My name is Jim and I, along with Jade and Kate, am one of the Research Associates on the Caring Communities project. In my first blog post, I’m sharing how my background as a researcher has shaped the type of history I am interested in and how it is informing the work I’ve done on the project to date.
My interest in the history of children’s care is a long-standing one. Before returning to university, I worked as a social work assistant in both England and Scotland. As a result, I became interested in people who performed frontline care work in the past. My PhD research centred around childcare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, specifically women who took in other children in exchange for money – either in the form of a one-off payment or a weekly fee. The provision of such services was a by-product of a society that stigmatised birth outside marriage and yet, at the same time, did little to set up formal procedures for adopting or fostering children. While from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards there had been piecemeal schemes established by local government and voluntary agencies, legal adoption was not formally recognised until 1926 in England and Wales, 1929 in Northern Ireland and 1930 in Scotland. As such, informal arrangements made between parents and local carers catered to a pressing need in Victorian and Edwardian society and offered something to both parties involved in the transaction. Women- often single parents – who handed over their babies would be able to continue working, often all the hours possible, to support themselves and their child. The woman taking in that child would gain an income at a time when earning opportunities for working-class women were limited.
It should therefore come as no surprise that women were offering to take on other people’s children in exchange for payment in every major town or city in Britain, and the classified newspaper columns would regularly feature advertisements like this one that appeared in the Glasgow Herald on 24 September 1869:
Wanted an infant to nurse by a respectable married woman.
Address 7581 Apply Herald Office[i]
While no mention of payment was made in the advertisement, this ‘respectable married woman’ could expect to get a one-off fee of between £3-£15 or a weekly payment of between 3 and 8 shillings. In a rapidly growing city such as Glasgow, she would not be short of clients who were eager to find someone to take on the care of their child.
A Massacre of the Innocents?
The daily presence of these advertisements in papers, the length and breadth of Britain, began to attract the attention of prominent doctors, lawyers and politicians who began to speculate about the fate of the thousands of infants who changed hands in this matter. At a meeting held in London in 1867, Dr J. Brendon Curgenven made the extraordinary claim that women who took in children in exchange for money murdered them at a rate of 5,000 a year without being detected by the authorities.[ii] These concerns began to grow, and in 1868, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) described women who took in children as ‘baby farmers’.[iii] ‘Baby farmer’ is not a label a woman would seek to apply to herself and would be used to describe any childcare practices performed for money that the speaker found problematic. The construction of this two-word phrase by the BMJ was a clever one, farming is an economic activity and an unsentimental one at that, it involves acquiring, raising and slaughtering stock for maximum return. By labelling a woman as a ‘baby farmer’, it implied that all women who took in children for money were, at best, motivated solely by money and, at worst, callously acquiring children and murdering them to maximise their financial gain.
Claims like this were taken up by popular newspapers, and the Sun newspaper (unconnected to the current newspaper of the same name) ran a series of articles in which they alleged a widespread ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ was taking place, that rivalled that undertaken by the biblical figure of King Herod.[iv] While Curgenven had nothing to back up these claims of mass infant murder for money, seven women between 1867-1907 were executed after murdering infants they were paid to look after.[v] Among the most notorious of these women was Amelia Dyer, the so-called ‘Reading Baby Farmer’ who was arrested in 1896 after the corpses of seven infants were discovered in the River Thames.[vi] Dyer’s conviction and later execution led to press speculation that she had murdered up to four hundred infants, shortly after getting a lump sum payment from their parents. Dyer has secured lasting notoriety and has featured in true crime paperbacks, TV documentaries and is the subject of countless podcasts. However, attention-grabbing as the Dyer case is, it is only a partial and unrepresentative story of the diverse forms of paid care that helped parents and children to survive.
Baby minding or baby murder?
