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The
Brynafon Hotel
The Brynafon Hotel is right opposite the
gates of Gigrin Farm where we saw the red kite feed so it was too handy not to
stay there. Linda & Gerard Wilkinson purchased the hotel in July 2004
and moved the family in over a period of 2 years. Gerard’s parents, now quite
elderly have been moved into the converted barn, Mark their son has worked as a
chef and now duty manager since 2005. The hotel started life
as the Rhayader Workhouse and the building metamorphosed from many different
uses into a Hotel in the mid 1970's. The history of this workhouse -
having had ancestors 'stay' in them we hope you find interesting.
 
THE WORKHOUSE
HISTORY
By whatever name it is
known: the Bastille; the spike; the union; or simply “the house”; the union
workhouse epitomized the harsher realities of life in Victorian Britain.
Workhouses were set up in response to the growing need for somewhere for
those who had nowhere else to go and they were set up with exactly that in
mind! Workhouses were not comfortable places to go to avoid your
hardships; they were hard cruel places where one only went because they quite
literally could not survive any other way. The general inmate population
would consist of longer-term inmates in the form of those who had some type of
disability and those who were considered lunatics or imbeciles (which category
also encompassed women who had had children out of wedlock). Shorter term
inmates would have been most likely those that had fallen on hard times and
would include entire families. Families were divided upon entry, and everyone
went through a degrading ritual of being stripped, scrubbed and examined for
illness.
“The place was as innocent-looking as to hospitality as if it had
been built in flinty rock, and never had a human being in it. We youngsters were
roughly disrobed, roughly and coldly washed, and roughly attired in rough
clothes, our under garments being all covered up by a rough linen pinafore. Then
we parted amid bitter cries, the young ones being taken one way and the parents
(separated too) taken as well to different regions in that merciful
establishment which the statesmanship of England had provided for those who were
driven there by its gross selfishness and unspeakable
crassness”.
 
Admission was, on the whole avoided for as long as
possible and in the most part you couldn’t leave without work prospects or proof
of an income. It also carried with it a change in legal status — until
1918, receipt of poor relief meant a loss of the right to vote! Workhouses
were prevalent across the UK and the general consensus is that they were far
worse in the cities than in the countryside simply due to the size of them and
the sheer number of inmates. They are often cited in Charles Dickens
writing as being bleak and dark and much loathed by the working class
population. The Rhayader Workhouse was built in 1877/8 towards the end of the
popularity of workhouses as a solution to the poverty problem, and was very much
mindful of the blight that it could have on the surroundings.
Some
of the former workhouse buildings still survive across Britain but those that
are still standing have shed the fearful stigma associated with them but have
continued to hold an important role in the day to day life of the towns and
cities they are found in! Many were turned into hospitals and other
community service related facilities. It is somewhat ironic that this
building is now a thriving conference centre and hotel which is used by many
charitable organisations helping the Welsh Community on a wide variety of
subjects.
 
Rhayader Poor Law Union was formed on 10th October, 1836. Its operation was overseen by an
elected Board of Guardians, 16 in number, representing its 10 constituent
parishes as listed below (figures in brackets indicate numbers of Guardians if
more than one):
County of Radnor: Abbey-cwm-hir or Gollan and Cefn Pawl,
Cefnllys, Llanbadarn fawr, Llanfihangel Helygen or Fach, Llansaintffraed Cwm
toyddur (2), Llanyre (2), Nantmel (3), Rhayader Gwy (2), St. Harmon (2).County
of Brecknock: Llanwrthwl.
The population falling within the Union at the
1831 census had been 5,970 with parishes ranging in size from Llanfihangel
Helygen or Fach (population 101) to Nantmel (1,294). The average annual
poor-rate expenditure for the period 1834-36 had been two thousand, eight
hundred and thirty nine pounds or nine shillings and six pence per head.
Prior to the building of the Rhayader workhouse, the parish
predominantly dispensed poor relief as 'out-relief' (money, food, clothes,
blankets, fuel). Times were hard and the Rhayader Union (the organization
that existed to administer the ‘out relief’) is recorded to have paid for a wide
range circumstances. The more popular sort of payments went to families
whose main breadwinners had deserted them either totally or in order to find
work elsewhere; ‘lunatic paupers’; and those who were sick and could not afford
to pay for their own treatment. More unusual cases covered a batch of
vaccinations (probably for smallpox); apprenticeships and even one family’s
emigration to Canada to find work. The aid however wasn’t a permanent
arrangement and if a ‘pauper’ was seen to have too many possessions the aid
would have been held back until they returned to a ‘proper’ state of pauperism.
All out relief was stopped in 1879 and the paupers who relied upon it were
forced to leave their homes and go to the workhouse.
 
The Rhayader
Workhouse
In 1838, the Poor Law Commissioners
authorised an expenditure of £1,100 on a workhouse to accommodate 60 inmates.
Remarkably it was to be another forty years before a workhouse was actually
built. Like a number of other unions in rural central Wales (Builth, Lampeter,
Presteigne, and Tregaron) Rhayader was opposed to the construction of a
workhouse and the expenditure it would involve in its erection and maintenance.
Under increasing pressure from the Poor Law Board, and its successor the Local
Government Board, the Board finally agreed to its construction in the early
1870s, but even then still debated at length over such matters as the choice of
site and the capacity of the building. Originally intended to accommodate 60,
they successfully petitioned for this to be reduced to forty.
Lloyd
George (incidentally the only Welshman to ever hold the position of Prime
Minister) introduced the “old age pension” so that many old people could
continue to support themselves after their working years and so avoid the
workhouse. In 1913 ‘indoor relief’ as the workhouses had been named was
increasingly restricted to those who physically couldn’t look after themselves.
“Four spectres haunt the Poor - Old Age, Accident,
Sickness and Unemployment. We are going to exorcise them. We are going to drive
hunger from the hearth. We mean to banish the workhouse from the horizon of
every workman in the land.”
David
Lloyd George (British Prime Minister 1863 – 1945)
The new
workhouse was finally erected in 1877/8 on the north side of the Builth Road
about half a mile to the south-east of Rhayader. Designed by Stephen William
Williams, the County Surveyor for Radnorshire, its construction cost around four
thousand pounds. It had three-storey main block, with a T-shaped layout — the
rear wing probably being just a single storey.
The Board of Guardians originally appointed as Master and Matron a
local farmer and his wife Mr and Mrs Hamer of Bryncennarth, St Harmon. However,
the Local Government Board blocked the Hamers' appointment because of their lack
of experience in running a workhouse, a deficit shared by everyone else on the
Board of Guardians. In their place, Mr Samuel Rose and his wife Sarah, who had
previously held the posts at the Belford Union Workhouse, were appointed at a
special meeting on the 30th of April, 1879. The Master received a
salary of forty pounds per annum and the Matron twenty pounds, plus food and
accommodation.
The inmates of Rhayader workhouse were fed, clothed and
sheltered but had to work to earn the cost of their care. Only those too
old or ill were let off this. Different workhouses set their inmates to
carry out different kinds of work. At Rhayader the inmates were set to
work breaking rocks into smaller stones for use in road mending or
construction. This was a common task in many workhouses. The work
was done in special sheds across the yard at the workhouse. The broken
stones had to be small enough to push through the grilles at the windows into
wheelbarrows. (The grilles are now part of the Retreat bedroom opposite
Gigrin Farm Entrance).
ALL IN ALL VERY
DIFFERENT TO STAY IN A HOTEL WITH SUCH HISTORY
SO NEAR TO THE RED KITES AND STUNNING
SCENERY
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