Good morning and now let’s take a look at the history of the workhouse through the eyes of celebrities who descended from workout inmates. You will hear a very familiar narrator in this miniseries. The run time for this episode is 46:25 and is called The Last Resort.
This is a miniseries featuring celebrities Brian Cox, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Kiera Chaplin, and Fern Britton. The Workhouse was a place where the destitute could end up in Victorian England and was adopted as a way to address poverty. The inmates were supposed to be shamed into doing better and standing up on their own two feet in order to pull themselves out of poverty. It was an institution that caused misery and invoked shame. There were no government-provided benefits. It survived into the modern era only ending after World War II. One in every ten British people can trace their ancestors to the workhouse. This episode begins with Keira Chaplin and her ancestor Charlie Chaplin. He entered the Lambeth Workhouse as a child. Charlie’s father had abandoned the family, and his mother was a singer who lost her voice. Charlie, his mother, and his brother ended up in the workhouse. Charlie and his brother would have been separated from their mother. Kiera learns more about her grandfather’s workhouse experience. Families were split up in order to stop the spread of poverty and horrible behavior. There was a male side and a female side in the workhouse. The children also had a wing themselves. There were further divisions into good and bad people. Workhouse life was brutal and conditions were such as to discourage people from entering the workhouse when they could earn a pittance on the outside. Families stuck together through thick and thin in order to avoid going into the workhouse. The next story talks about Brian Cox and how his grandfather ended up in the poorhouse, the Scottish version of the workhouse. He talks about his deep fear of poverty, which was something he mentioned in his Finding Your Roots episode. His grandfather was an Irish immigrant to Glasgow, Scotland. To qualify for the workhouse the people had to work ten hours picking rope or smashing rocks. The door was always open however there was a population who left the workhouse in a coffin. Fern Britton’s workhouse story was explored in this section. Her distant uncle ended up in the workhouse because of ill health. Eventually, her uncle was transferred to a London Hospital. The workhouse was where the poor could get some health care. If a family could get the body back they would, but if not the medical community would use it to teach future doctors. The last story explored in his episode is author, Barbara Taylor Bradford. Her grandmother and mother were in the workhouse which was a surprise to Barbara Taylor Bradford. It was a secret that her mother kept all her life. There was a stigma about the families that entered the workhouse and that stigma seemed to have carried through the generations. Why did her mother and grandmother end up in the workhouse? It is here that Barbara learns that her mother was born illegitimate. On top of free healthcare, the workhouse would have educated the children of the inmates. They were taught reading, there were sports and they were taught skills to help them gain successful employment. Charlie Chaplin was able to learn skills in the workhouse that would have led to a successful acting career. To learn more about each celebrity’s workhouse stories continue to watch the rest of the documentary. Brian Cox did Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates and learned more about his family history, and this show provides some additional background to Brian Cox’s story. The other stories were also a fascinating look into the history of the workhouse. I liked Barbara’s story and she seemed deeply touch and interested in what she was finding about her mother’s workhouse experience. I also enjoyed Barbara’s conversation with a surviving resident of the workhouse. The story transitions were very well done and I like Jim Carslie’s narration. This would be a good documentary to show to a history classroom and would be a good documentary to use for research purposes too.
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The purpose of this blog is to share information on what can be used in a classroom, private school, or home school setting as well as serve as a portfolio of my personal and professional work. The reviews are my opinions and should be treated as such. I just want to provide a tool for teachers to select documentaries for their classrooms. |