The Union Workhouse

Workhouses were once ubiquitous elements of the local landscape. These severe, penal-looking establishments, built in the years following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, replaced the use of cottages and other vernacular buildings as the dispensaries of relief under the Poor Law Act of 1601.  The 1834 Act compelled parishes to group together in Unions, with a single (usually large and imposing) workhouse, able to deal with the increased number of paupers seeking food, lodging and work.

Bill Hardy, an expert on the Bishops Stortford Union Workhouse, came to talk to our local history group recently. As Bill said, workhouses were so common a sight that many families will still have a workhouse story to tell. I am no exception. A close relation of mine was brought up in a workhouse in the early decades of the 20^th century (his own family having been the administrators of such an establishment in a Kent village).

Once you were admitted to a workhouse, it became very difficult to break free. The monotonous daily routine tended to breed a reliance on institutional support and maintenance. All ages were catered for: old and young, able-bodied and infirm. Families would be admitted, but then brutally split up by funnelling the adults into separate men’s and women’s quarters, with boys and girls also grouped separately after they reached the age of seven.

The Bishops Stortford Union workhouse was an imposing brick-built establishment and still stands today. It was built in 1836-37, to a hexagonal design by WT Nash.  (To the north, the Saffron Walden Union had already built a similar-looking workhouse a year earlier, to accommodate 340 inhabitants.) Workhouse residents were required to wear uniforms. Boys’ hair would be cut short, to reduce the risk of infestations. Residents would be sent to work in local fields, or given other mindless tasks to perform, such as walking on treadmills or picking oakum.

Tramps would seek overnight relief here, burying their possessions beneath nearby hedges where they could be retrieved after they were turfed out in the morning (they were not permitted to return within seven days, so would walk to the neighbouring Union for another night’s board and lodging.) Like many such places, the Stortford workhouse eventually became an infirmary (at the turn of the twentieth century). In 1936 it played host to the marchers heading to London on the Jarrow Crusade. Eventually it became a community hospital, until its closure in 2004. It is now divided into residential properties.

Bill was one of a team of local history researchers who delved deep into the public records, in particular the correspondence of the Poor Law Commission, formerly located at Somerset House. Four thousand documents were separately digitised and transcribed by Bill and the rest of the team, ensuring that the names and lives of those associated with the workhouse were properly recorded for posterity. The results of the work can be interrogated on the National Archives website.

You can see the Bishops Stortford Workhouse by looking at the satellite image on Google Maps. The hexagonal design is clear, with three blocks forming the radial spokes at the centre. This provided for six separate yards into which inmates would be sent for exercise. It does all look somewhat like an alien imposition. It might almost be a spaceship dropped onto the landscape, like that satellite image of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, sitting in the yard of a film studios in Surrey.

Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills

Not having been before, I didn’t know quite what to expect when I joined my local history group on a visit to Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills recently. I had heard of the site, where gunpowder had been made since the 17th century, but was otherwise slightly in the dark about what went on there. The visit was a revelation. 

The first surprise was just how big the site is. It is reached by a turning off the A121, opposite a McDonalds and a branch of TK Maxx. The presence of the site is announced by a roadside board, but first you must travel through an estate of recently built executive homes. You start to wonder if you are heading the right way, but eventually the road ends in a car park, and the gates of the complex are revealed. 

This innocuous entrance manages to conceal a site of 175 acres in total, which would once have been even larger (before the housing developments). The whole site is effectively an island, bounded by the River Lea and various of its tributaries. The site is low-lying and no doubt prone to flooding, but water was central to the industrial activities that took place here. 

There had been mills here for many hundreds of years, associated with the monks of Waltham Abbey itself. An early 17th century mill was adapted for making vegetable oil, and then at some point again, and certainly by the 1660s, converted to the manufacture of gunpowder. 

The tour of the site began with a video, on show in the permanent exhibition hall, which explained the 9th-century Chinese origins of gunpowder: a mixture of saltpetre (potassium nitrate, 75%), sulphur (10%) and charcoal (15%). Water could also be added to enable the gunpowder to be formed into blocks or cakes by means of screw presses.

The mills at Waltham Abbey were owned first by the Hudson family, and then the Walton family, who eventually sold to the Crown in the 1780s. The military use of the mills was associated at first with Lieutenant-General Sir William Congreve, who oversaw the expansion of production. Gunpowder was a useful propellant, since it generated sufficient power to fire a bullet or rocket, without being so great as to explode the device from which the ammunition was fired. 

The gunpowder produced at Waltham Abbey played an important role in the wars with France, and also influenced American gunpowder production. The line in the US anthem ("The Star-Spangled Banner") -- "...the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air" -- is a reference to the Congreve rockets that were used in naval and military assaults at this time (invented by Sir William's son). 

Gunpowder continued to be manufactured at Waltham Abbey into the 19th century, and was used in the Crimean war and later the Boer war, as well as for large-scale civil engineering such as the building of the railway network. Steam-powered technology replaced the use of the water-driven mills. The second stage of the mills’ life was connected with the development of cordite as a replacement for gunpowder from 1889 onwards. Cordite, an admixture of guncotton and nitroglycerine, had the benefit of being smokeless, and became the primary produce from the Waltham Abbey site during World War One. Thereafter, other explosives produced at Waltham Abbey included TNT and RDX, used in the bouncing bomb in World War Two.

The third phase of the site’s development came after 1945, when it served as the Explosives Research and Development Establishment, or ERDE during the Cold War. Here, rocket technologies were developed, right up until the site was decommissioned in 1991. 

