Lost Stories From Victorian England's Brutal Workhouses | Secrets From The Workhouse | Timeline

This channel is part of the History Hit Network. Stick around to find out more. The workhouse was a hallmark of Victorian Britain. In an era associated with imperial pomp and industrial revolution, the workhouse represented the vast underbelly of society. An institution that caused misery to millions and evoked shame in even more. They were awful. For the poor, the homeless, the unemployed or the ill of Victorian Britain, there were no welfare benefits and no NHS. They could starve on the streets or turn to the workhouse as a last resort. When he died in the workhouse, was his body chucked out with the rubbish? Astonishingly, the workhouse survived well into the modern era, until after the Second World War. In 100 years, it was home to over 16 million people caught between poverty and destitution. By the time it finally shut down in 1948, 5 million people had died in the workhouse. Today, 1 in every 10 Britons has a family connection to this formidable institution. But amongst the stories of tragedy, there are also stories of triumph against overwhelming odds. That is absolutely extraordinary. Western Australia. Extraordinary. Now actress Felicity Candle, actor Brian Cox, presenter Fern Britton and best-selling author will explore how their families were driven into the workhouse by poverty. An ordeal with uncanny echoes of life in today's Britain. The injustice of it is astonishing. It's astonishing. And model and actress Keira Chaplin will discover how the most famous workhouse inmate of all, her grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, took on the system and won. After going through this, he probably realised that he could get through anything. Victorian Britain. An era of rapid industrial growth, but also a time of soaring population and economic upheaval. The workhouse was adopted in 1834 as an ingenious solution to the spiralling problem of poverty. The idea was simple. Humiliate the poor for asking for help. Shame them into standing on their own two feet. In one extraordinary case, it worked. Charlie Chaplin went from the workhouse to not only stand on his own two feet, but to become a Hollywood superstar and one of the wealthiest men in the world. Charlie's life began here in Lambeth, in what was once one of the poorest parts of 19th century London. His granddaughter is the actress and model Keira Chaplin. My grandfather lived here with his brother Sidney and their mother Hannah. From what I know, my grandfather grew up very poor. Hannah was a singer and she lost her voice. They struggled to find food and I know that one of the most traumatic things that happened to my grandfather is when he had to go to the workhouse. To qualify for help, a poor person had to satisfy the authorities that they were truly destitute. That they had no money, no job and no place to live. Charlie Chaplin's alcoholic father had deserted the family when he was aged nine. And in July 1898, Charlie ended up here in Lambeth workhouse with his mother and half-brother. What would have happened to Charlie, Sidney and Hannah when they first arrived here? Well, they would have approached the workhouse and Hannah would have made it known that she wanted to be admitted. Okay. At which point she would have been separated from her two sons. So she would have been led to the female ward which was on this side of the building. Okay. And the two boys would have been led across the way to the children's building. So as soon as they're in, separation right away? Separation straight away. Segregation was at the heart of the workhouse system. Children from their parents, wives from their husbands. By isolating individual groups of paupers, the authorities believed they could contain the toxic influence of poverty and stop the spread of degenerate behavior. Sign up now for a 14-day free trial and Timeline fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code TIMELINE at checkout. We can see from the map of the workhouse just how regimented it was. Not only do we have the male side and the female side but there's a further Victorian designation of good and bad. This was an attempt to try to make sure that good people were not somehow punished by close proximity to bad people. The architecture was designed to judge people really, I think. To make it... To judge them and make them feel bad about themselves for being there and to scare everyone else from wanting to go there. Absolutely. This was meant to be terrifying so that you would do anything you could to avoid it. When Oliver Twist famously asked for another bowl of gruel, he was hit about the head with a ladle. But Dickens wasn't exaggerating the brutality of workhouse life. To minimize the welfare bill, the system was designed to make sure that life on the inside was worse than earning a pittance on the outside. Hollywood actor Brian Cox made his name in