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The part of Winson Green where houses were built was largely on land which had been farmed, whereas the institutional buildings were built on less productive heathland. The Borough Gaol (pronounced jail) was opened in 1849; the Borough Asylum, later All Saints, followed two years later; and the workhouse opened in 1852. This huge complex of buildings took up nearly 100 acres. Finally, from 1883-4 the Borough Hospital for Smallpox and Scarlet Fever was in use. This and All Saints have now closed, and whilst the prison remains, thankfully the hated workhouse has gone and in its place is the City Hospital (Dudley Road Hospital).
The workhouse was how our ancestors tried to deal with those caught in poverty. Since 1601 when Queen Elizabeth 1 made every Church of England parish responsible for caring for the poor in its district, a tax was collected from the better-off and distributed by officials to people in desperate need of food, clothing and housing when their families could not afford to help them. Some parishes, like Birmingham set up a workhouse for the able-bodied poor to be put to work, to ‘earn their keep’, and to accommodate the elderly and infirm who had no-one to look after them.
In 1834 a new Poor Law came into effect which brought much harsher conditions to discourage the poor from seeking assistance by making the conditions inside the workhouse worse than those outside so only the most desperate would apply. When a person’s only option was to ask for help from the workhouse they were legally defined as a ‘pauper’ and would lose all rights as a citizen. Inside the workhouse men, women and children would be separated from each other, and every able-bodied person over the age of 7 would be expected to work a harsh and relentless job such as breaking stones or unravelling and cleaning old rope, a process called ‘picking oakum’. Not everyone worked inside the workhouse, many were sent out to work, for very little pay, and expected to return to the workhouse every evening.
The Orders and Rules for the Workhouse include the following: Rule 3: That the bell be rung at a quarter before six o’clock in the morning, from Lady-day (25th March) to Michaelmas-day (29th September), and a quarter before seven from Michaelmas-day to Lady-day, for the outworkers to go to their several employments. Rule 4: That the poor, in general, do retire to their several apartments at nine o’clock in the winter, and at ten o’clock in the summer, at the ringing of the bell, and that the wardkeepers see that the fires and candles are put out at those times, on pain of incurring the governor’s displeasure.
The 1885 plan for the Birmingham Workhouse shows how people were segregated according to their age, gender and health.