The Bristol Female Mission Society, 1859-1884: Prevention ...
The Bristol Female Mission Society, 1859-1884: Prevention or Cure?
Gill James, PhD student, University of the West of England
This case study was prompted by my reading two articles for the MA module ‘The Bristol Poor’. The first was the chapter on ‘Immorality and the Poor’ in the Report of the Committee appointed by the Bishop of Bristol to Inquire into the Condition of The Bristol Poor, which was published in 1884[1]. The second was Paula Bartley’s essay ‘Preventing Prostitution: the Ladies Association for the Care and Protection of Young Girls in Birmingham, 1887-1914’, which was published in 1998 in the Women’s History Review.[2]
In the Report of the Committee there was a description of the work done by the two Branches of the Bristol Female Mission Society. This attracted my attention for two reasons. Firstly because it was noted that the Mission was run by women for women and without male assistance. And secondly that one of the aims of the Mission was to prevent young girls from becoming prostitutes through a programme of education, training and by the provision of a support network. A visit to the Bristol Record Office revealed that the Mission had begun this work in 1859 more than a quarter of century before the Ladies’ Association, was established in Birmingham.
Paula Bartley records that Ladies Associations sprang up all over the country in the 1880s to prevent prostitution by providing educational groups, night shelters, clubs, hostels and registry offices and training homes for domestic servants.[3] The work of the Ladies Associations sounded very familiar from my reading of the Bristol Female Mission’s Annual Reports. Another document that we had discussed in the ‘Bristol Poor’ was a report of a paper read by Frances Power Cobbe at the Meeting of the Association for the Promotion of Social Science held at Dublin in August 1861 and published in the English Woman’s Journal on November 1 in the same year. Entitled, The Preventive Branch of the Bristol Female Mission it described the work being done by the Mission in Bristol, in accordance to a plan conceived by Miss Stephen of Clifton. The article claimed that this work was revolutionary, for rather than helping girls who had already succumbed; the Mission aimed to ‘save them from falling’.
Background:
Bristol in the 1820s had the unenviable reputation of being one of the most over-crowded cities in England. In the inner city courts, houses originally built for one family, were occupied by as many families as there were rooms, in severe cases, it was reported, that a single room could house several families.[4] These rooms lacked a proper water closet, had no drains and were supplied with water by a single tap that often served the needs of the whole court. Unemployment was high, and outdoor relief for a man, wife and 5 children was 10s 1d a week, put of which rent could account for as much as 3s 6d.[5] In response to this overcrowding a ‘few conscientious non-conformist employers’ founded the City Mission in 1827, with the aim of improving the living conditions for the poorer inhabitants of Bristol.[6] Their wives formed a Ladies’ Committee and in 1851 appointed a female missionary to work amongst the poor women in St Judes. In 1855 the Ladies Committee separated from the City Mission. Founded as the Bristol Female Mission Society it widened its scope and became a non-sectarian society.[7] It is the work of the Mission that this study will discuss.
That prostitution was a growing problem in Bristol in the early years of the nineteenth-century is supported by the number of institutions and societies formed with the aim of the moral reformation of those considered to have ‘fallen’ or to be in danger of ‘falling’. In Bristol a Female Penitentiary or Magdalen House was established in 1800 for the reception of females, who, ‘having strayed from the paths of virtue, desire to recover their lost character’.[8] In 1813 the Bristol Female Refuge Society opened a Home in Marlborough Hill. It was founded for the ’same benevolent purposes’ as the Penitentiary and provided shelter for women rescued from a life of sin.[9] In Bristol, as in other towns and cities throughout Britain, the primary goal of such institutions was to provide an alternative to the streets, prison or the poorhouse for the newly fallen and victims of seduction. There was never any intention of rescuing women well established in the profession, or those prostitutes with criminal records.[10] In this respect the Bristol Female Mission was no different, its missionaries aimed to encourage the ‘newly fallen’ to voluntarily enter the Penitentiary in Upper Maudlin Street. They did, however, work with the sick, diseased and dying, providing nursing care and encouraging repentance for their lives of sin.
Following its break with the City Mission the Bristol Female Mission Society employed two missionaries to work amongst the prostitutes in St James, St Judes and St Michael’s, the three Bristol parishes identified as having the highest number of brothels and the worst problems with prostitution in the entire City.[11] Besides attempting to ‘rescue’ young women, the two missionaries had been instrumental, due to their knowledge of the areas, in preventing several young and innocent girls, who had come to Bristol in search of work, from falling into the clutches of known ‘pimps and madams’.[12] These young women were, the Committee decided, vulnerable because they lacked employment so a decision was made to establish a Free Register Office. [13] This was opened in January 1859 at 3 Park Row and operated as an employment agency, finding ‘suitable’ candidates employment as domestic servants.