blockbusters like Troy and The Bourne Identity. His great-grandfather, Patrick McCann, was just the type of person the authorities wanted to target. A Glasgow labourer who, like one-third of the city's population, managed to survive on the poverty line. But in 1897, Patrick succumbed to the Scottish version of the workhouse, the poorhouse. It's weird because one of my greatest fears has always been poverty and it's something I've always had, this fear of it. And when you see a history of it in the family, you begin to realize it's in the DNA. Patrick was one of thousands of Irish immigrant workers who had flocked to Glasgow in the hope of finding work after their own country was devastated by famine. He lived in the Cowcaddens area, one of the city's poorest districts at the time, with his wife and their eight children. She was living in tenements like this, his family, with 40 to 50 other people in one tenement. 40 to 50? Yes, so massively overcrowded compared to the present day, obviously. So how would they be divided up? Where you would have one room, a fireplace and one bed and that was it for a whole family. No heating, drafty, damp. By the late 19th century, Cowcaddens had one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe. One in every five children died of poverty-related illnesses, including five of Patrick's own children. So this is your classic close. It is. Or tenement stair. We all recognize this, don't we? We do know this very well. Annie has a record which shows just how desperate things got for Patrick's family before they turned to the workhouse. I have this document to show you, which is actually for Sarah Maguire, who was Patrick's mother-in-law. This is my great-great-grandmother. Yes. Now you see, the bit I want to point out to you is residence, Charlotte Street, on a stair. And what that basically means is she was homeless and living on the stairs. You're joking. No. You're joking. No. On the stairs. She was living, sleeping, if you like, on these hard stone stairs. We talked about Patrick and his family living in these very overcrowded rooms, but poor old Sarah was on the stair. I mean, did they not take her in? The McCanns were having their own major difficulties at this time, and they couldn't support her. At the turn of the century, there were over 100,000 people in Glasgow alone, living in conditions similar to the McCanns. Family structure seems to have been destroyed. It seems to have been eradicated. It seems to have been because, you know, there's canisters to the left of you, canisters to the right of you. It's all around you. You know, there's despair. And we're constantly applying for poor relief and constantly trying to keep ahead of the game. And, you know, I talked earlier about my own fear of poverty, but I now know where it lies, and it's a reality. It's right in the system. It's there, because what they went through, and it just leaves you... It's really bad, you know. It's really bad. By 1900, economic expansion had made Britain the richest nation on the planet, and yet almost one third of the country's urban population lived in poverty. To control the number of poor becoming dependent on what would be called welfare benefits today, paupers had to pass what was known as the workhouse test. In order to qualify for help, they had to be prepared to work 10 hours a day, six days a week, on mind-numbing, tedious labour, like breaking rocks or picking apart old rope. Inmates were treated like prisoners, but the workhouse wasn't a prison. The door was always open, and people were free to leave if they wanted. But for one in every 10 who came in, the only way out was in a coffin. This is what happened in presenter Fern Britton's family. Now, I have got a copy of the death certificate of my great-great-great-grandfather, and he has the most marvellous Christian name of Friend. He's called Friend Carter, and he died in the workhouse. And whatever he did, he did well because we're all all right now. That lovely name, Friend. Like a quarter of the population of Victorian Britain, Friend scraped a living working on the land. The upheaval of industrialisation and rural unemployment led to riots throughout his home county of Kent. But despite this turmoil, Friend was a model worker and managed to stay out of the workhouse even in old age. Right, so here we have the 1871 census. Yes. Can you see who we've got on there? Ah, yes. There's Friend Carter. And can you see what he's doing there? Agricultural labourer. So he's still working at the age of 64, and it's hard work. It wouldn't have been easy for him. God, what an extraordinary man. And he's living with his daughter Harriet at this time. People relied on each other then, especially in the family. The family unit was very, very important because there was no backup, really. No other pension, no income, nothing. No, that's right. To the Victorians, the family unit was sacred. By threatening to break up families, the