WE tend to think of the workhouse as a Victorian institution that died out long before anyone alive today was born.

Not quite so. The York workhouse in Huntington Road was still going strong in the late 1920s. George Bye knows that only too well – because in 1928, at the age of five, he was sent there with his mother and two brothers, Charles and Tommy.

George was born at No 1 Lord’s Passage in Shambles on March 12, 1923. He doesn’t remember much about it, however. “The earliest dwelling-place I remember was a one-roomed flat above a Mrs Kelly of Peart’s Court, North Street: just about where the Viking Hotel now stands,” he wrote, in a magazine article Those Were The Days – Thank God! published about 25 years ago.

It was a fairly dilapidated flat, he recalls – and it was pretty crowded. The whole family – George himself, his mother and father, his elder brother and sister Charles and Alice, his younger brother Tommy and baby sister Eva – were crammed into a tiny space. Four of the children slept together in one bed, head to toe.

“For light entertainment before sleep overtook us, we would peel back the damp wallpaper to watch the bugs scuttle and hide,” George wrote. The family used toilets in the yard below, and drew water from a long-handled pump.

Nearby in North Street were some stables and Blundy, Clark and Co’s coal, sand and gravel merchants. Off a small passage was Arthur Hemmen’s corner confectionery shop. The shopkeeper lived there with his daughter Cissy, George recalled – and the shop was “known for its bacon sandwiches and fresh warm tea-cakes and marge.”

Then, when George was five, his father, who had been wounded in the 1914-1918 war, died.

“I remember being taken to Foss Islands Road, behind the county hospital, from where we were told to wave at the top floor verandah where father lay dying in bed,” wrote George, now 88, who is a great-grandfather and who lives off Tadcaster Road.

His mum was left with five children to look after. “Father’s death had the almost inevitable effect on poverty-stricken families like mine. Mother could no longer feed us, nor pay the rent… At five years of age, I entered the workhouse at 75 Huntington Road with my mother, Charlie and Tommy. We found ourselves placed in the Ladysmith Block, situated between the mortuary and the bakehouse, where seed cake and bread loaves, approximately two feet long, were baked. Baby Eva was taken to the Elms Babies’ Home in Hull Road, and eight-year-old Alice was put into St Hilda’s Certified Industrial School for Girls, 84 Lowther Street.”

The workhouse master and matron were Mr and Mrs Edgar. George recalls: “They insisted that I took a bath before anything else. I wasn’t used to this, and the sight of the large white bath terrified me, for I was convinced that the large dark patch on the bath bottom, an area long devoid of enamel, was a black hole, in which I was about to be drowned.”

Within just a few weeks, the family was broken up altogether. Charlie was sent to the East Mount Road Public Assistance Home, Tommy to 120 Haxby Road, and George to the York Union Children’s Home in Wigginton Road. Their mother was kept in the workhouse to work. George went to the Haxby Road junior school. One day his sister Alice, who was then also going to the school, beckoned to him from behind the railings separating the boys’ and girls’ playgrounds. “Our mum’s run away from the workhouse, and we won’t see her any more because she dare not come back to York,” she told George.

That prediction sadly proved true. George never saw or heard from his mother again “except that many years later, I was approached by an insurance representative asking me to sign for a policy to be drawn on behalf of someone with whom my mother had been living. I refused, and so assumed my mother was now dead.”

• Next week: George’s life as a farmer’s boy and would-be runaway