Board of Guardians in Andover chose dietary number 3 as shown in source E. It is thought this was chosen on purpose as there had been a mistake there were smaller quantities of bread and vegetables than that originally planned this was done to make the workhouse less eligible. This proves that the poor in Andover workhouse may have been treated more harshly than in any other workhouse.
Source J shows the instruments used in the Andover workhouse for crushing bones. It was thought that the iron bar was so heavy that it took two boys to lift it. This was probably to make the work slower so the master had an excuse to beat them. Also the splints of bones that they were crushing could fly up and catch the faces of the paupers. This means that the poor may have been treated in Andover more harshly than in any other workhouse.
Source k is a description by the paupers themselves of what it was like in the workhouse. The pauper states that they didn’t have sufficient amount of food and that he had seen it weighed less than what it was supposed to be. The pauper states that he has seen his brother being severely beaten by the master’s son Joseph McDougal. The pauper states that after he went to bed he would eat the candle wax from his candle because he was so hungry. Other inmates would eat rotting flesh off the bones that they were crushing. It wasn’t until later that Hugh Mundy one of the guardians found out that that a graveyard nearby had been dug up for new church foundations that it was realised that the paupers may have been eating human flesh. This proves that the paupers in the Andover Workhouse were treated more harshly than in any other workhouse.
We can infer that the Board of Guardians may have wanted to make the Andover Workhouse ineligible because of the swing riots. The Board of Guardians would have owned land probably for farming and because the Swing Riots were very ferocious In Andover a lot of their property may have been destroyed. So the Board of Guardians may have wanted revenge and so they did this by making the Andover workhouse harsh on the paupers.
We can tell that the paupers in the workhouse may have been treated more harshly than in any other workhouse because of the punishments that the paupers got for the smallest things. Source D states that children were beaten for bedwetting and women who had illegitimate children had to wear a yellow stripe on their uniform as a symbol of shame. The inmates were beaten if they didn’t work or work fast enough they were even punished for communicating with other inmates. This goes to prove that the poor in the Andover workhouse may have been treated more harshly than in any other workhouse. Hannah Joyce an inmate had a base born baby, which died. She was told that she would be hung for murder until it was discovered the baby had dies from bronchitis. She then had to carry her baby coffin all the way to the graveyard. She then decided to leave unable to cope with the harshness and she was banged out of the workhouse.
However I disagree that the poor were treated more harshly in the Andover workhouse than in any other workhouse because Fareham workhouse and Eton workhouse were just as bad for example in Fareham three motherless base born children were kept in the same bed and were left to wet it they had food reduction and were kept in stocks until they were moved into a shed with no heating. It wasn’t until they were about to die that they left the workhouse and went back to Bishop’s Waltham. In Eton a woman was put in a cell for bathing her child’s feet. She was then made to clean the floor with no utensils. This proves that other workhouses were jus as bad as Andover.
Source A states that all workhouses and not just Andover should be a place of hardship and that the poor should be humiliated and the workhouses should be administered with strictness.
Dickens based source C on a workhouse and before the Andover scandal got out. So other Workhouses must have been ineligible before the Andover workhouse when Dickens wrote ‘Oliver Twist’. This means that Andover workhouse may not have been the harshest to its inmates.
Source G states that workhouses were locking the poor up as convicted criminals in a cruel experiment. This means that other workhouses were expected to be harsh as well as Andover.
Source H suggests that the workhouses weren’t so bad it says that the system was the finest in Europe. This goes towards proving that Andover may not have, been so harsh.
I think that the poor were treated very harshly in the Andover workhouse but I think the poor were treated just as badly in other workhouses such as Eton and Fareham.
