Origins

I wrote a short piece on May 11th 2020 about the Birmingham Workhouse in Winson Green and its infamous Arch of Tears as it was locally known, where my Great-Great Grandfather, Godfrey Rudge died, a pauper, having moved from his birthplace in Rhiwabon [Ruabon] in Denbighshire to the Midlands to find work in the late 19th century. I've latterly found the Workhouse record of his stay there, and interestingly he is listed, alongside all the other non-English inmates, as 'Irish'. Godfrey spoke only Welsh and so I guess they just lumped him in with all the others as a matter of convenience. I bought the book pictured a while back to try and shed some light on the conditions the poor could expect to experience in the various lodgings in which they might find themselves forced to inhabit. 

Mary Higgs was writing about her researches - including using incognito voluntary stays in various types of lodgings to garner objective observations - about vagrancy and the effects of The Poor Laws prevailing at the time on the poor themselves. I've as yet only dipped into the essays that the book contains, and a grim read it makes too, not exactly light reading, and as disturbing at this distance as it must have seemed to a liberal-minded reader at the time. The year of its publication? 1906, the year my Great-Great-Grandfather died, an impoverished widower, in the workhouse in Winson Green, the area where I myself grew up. How circular is life that I managed to migrate back to North Wales over half a lifetime ago. Wedi fy ngeni yn Lloegr, ond Cymraeg yw fy nghalon.