The term "dying wish" refers to highly heated and emotionally charged wants voiced by a person as they approach their last destination. It is said that it is a foolish thing to fear the unavoidable, but death has always elicited apprehension, maybe due to its unpredictability and mystery. The ambiguity that results from death's ambiguity accounts for a widespread distaste to it, something to be avoided at all costs - yet in certain cases, a dying desire for some individuals entails deliberately petitioning the sombre chains of doom to rip them from existence and hasten their ultimate separation. While such declarations are frequently the subject of humor and triviality, one such proclamation uttered in a moment of wrath by a London workhouse inmate, whether meant or not, had the most ironic of outcomes.
Amid 1856, William Watts was born in the harsh terrain of Stepney in London's East End. The capital's population has grown in lockstep with the area's continuous urbanisation as a result of the Industrial Revolution's inexorable spread. As the population grew, the East End's areas became congested slums, a hotbed for crime and deviance among the filthy tenements.
The East End was used to dishonest and vicious behavior long before the most famous slasher of them all haunted Whitechapel in 1888. The thick fog-filled air and poorly illuminated streets benefited both the minor crook and the more ominous villain in their illicit activities. This cloak of darkness may have even aided the young Watts as he negotiated his way through life in a brutal and merciless London, where violations of the law were commonplace.
If Watts' delinquent behavior began while he was a child, it did not cease with his adolescence. Watts was charged with stealing 51 battens from his employers, Joshua Knight & Sons, by the Westminster magistrates around the beginning of the twentieth century, when he was forty-five years old. Watts had previously worked as a carman, or a man who delivered things by horse and cart around the city. A frequent employment at the period was that of a carman, as evidenced by the court records, which list the occupations of all individuals punished before the magistracy. Watts, along with his co-accused, Joseph Ambrose Williams, and the alleged 'handler' of the stolen battens, William Frederick Benn, were arrested on October 10, 1901.
Watts was freed a little over a week later, with the record reading 'bill disregarded,' showing that the indictment had been dropped as false. Williams was found guilty of the crime in early November and sentenced to '8 months hard labour at Wormwood Scrubs Prison,' while Benn's participation earned him a year in prison.
If criminality in London's East End's dark rookeries and alleyways was typical of the Victorian age, so was another equally devastating scourge on a generation's social conscience — the Victorian workhouse. Originally intended to offer job and housing for the weakest members of society, it has since evolved into a prison-like system that merely detains the most vulnerable while failing miserably in its stated goals of combating poverty. The 'Act for the Relief of the Poor,' an edict that put duty on parishes for their own destitute transients, had questionable roots in 1601.
Parish authorities were permitted to lawfully collect money from local property owners in order to support 'poor relief' for the ill, old, and infirm. To individuals living in their own houses, parish poor assistance was first provided in the form of monetary gifts, clothes, food, and fuel. The workhouse concept rose to popularity in the seventeenth century, fueled by the assumption that giving care under one roof was the most judicious and cost-effective course of action; this form of'mass-produced' beneficence resulted in a rush of workhouses emerging in the early 1700s. When Sir Edward Knatchbull's Workhouse Test Act was passed by Parliament in 1723, the workhouse became a part of Britain's social fabric.
According to the statute, the workhouse was supposed to be a deterrent, and relief was only given to those who had no other choice than to accept its cruel government. A conventional workhouse greeting was devoid of accessible warmth and friendliness. New residents were given a uniform to wear for the length of their stay and had their medical records checked. Then a selection procedure would commence, with men, women, and children being separated, followed by the able-bodied and infirm being divided into groups. Despite the chilling similarities to the infamous Nazi 'work' camps discovered across Europe many years later, these classifications were thankfully not a morbid indicator of who would live or die, but rather an indicator of the residents' physical capacities to perform various tasks within the workhouse.
The conditions within the workhouse were designed to be revolting. Despite the fact that each workhouse was run by a distinct board of guardians, their goals were always the same: to be as unpleasant and repulsive as possible. Meals were a lesson in the most revolting cuisine, served in a vast communal dining hall with endless rows of despondent faces grimacing over their gruel. Families were shattered indiscriminately, with parents only getting an hour with their children on weekends. The message was clear: admission to a workhouse was not a reward for idleness; rather, it quickly became the pinnacle of Victorian society's depravity.
Due of financial hardship, William Watts entered the Whitechapel workhouse. Unfortunately, there are no records of his admission to the 'South Grove Institution,' despite the fact that the location was obviously considered as a 'center' for persons beset by misfortune. It was the second such facility in Whitechapel, having been built in 1871 on the south side of Mile End Road between South (now Southern) Grove and Lincoln Street, directly across from the City of London workhouse.
The bell had summoned the inhabitants to the community hall for breakfast one morning in February 1934. The notion of the gifts that would shortly be set before Watts would hardly have filled him with joy as he made his way through the assembling flock. Perhaps the disgusting anticipation, as well as the never-ending rules and restrictions, had finally reached the limit of his endurance. Even though he was 78 years old, he was still willing to disobey the workhouse orderlies on occasion. Although the word'silence' was belatedly eliminated in 1842, mealtimes insisted on'silence order and decorum' throughout — this was a rare relaxation of in-house legislation.
Watts had chosen to wear his hat to breakfast, which was against the rules. Within the workhouse, a bowler-style hat was part of the male uniform, although it was never to be worn during meals. Watts was immediately asked to take it down by an attendant. Watts was angered by the demand, which prompted him to yell a fairly harsh request: 'I wish I was dead, and out of this!' Nobody could have predicted Watts' eruption would happen with such uncanny speed, no matter how real it was. Watts collapsed forward in his chair, dead, no sooner had the words left his world-weary lips.
The clanking of dinnerware exploded into chaos as the guests raced to his rescue, but their efforts were ultimately in vain. The next inquest recorded a judgement of ‘death from natural causes’, albeit for the onlooking prisoners on that late winter’s day, the death of William Watts bore little relation to anything of a ‘natural’ composition. Watts' apparent contact with a higher being meant that his ultimate requests on Earth were realized mystically. Those are some famous last words.