Lurgan Workhouse Traditional Cache

Linen has been associated with Lurgan and the surrounding area for many hundreds of years. With the growth of the mills around the town to a point where there were approximately 50, people moved from the countryside in the hope of finding employment.

Today we probably do not really appreciate the Social Security system that can be called upon and it's hard to believe that there was a time when there was no assistance for people who fell upon hard times. Yet the system that we take for granted only came into being in the middle of the 20th century.

With the introduction of the Poor Laws in 1839, Poor Law Unions were established with responsibility for building and running a workhouse in their area. The Lurgan Union covered parts of Counties Armagh, Antrim and Down. The workhouse in Lurgan opened in 1841 and was designed and built to accommodate 800 inmates. The term inmate is important, since that is how those unfortunate enough to have to turn to the workhouse out of total desperation were regarded. The perimeter wall of the hospital is now intended to keep unwanted visitors out. Much of it is the original Workhouse wall, although its original function was to prevent inmates from leaving. On admission, a family was split up, with the male and female members and children being accommodated in totally separate areas. Such was the harshness in the workhouse, many families were never reunited, in life, at least.

Workhouses were both in their design and operation harsh and Poor Law Commissioner George Nicholls summed this up when he detailed what a workhouse should be: 'I wish to see the workhouse looked to with dread by our labouring classes'.

A six acre site was chosen on the Lurgan - Tandragee Road in the townlands of Tannaghmore South and Aughnacloy. The buildings were a mixture of permanent and semi-permanent, along with tents. The Master and his family lived in the centre of the complex.

In 1846, the potato harvest failed for the second consecutive year and the capacity of 800 had been exceeded. A Fever Hospital was built at the rear of the workhouse to try to deal with the increasing numbers of people with disease. Some of the practices in the Hospital added to the death-toll. More than 3000 people died in the Lurgan Workhouse and were buried in a field that was over the brow of a hill, out of sight of the Fever Hospital. This prevented inmates from being able to look out over their own waiting graves.

New patients were dressed in the clothes of those who had recently died, in many cases transmitting the disease quickly and causing death. It was said that the fever could kill in 12 hours. With the increase in deaths, the demand for space for graves became desperate and bodies were buried only metres away from the well that provided drinking water for the Workhouse. The results of this were again many more deaths. Often 5 bodies were put in each coffin and up to 30 bodies were interred in each grave. When the graveyard eventually overflowed, a 'paupers pit' was opened in the Shankill graveyard. These graves were unmarked and it is not known exactly where these graves are within the cemetery. The location of the original Workhouse graves is not known.>

Through the end of the 19th and into the 20th Century death rates in the Workhouse were nothing like those during the famine years, but it was not somewhere that people went to voluntarily. I will never know if my Maternal and Paternal Great-Grandmothers ever met, but their paths very nearly crossed in the Lurgan Workhouse. Annie Haddock met my Great-Grandfather when she was employed in the Workhouse - so was not an inmate. Elizabeth Castles was widowed at the age of 33 in 1908 and left with only her meagre wages as a linen yarn winder in the local mill to provide for her 3 sons aged between 2 and 8. The family were on the verge of having to enter the Workhouse when a distant cousin, Stuart Lunn who was studying for the Church of Ireland Ministry at Trinity College Dublin persuaded his father, a factory manager to give enough money to enable Elizabeth retain her independence. After his graduation and after entering the ministry, throughout his career, Stuart continued to send money to help support the family, thus saving them from indignity and definite uncertainty that the Workhouse would have represented. Sadly Elizabeth's struggle with financial hardship wore her down and when my Grandfather, her oldest son was in his late teens, he returned from work to find her stoking a large fire outside the house with much of the contents from it. Elizabeth was committed to the asylum, having 'lost her mind' and died shortly after.

In 1929 the Workhouse was replaced by Lurgan and Portadown District Hospital, which was later re-named Lurgan Hospital. The current building was constructed after the closure of the Workhouse, some of the old black stone building at the centre can still be seen today. A few years ago a mural was commissioned on the base of a block of flats across the road from the hospital as a tribute to those who suffered and died on the site. Take time to have a look and I'm sure it will make you think, as it did me of how fortunate we are for how much we have available to us today.

The Cache