AN alleged ancestral link between the new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and a “despotic” Victorian workhouse master in Farnham was unveiled this week.

According to the Sunday Express, the Labour leader’s great-great-grandfather James Sargent presided over “Dickensian” conditions at the workhouse on the site of the modern-day Farnham Hospital in Hale Road during the mid-19th Century.

It quoted a report in medical journal The Lancet dated 1867, in which the workhouse was described as “a scandal and a curse to a country which calls itself civilised and Christian”.

The journal cited the master of 14 years, Sargent, as the route cause of this scandal, describing Jeremy Corbyn’s forebear as a “large man, with an imposing presence, a confident manner, and a faculty for talking down any mildly remonstrant guardian”.

On one occasion, The Lancet said Sargent accused an epileptic inmate recovering from a fit of being lazy, and ordered him to ladle out the cesspit.

“The lazy man perversely went into another fit, fell into the liquid sludge, was pulled out three parts drowned, and a few hours afterwards gave up his fits and his life together,” added the journal.

Sargent was also accused of threatening the workhouse doctor with personal violence whenever he suggested “some tiresome reform or other”, until he finally resigned his office in 1867 having seduced one of the female “inmates”.

According to Sir Frederick Morton Eden’s report on the state of the Poor in 1797, the Hale Road workhouse for the elderly, infirm and children was built in 1791 to replace a “wretched” predecessor in the centre of town.

Its master was allowed the use of the house and furniture as well as the earnings of the poor, and received £1,000 a year from the parish “for which he is bound to maintain the poor of every description”.

As of 1795, Sir Frederick reported the workhouse had 124 inmates, of whom 50 were old and infirm, employed in picking wool. A typical diet included onion pottage or bread and broth for breakfast, meat pudding and vegetables for dinner, and bread, cheese and beer for supper.

Over a century later, the workhouse would become the Farnham Institution and Home for the Aged and then Farnham Hospital, before the final workhouse buildings were demolished for the redevelopment of the hospital site in 2006.