may help to account for the fact that it was laymen and men of affairs rather than clergymen and representatives of the Church who were active in this and related eighteenth century charities.

The Foundling Hospital was an early and enlightened attempt to deal with the problem presented by the illegitimate child, but it did not tackle the problem of illegitimacy itself. Coram and his friends were, indeed, accused of condoning profligacy by making themselves responsible for its visible consequences, and the grant to the Hospital from public funds was attacked by at least one contemporary on the grounds that it was likely to increase the evil it was seeking to cure, and ‘There will unhappily be too much Reason for saying that this present Humanity will be future Cruelty’.¹⁵ No social care was available for the mothers and, concerned as Coram might be about them, and distressed as he was by ‘the morbid morality possessing the public mind by which the unhappy female who fell a victim to the seductions and false promises of designing men’ was then left to face ‘hopeless contumely and irretrievable disgrace’,¹⁶ he could do little to ease her burden except to see that when she brought her child to the hospital she was treated with consideration and respect. Like others in a similar situation, she was left to struggle to rehabilitate herself as best she could and, if unsuccessful, to drift into a life of prostitution.

Prostitution, with its attendant evils of drunkenness and venereal disease, was widespread in eighteenth century London. According to Jonas Hanway, writing in 1784, three thousand prostitutes then walked the streets; many of them were young, scarcely in their teens, and doomed to die before they were 24.¹⁷ Some had been introduced to the brothel keepers by their mothers who then shared the profits, and they had no other way of earning a living.¹⁸ At the beginning of the century societies ‘for the Reformation of Manners’ flourished, and were active in prosecuting women on the streets, keepers of disorderly houses and Sabbath breakers, but all this zeal did little or nothing to help the individual woman back to normal life. As time went on, advances in medicine led to increasing concern about the health problems associated with prostitution and the Lock Hospital was opened in 1746 for the treatment of venereal disease in patients of either sex. But, quite apart from any question as to the efficacy of the remedies then available, many women on being discharged had no alternative but to return to their former profession. It was not till forty-one years later, in 1787, that the Hospital's avowed intention of ‘converting them to a more godly way of life’ as well as treating their sickness, found practical expression in the opening of the Lock Asylum, the object of which was to provide some form of training for women patients discharged from the Hospital.

Meanwhile the earliest and most famous institution for the ‘reception, maintenance and employment of Penitent Prostitutes’, the Magdalen Hospital, had already been in existence for nearly thirty years. Opened in 1758, this institution can be regarded as a forerunner of present day moral welfare work, not least on account of the humanity of its founders and the catholicity of their concern. This was evinced in the wording of the Hospital's Constitution which made it plain that those responsible for the care of the penitents were expected to observe ‘the utmost Care, Delicacy, Humanity and Tenderness; so that this Establishment, instead of being apprehended to be a House of Correction may gladly be embraced as a desirable, safe and happy Retreat from their Wretched and Distressful Circumstances’.¹⁹ Penitents from all classes and backgrounds were admitted, only ‘black women’ being expressedly excluded.

As had been the case with the Foundling Hospital, whose work had helped to inspire them, Robert Dingley, the founder of the Magdalen and his associates in the venture were all laymen, but their motives were religious as well as humanitarian, and religious training was regarded as a fundamental part of the process of reclamation. The Magdalen had its own chapel and chaplain and ‘quickly won the respect and support of the Church’.

The success of the Magdalen Hospital led to the establishment of other charities with a similar purpose, particularly during the early years of the nineteenth century. The first of these appears to have been the Dalston Refuge, established in 1805, and this was quickly followed by the London Female Penitentiary established at Pentonville in 1807. Although information is scanty, there seems no reason to suppose that these homes were run on lines different from those of the Magdalen itself, and, as yet, the word ‘Penitentiary’ had not acquired its later unpleasant overtones. The early rescue homes seem to have been local projects, associated with a particular district such as Stepney or Westminster, and founded independently as the result of the concern of a benevolent individual or group. There is no evidence that they were connected in any special way with any particular church.

It was not long before similar homes were opened outside London, for example one at Bath which was established in 1808, ‘upon a plan somewhat similar to that of the Magdalen Hospital in London’. Its object was ‘to receive into close residence, protection, government and employment, with a view to reformation and restoration to their friends, or to prepare for placing in suitable services, a limited number of such deluded females as have wandered from the paths of virtue’. To these ‘repentant daughters of vice and misery’ the penitentiary afforded ‘a friendly shelter from the storms of adversity and the goadings of conscience’. Like those of the Magdalen itself its ‘internal arrangements’ were formed ‘on the basis of encouraging industry’ as well as ‘affording a penitential asylum to the outcasts of society’ and no inconsiderable portion of the penitentiary's funds came from the profits of the work done by the ‘unfortunate inmates’. ‘Many females of distinction feel a gratification in thus affording them almost constant employment’, concludes the account triumphantly.²⁰ The combination of piety, complacency and, withal, a genuine desire to help, so characteristic of nineteenth century rescue work, was already firmly established.

By the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century the rescue of fallen women had become a reputable, and in the case of the Magdalen itself, even a fashionable form of charity. By this time, too, it had already been recognised that, ‘it is not only more charitable and humane, but less difficult and expensive, to prevent women and girls from being driven to Prostitution than to reclaim them when they are Prostitutes.’ There is no evidence that Mr. Massie's rather grandios...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Historical Development
• Part Two: The Present-Day Setting
• Part Three: The Organisation of Moral Welfare Work
• Part Four: The Scope and Character of the Work
• Part Five: The Issues Involved
• Notes
• Index