Henrietta Whiteford

She was Matron of the Charterhouse for only four years; yet she is one of the most intriguing figures connected with the institution.
We can piece together her life from official documents and newspaper reports, but they give us only the bare facts.  She was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on 7 December 1864. She was the daughter of a vicar and was educated at home.  In 1871 she was living with her 8 siblings in the vicarage in Maidwell, Northamptonshire, but neither parent is there.  By 1881 she was boarding as a pupil teacher in Mirfield with one of her sisters, Augusta (who, as Augusta Cradock, became a very successful children's author between the wars).
In February 1889 Henrietta enrolled at the London Hospital on a two-year nursing course and left in January 1891 to take the post of Sister in a government civil hospital in Gibraltar. After that she became a private nurse. We next find her in 1898 receiving the Maidstone Typhoid Medal for her nursing at the Maidstone hospital during that epidemic.
From February 1900 Henrietta served in South Africa as a nurse during the Boer War. She came home later that year to nurse her sick mother, then returned to serve until 1909. We know that she was awarded two medals during that period, but there are no details of the actions which merited those awards. Back at home in London, she qualified as a midwife.

In 1910 the Charterhouse Matron, Lena Jordan, retired and her job was advertised; a qualified nurse was required. There were 163 applicants. On 1 November the Hull Daily Mail reported the appointment of Henrietta, giving the full list of her experience, postings and medals.
It could scarcely have been more impressive.
No doubt she was looking forward to a quiet life, and for four years that is apparently what happened. But when war broke out in 1914 Henrietta was called up into the Army Nursing Reserve and left for London in August. Her job was kept open for her, while the assistant Matron, Gertrude Glister, took her place.

The next we hear of Henrietta is a newspaper report in June 1916. It includes the only photograph of this remarkable lady.  On 6 June Sister Henrietta Whiteford of the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve  had been invested with the Royal Red Cross First Class by King George V at Buckingham Palace.  The Charterhouse trustees noted that it was the highest nursing medal anyone could get - but again, we have no details of the service which warranted it.  A fat file on her service record in the National Archives is nearly all concerned with her unsuccessful attempts to get a pension from the War Office.  In 1916 Henrietta was over 50, and life in war-torn France was taking its toll.  She returned to England on sick leave in 1917, said to be suffering from neurasthenia (a popular but meaningless diagnosis).  She was reported to have difficulty sleeping and was exhausted all the time.  She stayed in London and in 1918 wrote to the Charterhouse trustees to say that she would not be returning to her job there.  Her health had given way, she said.
Henrietta lived the rest of her life in London.  We don't know how she earned her living, but private nursing is a possibility.  She died on 18 January 1934 at St Peter's Home, Kilburn.  She left effects worth £555 to her sister (around £32k in today's values).
While her time at the Charterhouse was brief, Henrietta Whiteford deserves to be remembered.
(My thanks to Sarah Rogers for her invaluable contribution to this story.)

For the rest of one's life?

For most of its history the Charterhouse provided a home for its inmates for the rest of their lives.  Of course, a few were evicted (including widows of dead male inmates) and a few chose to leave.  But the majority would stay there until they died, because there was nowhere else to go.  The question arises of who would care for those inmates who could no longer care for themselves.  The post of Matron did not exist until the late 18th century at the earliest.  A legal ruling at that time stated that the founding document didn't allow for such a paid post.  But the records show that women were employed as nurses on a casual basis many times over the years.  Even after a Matron was employed, she could not be expected to provide round-the-clock care for a sick resident, even with an assistant.  The practice continued of employing "carers" for those who needed them; we find small ads in the local paper for the jobs.  However, it's not clear who paid for them.  When the ad directs applicants to a specific room number it may be that it was the resident who was paying.
The situation started to change late in the 19th century.  There were two large workhouses in the area, for Hull and Sculcoates, and they had infirmaries which provided the only available medical care for the poorest.  There are several instances in the archives of Masters of the Charterhouse trying to get a resident accepted by the workhouse, and in one case getting a sarcastic response from the Guardians.  The pressure intensified after the new scheme of governance was introduced in 1901.  The cutting is