workhouse played on the worst fears of society. But even the strongest families were defeated sometimes by poverty. In 1879, the youngest of Friend's ten children, Jesse, was taken ill with angina, a heart condition. The workhouse was one of the few places the poor could get free health care. And although conditions inside were dire, Friend had no choice but to take his son there as a last resort. Oh, my goodness, yes. So that's when he was born. January, 1879. Carter Jesse, age 23. Dates of discharge, April. So January, February, March, April. So he said three or four months. Yes. Well, that's good. He didn't go there any longer then. Ah, yes. But then we found him in the 1881 census, and he is in hospital in London. Well, gosh, so Friend must have been worried about him. Jesse's medical condition was so serious, he was transferred to a London hospital. But what Friend didn't know was that this would turn out to be a fake. The earliest workhouses appeared in the 17th century, but it was the Victorians who first used them as the basis of a national welfare strategy. At its peak, there were 700 workhouses in England, housing over a quarter of a million people. Each was run by a master and matron, and the largest ones, like Lambeth, held over a thousand inmates at a time. Charlie Chatlin came here as a child with his mother, Hannah, and his half-brother, Sidney. Today, the building has been converted into a cinema museum in Charlie's honour. In this very room, now used for screening films, Charlie and his brother met up with their mother one week after they first arrived. Charlie gave an account of that reunion in his autobiography. How well I remember the poignant sadness of that first visiting day. The shock of seeing mother enter the visiting room garbed in workhouse clothes. How forlorn and embarrassed she looked. In one week, she had aged and grown thin, but her face lit up when she saw us. Sidney and I began to weep, which made mother weep. Eventually, she regained her composure, and we sat together, our hands in her lap, while she gently patted them. She smiled at our cropped heads and stroked them consolingly, telling us that we would soon be all together again. But the family's moment of reunion was to be all too brief. After eight days, Charlie and Sidney were sent to a pauper school on the edge of London, leaving Hannah alone in the workhouse. A week or two later, Hannah ended up in the infirmary with what's described as dermatitis and bruises all over her body. She's somehow been victimised, picked on, hit. We don't know whether it was by staff or by other inmates. But she's physically suffered some kind of abuse. In the workhouse infirmary, Hannah would have had her wounds cleaned and dressed. For her pain, she would have been given opium. How many days did Hannah spend in the infirmary? It seems she spent about nine days here, and then after a couple of months, she was transferred from the workhouse to Cain Hill Lunatic Asylum. Well, so, basically seven weeks after being here, ends up in the Usain Asylum. This place sounds like hell. Horrifying. Officially, physical punishment wasn't allowed, although unofficially, abuse was commonplace. This is partly what made the workhouse such a feared institution. But the torment of life inside wasn't just physical. It was also psychological, as inmates were stripped of their dignity. Barbara Taylor Bradford is one of Britain's highest-earning novelists. She is best known for her rags-to-riches saga, A Woman of Substance, the first of a series of books featuring illicit affairs and skeletons in family closets. Recently, research for her biography revealed that Barbara's own family history concealed a secret from her mother's past that could have come straight off the pages of one of her novels. I first found out that my grandmother, Edith Walker, and my mother, Frida Walker, had been in the workhouse. And I never knew any of this, but I received the manuscript of my biography and I couldn't believe it. I actually burst into tears. This is the only photograph my mother had of my grandmother, Edith Walker, and she looks like quite a young madam there with a hand on her hip and the lace collars and cuffs. And she doesn't look like somebody who's poor. Edith took Barbara's mother, Frida, to Ripon Workhouse in Yorkshire when Frida was six years old. I really cried one day because I couldn't imagine my mother, who was a very sweet and rather reserved woman, as a little girl put in the workhouse. And then it leads to that awful question, why? The workhouse was so hated that many poor families stuck together through thick and thin to avoid its clutches. This was the case with Fern Britton's family until a heart condition forced one member, Jessie Carter, into a Kent workhouse for treatment. Jessie's condition became so bad that he was transferred to a London teaching hospital. I don't like the idea that we're in this operating theatre. Was he alive or