You had to work, and work hard

These are the words engraved by Samuel Chandler of Wanstead over the door of the new Walthamstow Workhouse when it was built in 1730 for the princely sum of £344 18s 11d.

There is a harshness in the motto that repels in the age of the welfare state.

Yet the people who ordered the building and the running of the workhouse were generally charitable men wrestling with the extremes of poverty endured by parts of the population of what was then a large village.

A workhouse actually opened four years earlier when the Walthamstow Vestry - the parish council of the day - authorised a lease for a house in Hoe Street.

It was a success in financial terms. The call on weekly Poor Law relief dropped sharply, so the decision was taken to put up a dedicated building with a room in it for the Vestry meetings.

Over its 100-year life as a workhouse, the number of residents grew from 34 at the beginning - two men, ten women, 11 boys and 11 girls - to a peak of 80 in the 1820s.

Behind all this lay personal stories of destitution, desertion, widowhood, serious illness, the loss of families to the dreaded smallpox or hunger, old age and the bearing of bastard children.

You had to work, and work hard, to enjoy the benefits of a roof over your head, regular meals, decent clothing and a launch into adult employment if you were a child.

Some of the resident masters and mistresses were hard on the inmates or incompetent in their jobs. At the opposite end of the scale, Mrs Elizabeth Dallett was sacked in 1830 because she was alleged to have made it too comfortable for the paupers.

Women were involved in spinning, laundry and repairing clothes. For men, labour meant keeping up the building, working in the garden and oakum picking.

The latter, a boring and unpleasant task also carried out by prisoners, entailed picking apart the strands in lengths of used rope and separating the hemp fibres for recycling. Some people were paid for this - hence the saying "money for old rope".

Children, whether orphans or the offspring of older residents, had the best deal in some ways. They were taught to sew, knit and garden and to read and write, all of which prepared them for leaving the confines of the workhouse.

And when the time came to go, they were found positions, given clothing and a small sum of money. It was a hard life, but for many the alternative - to be blunt - was death.

By 1840, the age of the small locally-supported workhouse had passed and the care of Walthamstow's and Leyton's paupers passed to the newly built and much larger West Ham Union in Leytonstone, later Langthorne Hospital.