English local government from the revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act : the parish and the county / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1906 (repr.1922)
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: English local government from the revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act : the parish and the county / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    to no less than £92. The revenue side of the account was as scandalous as that of the expenditure. The total sums credited to the parish during these years as receipts on account of bastards amounted to no more than £124 for twenty-six cases. The Committee traced back two out of these twenty-six cases and found that, on these two alone, £131 had been paid to the officers; indicating, therefore, a relatively gigantic system of misappropriation of these receipts. Two years later, another committee, suspecting a more obvious form of peculation, began to publish the Poor Eate default lists, whereupon no less than eighty receipts were sent in by ratepayers, who indignantly threatened to prosecute the committee for the libel of publishing their names on the Defaulters' List.^ It would be easy to multiply examples of corrupt administration by the uncontrolled parish of&cers of the open parishes of the Metropolitan area. To contemporary observers the source of the evil was obvious. The mischief, says a workhouse master of 1*726, is caused by the artifice and knavery of some designing men in the parish, who, being tradesmen or shopkeepers, make interest to get into . . . of&ces of the parish, and particularly into such offices as have the disposal of the parish money. * Another writer complains of the many tricks and cabals of the lower sort of unsubstantial householders to get into office.^ The tradesmen and mechanics who, in large and populous parishes in cities and great towns generally filled the parish offices,* knew how to make neglect and corruption go hand in hand. Whoever reads what has been done, says the Gentleman's Magazine for March 1802, at Shrewsbury, Hull, and Lewisham [where investigations had recently taken place] will soon be satisfied that parish officers, 1 MS. Vestry Minutes, Chelsea (Middlesex), 20th June 1822, 26th February 2 A Representation of some Mismanagements by Parish Officers, with a proposal for possibly rectifying the same [by John Marriot, Governor of the Workhouse of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, LondonJ,l726, p. 8. 3 A Short View of the Fraiods, Abuses, and Impositioiis of Parish Officers, 1744. This pamphlet was the subject of a review in Gentleman's Magazine, December 1744. 4 An Inquiry mto the Management of the Poor and our usual PolUy respecting the Commm, People, 1767, p. 4,
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