from the Hull Daily Mail in April 1907, reacting to a caustic letter from a reader.  The trustees, it explained, had no choice but to remove "any inmate suffering from mental disease".  The Charterhouse was still expected to cope with physical disability, but the difficulties for people with what we would now call "mobility problems" were exacerbated by the fact that half the rooms were upstairs.  Many could find themselves marooned in their rooms because they couldn't manage those stairs.
The early 20th century saw the first faint signs of a modern social security system to replace the old Poor Law.  The first old age pensions were paid on 1 January 1909, for instance.  Gradually there were options for the elderly.  And the trustees of the Charterhouse seemed determined that this absolved them from any responsibility to make life easier for residents; if they couldn't cope, there was local authority provision to fall back on.  Two letters in the archives make this very clear.  They are from the 1930s and 1950s.  In the first case a geriatric specialist from the hospital was called in to advise on a resident who kept falling.  What they wanted, clearly, was a verdict that the man couldn't stay there.  The specialist was furious.  The falls occurred, he said, when the man had to make his way along the corridor at night to get to the toilet.  All that was needed was the installation of a handrail.  And while you're at it (to paraphrase) getting into and out of that toilet is a nightmare because of the lack of space.  There is no follow-up to this correspondence.  Nothing was done.  The second case involved a female resident who was in hospital having had a leg amputated.  The clerk to the trustees wrote to the hospital saying that the lady could not return to the Charterhouse and should be discharged to the care of the local authority.  The reply was fierce.  The lady had learned to cope very well with her prosthetic leg; she could even manage stairs.  It was the hospital's practice to discharge people back to their own homes, and they would do so in this case.
In the 1970s the Victorian buildings were demolished and replaced by modern flats.  But strangely, there was no effort to make these, and the renovated Georgian buildings, more friendly to those with disabilities.  It seems to have been deliberate.  Correspondence shows that organisations representing the elderly stressed the need for ramps to be included.  These would have cost nothing, but were not in the plans.  The new blocks were designed in such a way that stairlifts are impossible to install, and lifts were never considered.  It was assumed, as it still is, that anyone with an upstairs flat who could no longer manage the stairs would move to a ground floor flat when one became available. 
Naturally, when residents can no longer look after themselves they have relied on residential care courtesy of the local authority.  With this provision increasingly scarce, we now sometimes have the need for "carers" to visit a resident several times a day.

What's in a name?

Thomas Dykes was elected Master of the Charterhouse on 5 February 1833.  Or was it Thomas Dikes?
The family name appears clear in the transcriptions of the parish registers.  Both his baptism in January 1762 and his marriage to Mary Hey in 1789 have it with an "i", although the "y" variant of the name is generally more common.  Thomas's entry into Magdalen College, Cambridge, in June 1785 appears in Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses as "Dikes or Dykes"; but Venn compiled his list years after Thomas's death, when confusion had set in.
The fact is that all his life Thomas insisted that his surname was Dikes.  Contemporary records have that spelling because that's how he wrote his own name, and there would have been no reason to disagree. Among other documents we have his signature on a warrant for the police to remove

inmate John Gill from the Charterhouse.  
Thomas was the leading Anglican evangelical in Hull, and people who have written about this aspect of his life in modern times, like Peter Stubley (A House Divided, pub Univ of Hull, 1995), draw on the documents of the time and use the "i" spelling.  

There are numerous mentions of Rev Dikes in the local papers of the time; they report on him as Vicar of St John's, and on his involvement in local good causes; they report his appointment as Master of the Charterhouse and print an obituary of him on his death.  Every single report has him as the Rev Thomas Dikes.  That was simply his name.

So why is there so much doubt about the issue that every reference to him today in the context of the Charterhouse calls him Dykes?
The clue appears in Dikes' will.  He makes his eldest son, also Thomas, his executor and refers to him as "my son Thomas Dikes (usually written by him Dykes)".  When the will was proved in December 1847 the official record refers to "the Oaths of Thomas Dikes otherwise Dykes and William Hey Dikes the sons the executors".  Clearly it was Thomas junior who had decided that the family name should correctly be Dykes and that his father had been wrong all his life (with his brother William apparently disagreeing).  It was presumably Thomas junior who registered his father's death - as Dykes - and who insisted that the memorial tablet in the Charterhouse chapel carry that version of the name.
Only two years after Thomas' death a book was published about him: Memoir of the Rev. Thomas Dykes, LL.B, incumbent of St. John's Church, Hull, with copious extracts from his correspondence, Rev. John King, (pub 1849, Seeleys, London).  King tackles the question of the spelling in a footnote: 
"It is right here to observe, that, during the whole of his life, Mr. Dykes spelt his name Dikes; but it was a corruption of the family name; and in a memorandum, found among his papers after his death, he directed that it should appear on his coffin with the y instead of the i.  This instruction was attended to, and the spirit of it is carried out in the Memoir now submitted to the reader."
This is hardly conclusive.  As we have seen, there is good reason (in the parish registers) to think that the "i" variant is not a corruption; and no source is given for the memorandum, which strikes me as highly dubious.
But the revision stuck.  He is Thomas Dykes on our roll of Masters, and one of the modern blocks of flats is labelled Dykes House.  It seems disrespectful to the man and his memory.

Evicted!