For the redemptive work to succeed the Committee realized that the girls must not only be trained, outfitted and placed in suitable posts, but they must also be visited regularly in their situations, received back if they failed (in one case this happened 10 times) and given a home to come to in their free time, or in times of sickness or adversity.[14] Thus the Mission became both parent and friend to the girls. The Committee recognized that these girls had to struggle not only against circumstances but also against faults of character and lack of early training. Without continued encouragement and personal help from the Mission, the Committee concluded that most girls would not avoid the temptation to sin.
It is the supervision of the young women that makes the work of the Mission stand out from other philanthropic provision in Bristol. Not only were the young women visited monthly to ensure that they were being properly supervised by their employer, but the Mission also provided other benefits to those in who stayed in employment. At the Free Register Office girls could purchase, for the cost of the materials, suitable clothes and attend classes in religious instruction. The Mission also offered a savings scheme which paid interest on the money banked at the rate of 2d for every shilling saved, a sick club and a Friendly Society which organized regular social events, summer outings, and winter tea parties and for those that remained in continuous employment a cash prize.[15]
That domestic service was seen as the most appropriate work for respectable lower class women by most philanthropic societies is difficult to understand. G. P Merrick, a clergyman involved in rescue work amongst the ‘fallen’ in London between 1870-90, kept records of the women he interviewed. His findings suggest that somewhere between 40% and 50% of patients in Lock Hospitals had been employed as domestic servants before becoming prostitutes.[16] There was, however, little choice for most women, for factory work could be irregular and poorly paid and like shop work left young women unsupervised in the evenings, a particular worry as evenings were considered to be time that young women were at most risk of falling into bad company.
In the first year of operation, nearly six hundred girls applied to the Free Register Office of which just over 200 ‘suitable’ young women had been found employment. The success of the Free Register Office, however, highlighted an unforeseen problem. The Matron in charge, Mrs. Bartholomew, reported to the Committee that many of the applicants were ‘ignorant of duties expected of them in domestic service’.[17] To remedy this shortcoming, the Mission’s Committee resolved to open a Training School, which was to be called the Preventive Home, where girls between the ages of 12 and 16 would be taught the duties expected of a domestic servant.[18] This training would, the Committee believed, prevent these girls from falling prey to prostitution. Opened in late 1859 at 4 Lower College Green the Home provided accommodation for 18 girls at any one time. Thus by 1860 the Mission was not only seeking out young women who had fallen but was also providing an alternative to the streets and brothels by training and finding employment for the vulnerable, whilst at the same time helping to fulfill the almost insatiable demand for efficient and inexpensive servants in Victorian Bristol.[19]
The Preventive Branch of the Mission took on the responsibility for running both the Free Register Office and the Preventive Home, leaving the Rescue Branch to continue its work amongst the prostitutes in the brothels and the sick in the workhouses and hospitals. Between 1859 and 1884 around eighty-one thousand visits were made by the missionaries, a figure which equates to around 10-20 visits per day depending on the number of missionaries employed.[20] These women worked a six day week, from early morning to late into the night for a salary of £50 a year. The success rate for the Rescue Branch appears relatively very small with just over one thousand two hundred young women helped in the 21 years for which records survive, this equates to an average of 58 per year, compared to an average of 114 girls who passed through the Preventive Home each year. The majority of those helped either entered the Penitentiary, The Temporary Home in Southwell Street or were, occasionally, found employment as domestic servants under the auspices of the Free Register Office.
An additional activity of the missionaries was to encourage couples living in sin to marry. In 1864 the Committee reported that an unmarried couple who kept a brothel, had been ‘helped’ to give up their life of vice, marry and were now ‘living a good Christian life’ and that their home was ‘respectable and happy’.[21] The Committee always noted its successes in such terms, reporting that those who accepted the hand of friendship were ‘grateful, penitent, remorseful, repentant and were ‘showing true sorrow for their previous life’, whilst those who refused help were ‘willful, ungrateful, bad-tempered, depraved, proud, and ‘haughty of spirit”.[22] In the use of such language the Ladies of the Committee showed a typical middle-class view of those below, there was no acceptance that the working-classes had a different set of values. Moreover the Ladies expected gratitude and were hurt and upset when spurned, this attitude also created a dependency that appears to have been common to all Magdalen provision. (Both Frances Finnegan and Linda Mahood noted the same in their work of similar provisions in Glasgow and York.[23])
The BFMS was supported entirely by private subscription, donations and collections, with the majority of subscribers being middle-class married women.[24] The sums raised were quite considerable. The rescue branch’s income averaged £123 per year and the preventive branch £514. From the early 1870s the Rescue Branch’s income barely covered the salaries of the two missionaries.