Still owned by the Ministry of Defence, the gunpowder mills site is now largely run by volunteers, some of them former members of staff from ERDE days. We were taken on a trailer ride across the site, which is heavily overgrown in parts. Nestling among trees, scrub and ponds are semi-derelict remnants of each of the three phases: 18th-century powder mills, 19th-century cordite-mixing plants, and 20th-century research structures. The buildings often showed signs of their high-explosive purposes: they would have solid blast walls built next to them, or be built in shapes (such as the E-form) that were considered better for minimising the effect of accidental explosion. 

We heard of how the workers at the site had to take special care with their clothing. Matches and anything else that could cause a sudden detonation were strictly forbidden. In fact, the fear of contamination by dirt meant that workers often had to change into special clothing, including leather boots known as ‘Waltham Abbeys’. They would be instructed to work patiently and carefully, and to walk slowly and to avoid any action that might cause a sudden spark. There were fatalities at the site from time to time. Those workers involved in mixing acids for cordite were told to jump into the nearest water if the acid ever spilled on them. We heard of one worker, required to monitor temperatures all-day long, who was given a one-legged stool to sit on, to deter him from falling asleep on the job.

The future of the site is somewhat uncertain. After all, what is to be done with a group of largely derelict buildings, tucked away on an abandoned wetland site? Waltham Abbey has similarities with a site such as Orford Ness, also decommissioned in the early 1990s and now maintained by the National Trust in a spirit of ‘curated decay’. At Orford Ness, the history of 20th century military research vies with the conservation of a particularly rare form of shingle and the plant and animal life that is associated with it. At Waltham Abbey too, nature is slowly intruding to become the more dominant feature of the site, now that the leather-clad workforce has disappeared. In the middle of our trailer tour, we caught a glimpse of a group of fallow deer, their large antlers just visible to the naked eye as they sheltered from the sun under a clump of alder trees. 

Waltham Abbey Gunpowder Mills can be visited in the summer months on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Special tours can also be booked through Invitation to View. 

Bartlow Hills

A landscape palimpsest worthy of the name is at Bartlow in Cambridgeshire, near to the northern Essex border. Here, the Victorians drove a railway line through a Roman burial ground laid out in the first century AD. The railway itself disappeared in the 1960s, not having anywhere near the longevity therefore of three of the Roman mounds, the central one (at 13 metres) the largest of its kind in northern Europe.

 

Victorian railway tunnel cutting into Mound 5 at Bartlow Hills

Whatever possessed the Victorians to think that this was a good spot for a piece of transport infrastructure? Not long before the railway arrived the mounds had been excavated, revealing a treasury of finds: containers of cremated remains, lodged within wooden chests that also included vessels of food and drink, flowers, box leaves, incense and traces of blood, wine and milk mixed with honey. The finds were taken to Easton Lodge in Essex, the home of the Maynard family, but the fire of 1847 that destroyed the Elizabethan mansion  at Easton also destroyed the majority of the artefacts (though some examples still survive at Saffron Walden Museum).

Mounds 4 and 7 at Bartlow Hills

Perhaps the removal of the treasures inclined the railway company to think there was no harm in driving a train track and tunnel through this most ancient of sites. There were originally eight mounds in total, and traces of a few more survive on private land adjacent to the three that still stand today. These three are now held in guardianship by Cambridgeshire County Council, meaning that the mounds are fully accessible for public visiting. It is well worth climbing the stairs on the largest of them, to take in the view from the top.

The footpath leading to the mounds begins in the churchyard of Bartlow church, itself well worth a visit because of the remnants of its elaborate wall paintings. Three of these survive too, details of late 14^th-century decorative paintings depicting St George’s dragon, the weighing of souls by St Michael, and the bearded face of St Christopher. The church is one of only two round-towered churches in Cambridgeshire, and it is said that King Cnut ordered it to be built after the Battle of Assandun, when the Danes were triumphant over the English army of Edmund Ironside. (Sadly there is no evidence to support this theory, and the exact location of the Battle of Assandun remains unknown.)

St Michael, weighing souls, Bartlow Church

St Christopher, Bartlow Church

St George's Dragon, Bartlow Church

Bartlow Church, Cambridgeshire

 

Enoch Girling put it out

One of my Christmas highlights was the series of Late Junctions on Radio 3 hosted by Stewart Lee. Lee’s passion for interesting (if obscure) music made for some very enjoyable discoveries, which included for me the Suffolk-based violinist Laura Cannell. Cannell’s recent album, Hunter Huntress Hawker, featured on the set list, and I subsequently discovered it had been recorded in St Andrew’s church, Covehithe, on the Suffolk coast.

This reminded me of the visit we made to St Andrew's in August last year, while taking our (now customary) Suffolk holiday. It was a somewhat typical late summer’s day – for which read grey, cold and rainy. I had not been to Covehithe before but had heard much about it – not least from the China Miéville short story. (Miéville once worked in Chapel Books in Westleton, not far from Covehithe.)

  

Covehithe is significant because half of the church is no longer there. The bulk of the 15^th-century fabric is now ruinated, having been pulled down in the second half of the 17^th century when the costs of repairing it had become too prohibitive. Instead, the parishoners downsized, and built a smaller thatched church on the footprint of the earlier one, abutting the still-standing tower.

The medieval ruins are evocative. But then so is the 17^th -century church. Inside is a 15^th-century font. Two curious medallions on the north and south walls record the rebuilding of the church with the words ‘James Gilbert put it out 1672’ and ‘Enoch Girling put it out 1672’. Gilbert and Girling were officers of the parish, who ‘put out’ the contract for the rebuild.  

St Andrew's church is now partly looked after by the Churches Conservation Trust, and is well worth a visit.