Free Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue by Lynn Knight

deviation. I can see Kitty, Margaret and Annie walking down that long, hard path, Annie too young to walk the distance unaided; three little girls holding hands, as fragile as a string of paper dolls. Annie had no idea what they were walking towards, but Kitty knew: the Industrial School, coming closer and closer.
    Industrial Schools were instruments of the Poor Law, designed to house destitute and vulnerable children. The majority of their young charges were removed from their parents because of neglect (though the death of a mother could constitute ‘neglect’ in itself, the children being left to their own devices). Those admitted to the Schools were to be trained in ‘suitable occupations’ and so steered from the bad influences that might lead them to be a continuing drain on the public purse when they grew up. Children in the care of Poor Law Guardians were to learn to become ‘useful’ members of the community, not paupers. Much was made of this intention when, in 1881, the Chesterfield Industrial School – one of the first in the country, second only to St Pancras, a local newspaper was pleased to announce – opened its doors. ‘A boy trained not only in ordinary learning of a rudimentary character, but in such trades as tailoring or boot-making, and also in the rudiments of agriculture and gardening, and a girl able to read, write and cipher, and also to wash, iron, get up linen, cook and sew, need hardly re-enter a Union poor-house again.’
    A report of the opening ceremony described the buildings as well as their purpose. A central administrative block separated the girls’ wing from the boys’; the ground floor held classrooms, teachers’ apartments, an infants’ dining room, bathrooms and lavatories, while, on the floors above, dormitories, accessible via stone staircases, extended the full length of both wings. Each childhad their own bed, a fact considered noteworthy – as, indeed, it was. For many children, including little Annie Ball, this would be the first time they’d had a bed to themselves, recipients not of comfort, but of the adamantine care of the Union.

    The emphasis on the lack of ornamentation, ‘the utmost care taken to secure good ventilation’ – ventilation is stressed more than once – and the insistence that no unnecessary money had been spent, conjures as grim an admonishment as any Poor Law Union could wish for. And translated into plain walls, plain fare, plain everything; draughty corridors, insufficient heating, icy water and blasts of cold air. At least one orphanage matron of the period favoured wide-open windows, regardless of the snow drifting on to the beds.
    Methods softened over the years; labels softened with them. By the time my great-aunt walked through its vast iron gates, the Industrial School had been renamed the Chesterfield Children’s Homes. Within a few years, the new title had stuck, but, for now,the name recorded in the Committee’s monthly meetings depended on which member was taking the minutes. For all the renaming of the Industrial School, ‘shades of the workhouse’ were never far away. However well-intentioned individual committee members, they were working within the constraints of the Poor Law and answerable to the local Board of Guardians. Dietary regulations (which determined which foods the children and staff ate, and in what quantity) were those of the workhouse; the workhouse Master and Matron took charge during the School Matron’s annual leave. The workhouse by any other name… there was only a thin veneer between them. Regardless of which title officialdom preferred, as far as my great-aunt was concerned, she spent her childhood in The Orphanage. Another picture keeps coming to me, although it’s one I’d prefer not to see, of a little girl not yet three years old, sent to that drab institution, with its scratchy frocks, strict regime, echoing