WHEN we think of child cruelty during the Victorian period we often think of pauper ‘Oliver Twist’ orphans forced into hellish workhouses in the city slums.

But here in more rural Essex, records show treatment meted out to young children who were thrust into a life of servitude and apprenticeships or farmed out to households to work as little more than slaves, was equally as shameful.

In 1850 a farmer and his wife from Billericay were accused of terrible cruelty to 10-year-old Chelmsford workhouse girl who had been placed in their service.

The couple – ‘Mr and Mrs Boreham’ – both pleaded guilty to their mistreatment of Eliza Walker. The court heard a number of incidents involving the girl, including one night the farmer and his wife were out drinking and returned home late ‘in a state of drunkenness.’

“The poor child, worn out with fatigue, had lain down on a bed and fallen asleep, leaving the candle burning, upon which Mrs Boreham caused the child to strip herself naked, when they beat her to such an extent that her whole body was one mass of bruises and wounds, and so great was the injury that for several days the life of the poor child was despaired of,” the court heard.

“The appearance of the body was described as frightful from head to foot, to say nothing of the attendant indecent and revolting circumstances.”

The magistrates hearing the case expressed their horror and ‘detestation’ of the cruelty to the ‘poor helpless and inoffensive child’ and fined the couple jointly in the sum of £50.

In June 1893, an Essex woman named Selina Bickmore, of Broomfield Road, Chelmsford, was not treated so leniently by the courts. She was sentenced to two years hard labour after being found guilty of the gross neglect of one of her teenage servants.

The episode made headlines across the country and was deemed as one of the worst child cruelty cases to ever come before the Old Bailey. The case had to be moved to London from Chelmsford due to a local outcry over the scandal.

The court heard how 15-year-old Hetty Alderson had entered the service of the defendant, the wife of a cycle manufacturer, three months earlier. But her life was soon to be filled with beatings, brutal punishments and starvation.

The teenager was so badly starved in fact, that she had been seen to eat the food left out for the the chickens.

Ultimately, she managed to escape the house and went to a Salvation Army shelter in Chelmsford pleading for help.

“Her miserable state attracted attention, and on her making a statement proceedings were instituted against the defendant,” the court heard.

“Hetty was suffering from sores, which indicated, so the doctors said, that she was in a very bad state of health and had been ill-nourished and ill-clad.”

Just a year later, in 1894, a cruelty case at an Essex workhouse, again, made national headlines and caused a further scandal.

A nurse and overseer named Ella Gillespie who worked at the Hackney Union workhouse school in Brentwood, was booed and jeered as she was lead away from court after being sentenced to five years hard labour in prison.

The 54 year old had been found guilty of abusing dozens of young children in her care –most of them orphans who had been placed in the school attached to the workhouse – which stood on the north side of Brentwood Hill.

Among her victims was a seven-year-old girl named Eliza Clarke who had later died. The prosecution alleged that for eight years Gillespie had been guilty of systematic cruelty by thrashing the children on their bare backs with stinging nettles, knocking their heads against the walls, plunging their heads into pails of water and making them strip and kneel on hot water pipes.

Witnesses testified that Gillespie was regularly drunk and cleverly avoided detection of her crimes during surprise inspections by meeting inspectors outside the school and treating them to lunch first.

Many youngsters would have spent their early lives in the parish workhouse. Indeed numerous workhouses were scattered across Essex, to deal with the increasing problem of the poor.

A workhouse existed in New Street in Chelmsford from around 1716 then in 1837, a new Chelmsford Union workhouse was built at the west side of Wood Street, on a site known as Chelmsford Barracks Ground. The new workhouse could accommodate 400 men, women and children and cost £5,650 to construct.

The workhouse children were supposed to receive a half decent education, which would give them some shot at life outside, but this often did not happen.

Records show that for at least three years, from 1907-1910 the children in the Chelmsford Workhouse received no education whatsoever owing to an epidemic of ringworm.

One story from the Chelmsford Workhouse reveals just how inconsequential the inmates were – in death as much as in life.

Records show that in the summer of 1900 two women died in Chelmsford Workhouse on the same day. The friends of one of them attended her funeral at the Rectory Lane Cemetery.

The first part of the burial-service was read, and the coffin was being lowered into the grave, when it was discovered that the name-plate was that of the other woman who had died.

The incident was said to have caused “a painful feeling to the friends of the deceased women due to the misjustice.”

It took around two hours for the correct body to arrive and to be buried.