A First-Hand Account of Daily Life in Woodstock Union Workhouse in the High Victorian Period

Summary

Joseph Oliver of Stonesfield near Woodstock gave a first-hand account of life in a Victorian workhouse in the 1860s. Although Oliver was perfectly literate thanks, he said, to a good education at the village school as a boy, due to his failing eyesight his words were taken down by workhouse chaplain the Revd W. Saunders. Probably what brought Oliver to Saunders’ particular notice was his participation in the battle of Waterloo; in a precursor of the late twentieth-century realisation that the small group of survivors of the First World War was dwindling, there was an upturn in interest in veterans of the final battle against Napoleon. Saunders explains frankly in Charles Dickens’ periodical All Around the Year that, ‘The following memoir was not actually written down on paper with pen and ink by the narrator himself, but it is a transcript of notes made during the old man’s narration, and is in truth what it professes to be: the real uninterpolated history of a genuine soldier of 18 June 1815, given as nearly as possible in the veteran’s own vernacular.’ Oliver’s military memoir is published elsewhere with, it must be acknowledged, quite a few interpolations and, happily for Oxfordshire historians, his original narration of that story to Saunders also included the details of day-to-day life in the Woodstock Union workhouse which are reproduced here for the first time since 1866.

Joseph Oliver was born in Stonesfield in 1792. The Oliver men, like most of the menfolk in the village, worked in the local hillside quarries. Stonesfield slate was reputedly the best, lightest and least porous of roofing materials. The slates were created by the splitting action of frost on fissile rock, and they were in use by the seventeenth century at a time when there was rapid building development in the region. At nineteen, somewhat harassed by the family of the young woman he was courting, Oliver went into Oxford to sign up with the local militia and then transferred to the Rifles.