The Philanthropic Society in Britain with Particular

Reference to the Reformatory Farm School, Redhill, 1849-

1900

by

Mary Thompkins, BA (ANU)

This thesis is presented for the degree of Master of Arts of The University of Western Australia

In the School of Humanities

Discipline of History

2007

2

Table of Contents

Table of Contents 2

Abbreviations & Identifications 4

Preface 5

Introduction 7

Chapter 1. An Overview of the Society, 1788 – 1815 15

Chapter 2. Toward the Farm School: Beginnings of Partnership with the State, 1817-

1849 42

Chapter 3. The Philanthropic Society’s Farm School, Redhill: 1849-1879 71

Chapter 4. ‘Emigration or Home Disposal?’ 116

Chapter 5. Responding to a More Interventionist State 1880-1900 143

BIBLIOGRAPHY 175

4

Abbreviations & Identifications

AJCP – Australian Joint Copying Project, Microform held at National Library of Australia. Some records of the Philanthropic Society concerning emigration to Australia were copied as part of this project. BPP – British Parliamentary Papers reprinted in the Irish University Press Series Great Britain, Parliament, Sessional Papers, House of Commons and House of Lords. Material used from this source was derived from the Microform edition of Nineteenth-century papers produced under the general editorship of Eriksen. RPS – Royal Philanthropic Society (until 1952 the Philanthropic Society) SLS – Surrey Library Service, Woking, Surrey, UK

Preface

The research for this thesis began eleven years ago, but I knew of the

‘Philanthropic’ since childhood as my mother told of her upbringing – 1895-1910 – in a

Labour Master’s cottage on the Philanthropic Society’s Farm School for delinquent boys at

Redhill, Surrey. Her recollection of life on the estate of the Philanthropic Society’s Farm

School was detailed and borne out in my study of the Society’s archives

I wish to acknowledge the support, moral and financial, of the History Department,

University of Western Australia. A grant from the university afforded me the opportunity

to undertake primary research in England during 1996.

I thank Mr Iain J. Brash (former Head of Department, History) for his supervision of

my initial research. Professor N. A. Etherington became my supervisor upon my return to

complete my thesis when suggestions for re-organising the focus of my work were

invaluable.

During 1996, I met another mature-age student, Doreen Whitten, whose interest in

the Philanthropic Society arose from an interest in juvenile delinquency, who went on to

complete a Ph.D thesis on the history of the Society 1788-1848. For that reason, I

subsequently changed my focus to explore the work of the Society 1849-1900, while

retaining original features of my own overview of the first six decades of the Society’s

history

I thank the Royal Philanthropic Society, incorporating the Rainer Foundation, of

Brasted, Kent, for permission to consult their archives, then held at Kingston upon

Thames, later with the Surrey Library Service, Woking. I wish to record my appreciation

2

of help from Toni Knight, personal assistant to the Chief Executive of the RPS. My thanks

also go to the archivists and staff at the British Library, the British Archive, Kew, and the

County Archives in Surrey, Gloucestershire, and Sussex. Special thanks is due to the

Inter-Library Loan staff, Reid Library, University of Western Australia for their untiring

efforts to obtain documents from overseas before later technology became available for

access.

Mary Thompkins

Perth, Western Australia

3

Abstract

The Philanthropic Society in Britain with particular reference to the Reformatory Farm

School, Redhill, 1849-1900

This study of the Philanthropic Society (later the Royal Philanthropic Society) sets out

to explain how it survived during many shifts in thinking about the treatment of juvenile

offenders in nineteenth-century Britain. The study also pays particular attention to

relationships between the Society and the state, showing how the Society was gradually

drawn into dependence on the state.

The thesis begins with an overview of the Society’s work prior to its decision to move

from London to Redhill in 1849. Next it proceeds to a close study of the Society’s work until

the end of the century. The decision to concentrate on the Redhill Farm School reflects not

only changing views about the reformation of young offenders, but also the financial

imperatives which forced the Society along paths shaped by the state. Close attention is paid

to the way Parliamentary inquiries and commissions, which in the mid-Victorian period

tended to laud the Society as a model, later criticized it for lagging behind advanced thinking.

Interwoven within this narratives are descriptions of the specific measures the Society

took for training and caring for boys at Redhill. It explores the nature of unpaid labour,

training and discipline enforced at the farm school. It also examines the variety of subjects

taught during the years a boy would spend working within a strict discipline, and the methods

used to enforce such discipline. Another subject worthy of extended consideration is the

Society’s enthusiasm for emigration to British colonies following a boy’s term of

incarceration.

The thesis closes with an examination of how and why the Society lost its reputation as

a leader in the treatment of young offenders in the late-Victorian period, as government

imposed new rules and regulations.

The overall argument is that the Society – born as the result of moral panics about

children at risk – became a long-term survivor as the result of partnerships with the state.

1

Introduction

The main focus of this thesis is the work of the Philanthropic Society (after 1952,

the Royal Philanthropic Society, hereafter referred to as the ‘Society’) following its move

from Southwark to Redhill, Surrey – some forty miles from London in 1849 – when its

operations concentrated on agriculture as a means to reform boy juvenile delinquents.

The formation of the Society in 1788 aimed to prevent children from embarking on

practices that would lead them to prison. After experimenting with a number of different

remedial practices and institutional formats, the Society eventually decided to devote

most of its effort to the Farm School at Redhill. The farm school was eventually

acknowledged as one of England’s most prestigious reformatory schools because of the

support it attracted from private and government sources, and the number of boys it could

accommodate.

From the society’s inception it enlisted support from members of the aristocracy.

By the 1840s, its Patron was Prince Albert, and, when members gathered to inaugurate

the Redhill school in 1849, it was he who laid the Foundation Stone. Parkhurst Juvenile

Prison, a government establishment founded in 1838, used the Society’s facilities at

Redhill. Boys who were sent to Parkhurst under sentence of transportation to follow at

the end of their term proved difficult for the prison authorities. The colonies were not

anxious to receive England’s juvenile prisoners, but the Society was keen to accept such

youths at Redhill, as Treasury funds subsidised the boys. In this way the Society forged a

link between government authorities, Parkhurst, and their privately maintained charity.

Government grants to pay for more houses to accommodate boys at Redhill, and fees

2

charged by the Society to provide for Parkhurst boys helped the farm school to set up and

maintain its operations.

By accepting youths from government prisons, as well as from local councils on

payment of a regular fee between 1849-1900, the Society provided a different approach to

dealing with young offenders. The farm school was not envisaged as a place where boys

would stagnate, it was an edifice of learning run on regimental lines. The Society

relieved government prisons and many local authorities of the need to maintain their own

reformatory schools. It afforded a modern facility for boys to receive discipline and

instruction for between three and five years – this at a time when the notion of

agricultural labour was considered far preferable to imprisonment.1 The utilization of

convicted boys to wield spades and cultivate the soil at Redhill provided a model for

Britain’s growing number of reformatory schools.

However, as the Society did not work in isolation this thesis will examine the

Society’s interaction with others in the wider community who had their own ideas about

the treatment of child offenders and juveniles thought to be at risk of offending. One

difficulty for those involved with children in reformatory schools was how best to dispose

of the boys, or girls, at the end of their sentence. Members of parliament, parliamentary

inquiries, central government bodies, the Home Office and Prison Service, as well as

local magistrates, town and borough Councils, all sought to find successful outcomes for

juveniles released from institutional care. The fact that there were five parliamentary

inquiries on the subject of juvenile delinquency between 1811 and 1850 indicates the

importance the leaders of the country placed on the prevention and reformation of young

offenders, and the threat they posed against authority. To return them to their homes – if

1 J. A. Stack, ‘Mid-Victorian Reformatory School’, Journal of Educational Administration and

History, v.xiv (1) January 1982, pp. 36-45.

3

there had been homes to start with – invited recidivism, but emigration was an expensive

alternative.

The term ‘young transports’ was used to describe boy prisoners who were to be sent

to the colonies at the end of their term. However, prior to the Society’s move to Redhill

in 1849, the Society’s manufactory at Southwark accepted a number of young prisoners

from Millbank prison who were destined for emigration. In this early period before

youths were consigned to the Society’s care, the Inspector of Prisons, Home District,

conferred with the Society’s superintendent. Youths deemed worthy of transfer were sent

to live and work in the manufactory in London. After1849, they were despatched to the

farm school in Redhill. At the end of their terms the Society provided boys with a set of

clothing, and arranged the details of passage to a British colony. In addition to those

predestined to emigration, Redhill continued to train boys known as ‘Government

Account’ boys who were transferred from the London prison. In the 1850s four

categories of young boys were accepted by the Society, the details of which will be set

out in a later chapter.

The Home Office, through its reformatory school inspectors’ Annual Reports,

collected statistics on Redhill and other reformatory schools. Details on health,

sanitation, diet and punishment were featured in these Reports. The Society’s records

reveal problems of compliance with suggestions made by the various Inspectors.

My investigation began with the working hypothesis that a tension existed between

the formal objective of the Society to rescue as many girls and boys as possible from lives

of crime, and the practicalities of meeting the annual expenses of housing and training

juveniles. I was particularly interested in investigating linkages between the Society and

the State over a long period which saw many changes in thinking about the treatment of

4

juvenile offenders. Over the decades numerous government inquiries and parliamentary

discussions were devoted to the question. New approaches were constantly appearing. A

number of key questions guided my research. Why were certain sections of Britain’s

population anxious to control and direct unemployed vagrant children into productive

workers? Did the administration of the society improve as the years passed and did it

keep in step with the views of the wider community? At what points did the Society lead

informed opinion and when did it lag behind? Between 1849-1900 did financial,

political, or social imperatives dictate the farm school’s work? Did the Society remain

true to its main objective, which was to equip their charges with sufficient skills to enable

the best possible outcome for youths at the time of their release? And finally, what was

the fate of boys who emigrated to the colonies after their time at Redhill?

Context and Literature Review

Until recently there had been little or no scholarly attention paid to the Society in its own

right. A number of scholars have alluded to the Philanthropic Society, some briefly

others more fully. These allusions mostly arise in relation to the larger question of social

dislocation in the course of the industrial revolution. The poor and landless appeared to

threaten other classes – the ‘respectable poor’, as well as the middle and upper classes.

The vagrants’ lack of cleanliness, possible disobedience against authority and the

likelihood of criminal intent were, as Leon Radzinowicz indicates, enough to cause fear

‘when the danger of a French invasion seemed imminent’.2 Fear of an uprising of the

poor against the wealthy and propertied classes may also explain the support given by the

public as noted when Appeals were made by the Society as soon as its ‘Notices’ appeared

2 Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law (London, 1948-86), v.4, p. 107.

5

in The Times from 1788. Viewed from another perspective, the Society represented one

aspect of the ‘success of Social Control which conditioned and manipulated the property-

less masses’.3

Susan Magarey,4

Leonore Ritter,5 and Julius Carlebach

6 have contributed much to

our understanding of crime control of nineteenth-century delinquents and of the methods

employed by the Philanthropic Society. Magarey observes that ‘the reformatory [school]

movement would never had arisen had there not been children in prisons’.7 However,

these more general studies provide a paucity of detail about the daily happenings in the

Society’s operations. These emerged for the first time in the unpublished PhD thesis of

Doreen Whitten, which explores in rich detail the daily routines and administration of the

Society’s work in the first six decades of its existence.8 Although Dr Whitten has explored

the life of girls and boys accepted by the Society between 1788 and 1848, she provides

little information on the Society’s Farm School at Redhill, and none at all for the second

half of the nineteenth century. Her primary interest is in social history, using the Society

as a window into the daily realities of incarcerated juveniles and their keepers. Nor do

other histories reveal much of the character, trials and tribulations of those that trod the

delicate path of managing Redhill farm school where a complement of three hundred

boys lived and worked. The Reverend Sydney Turner organized and supervised the move

from Southwark to Redhill. He laid down the House Masters’ duties and routine to be

3 F. M. L Thompson, ‘Social Control in Victorian Britain’, The Economic History Review,

Second Series v.34, 2 May 1981 pp. 189-208. 4 S. M. Magarey, ‘The Reclaimers: a study of the reformatory movement in England and Wales,

1846-1893’, unpublished PhD thesis, (Australian National University, 1975). 5 L. Ritter, ‘A discussion of the attempts to solve the problem of juvenile delinquents with

particular emphasis on the development of reformatory schools 1838-1866’, unpublished honours

dissertation (University of Western Australia, 1970). 6 J. Carlebach, Caring for Children in Trouble (London, 1970). 7 Magarey, ‘The Reclaimers’, p. 9. 8 Doreen M. Whitten, ‘Protection, Prevention, Reformation: a history of the Philanthropic

Society 1788-1848’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of London, 2001).

6

followed by the domestic staff, and the boys’ regime. Turner also represented the Society

in the public arena on behalf of the Society’s managing committee between 1849-1855

before taking up an appointment as Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons in 1857. He

became the first Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools in 1861. Turner

maintained a close interest in the Society’s Reformatory Farm School sometimes to the

chagrin of the Superintendent in residence.9 Sydney Turner was ‘Controller, policy-maker

and spokesman for the school. His committee acted as a supportive rather than a

controlling body’.10

While Carlebach’s work covers many aspects of the Society’s work,

it neglects some of the controversial issues. Aspects of Reformatory School Inspectors’

reports to the Home Office expose areas of neglect in hygiene, in one instance eventually

leading to a boy’s death. Over the period addressed by this thesis, inmates suffered from

various complaints, even staff and their families were exposed to illness, or even death.

Medical advice to improve sanitation and cleanliness in the boys’ dormitories was not

implemented.

One of the most important aspects of reformatory school work was the transfer of

youths at the end of their terms into an environment where they were less likely to re-

offend. It was at this juncture, and the following four years after a boy’s release, where

success or failure of the Society may be monitored. Lis and Soly have written on

continental regimes whereby ‘eighteenth-century entrepreneurs directed their efforts at

the mobilization of very young workers’.11

The Society’s development of a similar

system deserves closer examination than it has thus far received. Put another way we

9 D. H. Thomas, ‘The Rev. Sydney Turner, A Redhill Social Worker’, Surrey History v.2, 1995,

pp. 66-75. 10 Carlebach, Caring for Children, p. 39. 11 Catherine Lis, Hugo Soly and Peter Mandler (eds.), The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in

the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 39-63.

7

should, as Andrews suggests, ‘search the treacherous and murky waters of motivation, to

discern and disentangle, so far as we are able, the complex currents of the heart’.12

The following chapters will chart the changes that took place in the Home Office,

eventually to administer new laws relating to juvenile reformatory schools. At the same

time public scrutiny manifest through questions and answers provided by public

witnesses before parliamentary committees, gave impetus to higher standards in the care

of youths living in a reformatory school in England. The Society’s venture at Redhill was

at first the leader for others to follow and, in part this lead was maintained. However,

periods of neglect – to inmates, buildings, farm and animals occurred.

The early years at Redhill were difficult as there was insufficient money for

necessities such as food for the staff and boys, although this particular situation improved

over the years. Month by month the responsibility for running the school was Sydney

Turner’s. Until his transfer to the Home Office he lived on the farm school estate with

his wife and children, as did other masters. Then, and later, the problems in running a

large reformatory school affected the day-to-day life of staff, boys and animals. Turner

and his successors were required to organize and oversee staff, to ensure that discipline

was maintained over the whole institution. Paucity of funds created difficulties for the

school administration between 1849-1900. An increased emphasis on education, in the

wider community and in reformatory schools encouraged the Society to train its own

teachers. The scheme was unsuccessful as the young and inexperienced teachers left the

farm to work in a community school at an increased salary.

By the 1870s the Society’s General Council, which met quarterly, were less likely

to be aware of minimal standards existing at the farm for the boys the Society had first set

12 Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century

(Princeton, New Jersey, 1989), p. 12.

8

out to improve, this despite the Society’s chaplain’s Annual Report. Not all members of

the management committee visited the farm on a weekly basis, as happened in the 1850s,

to observe life and standards for staff and boys, or the animals bought and kept to teach

the boys animal husbandry. The list of problems that eventually became public

knowledge through reports made to the Home Office via the Inspector of Reformatories

reveals a breakdown between the General Court of the Society and those in charge of the

administration of the farm school.

Apart from secondary sources and published reports emanating from the Society,

investigation of these topics depends on archival materials. The principal repositories of

information on the Society, and those that interacted with it, are held in the British

Library, the British Archive and County Record Offices of Surrey, West Sussex,

Gloucestershire, and the Education Museum at the University of Leeds. It is on these

sources that this dissertation relies.

1

Chapter 1. An Overview of the Society, 1788-1815

This chapter, whilst acknowledging that it overlaps some of the work of Doreen M.

Whitten, seeks to provide a useful overview of aspects of the Society‟s work and the

demographic, socio-economic and intellectual trends that prompted the Philanthropic

Society to take up the cause of reducing and preventing juvenile crime in the late

eighteenth century. I shall first consider the City of London and the adjacent parishes and

wards that became known as London‟s metropolis. Population growth brought financial

success to some in the middle and upper classes, but also attracted impoverished people,

including criminals. Boys and girls who had to live by their wits when their parents were

convicted will form part of this focus on London as it was in the second half of the

eighteenth century and the first six years of the nineteenth-century.1 Following this

overview of pauper children in London I shall consider the emergence of parallel

endeavour of men and women who sought to influence and reform the morals of all

Britain‟s citizens. Within this context I explore the founding of the Philanthropic Society

in 1788 and its efforts to reform the „destitute, homeless, and convicted‟ children of

London.2

Pauper children were one by-product of the expansion that London experienced in

the late 1700s and continued into the nineteenth century. In an atmosphere of social

upheaval and moral panic a group of men, including bankers and merchants within the

city of London, met in September 1788 to form the Philanthropic Society for the

1 This study defines London in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, and during the

nineteenth century, as the original walled city plus its adjacent Cities, Wards, Boroughs and

Parishes whose populations grew, eventually creating a large metropolis spreading to the north

and south of the River Thames, encroaching on the administration of the surrounding counties. 2 E. A. G. Clark, „Sir Stafford Northcote‟s “Omnibus”‟, Journal of Educational Administration

and History, v.xiv (1), 1982, p. 27.

2

„prevention of crimes‟.3 A broad spectrum of the community supported and subscribed

to its work as members of the governing classes served on the management committees,

while others supported the Society with cash donations. At the same time the work of the

Society became known through word of mouth, shared interest, and through its notices in

The Times. In general terms the social composition of the Society‟s leading members

can be set out thus:

1. Members of the aristocracy

Duke of Richmond - President, appointed 1841

Duke of York and Albany - elected President, following the death of the Duke of

Leeds in 1799.

Earl of Aylesford - Vice President

Earl Grosvenor - Vice President

Earl Spencer - Vice President

Marquis of Salisbury - Vice President

Viscount Cranborne - Vice President

Hon. Philip Pusey - Vice President

2. Finance

3 See Robert Young, Director and Treasurer, Warwick Court Holborn, „The second report and

address of the Philanthropic Society; instituted September 1788‟, for the most detailed plan

„designed to ascertain and fix the principles of general reform…‟. Young refers to the „examples

of the young creatures being often imprisoned and publicly whipped, are become quite common‟,

sometimes leading to the „ill-fated boys put upon their trial for life‟. Young admits that, „There

is so much difference between design and execution‟ but elaborates on the methods employed by

„men of business‟ who are practical men as opposed to the „merely speculative and visionary men,

who are, in general as unfit to direct its concerns as one who knows the theory, only, of

navigation would be to command a vessel in a storm‟ [Goldsmiths‟-Kress, Reel 1422, Item

13978, pp. 2-4].

3

John Julius Angerstein, head of the „largest trading firms in the city‟. Committee

member 1790, also underwriter at Lloyds, Evangelist and involved with the

Society for the Betterment of the Condition of the Poor (SBCP).

David Barclay, M.P., Banker, Brewer (1729-1809) Annual subscriber to the

Society. „A conscientious and active Quaker, and a pacifist‟.

Thomas Boddington; West India Company merchant, director of the London

Dock Company, the Royal Exchange Assurance and the Bank of England.

Samuel Bosanquet. City merchant, J.P. and High Sheriff for Essex, elected Vice-

President of the Society by 1792

Henry Hoare, Banker and supporter of the Society for the Betterment of Christian

Poor (SBCP) as well as the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge

(SPCK).

James Martin (1738-1810). M.P., Banker. (SPCK).

Alderman Sir James Sanderson, M.P., Vice-President of the Society 1790.

Banker and hop merchant.

3. Law and Politics

Rt Hon. Charles Abbot, Speaker, House of Commons.

Sir Joseph Andrews - Committee member 1790.

Jeremiah Bentham, Attorney, and Magistrate on the Middlesex Bench.

George Hardinge, Vice-President of the Society 1790 who served as Solicitor-

General in 1782, Attorney-General 1794, acted as Counsel in the House of Lords

for the East India Company.

Lieut-General Rainsford, early member of the Society. Committee member and

later a Vice-President.

4

4. Medicine and associated health services

John Cloakley Lettsom, wealthy Quaker. „Involved in the dispensary

movement…‟.

John Fothergill, „Quaker physician whose practice included prominent non-

conformist Industrial and banking families‟.

J. H. Hooper, Apothecary. Society committee c.1790.

James Sims, M.D., Vice-President 1790. „One of the most active Philanthropic

players…became President of the Medical Society of London‟.

William Houston, surgeon, committee member 1790, and Visitor to Southwark

manufactory.

5. Clergy and philanthropy

The Reverend John Grindlay, Society committee 1792.

Reverend Rowland Hill, evangelical preacher and prison visitor (widely known

for his philanthropy directed at children).

Paul le Mesurier, Member of the Society for Promoting the Gospel (SPG), also

awarded a directorship of the East India Company.

Moreton Pitt, Society committee 1804.

Samuel Whitbread, Society committee 1790.

George Holford, Society committee 1800.4

4 Whitten, „Protection, Prevention, Reformation’, pp. 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 54, 89, 91, 105, 134,

107, 171.

5

London – trade, population, and crime

London was by no means an attractive or peaceful place in which to live in the

1780s.5 Douglas Hay refers to that „large body of disorderly and parasitic poor‟ that

inhabited the city.6 London‟s population in 1750 „represented 11% of the population of

England. By 1800 its inhabitants approached one million, and in 1851 two and a half

million‟.7 Part of the city‟s inhabitants lived in unabated distress through overcrowded

rooms, poor sanitation, and poverty. Criminal activity was rife.

At the same time the city provided great commercial opportunities for bankers,

merchants and industrialists who in turn contributed to the growth of the city, gaining

wealth, status, influence and power along the way. Wealth gave men of commerce a

status in the social order. Originally regarded as socially inferior because of their

association with „trade‟, businessmen adopted life-styles similar to the existing middle-

classes. Eventually the men who became rich from trade were accepted as part of the

upper middle-classes. Such acceptance into a higher social rank facilitated other changes

to take place where businessmen assumed responsibilities on local government

committees or councils.8

Change also came about for the less fortunate. Driven, in some cases by necessity,

England‟s poor in the late eighteenth century had to become mobile to seek employment,

or to beg on the streets of London. It is estimated that one in six people in England

passed through London at some time of their lives, although it is difficult to make an

5 E. A. Wrigley, „A Simple Model of London‟s Importance in Changing English Society and

Economy 1650-1750‟, Past and Present, v. 37, 1967, p. 63. 6 Douglas Hay, „Property, Authority and the Criminal Law‟, in D. Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree:

Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975,) pp. 54-55. 7 John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750-1850, (New York, 1986)

p. 17. 8

See Ian R. Christie, British ‘Non’Elite’ MPs 1715-1820 (Oxford, 1995).

6

accurate assessment of London‟s shifting population at this time.9 It is important to

consider the men and women who came to London and the problems associated with

over-crowding, such as disease and death. For instance, in the parish of St Giles

inhabitants lived in „filth attendant upon improvidence, crime, and profligacy as if the

inhabitants by common consent deem themselves only „tenants at will‟ till the gallows or

the hulks should require them‟.10

Dorothy George argues that in estimating the rate of

London‟s population-growth the Bills of Mortality, compiled by the Company of Parish

Clerks on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis, failed to take into account the parishes into

which London had more recently expanded‟.11

At the same time, private burial grounds

were not included in the official burial records nor were the births and deaths of Jews or

Roman Catholics. Nevertheless, in 1751 approximately 676,259 people lived in London,

increasing to 900,000 when the first official census was carried out in 1801.12

A further growth in London‟s transient population came about in 1803, the time

when hostilities were resumed between France and England. London became home to a

reserve army of 50,000 men, plus 300,000 volunteers, including the Bank of England‟s

own regiment and „River Fencibles and Harbour Marines‟, as well as the Royal London

Cavalry.13

Soldiers and sailors discharged from duty, often with little money and no

prospects of earning more, caused fluctuations in the amount of crime committed within,

9 E. A. Wrigley, „A simple mode of London‟s importance in changing English society and

economy 1650-1750‟, Past and Present, v. 37, 1967, p. 50. 10 W. A. Miles, letter to Lord John Russell, 1837 [Goldsmiths'-Kress, R2247, Reel 2786 Item

30133]. 11 M. Dorothy George, „Some Causes of the Increase of Population in the Eighteenth Century as

illustrated by London‟, The Economic Journal, v.32, 1922, pp. 325-326. 12 Ibid., pp. 329-330. 13 Reginald R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom: A History Derived Mainly from the Archives at

Guildhall in the Custody of the Corporation of the City of London (London, 1895), v. 3, pp. 251-

52.

7

and outside London‟s metropolis.14

Significantly the numbers of impoverished persons,

„idlers‟, vagrants, thieves and confidence tricksters abounded.15

Moreover, the absence of

an efficient law enforcement agency made it easy for property to be stolen. Not only the

wealthy were at risk from robbery, but shopkeepers and tenants. All those who had to

make an income to pay rent to a landlord, were affected by criminal activity.16

Thieving

went unhindered in the crowded streets of London by comparison with rural areas where

a sparse population offered little obscurity.17

Citizens who travelled to and from London were targets for highwaymen.

Passengers in horse-drawn coaches were stopped and robbed as they moved towards the

metropolis through the counties of Surrey, Essex, Middlesex and Hertfordshire.

Punishment, even public executions appeared not to deter criminal behaviour. Some

doubt exists over the number of prisoners put to death on conviction of a capital offence.

Undoubtedly, men and women were taken to be hanged in public at London‟s Tyburn

gallows. Their crime of theft was regarded as more prevalent in London than in the less

populated parts of the country.18

One reason given for the lack of respect for property in

London was the absence of patronage exercised by the social elite over the less fortunate

in the densely populated metropolis. Rural people continued to rely, as they had for

centuries, on the local gentry‟s patronage. There was an understanding whereby those in

14 J. S. Cockburn, „The Nature and Incidence of Crime in England: 1550-1880‟, in J. S. Cockburn

(ed) Crime in England (London, 1977), pp.61-65. Also Homes Dudden, Henry Fielding, His Life,

Works and Times (Oxford 1952), p. 759. 15 Cockburn, ‘The Nature and Incidence of Crime in England’, p. 52. 16 Dudden, Henry Fielding, p. 763, and David J. Johnson, Southwark and the City (London 1969),

p. 117. 17 J. M. Beattie, „The Pattern of Crime in England 1660-1800‟, Past and Present No. 62, 1974, p.

93. Also Dudden, Henry Fielding, p. 759. 18 Hay, „Property, Authority and the Criminal Law‟, p. 60.

8

authority exacted deference from their social sub-ordinates, as well as from their servants.

In return, the gentry extended a level of concern for the poor.19

In the mid-eighteenth century serious thought began for the first time to be given to

the relationship between poverty, wealth and crime. In 1751 Henry Fielding, novelist,

barrister and Justice of the Peace, wrote of the need for a more efficient policing of

London, where crime appeared out of control.20

According to Dudden‟s work on

Fielding, the city had an „extraordinary outbreak of crime‟.21

McLynn believes Fielding

attributed this increase in crime to the envy of the poor for the luxuries enjoyed by the

rich, with Fielding denying the poor needed any benefit from luxury in their lives.22

The

Justice made efforts to track down criminals with a more sophisticated approach from the

usual method of „Hue and Cry‟; the latter term indicated the shouted call for witnesses to

an offence, in the vain hope of another citizen apprehending the offender. John Styles

suggests that dissemination of material – assize trials, newspaper reports, essays,

pamphlets, and so on – gave impetus to „entrepreneurs of criminal prophylaxis‟,

intellectuals focused on the „impersonal, statistical problem‟ of crime, and ways to reduce

it.23

John Fielding, a magistrate and half-brother of Henry Fielding, attempted to extend

the work of crime prevention through his General Preventative Plan of 1772. The Plan

was „designed to collect, collate and circulate criminal information on a national scale‟ in

an effort to prevent criminals escaping justice.24

Overall, the magistrate set out to reduce

the opportunities for criminals to escape by encouraging the national press to publicise

19 Ibid., pp. 45-47. 20 Dudden, Henry Fielding, p.758. See Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the late

Increase of Robbers etc., with some Proposals for Remedying this Growing Evil, (London, 1751). 21

Dudden, Henry Fielding, p.758. 22 F. McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989, 1991 edn.),

p. 244. 23 John Styles, „Sir John Fielding and the Problem of Criminal Investigation in Eighteenth-century

England‟, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 1983, v.33, p. 128. 24 Ibid., p.129, 132, 133.

9

crime; inviting the press to report on trials held in central London‟s Bow Street

Magistrates‟ Court.

In September 1773, John Fielding sent a request to all the Clerks of the Peace in

England and Wales asking for their cooperation. He wanted the magistrates in Boroughs

and Counties to send to his Bow Street Office all details of „felons or cheats escaped from

justice, and of people apprehended on suspicion of such offences‟.25

The advantage of

his plan over his brother‟s was the aim of generating a national system whereby evidence

of crime, with specific details and particulars of criminals, was circulated around the

country – rather than restricting the information, as his half-brother had done, to the

London area. Bow Street became a central office, receiving and despatching printed

details of stolen property, fugitive offenders and those committed to prison.26

The years between 1763-75 were years when burglary was perceived to be reaching

plague proportions. Horace Walpole wrote to Lady Ossory on 27 October 1774, that the

people of Twickenham – a place nearly fifteen miles from the centre of London – „talk of

nothing but houses broken open and robbed‟. He also refers to the highwayman who

fired at the Prime Minister, Lord North, as he travelled in his coach two weeks earlier at

„the end of Gunnersbury Lane‟, only to be robbed of his „watch and money‟.27

Despite

these robberies in and around London, Cockburn describes the upper classes‟ concern as

the „pre-occupation‟ that generations of Englishmen had with their fears about the extent

of lawlessness within the country.28

Nonetheless, the city did provide opportunities for

25 Ibid., p. 135. 26 Ibid., pp. 136-7. 27 W. S. Lewis (ed.) Horace Walpole's Correspondence (London, 1965), v.32, p. 213. 28 Cockburn, Crime in England, p. 49.

10

criminal activity with its „lanes, alleys, courts and by-places‟, and a burgeoning increase

in pedestrian population, as opposed to England‟s rural areas.29

Middle and upper class perceptions of crime were fuelled by anecdotal evidence

and the spectacle of public punishments, gave impetus to debates on the efficacy of

capital punishment. Property owners – shopkeepers through to wealthy residents – were

anxious to reduce crime. Change commenced in the wider public sphere, when forces

aroused through the evangelical conversion of some members of the Church of England,

widened an intellectual discourse on the need for all to improve manners and morals from

the highest to the lowest in the land. During this further push for the reform of manners,

aspects of the discussion dwelt on theories of how to prevent crime, and to reform

criminals. This debate created an awareness of the need to seek to prevent children

following the path of their parents into a life of crime.

In 1787 George III issued a Proclamation against Vice and Immorality. Supported

by a Proclamation Society whose committee, led by the Duke of Montague as President,

included other aristocrats, bishops and gentry. The committee published a Prospectus of

the Society for Enforcing the King’s Proclamation. It called for action to discipline the

children of criminals and for the King‟s „faithful subjects to check the rapid progress of

impropriety and licentiousness, to promote a spirit of decency and good order, and

enforce a stricter execution of the laws against vice and immorality‟.30

Further, the

Committee promoted vigilance „in the effectual prosecution and punishment of such

criminal and disorderly practices as are within reach of the law‟. The Prospectus singled

out, as the target of the reform measures, those cases likely to be brought before a

29 J. M. Beattie, „The Pattern of Crime in England 1660-1800‟, Past and Present, v.62, 1974,

p.93. Also Cockburn, Crime in England, p.52; Dudden, Henry Fielding, p.763. 30 I. Robert and Samuel Wilberforce, The life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838), v.1, pp.

