The Relieving Office

The Relieving Officer was responsible for responding to applications for 'relief' from the poor, which might take the form of food, money, medical assistance or admission into the dreaded Workhouse. He was required to investigate each case by visiting the person's house to make enquiries about their health and determine their circumstances.

Where someone needed medical assistance, he would arrange for the District Medical Officer to attend them and where they were destitute he would arrange for them to be conveyed to the Workhouse. It was also his duty to convey 'lunatic' paupers to an asylum and he kept a strait-jacket for this purpose.

As well as orders for the doctor, the workhouse or the workhouse infirmary, there were orders for coffins and cabs to carry people. Then there were the foodstuffs, distributed as 'out-relief' to the needy. Recipients came to the Relieving Office on a Friday for their weekly hand-out and waited their turn on long benches.

The Relieving Office had well-scrubbed floorboards and white-washed walls to guard against infectious diseases. Loaves of bread were stored on specially made shelves and there were drawers for packets of tea, sugar and oatmeal. The relieving officer made out orders for perishable goods such as meat and milk to be provided by tradesmen. So it was something like a food bank, GP surgery reception and dole office.

As at a modern-day dole office, applicants were questioned and assessed on their ability to work. A chapter describing the Relieving Office system in The Pinch of Poverty, by Thomas Wright (1892 ) tells us that a part of the relieving officer's job was

"to thwart the designs of idle and habitual charity-hunters when they attempt to prey upon the forms of charitable relief by law provided."

And that says it all.

Women fallen on hard times could expect a lot of questions, little sympathy and no help. When abandoned by a husband, they were suspected of plotting to defraud the system with him.

Women under sixty only received out-relief if they had more than one child. They were expected to work and their fourteen year old children were expected to work. The fact that the work available to women and fourteen year old girls was so low-paid that they couldn't feed their families didn't enter into it. There are many people who can relate to that situation today.

There was no help coming from the Relieving Officer, just intrusive and demeaning enquiries or a ticket for the Workhouse, where a mother would be separated from her children. So women were caught between a rock and a hard place, topping up charring and laundry work with stints engaging in the oldest profession. It was so widely known that you couldn't live on the earnings you made as a shop assistant that men considered teenage girls who worked in shops 'available'.

When girls aged out of parish relief and their families could no longer keep them, they might work at laundry or go into domestic service, become hawkers. This is the context for marriages involving girls of 14 or 15 - it meant they were provided for by their husband. Quite often, a married sister took in younger siblings, too, so child marriage could benefit the family as a whole.