Welsh Journals

The Rise and Fall of Henry Sockett: Visitor to the House of Industry by Marion J. Donald Henry Sockett was just another Swansea barrister until, as he was to claim later, his outrage at the many abuses of the rating system prompted this forward-looking individual, "who had the temerity and energy to challenge the status quo," to enter public service at the age of forty-seven. He began by presenting a petition to the Portreeve on 25th April 1812, to improve the supplies of fish to Swansea, and by June of the same year he had set up, and become one of the donators to, a society created for that purpose. Within three years his name appeared on the Committee formed to establish the new poor rate for the town, and the thanks of the meeting at St Mary's Vestry was "offered to Henry Sockett,"2 the first of many such approbations he would receive from that source. Attaining the position of committee member of the Swansea Infirmary in 1817, Henry lost no time in becoming Vice-President and with his inexorable character soon embroiled himself in dispute with those mem- bers who wanted to establish a 'Pest House' (fever wards). Highly critical of their efforts to build a new dispensary he wrote to the The Cambrian newspaper, adding his voice to those in opposition by stating that the public were being misled as to the status of the building, by the proposed name of 'House of Recovery'. The dispute rumbled on for a number of years and the concensus of his contemporaries was that Henry's opposi- tion was guided more by the fact that a hundred pounds was required from the poor-rate to fund the improvements, than by his genuine belief that the Pest House was unnecessary.3 In his usual autocratic manner, Henry had decided to establish himself as the protector of the poor-rate. His views were detailed with crystal clarity in the two pamphlets he was later to write. However, it must be said that in the early years of his public service, Henry more than fulfilled his role of rate-protector and estab- lished himself as the hero of the town, when he efficiently reduced the poor-rate and eliminated the abuses of the poor-law. Swansea had been operating its pauper policy according to the Gilbert Act of 1782, but increasingly the requirement that the only people to be sent to the poor house were to be: indigent by old age, sickness or infirmities, and unable to acquire a maintenance by their labour and orphan children,4