Andover Workhouse Sources Questions

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Karen Spanswick

Source C is from a novel and is about events in a workhouse.

How useful is this source for investigating events in the Andover Workhouse at that time?

Explain your answer using source C and knowledge from your studies.

Source C is useful because it states that gruel (and it states that the food was inefficient) was served and we know that this was served in the Andover Workhouse because they wanted the Andover workhouse to be as inhospitable as possible and gruel was served because it wasn’t very nutritious. Also Source C states that the child was desperate with hunger, which I know from other sources that in the Andover workhouse the inmates were starving because the master Mr. McDougal stole their food for himself and his family. There is almost proof of this in Source C as it states that the master was a fat healthy man and from this we can infer that this could have been due to him stealing the inmates food.

Source also states that the child was reckless with misery, which the inmates of the Andover workhouse were because families were split up, single mothers were shamed by having to wear a yellow stripe on their uniform, women were indecently assaulted by the master Mr. McDougal and they were so hungry that they were eating rotting flesh and bone marrow from the bones that they were crushing.

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Source C describes the child in the novel being hit round the head with a ladle by the master and we know that the master in the Andover workhouse would not hesitate to do this because the Andover Workhouse had to be as inhospitable as possible. The master even called for a beadle, which was someone who tried to keep things in order. The child would then have to be punished for daring to ask for something, which we can infer would have happened in the Andover workhouse.

The source was written as part of a novel originally, ...

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