Finding work didn’t seem so straightforward. For the first week they had spent every waking hour sorting out their new home, but then, with their money fast evaporating, they had concentrated on looking for jobs. Initially they had thought to find employment in a similar vein to what they knew – Ellie making enquiries at various bakeries, and Ruby at a couple of dressmakers and then a clothing factory. She had been appalled at the second-rate garments the latter had produced, the shoddy workmanship and cramped dark surroundings housing lines of weary-looking women depressing enough, without the leery foreman who had shown her round the premises and who had seemed to imagine he was God’s gift to womankind. She could have coped with everything but being forced to produce substandard clothes that looked as though they would barely hold together, and after her visit to the factory she and Ellie had recognized they had to rethink their options.

It had been that night that one of the other two lodgers they had talked to a couple of times knocked on their door. Bridget Finnigan was an Irish lass who had come over the water a few years before. She had told them she was employed at the Newcastle Workhouse, which was situated a little over a mile from Bath Lane Terrace as the crow flies, to the west of the city at the top of Westgate Hill. This particular workhouse was an extensive complex that had come into being over eighty years before, when the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Board of Guardians had decided to replace the then existing four smaller workhouses in different parts of the town for one purpose-built facility. Included were an administration block, dining hall, laundry, bakehouse, workshops, school, sick wards, lying-in ward, imbeciles’ ward and inmates’ quarters – the males on the western side of the building and the females to the east. An infirmary had been added thirty years later, but at the beginning of the new century any children had been removed and taken to live in the Union’s new cottage homes that had been built on a seventy-acre rural site at Ponteland. The children’s quarters had then become wards for the workhouse’s aged and infirm population, and their dining room converted into a chapel.

Bridget had told them there were a couple of vacancies in the workhouse laundry, and had offered to put in a good word for the pair of them with the head laundress if they were interested? They would then have to be interviewed by the matron.