POOR HOUSES AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS PART 2
Ray takes us to another visit with the society of the times, including references to the Jerrems family.
Introduction

The photo above shows an Almshouse in Bourne, Lincolnshire. By coincidence a number of Jerrems ancestors lived in that county.

This is the second article on the subject of Poor Houses and other institutions. These played a significant role in the history of Great Britain, the United States and Australia and help explain some aspects of the ancestors covered in the Jerrems Journal.

In the previous article I described the origins of Poor Houses in England and then described some Australian institutions. I will now move on to other institutions, including orphanages and Lunatic Asylums.

Bede Houses and Alms Houses

In the archaic Bede Houses (named after the 7th Century English monk), dating back to at least the 15th Century (when there was a Bede House in Gainsborough), and Alms Houses the residents had the additional duty of saying prayers for the House’s founder at specified times each day! I imagine that this would have been onerous for the elderly people who had tricky knees.

Bede Houses and Almshouses were mostly promoted by (and attached to) churches.

As mentioned in my previous article, Denise Harrison’s ancestor Sarah spent the last 40 years of her life in an Alms House in Suffolk after her husband William died.

The ladies in the above photo were inmates of the adjacent Alms House, and are dressed sombrely in their “Sunday best”. Although they look rather humourless it is possible that the photographer told them not to change their expressions because this could blur the photo.

I doubt whether the man on the left had anything to do with the Alms House!

Robert Colbrook (a stepson of James Jerrems) was in an Alms House in Pennsylvania in 1920.

Incidentally, Denise Harrison and her husband Brian visited the Alms House where Sarah lived. It is still occupied (perhaps fittingly) as Old Peoples Units and has been beautifully restored. It was built in 1811 by the local Lord of the Manor.

There is still an Alms House in Gainsborough, Gainsborough being the town where Big Bill and George Jepson and their descendants lived.
Orphanages
This photo shows St Aidans Orphanage, Bendigo, Victoria.

Orphanages were run along the same regimented lines as Poor Houses, and had similar ranges of standards.

Probably the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions orphanages is that classic line in the Dickens novel “Oliver Twist”, when Oliver (having eaten his dinner) went back and said “Please Sir, I want some more”.

In my earlier article I described the large variety of situations which could lead to children being orphaned. Orphanages also took in children whose parents could not afford to look after them, or were not willing to look after them.

Many orphanages (including the orphanage shown above) were set up by church bodies, particularly the Roman Catholic Church which had the particular advantage that many Orders had been created with the view to helping orphans. The costs were kept down due to the fact that the nuns were not paid.
Orphanages sought to educate and train their charges
 
Here is an evocative photo of girls scrubbing the floor in an orphanage.
But why were they doing this?

The interpretation of our modern-day readers may be one of sadness that the orphans were being exploited by reducing them to scrubbing floors.

On the other hand perhaps the intention of the photographer was to show that the children were in fact being trained to carry out tasks which would stand them in good stead for later employment. I think this is the correct interpretation.

Girls, in particular, were trained in housekeeping, cooking, needlework etc. This had a very practical component because in the 19th Century domestic employment was the major source of employment for girls and women. Also, girls as young as twelve could be taken in by private employers as indentured maids, orphanages were a common source of these girls when they were old enough.

Although she was not an orphan, my great grandmother Susannah provides an example of a girl trained in the domestic area. The daughter of a coal miner, she was a maid working in an inn in the Blue Mountains when she met her later husband, as described in the Jerrems Journal of March 2011.

Socio-economic considerations

Orphans in orphanages tended to come from a lower socio-economic level than other children for the simple reason that their parents were in situations where they were more likely to die from accident or sickness. The usual result was that their level of aspiration was probably set at the same modest level as their late parents.

Another aspect is that these orphans did not have comparatively affluent relatives who could take them in. An example of such relatives arose with my mother-in-law’s ancestors. Two of her uncles died from “dusting” (a common source of deaths in mining towns) in the mines in Bendigo and Ballarat. In one case the widow kept the children, which were her own, in the other case the widow had children from an earlier marriage, which she kept, but she gave up the three children from her later marriage because she could not afford to look after them.

These children were “taken in” and brought up by three compassionate aunts who were comparatively well off, a very touching story which I will include in a later Journal.

High incidence of orphans

Here is a photo of girls in an orphanage making their beds. The girls are neatly dressed and the curtains are very pretty. On the downside, the beds are very close together, reflecting the situation that space was at a premium in these types of institutions, resulting in an impression of regimentation and loss of privacy.

We tend to think of orphans as a comparative rarity, however I can think of several instances. One involves a friend, whose grandmother was an orphan, born in Scotland in the 1860s.