393-94.

11

Magistrates‟ Court. At this juncture, the committee members agreed to „endeavour to

afford the Magistracy such assistance in the discharge of their duty as the nature of the

case may require‟.31

The Proclamation called upon those in authority to uphold certain codes of

behaviour, but the document also high-lighted the social injustice whereby the poor were

prosecuted while the rich usually escaped with impunity. For example, S. Gasse

demonstrated his loyalty to the Monarch by urging other magistrates and Parish officers

to „apply their utmost endeavours to a business so intimately connected with the interest

and the happiness of society‟. He proceeded to interpret the Proclamation as a means

whereby the vices of the lower classes could be curtailed. He condemned the action that

„entails such a heavy burden of expense on the sober part of the community who are

bound to support them and their families‟. Gasse implored London‟s Lord Mayor, with

his Court of Aldermen, to suppress the „growing evil‟ of shops that open on Sundays, and

„fruit stalls standing in almost every street of the city, particularly Cheapside,

Whitechapel and Bishopsgate Street‟.32

Hannah More, on the other hand, condemned the

upper-class use of hairdressers on Sundays.33

If, therefore the rich and great, will not, from a liberal spirit of doing right, abstain

from those offences, for which the poor are to suffer fines and imprisonments

effectual good cannot be done.34

W. S. Lewis, quoting from Robert‟s Memoirs of Hannah More recalls Horace

Walpole‟s criticism of her tract Manners of the Great, „for having exhibited such

31 Ibid., p. 393. 32 S. Gasse, „A Narrative of Proceedings, Tending Towards a National Reformation‟, (London,

1787), p.3-4 [Goldsmiths‟ -Kress Reel 1364, Item 13488]. 33 Hannah More, Thoughts on the Importance of Manners of the Great to General Society,

(London, 1788), pp. 33, 35 [Goldsmiths‟ -Kress Reel 1389, Item 13672]. 34 Ibid, p. 116.

12

monstrously severe doctrines‟.35

Here we see More caught in a dilemma. She holds a

situation in society as an upper-middle-class woman, privy to the friendship of Walpole,

but is unable to use her influence to bring about her friend‟s reform. She is aware of the

stance taken by Walpole, and by association men and women of his social status, as he

refutes the need to obey the Fourth Commandment. Walpole, like others in his class, set

himself apart from the poor and their behaviour. In noting the failure of sections of the

upper classes to abide by the highest moral standards, we see the gulf between the rich

and the poor, and the contrast between the ways they were expected to behave. As

Walpole explained to More, „persons of fashion‟ had to use hairdressers on Sundays.

This caused More to lament „that he [Walpole] is a person of fashion, for whom the Ten

Commandments were not made‟.36

Criminal activity in London troubled people of property, but they were also worried

over the discontent in France, and America‟s war of independence. The governing

classes feared any change likely to affect their privileged position within the community.

Political unrest overseas became associated with worker discontent in England, an unrest,

which in turn unsettled those who traditionally held authority. Dr Johnson objected to a

change made by the magistrates responsible for prisoners being taken to be publicly

hanged at Tyburn. In 1783, these magistrates decreed prisoners would no longer be

brought from gaols to endure the „morbidly curious spectators lining the route‟ but would

be executed in the respective prison yards. Dr Johnson expressed his disgust at this

„innovation‟ and felt „all the business of the world is to be done by innovation; men are to

be hanged in a new way; Tyburn itself is not free from the fury of innovation‟.37

Despite

35 Lewis, Horace Walpole's Correspondence, v.31, pp. 260-261. 36 Ibid., p. 261. 37 Maurice J. Quinan, Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners 1700-1830 (Columbia,

1941, 1965 edn.), p. 40.

13

such protests, others with influence within the community supported change. In 1787,

W.M. Goschall published his plan in support of the Proclamation, outlining ways to

reduce „the number of boys and youths, who, for want of being early initiated into habits

of virtuous industry, have fallen victims to the laws of their country‟. Whilst Goschall‟s

plan retained capital punishment for indictments of murder, housebreaking, forgery, and

highway robbery, he advocated the prevention of criminal activity through a system of

child education and training.38

Evangelicals took a fervent interest in saving and reforming the lower classes. The

Anglican evangelicals preached the virtues of thrift, hard work, and individual discipline,

confident that labour in this life brought about redemption in the next.39

William

Wilberforce, who experienced his conversion to evangelism in 1787 as a young man of

twenty-eight, came to London as a middle-class member of parliament representing the

county of Yorkshire. His eloquence, wit, and personality gave him entrée into the highest

social circles; even the Prince of Wales „would go anywhere to hear him sing‟.40

Importantly, Wilberforce used his personal attributes to achieve goals that were aimed to

alleviate pain and suffering among the poor. His friendship with the Prime Minister,

William Pitt, afforded him the opportunity to associate with some of the most influential

men in the country. Wilberforce‟s conversion to „genuine Christianity‟ caused ripples

among the aristocracy at a time when religious conversion was seen as appropriate only

to the working classes. The „moving spirit‟ behind George III‟s Proclamation Against

Vice and Immorality, Wilberforce was also the initiator of support for the formation of the

Society for Enforcing the King‟s Proclamation. Unlike the Society for the Reformation

38 W. M. Goschall, „A General Plan of Parochial and Provincial Police…‟, (London, 1787).

[Goldsmiths‟ -Kress Reel 1364, Item 13489]. 39 Richard D. Atick, Victorian People and Ideas, a Companion for the Modern Reader of

Victorian Literature (New York, 1973), pp. 165-9. 40 M. Jaegar, Before Victoria (London, 1956), p. 3.

14

of Manners founded in London in 1692, 41

whose intent was aimed at the lowest classes,

the proponents of the 1787 movement, namely Wilberforce and Beilby Porteous (Bishop

of London 1787-1811), intended to „make Georgian England and its 8 million inhabitants

very different from top to bottom‟.42

The Evangelicals‟ first priority was the conversion of worshippers in the

Established Church who were merely „nominal Christians‟; that is, they attended church

but were not „total Christians‟. They sought to awaken all social classes to consciousness

of their duty to act their belief, and to carry Christian doctrine into „every corner of their

lives‟.43

In support of this ideology, Wilberforce took as his personal mission the reform

of morals of all classes throughout the nation. His hypothesis was that if the upper

classes set a good example, the lower classes would follow their lead.

Wilberforce, like Hannah More, whose friend he became, did not openly oppose the

discussion of The Proclamation Society, when its president, the Duke of Montague,

addressed a London magistrates‟ meeting at St Alban‟s Tavern on 5 May 1790 on the

problems arising from vagrancy. Vagrancy they regarded as the forerunner of crime.

The meeting discussed George II‟s Vagrancy Act, and noted how vagrants aroused „a

terror to the inhabitants of the countries through which they pass‟.44

The meeting

considered:

the prevention of begging and vagrancy as the object of the greatest importance to

the quiet and good Order of the Public; as beggars and vagabonds seldom return to

41 Ibid., pp. 60-61. 42 Polock, Wilberforce pp. 59-61. 43 Robin Furneaux, William Wilberforce (London, 1971), p. 41. 44 „Society for giving effect to His Majesty‟s Proclamation Against Vice and Immorality‟, Library

of Economic Literature, v.3, p. 9 [Goldsmiths‟ -Kress Reel 1455, Item 14499].

15

habits of labour and sobriety, but generally proceed to the commission of crimes of

the most atrocious and alarming nature.45

Although Carlebach believes the name „Philanthropic Society‟ did not date from

1788 but „probably from 1790‟, 46

on 16 December 1788 The Times carried a notice under

the heading, „Philanthropic Society, for the prevention of crimes, and for a reform among

the poor‟, which set out the need to care for a „class of children which it seeks and selects

from out of the most vile and infamous parts in the metropolis‟. The December notice

cited the Society‟s experiment in guardianship of a few children in support of its belief

that if vagrant children were controlled and trained to some skills whereby they could

earn a living, their obedience to authority would follow automatically.47

To attract subscriptions, the Society published an account of its work in December

1788, and a list of its supporters. This showed the Society not only attracted support from

the upper classes, but from others – in a lower stratum of society – who willingly aligned

themselves with the upper classes.48

The Philanthropic Society aimed to reform children of the „dissolute‟ who were

likely to become criminals. It solicited funds for a scheme to undermine criminal actions

that obstruct „the sources of national wealth, infringe upon personal safety, and render

property insecure‟.49

They began with a plan to rescue a few abandoned children from

the „most vile and infamous parts of the metropolis‟ and place them in the care of a

45 „Society for giving effect to His Majesty‟s Proclamation Against Vice and Immorality, delivered

to The Magistrates‟, St Alban‟s Tavern, (London, 1790), Library of Economic Literature, v.3,p. 2.

[Goldsmiths‟ -Kress Reel 1455, Item 14499]. 46 Julius Carlebach, Caring for Children in Trouble (London, 1970), pp. 5-6. Carlebach refers to a

group of middle-class business men who met on 5 September 1788 to consider the formation of a

society to be known as the ‘New Asylum for the Prevention of Vice and Misery among the Poor‟. 47 The Times, 16 December 1788. 48 Philanthropic Society, The Times, 16 December 1788. 49 The Times, 16 December 1788, p. 1, column 1b.

16

nurse.50

When the number of children reached twelve the Society rented a „small house

at £10 a year‟. At this time two categories of children were accepted; the offspring of

convicted criminals, and children who were likely to become criminals or had already

been recruited to crime. The home was initially placed under the supervision of a master-

craftsman and his wife whom the Society hoped would pass on their respective skills to

the boys and girls.51

Through these arrangements the Society imagined the children

would eventually be capable of earning an honest living and cease to pose a threat to the

property of their masters, or others in society.

In 1789 the Society sought to clarify its position, denying that it had singled out the

poor as a depraved section of the community. It frankly acknowledged that the

unemployed poor were „compelled to seek their bread by illegal and injurious practice‟.52

In this way the Society became one of the first to correlate crime with poverty. As

McLynn writes of Patrick Colquhoun, a London magistrate, they helped to push „the

eighteenth-century debate on the causes of crime forward a few notches by relating it to

poverty‟.53

At the same time the Society‟s Committee condemned the criminal elements

in society for their „atrociousness, and indecency‟ and their disgrace „to civil community,

and to human nature‟.54

Despite these particularly harsh words from the Society‟s

administration, Leon Radzinowicz captures the essence of the philanthropists‟ plan as

uniting „the purposes of charity with those of industry and police…to deal with a

nuisance, to check idleness and improvidence‟.55

They saw impoverished criminals not

50 Ibid. 51 „A History of the School 1788-1848‟, an anonymous pamphlet printed by The Royal

Philanthropic Society, c.1955, p. 3. 52 Ibid. 53 Frank McLynn, Crime & Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England, (Oxford, 1991), pp. 247-

248. 54 Philanthropic Society, The Times, 26 June 1789. 55 Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750

(London, 1968-86), v.4, p. 43.

17

simply as a moral and physical menace, but as a drain on the growth of the nation‟s

wealth and well being.56

They were at pains to emphasize their devotion to practical measures of reform.

Robert Young, elected as the Society‟s first Director and Treasurer, declared that the

Society wanted to avoid „speculative‟ theories in planning its „moral institution‟. The

Society intended to implement a practical scheme for turning wayward children into

useful and obedient men and women.

From September 1788 children began to be admitted into the care of the Society

from the „resorts of thieves‟, magistrates‟ and criminal courts, jails and bridewells

[poorhouses], with those „most immediately in the path of criminality‟ as the first

priority.57

On 13 January 1789 the Society announced it had „begun an institution of a

kind altogether new in the annals of charitable donations…by extending the influence of a

virtuous education to those children who are the natural heirs to infamy‟.58

Young gave more details in his Second Report and Address of the Philanthropic

Society (1789). He spoke of the work performed by other charities „imperfectly done‟.59

The Society had already taken into its care a few „children of vagrants and of criminals …

before the plan was announced to the public at large‟, although the individual house

system of accommodating the children in separate houses became too expensive, and

when competent staff were difficult to find. A second, temporary arrangement, named a

Seminary for the Wards was opened at Cambridge Heath, Hackney, within a building

named the Reform.

56 Philanthropic Society, The Times, 16 December, 1788. 57 Philanthropic Society, Abstract of the Original Publication of the Society, in the Infancy of its

Commencement [Goldsmiths'-Kress R2447, Reel 1455, Item 14497, p. 5]. 58 Philanthropic Society, The Times, 13 January 1789. 59 Robert Young report [Goldsmiths'-Kress, R2447, Reel 1422, Item 13978, p. 16].

18

Regular Appeals for subscriptions appeared in The Times beginning in 1789 to

publicise the Society and its objectives. At the same time it set out the problems the poor

caused to themselves, and to the classes above them. The poor were seen to prevent

financial growth because of their state of disorder. By separating certain categories of

children from their wicked parents the committee hoped to break the cycle of vice and

crime, and reduce the examples and executions. As Donna Andrew has observed, the

Society did not idealise the lives of the poor and frankly announced its objective to sunder

the bonds between irredeemable parents and reformable children; it would wield „the

sword of justice to sever those cords of paternal authority, which are used only to drag the

child to ruin‟.60

Andrew put her finger on a key element responsible for the Society‟s

early successes and long-term survival. It used the poorly paid labour of the boys and

girls it helped, simultaneously generating a reliable source of income to continue its

operation, while at the same time claiming the moral high ground of training up children

in habits of industry. „The Social Order depended solely on mutual self-interest for

cohesion, rather than seeing society as consisting of a web of duties and obligations,

benevolences given and gratitude returned‟.61

In other words the Society insisted upon the

children it agreed to help being put to work; through work they would achieve

reformation and win the approbation of those in authority. The small amount of money

paid to the children from the sale of articles they produced in the factory provided an

incentive for hard, quicker work. In this way the Society taught a practical lesson that

hard work brought pecuniary rewards.62

In 1793 the Society rented, and later purchased, a central institution at St George‟s

Fields in the City of Southwark, part of the expanding metropolis situated south of the

60 Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (New

Jersey, 1989), p.183. 61

Ibid. 62 Ibid.

19

River Thames. There were two buildings, a Reform to accommodate boys deemed in

need of close supervision, and some elementary education before being transferred to the

second building, the Manufactory. Here boys and girls with no recorded criminal activity

lived and underwent training. Master-craftsmen instructed the inmates in various

workshops in the building in the production of articles for sale.

The Society‟s attention to the minute detail of its institution and administration is

evident from its annual reports, which reinforced the attention given by the committee to

its financial viability. They held out the promise that the Society in its maturity would

„support itself‟, while at the same time reinforcing the belief that „labour is the one

genuine source of wealth‟.63

It followed that when the Society‟s Committee of Finance

and Trade made its decisions about whether to admit or reject children, it paid close

attention to their ages and their ability to contribute to the institution‟s industrial

production. This calculation ran along side moral judgments about whether older

children were likely to commit „serious mischief, if left to their own courses‟, and if the

juveniles would be producing saleable goods that would „soon exonerate the fund from

supporting them‟.64

The Society‟s decision to teach children to produce articles that could then be sold

as part of a scheme to indemnify the work of the Society may be seen as part of a wider

trend in Britain, whereby soldiers, prisoners in gaols, and mendicants in workhouses were

put to work to earn their keep.65

The Society‟s reformatory institution‟s scheme put into

practice the basic belief that is attributed, by Radzinowicz, to the work of Sir Benjamin

Thompson (Count Rumford), who spoke of „Rewards and punishments‟ being „the only

63 Young, Preface to the Second Report, p. iv. 64 Ibid., p. x. 65 Radzinowicz, A History of Engish Criminal Law, v.4, pp. 34-36.

20

means by which mankind can be controlled and directed ….‟66

However, much of the

late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century discussion on this topic of reward for good

behaviour and punishment for misbehaviour was already entrenched in the routine of the

Society‟s institution during 1793. Radzinowicz questions whether Patrick Coquhoun was

„directly influenced‟ by Count Rumford‟s work in Bavaria but suggests that „both men

reflect an outlook very prevalent at the time‟, supporting the concept of compulsory work

for vagrants and beggars, and the system of reward for productivity already set in place

by the Philanthropic Society. 67

Further, the Society for Bettering the Condition and

Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (RSBP), founded in 1796, owed its first principle to

the basic tenets of the Philanthropic Society when the founder of RSBP, Sir Thomas

Barnard, adopted the same principle in 1801 that all inmates should receive religious

teaching, as well as industrial training.

At the same time the Society emphasised it would deal with „human nature … not

as it is found in books, but as it is in fact‟. Therefore the Society did not rely on good

intentions but instituted a regime of close surveillance and control designed to prevent

their escape back into haunts of poverty and crime. „There should be no interruption [in

their total control] from custom, from prejudice, or from law‟. The Society wanted

freedom to conduct the „experiment‟.68

Only by seeing the results it obtained from

working with the „objects‟, as the children were called, could the Society‟s experiment be

assessed.

Meanwhile, subscriptions were needed to continue the work the Society had started

to „convert the rising part of society into good citizens; and exchange the burdens and

66 Ibid., pp. 34-35. 67 Ibid., p.37. 68 Young, Second Report, p. 8.

21

miseries of poverty, for increased population, happiness, and wealth‟.69

Young wrote in

his Second Report that if „sensible men‟ had read about the extent of the Society‟s plan at

its genesis they would have viewed it with „a degree of amusement‟. Nonetheless, the

Society offered the outcome of its initial work with children as a testimony of the

„beneficial effects in the community at large‟ in the belief its work was an influence in

improving the „degeneracy of manners which is so much complained of as having a

universal spread‟.70

The Society believed that:

Regular instruction and constant practice will of necessity make a thief, as it will a

shoemaker, according as one part or the other is pursued. To prevent the one course

of instruction, and to give the other, are, therefore, the means of preventing the

increase of thieves, and promoting that of useful labourers.71

A 1790 Report about the employment of the Society‟s wards stated that there were

sixty boys and girls in its care at the end of 1789.72

The Report set out how the boys in

apprenticeships received instruction from master-craftsmen within the workshops in the

Manufactory building. The scheme isolated apprentices from temptations existing

outside of the institution and gave the Society‟s management close control over the boys

at all times. When a boy completed his apprenticeship, at the age of twenty-one, the

Society hoped he would be a stable character with an ability to earn money without

„taking to vicious courses from necessity‟.73

69 Philanthropic Society, The Times, 16 December 1788. 70 Young, The Second Report, p. iv. 71 Philanthropic Society, A Report containing a List of subscribers to the 15

th January 1790,

(London, 1790), p. 4. 72 Philanthropic Society, A Report containing a List of subscribers to the 17

th January 1790,

(London, 1790), p. 4. 73 Ibid.

22

Corporal punishment was one method of disciplining recalcitrant children within

the institution but the approval by the Society‟s management for good behaviour

bestowed the „esteem of the world‟ upon a child.74

A Day-book recorded the virtues and

faults of the inmates during the preceding week. Comments from the book were read on

Sunday evenings to all the wards of the Society. The meeting formed part of a wider

concept the Society hoped to achieve through a „plan of moral education…where a

regular system of reward and encouragement shall become universal‟.75

The presiding

officer, the Regulator, at the School of Morals, distributed rewards and punishments by

giving or withdrawing „tickets‟.76

The Society believed moral education would triumph

over any attempts to provide only „reading, writing and an handicraft trade‟. It believed

that children would substitute „positive virtues, in the place of vices rejected, by such

strong, vigorous, and systematic education‟.77

Nonetheless, all the children within the manufactory had to learn to make industrial

articles that were then sold. The idea of employing prisoners – as in fact the children

were – was not new. Despite the benign rhetoric of the Society the children were

restrained in the care of the Society without legislative approval until the Society‟s Act of

Incorporation in 1806. The Act vested the charity with „the Authority of Parliament‟ to

continue to maintain, educate and employ „poor Children the Offspring of convicted

Felons, and of Children who have themselves been engaged in criminal Practices‟.78

The

expansion of the Society‟s authority between 1806 and 1849 to accept and contain young

offenders will be discussed in the following chapter. However, between 1788 and 1806

the charity considered admitting boys and girls in need of shelter and protection from

74 Young, The Second Report, p. 37. 75 Ibid., p. 18. 76 Ibid. , p. 39. 77 Ibid., p. 47. 78 46 George III, cap.144.

23

„Vice and Want, [and to be] carefully instructed in the Principles of Religion, and trained

to Habits of Industry and Regularity‟.79

In 1791 the Society appointed the following men

as Visitors to oversee staff and juveniles and to check the accounts at Southwark: B.

Hutton Esq., G. Backman Esq., J. H. Hooper Esq., and a Mr Provo.80

The Society‟s aim to isolate children from crime met with support from prominent

citizens in London. In 1791, Granville Sharp – philanthropist, pamphleteer and scholar –

presented a Report to the Corporation of London on the „industrious Poor‟ and the

„punishment of the idle and vicious Poor‟. Sharp blamed London‟s „alarming increase of

Street-robbers and Pick-pockets‟ upon the failure to apprehend and punish „dissolute

Vagrants‟. He spoke of the effect the „idle and profligate Poor and Vagrants‟ had on the

population of London and raised the issue of the petty criminal who had „no visible

honest means of subsistence‟.81

Whilst not directly supporting the Society, his views

support a central objective of the Society wherein to remove „Boys and Pick-pockets‟

from the streets to receive training for later employment, „would secure the Public from

many depredations and prevent many miserable forsaken boys from growing up in a

regular progression of vice and violence ….‟82

The Society believed its „objects‟ would be relieved from „fear, severity, danger and

fatigue … inseparable concomitants of the desperate course of life in which their vile

abettors initiated and dragged them on‟.83

Yet children who ran away from the Society

invoked punishments, described as „Ordered to be tied up and chastised‟ or „confined to

79 Ibid. 80 „Officers of the Philanthropic Society‟ [Goldsmiths'-Kress 1770-1800, v. 3, Reel 1484 Item

14973]. 81 Granville Sharp, Report of Court of Common Council To the Committee of the Corporation of

London, Appointed to Enquire into the State of the London Workhouse, Appendix No. 2, 18 April

1791 pp.52-53. [Goldsmiths'-Kress, Reel 1485, Item 14971]. 82 Ibid,, p. 54. 83 Philanthropic Society A Report containing a List of subscribers to the 15

th January 1790,

London, p. 5.

24

the solitary cell for three days‟, when a child was returned to the Steward in Charge.84

Words used in the Superintendent’s Journal to describe corporal punishment appear as

euphemisms such as „chastised‟, or „castigation‟. The staff maintained constant

surveillance if any inmates attempted to return to friends or relatives. Some disposed of

the emblems on their clothes, particularly the Society‟s specially engraved buttons, on the

way. For instance, on 7 September 1793 two boys absconded taking clothing and money

and two New Testaments. The children were caught and found to have replaced the tell-

tale buttons with „bright, white metal buttons‟ in an attempt to escape, unrecognised.85

The Committee of Finance and Trade administered the Society‟s day-to-day affairs.

In 1793, the committee met weekly to cost the administration of the institution and to

discuss the offers made by local merchants to purchase articles made in the manufactory

workshops; for fine shoes, coarse shoes and boots, tailoring and sisal cord weaving.86

Auditing of Accounts took place on 21 August 1793 when 137 boys were maintained at

the St George‟s Fields institution.87

The Society aimed to be self-sufficient, and to ensure

its future viability by selling the articles produced by the children in workshops.88

In

1795 the above committee was renamed the Sub-Committee of the Resources, Trade and

Finance to reflect an increased awareness of the need for precision in administrative

procedures.89

The Committee continued the discipline of the institution set in place by its

predecessor, negotiating contracts to supply printing from the Manufactory workshops,

and seeking opportunities to place reformed girls in domestic posts. It tried to place boys

84 RPS papers, Superintendent’s Journal, 1793-1794, Surrey Library Service (SLS) 2271/24/1. 85 RPS papers, Superintendent‟s Journal, 1793-1794, SLS 2271/24/1, 7 September 1793. 86 RPS papers, SLS 2271/24/1 10 September 1793. 87 RPS papers, Superintendent‟s Journal, 1793-1974, SLS 2271/24/1 21 August 1793. 88 RPS papers. Superintendent‟s Journal, 1793-1794, SLS 2271/24/1 5 September 1793; also Young, The Second Report, p.v. 89 RPS papers, SLS 2271/24/3.

25

and girls in workshops best suited to their skills by transferring the children from one

workshop to another, to remain under the supervision of another master-tradesman.90

Knowledge of the Society‟s work within the community is reflected in applications for

employment as staff, and the gradual increase of inmates.91

On 26 July 1798 the Society

housed 98 boys and 52 girls. A further 18 girls remained in domestic work with local

families and 12 boys remained under apprenticeship with local tradesmen. One girl, a

servant, filled a post as a nurse to a family sailing to America.92

The governing

committee of the reform and manufactory institutions at St George‟s Fields, Southwark

met challenges to its authority by the inmates. The problems manifested themselves

through boys gambling, forcing locks (to escape), insulting the masters, girls joining the

boys in their endeavours to abscond from the controls imposed upon them. Staff made

daily efforts to restrain some of the recalcitrant children. Nonetheless, other boys and

girls settled down and earned a little money by their labour in the manufactory. Selected

boys, apprenticed to workshop masters, completed their Indentures and received their

Apprentices Certificate, accompanied by a £5 Award and wages due to them from the

Society. Similarly, a girl placed by the Society into a domestic post, after one year‟s

satisfactory service, received a £1.1 shilling reward. What we can see through this cameo

portrait of a small sample of children taken from the streets is, as the Society

foreshadowed in 1788, an experiment in confinement and control to achieve a certain

objective, namely, obedient and useful youths who were unlikely to need to commit a

criminal act to survive.

90 RPS papers, Superintendent‟s Journal – SLS 2271/24/4, 12 August 1798. 91 RPS papers, Superintendent‟s Journal – July 1798- January 1801, SLS 227/24/4. 92 RPS papers, Superintendent‟s Journal – July 1798- January 1801, SLS 227/24/4, 25 and 26 July

1798.

26

The practical success of the Society‟s objectives must be balanced against the

numbers of children who continued to commit crimes and were convicted and sentenced

to gaol or the hulks moored on the River Thames to take the surplus convicts of the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth-century. However, the early years of the Society set in

train a combination of practical effort aimed to reduce crime through prevention. This

concept was new to Britain, other than Jonas Hanway‟s Marine Society established in

1751. Not only had the Society considered the theory of the prevention of juvenile crime

by isolating the child from its former environment, it produced the accommodation to put

its ideas into practice.

Even the work of the Society in providing accommodation, staff and industrial

training, along with basic reading and writing instruction; the whole integrated with

Anglican based religious teaching, is one part of a much wider influence the Society was

to have. Perhaps in its contemporary beginnings the Society was recognised as a

benevolent organisation, admitting certain categories of boys and girls who were likely to

become criminals on the streets of London if left to their own devices. Most importantly,

in its early notices in The Times, the Society makes a statement about poverty and relates

penury to the incidence of crime within the community. This in itself is not a new

observation but the Society sought to experiment with a component of juvenile crime,

albeit in a very small way. The Society hoped to arrest poverty and crime through

industrial training in an institution where children were isolated from relatives and a

criminal environment that crowded London offered at the end of the eighteenth century.

A further element of the Society‟s work is foreshadowed, namely, what is necessary to

increase the scope of the Society‟s reformatory agency? Can the Society achieve its

objective of self-sufficiency through juvenile labour and the production of articles, or

must further efforts be made to compete against other charities for donations? If the

27

Society cannot expand, who will continue the work it is doing? Does prison life give the

same benefits to a child as the reformatory institution?

These questions are relevant to the position of the Philanthropic Society as it

received its Act of Incorporation in 1806. Equally, the influence and interaction of the

Society‟s administration with other established agencies of the law grew. Representatives

attended London magistrates‟ courts, met gaol-keepers, and workhouse managers. The

role of the Society in the reformation of pauper boys and girls was recognised through its

practical example at the manufactory and reform regimes at Southwark. The Society‟s

work began to influence the wider sphere of policing and sentencing juveniles. The

disposal of a child after reformatory training was of great importance, an aspect continued

throughout the Society‟s existence. The administration of the Society was well organised

by 1806 and was well placed to influence the containment of delinquent children in the

first half of the nineteenth century.

28

1

Chapter 2. Toward the Farm School: Beginnings of a

Partnership with the State, 1817-1849

Introduction

The period following the end of Britain‟s fight against the French was pivotal in the

way one form of panic by the country‟s ruling classes against French aggression turned to

focus upon the lower orders within England‟s own borders. It was apparent to all that the

population of London and the whole of Britain had been increasing at an alarming and

inexplicable rate.1 The fashionable theories of Thomas Malthus generated fears of a

population explosion among the lower classes supposedly lacking in moral restraint. In

these circumstances those who were anxious to protect their wealth and property, worried

about juvenile poverty and crime. The wealthy in towns and cities, as well as land-

owners feared an uprising of the poor, plus the prospect of civil disobedience by those

who had become unemployed and organised by the efforts of leaders of combinations.

Soldiers now demobilised lacking work joined the ranks of an estimated „two million

paupers…and thousands of British subjects perishing by hunger‟ increased the concern of

those that paid the Poor Rate.2 The House of Lords listened to reports of proposed

anarchy „and plans of revolution‟ in 1817. Evidence given to the 18l6 Parliamentary

Committee by Robert Raynsford, a London Magistrate, indicated that „juvenile

depredators‟ had increased within certain metropolitan districts „occupied by the middling

and lower classes of society‟. Such fears generated panic among the governing classes,

culminating in the overreaction by local government led troops at St Peter‟s Fields,

1

Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815-1870 (Oxford, 1962), pp. 1-2. 2

Patricia Hollis (ed.), Class and conflict in Nineteenth-century England, 18l5-1850 (London,

1973), pp. 97-8.

2

„Peterloo‟, in 1819. Side-by-side with this punitive approach, more charitable sentiments

were voice by such persons as Lord Grosvenor, who asked if parliament „could not have

brought forward some measure for the amelioration of the condition of the people [where]

discontent and irritated feeling prevailed‟.3

However, taxpayers anxious for relief from wartime burdens, were reluctant to

spend money on new gaols. Supporting the idle and the poor was „bitterly resented‟.4 In

1819 the House of Commons pondered over the cost of maintaining convicts, while

fearing the results of incarcerating young offenders: „to let mere youths mix with the

hardened poacher, the deserter, and the bigamist, must lead to the most deplorable

consequences.‟5 One idea put forward in 1816 had been a

general plan of a penitentiary house for the children of convicts…[who] could,

by habits of industry, and better morals being inculcated, become good

members of society, instead of becoming, as they do, worse and worse, till

they are either transported or suffer capitally?6

Similar ideas were put forward a little later by pamphleteers such as Joseph

Adshead, who pointed to the lack of a remedy whereby young offenders could be

removed from the opportunity to commit further crimes.78 These ideas, of course,

approached to the Philanthropic Society‟s already existing institution at Southwark.

3

British Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, Hansard (First Series), February 25, 1820,

col.1636. 4 Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750

(London, 1968-86), v.4, p. 17. 5 British House of Commons, Hansard, First Series, February 18, 1819 col. 466. 6

Crime and Punishment ‘Police’, p. 56, BPP. 7

Joseph Adshead, „Extract from a pam Police, v. 1, pamphlet on Juvenile Criminals,

Reformatories‟, Prisons, v.16, BPP. 8

Robert Raynsford, „Committee on the State of the Police of the Metropolis‟, 1816, Crime and

Punishment „Police‟, v.1, pp. 56-7, BPP.

3

It would not be long before the state recognised the advantages of extending

assistance to it and likeminded charities.

A precondition for state assistance would be a new approach to thinking about

social problems, which voiced charitable intentions while calming fears of social

upheaval and promising economy in public expenditure. These emerged gradually

within the context that historians have long known as the „Age of Reform‟. As

Britain moved toward the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation, reform of

parliament, expansion of the franchise and reconceptualizing the Poor Law, the

Philanthropic Society found itself drawn into an ever closer alliance with the state.