This situation led to the Committee’s recommendation not to replace one of the missionaries in April 1884. [25] In contrast the income of the Preventive Branch never dropped below £500 after 1869. Lynda Nead suggests that this was because many Victorians felt more willing to contribute to towards preventing prostitution than rescuing those who had already sinned. It was felt that the fallen were likely to return to prostitution, thus wasting time, effort and money.[26]
In 1861 the Mission expanded its operations by opening a Factory Home at Barton Hill and a Free Register Office in St. Phillips. Unfortunately both were to close in the same year.[27] The Factory Home, next to a Cotton Factory, where ‘girls totally unfit for service’ had been found employment, aimed to provide protection in the potentially dangerous evenings. Unfortunately the lack of cotton imports due to the Federal blockage on the Confederate Southern ports forced the factory to close. Whilst the running costs for the St Phillips’ Free Register Office proved to be too great for the numbers registering for work. In contrast the success of the Preventive Home meant that by 1862 the house at Lower College Green had become too small for the numbers applying for admittance. So the Mission purchased larger premises in Fort Lane, off St Michael’s Hill.[28] The new home, Royal Fort House could accommodate upwards of 42 girls.[29] It continued to function there until 1937, although latterly as a home for mentally deficient girls.[30] Girls were admitted to the Home by either recommendation or more usually from attending a Probationary Sewing Class held at Royal Fort daily between 2 and 4 p.m. (There was another class held at Lewins Mead on two afternoons a week for the ‘shoeless unable to go as far as College Green’).[31] Also in 1862 the Register Office moved to 8 Lower Park Row. Within these larger premises a Free Lodging House was established, which provided accommodation between jobs or in times of sickness for the young women in the care of the Mission.[32]
Thus the aim of the Preventive Branch was to train young girls carefully in domestic service, including laundry and sewing, and to provide lessons in the three R’s. The Ladies of the Committee were closely involved in the lessons because it was felt that the girls would gain much advantage from contact with educated ladies, whose example was considered to be very necessary for the girls training.[33] The Home’s laundry and sewing class also provided much needed income. The sewing class provided the ready made clothes that were sold at the Register Office and the laundry provided not only a service for local families at ‘very competitive rates’, but provided a similar service at cost for the Ladies of the Committee. This service, however, depended very much on the abilities of the girls in the Home at the time and on several occasion the Ladies were asked to make other arrangements for their household’s linen.
The Mission Committee
Who were these women who gave so much time to the work of the Mission? From the Censuses I have identified the members of both Committees and some of the Founding Committee. For the most part, as you can see from the Handouts of The Founding Committee, 1855, the Preventive Branch 1874 and the Rescue Branch 1879 the Committees were drawn from the upper and middle classes. Most of the single women ran their own households, either alone or with relatives; all had servants and were of independent means.[34] The married committee members were the wives of merchants, ministers and professional men and employed at least two servants. Mrs. Annie May, a member of the founding Committee had six indoor servants and employed a coachman.[35] Relatively few of the BFMS’s Committee members belonged to the LNA, the exceptions being Mrs. J. P. Budgett, Miss Leonard and Miss Marriott who also sat on the Lock Hospital Committee.[36] Also none of the members of either Committee are mentioned by Heloise Brown as active in the Suffrage Movement in Bristol.[37]
Staffing was always a problem for both Branches; the Annual Reports frequently mention the need to find new employees. The longest serving missionary was Miss Hannah Denyer who worked for the Mission for six years (1858-1864) – she was forced to resign her position due to ill-health, the most common reason for missionaries to leave the Mission employ.[38] When in 1873 Miss Eliza Leonard resigned as both Secretary and Superintendent for the Preventive Home there followed an unsettled period. During 1874 the Head Matron of the Home changed twice, unfortunately the Annual Report for 1875 is missing, but from the 1876 report it appears that the problems of appointing a suitable Head Matron were ongoing. Miss Talbot who had replaced Miss Leonard as Secretary and Superintendent resigned in 1876 and the Head Matron (not named) was replaced by the second Matron.[39] This unsettled period ended1877 when Miss Gertrude Savill, who had been on the Preventive Branch Committee since 1874 became Secretary and Superintendent, a position she was to hold for over twenty years.[40] She was assisted throughout this period by Rose Coleman and Head Matron Blanche Whiteway.[41] Unfortunately the Reports do not tell us what the problems were, but the Committee did expect the Matron to be at their beck and call and required that two members of staff were in the home at all times.[42]
