Abstract
At a November 1897 demonstration in Mile End, John Burns condemned London’s India Docks company for launching a compulsory friendly society, presenting their 4000 permanent employees with the choice of joining the company society and leaving their current societies, or losing their jobs. Burns, a prominent leader in the 1889 dock strike and future Labour member of parliament, told an approving crowd, ‘if ever the Docks Companies started on a bad job, and they had pursued a good many, this was the worst they ever went for’. He concluded ‘The scheme must be recalled or 1889 would be revived.’ The crowd at this ‘monster meeting’ cheered Burns frequently, but gave a cold reception to Sydney Holland, vice-chairman of the docks’ company, when he spoke. Holland asserted that the docks society had been created to end malingering and, in a statement greeted by ‘uproar,’ claimed ‘This is not to bind the men to us and prevent them striking.’1
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Notes
Oddfellows’ Magazine, no. 297 (September 1899), pp. 325–7.
Eric Hopkins, Working-Class Self-Help in Nineteenth-Century England: Responses to Industrialization (New York: St. Martin’s Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), p. 227; P. H. J. H. Gosden, Self-Help: Voluntary Associations in the Nineteenth-Century (London: Batsford, 1973), p. 260; and Bentley B. Gilbert, ‘The Decay of Nineteenth-Century Provident Institutions and the Coming of Old Age Pensions in Great Britain’, Economic History Review, vol. 17 (1964–5), p. 553.
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Geoffrey Finlaison, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare 1830–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
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Gosden, Self-Help, p. 99.
Eric Hopkins, Industrialisation and Society: A Social History (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 21; and see Peter B. Evans et al., eds, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 11–15.
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Friendly Societies’ Journal, nos. 3 (December 1854), p. 6, and 12 (September 1855), p. 11.
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See Eileen Yeo and E. P. Thompson, eds, The Unknown Mayhew (New York: Schoken, 1972), and Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor, Victor Neuburg, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
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Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane, eds, Women and Aging in British Society since 1500 (London: Longman, 2001), warn against seeking a golden age for the old, though there was a preindustrial sense that age brought wisdom. See also Richard B. Lee, The Dobe Ju/‘hoansi (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1993), for an example of a society in which age earned not only prestige but also power.
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Quoted in Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and his Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 289.
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See for example the meetings held by the Leicester Bond Street Friendly Society in 1912: Leicestershire Record Office, DE 1884/2, Minute Book, 26 March 1912 and 21 May 1912.
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Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 84n.
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© 2003 Simon Cordery
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Cordery, S. (2003). Into the State. In: British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598041_7
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