dead? What happened? No, he was alive when he came here, but he was a very sick person when he came here. And unfortunately, then, he dies on the 1st of May. And given the amount of pain that he's in, it was probably a relief, actually, that he'd gone on. Now, the hospital is very keen at this point to obviously find out why a young man like that would have died, of course, because we're in a period when there's a limit. Absolutely. And all these people are standing around here. Oh, you're going to tell me he was here being post-mortemed? Yes, he was here being... Oh. Yeah. And it's at this point that he could go for further medical work. And it really depends on the family. So if they've got enough money, then his body will go back to them and they will take care of it. If not, then he'll go off for dissection. And in fact, many medical students in this room would have paid extra money in order to dissect someone like Jess. So poor Jesse, he's died. The message gets down to Kent. And what do the family do? We know they're on the breadline. From their point of view, this is a huge question for them because it's not just about the body, but it's also about Jess's afterlife because that's the belief at the time. And what they were most frightened of was the sort of things that would happen in these photographs because, as you can see, dissection doesn't just mean slightly cutting the body. It means cutting it a lot because obviously you're learning from it. When were these photos taken? Well, this photograph is in Cambridge and this is exactly the sort of dissection room that he would have gone to. It just seems so strange that paupers presumably had no civil rights over their own bodies and what would happen to them afterwards. No, there's a piece of legislation. It's called the Anatomy Act of 1832. It basically says that for the crime of poverty, and it was regarded as a crime at the time, you will be dissected. It was your fault that you'd not climbed up out of the situation. And the way to repay your welfare debt for Jess is to go for dissection. So we'll care for you in life provided that you repay your welfare debt to society in death. I always think of the Victorians as philanthropic, very religious, God-fearing, charitable, kind. And yet, if you were living on the poverty line, you were considered scum. You were a criminal because you'd never made it up to the next rung of the ladder and because of that, you were penalised. So much so that you gave your body when you died. That was it. And what happened to Friend? You know, he was 92 and he died in the workhouse. Was his body chucked out with the rubbish? By the beginning of the 20th century, Britain was accelerating into the modern age. Cars were appearing on the roads, the telephone was becoming widely used, and the first x-ray machines were being installed in London's private hospitals. The workhouse too was modernising. The standard of food, education and healthcare inside was now better than the conditions a pauper could expect outside. But despite the material improvements, workhouse inmates remained tainted by the stigma of fame. Barbara Taylor Bradford's mother, Frida, was in Ripon Workhouse as a little girl aged six. It's a bit of a shock because, well, people look down on families that went into the workhouse. Barbara's biographer, Piers Dudgeon, has found a clue as to why Barbara's family ended up in the workhouse. They're meeting outside the Ripon House, where Barbara's mother, Frida, was born. What are these papers you're holding? Now, come on, show them. They've got a secret, I'm sure. Well, this tells us... This is, in fact... 904. 1904. This is a birth certificate. Yes. It is a birth certificate of a little girl called... Frida. My mother. Let me see the date. Yes, 3rd of June, 1904. Mother, Edith Walker, domestic servant, living at 9A Waterskull Gate. And what's that? There's a cross through it. Name of father. Name of father is left blank. Oh, oh. So what we... All that we know is that Edith came back... Are you telling me my mother was illegitimate? Yes, that seems to be without a doubt. A very interesting situation. We have Frida, the first born, with no father on the birth certificate. And then we have the name of the second child she has, again illegitimately, Fred. So Frida and Fred. And then we have a third child. Yes, name of father missed off. So she is having these children now at regular intervals. Well, I hope it was the same man. But the only difference that we have between these three birth certificates... Yes. ...is that Edith had her first child at 9A Waterskull Gate. Yes, in that room there. And the next two she had at this place, 75 All Hallowgate. Whose house was that? 75 All Hallowgate isn't a private residence at all. It's the address of Ripon Workhouse. Oh, dear. Barbara's grandmother Edith came here in 1907 and again in 1910 to give birth, having been shunned by her family. There were over 7,000 illegitimate births a year in workhouses all over the country, as the institution was increasingly being used by the poor for free health care. In Glasgow, Brian Cox's great-grandfather Patrick McCann suffered a serious injury. rendering him disabled and unemployed at the age of 40. His wife had died, making him a single parent, bringing up his son Samuel, aged six, by himself. Patrick and Samuel were familiar faces at the poorhouse gates. 