The average age of the girls received into Royal Fort Home was 13 years and one month, and the average stay in the Home was just under six months. Whilst the majority of girls came from Bristol and the immediate counties of Gloucestershire and Somerset others came from as far afield as Ireland and America. Importantly the Mission required, before any girl could enter the Home, the parent or guardian to sign an agreement giving care and control to the Committee, plus the agreement stated that what ever the girl earned in the Home went into the common fund.[43] This action effectively severed all familial links and created a dependency on the Mission. It was seen as important that the girls were admitted before they did wrong with the emphasis being that help was given before they could ‘fall into bad influence’. Once admitted to the Home girls stayed according to the amount of teaching required to ‘fit them for humble service’ and until they could be provided with a suitable place, unless, of course, their conduct was bad or they became ill, when they would be returned to their family or guardian.[44]
Motives
What made the Bristol Female Mission Society stand out is the fact that unlike the other charitable provisions in the city dealing with prostitutes and young girls, the Mission was run and funded by women for women. What were the motives that made these women devote so much of their time to the rescue and prevention of prostitution? Both Finnegan and Mahood suggest that the fear that prostitution could infiltrate middle-class society and upset family values was a compelling reason; but can that explain the many hours these philanthropic women spent?[45] It has been suggested that female solidarity against prostitution could have been a persuasive reason, but Paula Bartley argues that the notions of female solidarity were misplaced and suggests that it was the well-regulated class context of power and authority that attracted middle-class women to societies such as the BFMS.[46] Such power and authority allowed both the Rescue and Preventive Branches of the BFMS to impose middle-class values on working-class women.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Bristol Record Office
41810/1/1 – Reports of the Bristol Female Mission Society, 1859-1913.
41810/3/1 – Elm House: 1855 - 1955 The History of a Mission.
40144/P/24 – Annual Report of the Old Park Lock Hospital for the Treatment of Women only, 31 December. 1878.
Bristol Reference Library.
20270 - Report of the Committee to ‘Inquire into the Condition of the Bristol Poor, 22 December 1884’ (London, P.S. King and Bristol, W. Lewis & Sons, 1885).
14683 – ‘Waifs and Wanderers in St Jude’s’, in The Homes of the Bristol Poor (Bristol, William Lewis & Sons, 1884), reprinted from the Bristol Mercury, 1884.
Census Enumerators’ Notebooks at
1861: RG9. Pieces 1721, 1722, 1723 and 1729.
1871: RG10. Pieces 2531, 2532, 2533 and 2534.
1881: RG11. Pieces 2475, 2476 and 2486.
Power Cobbe, Frances, ‘The Preventive Branch of the Bristol Female Mission’ The English Woman’s Journal Vol. VIII No. 46 (1 November 1861) pp 145-151.
Secondary Sources
Bartley, Paula, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England 1860-1914 (London, Routledge, 2000).
Brown, Heloise, Routes into Women’s History (Bristol, Bristol Historical Resource CD, 2000), The Dataset: Bristol women in philanthropy, 1850-1914.
Finnegan, Frances, Poverty and Prostitution: A study of Victorian prostitutes in York (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Mahood, Linda, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London, Routledge, 1990).
McHugh, Paul, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (London, Croom Helm, 1980).
Nead, Lynda, Myths of Sexuality (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988).
Trudgill, Eric, ‘Prostitution and Paterfamilias’ H J Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds) The Victorian City (London and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) pp. 693-705.
Walkowitz, Judith, R., Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Articles
Bartley, Paula, ‘Preventing Prostitution: the Ladies Association for the Care and Protection of Young Girls in Birmingham, 1877-1914 Women’s History Review, Vol. 7. No. 1, (1998), pp. 37-60.
Harrison, B., ‘Philanthropy and the Victorians’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 9 (1966), pp. 353-74.
Nash, Stanley, ‘Prostitution and Charity: The Magdalen Hospital, A Case Study’ Journal of Social History Vol. 17.4 (1983), pp. 617-628.
Prochaska, F. K., ‘Female Philanthropy and Domestic Service in Victorian Britain’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Vol. 54 (1981), pp. 79-85.
Thomas, Keith, ‘The Double Standard’ The Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. XX (1959), pp. 195-216.
Walkowitz, Judith, ‘Male Vice and Female Virtue: feminism and the Politics of Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 13, (1982), pp. 79-93.
