Close to the old police station on the Coventry Road (now a pub called The Old Bill and Bull) there once stood a workhouse. Yardley parish workhouse it was, serving the ancient parish of Yardley, which covered Acocks Green, Hall Green, Sparkhill, Greet and Yardley village itself.
The institution lasted for just 28 years. It was built in 1808 and closed in 1836, when Yardley was merged into Solihull Poor Law Union.
The Poor Law unions were one of those economies of scale we see from time to time, currently evident in the creation of 'super-hospitals'. The fact that poor old Yardley had to find £650 to pay for this new arrangement is a salutary warning that bigger does not necessarily mean cheaper.
Yardley was late in joining the list of parishes who had built a workhouse. Aston had made this step over 100 years earlier. The reason, as I see it, was that the parish had always had an alternative way to look after its poor.
It rented 51 cottages from the Yardley Charity Estates, scattered across the whole parish, and there the pauper families lived until a rise in numbers forced Yardley to go the way of all the others. Even the workhouse itself, when it was eventually erected, had to be rented from the charities at a cost of £12 a year.
Compared to Birmingham, whose workhouse held close to 1,000 inmates, the little house on Coventry Road was tiny. There were never more than 36 people inside, a mixture of men and women, boys and girls.
The boys were allowed to attend the free school for their education, while the girls were taught by the workhouse inmates. This was more likely to be floor cleaning than quadrilateral equations.
For the last few years of its life the Yardley workhouse was supervised by a Mrs Homer, the wife (I think) of a local tanner. But governance and finance was really in the hands of a vestry committee, who told the governess what to spend and who to let in.
Enough records survive from the institution to give a good idea of what went on there. We know, for example, that the women and girls of the house made the inmates' clothes and that the men, if they were able-bodied, were sent out to work on the roads. It was the only work Yardley could find for them.
We know too that the workhouse brewed its own beer and that this was the standard drink. Only the sick were permitted tea and coffee (as well as porter and wine if the surgeon ordered it).
The household accounts also tell us that the workhouse had a garden, and this was used to grow all the vegetables that went into the daily pot. They grew carrots and turnips, potatoes, beans and Dutch savoury. Down the garden too dwelt the pigs.
The house always had a couple of pigs, who invariably came to a sticky end in the winter-time. They were an economic way of recycling the left-overs, and then selling them back to a local butcher. The inmates themselves never ate pork, only beef and mutton.
Yardley workhouse may not have been luxurious, but it was local. Come the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, things were to change radically. From then on Yardley's poor found them shipped off to Solihull, a considerable distance away.
The vestry committee do not appear to have complained about that; they were more worried about where they would find that £650.
* Dr Chris Upton is Senior Lecturer in History at Newman University College in Birmingham.