24th of July, 1899, another application from Patrick. Got bronchitis. Grant order for self and boy, 11th of February, 1901. Order granted for Barnhill Poorhouse for self and Samuel, certified with bronchitis. Following month, he reapplies. 1902, 1903, 1903, 1903. It just kept going in and out. And it's unbelievable. And the boy, this is his life. Poorhouse to poorhouse to poorhouse, this wee boy. In, out, in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out. It doesn't make any sense. It's just appalling. Patrick was a sick man when he went into the poorhouse. But the moment he was well enough to work, he was thrown out. He would then fall sick again, go in to be patched up, only to end up back on the streets. For 14 years, Patrick was put through this ordeal time and time again, as his health became forever worse. He's a statistic, my great grandfather. All related to poverty, all related to how we don't take care of people. It's this assault on human dignity. This endless assault on human dignity. We've got to rub their faces in it, you know. But this, look at it, the whole book is about that. And then, the 19th of June, the 19th of June, 1911, Patrick McCann is declared insane by Dr Thomas. Oh, it's just awful. I mean, it's just down this, you know, this spiral into the abyss. And finally, he goes nuts. Oh, Christ. Patrick was 54 years old when he was sent to Gartlock Asylum. At the time, he was one of 45,000 old and infirm paupers who were moved from workhouses to asylums around the country because the authorities didn't know what else to do with them. By today's standards, the treatment they received was primitive. Physical exercise for therapy and opium for sedation. Charlie Chaplin's mother, Hannah, was also committed to an asylum after she was separated from him in Lambeth Workhouse. Charlie was sent to live in a school for poor children, miles away from the life he'd known. He was one of over 800 pupils here at Hanwell Industrial School. Alongside literacy and numeracy, children were also taught trades like carpentry, metalwork and tailoring to set them up for future employment. Today, Charlie's old school is a community and sports centre. I can imagine most children, when they got here, including my grandfather, they must have been extremely malnourished, frail. Yeah, I mean, children who came from the centre of town, which is where Charlie came from, would have been some of the poorest children in London. In fact, probably some of the poorest children in the country, actually. They had physical activity, sports? They did. I mean, they were taught how to swim. And running, jumping, tumbling, jumping over ropes, skipping. Sports were quite important. It makes me wonder, because my grandfather, in his work, he was very physical. He was his own stuntman. He knew how to walk on a tightrope. He knew how to roller skate. He knew how to fall and roll. So I wonder if this is the place where he learnt a lot of physical activity. Yeah, absolutely. Here's a picture, and this has actually got Charlie down there. They look like a crafty little bunch. Yeah, they do. They've kind of got chubby faces, so they must have been pretty well fed. The school wasn't only concerned with the child's physical welfare, but also its moral discipline. The gym used to double up as the punishment room. Penalties included reduced food rations, regular beatings, and being locked up in a windowless cell for up to 24 hours. Every Thursday, the names of the kids that had misbehaved were read out in the playground, and on Friday, they were punished. All the boys would be brought in here, and there'd be a desk like this, and they would be lined up. It was only the boys. The girls weren't beaten, and it was only the boys aged over seven. Charlie's name was read out, and he was accused of setting fire to the toilet block. And actually, Charlie didn't do it, but he decided that he was going to say something different. So this is what happens. Are you guilty or not guilty, he asked. Nervous and impelled by a force beyond my control, I blurted out guilty. I felt neither resentment nor injustice, but a sense of frightening adventure as they led me to the desk and administered three strokes across my bottom. The pain was so excruciating that it took my breath away. But I did not cry out, and although paralyzed with pain and carried to the mattress to recover, I felt violently triumphant. Being an actress myself, I can kind of see the joy of having the whole room staring at you and getting the