As the number of charities increased and diversified the Society competed against

others for support.9

The overriding imperative for the Society in the post-war years remained finding a

balance in the age and sex of its child inmates that would maximise income. As Donna

Andrew has noticed, the Society preferred to admit boys „between the ages of ten and

twelve‟ to maximise their productivity during the period of their institutionalisation. „By

admitting only children of the right age, and increasingly children of the right sex, the

Philanthropic was able to fulfil its goal of founding charity on the principles of trade and

sound policy‟.10 Not only did the Society need to find new ways to secure funds it had to

communicate with the government‟s growing „bureaucratic and professional structure‟

now formed to deal with the „new urban industrial society‟.11 Further the Society‟s

9

Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, 1961); Frank

Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London, 1988), pp. 39-40. 10

Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century

(Princeton, New Jersey, 1989), p. 186. 11 David Philips, „ “A Just Measure of Crime, Authority, Hunters and Blue Locusts”: The

“Revisionist” Social History of Crime and the law in Britain, 1780-1850‟, in S. Cohen and A.

4

committees were expected to demonstrate a capability for managing greater social and

financial responsibilities; a process described as part of the „nursery school of democracy‟

through which the upwardly mobile middle-class gained social status by an involvement

in philanthropic work.12

The most important development of the period for the Society was the emergence of

a new juvenile justice system signalled by the Parkhurst experiment. As the work of that

experiment was extended to involve private charities, the Society was drawn into

partnership with the state. From the late 1830s the Society proceeded to abandon many

of its early programs – including institutions for young females – in favour of operating

as an adjunct to the state‟s juvenile sentencing system. Thus committee decisions to

accept or reject a child for admission came to be based not only on age and sex but also

related to the existing number of older, proficient, inmates compared to the younger, non-

productive child. By 1845 work with girls had been entirely phased out, because the

money that could be earned by their employment in domestic service could never equal

the proceeds from the sale of goods made by the boys.13 By the end of the period covered

in this chapter, the Society‟s leading figures had decided to concentrate on two principal

areas of operation: the use of a farm school as a model reformatory and promoting

emigration as the most desirable outcome of a successful reformatory experience for

boys. These developments were not only the result of new thinking, but were also geared

to the availability of resources from the state on which the society became increasingly

dependent.

Scull (eds), Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays (Oxford, 1983), p.

65. 12

Frank Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London 1988), p.

30. 13

Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse, p. 29.

5

The incessant struggle for funding to support institutional work

The number of charities aiming to improve the morals and assist the poor and

needy in London continued to grow during the early nineteenth century.14 Despite

the change in the climate of ideas the Society remained competitive in attracting

public donations.15 Leon Radzinowicz has noted the dissatisfaction felt by those

within the population who paid the Poor Rate, as well as the criticism mounted

against the „indiscriminate private bounty‟ charitable agencies dispensed.16 David

Owen, on the other hand, believes „the Philanthropic Society played a notable part

in the story of Victorian charity not merely for its own achievements but because it

provided a take-off point for other attacks on the problem of delinquency‟.17

Although the Society‟s central objective was crime prevention the practical

application of its institutional regime was devoted to moulding the vagrant pauper

child into a pattern agreeable to those sections of the community who needed

obedient workers and servants. The Society‟s administration set in train a model

which offered, in retrospect, only a very small number of boys and girls an

opportunity to read and write whilst undergoing moral and industrial training.

However, the statistics of the plan proved to be irrelevant, for the Society‟s

influence may be attributed to its practical application of the concept of reforming

street children. In the process the Society presented a view of the inmates intended

to play upon the emotions of its benefactors, to stimulate sympathy and encourage

14

Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, 1961), passim. 15

Ibid. 16

Radzinowicz, History of the English Criminal Law, v.4, p. 2. 17

David Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660-1960 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964), p.121.

6

subscriptions to further the Institution‟s work of reform; boys and girls in the stages

of transition from delinquent child to amenable youth.

A broad spectrum of the community supported and subscribed to its work in

the post-war years, and members of the aristocracy continued to lend their names as

patrons, while members of the governing classes served on the management

committees. Others, with little status in the community gave and aligned themselves

with their superiors, their donations acknowledged in the public domain.

The Society not only followed the lead of the state but made its own

distinctive contribution to judicial procedures and reforms. One specific illustration

of the Society‟s influence is the document its Committee devised called a

„Magistrate‟s Certificate‟, which had to be completed before the Society‟s

Managing Committee would consider an application for admission of an „object‟ to

its Reform or Manufactory institution.18 Another indication of growing interaction

with instrumentalities of government was its relationship with the Superintendent of

the Convict Hulks, J. H. Capper which began with correspondence in 1813 over

release of a girl to join her convict father at Botany Bay, and led eventually to

Capper‟s election to the Society‟s committee in 1830.19

The Society had developed its philosophy and practice before the growth of

nineteenth-century government bureaucracy, and prior to the various Parliamentary

Select Committees that encouraged middle and upper-class public debate on how

best to arrest juvenile crime. The Society‟s theoretical framework was the principle

that crime could be prevented by removing children from the influence of criminal

18

„Appendix to Evidence before a Select Committee of the House of Lords on Gaols and Houses

of Correction‟, 1835, Crime and Punishment ‘Prisons’, v.4, p. 538, BPP. 19

D. M. Whitten, „Protection, Prevention, Reformation: a history of the Philanthropic Society

1788-1848‟, unpublished Ph.D thesis (University of London, 2001), p. 162.

7

parents or delinquent friends. Law enforcement within the wider community

concentrated on apprehending offenders after a crime was committed. The Society

also supported the concept of separating first offenders from hardened criminals

incarcerated in local and central gaols before and after conviction. The practical

application of one part of a working model of a reformatory establishment for

juveniles was provided in the evidence given by Thomas Russell – a steward

employed by the society – to the 1817 enquiry into the State of the Police of the

Metropolis.20 The detailed information he gave exposed the Society to further

publicity, as well as providing an insight into the day-to-day life of children in the

Institution governed by the Society‟s regulations, methods, aims and objectives. He

explained that the Society had been organised before private and public juvenile

reformatory institutions were accepted. It provided an alternative to sending

children to gaol. By its very existence it stimulated an emerging belief held by

certain parliamentarians, and other influential citizens, that the best way to reduce

juvenile crime would be to send offenders to a reformatory institution. In its work

the Society was an inspiration and a model for those who had the power to introduce

legislation, and changes to the penal system, which incarcerated children in adult

prisons. Russell stressed two current issues of concern to the Society, namely, the

limited orders for articles manufactured by apprentices and its inability to increase

trade by lowering prices. He explained that the Society could have extended its

business, but only by lowering prices, thereby throwing many industrious families

20

Thomas Russell, „First and Second Reports from the select Committee appointed to inquire into

the state of the police of the metropolis with minutes of evidence and appendices‟, 1817, Crime

and Punishment ‘Police‟, v.2, pp.441 BPP.

8

out of work.21 He believed that the society had done its best to balance the demand

for goods against the cost of labour. He outlined how the number of young children

accepted for reform had to be offset by the financial gains obtained from the

productivity of the older, skilled youth.22 In 1817, the Society controlled 119 boys

and 41 girls, admitting 21 boys and 8 girls during the previous year. The numbers

of children kept by the Society „for several years past‟ had remained fairly stable,

but only at the expense of using „a portion of legacies, which were otherwise

intended to be funded‟.23 In making a decision to admit a boy or a girl, the

managing committee applied the criterion of „the necessity to reform with respect to

that class who are most likely to be lost‟ rejecting the very young applicant and

favouring a male between the age of 9 and 12 years.24

Such practical experiments in self-funding projects for juvenile reform

commended themselves to what Selleck has called „a relatively new group – the

middle-class expert administrators who brought order, rationality and uniformity to

the solution of social problems‟.25 James Kay Shuttleworth received moral and

monetary support from the government of Lord John Russell to extend his scheme

for „a Model Industrial School for the Training of Pauper Children‟ which brought

his own endeavours „towards a new field of responsibility‟.26 Shuttleworth, and his

contemporaries such as Edward Carleton Tuffnell (assistant poor law

commissioner), supported the concept practiced by the Society namely, to

21

Ibid., p. 447. 22

Ibid., p. 447. 23

Ibid., p. 445. 24

Ibid., p. 447. 25

R. J. W. Selleck, James Kay-Shuttleworth: Journey of an Outsider (London, 1994), p. 130. 26

Ibid., p. 140.

9

„enlighten‟ pauper children through training and control.27 As parliamentary

enquiries into the causes of all kinds of physical and moral social problems

multiplied, it was not surprising that individuals connected with the Society were

called on to provide expert testimony.

The Society‟s work was noticed. The Fifth Report of the House of Lords‟

Select Committee on Gaols in 1835 noted the „very beneficial effects‟ flowing from

the work of privately-run reformatory schools „which might perhaps be

advantageously extended to public Establishments‟.28 Among other

recommendations of the Select Committee were the appointment of prison

inspectors and the establishment of a penitentiary for juvenile offenders, as an

experimental establishment.29 Most important was the recognition that juvenile

offenders demand a different system of treatment from that which then prevailed in

gaols and houses of correction. James Legge, onetime Inspector of Reformatories,

recorded in later years his belief that the Society had a major influence on the 1838

Parliamentary act,30 which established England‟s first public Juvenile Prison in an

endeavour to isolate young prisoners from adult prisons.31

The act establishing the well-known Parkhurst system, came at a most

opportune moment for the Society, which had been struggling to keep its operations

afloat. Not long before, it had appointed yet another sub-committee to see what

27

Ibid., p.137. 28

J. A. Stack, „The Juvenile Delinquent and England‟s “Revolution in Government”, 1825-1875‟,

The Historian, v.42 (1) 1979 pp.45-46. 29

„Surveyor-General Reports, Session 1852-55‟, Crime and Punishment ‘Prisons’, v.16, pp. 341-

342 BPP. 30

1 & 2 Victoria, C.81, 82, 1838. 31

James Legge, Memorandum Giving Some Account of the Reformatory and Industrial Schools in

Great Britain (London, 1904), p. 6.

10

might be done to diminish expenses and increase income.32 After reviewing annual

reports and trade accounts for the previous six years, the sub-committee decided that

the system of training apprentices within institutional walls had not been a success

financially and was, moreover, fraught with frequent unrest among the boys.

Whether the recommendation that boys be apprenticed to trades outside the

institution would have corrected the situation cannot be known, for in the meantime

the advent of Parkhurst suddenly altered the Society‟s financial prospects.

The 1838 Act had a number of ramifications for the Society. The significant

Section 11 of the Act set certain conditions for juveniles under sentence of penal

servitude or imprisonment who agreed to serve time „under the care of some

charitable institution for the reception and reformation of young offenders‟ until the

expiry of his or her sentence. Included in the same Section was an alternative for a

youth to accept Her Majesty‟s Pardon on condition the prisoner agreed to emigrate

upon release from either a prison or a reformatory school.33 This meant the Society

was eligible for government support for the young offenders sent to them from

Parkhurst Prison, formerly known as the Military Hospital and Medical Asylum for

the Children of Soldiers, in the Isle of Wight just off the coast of the county of

Hampshire. It would also gain financially from participating in emigration schemes

for boys who had served out their time within the Society‟s institution.

Until this time, the Society had assisted young males to obtain employment in

London at the end of their apprenticeship, as well placing girls in domestic

32

Whitten, „Protection, Prevention, Reformation‟, pp. 168-71. 33

1 & 2 Victoria, C.81, 82, An Act for establishing a Prison for young Offenders, 10 August 1838

Section 11. This Statute is vague when it refers to the recent “Royal Prerogative of Mercy in

granting Pardons to young Offenders”. Evidence shows the Philanthropic Society did accept boys

from London prisons at Southwark who had signed their agreement to emigration on completion

of their term with the Society.

11

situations and, similarly, boys not in apprenticeships whom the Committee

considered capable of maintaining honest employment. Female inmates were

considered for domestic service posts in London at the age of sixteen whereas

earlier parliamentary reports gave examples of the advantage of preparing homeless

boys for emigration, the most important of which was the 1926 Report from the

Select Committee on Emigration from the United Kingdom. Between 1826, and the

1840s interest had continued to grow in schemes and possibilities for „young

persons who may have been detected in the commission of crime in Great Britain‟.34

Parkhurst provided avenues for developing juvenile emigration. It housed two

main categories of young offenders; those sentenced to a term of imprisonment to be

followed by transportation when discharged at the end of their sentence and the

remaining youths who would be returned to the mainland on discharge from

Parkhurst.35 The Society proved to be a convenient means for circumventing a

problem the government had faced in 1836 when colonial administrators objected to

former convicts being sent to them.36 The ultimate meaning of the Society‟s

partnership with Parkhurst was that it moved from being a purely private voluntary

venture to acting as an extension of the state system for dealing with juvenile crime.

New leadership

34

Sir George Gipps, (Governor, New South Wales) to Lord Glenelg (Colonial Secretary) 29 May

1839, (412) 15 June 1841, Transportation, v.6, p. 3, BPP. 35

H.T. Holmes, „Reform of Reformatories and Industrial Schools‟, Fabian Tract No. 111 (1902)

p. 2. 36

Internal Home Office Memorandum to Sir James Graham, Home Secretary, HO 45 OS 239,

London, 4 April 1842; British Archive.

12

On its own, the formal partnership with the state might not have set the Society on a

path to greater success, had it not been for the advent of two very able and

influential leaders in 1841. One was the Duke of Richmond, who became

Philanthropic Society President; the other was the new chaplain at Southwark, the

Reverend Sydney Turner. A wealthy landowner of the old, Ultra-Tory school,

Richmond wielded considerable social and political influence after being recalled to

government as a member of Robert Peel‟s cabinet in 1842. Sydney Turner became

the Chaplain and Superintendent of the Society‟s institution at Southwark at the age

of twenty-seven.37 A Master of Arts (Cambridge, 1839), he nurtured a vision to

improve upon juvenile reformatory training in general and the Society‟s reformatory

system in particular. Essentially, Turner‟s ability to influence men of power with

his rhetoric on reformatory training publicised the Society‟s work. A friendship

with William Gladstone, Treasurer of the Society (and cousin of the statesman),

combined with the ease he later displayed in addressing the aristocracy and others

within the reformatory school movement who attended public meetings in the early

1850s. Turner presents a picture of a man who not only assisted the Society and the

progression of nineteenth-century juvenile delinquent training but laid the

foundation for his promotion to Inspector of Prisons and Reformatory Schools in

1857. Magarey sees the more mature Turner „as seeking self aggrandisement

through comments that would enhance his position‟.38

Nonetheless, Turner put forward new ideas on how best to reform delinquent

37

The Royal Philanthropic Society, A History of The Royal Philanthropic Society 1788-1988,

London, 1988 [no pagination] records Sydney Turner “as chosen by the Society” in 1840 “,

whereas the Dictionary of National Biography dates his appointment from 1841. DNB incorrectly

places Turner as “chaplain and master ... at Redhill 1841-57. The Philanthropic Society only

moved to Red Hill in 1849. 38

Susan M. Magarey, „The Reclaimers: a study of the reformatory movement in England and

Wales, 1846-1893‟, unpublished PhD thesis, (Australian National University, 1975), p. 198.

13

boys whilst retaining the principle of corporal punishment. He upheld a form of

punishment which could last a few days, being „laborious, seclusive and religious‟

in content, believing it to be „beneficial rather than injurious‟.39 Later, Turner

suggested reformatory schools should keep „one or two cells‟ to confine the

„incorrigible‟ and disruptive boy ... from a few hours to a few days with a bread-

and-water diet‟ with no comforts. However, Turner added that in many cases a

„whipping will do the culprit more good‟.40

Turner, first tentative but later assured, eventually became closely associated

with the plans of the Home Office to send discharged Parkhurst boys overseas. In

the meantime, he settled into his duties as Secretary to the Society‟s Committee of

Finance and Trade, in addition to all of his other duties within the Institution.

Turner noted in his Journal when ten female inmates were confirmed by the Bishop

of Winchester, and wrote of their „religious knowledge and their correct behaviour‟

which gave „the Chaplain great satisfaction‟.41 Juxtaposed with this benign

observation is Turner‟s note that the cells should be employed for a few recalcitrant

inmates „for this and the week following‟. He ordered the same children to be

locked up at 7 pm and released at 6 am.42 He exercised control over 93 boys in the

manufactory, 22 boys in the reformatory and 29 girls in the Female School in July

1843.

While the Society sought ways to earn a larger income, the Colonial Office

complained to the Home Office about being expected to receive former convict boys

on completion of their term at Parkhurst Prison. The Home Secretary, Sir James

39

Sydney Turner, The Times, London, 21 December 1853. 40

Sydney Turner, letter, The Irish Quarterly Review, v.5 (1854-1855) pp. 797-9. 41

RPS papers, Resident Chaplain’s Journal, 1843; SLS 2271/24/18, 26 June 1843. 42

Ibid.

14

Graham, wrote to the Commandant of Parkhurst on 4 April 1842 stating the

difficulty that would ensue with the Colonial authorities „if a considerable number

of boys proceeded directly to the colonies from prison ... it would in that case defeat

the object of the Emigration‟. Graham went on to suggest: „This objection would

not apply to the sending of a small number of the best conducted of these boys to

New Brunswick, occasionally, as free Emigrants‟.43

The Home Office tried to extricate itself from the dilemma of how best to

dispose of former prisoners, a problem the Society had, too, while Turner

endeavoured to find a solution to the Society‟s falling receipts. For example, he

explained in a letter to the Duke of Richmond, of „the pecuniary condition which led

me to enquire more closely into the state and prospects of ... (the Society‟s)

revenue‟.44 With the letter Turner enclosed a report from the Society‟s Sub-

Committee on the „small number of applications for admission into the female

school‟ and the Committee‟s recommendation to cease accepting females. Turner

sent the Society‟s Annual Statement of Receipts and Expenses and Trade Accounts

for 1842 to the Duke, whom he carefully cultivated. Turner‟ clearly grasped the

need to keep the President, who had many influential and wealthy associates,

informed of every detail regarding income and expenditure. Listed are the

„Subscriptions and Donations received - £2,416.12.6., Legacies received in cash

£172.‟ Money derived from the Manufactory amounted to: „Printing - £1,067.5.6.;

43

Sir James Graham, Home Office to Parkhurst Prison, 4 April 1842, HO. 45 OS 239, British

Archive. 44

Sydney Turner to the Duke of Richmond, 5 April 1843, Goodwood Estate Archives,

(Goodwood MS. 1661), West Sussex Record Office.

15

Book-Binding - £627.18.11.; Rope-making - £1,053.4.8.; Tailor work - £2,193 ;

Shoe-making - £1,080., Total: £6,742.4s.‟45

By 1 February 1843 Turner had become convinced of the need to obtain „the

assistance of the government ... towards the maintenance‟ of the Reform building.

Turner‟s draft resolution, written on behalf of the managing sub-committee,

exercised his perception of the situation, by including a phrase whereby the

committee „consult with the President of the Society on the subject of enlarging the

Reform‟.46 With his letter he enclosed the Society‟s „Notice of Resolutions‟ from

Committee Member Capper. The Resolution refers to „the increase in Juvenile

Offenders, and the degree of public attention and exertion now directed towards

their reformation‟. Capper requests that the Reform building be expanded „to

receive a larger number of inmates [and] to allow a greater classification and more

separate and effective discipline‟. Not only was the Committee of Management

anxious to enlarge the institution‟s capacity, a further Resolution stated:

That considering the diminished permanent income of the Society, it would be

of much benefit, if, consistent with its present constitution and independent

regulation, the assistance of the Government could be obtained, towards the

maintenance of this portion of the Institution.

Never had there been so frank a statement of the Society‟s determination to

embrace state aid as a solution to its problems. This was followed by another

momentous decision: to wind up the girls‟ reformatory. Turner, in a letter requesting

45

Ibid. 46

Ibid.

16

the Duke to preside over the meeting of „the great body of Subscribers to a General

Court to consider the closure of the girls reformatory‟, set out further Resolutions to

be placed for the approval of subscribers at the Annual Meeting: that the Society

restrict admission to children of convicts „between 10 and 14‟ years of age; „the

young men in the Society‟s Manufactory be allowed to leave before the age of 21‟;

„the age of admission for Criminal Boys be between 10 and 13‟; and „the Reform

boys be retained for a longer period in that department and be usually provided for

abroad‟. Finally, „that no more girls be admitted and that the Female School be

discontinued as soon as the present inmates can be judiciously provided for‟.47

Turner‟s forceful opinion on the impact of the draft Resolutions demonstrates his

growing confidence in his ability to assess the needs of the Society. With respect to

the girls, he pointed out:

While in the last two years we have had upwards of 50 applications for

criminal boys and more than 30 for sons of convicts we have had only nine

applications for the admission of girls [this] will I trust weigh with the

Subscribers and reconcile them to the measure.48

What Turner‟s statement downplayed was the substantial loss the Society suffered

from the girls‟ reformatory, because the cash value of their work never approached

that of the boys, while their expenses were virtually the same.

Through the 1840s the Society concentrated attention on the goal of achieving

economic viability. The committee had written to William Crawford, Inspector of

Prisons, in January 1846 who in turn wrote to S. M. Phillips at the Home Office

47

Ibid. 48

Turner to Richmond, 6 May 1843, Goodwood Estate Archives, (Goodwood MS. 1661), West

Sussex Record Office.

17

referring to the correspondence. Although Crawford failed to support the Society‟s

proposal he outlined the letter and gave his opinion of the situation.49 The Society

had written offering to receive into its care convict boys who were not more than

fourteen years of age. If such an agreement was made Crawford proposed that the

Society should receive a payment of £20 for each boy per annum. Crawford

continued:

In return I beg to state, as my opinion, that the proposal of the Committee [the

Philanthropic Society] offers no advantages which are not already secured by

the arrangements which have been made by Her Majesty‟s Government with

the Refuge for the Destitute in consideration of the Annual Parliamentary

Grant voted to that institution, and that it is not therefore expedient to comply

with the prayer of the Memorial.

However, the Committee of the Refuge of the Destitute was not without its

own problems when it came to finding employment for the former inmates of a

London gaol and now considered ready to leave the Refuge. The committee were

„compelled ... to have recourse to emigration as the channel by which [they could]

best dispose of the objects of their care‟.50

Despite the lack of unity between the Inspector of Prisons, the Home Office,

the Philanthropic Society, and the Refuge for the Destitute on how best to deal with

pauper and delinquent boys and girls – the former agency sought to achieve results

49

William Crawford to Home Office, Memorandum, „Discharge of boys to the Philanthropic

Institution from Parkhurst and other prisons‟. HO 45 O.S.1649, 7 January 1846, British Archive. 50

„The Second Report of the Inspectors of Prisons for the Home District‟, Crime and Punishment

‘Prisons’ , v.32 (1837) p. 67, BPP.

18

for the lowest cost, while the charities hoped to gain government moneys to sustain

their efforts in reforming young offenders – at least discussions were underway.

Several events occurred in quick succession. On the one hand the Society

needed money and on the other, the Home Office urgently wanted accommodation

in a private reformatory institution for a group of juvenile prisoners from Parkhurst

before their emigration to the colonies as private citizens. In early November 1846

the Society formed a Deputation to wait upon Sir George Grey, Home Secretary.

Later, on 16 November, Grey wrote to the Society in reply to the points raised at the

meeting and confirmed the government‟s consideration on „forming reformatories‟

of their own but „their course was not as yet determined‟. Nonetheless, the Home

Secretary although unable to „pledge the Government to send boys in the future‟ he

needed to send twenty boys now „on terms of payment proposed‟ from Parkhurst

Junior School to the Philanthropic Society on the understanding that the boys were

to be admitted „directly to the General Establishment‟ and not according to the

Society‟s rules „to the Reform institution or Probationary Ward‟.51 In this way the

earlier, 7 January „Memorial‟ from the Society, where an amount of „£20 each per

boy per annum‟ was requested, became an agreement between the penal agency and

the private charity „so long as the institution was inspected by the government

Inspector.52 The Home Secretary added, if the Society would arrange a plan to form

a union with the Refuge for the Destitute, many obstacles to the government‟s

cooperation would be removed.53 The Home Office had to overcome the dilemma

of how best to dispose of juvenile offenders at the end of their term of imprisonment

51

William Crawford and Whitworth Russell [Prison Inspectors] to S.M. Phillips, 30 November

1846, HO 45/1649, British Archive. 52

Memorial, 16 November 1846, HO 45/1649, British Archive. 53

RPS papers, SLS 2271/2/16, 20 November 1846.

19

when the British colonial authorities declined to accept former convicts as

emigrants. Nonetheless, the cost of maintaining „over 1,138, 393 paupers at a cost

of £4,353,765‟ to charitable agencies encouraged further thought on the idea of

emigration as a means of reducing such a financial liability.54

Meanwhile, in response to the Home Secretary‟s suggestion of amalgamation

with the Refuge for the Destitute, the Society‟s Special Committee met on 20

November 1846 at the London Coffee House, Ludgate Hill to consider the situation.

The debate centred on expanding

more systematic efforts to establish the true principles of reformatory

discipline as applied to young offenders, and to give a practical example of the

method that should be pursued in their education and employment.

The committee reported to the Special General Court of the Society on the

same day. However, a new issue came to relieve the situation where „all ways and

means‟ had to be considered to reduce costs as the Court decided to accept „lads

from the House of Correction, Brixton at £16 per annum‟.55

The Society‟s management committee met on 2 December and resolved to

write to Edward Forster, the Refuge for the Destitute‟s Treasurer, proposing „that

some system of combined operations should be adopted‟ by the two Societies. It

was the wish of the Philanthropic Society to ensure that the outcome would allow

for „powers of legal control over the inmates and the enabling magistrates to send

Juvenile Offenders to such Asylums on terms of payment.‟ William Gladstone

included the additional comment that:

54

Charlie Shaw letter, Chadwyck Healey Microform, Nineteenth Century, no. 1.1.527 pp.5-6. 55

RPS papers, „Minutes of Proceedings‟, SLS 2271/2/16, 20 November 1846.

20

the Committee of the Philanthropic Society have had in contemplation the

making of a large and efficient agricultural establishment for male juvenile

offenders at a short distance from town. A measure for which the cooperation

of the Government appears essential.56

The situation reached a conclusion when the Refuge for the Destitute opposed the

idea of merging with the Society, or indeed transferring from London to a rural

situation.57

The Society‟s plans to move to the country and enlarge its work based upon

agricultural labour was dependent upon a scheme to persuade central and local

agencies to contribute funds to support such an institution. One route to achieve

confidence in the Society was taken by Sydney Turner when he wrote to the Home

Office in 1848 setting out expenses and the ultimate disposal of boys it now

received from local magistrates‟ courts and Houses of Correction. An amount of

„£16 per head per annum‟ was the sum charged for maintenance and clothing while

in the Institution, plus £5 for „the apprentice fee given on their being placed out‟.

The boys were kitted out before leaving the institution at an approximate cost of £2.

10shillings each and it was „understood that the total cost of a boy‟s provision on

leaving [should] not exceed £8. „The total expense for Maintenance and Outfit of

the 74 boys ... placed in the Philanthropic Society from 24 December 1846 to the

beginning of the present quarter [8 July 1848] amounts to £674. 3s. 6d.‟58 Turner

elaborated on the disposal of inmates:

56

RPS papers, SLS 2271/2/16, reported in the „Minutes of Proceedings‟, 2 December 1846. 57

RPS papers, SLS 2271/2/16 copy of letter dated 17 November 1846 included in RPS „Minutes

of Proceedings‟, 20 November 1846. 58

Sydney Turner‟s report to the Home Office, 8 July 1848, HO 45/1649, British Archive.

21

Of the 40 discharged

20 have been apprenticed

14 have been placed (with assistance with clothes to average about

£3. 10shillings each) under the care of their friends and,

6 have been sent to sea, of these, 3 entered the Navy.

Thus Turner illustrated a successful account of the Society‟s regime whereby the

cost is justified and the expectations of its subscribers achieved. At the same time

he signalled how much administrative detail the charity was involved in, acting as it

did as a pseudo police and penal agency - and a convenient channel through which

to educate, train and dispose of a small proportion of London‟s pauper, or

delinquent children.

Not long afterwards, Turner put forward another revolutionary idea: the Society

should leave Southwark and concentrate all its energy on a farm school.

The plans for an agricultural reformatory school

The concept of farm schools was not new. They had been recommended as

remedies for indigent boys both in North America and on the Continent for many years.

Examples could be found in Boston, in Germany, Switzerland and other countries.59 For

instance, in 1804 Emanuel de Fellenberg (1771-1844) had introduced the idea of „making

agriculture subservient to the restoration of morality, by combining…instruction with a

routine of manual labour‟ at his school in Hofwyl, Switzerland.60 In the 1830s the details

of many of these institutions were publicised in Britain by Lady Byron, who took a

59

See, for example, A Report of the Directors of the Boston Farm School (Boston, MA, 1834). 60

„M. Fellenberg, His Schools and Plans‟, Library of Economic Literature, vol. V, 1820-1831

[Goldsmiths‟-Kress Reel 2507, Item no. 26375 p. 6].

22

particular interest in girls‟ reformatories. She took the lead in establishing an institution,

Ealing School, based on Fellenberg‟s principles.61 Similar ideas permeated the work of

mission schools among Indians of Canada and the United States in this era.62

Of all the available models, the one that most influenced the Philanthropic

Society was that begun in 1839 by Demetz and Bretigneres at Mettray, near Tours,

in France. From 1840 to 1939 it operated as reform penal colony, whose „graduates‟

were intended to go as emigrants to the new French Colony of Algeria. In more

recent years, Mettray has won notoriety as the boyhood home of playwright Jean

Genet, and as a totalising institution in Michel Foucault‟s Discipline and Punish.63

What most interested Sydney Turner in Mettray was the combined programme of

reform and emigration.

In 1845, at the request of the Society‟s Treasurer, William Gladstone, Turner

visited „La Colonie Agricole‟ at Mettray to learn more about the scheme.64 Turner,

and a police magistrate, Thomas Paynter, compiled a report based on their

investigation in France, which was presented to the „Committee of the Philanthropic

Society, St George‟s Fields, 19 August 1846‟. It summarised the experiment as an

agricultural colony of approximately 400 young offenders working the land. Turner

and Paynter identified the „chief features of the system‟ as being the institution‟s

practice of dividing inmates into „groups or families ... each having its paternal head

61

Joan Pierson, „Noel , Anne Isabella , suo jure Baroness Wentworth, and Lady Byron (1792–

1860)‟, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online

edn, Oct 2006. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/45789, accessed 20 March 2007]. 62

For further examples that would have been known to Sydney Turner, see Joseph Fletcher, The

Farm-School System of the Continent and its Applicability to the Preventative and Reformatory

Education of Pauper and Criminal Children in England and Wales (London, 1852). 63

M. Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (Paris, 1975). 64

Sydney Turner and Thomas Paynter, „Report on the System and Arrangements of La Colonie

Agricole, at Mettray; submitted to William Gladstone, Treasurer of the Society‟, RPS papers, SLS

2271/40/5 26 August 1846.

23

and its separate habitation‟, and the whole number of inmates „constantly

employed‟.65 By segregating various categories of young criminals into small

groups, the institution sought to reduce the influence of the more hardened

delinquents, who in towns and cities were supposed to have been guilty of training

the younger, more vulnerable boys. City life had been criticised by Mirabeau, the

eighteenth-century French statesman, „as the worst place to try to instil good habits

on pauper children. All institutions for the reception of Foundlings and Beggars are

established within towns. Why are they not removed from towns which they infect,

and which infect them, to the country?‟66 As a postscript Turner, keenly aware of the

Society‟s financial difficulties, suggested, „Should you as managers of the

Philanthropic, decide, at any time, in consideration of the greater economy and

advantage of a rural situation ... it would be well to bear in mind the conditions

which Monsieur Demetz‟ organised for the economic success of the institution.67

Turner concludes with a number of details for an improved Philanthropic

reformatory, with emphasis on agricultural labour.

The Society‟s General Council voted to adapt the rudiments of the system. At a

General Meeting of Subscribers in 1848 a decision was made to rent a 133-acre estate at

Red Hill in the county of Surrey, approximately forty miles from London and situated

alongside the London to Brighton railway line. The property was leased to the

65

Sydney Turner, Resident Chaplain to the Philanthropic Society and Thomas Paynter, Police

Magistrate copy of „Report on the System and Arrangements of “La Colonie Agricole,” at

Mettray; presented to the Committee of the Philanthropic Society, St. George‟s Fields, 19 August

1846‟, „Appendix No.8 to Report from Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Children with

Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index‟, 1852-53, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile

Offenders’, v.2, pp. 460-470, BPP. See also H. M. Jenkins, „Farming and Agricultural Training

in Reformatory and Industrial Schools, with Notes on Spade-labour‟, Royal Agricultural Society

Journal, v. 47, 1886, pp.176. 66

Anonymous, 11-page pamphlet, The Royal Philanthropic Society’s School, n.d., p. 4. 67

Turner to the Philanthropic Society, August 1846 p. 464 [Select Committee copy].

