Welsh Journals

GEORGE CLIVE AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE NEW POOR LAW IN SOUTH GLAMORGAN, 1836-381 by IAN DEWAR THE Poor Law Amendment Act became law on 14 August 1834. In the next three years the parishes in the greater part of England and Wales were grouped into several hundred Poor Law Unions, each with its elected Board of Guardians charged with the local administration of the New Poor Law under the supervision of the Poor Law Commis- sioners at Somerset House. It was an impressive administrative achievement on the part of the Commissioners and their Assistant Commissioners. This article is concerned with the work in South Glamorgan of one of those Assistant Commissioners, George Clive, who formed the Poor Law Unions in Monmouth- shire, Glamorgan, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire in the years 1836 and 1837. This was an interesting episode in local administrative history and throws some light on economic and social conditions in South Wales in the period immediately before the Railway Age. The background to the great reform of 1834, and the main features of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and of the Act itself, are fully described in the second part of the Webbs' history of the Poor Law. It may be helpful, however, to include here a summary of the ideas which inspired the reform of 1834. The Royal Commission of 1832-34 was convinced that the relief of the poor (which in reality amounted only to about two per cent of the national income in the 1820s2) was a 1 I am indebted to Mr. W. R. B. Robinson for his helpful comments on this article. 2 S. and B. Webb, English Poor Law History, Part II (1929), p. 7. See also Mitchell and Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, (1962), Table 1 in Chapter xiii and Table 7 in Chapter xiv.