Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (9 page)

These three little girls lost their mother in desperate circumstances (and may well have been in the house when Emily died). They were about to lose their father and their oldest sister too, who, despite her youth, had probably taken on the mantle of protector. Their births were registered as ‘Martin', but they now acquired their mother's surname, Ball. However, Emily Ball was dead and could not help them. They were about to become nobody's children; children of the Poor Law Union.

A long straight path led from wrought-iron gates to the doorway of Chesterfield's Industrial School on Ashgate Road. A broad
straight line, from which there was no deviation. I can see Kitty, Margaret and Annie walking down that long, hard path, Annie too young to walk the distance unaided; three little girls holding hands, as fragile as a string of paper dolls. Annie had no idea what they were walking towards, but Kitty knew: the Industrial School, coming closer and closer.

Industrial Schools were instruments of the Poor Law, designed to house destitute and vulnerable children. The majority of their young charges were removed from their parents because of neglect (though the death of a mother could constitute ‘neglect' in itself, the children being left to their own devices). Those admitted to the Schools were to be trained in ‘suitable occupations' and so steered from the bad influences that might lead them to be a continuing drain on the public purse when they grew up. Children in the care of Poor Law Guardians were to learn to become ‘useful' members of the community, not paupers. Much was made of this intention when, in 1881, the Chesterfield Industrial School – one of the first in the country, second only to St Pancras, a local newspaper was pleased to announce – opened its doors. ‘A boy trained not only in ordinary learning of a rudimentary character, but in such trades as tailoring or boot-making, and also in the rudiments of agriculture and gardening, and a girl able to read, write and cipher, and also to wash, iron, get up linen, cook and sew, need hardly re-enter a Union poor-house again.'

A report of the opening ceremony described the buildings as well as their purpose. A central administrative block separated the girls' wing from the boys'; the ground floor held classrooms, teachers' apartments, an infants' dining room, bathrooms and lavatories, while, on the floors above, dormitories, accessible via stone staircases, extended the full length of both wings. Each child
had their own bed, a fact considered noteworthy – as, indeed, it was. For many children, including little Annie Ball, this would be the first time they'd had a bed to themselves, recipients not of comfort, but of the adamantine care of the Union.

The emphasis on the lack of ornamentation, ‘the utmost care taken to secure good ventilation' – ventilation is stressed more than once – and the insistence that no unnecessary money had been spent, conjures as grim an admonishment as any Poor Law Union could wish for. And translated into plain walls, plain fare, plain everything; draughty corridors, insufficient heating, icy water and blasts of cold air. At least one orphanage matron of the period favoured wide-open windows, regardless of the snow drifting on to the beds.

Methods softened over the years; labels softened with them. By the time my great-aunt walked through its vast iron gates, the Industrial School had been renamed the Chesterfield Children's Homes. Within a few years, the new title had stuck, but, for now,
the name recorded in the Committee's monthly meetings depended on which member was taking the minutes. For all the renaming of the Industrial School, ‘shades of the workhouse' were never far away. However well-intentioned individual committee members, they were working within the constraints of the Poor Law and answerable to the local Board of Guardians. Dietary regulations (which determined which foods the children and staff ate, and in what quantity) were those of the workhouse; the workhouse Master and Matron took charge during the School Matron's annual leave. The workhouse by any other name… there was only a thin veneer between them. Regardless of which title officialdom preferred, as far as my great-aunt was concerned, she spent her childhood in The Orphanage. Another picture keeps coming to me, although it's one I'd prefer not to see, of a little girl not yet three years old, sent to that drab institution, with its scratchy frocks, strict regime, echoing stone corridors and ever-present discipline – Walk, Don't Run; Stand Straight.

The Orphanage could accommodate 124 children. Numbers fluctu ated, but in the 1900s, it held around 100 ‘inmates', including my great-aunt and her sisters. They were fortunate, apparently. Around 1903, the institution came under the care of the Madins, a married couple who were complimented on the marked improvement in the children since their appointment as Superintendent and Matron. True, questions were asked, in Mr Madin's first year, about his severe use of corporal punishment, but these concerns were quickly brushed aside. The Committee expressed its full confidence in his judgement and authority: the Superintendent should administer discipline as he thought fit. Some may think it even more fortunate that Mr Madin died three years later, leaving his wife in sole charge.

Other residential staff included a Labour Master (for the boys), an Industrial Trainer (for girls) and a Girls' Attendant and Infants Teacher (one post). There were some half a dozen Girls' Attendants in four years. Miss Turner, Miss Berrington, Rose Church, Alice Butler, Mrs Blagdon, Marion Shawson – one after another, they traipse across the Minutes. One attendant lasted only three months, another was dismissed for insubordination after five days. These were the women responsible for the welfare of the youngest girls, the women my great-aunt should have known best, and felt able to turn to. One face after another departing: no mother, and no motherly figure to rely on (although at least the careless and cruel attendants departed as swiftly as the kind ones).

