This page is really just a placeholder in the hope that someone will be able to flesh this out.
The book Class struggle and social welfare by Michael Lavalette and Gerry Mooney (Routledge, 2000) is copyright and not generally available online. However, Google snippets and Amazon “search inside” produce this fascinating detail from page 28:
In the 1840s a series of scandals brought to the attention of the wider public the true picture of what was going on inside the workhouses. The most famous of these was at the Andover workhouse in 1846. Inmates had been given bones to grind and vicious fighting broke out over the putrid scraps of meat that were stuck to the bones. Similar scandals occurred at Eversholt, Bridgewater, Sevenoaks and Keithly.
The book gives no further details and no reference for this information, and I’ve (EJW) been unable to find any mention of it elsewhere. Does anyone have any idea what they are talking about?
Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial … by John Foster (1974) says
June-July 1842: another procedural campaign against re-enactment, with a catalogue of scandals and exposures (Eversholt, Andover, Bridgewater, Sevenoaks, Keighly) and then a ‘tale of folly and cruelty on the part of the poor law commissioners exceeding anything that has yet been heard of…’ (the so- called ‘migration scheme’ by which the commissioners transported something over ten thousand pauper women and children from the south to work in the northern textile factories).