Mutual Aid and Civil Society: Friendly Societies in Nineteenth- Century Bristol MARTIN GORSKY* Dept of Geography, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, PO1 3HE

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Mutual aid and civil society: friendly societies in nineteenth- century Bristol MARTIN GORSKY* Dept of Geography, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, PO1 3HE

ABSTRACT: Recent work on 'civil society' has made claims for the past capacity of mutual aid associations to generate 'social capital': self-help, trust, solidarity. Friendly societies in nineteenth-century Bristol are examined to test these claims. Their origins and growth are explored, as well as their membership and social, convivial and medical roles. Solidarities of class and neighbourhood are set against evidence of exclusion and division. Trust and close personal ties proved insufficient to avert the actuarial risks that threatened financial security.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the nineteenth-century friendly society in the light of the revival of interest in the concept of civil society. Although the precise meaning of 'civil society' varies in the hands of different writers, the usage understood here is the notion of a sphere of activity distinct from the public arena of the state and the private world of the family.1 It is somewhere in which spontaneous participation occurs and public opinion is formed, and refers most typically to voluntary associations such as clubs, trade unions, professional and cultural organizations and mutual aid societies. The proposition that a healthy state needs a robust civil society was most famously made by de Tocqueville: 'In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all others'.2 This has become newly pertinent to political scientists considering how viable democracies are to be established in post- communist Europe.3 De Tocqueville also argued for the superiority of private association to government on the grounds of its beneficial effect

An early version of this article was presented at the Urban History Group Conference, Brighton, 1997, and I thank participants for their comments. I am also grateful to John Mohan for his advice. 1 E. Meehan, Civil Society (Swindon, 1995); J.L. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (London, 1992), chs 1,2; J. Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (London, 1988), ch. 2. 2 A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence (London, 1988 edn), vol. 2, part II, chs 5,7, quotation 517. 3 J. Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London, 1988), 2-5, part 3; A. Agh, 'Citizenship and civil society in Central Europe', in B. van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London, 1994), 108-26.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 Friendly societies in Bristol 303 on individual character: 'Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another'.4 This aspect of civil society is invoked in critiques of contemporary welfare arrangements which warn of the social and financial costs of public provision delivered by a strong state.5 The right has emphasized the transfer of power back to civil society through marketization and self-help - the empowerment of parents and governors in education policy for example.6 Thinkers of the left also favour more active citizen involvement in social welfare, pointing both to the practical achievement of grass-roots self-help initiatives, and to a theoretical antecedent in the tradition of guild socialism.7 The example of the friendly society, or benefit club, the characteristic social insurance organization of the nineteenth century, offers an opportunity to consider these claims for the importance of civil society. Two writers have already reviewed the history of mutual aid in these terms. Robert Putnam has analysed the ingredients of successful democracy through the study of post-war local government in Italy, contrasting the effectiveness of the north to the less satisfactory performance of regional administrations in the south.8 The distinction is explained in terms of the north's more vigorous tradition of 'civic community', here understood principally in terms of the historic 'vibrancy of associational life'.9 Central to this tradition were mutual aid clubs. They fostered trust and reciprocity between members, dependent upon the honesty of each other to safeguard the common benefit fund, and their participatory aspects stimulated many to become involved in political parties. In the south, however, the 'social capital' which these associations promoted to the benefit of society at large was absent as landlord patronage impeded their growth.10 A similarly favourable verdict on the legacy of English friendly societies has been given by David Green, who argues that they demonstrate the viability of a welfare system without an over-mighty state. Green suggests that they actively engendered an ethic of self-help and individualism, motivating members to become independent of the statutory Poor Law, that their coverage was far more extensive than has been supposed hitherto, and that they imposed a market discipline on