24

Philanthropic Society for „150 years with the option of buying at a fixed price within a

certain period‟.68 Here began the detailed plans for running the Philanthropic Society‟s

Farm School, with the transfer of „objects‟ from London to the new venue during 1849.

The central function of the farm school was to induce „practical reformation of the

individuals‟ admitted to the farm based on the benefits of hard physical labour associated

with agricultural work.69 As well as the transfer of boys from London there was little

likelihood of the school not being of use for during 1849 the Statistical Society recorded

figures of „Juvenile Prisoners under Summary Conviction in England and Wales as 8,787

boys and 1,466 girls‟.70 However, despite the Home Secretary‟s desire to use the Society‟s

reformatory as a private adjunct of the government penal system, accepting, training and

disposing – through emigration – certain categories of boys transferred from Parkhurst

Prison, an anomaly confused the situation. Lieutenant Colonel Jebb – who at this time was

„the principal civil servant concerned with penal policy and juvenile delinquency‟ – did not

directly oppose such Home Office arrangements but he covertly criticised such actions in

the belief that „juvenile offenders convicted of serious crimes should continue to be sent to

Parkhurst and that juvenile offenders convicted of minor crimes should be sent to district

penal schools instead of to local prisons‟.71 The Reverend Whitworth Russell, Prison

Inspector, advocated penal schools „with the power of detaining the children in those

schools till the age of eighteen‟.72 The Inspectors applied Edwin Chadwick‟s principle of

„less-eligibility‟, according to which an honest worker should not be disadvantaged

68

RPS booklet, „History of the School‟, 1788-1848, (8 pages). 69

Sydney Turner, Evidence to Select Committee‟, 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile

Offenders’, v.2, p.22, BPP. 70

Joseph Fletcher, „Statistics of the Farm School System of the Continent, and of its applicability

to the Preventive and Reformatory Education of Pauper and Criminal Children in England‟,

Journal of the Statistical Society of London, v.15 (1852), p. 46. 71

Stack, „The Juvenile Delinquent‟ pp. 47-48. 72

Reverend Whitworth Russell, ‘Second Report of the Surveyor-General of Prisons‟, Appendix

„0‟, Sessions 1847-1853, Crime and Punishment ‘Prisons’, v. 14, pp. 87-8, BPP.

25

compared with the benefits given to a less conscientious person. (In this instance poor

parents would be disadvantaged if criminal juvenile offenders received free food, industrial

training and an education in the name of charity.)73

Despite the opinion of senior members of the Prison Department over the issue of

„less-eligibility‟ the Society actively canvassed the transfer of what they came to term as

„Government Account‟ boys from local and central prisons, as well as from Parkhurst.

Why was the Society anxious to perform a public service in a private agency? One

explanation may be attributed to the nature of the Society‟s objective which was forever

pushing the boundaries of reform concerning juvenile offenders. To feed its case the

Society needed money, a surety upon which to extend the new „experiment‟ at Red Hill.74

Grand opening

If Mettray, in Foucault‟s view, presented a „theatre of punishment‟, the opening of Red

Hill presented an amazing spectacle of organised Victorian philanthropy. The Times

described the scene when the foundation stone of the School‟s chapel was laid on 30

April 1849 as one „of the gayest and most animated with a very large and influential body

of spectators‟.75 Incidentally, the report portrayed a range of social rank that existed in

mid-nineteenth-century England, when some of the highest-born in the land gathered with

some of the lowest-born to witness the proceedings.

The Society invited Prince Albert, Queen Victoria‟s consort, to lay the new

building‟s foundation stone, the Prince being one of a number of the charity‟s chief

73

Stack, „The Juvenile Delinquent‟, p. 46. 74

The Times, „The Philanthropic Society‟, London 1 May 1849. The article refers to the

„interesting character of the experiment about to be made‟ at Red Hill. 75

The Times, 1 May 1849, p. 5.

26

patrons. The prince, accompanied by the Duke of Richmond, President of the

Philanthropic Society, with other chief patrons and the Society‟s senior office-bearers,

travelled by train to Redhill. The royal train drew into a „temporary station‟ erected

within the 133 acres of the Society‟s farm shortly before 3 pm. Because the undulating

countryside had few roads the royal visitor, with his companions, walked from the train

up a steep incline and along a winding path to an elevated position, very near to the large

house occupied by Turner, and his family. The chapel‟s foundation stone lay slightly to

the right and to the rear of this house, next to a central meeting room, which was later to

serve as a dining hall for the reformatory school inmates. The band of the Royal Artillery

led the procession along the path, with the Society‟s committee following behind with

„wands and wearing rosettes‟. After the committee, walked a few inmates of the

reformatory school dressed in their „homely smock-frocks‟. The Times remarked with

evident distaste on the boys from the school and „their homely smock-frocks and peculiar

and not very prepossessing physiognomies contrasting very oddly with the elegance and

polish all around them‟.76 Villagers lining the pathway were kept in check by members

of the metropolitan police force strategically placed in front of the men, women and

children who waved flags and cheered the procession. The Bishop of Winchester and his

clergy, with the High Sheriff of Surrey, followed Prince Albert as they all made their way

to a large white marquee where „an influential body of spectators‟ had already gathered

for the occasion.

St Paul‟s Cathedral choir led the programme with an ode in honour of the royal

visitor. Next, Prince Albert „set‟ the chapel‟s foundation stone as it was lowered into

position. When the Prince had completed his task of spreading the mortar, several young

76

Ibid.

27

men, former apprentices of the Society‟s London institution, came forward to read an

address. The men spoke of the benefits the Society had bestowed upon them, especially

from the „religious and industrial training‟ during their reformation. They ended their

testimony with the fervent hope that the farm school would supply the „needs of young

and destitute and erring fellow countrymen‟. They hoped such boys could be „saved from

ruin, and trained up to piety to God, loyalty to our Queen, and usefulness to our

country‟.77 Prince Albert replied:

There can be nothing more gratifying than to witness the success of that noble and

philanthropic effort which attempts to reclaim from the earliest steps to ruin those

unhappy children whom poverty and misfortune more than any inclination have led

to crime, and I earnestly trust that by the progress of civilisation and true Christian

feeling society will daily more overcome any prejudices which may have stood in

the way of receiving them back with cheerfulness and trust, and of extending to

them a cordial aiding hand in their struggles to regain a position of equality with

their brethren.78

It is not clear if the Prince‟s reply referred to England, or to its colonies, when he hoped

for acceptance of reformed youth after their discharge as an inmate of a reformatory,

although it appeared to be common knowledge that the Society sent its former inmates to

work „their way‟ in British colonies and further, emigration always formed an essential

part in the plan of the Society‟s operations.79

The Prince took his departure after the band‟s rendition of Handel‟s „Hallelujah

Chorus‟, returning by train to London. Members of the Society and their guests stayed to

77

Ibid. 78

Ibid. 79

Ibid.

28

enjoy a lunch provided „by Mr Rolfe of the White Hart Hotel, Reigate‟. Loyal Toasts

were proposed by the Duke of Richmond, President of the Society, to „the Queen‟ and his

„Royal Highness Prince Albert‟. The Bishop of Winchester made a speech in reply to the

Duke in which he praised the Reverend Sydney Turner‟s endeavours at the farm school.80

These remarks about Turner in front of such a gathering would surely have increased the

chaplain‟s growing status, both within the Society and amongst juvenile reformers in

general.

It now remained to see how the Farm School would flourish. In the short run it

would substantially raise the Society in the eyes of government and organised

philanthropy, with Turner emerging as a prominent national figure in the juvenile justice

system.

80

Ibid.

29

1

Chapter 3. The Philanthropic Society’s Farm School, Redhill:

1849-1879

Chapter one described the Philanthropic Society‟s inception in 1788 as a response

to fears about the dangers represented by destitute children in parlous circumstances,

whom philanthropic individuals believed could be saved from drifting into a life of crime.

Chapter two showed the new climate of opinion that flourished following the Reform Bill

of 1832, and the Society‟s response to new thinking by establishing a farm school for

juvenile male prisoners. This chapter examines the implementation of the farm school

scheme at Redhill, showing that the Society was very much in tune with the kind of

thinking that motivated Poor Law and Sanitary Reform in the heyday of Edwin Chadwick.

The State assisted and inspected, but did not unduly interfere with Redhill‟s operations.

Sydney Turner became so influential a spokesman for the farm school that he was offered

a government appointment as an inspector of reformatories. The period 1849-1879 stands

as something of a golden age of Society operations, when its approach to rehabilitation of

young male offenders resonated with government thinking on the subject. This chapter

does not give a chronological account of the total operation, preferring to take individual

themes in turn.

The Society‟s move from London to Redhill aimed to provide reformatory school

discipline within the concept of agricultural labour. The school occupied land in a farming

area, which provided the Society with the space to instruct boys in basic farm work and to

receive guidance in animal husbandry. The reformatory farm school boys often came from

magistrates‟ courts within boroughs in the south of England. Both at home and in the

2

colonies at this time „children were a valuable part of the work force‟.1 The Society had

since its inception in 1788 sought to make money through the work of the young boys and

girls trained in the reformatory buildings. The same principle applied when the Society

accepted boys from Parkhurst and agreed to provide agricultural and farm training. At the

end of the specified period of institutionalisation, the Society arranged passages for many

of the boys. Redhill henceforth provided a link for the government to rid the country of

recalcitrant youths without giving Britain‟s colonies any problems in accepting boys who

travelled as private citizens and not as convicted felons.

The Farm School as an adjunct to the state penal system

The Society was but one link in the penal system of mid-nineteenth-century

England. The central government sought to dispose of many young boys incarcerated in

London gaols or in the juvenile prison at Parkhurst. The colonies proved unwilling to

receive young convict boys from penal institutions in Britain. In 1842, Sir James Graham,

Home Secretary, and Lord Stanley, Colonial Secretary, had discussed the pros and cons of

sending youthful offenders overseas.2 As things stood, after the passing of the Parkhurst

Act, the Society accepted youths upon the recommendation of the appropriate Inspector of

Prisons, or the prison superintendent, in conjunction with Sydney Turner. Boys served a

minimum of one year of training at Redhill, unless their sentences expired earlier.

Subsequently, the Society arranged private passages for a small group of released

reformatory schoolboys who were sent to various British colonies as free settlers. No

reference was made to their past convictions; in fact everything was done to suppress any

1

P. Hetherington, Settlers, Servants & Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth-

century Western Australia, (Perth, 2002), p. 38. 2

‘Correspondence and papers relating to convict ships, convict discipline and transportation

1843-47’, Crime and Punishment ‘Transportation’, v.7, pp. 77-85, BPP.

3

connection with past misdeeds.3 This arrangement proved to be mutually beneficial for the

Home Office and the Society in the late 1840s and the first half of the 1850s.4 For

instance, Captain Williams, Inspector of Prisons, Home District, reported to the Home

Office in December 1851 that boys were transferred to Redhill „under conditional pardon

from the Westminster House of Correction‟. Williams went on to refer to the „peculiar

facilities which the Philanthropic Society commands in quietly and unostentatiously

disposing of these boys by emigration‟.5

Categories of boys accepted at Redhill Farm School

The Society accepted three categories of convicted boys at Redhill. Admissions

included a „voluntary class‟, so-called because a boy could voluntarily, if selected upon

recommendation of the Inspector of Prisons, accept an offer of a pardon by the Home

Secretary in exchange for an unspecified period at Redhill.6 „Young transports‟, whose

ages ranged between eight to fourteen years were sentenced to a short gaol term prior to

transportation. They could become eligible for transfer to a private reformatory school if

recommended as suitable by the Director of Millbank Prison, in consultation with Sydney

Turner. Finally, boys came to Redhill, sometimes at the request of a parent or guardian, or

upon the recommendation of a county magistrate, on the undertaking of maintenance for

3

Home Office memorandum, HO.45, O.S.239/9, British Archive. 4

W. J. Williams, ‘Report of Captain Williams, Inspector of Prisons, on Minute of Committee of

Council on Education, relative to Establishment of Model Schools for Juvenile Criminals and

Paupers, in connection with the Training School for Masters at Kneller Hall’, Appendix, No. 1,

‘Report from the Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles; together with the

Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index‟, June 1852, Crime and Punishment „Juvenile Offenders‟, v.2, p. 385. BPP. 5

Ibid. 6

Sydney Turner, Evidence to Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles‟, 11

May 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 2., pp. 22-3, BPP.

4

the boy.7 Nonetheless, exceptions were made. In December 1853 some „short-term lads‟

were admitted to the farm for six months at a cost to their parent of two shillings and

sixpence per week. Conversely, a ten-year-old boy was refused admission for training on

account of his age and the inability of his parent to offer the Society more than two

shillings a week maintenance for the boy. In 1852 the Society had fifty-two boys of the

„voluntary‟ category under training, thirty-eight „young transports‟ and twenty-four whose

maintenance was partially met by relatives or friends.8

Topics such as juvenile labour within the farm, the boys‟ education, health, diet,

and discipline are discussed below in the context of an era where knowledge about

methods of dealing with juvenile delinquents grew, both within the Society‟s

administration, and in response to questions prompted by an expanding central state

bureaucracy. The Society‟s chaplain-superintendents‟ methods were paramount to

ensuring the health and welfare of staff, inmates and the function of the farm school.

Although this chapter identifies problems experienced by the Society‟s

administrative staff at Redhill, and the methods they adopted to achieve solutions, it also

endeavours to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages for the boys admitted for training

at the farm school during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Turner at Redhill, 1849-1857

Turner was charged with the Society‟s plan to implement a „more systematic effort

to establish the true principles of reformatory discipline as applied to young offenders and

to give a practical example of the method that should be pursued in their education and

7

Ibid., p.27. 8

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/18 Minutes of Proceedings, 7 December 1853.

5

employment‟.9 The Society expected Turner to adapt the French model of a juvenile

reformatory farm school to local requirements, and to turn convicted boys into proficient

farm workers; boys who had hitherto lived a life of „carelessness and independence‟.

Meanwhile, the Society‟s wider commitment aimed to relieve „the condition of that class of

children‟ which lived in penury on the streets in Britain.10 Turner and his schoolmasters

carried the responsibility of converting delinquent boys into youths capable of honest

endeavour.11

Turner‟s enthusiasm for Mettray reinforced the Society‟s view that by taking young

criminal ringleaders away from the cities a reduction in crime would result. Not only

would their removal from a city aid their reformation, but also boys trained for farm work

could reject the conditions and dissolute friends that had earlier led them into trouble.

Turner genuinely believed he could bring about the reformation of young male

recalcitrants at a farm school. Thus, when he set about organising the farm he investigated

ways to imbue boys with confidence in their ability to succeed if they obeyed certain rules

and regulations.

But self-discipline was not the whole answer to a boy‟s reformation at Redhill. A

boy had to have, or acquire, the physical stamina to perform the tasks set him at the

institution. The Society‟s Annual Reports set out its „Rules for Admission‟ which stipulated

boys should be of „sound bodily health, and capable of receiving mental instruction and

industrial training‟.12 Importantly, a boy‟s physical strength had to meet the demands of

„outside labour‟ as opposed to „house labour‟ formerly carried out at the now defunct

9

RPS, Surrey Library Service (SLS), Item no. 2271/2/16 Minutes of Proceedings, 10

November 1846. 10

Sydney Turner, evidence to ‘Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles’, 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 2, p. 22, BPP. 11

J. R. Fowler, „Street Occupations‟, Reformatory and Refuge Journal, v.7 (1862), p. 105. 12

Philanthropic Society, Annual Reports; see for example, 1858 - 1864.

6

Southwark Manufactory.

The role of chaplain/superintendent was central to the reformatory institution‟s

growth. Turner managed his staff, as well as performing secretarial and accountant‟s work

on behalf of the institution. He wrote a weekly report on the state of the farm school to the

Society‟s committee, and attended either at Redhill or in London. Separately, he fulfilled

his function as chaplain by preaching in the school‟s chapel, and preparing boys for their

Confirmation. Turner not only acted as chaplain-superintendent at the farm school, but

became a central link between the General (central) committees of the Society, and a wider

circle of juvenile reformers. Turner made friends with influential country gentlemen, such

as Thomas Barwick Lloyd Baker, a Gloucestershire landholder and magistrate. Lloyd

Baker facilitated opportunities for Turner to meet an increasing number of private

reformatory school managers at his country estate at Hardwicke, Gloucestershire. Men and

women who were interested in private reformatory schools learned from Turner‟s practical

experience at Southwark, while his position at Redhill provided him with the capacity to

convince others to support the cause of reforming young delinquents. His social

connections increased his opportunities to propagate the objectives of the Society, and to

outline details of the regime at Redhill.

In addition to supervising Redhill, and attending meetings to circulate details about

his work with young offenders, Turner also represented the Society at public meetings.

Specifically he attended two large conferences held in Birmingham in December 1851 and

1853, acting as co-honorary secretary at the second meeting. The conferences were

organised to bring together some of the most influential men, and some women, who were

interested in the issues associated with juvenile delinquency. Turner spoke on the issue of

government funding amongst other things and put forward the suggestion that

7

the Government [should] be induced to make grants, not only to the institution at

Redhill, Saltly [sic], or other similar institutions, but to all reformatory schools in

the kingdom. (Cheers.)13

It was a sign of the regard in which the Redhill experiment was held in influential

government schools that Turner was first appointed an Inspector of Prisons in 1857 and the

next year became Britain‟s first Reformatory School Inspector. In this capacity, he had

authority to certify and monitor the good order of all private reformatory schools and, later,

industrial schools came within his jurisdiction. Turner‟s personal interest in Redhill

therefore ran in tandem with his official duties and his wider responsibility for the good

management of all privately owned but government-certified reformatories. After his

appointment as Home Office Inspector, and perhaps to the chagrin of his successors at the

farm, Turner remained closely involved in Redhill. Indeed, Turner attended a management

committee meeting of the Society on 1 August 1861, nearly three-and-a-half years after his

resignation from chaplaincy at Redhill, to discuss two items of correspondence he had

received concerning juvenile reform.14 In this way, and because of his concern with the

inmates at Redhill, Turner remained ready to give an opinion on happenings at the farm,

not hesitating to criticise an incumbent superintendent.

Financial underpinning

Field labour was one part of three important economic objectives necessary to

maintain Redhill as a financially viable institution. From its inception the Society had

13

The Times, 21 December 1853, p. 10. 14

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/20, Minutes of Proceedings, 1 August 1860.

8

aimed to train inmates to produce goods to sell which, in turn, would bring in capital.

Money from production was not intended for profit but as a means to extend training to

others. First, inmates had to cultivate the land and perform all other duties as commanded

by a bailiff. Artisan masters ran small workshops where a few boys became proficient in

the art of tailoring and shoemaking, in an endeavour to reach self-sufficiency. The labour

of the young boys, the need for new buildings to house boys transferred from

government gaols, and a subsidy in the form of a grant from the government were inter-

related. Money was needed to provide for the cost of keeping „government account boys‟

at Redhill and for boys who were admitted from various local authorities.

The three objectives were inter-connected, namely the land, the labour and an

initial Treasury grant with per capita maintenance payments. It was essential to obtain

sufficient land upon which to build a number of schoolhouses, plus surrounding land

suitable for cultivation. A decision to lease the estate at Redhill was „ratified at a General

Meeting of Subscribers in January 1848‟. The initial area leased, and later purchased,

consisted of „133 acres with the option of buying at a fixed price within a certain period‟.15

Hence, the Redhill estate realised the Society‟s plans to reform greater numbers and to do

this through agricultural labour. At the same time as acquiring the land it became possible

to build the extra houses the Society needed to meet the needs of the Home Office: that is,

to transfer at least 100 juvenile boys from public gaols to a private reformatory school. In

turn, the Society‟s ability to house „government account‟ boys, as transfers from

government-run prisons were called, depended upon the receipt of a loan from Treasury to

build the necessary accommodation. Thus with land, money and potential inmates, the

15

Angela Alabaster (ed.), A History of the Royal Philanthropic Society 1788-1988, n.d., n.p.

9

Society‟s work at Redhill commenced.16 Although accommodation was an initial

difficulty, the Society still had problems with the narrow limits set by legislation to retain

boys, legally, within its institution at Redhill. It was empowered under section 11 of the

Act for establishing a Prison for young offenders of 1838, or Parkhurst Act, whereby the

Queen could pardon young boys sentenced to a term in gaol, prior to transportation, on

condition they agreed to transfer to a reformatory school until the end of their sentence.17

While boys accepted at Redhill under this section, and a select number recommended by

the Inspector of Prisons, worked at the farm until the expiration of their sentence date, the

Society had no authority to restrain other juvenile offenders referred by, or recommended

as suitable for reform, from magistrates‟ courts.

Commenting on the period between 1849 and 1854, J. A. Stack refers to the rising

dissatisfaction of some „magistrates and judges, some prison officials, and assorted

reformers‟ that prison was their only means of restraining young offenders brought into the

courts.18 When the 1854 Act for the better Care and Reformation of Youthful Offenders in

Great Britain was passed,19 [short title Youthful Offenders Act] it „permitted, but did not

require, magistrates and judges to send convicted juveniles‟ to a reformatory.20

Importantly, the Act laid down that a parent or guardian should contribute towards the

juvenile‟s „care and maintenance‟ during reform. If maintenance could not be obtained

16

Sydney Turner, Evidence to Select Committee‟, 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 2, p. 27, BPP. 17

‘An Act for establishing a Prison for young Offenders’, Statutes of the United Kingdom of

Great Britain and Ireland, v.78, 1 & 2 Victoria, C.82, s.11, 10 August 1838, p. 387. 18

J. A. Stack, ‘The Provision of Reformatory Schools, the Landed Class, and the Myth of the

Superiority of Rural Life in Mid-Victorian England’, History of Education, v.8 (1) 1979, p. 33 19

‘An Act for the better Care and Reformation of Youthful Offender in Great Britain’, Statutes of

the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, v.80, 17 & 18 Victoria, C.86, 10 August 1854,

pp. 320-322. 20

Stack, ‘The Provision of Reformatory Schools,‟ pp. 33-34.

10

from a child‟s parent the Treasury was empowered to provide a sum to help the cost.21

Stack also notes the failure of the Act to grant authority to „either the central

government or local governments‟ to build public reformatory schools; rather that the

legislation served to „utilise existing (and future) private reformatories‟.22 Juveniles

sentenced under the provisions of the Act had to be under the age of sixteen years, and

have served „Fourteen Days at the least‟ in gaol; only then could the recalcitrants be

committed to a reformatory school. If a boy subsequently absconded, he was subject to

punishment, either by the reformatory school staff or imposed by a magistrate‟s court.

The financial stability of Redhill improved when the boys attracted maintenance fees

from the Treasury. Following the passage of the Youthful Offenders Act in 1854, various

County Associations and County Courts wrote to the Society to try to arrange mutually

beneficial agreements. In consideration of a minimum maintenance fee the Society agreed

to admit boys sentenced to reformatory training. Thus, the Society received a measure of

security from central state and local government monies when a number of penal

establishments disposed of selected boy inmates. Further, the Society relieved local

authorities from the expense of building and running their own juvenile reformatory

institutions.23 Meanwhile, the Society‟s increased public role, interacting with state

agencies and local authorities, equipped Turner with further experience in the area of

juvenile delinquency and disposal, adding weight to the authority of Redhill as the model

reformatory school in Britain at that time.

21

‘An Act for the better Care and Reformation of Youthful Offenders in Great Britain’, Statutes of

the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, v.80, 17 & 18 Victoria, C.86, 10 August 1854,

p. 321. 22

Stack, ‘The Provision of Reformatory Schools’, p. 34. 23

J.A. Stack, ‘The Juvenile Delinquent and England’s “Revolution in Government,” 1825-1875,

The Historian, v.42 (1) November 1979, pp. 45-6. See Stack’s account of local authorities

questioning “the wisdom, not to mention the legality, of sending convicted juvenile offenders to

private institutions for correction and reform”, p. 46.

11

Expansion of accommodation

Between 1849 and 1854 the Philanthropic Society continued to accept boys under

section 11 of the Parkhurst Act while, at the same time, setting in train Mettray‟s system of

„separate housing‟, commencing at Redhill with „17 inmates‟ rising to „200 by 1855.‟24 But

the increase in numbers accepted by the Society was gradual. Turner told the

Parliamentary Select Committee, on 11 May 1852, of the „additional houses‟ being built at

the farm school „to hold 80 more boys‟, stemming from an arrangement made with the

government.

Larger numbers of delinquents were needed by the Society to produce food for

the institution‟s consumption and for sale locally. To accommodate the required number of

boys to assure self-sufficiency the Society needed to build more houses, and could not do

so without an assurance of assistance from the Government.25 On 8 August 1850, a

special meeting of the committee received a further report from Turner who argued that

„boys had to be taught skills and, importantly, Redhill‟s ground had to be made profitable

....‟26 The Society‟s ability to commence building on its estate came when Captain W. J.

Williams, H.M. Inspector of Prisons, Home District, informed the Society in April 1854

that Lord Palmerston had approved grants to the charity of £1,500 in the current year and a

further sum of £1,500 the following year in return for accepting 100 boys from public

prisons.

24

Sydney Turner, ‘The Quarterly Record of the Progress of Reformatory Schools, and of Prison

Discipline - to December 1855’, Irish Quarterly Review, v.5, 1855, p. 18. 25

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/18, April 1854. 26

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/17, 8 August 1850.

12

Juvenile labour at Redhill

On admission to the farm boys commenced to work the land. Between 1849 and

Turner‟s departure in January 1857,27 agricultural training at Redhill consisted of many

small groups of young offenders yielding hand-held spades. Such work was known as

„spade-labour‟. All ages of boys worked to clear the woodlands and fields in preparation

for sowing grain crops and vegetables.28 Turner was „an ardent apostle of agricultural

work for delinquent youths‟29 and noted the „softening and improving‟ effect such hard

work had on recalcitrant boys as they worked under the close supervision of the Labour

Masters. Boys suffered „much hardship, and trial of courage and endurance‟ as they

worked on winter‟s mornings in the „wind and snow‟ then, in summer, on hot afternoons.30

In the first decade at Redhill, „spade labour‟ continued for most boys. When a dairy

herd was formed some boys learned, in rotation with others, to milk the cows and to care

for other animals at the farm, such as sheep and horses. A forge, as well as a carpenter‟s

shop gave opportunities for a wider experience within a farm setting.31 The Society‟s

Annual Report for 1870 illustrates the „usual occupations‟ carried out by the boys, with the

numbers employed:

Field boys, 208; Cow-house boys, 14; Shepherd boys, 2; Stable boys, 3; Garden

boys, 10; Brickfield boys, 16; Tailors, 13; Shoemakers, 11; Carpenters, 3;

27

Sydney Turner, SLS Item no. 2271/2/17, Letter of resignation, 28 January 1857. 28

Sydney Turner, Evidence to Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles‟, 11

May 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 2, p. 23, BPP. 29

Stack, ‘The Provision of Reformatory Schools‟, p. 39. 30

Sydney Turner, quoted by S. Northcote, Quarterly Review, December (1855) p. 54. 31

Sydney Turner, Evidence to Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles‟, 11

May 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 2, p. 23.

13

Blacksmiths, 3; Bakers, 2; Bricklayer‟s Labourers, 2; House boys, 13; Laundry

boys, 3; Cook‟s boys, 2 amounting to a total of 305 juveniles.32

Summer and winter timetables governed work. In summer boys rose at 5.30 am and went

to work at 6 am, followed by breakfast and play at 8 am. At 9 am they attended school and

at midday were given their dinner followed by playtime. At 1 pm they resumed work,

ceasing at 5.30 pm for play. Supper was provided at 6.15 pm and chapel was at 7 pm.

Bedtime was at 8 o‟clock. The winter timetable differed slightly. Boys rose at 6 am and

attended chapel in the morning rather than at night, working in the afternoon only until

dusk. Turner‟s successor summarised the supposed effects of the regimen:

the unbroken round of steady, hard and compulsory toil, presents to young minds

the most trying contrast possible to their previous criminal career. The tone of the

school is vigorous, the discipline regular and effective, the instruction fair in

amount and intelligently conveyed.33

After Turner

The Society faced a difficult task in finding a person to replace Sydney Turner.

Nonetheless, the committee set out the duties of a chaplain-superintendent for the guidance

of Turner‟s successor, and whilst the chaplain was considered the governor and head of the

institution, the committee asked he should:

32

Philanthropic Society, Annual Report, London, 1870 p.19. 33

Reverend Charles Walters, The Philanthropic Society Annual Report, 1858 pp. 13-14.

14

make it his careful study to maintain a spirit of kind, cordial cooperation between

himself and the other officers of the institution, and to promote a good

understanding and kindly feeling among them towards each other, abstaining from

all trifling and unnecessary interference and endeavouring to conciliate and assist

rather than merely order or assert his own superiority.34

The Reverend Edwin Gyles, a graduate of St John‟s College, Cambridge and curate

of Saint Barnabus, Liverpool, took up the duties as chaplain superintendent at Redhill in

March 1857, only to resign six months later.35 His successor, the Reverend Charles

Walters, commenced duty on 3 November 1857 and remained in office until his death in

1882. Despite Walters‟ understanding of the work, and the challenge it presented to the

young delinquents, he struggled under the double burden of satisfying the Society‟s

committee and living under the shadow of Sydney Turner. Turner, although occupying a

position within the Home Department, jealousy guarded the personal prestige his

association with the Philanthropic Farm School had brought him and either he or his

assistant, Henry Rogers, quickly followed reports of any unusual occurrence at the farm.

For instance, Turner attested that Redhill was „inspected frequently‟ in 1858 and that he

did not feel „at liberty‟ to report further than „the school appears to be steadily

advancing‟.36

One instance of Turner‟s vigilance over Walters arose when the committee met at

Redhill on 14 July 1860 to consider a letter by a local resident and a Surrey County

34

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/19, Minutes of a Special Meeting held at the farm school on

Saturday, 31 January 1857. 35

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/19, 5 March 1857 and 12 September 1857. 36

Sydney Turner, Inspector of Reformatories, First Report, 1857-58, House of Commons, Sessional Papers [2426] XXIX.811, p. 19.

15

magistrate, G. G. Richardson, who complained of the reformatory boys working for a local

farmer at harvest time as „interfering seriously with the value of independent labour‟.37

Richardson had also sent a copy of his letter to H.M. Inspector of Reformatory Schools.

Subsequently, Turner wrote to the Society pointing out: „It is evident that to make the

Reformatory a means of injuring the condition and lessening the earnings of the

unconvicted labourer would be open to the gravest objections.‟ Turner went on to request

„that labour only be hired out when other labour cannot be obtained, and then at the current

rate of wages.‟ He also stipulated that local workmen should be consulted if work were

undertaken by convicted boys outside of the farm.38 However, prior to Turner‟s letter, the

Society, apprised by Walters of the situation which gave rise to the complaint by

Richardson, wrote to Sydney Turner „for the attention of Sir George Lewis, Home

Secretary‟. The committee pointed to the „distance from the school‟ where the boys were

employed and that „their labour was earnestly sought by farmers‟ who would otherwise

have been likely to lose their crops, „as no alternative labour could be obtained‟. The cause

of the labour shortage was attributed to a rise in wages „from twelve shillings to 13

shillings a week‟ creating a demand for men „throughout the whole neighbourhood.‟ As

well the committee reaffirmed that their boys were „carefully supervised ... with no

complaints about their conduct or their work‟.39

Difficulties with staff and maintenance at Redhill

Despite Turner‟s attention to detail in implementing the Society‟s „Rules and

37

G. G. Richardson Esq of ‘Garlands’, Redhill to Philanthropic Society, 5 July 1860. RPS, SLS

Item no. 2271/2/20. 38

H.M. Inspector of Reformatories, letter to Philanthropic Society, RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/20,

25 July 1860.

39

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/20, 10 July 1860.

16

Regulations‟ and Walters‟ continued efforts, a close examination of the Society‟s Minutes

of Proceedings reveals recurrent problems. On the 7 January 1875 Walters reported to the

managing committee about difficulties he had had with domestic staff. He was able to

state that although the school was „seriously disturbed by the misconduct of the laundry-

woman, and domestic servants‟ the offenders had been „discharged‟.40 Leading into the

1880s, and despite obvious defects apparent on an inspection of the farm, the Society‟s

administration failed to take steps to reconsider the benefits or otherwise of reformatory

training in such conditions. Even in the midst of obvious neglect of the farm, as well as

land degradation, those responsible for the wellbeing of the inmates did not refute the

benefit of rural life for juvenile delinquents.

