Monday 16 October – 7.30pm-9.00pm - Friends of Eastville Park Community Hub (Nissen Hut), Eastville Park, Near Park Avenue car park, Bristol BS5 6QG In 2015, to great public interest, Eastville Workhouse Memorial Group released details of more than 4,000 paupers who were buried in unmarked graves in Rosemary Green. These were inmates from Eastville Workhouse which was situated on the present-day East Park housing estate on Fishponds Road. The burials in Rosemary Green covered the period […]
Tag Index: Eastville Workhouse
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New pauper burial research at Greenbank cemetery
Introduction From 2014-2019 Eastville Workhouse Memorial Group (EWMG) studied Rosemary Green, a piece of land consecrated and used as a pauper burial ground soon after the new workhouse was built at 100 Fishponds Road in 1847. Eastville workhouse was the primary institution of the Clifton Poor Law Union which covered 12 parishes north of the River Avon outside the old city walls. In March 1877 the Clifton Poor Law Union was renamed as Barton Regis. The Union remained unchanged until 1898 when […]
Eastville Workhouse Memorial Group – Final Accounts
Eastville Workhouse Memorial Group (EWMG) was formed in 2014 after a public meeting with residents of Eastville and Greenbank in East Bristol. The primary aim of the group was to research and publish the names and details of the inmates from Eastville Workhouse who were buried in unmarked pauper graves at Rosemary Green. Information on the more than 4,000 burials was published in 2015 and is available on this website. In the two days after its release more than 3,000 people down loaded the data. […]
Bedminster Union Workhouse
The Life and Death of Hannah Wiltshire
Clevedon Library, 37, Old Church Rd, Clevedon BS21 6NN Author Rosemary Caldicott focuses on the draconian workhouse system that housed the vulnerable poor, and in particular women and children. Rosemary will be examining the history of the workhouse by offering an illustrated talk based on evidence extracted from reports published at the time about the violent death of Hannah Wiltshire who resided in Weston in Gordano. The involvement of Sir Arthur Elton of Clevedon Hall is pivotal to this true […]
An Alternative History of Westbury-on-Trym Workhouse
Gilbert’s Act of 1782. ‘An act for the better relief and employment of the poor’
In November, 2019 Louise Ryland-Epton gave an engaging talk entitled ‘By Pity and by Terror? A Contrary View of Workhouses’ at the M Shed, Bristol as part of the UWE Regional History Centre series of talks. As I had read and examined reports on shocking victimisation, neglect, exploitation and dehumanising treatment of later workhouse inmates I was intrigued to hear about an alternative, pre 1834 Poor Law Act, workhouse erected in Westbury-on-Trym. We are all familiar with the many indignant […]
‘Buried like Dogs?’
Pauper death and burial in Victorian Eastville
Elaborate funeral ceremonies became very important to middle-class Victorians, with increasingly meticulous rituals designed to mark the passing of family members. However, for the Victorian poor, things were very different. After the introduction of the 1834 Poor Law Act the customary pauper funeral, subsidised by the parish, came under government scrutiny as a financial and symbolic ‘extravagance’. Instead the need for Poor Law Unions to both save money and demonstrate disgrace in death of […]
The last piece of the jigsaw
Solving the mystery of the forgotten paupers of 100 Fishponds Road
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them Introduction One evening in 2010 some members of Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) were poring over some old maps of Eastville and discovered a forgotten burial ground at Rosemary Green, just round the corner from where they lived. Further investigation showed that the site was in fact the burial ground for Eastville Workhouse at 100 Fishponds Road, an enormous institution that had opened in 1847 and whose buildings were demolished […]
Pauper Graves Memorial Unveiling
1.00pm, Wednesday May 8th, Avonview Cemetery, Beaufort Road, St. George, Bristol, BS5 8EN
In 2012 Bristol Radical History Group launched a project to research into the thousands of unmarked graves of paupers from the Eastville workhouse (at 100 Fishponds Road) who were buried in nearby Rosemary Green. In 2014 the Eastville Workhouse Memorial Group (EWMG) was formed to commemorate and memorialise the 4,084 people who lived and died in Eastville workhouse and were interred at the site between 1851 and 1895, along with another 118 inmates' bodies which were sold to medical schools. In […]
Life and death in two Bristol Victorian workhouses
Congresbury History Group, Congresbury Methodist Hall, 2 High St, Congresbury, Bristol BS49 5JA Roger Ball, co-author of 100 Fishponds Rd: Life and death in a Victorian workhouse explains how a team of local researchers revealed that more than 4,000 men, women and children, inmates of Eastville Workhouse, were interred in unmarked graves in a burial ground that was forgotten for over a century. Rosemary Caldicott, author of The Life and Death of Hannah Wiltshire: A Case Study of Bedminster Union […]
Life and death in two Bristol Victorian workhouses
Clevedon Civic Society, St Andrew’s Church Centre, Old Church Road, Clevedon, BS21 7UE Rosemary Caldicott, author of The Life and Death of Hannah Wiltshire: A Case Study of Bedminster Union Workhouse tells the true story of how in 1850s the local community pulled together to uncover murder in the Flax Bourton workhouse. Roger Ball, co-author of 100 Fishponds Rd: Life and death in a Victorian workhouse explains how a team of local researchers revealed that more than 4,000 men, women and children, […]