Accessibility and Archives: “old age and infirmity will be treated with more respect”

10 Nov

Accessibility and Archives: “old age and infirmity will be treated with more respect”[i]

In this blog post, Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on the overlooked subject of old age in disability history.

Disability is a feature of many lives as we age: it currently affects 45% of us above State Pension age, rising to 67% of those aged 85[ii]. The medical model of disability suggests that old age often brings us, as unwelcome gifts, disabling impairments to, for example, hearing, vision, mobility, dexterity or cognitive functioning, that might need a doctor’s support and specialist equipment to manage. Although archivists are unlikely to need reminding that many current archive users are older people, we may not all be used to social model thinking which understands the disabling of older people to be societal and environmental. That is to say, the provisions not implemented by us to support equal access to records for younger disabled people, also serve to exclude those who had not previously considered themselves to be disabled.

However, my main focus, in this blog, is to remind us that some of the older people in our records had experience of disablement. Some of these were the ‘default humans’ that archives have been so good at preserving. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, for example, described himself in letters as suffering “the plague of old age and of a shattered carcass”, joking about having “old stiff, rheumatic limbs” which were now such that “I believe, I could now outcrawl a snail, or perhaps even a tortoise”[iii]. But people from the other end of the social scale can also be found. A Quarter Sessions record from Essex reports, for example, the petition of John Levitt of Peldon “being impoverished… & Lame through old age is in great want and unable to worke for his maintenance, And for a yeare last past hath had only a Barne… to reside in”[iv], and that of Henry Bayly of Chigwell “aged, blind and unable to relieve himselfe”[v]. Sometimes the petitioner was a woman, as with Jane Dobson of Euxton “a poor aged petitioner… in present daunger to bee starved to death”[vi] or Ann Furnace of Hertford(?), who “has lost the use of her limbs” and whose unnamed mother “who hitherto has supported her, is now very aged, and has but little means for keeping herself.”[vii]

Readers of Charles Dickens’ final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, will recall an old woman, Mrs Betty Higden, who was determined that she should never be admitted to a workhouse (hence her flight in the preview image). While she was fictional, the author’s Postscript refers to the “late exposure by The Lancet”[viii] of the conditions in English workhouses. These reports suggested that provisions might often have been unsuitable for aged and disabled inmates. At Rotherhithe, for example, where the inadequate provision of nurses was reproved, the aged residents needed to use toilet facilities in the yard because their custodian “could not be at pains to empty slops for them.”[ix]

Those inspecting the Windsor workhouse, lamented that the previously industrious should be stuck “without any amusement or useful occupation to while away the time” with “worthless individuals, from whose ribaldry and unkindness there is no escape”.[x] At Farnham, the inspectors noted an inadequate provision of food in the “infirm women’s day room”: “Here were seven aged women, toothless and decrepid, crouching over the fire, and making believe to dine… The actual dinner supplied consisted on the day or our visit of thick lumps of beef or bacon (not mutton as ordered); and, as if to mock the poor old creatures in their efforts to dispose of these tough morsels, knives were served out to them but no forks… [A]ll the meat is cut up in the dining-hall, and by the time the various rations for the sick and infirm arrive at their respective wards, they are in a condition of tepid greasiness which is well calculated to repress inordinate appetites.”[xi] Perhaps it is unsurprising that one Eliza Hollows was known to have threatened to drown herself before she drank acid, both word and deed in preference to returning to the workhouse in 1895[xii]. The hope expressed in the report on Wolverhampton’s workhouse quoted in this blog’s title did not become reality. Trollope’s euthanasia novel The Fixed Period includes an introduction where a character defends it on these grounds: “During the last years of their lives they were to be saved from any of the horrors of poverty. How many now lack the comforts they cannot earn for themselves?”[xiii]

But I also want to note that in eras before the welfare state, disabled older people might still be working. Mayhew, for example observed that “The street-sellers of tape and cotton are usually elderly females”, and recorded his visit to one “who had been getting her living in the street by such means for nine years”. “One of my legs, you see, is shorter than the other,” said she, rising from the bed-side, and showing me that her right foot was several inches from the ground as she stood. “My hip is out. I used to go out washing, and walking in my pattens I fell down. My hip is out of the socket three-quarters of an inch, and the sinews is drawn up. I am obliged to walk with a stick… After I put my hip out, I couldn’t get my living as I’d been used to do. I couldn’t stand a day if I had five hundred pounds for it. I must sit down. So I got a little stall, and sat at the end of the alley here with a few laces and tapes and things.”[xiv]

My final example is Mary Walker, described by the novelist Ford Madox Ford, as having suffered the loss of a toe in a childhood accident: “Her mouth was immense and quite toothless except for one large fang, and as she smiled cheerfully all the time, her great gums were always to be seen… She tied hops – and this is rather skilled work, she picked them in the autumn; she helped the neighbours with baking and brewing. She cleaned the church once a week. She planted the potatoes and cropped them. She was the first cottager in Kent to keep poultry for profit.”[xv] The 1891 census sums her up as “Charwoman.”

Guest blogs are welcome. Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk. We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.

[i] https://workhouses.org.uk/Lancet/Wolverhampton.shtml

[ii] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9602/

[iii] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3361/pg3361-images.html

[iv] https://archive.org/details/essexquartersess0000esse/page/110/mode/2up?q=old

[v] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3361/pg3361-images.html https://archive.org/details/essexquartersess0000esse/page/114/mode/2up?q=aged

[vi] https://www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk/petition/the-petition-of-jane-dobson-of-euxton-lancashire-6-october-1651/

[vii] https://archive.org/details/b24878315_0001/page/134/mode/2up?q=aged

[viii] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/883/883-h/883-h.htm

[ix] https://workhouses.org.uk/Lancet/Rotherhithe.shtml

[x] https://workhouses.org.uk/Lancet/Windsor.shtml

[xi] https://workhouses.org.uk/Lancet/Farnham.shtml

[xii] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000336/18950803/038/0003