The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany

1850-1950

Wolfgang Mommsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429865671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1981 The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany 1850-1950 is an edited collection on the history and future prospects of the modern welfare state. It attempts to pave the way for an analysis of the problems of the welfare state and its historical origins, and the likely future that transcends the nation-state orientated historical accounts. This collection of essays seeks to promote an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of the welfare state in two industrial societies. So far historians and social scientists concerned with this field of research have tended to work in isolation from one another, without mutual exchange of knowledge and using different methods. This book attempts to give equal scope to both perspectives.

PART ONE

THE HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE WELFARE STATE

1 THE ENGLISH POOR LAW AND THE ORIGINS OF THE BRITISH WELFARE STATE

D. Fraser

This chapter will explore the complex relationship of the Poor Law and the origins of the British welfare state within three broad contexts. The three categories chosen are not discrete and mutually exclusive factors but for the purposes of analysis may be treated separately. Historiographically these three areas of explanation have figured prominently in studies of the origins of the welfare state. The chapter is structured around the theory that the welfare state originated:

(1)as a response to the harshness and inadequacies of the Poor Law both as a relief agency and as a value system;

(2)as a self-sustained bureaucratic development which evolved in a pragmatic ad hoc manner out of early Victorian administrative initiatives, of which the New Poor Law was the most significant;

(3)as an instrument of social control which replaced the means but not the ends of the Poor Law.

In each case the paper will test the validity of these themes both as descriptions of the Poor Law and as explanations of the development of the welfare state.

The Harsh Poor Law

The broad theory that the British welfare state grew out of a popular revulsion for and a gradual official rejection of the Poor Law satisfies two quite distinct approaches to the problem of the origins of the welfare state. First, it conforms to the predilections of the most overtly Whiggish interpretation, that which cites the growth of the welfare state as evidence of a growing enlightenment in British society and politics. On this argument, most popular in the years immediately after 1948 and perhaps most forcibly advanced by Maurice Bruce,¹ the welfare state was part of a story of progress ‘onward and upward’ by which a punitive and insensitive selective system was replaced by a humane and generous universal one. The welfare state was ‘a good thing’, ergo it was the product of a benevolent process. Equally, however, the harsh Poor Law fits with a second interpretation which doubts whether the growth of the welfare state was a linear progression from inhumanity to enlightenment. This argument, while acknowledging the inadequacy of the Poor Law, would characterise the growth of the welfare state as a different rather than a better provision of public services.² Partly through a deeper understanding of the causes of poverty, partly through the positive effects of the stigma of pauperism, partly through the growth of the franchise, governments became aware of the inadequacies of the Poor Law. Hence on largely pragmatic grounds alternative services were provided outside the Poor Law, thus freed from its morally debilitating associations. While the harsh Poor Law figures centrally in this argument, the growth of welfare is regarded not as an inexorable tide of progress sweeping the beach of destitution (the Whig view) but as an uneven cross-current which left many islands of poverty behind it and whose most advanced waves often ended up as stagnant and isolated pools when the tide ebbed. On either argument the harsh Poor Law had a profound effect on subsequent thinking, as Ramesh Mishra noticed:

What has probably been crucial in the formation of the British ideology of welfare is the background of the extremely harsh nineteenth century Poor Law. Against the stigma of poor relief with its workhouses and means test, social provision outside the Poor Law appeared as a significant reversal and repudiation of past social policies.³

There is certainly much evidence to sustain the image of the harsh Poor Law, not least in the inflexible ideology which underpinned the 1834 reform. The object of the new order was not to reduce poverty but to deter pauperism and its main weapon was the punitive workhouse test. Its purpose was well characterised by the Chairman of the Sheffield Guardians in 1855:

The great object of the poor law board is to ensure a constant unvarying and efficient discipline during the entire residence of the pauper within the workhouse. He rises to the minute; he works to the minute; he eats to the minute. He must be clean, respectful, industrious and obedient. In short the habits inculcated in the house are precisely those the possession of which would have prevented his becoming an inmate… The pauper naturally enough concludes that the relief he received in the workhouse is a very inadequate return for the surrender of his liberty – the full occupation of his time – the value of his labour – the humiliation he must endure in being associated with some of the depraved and abandoned members of the community and the painful consciousness that he has lost all self reliance and self respect. Who can wonder that the honest poor should make every effort to keep out of the workhouse.⁴

The ‘honest poor’, thus deterred from applying for relief, would find their own salvation and the cost to the ratepayers would be correspondingly reduced. Even the widespread survival of outdoor relief, of which more will be said later, was the result of the Guardians’ preference for the cheapest, rather than the most humane, form of relief. Indeed, the flowering of philanthropy, which was the almost self-justifying concomitant of the Victorian Poor Law, itself inhibited the Guardians from paying subsistence benefits. As a Marylebone Guardian explained in 1874:

The Guardians know full well that, under the present conditions of charity… any really deserving case is perfectly sure to be supplemented by charity, and in the interests of the ratepayers they naturally refrain from giving a larger sum when a smaller one is practically sufficient.⁵

Paupers were to be imprisoned in ‘Bastilles’ or sustained on meagre doles outside: it was hardly surprising that the two most persistent accusations levelled against the New Poor Law was that poverty had been made a crime and that the poor were to be starved.

