Boarding out was the practice of placing workhouse children with foster families, usually for a weekly allowance. During the 1870s people became less inclined to support the institutionalisation of children, and more likely to support a move towards Scotland’s more family friendly model of boarding out/foster care.1 Research on fostering/boarding out in the other United Kingdom (particularly England) between 1800 and the passing of the 1926 Adoption Act is limited. Historians have examined legislative changes regarding childcare (and child abuse), including the 1872 Infant Life Protection Act and changes to Poor Law legislation. Much scholarship on fostering/boarding out concerns its administration, including the effects of (changing) legislation, religion, and region.2 There is much scholarly work about children within institutions and their adoption from them; though fostering and boarding out are touched upon, they remain largely peripheral in such studies.3 There is also work on child emigration schemes and individual agencies. There is little scholarly work on the boarding out/fostering of children from individual workhouses, and less on informal networks of care that facilitated the fostering of children (its practice, experiences, and effects).
After 1870 the Poor Law Guardians were authorised to place young orphans into foster homes to be trained in domestic work. Several (but not all) Poor Law Unions across England adopted their own Boarding Out Committees and practices, something we can gain an insight to via the holdings of local archives and record offices.4 In 1897, the Lincoln Union set out the terms of its boarding out programme:
‘The definition of “orphans and Deserted” Children includes all children above the age of two years, who, by death, desertion or permanent disability of their parents, are virtually orphans. The number of this class at present in the Workhouse is only about twenty, but the Committee unhesitatingly recommend that all children so qualified, be Boarded-Out in villages, with carefully selected Foster Parents willing to take them, and to bring them up as their own children, thus securing to them the benefit of home care and training.’
While this relates to the Lincoln Union, there is nothing to suggest Lincolnshire’s other Poor Law Union’s did not take the same approach. The minute books of Lincolnshire’s various Boarding Out Committees contain snippets of information that can be woven together to form some understanding of boarding out in the county in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The names of boarded out children, and the names and addresses of their foster parents, make up the bulk of direct information, but there are also some letters and observations about individual cases that provide a deeper insight into the system and experiences of it.
In the late 1920s a four-year-old-girl who was boarded out with a married couple in Timberland, Lincolnshire, developed pneumonia and meningitis. She was ‘seriously ill’, required round-the-clock nursing care, and was eventually transferred to the Sleaford Poor Law Infirmary for treatment. The day before the transfer, and presumably because the girl was very sick, the Clerk of the Kesteven County Council arranged for her biological mother, who was a patient at Rampton Hospital (for the mentally ill), to visit her. While she was hospitalised the girl’s foster parents wrote to the Sleaford Union to inform them of a change of address, to invoice them for the ‘medical extras’ they had paid for while the girl was at home, to express hope that the girl was ‘improving’ and their desire ‘to have her back with us again as soon as you think she is strong enough.’ The girl improved and returned to her foster parents, who had moved thirty miles away from where they’d previously lived (and to a district under a different Poor Law Union, from Sleaford to Lincoln). Her foster parents wrote to the Lincoln Union and asked for their boarding-out allowance to be increased, but the Guardians believed they were still the responsibility of the Sleaford Union who, after some back and forth, refused to increase the allowance (or provide additional money for clothing) but agreed to cover the costs of any medical extras, demonstrating the complexity of administration and also revealing interesting ideas about where responsibilities extended to and where they stopped. Upon return to her foster home, the child received a box of toys, sent via the Guardians, from an unknown person.
This is an interesting case that raises questions about the motivations and experiences of foster parents, the role of biological parents and their relationship with the state, their child(ren) and foster parents, and the experiences of foster children. One key question (also asked by modern-day sociologists) is whether foster carers are motivated by love or money.5 In the above case it is not clear what motivated the foster parents to take in the child. Probably, like many other working-class foster families in the nineteenth century, taking in a foster child provided a small but meaningful income that could boost the household economy. But there was clearly some attachment to the girl – they sought (and paid for) medical care within their home (although they were later reimbursed), and they actively sought her return to them. It’s unclear why they asked the Lincoln Union for an increase in allowance (at this stage in the research it’s unclear if the Lincoln Union paid a higher allowance) but the response of the Sleaford Union suggests there may have been ongoing medical costs involved in caring for the girl.
