At a time when benefits are being reduced, single parents stigmatised, and the efforts of social workers resented, it’s worth remembering a time before the welfare state.
One practice that led social reformers to introduce regulations into child care and adoption was baby-farming.
Baby-farming was a term used in late-Victorian England to mean the taking in of an infant or child for payment.
Some baby farmers ‘adopted’ children for lump-sum payments, while others cared for infants for periodic payments. Baby farmers, usually middle-aged women, solicited these infants through ‘adoption’ advertisements in newspapers, and through nurses, midwives, and the keepers of lying-in houses (private houses where poor, unwed women could pay to give birth and arrange for the transfer of their infants to baby farmers).
However, particularly in the case of lump-sum adoptions, it was more profitable for the baby farmer if the infant or child died, since the small payment could not cover the care of the child for long. Some baby farmers adopted numerous children and then neglected them or murdered them outright.
Several were tried for murder, manslaughter, or criminal neglect and were hanged. The last baby farmer to be executed in Britain was in 1907.
On February 15, 1865, the body of Mary Jane Harris’ illegitimate four-month-old son was found wrapped up in a copy of the Western Times beside a road in Torquay.
Miss Harris had farmed out the child to Charlotte Winsor of Lawes Bridge for 3 shillings a week. At first she had resisted Mrs Winsor’s offer to dispose of the child. Yet, when the burden of its support became too much, she stood by and watched Charlotte Winsor smother her son and wrap his naked body in an old newspaper. The body was later dumped on the roadside.
Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post described the pair as an ‘un-natural mother and the wretched murderess’.
Testimony revealed that Charlotte Winsor conducted a steady trade of boarding illegitimate infants for a few shillings a week or ‘putting them away’ for a set fee of £3 to £5.
Though public interest soon died down after Winsor was sent to prison, the British Medical Journal published allegations in 1868 that baby farming was just a form of commercial infanticide. They claimed that the infants in the care of baby farmers were deliberately and severely neglected, leading to their deaths.
The Winsor case was used to illustrate a country-wide practice and to campaign for reform. Parliament began to regulate baby-farming in 1872 with the passage of the Infant Life Protection Act. A series of acts passed over the next seventy years, including the Children Act 1908 and the 1939 Adoption of Children (Regulation) Act, gradually placed adoption and foster care under the protection and regulation of the state
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