4 De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 515. 5 P. Rosanvallon, 'The decline of social visibility', in Keane, Civil Society, 199-220. 6 Meehan, Civil Society, 7-9; Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, 11-15. 7 The Commission on Social Justice, Social justice: Strategies for National Renewal (London, 1994), 306-10; P. Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Oxford, 1994); see also S. Yeo, 'Working-class association, private capital, welfare and the state in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries', in N. Parry et al. (ed.), Social Work, Welfare and the State (London, 1979). 8 R.D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modem Italy (Princeton, 1993); idem, "The prosperous community: social capital and public life', The American Prospect (Spring 1993), 35-42. 9 Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 91. 10 Ibid., 139-41,144-5.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 304 Urban History the cost of medical care by employing doctors on renewable contracts.11 This argument, for a 'reinvention of civil society' based on historical precedent, in which citizens take charge of their own welfare in a manner that obviates fraud and dependency, has a wide appeal. It is a feature not only of New Right rhetoric, but also of communitarian thought with its stress on the role of associations in engendering duty and civic responsibility.12 Victorian mutual aid has also been specifically invoked by some sections of the left in support of proposals for secondary pensions administered by stakeholder corporations.13 The claim then is that friendly societies benefited society not simply as insurers, but as associations. They fostered social capital by encouraging solidarity between members, they promoted civic engagement and acted as nurseries of democracy, and they cultivated an attitude to social welfare founded on independence and self-help. To explore these ideas this article will consider the friendly society movement in the context of a nineteenth-century provincial city. Bristol is offered as a suitable case study: it was one of Britain's largest cities with around 400 known friendly societies formed in the course of the century, its mixed economy meant that no single industrial sector dominated, and it had a rich tradition of clubbing which allows mutual aid organizations to be placed in the context of early modern forerunners. The first section will draw a distinction between friendly societies and other types of association which constituted civil society from the late eighteenth century, pointing to their procedural origins in the trade guilds and the influence of legislation on their development. The second part considers the role of the benefit clubs in the public life of the city, pointing both to their insurance activities and their physical presence as foci of conviviality and urban ritual. Finally the issues of membership solidarity and political life are discussed and an agnostic position is adopted to the characterization of friendly societies as repositories of social capital and lynchpins of the good society. Instead renewed emphasis is placed on their primary significance as pioneers of sickness insurance, and it is argued that the pressures they faced in tackling social risk created a powerful tendency towards increased bureaucratization and centralization throughout the period.

11 D.G. Green, Working Class Patients and the Medical Establishment (Aldershot, 1985); idem, Re-inventing Civil Society: The Rediscovery of Welfare Without Politics (London, 1993). 12 Keith Joseph, 'Why the Tories are the real party of the stakeholder', Daily Telegraph, 12 Jan. 1996; David Willetts MP, 'A buccaneer nation dares to be different', Sunday Times, 25 Aug. 1996; A. Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Commu- nitarian Agenda (London, 1993), chs 4 and 5, 248, 259-60; W.M. Sullivan, 'Institutions as the infrastructure of democracy', in A. Etzioni (ed.), New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions and Communitiers (Chapel Hill, 1995), 170-80; see also D. Selboume, The Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundations of the Civic Order (London, 1994), ch. 10; R. Bellah et al.. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (San Francisco, 1985). 13 F. Field, Making Welfare Work: Reconstructing Welfare for the Millenium (London, 1995), esp. 124-6.

Antecedents of the friendly society It is important at the outset to highlight points of contrast between the development of the friendly societies and the simultaneous burgeoning of other types of association. The surge of voluntary activity between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries was devoted in large part to charitable effort, with the establishment both of institutions, such as hospitals, elementary schools and asylums, and of societies, to evangelize or materially relieve the poor. There were also groups which combined philanthropy with sociability based more on horizontal social ties, for example freemasons and 'county' societies, while others, such as 'Phil, and Lit.' institutions, were devoted to cultural and scientific pursuits.14 Scholars emphasize a range of causal factors underpinning this trend. These include structural antecedents, such as the joint-stock company and the nonconformist chapel, from where the organizational procedures were drawn, along with the intellectual and spiritual climate of the evangelical revival, and the need for institutions which aided the integration of new groups in rapidly growing towns.15 Voluntarism is also widely identified with the 'making of the middle class', in that it provided a milieu in which political and religious differences were set aside and more homogeneous class values expressed, though opinions differ on the chronology of this.16 To discuss civil society in these terms is therefore to emphasize such features as the negligible involvement of the state, the use of a free press to publicize activities and encourage participation, the open public meeting with its rules and decorum permitting the expression of opinion, and the transparency and account- ability of open subscription lists and published accounts. The friendly society is distinguished from other branches of civil society by its origin in much older forms of association. In Bristol as elsewhere such practices as visiting the sick, obligatory attendance at deceased members' funerals, regular convivial events, and payment of alms from a common chest to which all subscribed are first discernible in

14 R.J. Morris, 'Voluntary societies and British urban elites, 1780-1850: an analysis', The Historical Journal, 26,1 (1983), 95-118; idem, 'Clubs, societies and associations', in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950. Vol. 3 Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1990); F. Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse (London, 1988), ch. II; P. Clark, Sociability and Urbanity: Clubs and Societies in the Eighteenth Century City (Leicester, 1986). 15 Morris, 'Voluntary societies', 104-5; I. Bradley, The Call to Seriousness. The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London, 1976), chs 4, 5, 6, 7; J. Brewer, 'Commercialisation and polities', in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth Century England (London, 1982), 217-30; P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford, 1989). t6 R.J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party. The Making of the British Middle Class, Leeds 1820-1850 (Manchester, 1990); J. Barry, 'Review article: the making of the middle class?', Past and Present, 145 (1995), 194-208; idem, 'Introduction' and 'Bourgeois collectivism? Urban association and the middling sort', in idem and C. Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People. Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800 (London, 1994).

