To mark ‘Care Experienced History Month’, Theo – a young producer for Shout Out Loud – came up with the idea of telling stories from English Heritage sites that specifically relate to care experience. Based on Theo’s passion and expertise in this topic, they have collaborated with English Heritage historians and Dr Kate Gibson from Manchester University, to construct several compelling research stories around Care Experienced children in England.
Care Experienced children have been looked after in various ways throughout England’s history. Spending some time being looked after by family, friends or the state was a relatively common experience for children in the past and can be found in the histories of many of the places that English Heritage look after.
Framlingham Workhouse
Workhouses were set up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, following the wishes of philanthropist Sir Robert Hitcham after his death, to provide work and accommodation for the poor, endowed by the state or by local charities. From 1699, the workhouse at Framlingham in Suffolk housed ten poor children, to teach them combing, a combination of spinning and weaving wool. The children, boys and girls aged over three years, were also taught to read and provided with clothes, food and lodging.
The trustees of the workhouse set out their motivations for providing care in a document from 1699.
Firstly, so that ‘Those who have many Children by putting some into [the] Workhouse may better maintain the rest & themselves who now live upon ye Collection’. The trustees hoped that if they took one child from the poorest, largest families who were already receiving financial help from the parish, these families would be more able to look after the children they kept at home. Families in the past were large – around six children on average – and, as now, caring for lots of small children put considerable financial pressure on a family. By sending one child to the workhouse, parents would be more able to feed and clothe the children kept behind. The trustees hoped to help poor families make ends meet, but they also wanted to save money in the hope that families with fewer children at home would need less financial help.
Secondly, the trustees felt that poor children would be better cared for at the workhouse than with their own family. One concern was that ‘at the Workhouse their Clothes will last ye longer then when with their Parents whereby they are Rent [ripped] & torne wth stealing wood & Idleing at play &c and never mended.’ Here, the middle-class trustees assumed that poor parents didn’t put their children to work or school but allowed them to play and get into trouble.
In the seventeenth century, there was a belief that poor children were a national asset who needed to be taught to be hardworking so that they would grow up into industrious adults who would contribute to the economy and not themselves need help from the state. Local elites (like the workhouse trustees) believed that poor parents would only teach their children to be poor, and that workhouses should be used to remove this bad parental influence and instead educate poor children to be obedient and hardworking citizens.
The rules for the workhouse stipulated that the children wear distinctive blue bonnets and to have the emblem/coat of arms of the workhouse benefactor, Sir Robert Hitcham, stitched onto their coats. This stigmatised the children as the objects of charity, identifying them as poor children whose parents were judged unable to look after them, but was also meant to publicise Sir Robert’s charitable virtue for the admiration of the community.
Wrest Park
Jemima Campbell, Marchioness Grey (1722-1797) moved back to Wrest Park in Bedfordshire with her mother Amabel and elder brother, Henry, in early 1726. On account of Amabel’s health declining, the family moved in with Jemima’s maternal grandparents, the Greys, at Wrest Park, when she was three. Her father, Lord Glenorchy, was working as the British government’s envoy in Denmark at the time.
It was common for parents working abroad in the eighteenth century to send children ‘home’ to England for education or because they feared the effect of foreign climates on their children’s health. This was a time of huge expansion in the British empire, so many families were split across continents when parents went to work abroad.
Jemima’s mother died in 1727 when Jemima was five and her older brother Henry died shortly afterwards in May, aged just 6 years old. Her grandmother, Jemima Crew died in 1728, and when the Duke remarried and had a child in 1729, Jemima and her aunt, Mary Grey, were placed in a house in Chelsea owned by the Duke. Eventually, Jemima and Mary returned to Wrest Park in 1734, the reason of which was steeped in family tragedy…
… Due to a considerable number of family deaths, including Jemima’s Uncle Anthony, the Duke’s son and Jemima’s brother, Jemima was left as the sole heiress to her grandfather Henry Grey’s wealth, including the majestic Wrest Park. It therefore suited the Greys to keep Jemima close to them, allowing them to control her upbringing, education and even her marriage as a future representative of the Grey family dynasty. Elite families who had been unable to have children or whose children had died, sometimes adopted nieces, nephews, cousins or grandchildren to provide a new heir. This child would be incorporated into the family dynasty and educated for their future important role as a major landowner. For Jemima, her inheritance allowed her to travel, entertain guests, educate herself, and exercise political influence.
Eltham Palace
In 1926, brothers Peter and Paul Peirano, then aged 10 and 8, were fostered by their aunt Virginia and her husband Stephen Courtauld at their home, Eltham Palace. Virginia had been unable to have children, and she did not approve of the way their father had brought them up. It is thought that their father and mother, Henry and Dorothy, separated, perhaps after Dorothy had an affair. Virginia (more commonly known as Ginie), Henry’s sister, didn’t think his brother was looking after the children properly, and so took them in. In an oral history recording, Ginie’s niece Margaret Barnard said “the mother I think walked out, and the father was charming, and I rather ne’re-do-well, I’ve never met him. And Ginie just decided they weren’t being brought up properly and swept them up”.
The two boys lived with the Courtaulds at 47 Grosvenor Square from 1926, though Peter was sent to board at Clifton College, and Paul to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. By 1936, when the Courtaulds moved into Eltham Palace, Peter was studying at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Paul joined him there in October of 1936. The two boys, despite not spending a huge amount of time living with the Courtaulds, appear to have holidayed with them on their motor yacht, and to have travelled overseas with them to Europe and North America.
Kinship care, when a child is looked after by a relative like an aunt and uncle, is and has always been the most common type of care. Relatives often felt a strong sense of duty to look after children, particularly if a parent had died, as well as love and concern for their welfare. Virginia’s marriage into the wealthy Courtauld family also meant that she had the resources to look after her nephews, and their father may have felt that she was able to provide the type of care that he could not.