ABSTRACT
THE death of Six-Fingered Jack, aged 79, in the workhouse in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, was reported in mid-1902.1 The destitute Black man had been a navvy, working with pick and shovel to build dams, railways, canals, docks and tunnels. Workhouses were prisonlike, administered by boards of guardians drawn from the tax-paying classes, who kept expenditure to a minimum to deter the poor. Members of the working classes, down on their luck or no longer fit enough to sell their labour, found accommodation in the workhouse when all else had failed.2 Blacks have been traced in Edwardian workhouses.