The Society‟s managing committee and the staff it employed to oversee the

institution varied in their capabilities. Different facets of the farm school needed attention

over the decades. The Reverend Arthur G. Jackson, chaplain-superintendent at Redhill

between 1882-1887, was prone to paint rosy pictures of affairs at the farm. In 1885 he

replied to a questionnaire received from H. M. Jenkins. Secretary of the Royal Agricultural

Society,41 pointing out „contact with the soil appears to act as a moral deodoriser

[providing] the best preparation for Colonial life.‟42 But when Jenkins visited Redhill in

1885, he found the farm to be „suffering from a long course of mismanagement‟. Even so,

the reformatory retained „64 acres of permanent pasture, 216 acres of arable land, 17 acres

of market garden, and 21 acres of officers‟ gardens‟, and continued to possess the potential

to be „a really remarkable establishment‟. Jenkins noted the tailoring, shoemaking, and

carpentering workshops continued to employ a few boys „so that the needs of the

40

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/23, 7 January 1875. 41

H. M. Jenkins, ‘Farming and Agricultural Training in Reformatory and Industrial Schools, with

notes on Spade Labour’, Royal Agricultural Society Journal, v.46 (1886), p. 201. 42

Ibid.

17

establishment‟ are met.43

Several years elapsed before the Society set up a sub-committee to enquire into the

„State and Management of the Farm‟. On 6 April 1889 a report from the sub-committee

noted work recently done to mend „hedges, ditches and buildings‟. Nonetheless, the report

outlined,

how much remained to be done to make the premises as tidy and as in good order

as we should wish to see them ... we fear this untidiness and want of method

pervades the whole management.44

The list of neglect continued: „the sheep, 19 ewes with lambs by side‟ suffered from

footrot, „the bull rarely brought in [was] not a good one‟, and the condition of the land was

„foul and apparently neglected‟. Not least, the „labour of the boys has been injudiciously

applied.‟ At the time of the sub-committee‟s report 310 boys were in residence at

Redhill.45 Alerted to the state of its work at Redhill a further sub-committee investigated

the situation of the market garden and reported on 12 November 1889 that 15 acres

remained cultivated but „less spade labour and more horse power‟ should be employed

within this area.46

Education at the Farm School

Boys received instruction in the rudiments of an elementary education at the farm,

learning to read, write and perform simple arithmetic. Criticism over the provision of

43

H.M. Jenkins, ‘Farming and Agricultural Training‟, pp.200-1. 44

RPS, SLS Item 2271/2/25, 6 April 1889. 45

Ibid. 46

RPS, SLS Item 2271/2/25, 12 November 1889.

18

education for reformatory school children came from certain sectors of public opinion

which opposed any attempts to give inmates more educational opportunities than were

available to ordinary children.

Turner, whilst promoting the need to have specially trained reformatory school

teachers, nonetheless, recognised that the schools were set apart, because „the intellectual

teaching which forms the staple of ordinary school is a very small element in their

constitution‟.47 He was nonetheless committed to finding the best possible teachers for

employment in reformatory schools. One master, a Mr Hearne, was trained at Redhill and

returned to replace a teacher during 1861.48 Turner continued his campaign to increase the

training of reformatory schoolmasters. He wrote to Sir Stafford Northcote in 1855

informing him of Redhill‟s recent submission before Mr Lingen of the Privy Council

Committee, to argue the „essential necessity of preparing and training men for the work‟.49

Although the Society attempted at various times throughout the period to run an orderly

programme for training assistant masters training, resignations, and the financial ability to

engage or retain such masters-in-training fluctuated over the decades.

Despite the limitation of elementary education at Redhill, the Society‟s Annual

Reports continued to record statistics on who could read and write on arrival at the farm,

taking pride when the boys met the standards of literacy set during official inspections by

school inspectors.

Redhill‟s schoolroom is described as typical of those found in reformatories, being „a

single room about 35 feet long and 18 broad, with walls of plain brick whitened over with

47

Sydney Turner, [definition of a reformatory school 1870] quoted in ‘Reformatory and Industrial

Schools’, 1896, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v.5, p. 11, BPP. 48

RPS, Annual Report, 1862, p. 25. 49

Sydney Turner to Sir Stafford Northcote, 9 December 1855, Iddesleigh Papers, British Library, ADD 50013, folio 228.

19

lime, floored with tiles or concrete, and warmed by a common stove or open fire.‟50

Inmates of this school were believed to be dissimilar to scholars of ordinary elementary

schools, being older, more ignorant, criminal in character, and detained by sentence of

law.51 However, the Society placed its inmates in appropriate levels of instruction after an

assessment of their competence in reading and writing by either the chaplain, or his staff,

which in the 1850s consisted of one school-master and one assistant school-master. The

chaplain and masters supervised the education of approximately one hundred and ten

inmates though it was hoped to appoint an additional assistant master as the number of

boys increased.52

School hours were set out in the Society‟s Annual Reports but in practice the boys‟

attendance at the schoolroom depended on the farm‟s needs. For example, the master of

Duke‟s House noted in his House Diary on 12 July 1853, „the boys worked in the hayfields

until late,‟53 whereas the new superintendent-schoolmaster in Duke‟s House, a Mr Braid,

recorded on 9 September 1853 that he had many more boys in school as „the harvest being

so far advanced‟ their labour was not required in the fields. Braid went on to mention that

his pupils „were very deficient but were very attentive and appeared anxious to learn‟,

although he queried, to the school diary, if this attention related to his warning the class

that an ability to read and write could assist a boy‟s recommendation for emigration upon

release from Redhill.54

The scope of the Society‟s curriculum of „academic and moral education, industrial

50

Sydney Turner, H.M. Inspector of Reformatory Schools’ ‘First Report’, 30 June 1858, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1857-158 [2426], XXIX.811, p.7. 51

RPS, SLS Item no.2271/2/23, 7 May 1872. 52

Sydney Turner, evidence before the ‘Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles‟,

11 May 1852, v. 2. p. 26, BPP. 53

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/29/2, Duke’s House Diary, 12 July 1853. 54

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/29/2, Duke’s House Diary, 9 September 1853.

20

training, and “military discipline‟‟‟ tended to conform to a pattern of measures which Linda

Mahood identifies as the basic ideology for the reform of delinquents in reformatory

schools in the nineteenth century.55 This pattern is seen in the innovative measures, such

as musical instruction, introduced by the Society in 1857 as a means of encouraging a

disciplined approach to tasks, whether in a reformatory school or later, on release. Dr

Wallis, holding a doctorate in music, organised a select number of the farm school boys

into a „Brass Military Band of Music‟. His terms of instruction being moderate, and „the

advantages worth the outlay‟, the committee approved the sum of 50 or 60 guineas for the

purchase of musical instruments.56 During 1859, Mr Holman, a drill and bandmaster, was

appointed on a „salary of £50 per annum, with lodging and firing‟. The Reverend Charles

Walters, resident chaplain, explained Holman‟s duties in his Annual Report to the Society‟s

committee and membership in 1860 as:

an introduction of a small amount of military drill as a useful addition to the

machinery of the school by improving the appearance, manners, and bearing of the

boys, and regulating their movements.57

Hitherto, the Society had not used music as a means to achieve obedience. Now,

the band, and its support of the drill squad, became a catalyst to teach boys to respond to

orders with mechanical alacrity. The band and marching youths gave performances before

members of the Society and the general public, creating a positive image of a corps of

inmates living in a well-ordered establishment. The formation of the band also attracted

55

Linda Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family: Britain, 1850-1940 (London 1995), p.

115. 56

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/19, 8 April 1857. 57

RPS Annual Report, 1860 p. 20; Australian Joint Copying Project microform item no. M1836,.

21

donations of more musical instruments, as at the 1863 Harvest Home ceremony when the

band, „so essential to ... [the] weekly entertainment‟, was presented with a „handsome

drum‟.58 Some boys, less suited to field labour due to their small physique, learned to play

a musical instrument in the band, which led to a few being accepted into the regular army

as „band boys‟.59 An indication of the part played by the boys‟ band in projecting the

message of reformatory school success may be seen when some forty years later, in 1889,

the Society‟s committee ordered that the bandmaster was „to be advised that his “whole

time” should be considered at the Society‟s service‟ and the band was to be „used at every

reasonable occasion‟.60

The success of music and drill instruction at Redhill encouraged the committee to

approve a plan to adopt gymnastic training. H. E. Gurney, a member of the Society‟s

committee, provided for the purchase of gymnastic material for boys to participate in

controlled exercise to bring about „the promotion of vigour and health‟.61 In this way the

Society advanced methods to impose a more subtle form of supervision, and reformation,

whereby inmates responded, instantly, to a master‟s instructions in the performance of

athletic movements, either in a team or as an individual. For a time the regimentation of

Redhill represented the epitome of order and control, an institution where the

superintendent expected „tidiness and method‟, not only from those boys committed to

serve between three to five years, but from the staff as well.

Admission statistics

58

RPS Annual Report, 1863, p. 23; Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP) microform item no.

M1836,. 59

RPS Annual Report, 1861, p. 19. 60

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/25, 16 July 1889. 61

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/19, 6 January 1859.

22

Redhill was one of the largest private reformatory schools in England, with an

approximate number of between 260 to 310 boys detained at any one time. The following

table shows a fairly steady growth in the number of boys at Redhill between 1849 and

1872:62

1849 1853 1858 1859 1865 1866 1867 1872

90 145 102 164 240 256 265 307

Until 1854, when the Society received a government grant, it had to restrict its

admissions until further accommodation was ready to house the rise in inmates it expected

in the following years.63 The eventual increase in admissions was associated with Redhill‟s

„Certification‟ and subsequent qualification to receive government funds defrayed against

the „Care and Maintenance of any Juvenile Offender‟ under the 1854 Act.64 The Act,

variously referred to as the „Youthful Offenders‟ or the „Juvenile Offenders‟ Act, provided

for certification of a private reformatory after H.M. Inspector of Prisons submitted a

satisfactory report, and in consideration of further inspections from time-to-time. To

ensure adequate funding for enlargement of the school to accommodate nearly 300 boys

the Society relied on the „faith of the arrangement made with Viscount Palmerston‟.65 The

Society applied for Certification following approval of a draft letter by its committee on 16

July 1856.66

62

See RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/1/1-21 - Annual Reports, also Item no. 2271/2/25 Philanthropic

Society ‘Minutes of Proceedings’, 6 April 1889. 63

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/17, 11 November 1853. 64

An ‘Act for the better Care and Reformation of Youthful Offenders in Great Britain’, The

Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 10 August 1854 v. 94, 17 & 18

Victoria C.86, p.320. 65

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/1/2/19, 16 July 1856. 66

Ibid.

23

Cost of Food, for staff and inmates

The regime at the Farm School made various and increasing demands on the boys‟

physical strength, which, in turn, emphasised the importance of the school‟s diet. In 1852

Turner gave evidence before the Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles.

He revealed the Society fed inmates according to their physical worth and strength, but

food could be restricted if a boy‟s behaviour warranted this form of discipline. The

chaplain-superintendent outlined two categories of diet:

the highest class, the oldest and best boys, will have in the course of the week, eight

pounds and three quarters of bread, one pound and a half of meat, five ounces of

butter, two ounces of cheese, and a pound and a half of suet pudding. Twice a

week they have half a pound of meat, twice a week a quarter of a pound, twice a

week pudding, and once bread and cheese.67

He considered all the boys received more nourishing food than was then supplied to

children living in a workhouse but went on to refer to the

lowest class, that is the boys who have forfeited their privileges by idleness, or any

fault, have no pudding, and have nothing but dry bread on those days; they have

also less meat.68

Turner‟s evidence suggests that food was used as an inducement to good behaviour;

recalcitrants were penalised by receiving less food, to become physically weak, and less

67

Sydney Turner, evidence before the ‘Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles’,

11 May 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v.2, p. 26, BPP. 68

Ibid., p. 26.

24

able to complete the tasks expected of them. The dilemma for the administration was to

achieve the maximum output from the boys while not appearing to reward pauper children

with over-indulgence.

Labour in the fields, the schoolroom, at drill, and in workshops – the whole

reformatory establishment exacted physical strength and was aimed to reform and instruct.

However, the number of efficient juvenile labourers available to grow crops and plants was

undermined when each boy‟s sentence came to an end. The youth had to be discharged at

the very time when his physical strength, in combination with his farming skills, would be

most useful.69 Because of the lack of food production basic items of food were purchased

from local merchants. This fare was „of the plainest kind ... improved only as a reward of

merit‟.70 Despite the paucity of funds to purchase necessities for the school, members of

the management committee lent money until „the end of the month pending the payment of

the account due from the Government‟.71 For example, at a committee meeting on 12 July

1854 three members lent £100 each to the Society to enable wages and local bills to be

met. In turn, Turner accepted the local butcher‟s offer to provide meat at the cheaper price

– and presumably lower quality – at „seven-pence-halfpenny a pound for the month of

August‟.72

The costs involved in feeding staff and inmates remained a problem throughout the

period 1849-1900. Food grown on the land at Redhill helped to feed twenty-six officers

and staff plus 251 boys who lived at the farm school in 1862. A visit by an „Excursion of

the Social Science Association‟ on 17 June 186273 records the following statistics: the

69

Ibid., pp. 27-8. 70

The Times, 1 May 1849. 71

RPS, SLS, Item no. 2271/2/18, 5 July 1854. 72

RPS, SLS, Item no. 2271/2/18, 5 July 1854. 73

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/40/10, Charles Walters’ letter reference Baron Arthur Hohenbruk’s

visit on 17 June 1862 to the Farm School, September 1863.

25

farm covered 240 acres, of which 57 grew wheat, 13 barley, 8 oats, 12 beans, 7 peas, and 8

potatoes. The school possessed 36 cows, 48 pigs, as well as 8 horses.74 An examination of

the items purchased by the Society during 1864 provides information not only on the cost

incurred for the purchase of food for staff and inmates, but it also highlights an imbalance

in the quality and quantity of food consumed by the staff to that eaten by the boys. For

example, the money spent on one item, meat. We find that the Society‟s twenty-six

officers and staff were allocated £234 and 1 shilling‟s-worth of meat for the year, whereas

£619.15s.9d., covered the cost of meat supplied to 251 inmates in residence over the same

period. The grade of milk purchased indicates that a large amount of skimmed milk was

consumed in proportion to the amount of „Milk, New‟. This suggests that a lower grade

was served to the boys than the higher quality milk. The „School Account. Provisions‟

detailed:75

Meat, Officers, £234.1s.0d.; Meat, Boys, £619.15s.9d.; Flour, £651.11s.0d. Malt,

Hops, etc., £17.16s.0d.; Milk, New, 220 gallons, £19.19s.11d. Milk, Skim, 11,943

gallons,£299.1s.6d.; Butter, Salt, 220 lbs, 15s.10d. Butter, Fresh £34.19s.10d.;

Cheese, 856 lbs, £22.3s.4d.; Beer, £8. 17s.7d. Tea, 229 lbs., £38.3s.4d.; Coffee,

1,268 lbs, £80.10s.0d.; Sugar, 3,862 lbs., £76.16s.11d.; Rice, 448 lbs, £4.2s.6d.;

Vegetables, £171.5s.7d.; Wine [for the] sick, £12.11s.8d.; Treacle, 1,199 lbs,

£11.4s.4d.; Groceries, £17.19s.2d.

74

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/40/10, a pamphlet from a translation arranged by Charles Walters in

September 1863, of Baron Arthur Hohenbruk’s paper, ‘Agricultural Institutions for Compulsory

Labour for Boys at Redhill, England and at Douaires, France’, read at Vienna on June 17, 1862,

pp.8-9. 75

Philanthropic Society Annual Report, 1865; AJCP Microform Miscellaneous Series M 1836,.

‘Philanthropic Society - Abstract of Receipts and Expenditure from 1st January to 31st December,

1864, pp. 60-61.

26

The annual net costs of keeping a boy at the Philanthropic Farm School, that is the

amount the Society spent on each boy‟s rations, varied within a narrow range over the

years, as shown in the following table:76

1851 1860 1864 1883

£24.0s.0d. £19.0s.8d. £19.18s.6d £21.16s.6d

The weekly diet in the year 1883 provided each boy:77

Meat (uncooked) without bone - 24 oz; Suet - 2 oz; Bread - 8½ lbs; Flour - 1¼ lbs;

Butter - 5¼ oz; Milk - 10½ pts; Vegetables - 4½ lbs; Sugar -.3½ oz; Cocoa (when

milk is less than 10½ pints) - 5¼ oz; Cheese - 4 oz; Oatmeal - 6 oz.

A variation in the items supplied to the boys appears to have occurred between 1864 and

1883. Rice, tea and coffee are not listed, whereas suet, oatmeal and cocoa are. As noted in

1879, cocoa and oatmeal had replaced beer as a drink for boys working at harvest time,

which would account for its inclusion on the later itemised accounts.

Turner set out details of the commissariat in 1855 in a document addressing the

„problem of how to organise an Institution.‟78 He explained that at the Redhill storehouse

the stores were received by the superintendent and distributed by the school‟s matron „in

certain regulated quantities to each house weekly, the diet being so arranged as to allow of

76

Sydney Turner, reply to Q.303 in evidence to „Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles‟, 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’ v. 2, p. 27, BPP.

See also, SLS Item no. 2271/1/11, Philanthropic Society, Annual Report 1861, p.19; SLS Item

no. 2271/1/13 Annual Report 1865; SLS Item no. 2271/1/20, Annual Report 1884, p. 30. 77

Philanthropic Society, Annual Report, 1884, p.30. 78

The Reverend Sydney Turner, Resident Chaplain of the Philanthropic Farm School, Redhill,

‘Reformatory Schools. A Letter to C.B. Adderley Esq MP, London, 1855; E.A.G. Clarke‟s papers (uncatalogued), Education Museum, University of Leeds.

27

the larger part of the cooking being done before the food is served out.‟79 Supplementary

details of the institution‟s catering methods followed:

All we have found necessary to do is supply each separate house with a hot-plate, a

boiler (of galvanised iron), and a moderate sized iron oven. These would suffice to

cook all that is required, but it saves trouble, and is more economical to prepare the

meat dinners for the boys en masse, and to divide them in the necessary proportions

afterwards, and as we do not think it necessary to give our lads hot meat, we are

able to do this upon the previous day, the Sunday‟s meat dinner being cooked and

sent out on Saturday, the Thursday‟s on the Wednesday. The bread is of course

baked at the central oven, so also the suet puddings, which they have twice a

week.80

The kitchen in each house was used to prepare the master‟s dinner, and the making or

warming of soup which was served once a week. Turner continued:

The bread and cheese which they have twice a week, requires only to be cut up and

served according to the fixed allowance. Such boys as choose to afford it, by

paying twopence out of their small weekly earnings, are allowed coffee in the

morning, in place of milk and water.81

Some people in the wider community had reservations about the morality of

becoming too generous in providing for pauper children incarcerated at a reformatory

79

Ibid. 80

Ibid. 81

Ibid.

28

school. They believed „the impoverished should never be given anything more than the

minimum needed to keep them healthy‟.82 There was an exception to the austerity with

food at Redhill on Christmas Day when all inmates enjoyed „their usual Christmas Dinner

and were allowed to have a holiday in consideration of the Season‟.83 However, plain fare

was usually served to juvenile delinquents, as food was believed to be a „powerful

inducement to begging and dishonesty‟, and would lead to a higher percentage of poor

children stealing for the purpose of having a regular supply of food.84

Innovations were made to the bill of fare at Redhill in an attempt to reduce costs.

For instance in 1867, when an average of 254 boys and youths had to be fed, the Reverend

Charles Walters followed the advice of the Society‟s secretary „as an experiment‟ and used

cocoa in place of coffee to reduce the „want of milk‟.85 The shortage of milk on the farm

prompted the Society to approve the purchase of another cow at a cost of £13. 5s.86 Much

later, in 1878, cocoa, oatmeal and sugar was added to boiling water, and formed part of a

further experiment, introduced to reduce the cost of providing a beverage to boys who

worked in the fields at harvest time. At a meeting held on 1 August 1878 the committee

received a report which stated the new drink was „very acceptable to boys and men‟. The

committee ordered that „No more beer‟ was to be provided.87 Subsequently, over 990

gallons of the new refreshment met the thirst of boys during the summer of 1879, at an

82

H.J.M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy 1815-1830: ‘Shovelling out Paupers’ (Oxford

1972), pp. 11-12. Johnston writes in the context of early nineteenth-century pamphleteers. His

argument draws on the views of Thomas Robert Malthus’ writing, and contemporary authors and

their opinion on the limitation which should be placed on feeding the poor. 83

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/20, 27 February 1859. 84

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/42/2, Sydney Turner, Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools,

Report, 1862, p .9; 85

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/21, 23 March 1867. 86

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/21, 4 April 1867. 87

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/23, 20 July and 1 August 1878.

29

estimated cost of less than 2d. a gallon.88 Beer, or the new mixture of cocoa and meal

reduced the consumption of a water supply that could be infected with typhoid bacteria, a

cause of illness, and sometimes death, over the years amongst staff and inmates, alike.

In 1879, the same year as the Society first served cocoa and meal to the boys at

harvest-time, Redhill found it could no longer act independently regarding food and the

amount served to inmates. The Home Office issued a directive to all reformatory schools,

denoting a major shift from the acceptance by the state of ad hoc reformatory school

regimes to one of a concerned central bureaucracy.89 The Home Secretary imposed

standards of dietary care for reformatory schools to follow in Britain and forced private

penal agencies into accountability to a government department. Thus the diet of children

in juvenile detention was controlled through H.M. Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial

Schools who had the authority to stipulate that all inmates should be „supplied with plain

wholesome food.‟ Furthermore, the Inspector had to authorise any „substantial alterations

in the dietary‟. As well, a copy of the „dietary‟ had to be „hung in the dining room‟ of

juvenile institutions, for the information of staff, children and visitors alike.90

Despite this state of surveillance did hunger prevail at Redhill? The Reverend Mr

Jackson wrote in his „Half-yearly Chronicle of the Farm School, Redhill‟, in 1884, that he

would rule out the theft of food now that boys „had more to eat‟, although Jackson‟s text

suggests he did not classify fruit and vegetables as „food‟. Theft accounted for 58

punishments in the „last half of 1882, of which 26 were for stealing food, and 19 for

88

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/24, 18 October 1879. 89

See R. J. Morris, ‘Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780-1850: an analysis’, The

Historical Journal, no. 26 (1) 1983, pp. 95-118 for an overview of voluntary societies, and p. 118

for an interpretation by Morris of how the “ambitions within state institutions met realisations of

weakness on the part of the promoters of voluntary societies, creating part of the environment for

growth in the scope and depth of the social actions of the state”. 90

‘General Rules and Regulations for the Management of Certified Reformatory Schools for the

detention of Juvenile Offenders, under the provisions of statute 29 and 30 Victoria, cap. 117; 30 September, 1879 p. 1, HO 45/9581 85757, British Archive.

30

stealing peas and fruit.‟ Jackson threatened to expose such boys in future and „print names‟

so the culprits could be avoided. Ironically, he concluded with the statement: „We do not

want any thieves in our School‟.91

Health and fitness at Redhill.

Although theft of food may have been the cause of a boy arriving at Redhill for

reformatory training, he was nonetheless, expected to be strong and healthy enough to

meet the rigour of the reformatory system. The „Regulations for Admission‟ which

appeared in the Society‟s Annual Reports, stated, „To be eligible for admission the boy

must be under 15 years of age, of sound bodily health, and capable of receiving mental

instruction and industrial training.‟92 Unfortunately, the Society‟s medical officers, and the

Reformatory School Inspector, who at various times visited Redhill, found it necessary to

criticise „the present scrutiny‟ and efficiency in selecting boys for reformatory training. In

1860 Peter Martin, a doctor attending at Redhill, called the farm‟s management committee

attention on 4 July 1860 to the poor state of health of several boys sent to the farm school

„requiring them to be sent quickly to the Sick Room‟ and „making the necessary discipline

of a reformatory school inapplicable to them‟.93 Other doctors wrote of „many lads‟

admitted to Redhill that their physical condition was „not equal to the discipline of the

school.‟94 Turner confirmed the fears of the doctors in his Fourth Report, as Inspector of

Reformatory Schools, noting the change „as to the age, size and criminal condition of the

boys‟ admitted to reformatory schools during the late 1850s and early 1860s „compared

with four or five years ago‟. Turner concluded that this trend was „nowhere more marked

91

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/40/13, The House of Bees, no. 3, January 1884. 92

RPS, Annual Reports. ‘Rules for Admission‟, 1858. 93

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/20, 4 July 1860. 94

Doctors C. Holman and F. Blackwood-Hallowes, RPS Annual Report, 1864 p. 15.

31

than at Redhill ... [where] a number of small boys, chiefly from country districts ...

appeared to be better fitted for common industrial schools than a reformatory‟.95 Turner

recorded his criticism, again, in 1862 when he referred to the physical hardship inflicted at

Redhill on „the younger boys‟.96

Despite this criticism levelled by the Inspector at Redhill‟s organisation, the

incumbent chaplain at Redhill had little alternative but to accept any boy, irrespective of

his physical state, when he arrived at Redhill railway station, if the committee had

previously agreed to his admission. Often Redhill offered the only alternative to boys

going to gaol. Similarly, in a veiled criticism of private reformatory schools, the Home

Office, with the benefit of hindsight, referred to reformatory institutions in a memorandum

of 5 October 1880, observing that „many inmates that ought never to have been sent‟ to a

reformatory school or were „sent there too early‟ or „kept there too long‟. However,

irrespective of the stance taken by the Home Office concerning past admissions to

reformatory schools, many boys admitted to Redhill came to the Society upon the

recommendation of prison superintendents, county magistrates, or after letters to the

Society by a parent or a friend, beseeching admission for a delinquent boy.

Difficulties arose when boys arrived at the farm in less than robust health. In such

instances, at a time when diseases such as typhoid fever and cow fever remained prevalent

in rural mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the physically weak were easy prey to life-

threatening infections. The estate‟s drains were cleaned out, in accordance with prevailing

medical theories, an attempt to destroy such breeding grounds.97 Nonetheless, out of an

average of 255 boys in residence, the Society‟s medical officers reported twenty-four cases

95

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/42/2, Sydney Turner, Fourth Report, June 1861 p. 48. 96

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/42/2, Sydney Turner, Fifth Report, June 1862 p. 51. 97

Philanthropic Society Annual Report, 1863 p. 13.

32

of typhoid fever at Redhill in March 1862, „sufficient to justify engaging a special nurse‟.98

In spite of efforts to nurse staff and boys, the death occurred of a „little delicate boy‟ from

cow fever „after a short illness‟.99 The following week Walters reported the death of

another boy, from Garston House, who died from the same disease.100

Employees and their families proved no less immune to disease. Mr Lawson,

schoolmaster, and his wife both died from typhoid fever at Redhill in 1863, leaving their

two children to be sent to an Infant Orphan Asylum at Wanstead.101 The farm‟s water

supply and its drains remained unsatisfactory, causing continued disquiet over health and

sanitation at the farm. In 1887, Doctor Ewen noted in his first quarterly report to the

management committee, that although he found the boys in good health, „with few

exceptions‟, something must be done about the „unsatisfactory condition‟ of the water

closets and the „doubtful‟ water supply going to the boys and all staff living in „family

houses‟.

Overcrowding within the boys‟ dormitories also contributed to the spread of disease.

Dr. Ewen‟s report to the committee suggested the use of hammocks, spaced so as to allow

room to sweep the floors each day.102 Despite this suggestion hammocks were not brought

into use at Redhill. After his inspection in 1889 Ewen wrote that he found „the boys in

average health and condition‟, except that „one lad, John Beale‟ was dying from blood

poisoning.103 Neglect of a chilblain caused the infection which led to Ewen sending him to

„the cottage hospital for an operation‟. The amputation of Beale‟s leg was ruled out as, in

the opinion of „medical friends‟, it was considered inoperable, „with no hope for his

98

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/1/11, 3 March 1862, p. 14. 99

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/21, 7 May 1863. 100

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/21, 16 May 1863. 101

Philanthropic Society Annual Report, 1863, pp. 24-5. 102

RPS, Item no. 2271/2/24, 13 April 1887. 103

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/25, 16 July 1889.

33

recovery‟. Neglect by the boys themselves was documented by the Society, as in the case

of a boy who, according to the medical officer‟s report, „aggravated‟ his own demise from

pleuro-pneumonia by „carelessly‟ exposing „himself to cold‟.104 By January 1890 the

warden himself „was confined to bed‟ during an influenza epidemic which affected several

boys. Their sufferings included „ailments of ears, eyes and teeth‟ with „active caries of

lumbar vertebrae‟ bringing „paralysis of both legs‟.105 Later, in July, the doctor inspected

the institution and found „some improvements‟ to the facilities had occurred, but noted „the

lavatories, closets, and playgrounds need attention‟.106

Even in the midst of staff and juvenile ill-health, and as boys and staff died, the

work of the reformatory went on with due attention given to the economic expansion of the

boys‟ work. The topics considered by the committee at its meetings at the farm reveal the

haphazard approach taken to the management of the Farm School in the 1880s. For

example, in 1889 the committee considered various aspects affecting the management of

the farm and the boys. For example, on 15 January 1889, the bailiff reported the Cream

Separator „was now satisfactorily at work‟ with an increase in the „yield of butter ... from

18 to 30 per cent ... with a ready market‟ for cream.107 On 12 February the committee

considered paving Gurney‟s House yard but postponed the method, finding that the „old

sleepers‟ were less satisfactory but „asphalt would be considered‟ at their next meeting.108

Meanwhile, the Society‟s Annual General Meeting (Court), held on 1 March 1889 called

for a report on the „state and management of the Farm School‟ and also on the „time-

104

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/25, 15 January 1889. 105

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/25, 21 January 1890. 106

RPS, SLS, Item no. 2271/2/25, 18 July 1890. 107

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/25, 15 January 1889. 108

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/25, 12 February 1889.

34

keeping and work of the trade shops‟.109 On 18 June the committee recommended that the

Bailiff resign and on 16 July the committee ordered his position be advertised at £100 per

annum. At the same meeting the medical officer reported the boy‟s death from blood-

poisoning, but no comments by the committee were recorded in the Minutes. On 13

August, the chaplain, J.M. Vine with six members of the committee present, elected a Mr

Brown to be bailiff. A letter from Lord Monkswell, Chairman of the Reformatory and

Industrial Schools‟ Committee of the London County Council asked for facilities for the

„Medical Officer of the Council to periodically examine boys in the school for whom the

Council was responsible‟.110

Punishment

Agricultural and farm training went on under close supervision by the bailiff and

his labour masters. A lapse in good behaviour could involve the loss of a „mark‟; a boy‟s

money credit would be debited by his housemaster. For some offences, corporal

punishment remained an option at Redhill until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1850

the Society agreed to Turner‟s rules and regulations on how masters should approach

discipline, and the various forms of punishments to be imposed taking into account ages

which ranged from ten to sixteen years of age. Turner believed that boys between fourteen

to sixteen years could be „as deliberate in their offences as many men‟.111 Turner‟s „Rules

and Regulations‟ were enforced by successive chaplain-superintendents, to a greater or

109

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/25. Philanthropic Society, Annual General Court, London, 1

March 1889. 110

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/25, 13 August 1889. 111

Sydney Turner, evidence before the ‘Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles’,

11 May 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 2, p. 31, BPP.

35

lesser degree, and Jelinger Symons, an Inspector of Schools in 1855, referred to Redhill as

a place of „habitual industry, good discipline and tolerably sharp punishment for offences

committed within the institution‟.112 However, Turner encouraged staff to provide

„influence rather than discipline ... to lead and induce‟, as well as to exact good behaviour

from the inmates, but he also anticipated the need for masters to administer „punishment

and reproof‟ to their charges.113 As he later explained to members of a parliamentary select

committee, the „basis of reformatory training must be laid in a certain experience of

suffering‟.114

Meanwhile, between 1849 and 1857, when Turner devoted his attention to the

detail of organising Redhill, he advised his staff not to overlook any fault in a boy‟s

behaviour but to treat „each fault with good temper and with strict justice‟. They should

correct a boy in such a way as to make the offender feel the person he most injured was

himself. Turner went on to advise that,

all punishments and reproofs should be administered with seriousness, great care

being always taken to avoid harsh, hasty, or violent words and tones. Let it be an

object to make the boy respect himself.115

Turner did not apply to his own actions the same caution he expected from his masters.

