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Local History<br />
George Barkaway of Brockdish, a tale of the New Poor Law<br />
© Elaine Murphy.<br />
Dickens’ Oliver Twist and other colourful tales of the harsh<br />
cruelty and bureaucratic inflexibility of unthinking beadles and<br />
overseers has coloured our ideas about the way the poor law<br />
was administered by the Victorian Boards of Guardians and<br />
union workhouses. It was an uncompromising and rigid<br />
system, designed to deter the feckless. It could also be a life<br />
saver and provided financial support and care when there was<br />
nothing else available. The life story of George Barkaway from<br />
Brockdish, and his family, gives a flavour of a bureaucracy that<br />
wasn’t always unthinking or unkind.<br />
The Barkaway family, on Brockdish Street, (later simply<br />
Barkway) were a prosperous hardworking family of<br />
fellmongers, who prepared skins for leather tanning. Charles<br />
Barkaway (1769-1843), became right hand man to Brockdish<br />
tannery owner John Doughty. When John Doughty died,<br />
suddenly in 1837, the Barkaways could not afford to buy the<br />
whole tannery with its stores of skins and oak bark, but, they<br />
could afford to keep the fellmongering business going in a<br />
smaller way.<br />
A fellmonger at work<br />
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