John and Ann Davis

A very common set of  names, in Wales and England.  And, often you get just enough information to set you down a research path that ends at a sad place.
I was researching an ancestor, John Davis and his wife, Ann and the 1871 census listed them as "inmates" of the Union Workhouse.
The Llanfyllin Union Workhouse, a Victorian workhouse was probably on par with all the other workhouses.
The workhouses were built in a distinct way, with the separation of families as the primary objective. When a family walked in the door, children over the age of two were separated from their parents and sent to the children's section, men to their section and the same with the women. This was done to make it easier to control and to provide enclosed yards for the different groups.
The line between a prison and workhouse was very thin. Workhouses were often built on high ground to serve as a warning to the community.
The master of the workhouse and his family lived in the block at the center of the building.
The workhouses were built to look very forbidding.  The workhouse at Llanfyllin was built in 1838, not long after the harsh new rules, the New poor Laws of 1834, for dealing with paupers.
Most among the ruling classes of the day, especially in the early Victorian years believed that the poor were just lazy, drunkards who didn't want to work and wanted to live off the parish instead of supporting their families.  Seems, I've heard that mutterings recently in my day and age.
Thankfully, most of the people accepted that the very poorest people of their parishes were just unable to help themselves because they were old or sick or had been injured in accidents. They were given the label of DESERVING POOR but all other homeless people were harshly treated as ROGUES and VAGABONDS or even IDLE BEGGARS.  Some familiar?
The cost of supporting the poor under "outdoor relief" had been steadily increasing up to 1834 and parishes were objecting to the high charges of the Poor Rates.
The Government came to the rescue, their answer was to put all the people supported by the ratepayers was to put all of them into large bleak stone buildings and spend as little as possible on them by putting them to work.
I'm sure there are a number of people, reading this today that might be nodding their heads and saying, well there's a good idea.
Unfortunately, the workhouses intent was to make life much tougher on the inside than the outside. They were full of illness and disease brought about by over-crowding and the starvation diet.
When you were admitted to the workhouse, you were stripped, searched, washed and had your hair cropped. You wore a uniform. Women were at all times kept separate from the men, including their husbands. It was most likely that they never even received word of a loved ones death until they were ready to leave.
Work projects were anything that was deliberately tedious. The objective was to keep people busy and to subsidise the cost of relief provided by the parish. This often cause problems within the parish too because when work wasn't available there was hostility towards the workhouse's cheap labor.
Often work was gardening, cooking, sewing, corn milling sack making, oakum picking, crushing stone. Bones were crushed by hand to make fertiliser. These weren't always just animal bones. Bone crushing was eventually banned after 1845.
Until 1843 all meals were taken in silence. No cutlery was provided you ate with your hands. There were six official diets often referred to as "a slow process of starvation".
Breakfast: 6 oz bread
Dinner: 4 oz bacon and 3 oz bread OR potatoes
Supper: 6 oz bread & 2 oz cheese
The official ration in HM Prisons was 292 ounces of food a week.  The workhouse diet was between 137 and 182 ounces a week.
And, of course, to be expected there was often trouble. Riots broke out often. There was a report from the Cosford House of Industry in Suffolk that "the windows in the dining hall were much broken by the practice of throwing stones at the governor as he was passing through the hall."

John and Ann were in their late 60s when they entered the workhouse. There is no record of them after that.

Further research shows that this couple were not my John and Ann. But, they could have been. I felt their pain and sorrow when they entered that place. I felt the agony that they must have felt when they were separated and knew that they might never see each other again. I felt their humiliation after all these years of trying to make it in a very difficult world.

They might not have been my John and Ann but I felt they deserved to have their story told. For all of us to be reminded of the "solutions" that we as a society have found to deal with those of us that are "deserving poor" or "not so deserving".

History shows us how some problems were solved and what the results were of those solutions. Hopefully we learn and come up with better solutions for what seems to be an ongoing problem for humanity.