The chaplain wrote of various forms of punishment, which sometimes took the form of

confinement to a cell or a bedroom, or whipping. He also experimented in an effort to

112

Jelinger Symons, Journal of the Society of Arts, no. 128 (3) 1855, p. 418. 113

Sydney Turner, ‘The Philanthropic Farm School. Arrangements, Regulations, Salaries and

Masters’ Duties’, RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/29/1, January 1850. 114

Sydney Turner, evidence before the ‘Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles’,

11 May 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 2, p. 30, BPP. 115

Sydney Turner, ‘Masters’ Duties’, RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/29/1, 1850.

36

instil discipline into the more difficult recalcitrants. For instance, when the managing

committee met on 12 July 1854 Turner took a boy named Jones from Prince‟s House

before the members „as an extra means of impressing him‟. Jones had been „twice whipped‟

in one month and then threatened „with removal to Wandsworth Prison‟. Jones‟ appearance

before the committee was due to Turner‟s fear that another punishment of whipping „would

lose its effect by being made too frequent‟. However, other boys from Prince‟s House who

stole fruit from a neighbour‟s orchard at the time of Jones‟ misdemeanours, had „wandered

about the neighbourhood all day‟ only to return at night. Turner reported to the committee

he believed the boys deserved „a good whipping‟ and had carried out this punishment

himself, „the first four on Monday the other three on Tuesday‟.116

Turner‟s willingness to apply corporal punishment during his term as superintendent

at Redhill contrasts to his writing in the years following his commission as Inspector of

Reformatories. He presents an ideal model for reformatory school administrators to follow

but in reality his practical experience at Redhill illustrates how difficult he found it to

follow his own advice. In 1859, Turner wrote about the standards of „a successful

reformatory‟, where

a manly training to obedience, regularity, industry, and self-control is the needful

remedy ... [where the] principle of duty is more clearly insisted on, persuasion less

trusted to .... Confidence without familiarity on the part of the child; kindness

without weakness or flattery on the part of the teacher; earnestness in everything –

work, devotion, school instruction or play; self-respect in personal cleanliness and

116

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/18, 12 July 1854.

37

neatness; order in daily habits and meals; these are the marks of a successful

reformatory.117

Did the Philanthropic Society‟s farm school ever match Turner‟s idealistic

aspirations? In 1858 when approximately 263 boys lived at the school, 119 cases of

solitary confinement occurred, varying from periods of 1 to 9 days. Walters continued

Turner‟s practice, whereby boys who tried to escape from the farm were subjected to

corporal punishment upon their return to the Society‟s care. In the first full year of

Walters‟ administration, punishments included „84 with slight corporal infliction, 14

floggings, and 5 committed to prison for desertion‟, out of a total of 22 cases of

desertion.118 The incidence of corporal punishment appears to have increased as the

number of admissions grew, but this routine was accepted as a part of philanthropic

endeavour, and was meant to be a lesson for other inmates as well as securing the

recalcitrant‟s ultimate reform. An indication of the superintendent‟s rationale for any lack

of sensitivity towards boys who received corporal punishment is contained in his report to

the committee based on happenings at the farm during 1859. Walters wrote: „whilst there

is no trifling with offences which really deserve punishment, there is no severity as might

rob our work of its distinctive character as a labour of love‟.119

Corporal punishment became the centre of concern for the Society and H.M.

Inspector of Reformatory Schools in early October 1860.120 In 1860, Turner became aware

117

Sydney Turner, ‘Second Report’, to The Right Honourable Sir G.C. Lewis, Secretary of State

for the Home Department. RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/42/2, 1859 p.16. 118

Reverend Charles Walters, ‘Report to the Treasurer and Committee’, Philanthropic Society,

Annual Report, 1859. 119

Reverend Charles Walters, ‘Report to the Treasurer and Committee’, Philanthropic Society,

Annual Report, 1860, p.18. 120

For one example see Sydney Turner letter, Irish Quarterly Review, v.5, 1854-55, pp. 799-800.

38

of a reported „act of gross cruelty‟ at the Redhill reformatory, supposedly perpetrated by a

schoolmaster, Mr Lawrence, and an assistant master, Mr Hearne, against an inmate named

Henry Smith of Princes‟ House. The Inspector arrived at Redhill on 12 October to follow

up the report while Walters was away on business, but Mr Rogers, his deputy, remained on

duty. Turner later learned that Smith had become violent in a detention cell after

„misconduct at drill‟ where he proceeded to give „much insolence‟. Smith used his boots „to

knock the cell about‟, whereupon Messrs Lawrence and Hearne – witnessed by three other

boys and a servant – tried to remove Smith‟s boots. In the scuffle Smith was „knocked to

the ground several times causing a black eye and a bloody nose‟.121 Turner‟s subsequent

visit to Redhill caused concern, not only to the Society‟s committee, but to Walters. The

Inspector‟s intervention implied a dereliction of duty on his part. In reply, Walters

produced statistics indicating that in Turner‟s last year at Redhill (1856), „with a smaller

number of boys‟, there were 22 floggings compared with eleven under Walters‟

jurisdiction in 1860. Furthermore, Walters, determined not to be intimidated by Turner‟s

reputation, presented for the committee‟s perusal a full comparison of punishments at the

institution. During 1860, compared with Turner‟s last year as chaplain, he demonstrated

that a reduction had occurred in cell cases, floggings, committals to prison, and

desertions.122

Turner subsequently addressed the Society‟s committee at the London Tavern,

Bishopsgate Street on 7 February 1861. His mood was of a man determined not only to

leave his mark on the Society‟s reformatory at Redhill but, through his understanding of

reformatory regimes, to achieve recognition and prominence in his role as Inspector

Reformatory Schools. He spoke of the need for Redhill‟s management committee to

121

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/20 ‘Minutes of Proceedings’, 15 October 1860. 122

RPS, SLS Item no.2271/2/20, Proceedings of the Philanthropic Society, 15 October 1860.

39

appraise itself of all matters within the farm school and recommended „for the future to

enquire for themselves into the conditions of the School and make such arrangements‟ as to

„ensure their being intimately informed on all that takes place within the institution‟.123 He

also suggested the Society adopt „with the Sanction of the Government‟ a series of

Regulations‟ that:

no boy shall be confined more than three days without the special authority of

the Visitors or the Committee – nor more than seven days under any circumstances.

In such cases extra diet to be allowed after the third day. No boy to be punished

with corporal punishment except by the Superintendent. No boy to be punished

with corporal punishment who is above sixteen years of age ... all punishments to

be accurately recorded in a book kept for that purpose and to be entered and

recorded by the master of the House to which the boy belongs .... The Assistant

Superintendent to be answerable to the Committee for such Reports being made

and for all punishments being according to regulations. Every case in which more

serious punishments than the above seems necessary, to be referred to the

Magistrates.

Turner continued to monitor the number of punishments carried out at Redhill. He

noted in his Annual Report for 1862 to the Home Secretary the increased number of

punishments imposed at Redhill in 1861. Turner attributed this rise to „the large number of

cases of desertion, amounting in 1861 to nearly sixty on an average of nearly two-hundred-

and-fifty boys‟.124 Once again Walters interpreted Turner‟s comments as a criticism of his

methods at the Farm School. Walters‟ Annual Report for 1861 rejected any need for undue

123

Sydney Turner’s address to the Philanthropic Committee, RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/20 7

February 1861. 124

Sydney Turner, Inspector’s Annual Report to Rt Hon Sir George Grey, 1862, p. 51.

40

concern. He maintained the reformatory had returned „to the contentment and quiet

working which marked its operations in 1860‟.125 The friction between Turner and

Walters served to maintain the committee‟s attention on the issue of punishment and any

abuses by the Society‟s staff.

In the summer of 1871, Mr Shore, a labour master was accused of abusing boys as

they worked under his supervision in the fields. Mrs Sadler, a local resident, confirmed an

earlier report about Mr Shore. Details of the incident, were published in a local newspaper

on 12 August 1871. The matter caused Turner to write to Redhill on 26 and 31 August,

also on 13 September asking for an explanation. The Society‟s managing committee were

tardy in replying to Turner and he sent his Assistant Inspector of Reformatories, Henry

Rogers, on an official visit to the Farm School on 3 October 1871. Rogers examined „the 2

upper classes of all the Houses and the Industrial Departments: the attainments of the boys

and the general condition of the School [which] he considered highly satisfactory‟.126

However, earlier, on 29 September, the committee had met to confirm it „had no reason to

suspect‟ that labour masters inflicted any corporal punishment „unless at the express

direction of their Superior Officers of the School and in their presence‟.127 The committee

„disproved that ill-usage‟ of the boys at work in the fields had taken place.128 Turner, away

in Glasgow, wrote to the Society on 20 October 1871 to state he did not believe there were

„grounds for dispensing with any further interference‟. He continued: „that were it not for

Shore‟s age and long service I should hardly feel justified in consenting to his retention on

the Staff‟. Furthermore Turner wrote that „Mrs Sadler‟s statement shows that a good deal

of irregular punishment complained of in Shore‟s class has taken place, but I am satisfied

125

Philanthropic Society Annual Report, London, 1863 p. 12. 126

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/23, Minutes of Proceedings, 5 October 1871, folios 4 and 5. 127

RPS, SLS Item no.2271/2/23, Minutes of Proceedings, 29 September 1871. 128

RPS, SLS Item no.2271/2/23, Minutes of Proceedings, 29 September 1871.

41

that your attention has been fully drawn to it, and that it will be effectually checked‟.129

Turner was still not content to leave matters as they stood. Redhill was identified

with his success as an organiser and leader in the field of reformatory schools. He was

determined not have his work sullied by any form of incompetence, or lack of respect for

his status by the incumbent manager of Redhill. He dealt with the lightly veiled criticism,

apparently included in the Society‟s letter by Mr Britcliffe, the current bailiff, and his

„memories of the state of things‟ during Turner‟s management of the school. Turner wrote

to the Society:

As to Britcliffe‟s memories of the state of things under my management, I am quite

content to leave them without comment, unless it were really essential to deal with

them. The tu quoque argument is never a very satisfactory one, however naturally

resorted to. The Reformatory System is in a very different position now that it is

developed by practice and experience from what it was in its struggling childhood –

and the class of boys we have to deal with are of a very different class than what

had to be dealt with 15 or 20 years ago.130

Turner argued that delinquents admitted to Redhill between 1849-1857, during his

term as chaplain and manager of Redhill, required greater discipline than he believed was

necessary in 1871. Thus Turner had changed his opinion of the methods used in

reformatory institutions. Since the Youthful Offenders Act of 1854 magistrates tended to

sentence juvenile offenders after their second or later offence. As noted earlier, boys with

no previous convictions were considered for reformatory training during the early 1850s in

129

Sydney Turner to Charles Walters, Philanthropic Society, 20 October 1871, and RPS, SLS Item

no. 2271/2/23, Minutes of Proceedings, 2 November 1871, folio 10. 130

Ibid.

42

an attempt to avert them from the more hardened criminals in adult gaols.131 Turner‟s

argument indicates that the more difficult boys were admitted to Redhill in the early 1850s,

whereas John Trevarthan, secretary at Redhill, in his evidence to the 1882 Reformatory

and Industrial Schools Commission stated that the Society accepted „the worst of those

applying‟.132

Reformatory School inspectors reported on the maintenance of accurate records of

punishments imposed. The extent of this surveillance is illustrated by W. Inglis in his

memorandum to the Home Office in 1881. He noted the incorrect maintenance of

Punishment Books‟, querying if the intent was to „lead the Inspector to suppose that less

punishment has been inflicted than has really been the case‟.133 In the same year the Home

Office sought the „official means of administering flogging‟. Redhill‟s methods of birching

were

the use of the cane by the Masters of Houses at their discretion and reported weekly

to the Chaplain Superintendent and the use of the birch rod, rarely, and only for

very grave offences and by the Chaplain Superintendent only. We have no

appliances special for this purpose but the boy, in a stooping position, is tied by his

hands and feet to a strong domestic table in common use and the birch rod is then

applied. We find this quite sufficient for the purpose.134

Walters had attended a conference on 30 November 1880, as a delegate from

Redhill, to discuss the topic of the treatment of juvenile offenders. He spoke of his

131

Adshead, ‘Extracts from a Pamphlet on Juvenile Criminals‟, p. 343. 132

Report of the Commissioners together with Minutes of Evidence, Appendices, and Index,

Reformatories and Industrial Schools Commission, London, 1884 p.154. 133

13 October 1881, HO 45/9613 A9566, British Archive. 134

4 May 1881, HO 45/9613 A9566, British Archive.

43

experience at the Society‟s school and related that Redhill did not „believe in whipping

unless it is judiciously inflicted [and further that] the rod is an excellent thing, however,

when it is soundly used to point a moral, and adorn a tale‟.135 In 1899, the Society‟s

chaplain superintendent, the Reverend Marshall John Vine, wrote:

During recent years the aim of the committee has been to school to that of the

great public schools of England. The monitor system has been reorganised

and, under necessary restriction, has worked well. Punishments have been so

largely reduced that the penal character usually attached to a certified

reformatory has been abolished.136

Conclusion

Redhill‟s foundation and expansion owed much to a shift in public attitude regarding

children in adult gaols. A demand for schools to accommodate young offenders apart from

other public penal institutions, encouraged the mid-nineteenth-century governments,

whether Conservative or Liberal, to look favourably on the Philanthropic Society‟s plans.

The visit by Turner to Mettray, followed by his conversion to the worth of a similar

agricultural reformatory establishment in England, coincided with the Philanthropic

Society‟s ambition to extend its work. Turner and his staff aimed to project the image of

Redhill as a well-run institution where order, discipline and training produced honest, hard-

working young men.

The Society‟s elite patronage were pleased for Turner to represent the Society. He

not only furthered the Society image, and set Redhill as an example, but his enthusiasm as

135 C. Walters, in Reformatory and Refuge Union Journal, no.106, January 1881, p. 266. 136 M. J. Vine, Brief History of the Farm School, Jubilee 1899, RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/40/21

pp. 33-34.

44

an employee of the charity, endowed the attributes of care and compassion upon the rich

and influential men who were its membership. When Turner was chosen as the first

Inspector of Reformatories, his successors tried to follow in his footsteps. They ran the

institution according to their capabilities, and the capabilities of the Society‟s committees.

An examination of Redhill‟s administration between 1849 and 1879 shows the high and

low troughs that the Society‟s staff, and inmates either enjoyed or endured. Whilst the

committees responsible for the day-to-day administration at Redhill did not shirk their

duties, they relied upon the chaplain-superintendent to alert them to any problems. The

Society‟s official „visitors‟ did not carry out their functions as they were meant to do,

therefore the problems which should have been corrected were neglected.

The military and gymnastic public displays given by the boys at Redhill gave the

committee cause for pride. Every indication of achievement by the boys who came to the

institution as convicted criminals was used by the Society to advance the reformatory‟s

status in the public arena. By contrast, adverse reports were downplayed or ignored, as

shown by the lack of response to Dr. Peter Martin‟s report in 1860, and Dr. Ewen‟s

recommendations to the committee in 1877-88. Thus young boys continued to be

admitted even when they showed deficiencies in physical stamina.

45

1

Chapter 4. ‘Emigration or Home Disposal?’

This chapter focuses on the juveniles who were transferred to Redhill Farm

School from Parkhurst Juvenile Prison prior to completion of their sentence, and on the

training and outcome of those boys chosen by the Society to become emigrants as a

reward for their good behaviour at Redhill. It also compares the change in attitude by

government in the mid nineteenth-century to the legislation brought down in the 1890s

indicating a more humane attitude towards incarceration and release options for young

delinquents. Although the Society’s surviving records do not enable us to follow every

boy who went abroad, by comparing mid-century procedures with the situation obtaining

at the end of the nineteenth century, it is possible to trace the broad development of the

emigration programme.

The Society judged its own success by the degree to which it trained the boys in

its care to strive for achievement, either at home or as an emigrant. Written testimony by

former inmates of the reformatory reveals something of the work of their mentors in

England. For the most part letters from boys released from the farm school convey a

spirit of jubilation and confidence in the future. Such testimonies served to enhance the

work of the Society when included in the charity’s Annual Reports. I argue that the

period between 1849-1900 was one of transition, when training the uneducated to master

machinery, and to apply new methods of agriculture, was seen as benefiting the worker,

employer and economic development at home as well as in the British empire.

Juvenile convicts transferred from Parkhurst to Redhill, although sentenced to

transportation at the end of their term, had voluntarily agreed to serve out their sentence

at a privately run reformatory and to emigrate under the provision of a Royal Pardon at

2

the completion of training.1 After the passing of the Parkhurst Act in 1838 the Society

accepted youths from public gaols on the recommendation either of an Inspector of

Prisons, or the prison superintendent, in consultation with Sydney Turner. Ideally, the

Society wanted this category of inmate to undergo a minimum of one year’s training at

Redhill, but in reality the charity had no authority to postpone a boy’s release if his

sentence expired earlier.

This chapter will show the Society’s efforts to prepare boys for their role as

emigrants. Further, letters received at Redhill from young men who had received their

training at Redhill are considered. In conjunction with the practical work of the Society

attention is drawn to the mid-century views of the Colonial Secretary and the Home

Secretary. These views are compared with those of the 1895-96 Departmental Inquiry on

Reformatory and Industrial Schools to reveal a major shift in government and public

concern for youths sent from Britain to the colonies.

* * *

From the 1820s adult emigration was encouraged by government to ease the number

of unemployed, and the burden they placed upon ratepayers.2 Children were also part of

changing patterns of work as production shifted from cottage industries to larger

manufacturing centres. Although families tended to migrate to nearby towns and cities to

seek work they only achieved a measure of success. This internal movement from

country to town, especially to London, was seen as an event more to be dreaded than

desired. The more London increased, the more the rest of the Kingdom must be deserted;

1

Statutes (at Large) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1 & 2

Victoria, C.81, 82 v.78 pp.385-389. See paragraph XI for details of conditions of a Royal

Pardon. 2

See Alexander J. Murdoch, British Emigration, 1603-1914 (Basingstoke, 2004).

3

the fewer hands must be left for agriculture, and, consequently, the less must be the

plenty and the higher the price of all the means of subsistence.3

In 1826 a government Select Committee discussed emigration as a means of

reducing the number of children who roamed crowded cities, with little opportunity for

employment.4 Robert Joseph Chambers, a London police magistrate, suggested ‘that

London was too full of children’ when he appeared before the parliamentary committee.

He spoke of the ‘very great stagnation for the employment of children in London’ and

presented a Return of the Number of Prisoners at Brixton Hill between 1820-1825.

Youths of twenty-one and under numbered 2,825.5 Chambers was asked if ‘the parishes

of London would be very willing to advance something to facilitate the emigration of

those children?’ He believed that parishes would for they were ‘now in the habit of

paying five pounds for apprentice fees, and they find great difficulty in obtaining a

sufficient number of masters for them’.6 Emigration was also encouraged from Britain

when bounties were introduced by the Colonial Office in 1832 and, later, as an

inducement to obtain free settlers by the government of New South Wales in 1836.7

Thomas Russell, an employee at Southwark, spoke of the possibility of more youths

being assisted to emigrate at the end of their workshop training. He represented the

Society during the 1835 parliamentary inquiry into the state of ‘Gaols and Houses of

Correction’. Russell suggested that should the government

grant the Society a moderate sum for each of the criminal boys maintained and

instructed in the Reform establishment of the Institution, and if after their two

3

Murdoch, British Emigration, p. 49. 4 ‘Report from the Select Committee on Emigration from the United Kingdom with Minutes of

Evidence and Appendix’, 1826, Emigration, v.1, p. 83, BPP. 5

Robert J. Chambers, ‘Report from the Select Committee on Emigration from the United

Kingdom with Minutes of Evidence and Appendix’, 1826, Emigration, v.1, pp. 83-7, BPP. 6

Ibid., p. 85. 7

Murdoch, British Emigration, pp. 75-6.

4

years probation the government would then afford the Society pecuniary

means for sending them to the Northern Colonies, to be there apprenticed to

Agriculturalists, they would very much assist the declining funds of the

Institution and greatly increase its benefits to the public, by enabling the

Society to extend its protection to a far greater number.8

Agricultural training at Redhill aimed to prepare boys for honest labour at home or

as independent migrants in a British colony of settlement. Sending young delinquents

overseas was not a new concept. For instance in 1838 many boys were to be found in

public gaols or at the Parkhurst Juvenile Prison awaiting transportation when their first

sentence expired. However by the 1840s British colonies proved less willing to receive

juveniles released from England’s penal institutions. The Home Secretary found

‘considerable difficulty’ in pardoning boys to live and work in Britain who had originally

been sentenced to transportation. He considered that in such a situation the boys would

face:

formidable difficulties from the loss of character, the want of friends, and their

recent discharge from prison ... and would therefore, in most cases, return to their

criminal pursuits.

He also believed that:

8

Evidence by Thomas Russell, ‘Third Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords

appointed to inquire into the Present State of the Several Gaols and Houses of Correction in

England and Wales, with the Minutes of Evidence and Appendix’, July 1835, Crime and

Punishment ‘Prisons’, v. 4, p. 524, BPP.

5

boys released after a period of penal servitude and sent to the colonies on convict

ships risked the loss of the moral improvement ... derived during their imprisonment

at Parkhurst.9

Lord Stanley thought ‘there would be little difficulty’ in accepting boy prisoners

from Parkhurst if they travelled as free settlers, and that a ‘colony could hardly object to

receiving them in that capacity’. He preferred sending boys to Australia rather than to

‘the North American colonies’ as the distance from the Antipodes put ‘greater difficulties

in the way’ of their return to Britain.10 The Colonial Secretary did not object to sending

a limited number of boys as an experiment to New Brunswick, privately acquainting the

Governor with their circumstances and avoiding everything which would expose them to

unnecessary observation.11 The authorities reasoned that if former offenders arrived

overseas in small groups the colonial residents’ fears were unlikely to be aroused.12 In

the event, the enthusiasm of employers, in Canada and Australia, to take boys from the

farm school at Redhill suggests that such fears were without foundation. By the 1840s,

Sydney Turner, representing the Society’s interests, and Captain Williams, Inspector of

Prisons, would meet to select boys deemed suitable for transfer from London’s Bridewell

to enter the reformatory at Southwark. At the end of their sentence the youths were kitted

out, with passage and expenses paid to a British colony by the Society. Later, when

Parkhurst boys were transferred to the Society at Redhill similar arrangements were

9

Ibid., pp. 77-78. 11

Ibid., p. 81. 11 Ibid. 12 Hunt, Adelaide (1860). Henry Wakeford, Police Magistrate, Perth (1863). George Teale Esq.,

Melbourne. Colonel Laurie, Nova Scotia, all wrote to the Society (recorded in Minutes on 22

March 1897, SLS 2271/2/24) giving an account of Redhill youths, how they had settled and the

current labour market.

6

made.13 The emigration of convicted juveniles on completion of their sentence reflected

the government attitude towards young men discharged from reform training –

particularly the belief that boys sent to a reformatory would be more likely to succeed if

divorced from former friends in cities and towns.

In 1849, as the Society transferred its training programme from the Southwark

buildings to Redhill, much of the work was aimed at preparing young men for work as

free emigrants. Difficulties were encountered by the Society as the General Committee

needed money to build sufficient houses on the estate to house the boys the government

was anxious to transfer from Parkhurst to Redhill. The Home Secretary and the Colonial

Secretary were anxious to avoid boy emigrants being seen as convicts; it was therefore in

the best interests of all parties, government, the Society and juveniles to leave Britain as

free emigrants, and not as convicts. At the same time all monies the Society could obtain

by accepting responsibility for ‘young transports’, boys sentenced by local borough

courts and county magistrates, increased the charities’ annual income.

The reformatory did not gain financially if the Society detained a youth when he

could be released either on license to an employer in Britain, or as an emigrant.

Treasury’s maintenance allowance was based on the age and years a boy was detained in

a reformatory school. During the years 1892 to 1895, Treasury paid for each boy detained

‘6s per head, per week, subject to a reduction to 4s. a week after 3 years detention and the

attainment of the age of 16 years’.14 Nonetheless, the Society did not rush to accept the

1893 legislation, which capped a boy’s term at a reformatory school at nineteen years of

age. The words embodied in the Bill referred to ‘a period of not less than three and not

13

Statutes (at Large) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1 & 2

Victoria, C.81, 82 v.78, pp. 385-89. 14

‘General Rules and Regulations for the Management of Certified Reformatory Schools for the

Detention of Juvenile Offenders’, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, v. LXVIII, London

1893-94, Note 1 p. 259 .

7

more than five years’ in detention according to the sentencing court’s satisfaction that the

upper age limit would not be exceeded.15 The inquiring committee reflected

contemporary concern and interest in the wider community regarding children sent to

institutions. The committee sought facts and figures on the disposal of juvenile offenders

prior to, and after release from a reformatory institution, revealing the substance of the

changes which had taken place between 1849 and 1895.

Despite the hardship encountered by the boys at Redhill, after their release to work

overseas, some became avid correspondents with the Society’s chaplain, and with

individual school-masters at the Farm School. They wrote of their daily routines, the

countryside, and of their employers. Many overcame hardship – ill-health or accidents –

while some faltered and were sent to gaol, but most correspondence reflects the vitality of

young men, now free to travel and work in vastly different environments. Many letters

stress the need to work hard and express appreciation for the training received during

their time at Redhill. Although the correspondence entered by Turner and in turn by

Walters, into an ‘Emigration Letter Book’ between 1854-1874 must be considered with

caution, many youths did undoubtedly improve their circumstances and attribute much of

their success to the Society’s efforts.

Some youths struggled with inadequate literacy skills, while others wrote a coherent

record of their lives over a period of months. These letters were often re-printed in the

Society’s Annual Report as testimony to success of Redhill. Nonetheless, apart from the

feeling of camaraderie which developed between the migrant and the chaplain, or school-

master at Redhill, and aside from the possibility the youth experienced nostalgia for the

security life at Redhill, the letters provide frank descriptions of life in the 1850s through

15

‘An Act to amend and consolidate the Acts relating to Reformatory Schools in Great Britain,

Youthful Offenders Bill, Hansard v.74, col.461, 11 July 1899.

8

to the 1870s. Distance in time and space from England may well have clouded former

inmates’ memories of discipline but the institution’s regime does not appear to have

kerbed their enthusiasm for life.

The Society’s Agents Overseas

The Society much preferred to send released boys to suitable posts overseas through

the assistance of its own local agents. William Hanson, an employee of the Government

Printing Office, Sydney, was such an agent. He maintained a flow of information

between 1856 and 1858, from Sydney to Redhill, about the boys he met on their arrival in

Australia. Hanson recounted the various instances of a youth’s acceptance, or not, of

employment he had arranged, indicating the migrant’s freedom from the control of former

days. Hanson’s work as an agent is indicated by the letters he wrote to Sydney Turner

when he confirmed his dedication to Redhill on 22 January 1857:

I continue my service to yr cause most cheerfully. I have made such arrangements

that there will be no difficulty in getting them [the new arrivals] situations. I

instruct them on no account to leave the ship until they see me.16

He continued:

Sent the two lads who came by the Alnwick Castle (Oct 8) – Nokes and Stoliday –

to Mr and Mrs Cabe at Illawara @ £15 a year and rations. All your boys are doing

well except Boyd, Gaynor and Rees.

16

Letter from William Hanson to Sydney Turner 22 January 1857, RPS (AJCP) M1838.

9

Hanson wrote again on 19 May 1857 to refer to the announcement of Sydney

Turner’s forthcoming appointment as Inspector of Prisons:

Truly pleased to hear of your appt. Glad you are willing to continue [as] Emigration

Agent to the Society. Shall still be willing to assist the cause, only you must

continue as correspondent. Have heard from several of the lads. MacKenzie is

really a bright youth, doing well and quite contented. I could dispose of an

unlimited number of lads. Henry Stanton is a general favourite. I am giving him £2

a week and propose shortly to place him in the composing room with an increase.

Am constantly receiving applications for yr boys. We could absorb the whole of

your surplus labour without feeling the influx.17

Through the correspondence between William Hanson and Sydney Turner the situation of

the colony’s regard for those who administered the discipline and teaching at Redhill is

clearly indicated.

Emigrants’ Letters

The experience of a number of boys who migrated to Australia from Redhill

between 1853 and 1874 are available through their letters. The Emigration Letter Book

presents a kaleidoscope of happenings as the young migrants related their experiences in

a new country.18 The Letter Book was not only used by the Society’s administration to

fulfil its ‘obligation to follow its children for three years after discharge, and to report on

them annually’, it also served as a repository of all kinds of useful information. It

sometimes provided a link for those who had lost touch with close relatives, and a means

17

, RPS SLS item no. 2271/33/1 ‘Emigration’, William Hanson to Sydney Turner, Philanthropic

Farm School, 19 May 1857, 1838. 18

Philanthropic Society, SLS Item no. 2271/33/1, Emigration, AJCP M1838.

10

whereby the emigrant could possibly have mail directed to a relative in England. 19 The

letters themselves often contained information of other youths, their employment and

current whereabouts that could be of assistance to their kin still in England. This

reporting by some former boys assisted the Society to maintain its records for annual

returns to the Home Office.

A sample of the letters received are those written from Australia in the 1850s to

illustrate the work the young men did, and the value they placed on earning enough to

survive. Letters sometimes echo the writer’s desire to return to England and to be

reunited with relatives, others ask for help to trace the relative of pre-reformatory days.

Stanton, wrote to the Society on 14 June 1857, and confirmed his prospects of

promotion with Hanson at the Government Printing Office. He went on to give

information about his friends from Redhill.20

[I am] still with Mr Hanson, who continues very kind. Expect shortly to be

advanced to the composing room. Williams is doing well at Bathurst, also

Meldrum, McKenzie & Dent all doing very well. Boys who go up the country have

a better chance of getting on than those who remain in the town. They are exposed

to fewer temptations and wages are quite as good. Boys coming out here may as

well know that they will get no money unless they work for it.

19

RPS, SLS Item no. 1171/2/17, ‘Minutes of Proceedings’, 23 November 1853, when the

management committee ordered that staff were to keep a ‘Letter Book’ in which the letters sent

from overseas would be copied and preserved at Red Hill. The manuscript copy of the Letter

Book, between 1856-1874 appears to be the only surviving evidence containing Turn and

Walters’ record of the letters sent from young men overseas. A copy is available, thanks to the

work of the AJCP (Microform 1838). However, letters from overseas continued to be published

in the Society’s Annual Reports, although all such letters were identified only by initials to

preserve the anonymity of the senders. 20

Henry Stanton to Philanthropic Society, 14 June 1857, RPS (AJCP) M1838.

11

Notwithstanding the success achieved by emigrant boys arriving in Australia, when

success was defined as no further criminal activity after release, former delinquents were

protected by the opportunity to travel as private citizens, not under sentence of

transportation. Captain Williams, Inspector of Prisons, Home District, reported to the

Home Office in December 1851 that boys were transferred to Redhill ‘under conditional

pardon from the Westminster House of Correction’, their eventual discharge from the

reformatory was carried out in such a way to suppress any connection with past

misdeeds.21 Some boys were considered unsuitable for emigration and could not return to

relatives or friends without risking recidivism, while others never lost the stigma of

reformatory-school training. Williams referred to the ‘peculiar facilities which the

Philanthropic Society commands in quietly and unostentatiously disposing of these boys

by emigration’.22 Such a delicate turn of phrase was not always in evidence throughout

the century. Much later, Colonel Inglis, Inspector of Reformatories, offered a more

forthright opinion after his visit to Redhill on 25 November 1891. He reported that

‘generally the boys looked hearty and robust, and quite the material for soldiers and

colonists’.23 Whether the colonial employers who welcomed Redhill’s young men

accepted the School’s assurance that only the most deserving and best boys were chosen

by the chaplains for migration is problematical.

Emigration expenses

Emigration was believed to provide the best possible chance for a former

reformatory school boy, but the process involved the Society in complicated financial

21

Home Office memorandum, HO.45, O.S.239/9, British Archive. 22

Ibid.,. 23

Colonel W. Inglis, ‘Thirty-fourth Report, Inspector of Reformatory Schools of Great Britain’,

House of Commons, Sessional Papers, [C.6477] XLIV, London, 1891 p. 92, BPP.

12

affairs. When the Society accepted a boy from gaol pending emigration, it became

necessary for the Society to organise his itinerary from Redhill to the port of embarkation.

