Wendy Tagg's Uckfield: Workhouse runs - Uckfield

My 3 previous posts visited the parish workhouses of Uckfield, Framfield and Buxted. In the 1830s, these were superseded by a single, Union workhouse at Uckfield located in Ridgewood around the place where Wares Road and Highview Lane meet.

Uckfield Union Workhouse

The Union Workhouse

Uckfield Poor Law Union was formed from about a dozen parishes on 25th March 1835. A new Uckfield Union workhouse, 3 stories tall and designed to accommodate 350 inmates, was built in 1838-9. Ron Martin's article "Casual Wards at Uckfield Union Workhouse" in Hindsight Volume 2 tells us that facilities included: male and female accommodation, dining room kitchen, offices and board room, nursery, wash-house, disinfectant house and workshops. The presence of a school mistress in the 1881 census suggests a classroom.

Site of the Union Workhouse. Pleasant houses and colourful gardens.

It has since been demolished and pleasant-looking houses with colourful gardens now fill the site. The area between the workhouse and New Road comprised fields in which the inmates would have been expected to grow vegetables in the same stubborn clay that Wares Pottery used to make their tiles and pots.

Looking at the old censuses, plenty of local names jump off the page. One name, in particular catches my attention.

1841 - Charlotte Langridge, F, age 10, born Sussex

There are Langridges from the Dane Hill part of my family tree. Could Charlotte be connected somehow? How did she end up in the workhouse?

The 1851 census shows that she is still at the union workhouse and that other Langridges have arrived. namely 68-year old William Langridge and his wife. William was born in the parish of Newick and married Fletching girl, Martha Thorp in September 1807. He worked as a farm labourer and they raised a family in Fletching before ending their days in the Uckfield Union workhouse.

Charlotte Maria's record on the Weald website shows that she was William and Martha's grandchild. Their first child, Jane, was born in 1807, not long after they married. She had three illegitimate children with different men. The first two, Philip and John, were born and died in the Fletching workhouse. The third, Charlotte Maria survived and must have been transferred to the Union workhouse in Uckfield before she was 10 years old.

So are we related? A bit of burrowing on the Weald website gave me the answer. Going back six generations from Charlotte Maria, I find myself in the England of 11th September 1675. The civil war had ended 24 years previously and King Charles II is on the throne. In London, the reconstruction of St. Paul's Cathedral has just started. In the rather more modest surroundings of St Andrew & St Mary Church, Fletching, John Langridge (born 1655 in Horsted Keynes) married Anne Hysted (born 1655). They had six children. The second youngest, William (born 1862) was Charlotte Marie's ancestor. The youngest, George (born 1863) was mine. So we are related. I am assuming that Charlotte ended up in the workhouse because she was illegitimate. There is illegitimacy in my Langridge line too - but my ancestor was lucky, she and the father of her children moved in together and later married and, as far as I know, no one ended up in the workhouse.

The Casual Wards block

Highview Lane, which led down to the workhouse's casual wards.

The Hindsight article goes on to explain that, about 60 years after the Union workhouse was built, the casual wards block (vagrants lodge) was added. This long, low building had a central corridor with individual cells for the overnight occupants. Male and female accommodation were separate. There were 7 cells for men. Each had an adjacent stone-breaking cell. Cells had hooks for hammocks and high windows. The 2 women's cells were similar but with no stone-breaking cell.

The last run

The last of my workhouse runs took me to the site of the Uckfield Union workhouse. by finding out a little about the inmates I found a distant relation whose family, like mine on the Langridge side, were agricultural labourers. I saw how small differences in a family's fortunes and maybe a bit of luck enabled my ancestors to scratch along OK while she ended up in a workhouse, a significant distance from her home village. Coming up to date, so far I have been one of the lucky ones but I am all too aware that this could change with a fall in share prices and a couple of other quirks of fate, which is why I have been running in aid of Shelter.

https://raiseyourrun.shelter.org.uk/fundraising/wendy-tagg-in-aid-of-shelter