ST PETER'S Hospital is a familiar site to Maldon people and a provides friendly local NHS services, including maternity – but it has a much darker past.

With its grand exterior and dated yet somehow comforting interior - perhaps rather like the fifties hospital featured in popular TV series 'Call the Midwife' – any visitor could be forgiven for thinking that St Peter's, in Spital Road, had always been a hospital.

In fact, it was built to be the new Maldon Union Workhouse. Completed in 1873 it could house up to 450 'inmates', people who were too poor to continue supporting themselves for a variety of reasons.

Local folk who entered the workhouse paid for the food and shelter they received there with their freedom, usually as well as with work that could at best be described as tedious and often exhausting. The women tended to be given domestic tasks such as laundry and cooking, while the men were often set to work on jobs including stone breaking and teasing out fibres from ropes so that they could be reused again.

Families were split up – in the Maldon workhouse, men and women, including those that were married, were housed in different wings. They were not allowed to mix.

Children in the workhouse were given schooling inside the establishment up until the age of 14. Many of the children would go on to enter domestic service in the outside world or, as is the case locally, quite often the boys secured junior positions on local boats and barges.

However, the census of 1881 shows some chilling truths about the Maldon workhouse.

Like all such establishments up and down the country, the workhouse was considered charitable, providing a place for those who would otherwise starve and perish on the streets. But it was with a sense of great shame and dread that most people who ended up there entered it, for the census description of 'inmate' offers an accurate picture of what the lives of its desperately poor residents, described as 'paupers', held.

At Maldon, the census reveals that whole families entered the workhouse at that time, as well as people entirely on their own. The picture can be drawn from looking at their surnames, with families appearing together on the census list. Their ages range from just one month to 89 years of age.

Occupations once held by the inmates are recorded and show that domestic servants and agricultural labourers, all of whom had fallen upon hard times, are among the most common.

The census includes the names of the family in charge of the workhouse. In 1881, Charles Robinson Timperley, 44, was the Master, with his wife Mary Ann, 37, the Matron. They had three children living in their own lodge at the workhouse.

Heartbreakingly, careful study of the list reveals a more haunting picture still. Some of the residents are described as 'lunatics'. These inmates are usually alone, apparently without other family members. This is also the case for one little boy, aged just 12. Unlike most of the other children, Alfred Marshall is not described as a 'scholar' in the column for occupation. It is left blank and instead, in a column headed 'handicap', is the word 'imbecile'.

The building remained a workhouse right up until 1930, then was renamed as a 'public assistance institution' and transferred to local authority control.

It wasn't until 1948 that St Peter's joined the NHS, standing now as part of an institution that truly does work for the greater good and for which the Maldon community is grateful in the time of the current pandemic.