punishment, being able to control your emotions and feeling triumphant. I think my grandfather learned a lot of discipline here. Mostly, he learned how to become a stronger person and a more independent person. And I think after going through this, he probably realized that he couldn't get through anything. In 1913, Charlie moved to Hollywood, where he turned his experience of poverty into cinema gold with his classic comic persona, The Little Tramp. Two years later, age 26, he was earning the equivalent of $8 million a year, making him one of the highest paid people in the world. He went on to co-found United Artists, still one of the most famous studios in Hollywood today. But Charlie never forgot his mother and rescued Hannah from the asylum in 1921. She spent her last seven years in luxury in California, a world away from the workhouse. Charlie's success may be unique, but the resistance he showed against all the odds is shared by other workhouse inmates, people who took on the system and left a legacy of courage and defiance for future generations. Barbara Taylor Bradford's grandmother came to Ripon Workhouse twice as an unmarried woman to have illegitimate children. Each time she was accompanied by her eldest child, Barbara's mother, Frida. The workhouse has been conserved as a museum and this is the first time Barbara has set foot in the building. Now she will see for herself the place that her mother kept secret all her life. My mother was six, very young to be in the workhouse and I'm sure there was that feeling of embarrassment and shame. This is the bathroom, of course, you see. Your mother would have had to be bathed when she came in and searched. Anything private was all taken away. Why all private things were taken away? Because you were put into a public workhouse uniform and even your clothes were taken away. And what is this? Now this is the disinfestation of their clothing to take any lice out or anything like that. Everything was bundled up and they fumigated it. Your mother would have been dressed... Oh, a brown dress and a little... Well, a pinafore really, isn't it? A pinafore, yes. Over 30,000 children ended up in workhouses every year. The only toys there were had to be shared amongst everybody. All inmates were given three meals a day. A watery porridge called gruel, bread and occasionally meat. Life was ruled by a strict timetable of work and sleep with little free time. Those who entered the workhouse were often determined never to return. Alma Scaife came here in 1942. She was just six, the same age as Barbara's mother when she was here. What are your memories of this workhouse? Just the frightenedness. No, very unhappy. Bad memories? Yes. Cardboard in your plimsolls to go to school. I didn't think my bands were going like that, no way. Is that how you went to school? Yes, we did. With cardboard in your tennis shoes? Not proud of it. I hate to say I've lived there, but I'm proud of what I've become. When I was growing up and I was about 16 or 17, my mother said, I want you to have a better life than I had. Did you ever think that or say that to your children? Yes, yes. They had the best of everything. Everything. My children didn't have a hand down like I had. Everything I wore was given. My children, if I had anything given, it went in the bin. So you did give them a better life than you did. Always Clark's shoes. Always Lady Bird clothes. They've had everything, my children. My mother did say to me many times, I want you to have the kind of life I should have had. And I often wondered what she meant. And I would think, isn't she happy with my father? And they seem to be. And I think what she was thinking of is this place. I think being in Ripon Workhouse actually gave her that determination and that toughness and that will to make me have a different life, to give me the opportunities that she didn't have, basically, to be a lady. Frieda's success in bringing Barbara up can be seen as a triumph for the workhouse as a deterrent. But it was also a system that could be devastatingly cruel, especially to those who fell foul of the authorities. In Glasgow, Brian Cox is trying to find out why his sick and disabled great-grandfather, Patrick McCann, was never given the level of health care he needed in the poorhouse. Irene, hi. Nice to meet you. So what a saga. It is indeed. So many times in and out, in and out. Is that regular or was he the exception or was he the rule? Well, he goes into the poorhouse, they are looking to diagnose his health problems and they have decided he's well enough to come out the poorhouse after four days and five days each time. He's never in very long, which suggests his health is not chronic in the sense that he's off for months. Sometimes people won't be in there for months. That's not the case in terms of Patrick. And then in 1905, he's classified as a C10. What does that mean? There's a description in that book here. Can I just get this