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 306 Urban History the late medieval parish guilds.17 The rulebooks of the earliest Bristol benefit clubs suggest the direct influence of the declining craft guilds on the rules of order that governed their business and social arrangements.18 There was home-visiting, to ensure observation of guild ordi- nances, just as friendly society stewards visited members' homes. Fines, to enforce decorum, the duties of office and attendance at meetings and funerals, were common to both types of association, as was participation in the election of officials, with guilds voting at an annual meeting, and the societies selecting members as stewards and balloting for president from nominees. In both cases democracy was tempered with respect for hierarchy. Other similarities were the use of a box with multiple locks and keys held by separate officials, and the central importance of members receiving a decent funeral. Both set great store on conviviality, with guilds celebrating patron saints' days and civic ceremonies, and benefit clubs diverting monthly sums for beer on club night and enjoying an annual feast, often around Whitsun. Finally, guilds had formal procedures for mutual aid, which could extend to running their own almshouses, and operating schemes to maintain dependants of bankrupt members. By the eighteenth century these functions were comparatively trivial, save in the case of the few wealthy companies. Of more direct significance were the arrangements increasingly made at least up to the 1730s to support travelling journeymen, both by the payment of relief and certificates which temporarily bound the tramping artisan to a guild master.19 It was this system of travelling relief which formed the chief financial benefit of Oddfellowship in its early years.20 Recent work on the decline of English guilds has argued for the persistence of their activities into the early eighteenth century, and suggested that the journeymen's trade clubs which began to emerge at

17 N. Orme, "The guild of kalendars, Bristol', Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, xcvi (1978), 32-52; H.F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Mediaeval England (London, 1919), ch. iv, 42-4. 18 The following discussion draws on sources in Bristol Record Office (hereafter BRO). Guilds: BRO 9748 Bakers (1623), BRO 08155 Bakers (1499-1732), BRO 04369(1) Joiners (1606); BRO 01244 Drapers (1654), BRO 08156 (2) Feltmakers, etc. (1673-1865), BRO 08019 Whitawers, etc. (1735-81), BRO 35684 (15) Merchant Taylors (1707-1818); friendly societies: BRO Quarter Sessions (hereafter QS), 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18a, 24a, 30a; also F.H. Rogers, "The Bristol craft guilds during the 16th and 17th centuries' (University of Bristol M.A. thesis 1949), 90,104,110-11; E.W.W. Veale (ed.), The Great Red Book of Bristol, part I (Bristol, 1933), 26-7, 74-5, 118, 150-1, 153, 160-1, part in (Bristol, 1951), 75, 116; F. Bickley (ed.), The Little Red Book of Bristol (Bristol, 1900), part I, xxvii-iii, part II, 186-92; M. Fuller, West Country Friendly Societies (Reading, 1964), 51-2; A. Howkins, 'The taming of Whitsun in nineteenth century Oxfordshire', in E. and S. Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590-1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (London, 1981), 187-208. 19 M.J. Walker, "The extent of guild control of trades in England, c.1660-1820' (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 326-8,332-5. 20 R.W. Moffrey, A Century of Oddfellowship (Manchester, 1910), 25-7; Odd Fellows Magazine, lxxxii (March 1951), 91.

21 Walker, 'Extent of guild control', 62-3, 102, 332, 361, 345, 389; R.A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries' Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade Unionism (London, 1979), 77-8, ch. 16; C.R. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen: A Prehistory of Industrial Relations 1717-1800 (London, 1980); J. Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750-1850 (London, 1986), 255-65. 22 J. van Genabeek, 'Mutual labour insurance in the nineteenth century: the Netherlands internationally compared' (forthcoming Free University of Amsterdam Ph.D. thesis); J. van Gerwen and J. Lucassen, 'Mutual societies in the Netherlands from the sixteenth century to the present', IISH Research Paper 15 (Amsterdam, 1995). 23 BRO QS, 4a, 7a, 18a, 21a, 34a; J. Barry, 'The cultural life of Bristol, 1640-1775' (unpublished University of Oxford D.Phil, thesis, 1985), 172, note 3. 24 H.R. Southall, 'Unionization', in J. Langton and R.J. Morris (eds), Atlas of Industrializing Britain (London, 1986), 189-93. 25 Moffrey, Century of Oddfellowship, 16. 26 D.M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 (London, 1971); BRO 08155 Bakers (1720); BRO 08019 Whitawers, etc. (1735-36); BRO 35684 (15) Merchant Taylors (1737); W. Dobson and J. Harland, A History of Preston Guild (Preston, 1862), 54-71. 27 G. Rose, Observations on the Poor Laws (1805). 28 Chief Registrar (Friendly Societies) Annual Report (hereafter CR's Report) 1892, PP 1893-94, lxxxiv.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 308 Urban History found eighty-eight clubs in the city.29 Subsequent legislation supported their capital stock by encouraging investment in trustee savings banks and public funds, and the societies duly responded.30 By the late 1860s over a hundred Bristol clubs had accounts in the city's Savings Bank, representing around two-thirds of the total number in existence at the time.31 Parliament also periodically redefined the societies' position in respect of the Poor Law: for example, in 1793 exempting members from removal under the laws of settlement or, a hundred years later, permitting Guardians to disregard a proportion of friendly society benefit when paying out-relief.32 The state also acceded to the wishes of the medical profession that club practice should be the sole preserve of regular practitioners, when it debarred irregulars from friendly society work in the Medical Act of 1858.33 Finally, a key goal of legislation was to encourage actuarial soundness through valuations, returns and the advocacy of graduated contributions. Although this was initially widely resisted, by the 1880s the major orders were following the lead of the Oddfellows in adopting these procedures.34 Their origin in earlier forms of labour organization and their relationship with the state therefore sets the friendly societies apart from the contemporaneous developments in voluntarism. Of course the 'friendly society mania' of the late Georgian period did share some common features with the efflorescence of urban associational life.35 First, internal migration and the structural transformation of the labour market created a demand for clubs which could operate as institutions of adaption for new arrivals.36 This author has argued elsewhere that the geographic distribution of early friendly societies in areas of in-migration and industrialization suggests a primary appeal to young incomers who had relinquished rural support structures for the higher wages of the town,

