Sent to the Poorhouse in 1890s Scotland: 52 Ancestors 2024 Prompt “Free Space”

 

Robert Muir Lives His Final Years in the Poorhouse

Robert Muir: 1833-1902 (Paternal First Cousin 4x Removed)

 

When I was young, unexpected expenditures would lead adults to exclaim, “We’re going to end up in the poorhouse!” By that time, the 1960s, poorhouses no longer existed, but we children all knew what they meant by the phrase. A poorhouse was where people in poverty ended up before the era of social welfare programs like Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and Aid to Families With Dependent Children. The poorhouse, or sometimes a poorfarm, was a building that housed the indigent and was subsidized through local taxes and charity. Poorhouses were, in general, horrific places that no one would ever choose to go to—they were shelters of the very last resort. Sadly, one of the Muir ancestors, first cousin 4x removed Robert Muir, spent the last years of his life in a poorhouse in Lanarkshire, Scotland.

Robert Muir was born September 15, 1833 in New Monkland, Lanarkshire to parents Hugh Muir and Helen Thomson. He was the eldest of their eight children. The family seems to have struggled financially. By 1841, they lived in a small town near Airdrie called Rawyards. It apparently was as miserable as the name sounds. Most of the housing was substandard, and rented to the men who worked in the nearby coalmine. In 1875, a reporter for the Glasgow Herald visited the town and described it as follows:

“…at the end of the village is Baird Square, a mining settlement owned by various proprietors. Here there are two rows, belonging to Dr Robertson, which are quite as miserable as those already described. They are single apartments, lighted from one side only, with earthen floors patched with pieces of wood, and are all terribly out of repair. The earthen floors are broken up into a series of watery holes, some of which the tenants have filled up with clay and mud from the street. Everything is untidy, inside and outside. The ashpits and closets are filthy in the extreme, and the road in front of the houses is a dirty puddle. A good deal of overcrowding exists in these rows. In two of the single apartments which I entered there are eight of a family.”

By the 1851 census, seventeen-year-old Robert was working as a general laborer, while his father was an “unemployed labourer”. It looks like young Robert was already supporting his parents and siblings.

I find no record of Robert after 1851 until he appears on the 1871 census with a wife named Ann, and a seventeen-year-old son named Adam. Robert was working in the coal mines, and like his parents, he was living in Rawyards.

Just six years later, Robert’s life was even bleaker. He had his first interaction with the Poor Law Registry. The paperwork shows that he called at the Schotts Parochial Board office at 8 p.m. on June 21, 1877, and was entered on their “General Registry of the Poor”. The record noted that he had “no fixed place” to live and was a widower. He had been employed as a “pit worker” (coal mines), was forty years old, and was “partially” disabled due to “inflammation of throat & hands & a leg”. It is difficult to identify what medical condition Robert might have suffered from with such disparate symptoms.

There was no mention of his son, Adam. Did Adam die along with Robert’s wife? Did he move out when he turned eighteen? I have been unable to identify the correct Adam Muir in any further records.

Robert’s life continued to spiral downwards. By March 16, 1886, Robert appears on the records of the Parish of Cambusnethan in an Application for Parochial Relief. The form stated he had no home, was age 53, was single, and was the son of Hugh Muir and Helen Thomson who were both dead. He was Protestant and a former laborer who was wholly disabled due to “hemorrhoids and bleeding”. I suspect the disability diagnosis referred to a more significant medical issue than today’s hemorrhoids.

The relief Robert was applying for was entry into the parish poorhouse. According to the North Lanarkshire Council website, life in the poorhouse was not much of a “relief” for the poor.

“Those who entered the poorhouse were known an inmates. Conditions were very harsh; on entering you were stripped, bathed and issued with a uniform. Husbands, wives and children were separated and could be punished for talking to one another. Inmates followed a prescribed daily routine while the able bodied were set to work, although it was not compulsory. Women did domestic jobs such as cleaning, working in the kitchen or laundry. Men were allocated jobs in the workshops.”

Robert’s records show he was sent first to the Motherwell Combination Poorhouse, and then to the New Monkland Poorhouse. 

A poorhouse in Old Monkland around 1900, so probably similar to the New Monkland facility.

He at times was able to pay for lodgings elsewhere, probably during periods when he was healthy and strong enough to work in the coal mines. His lodgings were on Reading Room Row in Calderbank New Square. This area was probably worse than the poorhouse. It was described by the Motherwell Times newspaper as follows:

“ Two rooms together form tenements in which there is neither water nor sink or light laid on. Rooms? They are not deserving of the name. They are hovels. They would not bear comparison with the barns in which a decent farmer houses cattle. But in them whole families, numbering anything up to a dozen souls, contrive to live. Two or three huts in the open square provide at least one hundred men, women, and children with the only sanitary convenience there is. These huts do not connect with any sewer. There is an open cesspool. The filth is indescribable.”

At the time of the 1891 census, Robert was 58 years old and was living at the New Monkland Poorhouse. His former profession was listed as “pit engine keeper”, some sort of coal mining job. He was still at the New Monkland Poorhouse ten years later at the time of the 1901 census. At least he had a roof over his head and regular food during that decade.

Robert died a year later on July 31, 1902, at age 68. The death record states he died of “cardiac valvular disease”. His brother John Muir of Calderbank provided the information on the death record, including their parents’ names. Perhaps when Robert had lived in Calderbank New Square, he had been living with this brother.

Poorhouses may have been places of last resort for the homeless and impoverished of the Victorian era, but they at least provided some sort of security in a world where even the working poor lived in desperately overcrowded, unsanitary squalor. Robert was able to survive into his late sixties due to the Lanarkshire poorhouses. Without them, he would certainly have died in his fifties once he was too crippled to work in the coal mines and became homeless.

 

Sources:

Description of Rawyards from March 2 1875 Glasgow Herald article, an description of Calderbank New Square. http://scottishmining.co.uk/414.html

https://www.workhouses.org.uk/NewMonkland/

North Lanarkshire Council. “Life in the Poorhouse”. https://www.culturenlmuseums.co.uk/story/life-in-the-poorhouse/

North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre; Motherwell, North Lanarkshire, Scotland; North Lanarkshire Poor Law Applications and Registers; Reference: CO1/26/65. Accessed on Ancestry.com.