Case 1269

I know nothing of the history of A previous to her coming to the Wakefield Preventive House on March 29, 1887. Since that time she has been under our care.

She tells me her father was at one time a soldier in India in the 77th Regiment, that her mother died when she was about 3 1/2 when she was placed in the Barnsley Workhouse, from there, her father removed her on his second marriage. They then went to live in Sheffield where he had employment as China Mender to good firms. This he lost through intemperance, & then took to itinerating.

I wrote to an address of a friend of the girl in Sheffield who had shown the girl kindness & she corroborated the girl had said of her life there & said she was very badly treated & starved by her father & stepmother. Since they began itinerating she had known nothing of them.

A says they were always moving from town to town walking long distances, & taking lodgings as cheap as they could, begging their food during the day. There is no doubt she is accustomed to life in low lodging houses, & is of a low moral type herself, using bad language & acquainted with evil in many ways. She had run away from her father in Leeds when the came to us & brought in with her, a large quantity of bread & scraps which she had begged on the way.

She reads & sews nicely & is affectionate. Very deceitful & untruthful & utterly unfit from a moral point of view to have charge of children.

I wrote to the Barnsley Workhouse, hoping to verify her statement about it, but her name was not known there from 1874 to 1879.

Miss Gertrude Fennell