While the Dyer case generated newspaper columns and questions in the Houses of Parliament, it obscured the fact that most women who took in children for money did not murder them. As historians, we are not immune to being drawn to studying extraordinary people and sensational events and neglecting the everyday and the mundane. Indeed, where we as historians should focus our attentions on extortionary or ordinary lives is something that has been widely debated. Using the latter approach, Alison Light’s Common People uses the author’s unremarkable family history to tell a compelling and immensely readable story of social, economic and cultural change in nineteenth-century England.[vii] Similarly, I became increasingly interested in the cases where children taken for money were well looked after, and I was surprised that so few historians had looked in depth at informal fostering arrangements that worked well for both the child and the woman paid to look after them. I was keen to recover the relatively untold story of the many women who fostered children at an informal and local level – arrangements which left minimal trace in historical records, save for the briefest of glimpses in census documents and newspaper advertisements. While these functional forms of childcare performed for money are not necessarily as immediately compelling as the Dyer case, they are of perhaps greater historical significance in the context of twenty-first-century life. Working parents today are often reliant on diverse forms of paid childcare, and these Victorian and Edwardian care workers form an important part of the story of the development of modern-day care work. Moreover, the way that these workers were increasingly subject to scrutiny, legislation and inspection demonstrates how the state was more willing to intervene in the topic of how children should be looked after and by whom.
This research also provided an opportunity to reflect on some of the continuities in care labour history and the many inequalities that carers still face today. The historian Ellen Ross commented that in late nineteenth-century London, paid childcare was recognised as ‘poor women’s occupation … an alternative to charring or taking in washing.’[viii] In 2025, looking after other people’s children is still overwhelmingly performed by working-class women and their labour is devalued, underpaid, often treated with hostility in the press and subject to harsh criticism and misrepresentation when misconduct cases reach the media.
For love or money?
Arrangements were made at the community-level and between working-class women; they left extraordinarily little trace in the records. While we know plenty about what lawyers and politicians thought about women who performed childcare for money, one of the few times the women themselves appeared in the historical record is when something went very badly wrong and they ended up the subject of press attention or as the defendant in a criminal court. To get at the everyday realities of providing care labour, criminal court documents proved an incredibly useful source. To the dismay of historians everywhere, a lot of English and Welsh court papers have been destroyed, but I could, however, use the brilliant https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ website, which gives transcripts of cases tried at the Criminal Central Court – better known as the Old Bailey. Scotland has done a far better job of preserving court papers and examining the witness statements in the trial of Barbara McIntosh in 1881 for culpable neglect.[ix] I was struck by the way that McIntosh could draw upon local dignitaries, such as her local GP and the Church Minister’s wife, to give testimony to how well she performed her job. McIntosh’s ability to call upon a range of witnesses who testified to her good character suggests that within their communities, McIntosh and women like her were not always seen as deviant. It was also interesting to see the links McIntosh had with Edinburgh’s ‘respectable’ medical community. One of the defence witnesses was the Matron of the Royal Simpson Maternity Hospital, who had handed several infants over to McIntosh, seemingly with the consent of the hospital hierarchy.[x] From these documents, McIntosh was keen to present herself as a professional childcare practitioner offering a legitimate and necessary service.
I came across another incredible source in the archives of the London County Council, which, from the 1870s onwards, had a dedicated team that inspected the homes of women who offered informal fostering for money. These archives revealed some extraordinary and moving letters: one example that left an impression is one written by Annie Danston in March 1898 to one of the London County Council’s Infant Life Protection Officers.[xi] Danston had taken two children in exchange for a weekly payment from the parents. The parents, having handed over the children, promptly disappeared without paying a penny, and quite literally left Annie Danston holding the baby. It is worth observing that the informal nature and lack of legislation left childcare providers in an extremely vulnerable position; they were liable to be left with someone else’s child and with no means with which to provide for it. A fee of between 3-8 shillings a week left a very slim margin for the carer. As such, even a temporary halt in payment could cause financial hardship very quickly indeed. Indeed, this appeared to be the case with the Danston family; Annie Danston’s husband was seriously ill in hospital, and she owed her landlord over £1 in unpaid rent. Despite these devastating setbacks, Annie Danston’s letter revealed her desperation to do the best for the children she still felt morally, if not legally, obliged to take care of. Danston went to quite extraordinary lengths to fulfil her end of the bargain. The Council’s Infant Life Protection Officer reported to her superior that Danston and her husband had ‘sold or pawned all that they can part with and are denying themselves necessary food to provide sufficient for the infants in their care.’ [xii] While we cannot know for certain why Annie Danston did this, whether through an emotional bond with the children, moral considerations or simply that abandoning a child would damage her professional reputation, accounts like this chart an experience that is starkly different to the stereotype of the wicked and greedy baby farmer as embodied by Amelia Dyer.