Staff had to arrange his passage and provide maintenance costs for the journey. Treasury

eventually reimbursed the Society ‘for the emigration expenses of their own boys viz they

repay us the expense of any boy of theirs we send out’.24 In the long run progress of a

juvenile’s conviction from local court, to gaol, to reformatory school, to a British colony,

brought the Society a dependable annual income from Treasury, so essential to the

charity’s day-to-day work.25

In 1854 it cost approximately £13. 17s. 1d to send a boy to Quebec.26 The Society

listed the emigration costs for one boy as follows:

Maintenance, 33 days @ 1s. 4½d. £2. 0s. 0d.

Passage on s.s. ‘Sunbeam’ 7. 7s. 0d.

Outfit £ s. d.

1 Working suit 18. 0.

1 Best suit 1. 10. 0.

2 Coloured shirts 3. 3.

1 White shirt 2. 4.

2 Flannel shirts 3. 11.

24

Sydney Turner, evidence before the ‘Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles’, 11

May 1852, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 2., p. 24, BPP. 25

W. J. Williams, ‘Report of Captain Williams, Inspector of Prisons, on Minute of Committee of

Council on Education, relative to Establishment of Model Schools for Juvenile Criminals and

Paupers, in connexion with the Training School for Masters at Kneller Hall’, Appendix, No. 1,

‘Report from the Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles; together with the

Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index’, June 1852, Crime and

Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 2 , p. 385. 26

AJCP M 1836. See also RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/36/3 ‘Working Ledger: Emigration, Records

expenditure on outfit and passage for each boy emigrating’, 1854-1 1861.

13

3 prs Worsted Hose 2. 4½

3 prs Cotton Hose 2. 4½

2 prs Boots 13. 6.

3 pocket Handkerchiefs 9.

2 Neck Handkerchiefs 9.

3 Towels 9.

1 Comb 3.

1 Knife 1. 1.

1 pr Braces 3½

1 Thrasher* 8½

Needles and Thread 6.

Books, etc. 3. 0.

1 Cloth Cap 1 3.

Box for outfit 5. 0.

Sub-Total: 4. 10. 1

Total cost of emigration: £13. 17s. 1d

* An implement used for separating grain; a flail, to assist a boy who secured

employment on a farm.

14

For the year 1857 the Society’s ‘Receipts and Expenditure’ recorded the total

emigration costs as: 27

66 Passages £807. 15. 9.

Outfits and Bedding 308. 5. 2.

Travelling 81. 18. 8.

Cash 64. 8. 6.

Boxes 12. 17. 6.

Books, etc. 22. 1. 11.

The Reformatory and Refuge Journal, the official organ of private reformatory and

refuge schools gave advice on how to provide for a young emigrant’s needs:

Boys should have blue or grey, strong twill white trousers, boots without nails or

iron heels, but with double soles. Girls should have light cotton frocks.28

In 1863 the Reformatory and Refuge Journal included advice on juvenile

emigration stating that emigration was an ‘important means of disposing of the inmates of

our Institutions’.29 The journal queried the justification for spending £10 to send a former

city boy to Canada to live. One line of argument suggested that boys with a city

background were often unfit for the hard work involved, causing the migrant to become

‘a wanderer’, thus placing him ‘beyond the reach of our influence’.30 A warning was

delivered that some emigrants had the wrong idea ‘as to what they might expect on their

27 John Moxon, Auditor, The Philanthropic Society – ‘Abstract of Receipts and Expenditure,

1857’, Annual Report, London, 16 February 1858, p. 11. 28

Anonymous, ‘Notes on Emigration’, Reformatory and Refuge Journal, (9) 1863, p. 6. 29

Ibid., p. 4. 30

Ibid., p. 5.

15

arrival’ only to find the work ‘would be harder, much harder’. A warning was given that

it was ‘no use expecting to work in the trades taught in the reformatory schools’.31

Superintendent Walters wrote to the Aldermen of the City of London in 1863 to

request money to cover the cost for two London boys to be sent overseas as it was

deemed necessary to separate the boys from their ‘friends of the worst kind’ who lived in

their home city. While the Society reserved the right to use its discretion when choosing

who would be eligible to leave Redhill for the colonies, it also levied a charge of one

shilling and sixpence to the City Council per week for boys from Newgate and Holloway

prisons in a bid to cover costs in the event of a City boy emigrating. Walters wrote to

remind the Council that:

A boy cannot know on his admission to the School that he will have the privilege of

emigrating, it being reserved for those who prove themselves to be deserving, and

whose connections are such that entire separation from them is necessary to their

well-doing.32

It should be noted that such arguments were not routinely accepted. In this particular

case the London authorities declined to pay.33

A further form of expenditure was faced by the Society when its overseas agents

remitted their accounts. For example, G. Teale of Melbourne, requested payment to

cover two years’ expenses, £23. 16s. 1d., for various charges incurred ‘on behalf of boys

31

Ibid., p. 4. 32

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/21, ‘Minutes of Proceedings’, 20 January 1863. 33

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/21, ‘Minutes of Proceedings’, 2 April 1863.

16

recently arrived in the Colony for Board and Lodging etc., before situations have been

found for them’.34

Kitting out boy emigrants, plus passage, created cash flow problems. Although

Redhill complied with the government preference for the boys to be sent to Australia,

Treasury’s reimbursement to the Society for the care and disposal of pardoned young

transports was restricted to the specific category of those who would have remained in

gaol if they had not agreed to emigrate at the end of their sentence. From time to time

Treasury made supplementary grants to the Society, not necessarily targeted to cover the

cost associated with emigration. Not withstanding additional moneys allotted by

government to the Society, a fee meant to cover the cost of emigration was levied against

local and county agencies at the time when Redhill’s management approved a boy’s

admission to the reformatory. Despite donations from the membership, income from

legacies and bequests and the fees from all sources, including those promised by a boy’s

parent or guardian, the Society could not cover the expenses incurred in running Redhill

and the emigration program. Gaps between income and expenditure cropped up regularly

to the end of the century.

John Trevarthan, the farm school secretary, believed that emigration gave ‘the

proper finish to a boy’ – even though the financial cost was greater than if a boy was

released to his parents or friends. In evidence for the Royal Commission on Reformatory

and Industrial Schools in 1882, the school secretary, Trevarthan produced comparative

costs for home disposal and emigration for the period between 1872-1882.35 The figures

34

Goodman Teale Esq., Melbourne to the Philanthropic Society, RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/20, 2

November 1859. 35

J. Trevarthan, ‘Minutes of evidence taken Before the Commissioners appointed to inquire into

and report upon the Operation, Management, Control etc., of Certified Reformatories, Certified

Industrial Schools, and Certified Day Industrial Schools in the United Kingdom’, 23 May 1882,

Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 4, p. 147, col.1, BPP.

17

illustrated that the Society paid an average of £10. 12s. 1d. for a youth’s emigration,

compared with the cost of £2. 5s. 2d for a home disposal.36

As well, the secretary supplied the Committee with information on the increased

proportion of relapses over the previous three years particularly in Canada. In an effort to

contain costs he explained that over ‘the last 22 or 23 years most of our boys’ preferred to

emigrate to Canada rather than undergo the long journey to Australia. Because other

reform agencies followed the Society’s ‘unquestionable’ success they, too, sent boys to

Canada. Unfortunately, as the number of former offenders grew many of the Canadian

‘advantages’ were reduced. Old associates in crime were likely to cross paths.

Furthermore, the general increase in emigration meant that youths who had not

successfully settled in Canada ‘worked their passage back to England’.37 However, the

Society did not publicise the recent Canadian failures in its Annual Reports. Instead

statistics were published to show Redhill’s positive achievement.38 By the end of 1887

the Society had trained and sent forth about 5,148 young people since the establishment

of Redhill. It had educated 3,674 boys, and of these 1,492 emigrated to the colonies. The

same Annual Report told the Society’s members that ‘a special watch is kept over every

boy for at least four years after his discharge from the School’.39

Legislative Change

The Reformatory and Industrial Schools Act was passed in 1891. The intention of

the Act was to allow managers of certified reformatory, and industrial, schools to dispose

of inmates earlier than their release date. Section 1 of the Act stipulated that if a boy had

36

Ibid., p.146, col.1. 37 Ibid. 38

Philanthropic Society, SLS Item no. 2271/1/21, Annual Report, London, 1888, p. 6. 39

Philanthropic Society, SLS Item no. 2271/1/21, Annual Report, London, 1888, p. 7.

18

not served more than twelve months of his sentence prior to emigration ‘the consent of

the Secretary of State’ to the Home Office was required. The legislation also provided

for boys of good behaviour to be released prior to the end of their sentence as apprentices,

or to ‘any trade, calling, or service’.40 The relevance of the Act to the 1895 Home Office

Departmental Committee, headed by Sir Godfrey Lushington, formed to ‘Inquire into ...

matters connected with the Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ became evident in the

unrelenting cross-examination of the Reverend M. G. Vine, chaplain-warden at Redhill

(as the incumbent was now called), who took office in 1887 and remained as warden until

his death in 1918.41 His testimony disclosed that he had not used the provisions

contained in the 1891 Act to any significant extent, although managers of reformatory

schools had sole discretion to release well-behaved boys out on licence or, if intending

emigrants, earlier than the final term of their sentences.42 Vine argued he had substantial

difficulty in finding suitable employment for boys to be placed out on licence. He

supplied the Inquiry with statistics of the number of boys discharged during the period

1892 to 1895, plus their age on release.

At 20 years and over, 20 boys left; at 19 years and under 20, 74 boys left; at 18

years and under 19, 106 boys left; at 17 years and under 18, 56 boys left; at 16 years

and under 17, 34 boys left; at 15 years and under 16, 9 boys left; and under 15, one

boy left, making a total of 300 who left in four years; that is, about a third of the

40

House of Commons, ‘Bill to assist Managers of Reformatory and Industrial Schools in

advantageously launching into useful Careers Children under their Charge’, House of Commons,

Sessional Papers, 1890-91 (viii) [54 Vict], p.495. 41

‘Departmental Committee appointed to Inquire into Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, 1895,

Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 6, BPP. 42 M. G. Vine, ‘Minutes of Evidence taken before the Departmental Committee Appointed to

Inquire into Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, 12 December 1895, Crime and Punishment

‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 6, pp.166-181, BPP.

19

number were over 19 years of age on leaving; another third were over 18; and

another third under 18, but over 15.43

Vine told the committee that on release, irrespective of age, similar work was

undertaken by the former inmates, although the ‘younger ones do not get as large wages,

because they are not able to do such good work’. The implication that a boy’s age related

to the standard of work he performed prompted a question from the Chairman, ‘Why do

you keep the boys of an older age to such a very mature period of life?’44 Undaunted by

his earlier reference to the abilities of the young compared with the older boys’ output of

work, Vine explained that the ‘boys we receive are so old when they come to us, and they

are boys that have been for many years leading criminal lives they want a great deal of

training’.45 Vine did not disclose, as Sydney Turner had to the 1852 Select Committee on

Criminal and Destitute Juveniles, that the Farm School relied on the optimum skill and

strength, which came with age and instruction. However, Vine’s statement regarding the

age of boys on admission was endorsed by Colonel Inglis, Inspector of Reformatories, in

his annual report of 1891. He gave the ages of 941 boys admitted to London’s

reformatory schools in 1889 as between fourteen and sixteen years of age. Inglis placed

total admissions into the following cohorts: 46

Under 10 years, 14

From 10-12 years 164

From 12-14 years 432

From 14-16 years 684

43

Ibid., p.170. 44

Ibid. 45

Ibid.

46 ‘General Rules and Regulations for the Management of Certified Reformatory Schools for the

Detention of Juvenile Offenders’, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, vol. LXVIII, London

1893-94, p. 259.

20

Despite criticism contained in the Departmental Committee’s Report, ‘criticism

principally against the industrial training’ given to inmates, it was a criticism which

should not have been levelled at the Society’s work, if the above testimonies are

considered.47 While not all boys discharged from Redhill considered their training

adequate, evidence of men who returned to visit, and those who wrote, or even became

employers, suggests that youths who were discharged had acquired not only basic

agricultural skills, but also an elementary education.

The 1896 Inquiry’s Report brought Redhill into an historical perspective, noting

that the ‘number of children under sentence or order of detention at the present time

exceeds 24,000’.48 The Society had pioneered the concept of separate housing on a farm

estate within Britain, becoming a leader for others to follow. But by 1895, wider

expectations pervading the public domain had overtaken the capability of the Society’s

administration. A central area of contention in the Report drew attention to the Society’s

apparent lack of commitment to release eligible children out to employers, on licence, or

to seek home employment on final release. Turner had in 1870, as Chief Reformatory

School Inspector, protested and expressed his abhorrence of reformatory schools retaining

an inmate to use his or her skills for the benefit of the institution rather than that of the

former delinquent.49 Vine’s views appeared to contradict the late Inspector. He bluntly

informed boys due to be released:

47

M. G. Barnett, Young Delinquents: A Study of Reformatory and Industrial Schools (London,

1913), p. 22.

48

‘Report to the Secretary of State for the Home Department of the Departmental Committee on

Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, 1896 (C.8204), p.7, BPP. 49 ‘Report of the Departmental Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, 1896, House

of Commons, Sessional Papers (C.8204), pp. 62-63.

21

We have not any special openings that we can offer you, except emigration and

enlistment, and if you are willing to take that offer, well and good.50

The Report supported the case for individual placement in employment by reformatory

school managers.

We need not enlarge on the importance of placing the children out well. To give a

child a fresh start in life is the object of the whole school training; and carefulness

in disposal is as true a test as any of the sincerity of the interest which the school

authorities take in those entrusted to their charge. The duty is one which is the

concern of both managers and superintendents.51

The Report went on to highlight the government’s concept of how privately owned,

publicly certified reformatory schools should be run. In so doing, it criticised the

Philanthropic Society because it had ‘turned adrift’ those boys who did not wish to

‘emigrate’ or enlist.52

Emigration statistics and recidivism

Both Walters and Turner spoke of emigration being the most desirable course for

boys released from the Society’s institution. Nevertheless, Walters believed that

emigration was ‘too expensive a luxury to be indiscriminately offered, and I am obliged

50

M. G. Vine, ‘Minutes of Evidence taken before the Departmental Committee Appointed to

Inquire into Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, 12 December 1895, Crime and Punishment

‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 6, pp. 166-181, BPP. 51 Reformatory and Industrial Schools Committee, ‘Report and Appendices’, Departmental

Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools, 1896, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile

Offenders’, v. 6, p. 61, BPP. 52 Ibid., p. 62.

22

to restrict it, as a privilege, to those boys who qualify by good conduct’.53 Turner had

always been keen to promote emigration from Redhill. He became anxious when the

former emigration figures plummeted. In 1862 he ‘called for returns showing the present

character and circumstances of boys discharged during the years 1859, 1860 and 1861’.

He also requested that future annual returns from all reformatory schools to the Home

Office contain similar statistics.54 Prior to Walters’ appointment in 1857, the preceding

three years’ emigration figures were higher. He reported to the Home Secretary in 1859,

that to return boys to their ‘former haunts’ was undesirable.55 The figures below show

that a higher percentage of recidivism occurred – recidivism being defined as one

subsequent offence after discharge from the reformatory – when the Society released

youths to their parents or to friends at home.

Year Boys Emigrated Relapsed Home Relapsed

into Crime Disposal into

crime

1855 65 5 24 6

1856 72 10 25 5

1857 66 9 52 13

1858 30 1 26 5

53

C. Walters, Philanthropic Society Annual Report, [1864]/1865, p. 23. 54 Philanthropic Society Annual Report, 1863 p.16. 55

Sydney Turner, Report of the Inspector of Reformatory Schools, 2nd Report to the Right Hon

G. C. Lewis, Bart M.P. Secretary of State for the Home Department, 30 June 1858, House of

Commons, Sessional Papers, 1859 [2537], XIII Pt. II p. 47.

23

The figures showed that 11 per cent of boy emigrants returned to crime, compared

to 23 per cent of boys released to try to find employment in England.56 Trevarthan

supplied emigration statistics for the years 1872-82 to show that the Society had ‘sent

away ... 270 boys by emigration, and through home disposals 486’.57 He also provided

figures for admission, disposals – overseas and at home – between May 1849 and 31

December 1881. A total of 3,179 boys were accepted at the farm school, 2,891 were

discharged ‘of whom 1,302 emigrated’.58

The Society placed great importance on statistics, and the dissemination of material

to reinforce the image that former inmates made good. The 1860 Annual Report, the

Reverend Charles Walters included information about the use of a separate farm house on

the estate. He records that boys about to be released for emigration were transferred to the

less formal atmosphere and less restrictive discipline ‘preparatory to their new start in

life’.59 In the following year’s Annual Report, Walters wrote of the ‘natural restlessness

of lads as the time of their dismissal approaches’.60 But in 1895, Superintendent

Reverend Vine denied knowledge of any such restlessness amongst boys due to leave

Redhill, although agreeing it was ‘natural that boys should look forward to the time ... of

leaving school’.61

Debt of Honour

56

Charles Walters, in Philanthropic Society Annual Report, 1860 p.17. 57 John Trevarthan, ‘Reformatories and Industrial Schools Commission. Report of the

Commissioners together with Minutes of Evidence, Appendices, and Index’, 23, May 1882,

Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v.2, p. 146 BPP. 58

Ibid. 59

Philanthropic Society, Annual Report, 1860, p. 19. 60

Ibid., p. 17. 61 M. G. Vine, ‘Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Departmental Committee Appointed to

Inquire into Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, 12 December 1895, Crime and Punishment

‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 6, p. 180, BPP.

24

In 1861 the Society endeavoured to arouse a sense of obligation in former inmates

who now lived in the colonies. The committee composed an appeal in the form of a

‘Debt of Honour’ to be sent to the last known address of all former emigrants. The

Society reminded them of the benefits they had received through emigration, and the role

of the charity in these gains. Contributions were sought to help recoup the cost of their

passage so that other boys waiting at the Farm School could be provided with similar

opportunities overseas.

We send annually about 40 or 50 boys as Emigrants to Australia, Canada, or Africa,

we should be glad to send many more, for a much larger proportion of them relapse

into crime in England than in the Colonies, but the expense is very heavy

depending almost exclusively on the munificence of friends. This Society is

entirely a private institution, but we have agreements with 9 counties and 5

Boroughs, to take their criminal boys sentenced for long periods.62

There was an occasional response to this appeal, although apologies for the lack of a

donation is sometimes mentioned by a former youth in a letter to the Society.

The Society acknowledged a gift from a Member of Parliament, Mr Alcock, of a

donation of ‘300 pocket books for emigrants with suitable vignette and inscription,

reminding them of their debt of gratitude’.63 Whereas, the Society’s ‘Debt of Honour’

note, despatched to all former inmates in 1861, may have aroused a sense of guilt in Lane,

he was reminded, as all young men from Redhill were, of the benefits received during

their term at the Farm School. Lane’s inability to meet the Society’s request to find

employment for two boys could also reflect the Society’s subtle control over the boys it

62

RPS, SLS Item no. 2271/2/20, Minutes of Proceedings, 16 February 1861. 63 Philanthropic Society, Annual Report, 1863, p. 25.

25

chose to help; a form of control which may have continued long after their release from

Redhill.

In 1895 Superintendent Marshall Vine told a Home Office Departmental

Committee of the Society’s difficulties if he released older youths without considering the

consequences at the farm.64

Conclusion

The transition from close supervision by staff at Redhill to opportunities for boys

sent to Canada and Australia in the mid-nineteenth century indicates that the

Philanthropic Society was capable of organising a method of training and disposing of

young recalcitrants from the streets of London to earn their living, honestly, in a country

where ways were unknown to them. The first plans were to assist the children of convicts

to prevent their drifting to criminal activity for want of guidance. These plans changed,

and by the second decade of the nineteenth-century the Society had the support of

influential members of the city of London, as well as those who gave support to new

technology, providing a base for improvements in hygiene, education and sanitation.

Between the years of 1849-1880 the Society provided an example for other

reformatory schools to follow, but social conscience and those that sought to educate the

poor, realising that the industrial age required higher standards of training to increase

production, encouraged government legislation to improve reformatory school training

from purely agricultural work to a wider curriculum. Boys released from the Farm

School at Redhill grasped the opportunities afforded them in Australia; emigration

offered the same element of excitement some young boys enjoyed prior to their

64

M. G. Vine, ‘Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Departmental Committee Appointed to

Inquire into Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, 12 December 1895, Crime and Punishment

‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 6, pp. 166-181, BPP.

26

conviction. Their time at Redhill was over, they were free to choose a new life. Many

youths sought and obtained a measure of self-expression in their employment, as

demonstrated in their recorded experiences. Nonetheless, the effect of the Society’s

regime on the boys only served to prepare them for hard work.

The Society retained most of its mid-century routine, and punishments. The

training and guidance given to inmates over the fifty-year period was considered by many

who emigrated to have been of great service and of lasting benefit to them.

Change, through government legislation, reflected social interest in the welfare of

committed youth to reformatory schools. The new legislation mirrored a transition from

earlier thought on how best to deal with children who roamed the streets, and became

involved in criminal activity, virtually to survive. New laws decreased fiscal grants to

reformatories by lowering the upper-age limit of the youths detained from twenty-one

years to nineteen. Shorter sentences became the norm, rather than the five-years

preferred by the Society. Finally, the mandatory, then optional, pre-admission gaol

sentence for juveniles was abolished. The Society’s role in mid-nineteenth century

England of leading, teaching and training those boys sent from magistrates’ courts was

steadily becoming part of a greater, central administrative regime. Once it had become

beholden to the state for financial security, the Society had no choice but to conform to

follow the new laws instituted by government for the betterment of youth.

27

Chapter 5. Responding to a More Interventionist State 1880-

1900

In 1849, the Philanthropic Society might have justifiably claimed to be in the

vanguard of progressive thought about the treatment of juvenile criminals.

Through the 1850s it maintained a high profile promoting new legislation.

However, during the latter part of the century the Society found itself accused of

falling behind. This chapter argues that the farm school at Redhill lacked the

energy and force that had earlier been present in men of vision who sought

juvenile reform through reformatory schools. In particular, the Society struggled

to cope with the demands of a more interventionist state and new ideas about the

treatment of juveniles, and who should be responsible for the reform of young

offenders, public or private agencies.

At the beginning of the 1880s, and into the 1890s, deep consideration was

given to such matters as the young offender’s age of admission to a reformatory

school, the term of the sentence and time of release, as well as the arrangements

made for the successful disposal of the delinquent. The whole question of

reformatory and industrial training was brought into the public arena and

considered in great detail, and from a vastly different perspective than forty years

earlier. These deliberations by central state bureaucracy, and the official reports

that mark its progress, reflect a change of attitude towards the punishment of

youth in government and social attitude in the public arena. I argue that the

Society found itself less inclined to accept change to the manner of how it treated

boys it sought to reform and return to earn an honest living. Despite the

Society’s aim of discharging reformed youth John Trevarthen, Secretary at

2

Redhill, told the Aberdare Committee in 1882, of the farm school’s expectation

of receiving more delinquents to reach the average figure of 301. Trevarthen

appears, as did Turner in the 1850s, to seek a larger number of inmates. It is

possible that without the requisite numbers to occupy the reformatory school, and

without financial assistance paid by government on a per capita basis, the whole

scheme could not proceed.1

Juvenile offenders and their treatment were but part of a growing interest

shown by the state in the administration of its penal system. After the general

election of 1880, when Gladstone was once again Prime Minister and Chancellor

of the Exchequer, the government tried to shift greater responsibility to local

administrations, primarily as a means to reduce government expenditure. This

drive instigated, among other things, a careful appraisal of the cost of

reformatory schools for young offenders. The Home Office had already

scrutinised the General Rules and Regulations for the Management of Certified

Reformatory Schools in 1879.2

Now in Gladstone’s new ministry, Sir William Harcourt – former

Queen’s Counsel, later Solicitor-general – was Home Secretary. ‘Harcourt was

especially preoccupied with the unsatisfactory administration of justice in the

case of juvenile offenders, and was only pacified after receiving the most

exhaustive reports’.3 He circulated a letter to the Chairmen of Quarter Sessions,

Recorders, and Stipendiary Magistrates, as well as to the magistrates of

metropolitan police and Borough courts, requesting comments on the state of the

1

John Trevarthen, Minutes of Evidence, ‘Reformatories and Industrial Schools Commission’,

Crime and Punishment Juvenile Offenders, v.4, pp. 144-158, BPP. 2 ‘General Rules and Regulations for the management of Certified Reformatory Schools for the

Detention of Juvenile Offenders under the provisions of the Statute 29 and 30 Vict.’ Cap.117. 3

A. G. Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt in two volumes, v.1 1827-1886, (London,

1923), p. 394.

3

law concerning the treatment and punishment of juvenile offenders.4 In 1880

England had 4,792 children in reform institutions, and Scotland 1,146, a cost to

the public of £91,000 per annum in maintenance; although this figure was

reduced to £85,000 after deducting the £6,000 received from parents’ compulsory

contribution.5 The Home Office questioned a system which assigned convicted

boys to between three to five years reformatory school training when it would be

more expedient, and less expensive, if summary whipping were applied by the

police at the courts.

By the same token, it could be said that mercy could save money. For

example Harcourt took up the case of Walter Dean, a juvenile sentenced by ‘a

hard-hearted justice’, as an example of the trivial offences for which children

were sent to prison. Harcourt spoke of the fine which had been imposed, and, in

default of payment, ‘the little culprit is incarcerated’.6 When he addressed the

House of Commons the Home Secretary referred to his revulsion ‘at the spectacle

of magisterial despotism’. Magistrate J. Watts Hallewell, was accused by

Harcourt of handing down fourteen days hard labour to Dean a ‘punishment

altogether improper for a child of such tender years for breaking windows’.7 The

correspondence that ensued in The Times between August and October 1880

brought to the fore the concern of thinking men about the imprisonment of young

boys and girls. James Rawlinson produced a table of juveniles committed to

prison between 1870-1877, remarking ‘that all those who will ponder over this

painful subject will hail the decisions of the Home Secretary as one of greatest

4

Godfrey Lushington, circular signed on behalf of the Home Secretary to Chairmen of Quarter

Sessions , HO 45/9593 93897, 15 October 1880, British Archive. 5

Henry Rogers, [Reformatory School Inspector] to Home Office, 20 November 1880 p. 1, H0

45/9607 A2720, British Archive. 6

W. V. Harcourt, letter to The Times, 1 October 1880, p. 4. 7

A. F. O. Liddell, Home Office to J. Watts Hallewell, The Times, 14 September 1880, p. 8.

4

boons conferred on society for some time past’.8 Other readers to The Times

suggested more reformatories were needed to reduce the numbers of children sent

to prison for punishment, a position at odds with the Society’s rule that boys

should first serve two weeks in prison prior to admission. This time was seen by

the administrators at Redhill as an opportunity for the young delinquent to reflect

upon his behaviour, so as to prepare him for the discipline he would receive at

the reformatory. Others believed it damaged young people by ‘blighting their

prospects on the threshold of their lives by allowing them to come into contact

with hardened criminals’.9 Still others argued that the boys were treated too

leniently by their gaolers and the two weeks did not have the intended effect on

the young prisoners.

The House of Lords debated the Reformatory Schools Bill on 13 July 1893

when Lord Leigh moved the Second Reading. He spoke of the ‘important

measure to amend the law’ that ‘compelled’ a magistrate to commit a juvenile

offender to prison ‘before they could be admitted into reformatory schools’.10

The Earl of Onslow, President of the Philanthropic Society spoke in support of

Lord Leigh’s Bill. He knew of magistrates who would rather set a ‘young rascal’

free than commit a child to the obligatory two-week gaol sentence. Here is

different point of view between the office bearers within the Society’s Central

Committee and their paid employees who worked at the reformatory school at

Redhill.

In 1895, The Reverend Marshall G. Vine, Superintendent at Redhill,

appeared before a Home Office Departmental Committee where he spoke of the

8

J. Rawlinson, The Times 14 September 1880, p. 8. 9

Ibid.

10

Lord Leigh, the House of Lords, Hansard v.14, Fourth Series, 13 July 1893, col. 1434.

5

difficulties staff had with boys arriving with a policeman ‘without any notice

from the police courts’. Moreover, the offenders now underwent no quarantine

period to detect disease before admission to Redhill.11

Official Committees, and subsequent changes affecting certified reformatory

schools 1880-1900

The first International Prison Congress was held in London during 1872

where the leading principles of a modern penal system were discussed by

delegates from Britain, North America, and northern Europe.12 A further

International Prison Congress was convened on 20 August 1878 in Stockholm.

Whereas the earlier conference was largely a discussion by theorists, the latter

conference focussed on the practical experience of prison administrators.13 A

majority of the two-hundred and seventy-seven members present expressed their

belief that the state should ‘control all prisons without exception’. Fred Wines

argued that fragmentation of institutions increased the cost of prison

administration and reduced efficiency. He advocated ‘uniform procedures across

the states of North America, Britain and in northern Europe’.14 The issues raised

in London and Stockholm cropped up repeatedly in the reports of subsequent

government inquiries into the management of reformatory schools in England

and Scotland.

11

M. G. Vine, ‘Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Departmental Committee Appointed to

Inquire into Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, 12 December 1895, Crime and Punishment

‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 6, p.167, BPP. 12

L. W. Fox, The English Prison and Borstal Systems, (London, 1952), pp. 51-2. 13

Rev. Fred. H. Wines, Report on the International Prison Congress held at Stockholm, Sweden,

August 20-26, 1879 pp.10-42. Weber & Co, State Printers, (Springfield, USA, 1879). The

Rev.Wines, Secretary of the Illinois Board of State Commissioners of Public Charities, Special

Commissioner for the State of Illinois. 14

Ibid., p. 11

6

Commencing in 1882, a Royal Commission took evidence and reported

in 1884, although it was not until 1893 that Parliament brought down legislation

‘to assist Managers of Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ to rehabilitate boys

and girl so that they could be sent back into the wider community.

Government policies were important because the Society’s reformatory

school at Redhill had become dependent on government funding and local

authority subscriptions. At the same time as the government demanded better

facilities for those committed to reformatory schools the Society’s income was

declining due to a diminished membership. Money was also needed to replace

livestock and to buy farm machinery. At the same time a newly formed state

Education Department imposed higher standards on the quality of education

provided at reformatory schools. Teachers trained to understand the needs of

reformatory school children sought salaries commensurate with their

qualifications further increasing the Society’s running costs. It is also evident

that public opinion, as expressed by members of the Houses of Parliament,

favoured humanitarian policies in respect to working-class children in elementary

schools. During the years 1885-86 children were required to attend an

elementary school on a half-time basis up to ten years of age. This was raised in

1893 to 11 years and, in 1899, a further ‘growth of public opinion’ justified

raising the age to 12 years.15 However, educational standards varied depending

on whether children lived in agricultural districts – where their labour was

utilised at various times of the year, for example at harvest time. New

regulations were bound to affect the standard of education provided within

reformatory schools.

15

The Times, 1 July, 1899, p. 8.

7

In 1893, when the Society was under pressure to modernise the boys’

accommodation – as well as its workshops and farming equipment – the Juvenile

Offenders Act of 1874 was amended. The amendment effectively increased the

number of youths due for release after three years of reformatory training instead

of five years. As a result the Society’s reliance on the older, skilled and

physically stronger youth was undermined; the less physically mature were

expected to acquire skills in a short space of time. Redhill’s workshops, bakery,

laundry, kitchens, and farm had hitherto depended on the work of eighteen-year

old youths. The hard physical labour imposed upon twelve to sixteen-year old

boys had been a cause for concern to Sydney Turner in 1863. Now the central

government, through legislation, placed this physical burden upon young

delinquents because of the release of older youths from institutions.

The Home Office maintained close scrutiny over all areas of juvenile

justice system between 1880 and 1900. Reports and recommendations based

upon evidence presented to government enquiries, generated waves of legislation.

New rules and regulations had a profound impact on the administration and

treatment of juvenile offenders, including the Society’s farm school.16 For

instance, Treasury had a specific interest in the number of young offenders

committed to reformatory schools, for each admission was a cost to the public.

By the 1880s this expense had become a major liability. Treasury argued that

local authorities should accept a greater financial responsibility for the juveniles

that magistrates committed for reformatory training. Henry Rogers, Inspector of

16

For example the ‘Report together with Minutes of Evidence, Appendices and Index’, of the

‘Royal Commission appointed to inquire into and report upon the Operation, Management,

Control, etc., of Certified Reformatories, Certified Industrial Schools, and Certified Day

Industrial Schools in the United Kingdom’, 1884, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v.

