This guest blog has been written by Phil Carstairs.
The Hexham Soup Kitchen seems to have started life in the cholera epidemic of 1831/32 but finally became more permanently established in the late 1830s judging by reports in local newspapers, notably the Newcastle Courant. Hexham Soup Kitchen’s minute books and other documents dating from 1841 to the early twentieth century are held in the Northumberland Archives at Woodhorn. Contained in these documents are lists. Lists of subscribers to the charity, lists of worthy committee members, lists of ingredients for making soup, of expenses for converting a vacant factory building into a soup kitchen, and lists of the deserving Hexham poor who were deemed worthy enough to receive soup and bread during the winter months.
This last category of list, recipients of soup, is the subject of this article. Although there were many thousands of soup kitchens across nineteenth-century Britain, lists of those receiving soup at these soup kitchens have almost never survived.
Like many other soup kitchens, Hexham’s did not rely on subscribers to hand out tickets. It invited the poor to apply for tickets which could be exchanged for soup and bread. The Soup Kitchen’s committee interviewed applicants for tickets at the start of each ‘season’ (usually December to March) to determine their worthiness. In 1851 the committee asked Mr Fairlamb, Hexham’s Relieving Officer, to attend the application process at the Vestry. He was the poor law official appointed by the Guardians of the Poor for Hexham Poor Law Union. His job was to provide immediate relief to those poor in crisis and to refer cases for long-term relief or admission to the workhouse to the Board of Guardians. He would have known many of Hexham’s poor and have had an opinion on who was deserving of charity and who was not. Mr Fairlamb was co-opted onto the committee in January 1861, cementing the close relationship between the charity and Hexham Poor Law Union.
The list of successful applicants would inform the committee how much soup to make and bread to order. The eligible got only the amount of soup they deserved, and no more. Further people could be added to the list during the season and ‘casuals’ (a category ranging from those suffering an emergency to tramps and vagrants) could be given soup on a case-by-case basis.
Soup lists for seven different seasons survive in the Northumberland Archives collections; each list contains the names of between 200 and 400 people. The first five lists are written in the back of the minute book used between 1841 and 1881. These five lists are on consecutive pages and so must have been recorded in chronological order. Only the last is dated, 1880-1881. The other two lists are in alphabetical ledgers. The lists record the names of the heads of household and the family size or the soup ration awarded, and their approximate address (except for the second list). The first list also records the occupation of many of the applicants.
Although six lists are not dated, we can work out to within a fairly narrow period when they were drawn up comparing the data recorded in the lists to census data and burial registers. Street addresses can also provide data evidence for a list. For instance, Jubilee Terrace probably got its name from Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in June 1887 and first appears as an address in the first of the alphabetical ledgers (other preliminary data from the census suggests a date in the late 1880s or early 1890s for this list). Identifying the exact dates of these lists is ongoing, but there appears to be one list from roughly each decade of the second half on the nineteenth century. The rest of this article focusses on the 1880-1881 list, made in December 1880, coinciding roughly with the 1881 census which took place in early April.
The 1880 list contains the names of 339 heads of household, 23 names are crossed out and one a female first name was replaced with a male one. People’s names will have been crossed out for various reasons. Some died that winter, like Dorothy Dodd and Thomas Brown. Others moved away, like Davison Bell, a joiner, whom the 1881 census records in Ryhope, Tyne and Wear. His family were still in Hexham at census time but not on the soup list so, having found work in Ryhope, Davison may have been sending money home to his family. Others were later deemed to be ineligible, perhaps because they found to be undeserving, or because they became so destitute that they had to enter the workhouse, like labourer William Askew and his two children. Charles Lowe appears on the list twice, once crossed out, probably the correction of a bureaucratic error rather than him trying to cheat the system, which would probably have resulted in him losing all entitlement.
The 1880 list is not in alphabetical order, suggesting that it was drawn up in the order in which people applied. In several instances people who were recorded in the census as being neighbours appear next to each other on the list. This indicates that they probably attended the application meeting together and is evidence of community and solidarity. Ann Dinwoodie and Isabella McGill were neighbours in Tyne Green and both worked at the paper mill as ‘paper dressers’; they attended the application meeting together, perhaps to provide each other with moral support: applicants for charity were exposed to intrusive investigation and to shame. Similarly, Thomas Welch a painter and Ellen Ritson, a cordwainer (shoemaker) lived next door to one another in Bell’s Court on Priestpopple, and attended together. All the soup applicants lived in Hexham town rather than the surrounding rural parts of the parish. Although they had occupations listed in the census, they were mostly without work or only working part-time as queuing for soup and taking it home would have taken several hours.