My great-aunt said she was neither happy nor unhappy during her orphanage years – both states seeming too extreme for the kind of nothingness she lived in, which was neither one thing nor another, but just Tuesday following Monday and her left foot following her right in the slim crocodile heading to and from the Catholic Church on Spencer Street on Sunday mornings. As Catholics, she and her sisters were in a minority; theirs was a longer walk to church, more fresh air and a longer time away from Ashgate Road, but greater opportunities for chapped hands and chilblained feet. Her cuffs never quite reached her wrists, no matter how hard she tugged them; her boots were generally too large or too small, with the rare pair that fitted shaped by someone else's feet before hers. She was never quite warm enough and there was never quite enough to eat. She had known it for so long, my great-aunt did not even recognise that the stone in the pit of her stomach was hunger.

Friday breakfasts consisted of 6 oz of bread, a pint of milk and a pint of porridge – glutinous, thick grey porridge that stuck to the
bowl and made her gag. With the children struggling to swallow this tepid mess without the sugar that would have helped to make it edible, much of the ration was wasted. Orders were issued that Friday porridge be replaced with three-quarters of an ounce of jam. Friday's stone became even larger. Though, however much she loathed the inedible porridge, my great-aunt was lucky to be given fresh milk and in such quantity – a splash of condensed was a more frequent offering for most working-class children at this time.

For all the ghastly food and insufficient everything, attempts were made to humanise institutional life. There were fireworks on
Guy Fawkes' Night (costing a sum not to exceed £2), annual trips to the seaside, plus the ‘usual extras' at Christmas. Benefactors donated greenery, crackers, oranges, sweets, figs and – on one occasion – dolls, though there were not enough dolls to go round, and some little girls had no idea how to play with a doll, having never had the chance until now. Figs and oranges, though appropriately festive and a vast improvement on the usual fare, disappeared with the season and were, anyway, not things you could play with. And even figs and oranges could not be relied on. Nothing nice was guaranteed. It is impossible not to consider the following year, when the youngest girls wanted dolls and none appeared.

For anything out of the ordinary, the children were dependent on someone's generosity: on upstanding citizen and committee member Miss Swanwick providing shuttlecocks and three dozen tennis balls, or the Reverend Templeman supplying footballs, a cricket bat, magic lantern slides, and so on. People living nearby sometimes donated a shilling or two for sweets, or brought in magazines they'd done with. One year, the Mayor gave £1 for Christmas games, prompting the Committee Chairman to dig into his own pocket and match it.

Christmas entertainments provided by church and chapel were gradually supplemented by more colourful treats: a trip to the dress rehearsal of
The Mikado
one year; a rehearsal of
The Gondoliers
the next, to watch Chesterfield's Amateur Dramatics Society do its finest. In 1907, the children were invited to the pantomime at the town's Corporation Theatre (no mere dress rehearsal on that occasion). At the end of the performance, when the lights went up, each Industrial School child was presented with an orange.

But these were the high days and holidays. Weekdays saw a
plainer regime in every sense: junior children attended lessons at the local elementary school and, as they approached thirteen or fourteen, began to be prepared for work. Boys could volunteer for naval training; some became farm workers, or were apprenticed in tailoring, shoe-making and other trades. For young women, as in all Poor Law Union schools, only one option was considered suitable: domestic service. (Domestic service was the largest form of employment for single women at this time.)

Industrial School girls were destined to become general servants or lowly kitchen maids doing ‘the rough': staggering with pans of scalding water; manoeuvring heavy terracotta pancheons; carrying coal – a full hod of coal weighed around thirty pounds; emptying and scouring cast-iron stew pots they could scarcely lift when empty, let alone full. The School had its own laundry where girls learned the intricacies of goffering and starching collars and cuffs. In 1907, the institution needed a new servant of its own – its lower-ranking servants rarely stayed long, though one or two were promoted within the School itself: kitchen maid one year, seamstress the next. One young woman who accomplished this feat, asked if her sister could replace her in the kitchen. Within a month, her sister resigned, unable to cope with the heavy lifting. When the Matron found a further replacement in a girl who had just left school, she could not manage the work either, being ‘rather young and scarcely strong enough'. Yet this was the role for which the Matron's school-leavers were being trained. Never mind frilly aprons and lace caps; most of these girls were destined to do the donkey work. And my great-aunt looked set to join them.

Thinking about it now, I can see the beginnings of this training in the way she polished shoes. She was a dab hand at cleaning shoes, could polish them to a shine no one else in the family could
muster – ‘I'll do them, Pidge,' she'd say, when school shoes loomed on Sunday evenings. (We were always ‘Pidge', my brother and me, to Auntie.) ‘You leave them.' It saddens me to remember this now. I want her to have had a different childhood.

Month after month, the townswomen of Chesterfield applied to the School for domestic servants. If the enquiring household was deemed ‘satisfactory' – these young women would be living in, surrendering themselves to their employers – girls were sent for a month's trial and, all being well, supplied with a uniform at the month's end. Except that, all was not always well. Girls (and boys) were returned for impertinence and insubordination; some were sent to a second household and returned yet again. Institutional life did not fit girls to become accomplished servants. It was hard to be careful with your mistress's things if you had never handled nice teacups, and some of those taking on orphanage girls merely wanted cheap and easily exploitable labour.