The Reigate workhouses established in the 18th century grew out of centuries of national poor laws. The defining framework for two centuries was set by Tudor legislation, which put the burden of caring for the poor on local authorities. They were succeeded by a more punitive and widely feared national regime in the nineteenth century that survived until the 1930s.
As far back as the Black Death, there have been national laws that tried to force the able-bodied poor to work. The need became more acute when Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries stripped away the main source of institutional welfare. Alarmed by a swelling population of the poor, the Tudor State put the whole burden on secular local authorities, requiring them to raise funds locally and penalise ‘idle’ vagrants. The Elizabethan Poor Relief Act of 1601 was the grand finale of this legislation. It remained the defining framework for the next two centuries until it was replaced by the new Poor Law in 1834.
Parish workhouses were first established by the Poor Relief Act of 1722. This established a legal framework for parishes to buy or rent buildings to establish workhouses and contract out their management. It did not require workhouses to be set up and most parishes did not do so. Parishes were expected to apply what was known as the workhouse test to anyone seeking poor relief. A poor person could be denied parish poor relief if they refused to enter the workhouse and work in return for food and lodging.
In Reigate, two workhouses were opened by 1730. One was in Park Lane, then called Workhouse Lane and this building has since been demolished. The second was at Shaw’s Corner, then known as Gander’s Hatch. This was in the ‘Reigate Foreign,’ (the outlying rural areas). The workhouse occupied the rear part of what is now the Hatch pub and the area behind it.
Together the two institutions had places for 70 people in 1776. Although called workhouses, they were mainly used to house the aged, homeless and infirm poor, and destitute children. It was far cheaper for any parish to continue the former practice of giving unemployed but able-bodied labourers small cash handouts known as outdoor relief in their homes. These could be regular weekly or monthly ‘pensions’ or shorter-term cash doles and they kept most fit workers available for hire in the agricultural economy.
By the late eighteenth century, the borough was spending about £300 a year on the Reigate workhouse and double that in Reigate Foreign. A further Poor Relief Act in 1782 (The Gilbert Act) allowed neighbouring parishes to unite into Gilbert Unions to share the cost of building new workhouses. This Act formally excluded the able-bodied from overcrowded workhouses to focus on the elderly, sick and orphaned children. Parliament sanctioned the payment of outdoor relief to those who could work, where no work was available.
Only 6% of parishes in England and Wales formed a Gilbert’s Union, but Reigate was one of them. The Reigate Union comprised Reigate Borough and Reigate Foreign, Horley, Nutfield and Headley. In 1793, the Lord of the Manor, Lord Somers, and some of his tenants agreed to the enclosure of ten acres of Earlswood Common, known as Broad Plain, for a bigger workhouse. This opened in 1794 at the east side of what is now Pendleton Road and was administered by a Board of Guardians for the Poor.
This is when the smaller workhouses at Shaw’s Corner and Workhouse Lane ceased to operate as poorhouses and were repurposed to provide basic housing for low-income workers.
In the early years of the 1800s, the medical support for the Reigate workhouse was provided by Dr Thomas Steele and Dr Thomas Martin. They visited every five days and treated a range of diseases including measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, tuberculosis and even malaria, typically caring for half a dozen patients on their visits.
‘A Don Juan appears to have been around as several female patients were afflicted’.
They also introduced vaccinations, undertaking 60 vaccinations. In 1809 there was a local outbreak of smallpox, for which the doctors inoculated patients with cowpox. However, there were no surgical procedures undertaken, apart from the amputation of a toe. The doctors dealt with venereal disease for both men and women. After one visit in 1813, the doctor noted,
The Reigate Union sub-contracted the management of the workhouse to guardians in a practice which has been described as ‘farming the poor.’ The contract for this work was advertised at £1900 a year in 1811. The guardians were responsible for providing food, clothing, bedding, and medical care and any money they did not spend on the inmates was pure profit.
The contractor could also keep any profits generated by the inmates’ labour. A business manufacturing blankets and coarse woollens and a fulling mill were set up within the workhouse which employed workhouse inmates capable of work, and the poor whom the guardians were supporting through outdoor relief. Children were employed in spinning. Sometimes such work provided a small profit but not enough to make the workhouse self-sufficient and by 1834 the business had ceased.