volume? This one? Yeah. OK, there you go. Now, this is what they thought he was. I don't know if you want to look at that. Category 10 there, 10th class there. Bastards. Malingerers and others of questionable character to be sent to Barnhill for thorough diagnosis, probationary treatment and thereafter transferred if necessary. Malingerer? A malingerer. Do you think that was accurate? Probably not. Because what they did was at the beginning... He had this injury. He had an injury and he suffered from bronchitis. But they don't feel that his illness is genuine. They decided about who was the deserving and the undeserving poor. And they decided in this case, he was undeserving. He was undeserving. I mean, it is a very harsh system. There's no doubt about it. It's horrible. It's a horrible system. It's horrible and the man's a victim. I mean, it's just atrocious. I mean, times are really harsh. And what you get is lots of cases of drunkenness, criminality. But what it is about most is grinding poverty. Within four years, they're sending these people in front of machine guns to fight a war for them on their behalf. You know, I mean, the injustice of it is astonishing. It's astonishing. And it's an outrage. It's an absolute outrage of what they did to these people. Sadly, that's a lot of people's life in Glasgow. I know, that's what I mean. I mean, I'm not just saying it in terms of my great-grandfather's life. I'm saying that the system sucks big time. Yeah. And it should never have happened. I mean, it is a terrible system. I don't think there's any doubt about it. Appalling, appalling. I mean, just cruel beyond belief. By classifying people into categories, the workhouse treated paupers according to how deserving they were of help. It was a ruthless system designed to judge the poor without ever addressing the problem of how to deal with poverty itself. For my family, who had nothing but appear to be very good people, and they were trying their very, very hardest to do what they could. They were trying not to be a drain on society. And yet the odds were totally stacked against them. They would never have been able to get out of where they are now. Never. How does one climb out of the gloom? How do you do it? Fern Britain's ancestor, Jesse Carter, was in all likelihood dissected for medical science because his family were too poor to pay for his funeral. Jesse's father friend worked all his life to avoid the shame of the workhouse. But the records show he ended up dying there. You can see the reference to friend having been admitted to the Strood workhouse when he was about 91 years old. He kept out for 91 years? It's incredible, yes. Yep. So I'll just, um, if we have a look through here. It's quite amazing that someone should live that long anyway at this time, especially someone who had probably done a lot of manual labour during his working life. And on this page here, you can see... Carter, friend, there he is. Name of informant, self. Friend, managed to bring himself in. On the next page, you've got the actual date. Oh, I can see the word. Yeah. Dead. Gosh. I don't know why, 120 years later, that is so, you know, you sort of hope that things would have improved for him. But it didn't. Is the possibility that he had to give his body to medical science too? Or what did they do with him? I can shed a little bit more light on what happened to friend. Obviously, Carter, friend, age 91, parish of Cliff, where buried, Malden. Who would have paid for that burial? Can you see those letters? It says F. Family. Family? Yeah. Really? Yeah. So they did, they came to collect him. Looks that way. And they buried him even though they had nothing. Oh, my goodness. Well, he must have been very well thought of. So he did get a burial somewhere. He had a proper Christian burial. Wow. One third of all workhouse inmates were over 65 years old. Like thousands of other paupers, friend had been using the workhouse as a retirement home. And remarkably, after he died, it was discovered that he'd even managed to squirrel away a nest egg. Well, well, well. I suspect that it might have been his money put by for his funeral. His funeral fund? Yeah, yeah. So he would still not be a drain on the family? Yes. Even though at the age of 91, finally, he had to relinquish himself to the workhouse. Nonetheless, he was still fighting that whole issue of being a pauper. Yeah. It's astonishing, really. What a marvellous man. Thank you, Alison. You're very welcome. Thank you. Next time, Felicity Kendall discovers the workhouse secret in her family. Born in the house. She's a goer, isn't she? Brian Cox eventually finds hope in the tragic story of his great grandfather, Patrick. Oh, my God. My mother would have been two. Right. So you would have seen his granddaughter? Yes. And Barbara Taylor Bradford discovers how her mother's siblings were sent from the workhouse to the other side of the world. I just feel a terrible sadness at this moment.