The other instance is described in the Jerrems Journal of November 2008.It involved Anna, the great grandmother of Sandra, one of our readers, whose parents died in Utica in New York State in the 1860s. She probably went to an orphanage initially with her sister and then when she was old enough she was employed as a maid by a wealthy widow. She then went to the illustrious Root family, one of whose sons was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

United States Civil War

In the United States the terrible death toll in the American Civil War led to an upsurge in the creation of orphanages and refuges for widows. In Utica alone there were at least four orphanages. Robert Colbrook and his brother Benjamin (stepsons of James Jerrems) spent their childhood in one of them.

Asylums for the insane

In England the Poor Law Unions became a handy tool for parishes and government officials to deal with mentally disturbed individuals. In those days, the term “lunatic” was applied to a range of mental problems. These individuals were evaluated, and if they could be adequately kept in the workhouse infirmary or barracks, that’s where they were housed. For more severe cases the Union would move them to an asylum, set up initially under the 1774 Madhouse Act.

A similar system applied in Australia. In one sad case the son of Arthur Reginald Jerrems Snr (my great grandfather’s brother) and Henrietta Harrison, apparently spent most of his life in insane asylums, including the asylum at Mount Ararat (where he died), in western Victoria.

Arthur Reginald Jerrems

Journal reader Ian Harrison, a relative of reader Brian Harrison and a descendant of Henrietta’s family, spent a lot of time trying to trace the movements of Arthur Reginald Jerrems Jnr, with limited success. Ian at least located the “Report of Death For Coroner” regarding Arthur’s death at the Ararat Asylum in 1957. It was standard practice to have inquests into the deaths of inmates, the cause of death being a coronary occlusion (heart attack). The Report shows his date of admission at Ararat as being in 1916, when he was 36.

A further sad fact is that Arthur Jnr’s family would have lost touch with him. His mother Henrietta died quite young in 1890 when Arthur Jnr was only 10, and his father died in 1930. His brother William Frank (b1885), the sole other survivor of the children, moved away from Melbourne after 1919.

Arthur Jnr does not show up in the Electoral Rolls from 1903 onwards so it would seem that he had already either been put in an institution or had been judged unfit to vote. Alternatively he had been looked after by his father until 1916 when his father (an upholsterer) had reached the age of 64 and could no longer support him.

The “Report of Death stated “No trace of relatives”, confirming that no one had visited him for some time.

Arthur died at the ripe old age of 77, indicating that the rural environment agreed with him.

 

 
 
Ararat Mental Asylum

Aradale (formerly known as Ararat Lunatic Asylum) is Australia’s largest discontinued lunatic asylum. Comprised of over sixty buildings and placed in over hundred acres on the top of a hill near Ararat, Victoria, Aradale is a most-impressive facility.

Opened in 1867, the complex housed, in its approximately 130 year history, tens of thousands of patients Reputedly around 13,000 people died there in its 130 years.

Catherine Harrison

Equally sad was the case of Arthur’s grandmother Catherine Harrison, who spent time in Kew Asylum (near Richmond in Melbourne) in the mid-1870s and later died there as the result of dementia at the comparatively early age of 57.

The asylums at Kew and the regional areas of Mount Ararat and Beechworth were the main Victorian asylums.

The case of the mad cricketer

There is the old quip about mad dogs and Englishmen playing cricket in the noonday son. Here is an anecdote about a mad cricketer.

It was not all doom and gloom for inmates of Mental Asylums. My grandfather Alf Jerrems told me of an inmate of Callan Park Mental Asylum at Gladesville in Sydney. My grandfather was in a cricket team in the late 1890s playing against a Gladesville team when a member of the opposing team ambled nonchalantly to the wicket trailing his bat along the ground. The man refused to run between the wickets, contenting himself with hitting boundaries. After he had single-handedly beaten my grandfather’s team my grandfather learned that the batsman had previously played for NSW but had been hit on the head with a cricket ball!

Debtors Prisons

These institutions were notorious for having poor conditions. In contrast with all the other institutions I have discussed the inmates were not voluntary, they had been incarcerated following a court order.

Names of institutions

Most of the institutions had simple generic names like “Poor House”, “Orphanage”, “Alms House” or “Womens’ Asylum”.

However, the name of a Home established in 1862 in Parramatta must surely take the cake for complexity and lack of sensitivity. It was variously known as “The Macquarie Street Home, Parramatta”, or “The Home for the Blind and Men of Defective Sight and Senility”.

Conclusion

That’s it for now folks! I hope you have enjoyed this article and its predecessor.