Look at the women on the benches.

This photo was taken in 1890 inside the Whitechapel Workhouse in London — the same street where Jack the Ripper killed just 2 years earlier.

Look at the women on the benches.  They are not in jail. They are poor.  In Victorian England, if you had no money, no husband, no job, you were sent here.  Their job today is picking oakum — tearing apart old, tar-covered ship ropes with their bare fingers to make new ropes for the Royal Navy.

 Their fingers bleed.  Their skin is burned by the tar. But they won't get any food if they stop. The matron is the woman in the black dress who walks with a cane. She will hit any woman who talks.  Silence was the rule.  From 6 AM to 8 PM, they sat here in this freezing stone hall with one tiny window, tearing ropes.

 See the children next to them?  They are 6, 7 years old.  In 1890 London, a child in a workhouse had to work too.  No school.  If a mother entered the workhouse, her children were taken from her and sent to a different room.  Sunday was the only day she could spend with them. They shared two straw beds and slept 50 people in one room at night. Dinner was watery gruel and a piece of bread with mold.

 What brought them here? Most are widows.  Their husbands died in factories.  Without a husband, there would be no house or money. The workhouse was the last place before the street.

 This is the London that Charles Dickens wrote about.  This photo is the reason he wrote Oliver Twist.

 This hell was just 136 years ago, in the heart of the British Empire.

   Writer: Binod Kumar Simkhada 

binodkumarsimkhada315@gmail.com