Being awarded a place in the Charterhouse was a much sought after privilege.  For a few, through the centuries, it ended in eviction.
The earliest such unlucky person in the records was Leonard Home who, in 1636, was "expelled for his evil carriage and misdemeanour”. With no more detail than that, we can only speculate about his actual offence. A little more detail appears about Frances Ellis in the Bench Book of 1714. In September she had been "expelled from God's House for being disobedient to the Master and disturbing the Brethren and Sisters". And in 1832 John Batman was dismissed for  "immoral and disorderly conduct". 
In the early nineteenth century it was still the Bench which made decisions about dismissals after requests by the Master.  In June 1831 it was reported that the conduct of John Webster had been “exceedingly irregular immoral and reprehensible”, and he was to be removed from the house and lose his pay. It seems that he was given another chance, because nine months later the Bench returned to the subject of Webster's conduct. It was still “disgraceful and discreditable”; he had not changed his ways and so was dismissed.
Not everyone went quietly.  John Gill had lived in the Charterhouse for nearly 20 years when, in 1847, he and his wife were dismissed for some unspecified "misconduct".  Gill refused to vacate the room.  The Master, Thomas Dikes, issued a warrant to the Chief Constable, dated 15 June 1847, requiring the police to remove Gill and his wife "using no more force than may be necessary".  We have no record of what happened to the Gills; but it is likely that their only recourse was the workhouse.
Henry Lee was more fortunate.  In 1859 he was threatened with dismissal for "having broken the rules of the house". The rules at the time were those drawn up by the Master, John Healey Bromby. Lee was given another chance, but died a few months later. Hannah Hammond was another who narrowly escaped. She was admitted in 1857. Eight years later, aged 78, she was threatened with dismissal for "unfeminine and disreputable conduct". She survived this and presumably mended her ways. She died 4 years later.
In 1866 Bromby complained about John Ridgway and his wife Ann. They were, he said, guilty of "gross misconduct". John was 81 at the time, so it is difficult to see what this amounted to. It is not clear what happened to them. An 1867 residents list shows them living "entirely out of the Hospital" but the register shows John dying in 1868.
So far the records do not mention alcohol, but it is safe to assume that drunkenness was a factor in some cases. In 1883 it was cited as a reason for eviction. According to the records of the council Jane Parker "had seriously misconducted herself and being of drunken habits [the Master] had thought it right to forbid her the house". (There is no record of a Jane Parker in our register, so we can assume that she was the wife of an inmate. But the only possible candidate for her husband had a wife with him called Sarah Ann.)
At the turn of the century two men were dismissed simply for "drunkenness"; Thomas Wilson in 1899 and Theophilus Routledge in 1901. A terse record in 1906 shows George Johnson dismissed for "misconduct". Three years later Mary Ann Stephenson was "deprived of room for insobriety".
As the 20th century progressed the records become more explicit, although in 1917 Christopher Hewson was simply "removed by the trustees". But some sad cases are recorded in the trustees' minutes in detail. There was, for instance, the case of Frederick Rutherford, who was born in 1826 in Staleybridge, Lancashire, and was in Hull by 1851. He was a general dealer, then a hosier and later the manager of a bookshop. He was married twice. The trustees heard none of this history in 1904, only that he was admitted to the Charterhouse in January 1894 and that his wife had left him a year ago. The Master was now complaining about his drunken habits, and gave specific examples, such as: “He was drunk on a seat in front of the Charterhouse from which he fell to the ground and could not get up without assistance”; he had been drunk and had been carried home by his friends. The final straw was when he had been “helplessly drunk in his room and calling for assistance”. His neighbours had all ignored him. When asked later why, they said that he had done it too often before and they were sick of it. The Master had heard him and forced open the door. The most worrying aspect was that Rutherford had broken a paraffin lamp and there was the danger of fire. “He does not get sufficient food,” said the Master, “and is generally in a dirty condition.” Rutherford was summoned to appear at the next meeting, where he apologised and was given a reprimand and a last chance. A year later the Master asked that he be removed from his room for “insobriety and uncleanly habits” but Rutherford died before this could be carried out.
Mary Ann Sunley, aged 73, started drinking too much and spending hours each night “screaming in the yard”. The Master, Fea, suspended her “from the benefits of the Charity” for 14 days. Two years later she was repeating the behaviour, and her son was obliged to remove her.  A number of other cases are recorded where drunkenness resulted in warnings and the stoppage of allowances but not eviction.  But there was no hesitation about William Copeland in 1919.  He was a 77-year-old former shoemaker who was arrested for indecent conduct in St. Mary's Old Burial Ground and sentenced to 14 days imprisonment. He was removed from the Charterhouse.
Later in the 20th century the references to dismissal become fewer and more guarded.  The trustees didn't want bad publicity, and residents had greater access to legal help to fight eviction.  There was also a growing supply of alternative housing for the elderly, and those who would have faced eviction in the past could now be persuaded to leave.