Workhouse Museum
Here are a few facts taken from our museum displays, which tell the tales of not so lucky children in Victorian Ripon…
- An Urchin is a young boy or girl, especially poorly or raggedly dressed.
- A Sprog is a youngster, child, a baby, from the word ‘sprag’ meaning a slip or cutting from a plant.
- Guttersnipe, is a street urchin, a gatherer of refuse from the street gutters.
- Children were put into the Workhouse on their own because they were abandoned, orphans, physically or mentally disabled, illegitimate or left by parents unable to feed the child.
- Ripon Workhouse appointed a trained teacher to give 3 hours schooling a day.
- Regular excursions to Hackfall, Studley and Harrogate were organised.
- Innocent children of convicted women were transported with their mothers to Australia.
- Girls sent to prison worked long hours in laundry, picking oakum and plaiting straw for hats. Punishment for misbehaviour, unlike the boys who were whipped, was to be put in a straitjacket or given a diet of bread and water.
- Children of the poor were often organised into criminal gangs and taught to steal such as in Fagin’s gang in the Charles Dickens novel, ‘Oliver Twist’.
- The worst punishment for children was to be put in the ‘dark cell’. This was a specially built very small cell with no furniture and totally without light.