Performing Care
With the research stage of the Caring Communities project now underway, those questions that shaped my PhD research have come back to the forefront of my mind. I have developed a particular interest in care work and how the stories of front-line carers are often left out of the research process. We can access a rich range of sources about wealthy benefactors who founded institutions for orphans, and official records give us a sense of how politicians, civil servants, and academics thought care work should be performed. We are also beginning to see historians give long-overdue attention to the testimony of care-experienced young people. However, the people with whom children had the most contact are often, if they feature at all, as bit part players in other people’s stories and like the women who featured in my PhD research, we generally don’t get to find out how they felt about their work and what attachment if any, they formed with the children they looked after without diving deep into the archives and thinking creatively about our sources.
Once such collection is in the archive of the Edinburgh Orphans’ Hospital, held at the National Records of Scotland.[xiii] Documents like job advertisements and applications give us a clear sense of what qualities staff were expected to possess or acquire when taking a job at the Edinburgh Orphans’ Hospital.[xiv] There is also a detailed handwritten ledger that lists staff rotas and cleaning regimes, which highlight long working hours and the sheer amount of drudgework that staff were expected to undertake.[xv] However, there are limits to what these records can tell us about the experiences of carers, including whether staff performed this exhaustive list of tasks in the regimented way prescribed in the book or what they thought about their work. But what really interests me is what is NOT included in these lists of duties and responsibilities. While the practical aspects of the job are covered in exhaustive detail, very little is said about how they should relate to the children or lay down any expectations of how they should relate to the children in their care, particularly those who might have experienced different forms of hardship before their admission.
Trying to piece together a history of the emotional worlds of care workers will allow us to consider the meaning of the word ‘care’ and what it meant to ‘care for’ a child at different places and times. We will also be able to tell a history of the emotional as well as physical labour expected of carers, and how the presence or absence of kindness shaped the lives of those in care.
[i] [No title]. Glasgow Herald 24 September 1869, p. 2.
[ii] J. Brendan Curgenven, The Waste of Infant Life: Read at a meeting of the health department of the national association for the promotion of social science, (London: 1867).
[iii] ‘Baby-farming’, BMJ, 21 December 1868, p. 570.
[iv] Massacre of the Innocents’, Sun, 31 October 1895, p. 2.
[v] Anette Ballinger, Dead woman walking executed women in England and Wales 1900-1955 (Aldershot: 2000), p. 65. The cases discussed by Ballinger are, Ada Chard Williams (executed 1900), Amelia Sach and Annie Waters (both executed 1903) and Rhoda Willis (executed 1907)
[vi] ‘The Reading horrors’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 3 May 1896, p.1
[vii] Alison Light, Common people: the history of an English family, (Harmondsworth: 2015).
[viii] Ellen Ross, Love and toil: motherhood in outcast London, 1870-1918, (New York:1993), p.136.
[ix] Indictment against Barbara Gray or McIntosh, 16 January 1881, High Court of Judiciary processes 1881, National Records of Scotland, JC26/1881/266/6
[x] Evidence of Mary Fraser or Mather, Precognition against Barbara Gray or McIntosh, 881. National Archives of Scotland, AD14/81/82
[xi] Letter, Jane Danston to Isobel Smith, 14 March 1898, LCC, Subject and Policy Files – Infant Life Protection Act, LMA, PH/GEN/1/1.
[xii] Special Report, March 1898, LCC, Subject and Policy Files – Infant Life Protection Act, LMA, PH/GEN/1/1.
[xiii] https://www.whocaresscotland.org/care-experienced-history/edinburgh-orphan-hospital/
[xiv] National Records of Scotland, Orphan Hospital (latterly Dean Orphanage) Applications for posts of warden, house governor and teacher. GD417/167
[xv] National Records of Scotland, Orphan Hospital (latterly Dean Orphanage) Household stores book, also containing lists of clothes supplied to children on leaving and staff duties, GD417/167.