Internet Sources
J. Bartholomew, Map of Bristol, Black’s Guide to Gloucestershire (Edinburgh, Adam & Charles Black, 1869) at (last updated September 23, 2003)
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[1] Report of the Committee to ‘Inquire into the Condition of the Bristol Poor, 22 December 1884’ (London, P.S. King and Bristol, W. Lewis & Sons, 1885).
[2] Bartley, Paula, ‘Preventing Prostitution: the Ladies Association for the Care and Protection of Young Girls in Birmingham, 1877-1914 Women’s History Review, Vol. 7. No. 1, (1998), pp. 37-60.
[3] Bartley, Paula, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England 1860-1914 (London, Routledge, 2000).
[4] The Report of the Conditions of the Bristol Poor, ‘Dwellings of the Poor’, page 34
[5] ‘Waifs and Wanderers in St Jude’s’, The Homes of the Bristol Poor by the Special Commissioner of the Bristol Mercury (Bristol, William Lewis, 1884), p. 26.
[6] Elm House: 1855 – 1955: The History of a Mission. (BRO 41810/3/1).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Report of the Committee to Inquire into the condition of The Bristol Poor, 22 December 1884, p. 216.
[9] Ibid, p. 217.
[10] Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London, Routledge, 1990), p. 159-60; Stanley Nash, ‘Prostitution and Charity: The Magdalen Hospital, A Case Study’ Journal of Social History Vol. 17.4 (1983), p. 619.
[11] ‘Waifs and Wanderers in St Jude’s’.
[12] The Centenary Report of Elm House: Home of Bristol Mission to Women and Girls (1955), p. 3.
[13] The Fourth Annual Report of The Bristol Female Mission Society (1859), p. 4.
[14] Power Cobbe, Frances, ‘The Preventive Branch of the Bristol Female Mission’ The English Woman’s Journal Vol. VIII No. 46 (1 November 1861) pp 145-151.
[15] Centenary Report, p. 4.
[16] G P Merrick, Work Amongst the Fallen as Seen in the Prison Cell (London, Ward & Lock, 1891).
[17] Power Cobbe, ‘The Preventive Branch’, p. 148.
[18] The First Report of the Preventive Branch (1861), p. 8.
[19] F. K. Prochaska ‘Female Philanthropy and Domestic Service in Victorian Britain’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Vol. 54 (1981), pp. 79 and 155.
[20] The Annual Reports give details of visits made in each year.
[21] The Ninth Report of the Rescue Branch, (1864), p. 5.
[22] The Fourth Report of the Rescue Branch, pp. 7-8.
[23] Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution: A study of Victorian prostitutes in York (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979); Mahood, Linda, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London, Routledge, 1990).
[24] The amounts given and the subscriber’s names were noted in the Annual Reports.
[25] The Twenty-ninth Report of the Rescue Branch (1884), p. 3.
[26] Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988), particularly Chapter 5 ‘The prostitute as Social Victim’, pp. 138-164.
[27] The Second Report of the Preventive Branch (1862).
[28] The Fifth Report of the Preventive Branch (1865), p. 21.
[29] 1881 Census Return, RG11, Piece, 2486, Folio 55.
[30] Centenary Report, p 4.
[31] The Thirteenth Report of the Preventive Branch (1872), p. 26; The First Report of the Preventive Branch (1861), p. 10.
[32] The Third Report of the Preventive Branch (1863), p. 13.
[33] The Thirteenth Report of the Preventive Branch (1872), p. 26
[34] Census Enumerators’ Notebooks, 1861: RG9. Pieces 1721, 1722, 1723 and 1729; 1871: RG10. Pieces 2531, 2532, 2533 and 2534; 1881: RG11. Pieces 2475, 2476, and 2486.
[35] 1881 Census: RG11, Piece 2502, p. 60
[36] It has not been possible within the time constraints of the study to make comparisons of the BFMS Committee with that of the Ladies Committee of the Female Penitentiary in Upper Maudlin Street.
[37] Heloise Brown, Routes into Women’s History (Bristol, Bristol Historical Resource CD, 2000), The Dataset: Bristol women in philanthropy, 1850-1914.
[38] The Ninth Report of the Rescue Branch (1864), p. 3.
[39] The Seventeenth Report of the Preventive Branch, (1876).
[40] The Eighteenth Report of the Preventive Branch, (1877)
[41] 1891 Census, RG12, Piece 1964, Folio 34, page 9.
[42] The Eighteenth Report of the Preventive Branch, (1877).
[43] The Thirteenth Report of the Preventive Branch (1873), p. 26.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution; Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century.
[46] Bartley, ‘Preventing Prostitution’, p. 40.
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