5, p. 593ff., BPP.

8

Reformatories, wrote to a Home Office Inter-departmental Committee on

Reformatory and Industrial Schools in November 1880 to support a reduction of

central government allowances, based on an increase from local country agencies

instead.17 Rogers was anxious to settle ‘the subject for another period of years’,

noting that ‘the present procedures had been in place for a quarter of a century’.18

He wanted reformatory schools to

run on an improved and equitable basis…with a view to general economy,

and in order to check the undue use or actual abuse of those institutions to

which they are occasionally liable.19

Rogers suggested that less money could be paid to support children in institutions

if a way could be found to reduce the numbers committed by local magistrates.

In essence Rogers set out the problem Treasury faced when he argued that not

only improvements to reformatory institutions were needed and ‘modifications

desirable’ but were ‘demanded’, although he believed that for a ‘quarter of a

century’ the reformatory system had been seen as ‘substantially successful in

every point of view’. Rogers acknowledged that ‘reformatory schools operated

well, taking the ring-leaders away to reduce their corrupt influence’, but he

recommended that no child, in the case of the first offence, should go to a

reformatory school unless the Secretary of State so determined.20 Nonetheless,

17

Henry Rogers to Home Office ‘Inter-departmental Committee on Reformatory and Industrial

Schools’, H0 45/9607 A2720, 20 November 1880, British Archive. 18 Ibid. 19

Ibid. See also printed, unpublished, document on this British Archive’s file consolidating the

input to the inquiry, including memoranda with suggestions on how to reduce government

spending on juvenile institutions. 20

The Philanthropic Society always wanted to retain the optimum number of inmates, c.300.

First to obtain the gross amount paid by Treasury per capita and, second, to increase its

9

as H. T. Holmes was to write in 1902, it would be a great mistake to imagine that

those sent

[to certified reformatory schools] without previous conviction are first

offenders. They are really old offenders who have hitherto managed to

evade the clutches of the law, or have been previously charged but, with a

view to leniency, not convicted.21

By no means an advocate for privately run reformatory schools, Holmes went on

to write that the care of juveniles was ‘too important to be delegated to a few

well-meaning but irresponsible individuals’.22

By comparing early Reformatory and Industrial Inspectors’ Reports with later

years we can chart the government’s view of progress made at the Farm School.

Sydney Turner’s first report as Industrial and Reformatory School Inspector was

submitted in 1857, but by 1866 reformatories were ‘to be certified by the

Secretary of State, and to be inspected annually’.23 The inspectors’ Reports

reflect the importance given to aspects of reformatory school management, with

comments on Redhill, sometimes praising and sometimes admonishing the

management committee and staff.

Inspectors’ Reports

agricultural, farming and industrial labour output for without the largest number of boys the

institution could not function. 21

H. T. Holmes, Reform of Reformatories and Industrial Schools, Fabian Tract No.111, (London,

August 1902), p. 4. 22

Ibid., p. 11. 23

‘Report to the Secretary of State for the Home Department of the Departmental Committee on

Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, C.8204, 1896, v.1, Report and Appendices, Crime and

Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 5, p. 11, BPP. See ‘History of the Institution’ in the same

volume, pp. 10-11.

10

Sydney Turner’s report for 1857 remarked that ‘the school appears to be

steadily advancing’. He noted that the school had been ‘inspected frequently’

during 1856 when staff consisted of: a ‘Chaplain-Superintendent; Secretary; six

Masters; six Labourers; Tailor; Shoemaker; Smith; Carpenter; Cook, and

Porter’.24 Turner reported in 1862 that the reformatory had been ‘examined very

minutely [and the] teaching in three of the houses [namely] Queens, Waterlands,

and Garston’. He continued:

The industrial instruction also continues to be very efficiently carried out;

especially the farming; brick-making and shoemaking. It will be a

question whether the work required does not tell rather severely on the

younger boys, who are rapidly becoming [sic] here. The year appears to

have been marked by a good deal of sickness. The profits of the boys’

labour have been considerable, amounting on all the branches to above

£1,200 and reducing the cost per head from above £22, to about £19 per

head. I regretted to find the number of punishments so large mostly by

fines or the use of the cane.

The number of boys at the school was 262 with ‘a gross cost per head [of] £28

8s. 6d; the net cost after deducting the industrial profits was £19 l0s. Parents’

payments were £257 17s. 11d.’25

A very different picture was conveyed in a report to Harcourt in 1879 by

William Inglis’, Chief Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools:

24

Sydney Turner, ‘First Report’ (London, 1857), pp. 19, 31; House of Commons, Sessional

Papers, v.24, pp. 800-899. 25

House of Commons, Sessional Papers, v. 26, pp. 500-599. See also Reformatory Inspector’s

Fifth Report, 1862 [3034] XXVI.523, p. 51.

11

There is so little alteration from year to year in the way these schools are

managed, and so much has been said in previous years about the results of

the Reformatory and Industrial Schools…that it is not easy to divest these

annual reports of a certain degree of sameness, or to avoid going over well

trodden ground. It must be remembered that as all children must undergo

an imprisonment of at least 10 days before being sent to a reformatory; the

1,334 boys in such schools in 1879 are included in the juvenile

commitments to prison during that year.26

Inglis urged on the managers at Redhill ‘the necessity of giving the matter

their best consideration, with a view of finding out the weak points of their

system’. He recommended ‘engaging staff of strength, quality and character’.27

Inglis reported that ‘the yards of all the houses are sloppy and dirty, and require

paving or asphalting, especially in Waterlands, where the younger boys are

housed. In this respect the houses are far behind other schools’.28 On the other

hand Inglis wrote that on the 10th and 11th December 1885 he ‘went all over the

five houses…and found them very clean and well ventilated, and suitable for the

work carried on’. At this time the Reverend A.G. Jackson was superintendent in

control of 280 boys, with 5 absent on license.

Despite negative comments made by Inspector Inglis the Reports do

indicate change not only to the Farm School, but the more subtle changes in the

26 Reformatory Inspector’s Twenty-third Report, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1880

[C.2680] XXXVII.1, pp. 3-4. 27

Ibid. 28

Inglis’ Report, 1884-85, House of Commons, Sessional Papers [C.4505] XXIX, p. 91.

12

boys’ attitude towards work and learning. He noted in his visit to inspect Redhill

on 2nd and 3rd December 1885 that 308 boys lived at the reformatory school

where each master ‘has sixty boys under his care, somewhat more than he can

properly manage’. Nonetheless, he found the houses to be ‘clean and

wholesome’. He noted that the yards were ‘still in very bad condition’. In his

General Comments, the inspector noticed

a marked change for the better in the manner and bearing of the lads

generally. The criminal look of suspicion and defiance has very much

disappeared and a more hopeful and trustful aspect set up in its place.29

In the late 1880s the Inspector stressed the need for a ‘warm play-yard and

covered shed, to give the boys the protection they require’. Mention was made of

the installation of a ‘new lavatory’.30 Further, while the standard of drill attained

by the boys received an accolade from Inglis, and despite his comments about the

lack of modern farming methods at Redhill, he wrote: ‘There is no field like the

colonies for such boys as these, after agricultural training in a farm school’.31

Inglis wrote to Henry Matthews, Home Secretary, in 1887 that there was

‘still much to be done, which I have often said’. Notably, until this date the

Reports had not used the expression ‘home-like and attractive for the boys’

which Inglis now did. He went on to comment that these efforts were

appreciated by the boys. Despite the improvements made to their living quarters,

with corporal punishment reduced - absconding had increased.

29

Ibid., pp .93-4. 30

Inglis, Thirty-third Report, 1889, House ofCommons, Sessional Papers [C6085] XLII.1, pp. 90-

2. 31

Ibid., p. 92.

13

Government regulations and their practical application

During the 1880s and 1890s staff at Redhill struggled to retain the

reputation the reformatory had once enjoyed. Standards previously commended

by the Home Office were now outdated. Government regulations and

committees intruded further as the decades advanced, even as the Society’s

membership and its private funds diminished.

The school secretary was questioned, and the superintendent appeared

before various government committees. Responsibility for the good order of the

boys and routine duties of staff at the reformatory was placed upon the shoulders

of these two men. During the last twenty years of the nineteenth-century only a

core of administrative committee members met with the chaplain and secretary at

the farm on a regular basis. The Society’s lack of initiative at the farm became

evident in its failure to adopt modern farming techniques.

Changes in staff between 1881 and 1899 were partly to blame for the

deterioration noted by the Home Office Inspectors in their reports. The Reverend

Charles Walters died in 1881. He was followed by the Reverend Jackson, whose

service ended with his untimely demise in 1887, and the arrival of a new resident

chaplain, the Reverend Marshall.G. Vine. Meantime, reduction in expenditure

affected the upkeep of the boys’ quarters, and the farming stock. Redhill had to

supply its inmates with a diet controlled through the Inspector of Reformatory

and Industrial Schools. This officer had the authority to stipulate that all inmates

14

should be ‘supplied with plain, wholesome food’. The dietary regulations were

to be ‘hung in the dining room’ of juvenile institutions for all to observe.32

The Reverend Vine’s staff, as reported by Inspector William Inglis during

his visit to Redhill in November 1890, consisted of:

Secretary, Mr John Trevarthan; Masters of Houses, Messrs. Howe,

Cowen, Hearne, Jones, and Walker. Matron, Mrs Bilcliffe; clerk and

bandmaster, Mr N. Mallinder; assistant bandmaster Mr W.G. Hearne;

baker, drill-sergeant, tailor, shoe-maker, smith, carpenter, bricklayer, two

gardeners, farm bailiff, cowman, six labour masters, carter, nurse, cook,

three domestics and a laundress.33

Life for those in charge of the reformatory school was complicated by constant

requests for information from persons who were not intimately involved with the

situation at Redhill. Vine and Trevarthen presented the Society’s point of view at

Home Office and Government Enquiries throughout the last decades of the

nineteenth-century.

Profound changes flowed from the passing of the Education Act of 1870.

Questions posed by the 1882 Reformatory School Commissioners focussed on

aspects of instruction at Redhill. In reply to the question put to John Trevarthen

on 23 May 1882 ‘Do your boys receive instruction the whole time they are there’

the Society’s secretary spoke of the

32

General Rules and Regulations for the Management of Certified reformatory Schools for the

detention of Juvenile Offenders, under the provisions of statute 29 and 30 Victoria, cap.117. 30

September 1879, p. 1, HO 45/9581 85757, British Archive. 33

‘Thirty-fourth Report, Inspector of Reformatory Schools of Great Britain’, House of Commons,

Sessional Papers, 1890-91 [C.6477] XLIV.1, pp. 1-99.

15

time-table for work, according to which we take half the boys at school,

every day for some part of the day; we give most of them nine hours a

week schooling in the summer, and for some part of the day, 27 hours a

week schooling in winter.34

The commissioners continued to question the amount and standard of classroom

work as well as the standards reached by the boys during their tenure at Redhill.

The Society followed the syllabus of the Education Department in its

schoolrooms, whilst noting any remarks made by the Reformatory and Industrial

Schools Inspectors on their annual visits. The emphasis on the Society’s

programme of education for young delinquents committed to the reformatory, as

presented by Trevarthen, accentuates the independent stance taken by the

Society. From the time that Sydney Turner set down the system of training to be

followed by the inmates, overseen by house masters, Redhill had led the way that

other, newer reformatories followed. Trevarthen spoke of the ‘industrial part’ of

work carried out at the farm as more important [than] the intellectual part of it.

‘We could not give more time than at present [to class-room work] without

injuring the moral work of the school’.35 Here we glimpse factors which

eventually caused the Society to condemn the legislation passed in 1893, and in

1895 when the two-week prison sentence prior to entry to a reformatory school

was abandoned.

34

Reformatories and Industrial Schools Commission, Report of the Commissioners together with

Minutes of Evidence, Appendices, and Index (London, 1884), p. 150. 35

Testimony of J. Trevarthen, 23 May 1882, in Reformatories and Industrial Schools Commission,

p. 150.

16

In 1882, Trevarthen expressed the Society’s wish that reformatory

schools should continue to be administered by the Home Office and not, as

suggested by some Commissioners by the Committee of the Council of

Education. The Secretary pointed to the many differences between parish

schools and reformatory schools. He queried the competence of Inspectors who

could not be expected to understand how students in a reformatory school

differed from the way children were treated in an ordinary elementary school.

The Society, he argued, had depended to a considerable extent on boys doing the

physical work of the farm. Thus the Society sought exemption from the

demanding and time-consuming role of providing specific educational timetables.

As far as the Society was concerned ‘Moral machinery’ took precedence over

classroom learning with an emphasis ‘on the improved habits of industry’.36

Home Office Reformatory and Industrial School Inspectors continued to

provide details of the standards maintained at all these schools. Inspector Inglis’

in December 1884 noted that Redhill housed ‘280 boys, and 5 released to work

on license’. The boys had ‘far greater ambition to do well’ than had been noted

on former inspections.37 The Inspector’s Report of 27 and 28 November 1889

noted that thirty-one boys had been released from Redhill to work on license and

that ‘education takes higher ground and is progressing not retrograding’.

However, Inglis admitted that he would like to see the farm work run ‘wholly on

modern principles’.38

36

Ibid., p. 151. 37

Inglis, Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools, Twenty-eighth Report, 1885, House of

Commons, Sessional Papers [C.4505] XXXIX, p. 91. 38

Ibid.

17

In 1891 Parliament passed an Act to assist the Managers of Reformatory

and Industrial Schools. The 1884 Royal Commission had instigated a wider

discussion of the means to help reformatory schools in their work of releasing the

inmates into satisfactory employment either at home or abroad. The Society was

assisted when freedom was given to those in charge at reformatory schools to

place a boy, or girl, in suitable employment without parental interference, ‘as if

the managers were his parents’.39

Further legislation in 1893, the Reformatory Schools Act, dispensed with

the requirement that a magistrate should sentence a convicted juvenile to a

summary gaol term of between ten to fourteen days prior to entry to a

reformatory school. In fact the young offender could be sent ‘to any other place

… willing to receive’ the juvenile prior to admission for reform training.40

A further significant development was the decision by the Home Office on

20 May 1895 to appoint Sir Godfrey Lushington, who had in 1882 served as

Assistant-Under-Secretary at the Home Office, as head of a departmental

committee of six men and two women to consider and report upon reformatory

and industrial schools.41 The committee’s tasks included an inquiry into ‘the

general state of the schools, their control by Government and Local Authority,

and the framing of model rules and their application to particular schools’.42 The

committee was asked, as at the 1882 Royal Commission, ‘to report what

39

‘An Act to assist the Manager of Reformatory and Industrial Schools, in advantageously

launching into useful Careers the children under their charge’, 3 July 1891, The Law Reports, The

Public General Statutes, v.28, London , 1891, p. 57. 40

Ibid., v.30, 1893, pp. 193-4. 41

Home Office ‘Departmental Committee Appointed to Inquire into Reformatory and Industrial

Schools’, 1895, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v. 5, BPP. 42

Industrial and Reformatory Schools Committee, ‘Report to the Secretary of State for the Home

Department of the Departmental Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, v.1,

Appendix 35, House of Commons, Sessional Papers.

18

administrative changes or amendments’ could ‘render these institutions more

efficient for the object for which they were established’. The committee reported

on 30 October 1896. According to Inspector James G. Legge, who succeeded

Inglis as chief reformatory school inspector on 19 March 1896, they had

experienced difficulties in coming to a consensus. In 1897 Legge’s report to the

Home Secretary, Sir Matthew White Ridley, referred to the ‘mass of detail’ and

‘the difficulties of the subject’. Further, he suggested the committee were less

than unanimous in their findings, for almost ‘all the conclusions arrived at in the

main report are assailed with criticisms’.43 Nonetheless, the Reformatory Schools

Act, section 1 of 1893, was amended and in 1899 the Act provided ‘that when the

offender is ordered to be sent to a certified reformatory school he shall not in

addition be sentenced to penal servitude or imprisonment’.44

As the Society’s representative informed the commissioners of the

practical way education and industrial training were maintained at Redhill, the

system employed in the 1880s remained the same in 1882 as when the farm

school was first organised by Turner in 1849.

One commissioner asked if the stigma former reformatory inmates

carried ‘against them all their lives through’ was attributable to their ‘having

been in a reformatory school, and not in consequence of their having committed a

crime?’.45 Whereupon Vine asked for some ‘official utterances and for some

43

James G. Legge, ‘Fortieth Report of the Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools’,

House of Commons, Sessional Papers, v.41, 1897, p. 1.

44

‘An Act to amend the Law with regard to Reformatory Schools’, The Law Reports. The Public

General Statutes, 1899, v. 36, pp. 19-20. 45

M. G. Vine, testimony in ‘Minutes of Evidence’, 1895, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile

Offenders’, v. 6, p. 166, BPP.

19

statement by the Home Office’ to educate the public about the situation regarding

a boy’s reform after his training was complete.46

Ultimately, this series of inquiries led to the introduction of reform

legislation and regulations which involved Redhill’s already extended staff in

further work. An illustration of the amount of detail the Home Office expected

from certified reformatory schools overall, is contained in the list of ‘model

Rules’ introduced in 1893. The rules stated that the manager

shall also keep a Discharge and Disposal Book, showing the date of

discharge of each individual, giving particulars as to conduct after

discharge. He shall also regularly send to the Office of the Inspector, the

required returns of Admission and Discharge, Quarterly List of cases under

Detention, and Quarterly Account for maintenance, and in the month of

January in each year ... [a] full Statement of the Receipt and Expenditure

of the School for the past year, showing all debts and liabilities duly

vouched by the Managers.47

However reluctantly, during the period 1885-1900 the Society followed the

directives of government legislation, and despite negative comments in Home

Office reports, the management committee and superintendents at Red Hill

encouraged innovative training programmes for the boys. For instance the large

gymnasium erected on the school grounds provided teamwork and physical

training not only for residents of the reformatory, but also for pupils at nearby

elementary schools. This facility provided by the Society for young delinquents

46 Ibid., p. 167. 47

‘An Act to amend the Law with regard to Reformatory Schools’, The Law Reports. The Public

General Statutes, 1899, v.36, pp. 19-20.

20

appears to have been in advance of government-run elementary schools. In 1900,

boys admitted to the Philanthropic Farm School experienced, for the most part, a

more humane environment than the boys who had been accepted by the Society

in the 1850s. Redhill Farm School thus reflected many of the social changes

which had taken place in England over the course of fifty years. A combination

of factors relevant to juvenile reform brought about a better environment in

which to prepare boys for an honest future. For example, the rejection of the

mid-nineteenth-century ideology of less-eligibility enabled greater flexibility in

subjects taught to young offenders. Coupled with community advances in the

sciences, improvement in hygiene and sanitation offered a healthier life, not only

to the inmates but also to the community at large.

While central government regulated the better care of children sent to

reformatory schools – including the need to encourage and oversee that an

elementary education was provided – Treasury and the Home Office remained

mindful of the need to control fiscal expenditure; philanthropic endeavour still

carried the responsibility of balancing standards with fiscal responsibility.

Apart from the surveillance of the Home Department’s Inspector of

Reformatories, the Society retained virtual autonomy of care for the boys

committed until 1882. However, with an ever-increasing interest of central

government in the expense of maintaining juvenile offenders, the Society could

not retain an independent position. In the 1880s not only the cost of supporting

juvenile reform came under attack, but also evidence suggests the Society had

lost its mid-century sense of mission. In the middle of the century it had been at

the forefront of public debate and negotiations to achieve government support for

juvenile reformatory schools. Inglis’ report of 1880 noted that the Society ran an

21

‘important and excellent institution’. However, the momentum of leadership in

the field of reform was overtaken by the agitation of informed people, in and

outside of the bureaucracy, who demanded changes to the current legislation, and

practical means of dealing with young offenders.48

After the death of Charles Walters in early 1882, and the subsequent

appointment of the Reverend A.G. Jackson, Redhill appeared to have ‘new

energy ... infused into the administration. Where there had been defeat or want

of vigilance there has been amendment and searching movement’.49 The boys’

accommodation was made more attractive and comfortable. Sanitation at the

farm was improved when water was piped from the local water authority. New

facilities, such as installation of modern plumbing, helped to raise the staff and

inmates’ standard of health. Nonetheless the institution stuck to its policies

regarding corporal punishment. It believed it necessary for boys to undergo some

form of retribution for their misdeeds, in the form of ten to fourteen days in a

local prison prior to being admitted to the reformatory The Society prided itself

on leadership in the field of reformatory training, as well as housing the largest

number of youthful offenders in Great Britain. In practice, however, its

administration was often chided by the Home Office Inspector for failing to

conform to the advances made by other private reformatories, as well as to make

structural improvements on the estate. Facilities for play and exercise had to be

48

See for example, B. Rogers, ‘The Social Science Association, 1857-1886’, The Manchester

School of Economic and Social Studies, v.20 (3) 1952, pp.283-310. Although Rogers draws

attention to the Association’s ‘Education Department’s’ lower legislative success, it is also

relevant to note that in 1882 moves were made by the Home Office to request information from

reformatory schools on the qualifications of their teachers, ‘Recruitment of Qualified Teachers’,

28 January 1882 (HO 45/9606 A2457, British Archive) at a time when an internal struggle was

taking place between the emerging strength of the Education Department and the right of

reformatory school teachers to have their qualifications recognised. 49

Inglis, Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools, ‘Twenty-sixth Report’,1883, House of

Commons, Sessional Papers [C.3716] XXXIV, pp. 9, 88-89.

22

provided. There was an expectation that the Society should employ a

professional schoolmaster to ensure inmates received instruction in a range of

subjects, similar to those taught to children in other elementary schools. In this

manner the Home Office illustrated the importance attributed to education – not

only of the poor, through free, obligatory schooling, but for juveniles that hitherto

were seen to be dangerous, and not given the advantages of children living

outside of a reformatory school. The farm had to be upgraded, and a change of

staff brought about, also the use of modern farm equipment and, finally, to

provide ‘more cheerful and comfortable surroundings’ in the boys’ quarters.50

As if to confirm Red Hill’s desire to avoid complacency in matters of detail

at reformatory schools, the Society undertook ‘a reorganisation of the school’,

which was seen by Inspector Inglis as a ‘much needed’ task. He reported:

Institutions like Red Hill require to be subjected to a close investigation

now and then to awaken them from their routine and lethargy, and to

quicken them into earnest life.51

The Society continued to admit offenders from a wide range of counties in

England, retaining many longstanding agreements to accept boys. In 1883 the

Society’s field of operation covered the following localities where agreements

were made to accept ‘a limited number of boys, at a rate of payment for

maintenance and training not exceeding 2s. 6d. per boy per week, in addition to

the Treasury allowance:52

50

Inglis, ‘Thirty-second Report, 1889, House of Commons Sessional Papers [C.5829] XLII, p.

95. 51

Inglis, ‘Twenty-sixth Report’, 1883, House of Commons, Sessional Papers [C.3716] XXXIV,

p. 88. 52

Philanthropic Society, Annual Report, 1860, pp. 9-10.

23

Kent Reformatory Association, (for the county of Kent)

The county of Sussex, Surrey, Somerset, Nottingham, Salop Lincoln,

Montgomery [sic], and Oxford. The Isle of Ely, the Boroughs of

Nottingham, Hastings, Brighton, Reading, and the City of London.

The Society’s staff were questioned in detail, and sometimes found wanting in

the evidence they gave. However, the period was one of extreme pressure for the

Farm School due to declining income from the Society’s membership and

changes in administrative personnel. An 1891 Act to assist the Managers of

Reformatory and Industrial Schools was welcomed by the Society.53 It treated a

reformatory-school manager’s actions on behalf of a boy as if the manager were

his parent. The Act gave the warden, or manager, the authority to dispose of an

inmate, with his consent, as an apprentice, or as an emigrant. In the event the

new law prevented a parent from interfering with the plans of a reformatory

school to properly help a reformed youth.

The consolidated Reformatory Schools Act was passed in 1893, legislation

which gave magistrates an option of summarily remanding a young offender to a

reformatory school, to serve ‘a period of not less than three and not more than

five years’, and without the legal requirement to serve an initial period of at least

two weeks in gaol.54 The offender receiving this sentence had to be at least

twelve years of age but less than sixteen years, with a ‘previous conviction ...

53

‘An Act to assist the Manager of Reformatory and Industrial Schools, in advantageously

launching into useful Careers the Children under their Charge’, 3 July 1891, The Law Reports.

The Public General Statutes, passed in the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth years of the Reign of Her

Majesty Queen Victoria, v.28, London, 1891, p. 57.

54

‘An Act to amend the Law relating to Reformatory Schools’, The Law Reports. The Public

General Statutes, 1893, v.30, pp.193-94.

24

punishable with penal servitude or imprisonment’. The 1893 amendment to

section 1 of the Act, which removed the old prerequisite of punishment, the two-

week mandatory gaol term for juvenile offenders, struck at the very heart of the

Society’s philosophy. When the removal of imprisonment had first been mooted

in the 1880s strong opposition came from influential reformatory school owners,

including Gloucestershire’s Thomas Barwick Lloyd Baker. Sydney Turner was

quoted in successive government Reports, following official inquiries into

reformatory and industrial schools, in support of a continuation of short-term

imprisonment prior to admission to a reformatory. Turner had been adamant, a

feeling shared by succeeding superintendents at Red Hill through to the Reverend

Marshall G. Vine in the 1890s, that boys convicted of a crime should serve an

initial period in gaol as a form of punishment, and atonement. Those advocating

the gaol sentence saw it as a time for the young offender to reflect on his

behaviour and emerge, docile, ready to accept reformatory-school discipline.

‘Enactments relating to Reformatories’ gave detailed information about

who could financially contribute to the administration of juvenile reformatory

schools, with details included in an ‘Appendix’ to the 1896 Report ... on

Reformatory and Industrial Schools.55

What does the 1893 Act, and its 1899 Amendment, tell us about

contemporary opinion regarding young male offenders? Conversely, what

caused the Society specific concern over the prospect of implementing such

laws? Home Office documents refer to reformatory schools as ‘an experiment at

the beginning’ when their numbers were small. Furthermore, the ‘Treasury

55

Industrial and Reformatory Schools Committee, ‘Report to the Secretary of State for the Home

Department of the Departmental Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools’, v.1,

Appendix 35, Crime and Punishment ‘Juvenile Offenders’, v.5, pp. 175-382, BPP.

25

subsidy was intended to be ancillary to private subscriptions or parents’

payments’, but private subscriptions were not maintained ‘in proportion’ to the

Treasury’s outlay. Perhaps more important was the writer’s perception of the

doubtful advantage to the community, [when] both reformatories and

industrial schools contain many inmates who ought never to have been

sent there, or even sent there too early, or who are kept there too long’.56

In 1885, William Inglis, wrote from Birmingham to the Home Office on

‘Comparative Results on long or short detention in Reformatories’,

commenting:57

that with one exception, Red Hill, a boy should always be committed for a

full term of five years but that he should not be detained more than three

and I think that frequently a shorter detention would be sufficient.

Mr E.R. Pearse Edgcumbe wrote to the Home Office about the Bill to

Amend the Reformatory Act. He suggested boys should be sent to the union

workhouse, instead of to prison, prior to entering a reformatory school. He also

noted that ‘prison was not the deterrent it should be because the boys were

invariably kindly treated awaiting their transfer to a reformatory’.58

56

Unsigned memorandum reference number A 13312/47, 5 October 1880 filed on HO 45/9673 A

46656, British Archive. 57

Inglis to Home Office, 9 August 1885, HO 45/9655 A40609, British Archive. 58

E. R. Pearse Edgcumbe letter attached to Home Office Memorandum number 37, 16 April

1893, within the broader file H0 45/9673 A 46656, British Archive. See note of 26 April 1893 on

this file’s Memorandum Minute Sheet that ‘the Palmerston’s would support a Private Member’s

Bill that gave Courts the discretion to send Juvenile Offenders to a Workhouse prior to their

removal to a Reformatory School instead of the period in prison’.

26

Conclusion

The Philanthropic Society had commenced with support from men with

high rank and great wealth. During the years 1849-1900 this support dwindled to

a few who had achieved longevity, or those who occupied positions in

government.

Although Redhill continued its daily routine in much the same way as it did

during Sydney Turner’s time through to the end of the century, it had to conform

to a changed social expectation. The Society lacked the freedom to make its own

rules as it had during the early days. Gradually, social reform forced the Society

to accept legislation with which it did not always agree. The last twenty years of

the nineteenth century presented a challenge to the superintendent of Redhill.

Instead of occupying a role of authority –as in the first seventy years of the

century –answerable only to the committee of management and the hierarchy of

officers who formed the ‘General Court’, the reformatory had to conform to state

regulations, as did the whole reformatory system, even though the reformatories

continued to be privately owned. Central government, and specifically the Home

Office administration, supported by its Reformatory and Industrial School

Inspectors, had assumed leadership over almost all aspects of juvenile reform.

The Society, as one of the oldest and largest institutions in Britain, tended to

defend the status quo. Its resistance was only based on the experience it had

gained over its long existence. Nonetheless, the Society had no choice; it had to

meet the administrative demands which flowed from the changes to legislation.

27

1

Conclusion

This dissertation has charted the process by which late eighteenth-century

philanthropy, which aimed at rescuing children at risk of becoming criminals, evolved

into a minor partner in the state’s apparatus of punishment and reformation. It pays

particular attention to the Philanthropic Society’s development of the farm school

reformatory at Redhill.

The Philanthropic Society originated as a response to a moral panic about the

growth of crime on the streets in the rapidly growing city of London. It soon attracted

support from influential individuals who believed that crime could be prevented by

removing potentially criminal juveniles from the bad influences. Men of wealth, business

acumen and social conscience lent their financial and moral support. Food, shelter and

clothing were supplied to a select number of boys and girls at the London reform

institutions.

Accepted by the early committee as an ‘experiment’, the work of the first

reformatory was deemed a success. Influential patrons continued to support its work. In

the beginning, the Society made its own rules and regulations for the acceptance of boys

and girls. Following the Napoleonic Wars, however, the work of the Society became

increasingly enmeshed with the judicial system, as magistrates learned of opportunities

for consigning children to the care of the Society. The development of the Parkhurst

system for the treatment of juvenile offenders opened new doors for defraying the cost of

the Society’s operations. Soon afterwards the government began asking the Society to

accept specifically screened boys who could be sent to British colonies as free emigrants

on completion of their term in the reformatory.

2

Encouraged by these new avenues of state assistance, by the late 1830s the Society

had decided to concentrate entirely on operations that attracted significant returns from

state assistance, remuneration from work done by able-bodied boys and proceeds

accruing from government-backed colonial emigration schemes. The Society ceased to

accept girls for training and the Society began to investigate the increasingly popular idea

of farm schools as the best model for a juvenile reformatory. The work was greatly

assisted by new leadership, including Sydney Turner, the Duke of Richmond, and Lord

Ashley (later the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury). After close study the Society decided to

close its Southwark operations and to open a farm school at Redhill, south of London,

based on the French model recently put into operation at Mettray.

Redhill proved a model that others followed. The Society designed and planned its

own reformatory, making rules and regulations regarding alliances with local authorities

and parents of children brought before courts for sentencing. Responsibility for the work

of the Society at Redhill lay with the superintendent and if many of the trained youths

were released without others to take over their duties the whole production and routine of

the farm would collapse. Here lay the dilemma for the persons in charge in the latter part

of the nineteenth century. On the one hand the Society was a representative of

philanthropy and sought the best outcome for those sent to the school, and would surely

be pleased to release their trained boys. On the other hand the Society’s reputation of

maintaining a satisfactory institutions was dependent on a full complement of youth – and

the financial aid that came from government for such numbers – to enable Redhill to

sustain its range of facilities and keep up-to-date with Home Office prescribed standards.

With the passage of time, however, the reports on Redhill submitted by Reformatory

School Inspectors began to criticize the institution as stuck in an outmoded groove.

3

Criticism intensified after Gladstone’s return to government in 1880. A series of

commissions of enquiry and investigation pushed the Society more and more into

compliance with new demands from the state. That trend was reinforced by drops in

private subscriptions. After one hundred years of operation the Society found itself

transformed from a philanthropic organisation dedicated to preventing juvenile crime, to

one acting as an arm of the state penal system.

Although a relatively minor player in the larger scheme of things, the history of the

Society and its Redhill farm school illustrates the important point that the British welfare

state did not always evolve by displacing charities, but rather by co-opting them through

state aid. The final proof of that proposition is that the Philanthropic Society survives to

this day (as the Royal Philanthropic Society since 1952).

4

1

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