The Lincolnshire records also provide a sense of who was applying to foster children. While several children were boarded out with men and women who bore no relation to them, several children were boarded out with their aunts, uncles or grandparents.6 It’s not always clear how this process started. It’s possible that such arrangements followed a period of informal fostering within the family, formalised once the child entered the workhouse for a period.7 This formalisation came with a clear income (arranged by the Boarding Our Committee), just as it also did when children were boarded out with non-biologically related foster parents. There is certainly a sense, from both the boarding out committee members, and children’s biological relatives, that keeping families together was an important motivation (fuelled in some cases, perhaps, by a sense of obligation as well as love and attachment). This might mean, where possible, boarding out siblings together, or trying to ensure a child was boarded out with relatives, providing a sense of security, familiarity. In one case, two siblings (girls) were each boarded out with one uncle, suggesting a desire to keep the girls within the family but (for unknown reasons, perhaps space within the home) they had to live separately. The records provide an insight into the lives and feelings of foster carers (during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries): the anxiety of having a sick child (a foster mother writing about the ‘poor boy’ in her home who started having nightly fits, for instance), potential money worries (perhaps signified by asking for an increase in weekly allowance). Foster carers shared many of the same worries as other working-class parents: they wanted to care for and guide their children, and they were attached to them.
When we combine an analysis of the Poor Law records with the records of the Lincoln Girls’ (Penitence) Home, this becomes clearer. The foster parents of an older child, an ‘illegitimate’ girl, whose mother was dead, appear to have had difficulties. In 1902, the girl was first sent to St Swithin’s Home, Lincoln (a home for “fallen” girls and women), before being transferred to the Girls’ (Penitence) Home (the typical stay was two years during which girls would work and be trained, and after which they’d go into service). It was recorded, the girl ‘has got quite out of hand and was constantly going about the streets with the boys and had bad companions. She has been twice in service but left for stealing money. She is very small and ignorant’. Perhaps hoping for a more stable life for the girl, or maybe having been cajoled into it, her foster parents initially agreed to pay for her weekly maintenance at the Girls’ Home. One month later they asked for her to be returned to them and she went home. It’s possible they reconsidered who provided her care based on the loss of important earnings. Perhaps they feared she’d be sent away like the many other girls who were sent to work in different counties. In this case, when the girl was first admitted it was noted in the Ladies’ minutes that her foster parents didn’t want her to be sent away from Lincoln. It’s almost impossible to guess, but this case indicates that the foster parents like felt a combination of fear and frustration towards the child’s behaviour as well as an enduring attachment to them.
The experiences of foster children are almost impossible to see in the records: their feelings often mattered very little to welfare administrators. A child’s actions (e.g. absconding) are sometimes recorded, as are their illnesses and house moves. Some children were removed from their foster home after their foster parent became ill, others were removed after the continued suitability of their foster parent was questioned. In one case a foster parent’s biological child gave birth to an illegitimate child which raised questions about the family’s suitability to care for a foster child. While the position of the Lincolnshire Unions appears to have been that boarding out was preferable to institutionalisation, it was impossible to find some children, particularly if they were Roman Catholic, a foster home within Lincolnshire.8 These experiences were likely to elicit feelings of displacement, fear, and powerlessness in some children. But other children undoubtedly had positive experiences, forming life-long attachments to their foster families and siblings (as scholars have uncovered), but these are unrecorded in the archives.
The Lincolnshire Poor Law records (which comprise mainly of committee meeting minutes) are simultaneously numerous, patchy and vague. What’s not clear from the records is the why? Why were children institutionalised/boarded out? Why did they abscond? Why did foster parents volunteer their homes? Why did foster parents send children back? The records don’t usually tell us much, if anything, about the experiences of children, foster parents or biological parents. In researching boarding out/fostering in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries much of the information in these records can be used as a starting point. Further research into the case that began this piece has been simultaneously illuminating and frustrating. The young girl was an only child born to a single mother, she went on to marry twice (widowed both times), and she had two children, several grandchildren and a great grandchild. I know the ages of her grandparents, aunt and uncle. She died in the early twenty-first century. Further information relating to her fostering experience hasn’t yet been uncovered (it’s unclear why, for instance, her aunt or uncle were either unable to care for her or considered unsuitable), and her mother’s hospital records are (understandably) closed. The 1931 census, which might’ve shed further light on her circumstances (and those of her foster parents), has been destroyed by fire. Despite this, such cases highlight important themes and issues requiring further exploration, particularly regarding boarding out/fostering: ideas about family, community, childhood, region. These themes feed into bigger questions and tensions (first raised in the nineteenth century) about what foster care is, what it should look and feel like. It’s impossible to know for sure without access to further records (which might not exist), but that the young girl’s mother was able to visit her daughter when she very ill (perhaps fearing she might die), knowing – and seeing – that she was being cared for (when she was unable to care for her herself) might have brought some comfort (even if it was combined with anguish and fear).