This system naturally incentivised the contractor to cut costs to the minimum, and it resulted in complaints that were investigated in 1826. It was concluded that many abuses existed though the nature of these abuses and the remedies taken were not recorded.
More sympathetic commentators observed that the poor hated the idea of entering a workhouse, dreading the loss of liberty. In November 1821, the British Mercury was among several newspapers that reported the very sad story of an elderly Reigate couple who had lost their only means of support when those providing for them moved to Ireland,
No alternative was left but to perish or apply to the parish for relief. It has frequently been stated that persons who have lived respectably feel the greatest repugnance at taking parochial relief: in this instance the unhappy female found the prospect of the workhouse so terrific, that death appeared more acceptable. A few days since she took an affecting farewell of her aged partner in affliction, who had lost the use of his limbs, and soon after threw herself into the well in her garden.’
For all its inadequacies, the workhouses were fulfilling a social need and they were relatively flexible and humane compared to what was to come. Economic depression and an increasing population caused a big increase in the financial burden of poor relief local poor rate payers. The Government responded with the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which ended outdoor relief to force the able-bodied to find work or enter the workhouse. In parallel, conditions inside the workhouses were made deliberately worse than those of the lowest paid labourer. Husbands, wives, and children were split up and housed in different areas of the facility.
Fewer, larger Poor Law Unions were set up across the country. A new Reigate Poor Law Union was formed in 1836 with an elected board of 23 guardians. It now covered 17 parishes in an area stretching from Betchworth and Buckland in the west to Horley in the south, King’s Wood and Merstham in the north and Nutfield in the east.
Inmates wore rough uniforms, and were fed monotonous diets of gruel, bread and cheese. Able-bodied men were made to perform backbreaking, repetitive labour such as breaking stones or picking oakum, (teasing apart old ropes).
A workhouse existence was also effectively confinement for its inmates. In February 1860 the Surrey Gazette reported in February that an inmate known as John Bull was charged with the crime of absconding from the Reigate Union House. He had been sent to Bletchingley on a Thursday to inform the family of another inmate that their relative had died but he had not returned until Friday evening. For this offence he was committed to prison for 21 days with hard labour.
The local newspapers liked to report stories of poor people ‘playing the system.’ In November 1864 the Surrey Advertiser reported that George Whiteman, ‘an able-bodied man and a good labourer’ was given three months imprisonment with hard labour for leaving his wife and daughter in the workhouse for two prolonged periods ‘at the charge of the Reigate Foreign.’ The wife and child were admitted ‘in a shocking state of destitution,’ probably because the family was so poor, but the newspaper was more indignant that the cost of their care amounted to more than £3.
Some poor people did try to pull a fast one. The Sutton Journal indignantly reported in October 1867 that tramps were given to destroying their clothing during short stays in the workhouse’s ‘tramp ward’, so necessitating their replacement at the union’s expense.
Throughout the nineteenth century, social reformers and writers including Charles Dickens drew attention to the harsh conditions in the workhouses but they were not officially abolished in the UK until 1930 by the Local Government Act 1929. The final remnants of the workhouse system were dismantled in 1948 with the introduction of the National Assistance Act and the National Health Service. However, the physical buildings and remaining inmates were often simply rebranded as Public Assistance Institutions.
In Reigate the workhouses were taken over by Surrey County Council and existing inmates transferred to a new location at St Anne’s, Redhill which later became an old people’s home. The workhouse building became Redhill County Hospital which was closed in 1991 when the site was redeveloped for housing, with most of the buildings being demolished.
The Doctor’s Tale: 1662-1975, (1977), L Dulake
Workhouses of London and the South East, The History Press (2019), P Higginbotham
Reigate: Its story through the ages, (1945) W Hooper
Poverty, Unrest and the response in Surrey, (2006), Judith Hill
Reygate, Earlswood Common, two watercolour drawings of the workhouse, by J Hassell, 1821
SRO P26/9/13