There was a remarkable continuity of views across the country condemning the new system. Thomas Maberley’s famous charge that the 1834 act was ‘tyrannical, unconstitutional, anti-scriptural, anti-Christian, unnatural, cruel and impolitic’ was but an echo of the Birmingham comment – ‘a more monstrous, a more iniquitous, a more cruel, a more tyrannical measure was never brought before an English legislature.’ In Bradford it was claimed that the Poor Law would ‘grind the poor to the dust’, in Nottingham that it would ‘draw the cord tighter round the neck of the poor’.⁶ And the many workhouse scandals, culminating in Andover, merely confirmed these judgements. If families were to be broken up, female paupers abused, humiliating task work performed and starvation rations provided, it was understandable that the workhouse would be the resort of only the truly desperate while the ‘merely poor’ would struggle on unaided. As a prominent Liverpool philanthropist explained, there existed ‘side by side so much useless and needless splendour and so much unmerited and unrelieved destitution’. Yet the Poor Law was inadequate to meet the legitimate demands of poverty in the midst of plenty because

the receipt of parish relief is felt so deeply to degrade the pauper that the best of the working class will rather starve – often do rather starve – than apply for it…

It [the workhouse] does succeed in deterring those who can support themselves from applying for parish support; it does diminish pauperism, it has effectively checked the rapid progress of demoralisation and ruin under the old Poor-Law of Elizabeth. But as a system of public charity it fails altogether. It is beyond the omnipotence of Parliament to meet the conflicting claims of justice to the community, severity to the idle and vicious and mercy to those stricken down into penury by the visitation of God... There is grinding want among the honest poor; there is starvation, squalor, misery beyond description, children lack food and mothers work their eyes dim and their bodies thin to emaciation in the vain attempt to find the bare necessities of life but the Poor Law authorities have no record of these struggles.⁷

The greatest cruelty in the Poor Law system was that practised upon those who declined to apply for relief who were yet in need, those in Lloyd George’s phrase who were ‘too proud to wear the badge of pauperism’. Hence it seems reasonable to assert that the welfare state was essentially a reaction against a harsh and unfeeling Poor Law.

On the other hand, this interpretation rests upon a condemnatory characterisation of the Poor Law, a characterisation that derives as much from the image as from the reality of Victorian poor relief. Nothing fixed the image of the inhuman Poor Law more firmly in the popular mind than the early Victorian workhouse scandals. Yet many of these scandals were exaggerated and others were imaginary. Those that were proved frequently derived more from incompetence than malevolence. It was, however, politically expedient for anti-Poor Law agitators to sustain rumours of workhouse cruelty and, for example, in the case of the Basford scandal, which was eventually immortalised by Engels, the whole episode derived from political manipulation.⁸ Poor Law, municipal and even parliamentary elections could be won on an anti-workhouse vote and so popular resentment of the new Poor Law was often fanned by a workhouse scandal. Local political control of the Board of Guardians determined what political colour anti-Poor Law sentiment would wear. In the early Victorian years the anti-Poor Law vote was Tory in Salford and Nottingham but Whig in Banbury.

The popular image of the workhouse was in fact at variance with its actual character. Poor Law Inspectors might tell Guardians, as H.B. Farnall did in the mid-1850s, that ‘if there was one class more than another requiring the workhouse test it was the able bodied man in receipt of parochial relief or that workhouses ‘were intended for the idle and for the dissolute and for those who were able to work but would not work’.⁹ In practice it was the able-bodied adult male who was least in evidence in Victorian workhouses. The mid-Victorian radical W.E. Forster spoke for Guardians generally when he remarked in

that it would not be supposed that the workhouse test, as generally understood, would be generally applied or that it was the intention of the Board of Guardians at any time to withhold outdoor relief and to substitute indoor relief… he would not consent for the honest well disposed pauper to be compelled to enter the workhouse because he was obliged to apply to the parish for relief.¹⁰

During trade slumps urban industrial Guardians refused to apply either the workhouse or the labour test because the increased demand for relief was clearly not due to moral failing. In rural areas also the workhouse test was rarely applied, as Sir John Walsham confirmed:

with scarcely an exception the tendency everywhere is to substitute outdoor for indoor relief whenever the guardians may legally do so… The exceptions to the Prohibitory Order…are almost invariably treated as rules. Outdoor relief may be given ergo outdoor relief should be given.¹¹

The workhouse might be a place of fear, but it might also be a place of comfort. As an American scholar has remarked with reference to the best-run union in Shropshire:

In the case of children…the Union set out in the late 1830s to offer an education superior to any afforded by Poor Law authorities in the Kingdom in a workhouse among the cleanest, largest, most professionally staffed in the land. Those who criticised workhouses held their tongue before the Atcham model. The inmates were generously fed and medically well watched.¹²

It was indeed the services provided within the Poor Law, and particularly within workhouses themselves, that most qualify the image of the harsh Poor Law. The debt the welfare state owes to the Poor Law may be measured in the legacy of Poor Law bui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Part One: The Historical Foundations of the Welfare State
• Part Two: Unemployment and the Crisis of the Welfare Policies in the Interwar Period
• Part Three: The Breakthrough of the Welfare State after the Second World War
• Part Four: Past and Future of the Welfare State in Social-scientific Perspective
• Notes on Contributors
• Index