Richard and Jane Reeves, Workhouse Managers

 Great Marlow workhouse was in what we now call Munday Dean Lane but was then often called Workhouse Lane, on the edge of the town.

In 1835 the Bucks Gazette* carried an advert for an "intelligent master" for the place. The successful applicant needed to be a married man with a wife willing to act as the workhouse matron. Wages were to be £100 a year for the two of them together. This was about the standard wage in the region for such a master / matron work team, though some complained it was extravagant.

Richard and Jane Reeves were probably the successful applicants as they were running the workhouse by the time of the 1841 census. I can find no adverts for replacement staff in between times, and such posts were widely advertised.

With them in 1841 were two teenage children, William and Jane junior.

Richard on a later census said he was born Greys Oxfordshire which is likely Rotherfield Greys. Jane said she had come all the way from Yorkshire. Their children I found were baptised at Wooburn Bucks.

The Great Marlow workhouse had benefited from some renovation and improvement 1836, not to make the paupers within more comfortable of course but to further plans to close as many local workhouses as possible and cram their inmates into just 2 premises. One of these was to be at Bledlow and one at Great Marlow. 

As part of the same changes the poor were no longer to be given money to help them survive, only bread. Landlords and shopkeepers of course didn't except bread as payment so if the poor couldn't support themselves entering the workhouse became their only option. In order to compensate the authorities for the food and shelter provided at the institution adults inmates were made to work (for no other pay). At Marlow this work then consisted largely of digging gravel out of fields bought for the purpose near the workhouse. 

This work may have had little real economic benefit but there was an oft repeated belief that given the chance poor people would never work, only laze about waiting to be fed bread and handed money so they needed to work at something every day in order not to lose the habit. Of course such beliefs were not universal. Even in the 1840s there were those who angrily questioned how people who employed servants to personally avoid doing any hard work felt qualified to make pronouncements on the subject of other people's "idleness".

While the adults worked outside the children were supposed to be receiving an education. Later Victorian reports suggest the workhouse children had attended the Oxford Road infant school but on the 1841 census there was a schoolteacher on the workhouse premises who was responsible for educating the children directly.  

The census shows far more children than adults in the workhouse. The youngest was just 4 days old. 

Though quite well paid it must have  been a stressful job to run the institution. The new system of refusing to give out of workhouse financial relief caused great resentment. Robert and Jane may have felt some of that in person. Fiction tends to paint workhouse managers as awful people. The Reeves however took up their role early on in this new workhouse system regime when it was largely untested. They may have been part of the (minority) of people who hoped that the poor would benefit from it by higher wages. If a farmer gave a worker a miserably low wage under the old system they knew that the local parish would top up the wages to a slightly less miserable level by way of poor relief. Under the new system without that extra money workers would become destitute and have to give up their jobs for the workhouse leaving farmers and other employers without enough available workers. If they wanted to continue as businesses the thinking went employers would have to pay their workers sufficient wages to actually live on. It had logic as a theory, but it didn't prove true.

An anonymous letter writer to the local papers in 1840 accused the Marlow workhouse of being one of the worst run and said that the managers (who he did not name) were too lax in their supervision of the inmates. The inmates could be found consorting about the town with criminal elements it was said, while the children were not escorted to Sunday school. He or she also thought that the female residents were mainly there because they needed to support illegitimate children, with the implication that it was not sufficiently strict enough to provide a determent from immorality. 

Richard and Jane had left their workhouse jobs by the 1851 census (no earlier than 1843) to become publicans at the Ship Inn West Street. In 1843 the Wycombe Union had opened a central Workhouse at Saunderton to replace the local workhouses. 

By 1863 Jane was a widow running the pub alone. Following her death her daughter in law Sarah (son William's wife) would become the landlady.

The workhouse buildings survive in a private residential capacity.

More Information: 

Poverty in Victorian Marlow here

The most famous person to be born in Great Marlow Workhouse was John Richardson. See here

For complete landlord listings for The Ship see this post. More pub related posts can be found on the menu  here

For every mention of someone on this blog see the Person Index in the top drop down menu. There are now 6,000 people listed there with more added weekly. 

Written and researched by Charlotte Day. Additional research by Kathryn Day. 

Sources:

Censuses from microfilm images 

* Paper copy from the British Library accessed via the BNA August 1st 2020.

Wooburn parish registers.

Annual Report Of the Poor Law Commissioners Volume 1. 1835. Copy from Bavarian State Library digitized by Google.

© Marlow Ancestors.  You are very welcome to use this information for family or local history purposes if you credit this blog and link here.