NORMAN McCORD

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE 1834 POOR LAW AMENDMENT ACT ON TYNESIDE

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was a measure of major im- portance, both as an administrative innovation and because of its social effects.1 The Ministry of Health archives in the Public Record Office include in the Poor Law Papers a very large and valuable source for the social history of nineteenth century Britain. Much more work on this mass of evidence will be necessary before any very reliable assessment of the effect of the New Poor Law can be made. This paper is an attempt to use a small selection of these papers to discuss the way in which the system prescribed by the 1834 Act was introduced into Tyneside, already an important region of economic growth in these years. Such local studies are especially needed here, for one thing which is already clear is that the early impact of the 1834 Act was not uniform over the whole country, but showed considerable local variation. The nature of the local economic situation at the time the new adminis- trative machinery was introduced, the calibre of the responsible agents involved, and the attitude of the local influential groups, were all factors which could produce important variations in the experience of different areas of Britain. In parts of the West Riding, for instance, all three elements combined to give the new system a rough passage in its early years. The experience of Tyneside is a useful corrective to 1 The principal source used here is the Poor Law Papers in the Ministry of Health archives in the Public Record Office. I am grateful to the Research Fund of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne for a grant to facilitate study of these documents. The correspondence with local Boards of Guardians is contained in the MH 12 series. In addition I have drawn upon an undergraduate dissertation on the Hexham Union by Miss Gloria Cadman, BA in the Depart- ment of Modern and Medieval History, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. The following papers may be cited as useful background material for the contents of this paper: David Roberts, "How cruel was the Victorian Poor Law?", in: Historical Journal, Vol. VI, 1963, pp. 97-107; Ursula Henriques, "How cruel was the Victorian Poor Law?", ibid., Vol. XI, 1968, pp. 365-371; Mark Blaug, "The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New", in: Journal of Economic History, Vol. XXIII, 1963, pp. 151-184; Mark Blaug, The Poor Law Report Reexamined", ibid., Vol. XXIV, 1964, pp. 229-245.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 03 Oct 2021 at 06:55:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000003527 THE 1834 POOR LAW AMENDMENT ACT ON TYNESIDE 91 the better known accounts of the textile districts. It is perhaps un- reasonable to expect that the legislators of 1834 should have antici- pated the economic tribulations of the textile districts in the later 1830's, or the violent opposition to the New Poor Law of men like Oastler and the Fieldens; the story on Tyneside in the first years of the new system demonstrates that the new system could be introduced and set to work reasonably smoothly even in one of the developing areas of the North of England. Although it was not until 1836 that arrangements were made to divide the North Eastern counties of Northumberland and Durham into the new local Poor Law Unions governed by Boards of Guardians, the new system exerted some influence in the area from its creation in 1834. In North East England, as elsewhere, the old poor law authorities were required to supply their new masters of the central Poor Law Commission with the statistics and other information needed to plan for the introduction of the new arrangements. More- over, from the time it came into existence, the Poor Law Commission began to exercise a general control over the manner in which the existing authorities carried out their poor law duties. This early correspondence demonstrates clearly enough that