§ MR. SHERRIFFsaid, he would beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Whether his attention has been directed to an inquiry before the Coroner for Middlesex on the 5th instant, by which it appears that a man, apparently a mechanic, had been taken out of the Regent's Canal by the lock keeper and, whilst the body was still warm, had been carried to the Bethnal Green Workhouse and refused admission by the officers of that establishment on the ground that the body was not accompanied by a policeman, 1454 a whole hour having been occupied in procuring the authority necessary to satisfy them; that the Coroner, after hearing the evidence and the explanation given by the workhouse authorities, gave his opinion
That it was possible the poor man's life might have been saved if he had been at once admitted into the workhouse and attended to, and that the way he had been treated was cruel,and that the finding of the jury was accompanied by the following remark:—That the said jurors consider the refusal at the Bethnal Green Workhouse to receive the body while still warm was inhuman.
§ MR. GATHORNE HARDYsaid, he had made inquiries, but could not find at the Home Office any information about an inquest at which a jury had attributed the death of a man taken out of the Regent's Canal, to the refusal of the authorities at this workhouse to admit him. Probably the matter had been represented to the Poor Law Board.
§ MR. SCLATER-BOOTHsaid, that the attention of the Poor Law Board had been directed to the case of the recent alleged refusal to receive into the workhouse the body of a mechanic, and Mr. Corbett, one of the metropolitan Poor Law Inspectors, had attended at Bethnal Green Workhouse, and made minute inquiries into all the circumstances of the case. The information thus collected differed in some important particulars from the account published in the newspapers. For instance, it was denied that the body when taken into the workhouse was warm, though it was so when taken out of the water; and it was also denied, on the part of the workhouse authorities, that there was any refusal to receive the body. The principal officers were absent at the time, and the person in charge was the superintendent of labour, and it was a question now before the Poor Law Board whether that person was liable to censure or punishment for the course he had taken. The matter was still under consideration, and careful attention would be paid to it.