page_title: Sheppard family (clothiers)
section_title: Emma Sheppard (1813-1871) writer and workhouse reformer
hierarchical_section_title: Sheppard family (clothiers) / Emma Sheppard (1813-1871) writer and workhouse reformer
caption_attribution_description: English: Rowden House, 2 Vallis Road, Frome, Somerset BA11 3EA; Grade II listed building, the Emma Sheppard Centre, specialist dementia care; named after the reformer Emma Sheppard
context_page_description: The Sheppard family dominated cloth manufacture in Frome, Somerset, England. They were the first to introduce machinery into the area and in the first quarter of the 19th century were the largest employers.
  First names of the Sheppard family occur again and again down the centuries: John, Edward, William, Thomas, Eleanor, Walter, George.
  In the town their name is attached to three places: the Emma Sheppard Centre for dementia day care, Sheppards Barton where there is a plaque at the south end of the barton and Network Rail's Sheppards Overbridge on the lane leading to Garston Farm once owned by them.
context_section_description: Emma Brown from Bath married George Wood Sheppard in 1834; they had a daughter, Mary Stuart in 1841.  They first lived in Berkley House.  In 1848, by which time she had seven children, they moved into Fromefield House with George Sheppard senior, some ten years after the death of his wife, Mary Ann Stuart Byard.
  Emma's husband was a pillar of local society: a JP, chair of the Board of Guardians which ran the workhouse as part of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, vice-president of the Frome Literary and Scientific Institution (now the Frome Museum), trustee of Frome charities, supporter of the Frome School of Art (founded by Singer) and of the Church Missionary Society.  The Frome Times documented his public life.  He addressed Queen Victoria at a levee in 1842.  In this milieu, his wife had opportunities to examine the lives of less fortunate members of society.
  In 1833, a cottage was built on the corner of Bath and Rodden Roads.  This was built as a Dame school on her behest, before their marriage, as a school for the domestic servants and estate workers of Fromefield House.
  Emma became interested in the workhouse and its inhabitants.  She was initially taken aback by the empty life of the hospital wards and the lack of simple everyday comforts.  Her own children prompted her to provide gifts to the pauper children. The Temperance Hotel in the Market Place agreed to supply twopence of hot drink and bread and butter for a ticket-card given to local beggars; Emma reimbursed the costs. Quite quickly she adopted the position of a workhouse reformer. She wrote a pamphlet in 1857: 'Experiences of a Workhouse Visitor'.  This was circulated privately and gained so much attention that in 1859 as Mrs George Wood Sheppard, she expanded it into a book, "Sunshine in the Workhouse".  There she gives examples "she has successfully arranged, by the aid of private assistance, to keep aged persons from the workhouse, and this seems to be a very legitimate mode of applying charity, and a likely means of encouraging persons to exert themselves in maintaining, at least partly, their aged relations. One shilling a week added to the 2s.6d. allowed by the parish is found to be sufficient to keep them at home." She noted the extreme cleanliness of existing workhouses, but astutely commented that they were ‘painfully spotless, making one almost shudder to think of daily scouring under the beds and feet of the sick and rheumatic’. She was distressed by "the monotonous rituals of cleaning.... which both disturb the bedridden inmates and potentially increase their rheumatic pain." She wrote to The Times of her concern for paupers with venereal disease: "Once they have recovered from the disease that brought them into the workhouse, they are ‘driven from the “foul ward,” (properly so called,) into the “wide, wide, world,” to inevitable iniquity’."  She proposed that a simple thing, such as replacing the tin mug used for drinking tea with a cup and saucer, would improve the comfort and dignity of the aged.  In 1860 she wrote another book: "An Outstretched Hand to the Fallen".  In this she wrote: "the purer, the more ignorant of vice the lady is who seeks them, the greater the influence she has."
  At Emma Sheppard's Home in Frome, inmates were free to leave the home during the day, and sometimes worked outside the home, coming back at night. She disapproved of institutions which took away the freedom of their inmates, arguing that they were, "I think, misnamed, being more a system for criminals than for penitents."
  In 1871 she died of a stroke while visiting her brother, a vicar in Wokingham. When her funeral took place in Frome, hundreds of people attended, including children from the workhouse.
  In 1882 evidence from her writings were given before a Select Committee of the House of Lords on the law relating to the Protection of Young Girls.
  A dementia day care centre opened in Rowden House, 2 Vallis Road, Frome in 2013. It is named the Emma Sheppard Centre.
caption: The Emma Sheppard Centre, Rowden House, Vallis Road, Frome
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