29 BRO QS Friendly Society Articles of Association; PRO FS 1 and 2, Gloucestershire; Abstract of the Answers and Returns made pursuant to 'An Act for procuring Returns relative to the Expence and Maintenance of the Poor in England', PP1803-4, xiii. 30 B. Supple, 'Legislation and virtue: an essay on working class self-help and the state in the early nineteenth century', in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives, Studies in English Thought and Society, in Honour of J.H. Plumb (London, 1974); for society invest- ments, see CR's Report 1878, PP 1878-79, lxv. 31 Bristol Mercury, 18 Jan. 1868. 32 P.H.J.H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England, 1815-1875 (Manchester, 1961), ch. 8; J.H. Treble, "The attitudes of friendly societies towards the movement in Great Britain for state pensions, 1878-1908', International Review of Social History, 15 (1970), 284-5. 33 See, for example, PP 1840 II, A Bill for the Registration of Medical Practitioners, 8-9; Gosden, Friendly Societies, 145. 34 Ibid., 211-14; N. Doran, 'Risky business: codifying embodied experience in the Manche- ster Unity of Oddfellows', Journal of Historical Sociology, 7,2 (1994). 35 Quotation from B. Supple, The Royal Exchange Assurance: A History of British Insurance, 1720-1970 (Cambridge, 1970), 54. 36 Clark, Sociability and Urbanity; compare also M.R. Weisser, A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landmanschaften in the New World (New York, 1985) and K. Little, Urbanization as a Social Process: An Essay on Movement and Change in Contemporary Africa (London, 1974), 88-94.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 Friendly societies in Bristol 309 but lacked a Poor Law settlement or entitlement to charity.37 In Bristol a comparable function was fulfilled by the county and ethnic societies, such as the Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Hereford, and Ancient Britons (Welsh); natives of these places would meet for an annual service, feast and charitable collection to support needy compatriots by paying apprenticeship fees and lying-in gifts.38 A second common feature was the central role of the public house in providing the venue for clubbing. Of the sixty-one Bristol friendly societies founded before 1820 for which records survive only six were not based in pubs, and in this period major charities, Bristol Dispensary for instance, also used inns for their public meetings.39 These similarities did not, however, persist, and the world of middle-class voluntarism rapidly distanced itself from the friendly society. The rise of commercial life assurance rendered mutual insurance clubs for the well-to-do unnecessary, and the white-collar friendly society member became a rarity.40 Efforts by philanthropists to establish 'ra- tional' friendly societies underwritten by wealthy subscribers were not well received: in Bristol the Prudent Man's Friend Society, founded 1813, failed to attract benefit members, and the later South Gloucester Friendly Society soon folded under the weight of duplicitous claims.41 The visibility of middle-class associations in the local press, which both advertised and reported meetings and reprinted annual reports, contrasts markedly with the absence of the friendly society; mention of galas and annual feasts of the affiliated orders begins to appear from the mid- century, but it is trivial in comparison. The removal of the middle-class society from the public house to more salubrious surroundings such as assembly rooms occurred early in the nineteenth century, a spatial segregation of class and gender reflecting a new ethic of respectablity and the growing extent of female voluntarism.42 There are therefore conceptual difficulties to be faced in aligning the benefit club with the blossoming of civil society - arising from its class make-up, its structural antecedents and its circumscribed legal status. Antony Black has responded to this problem by simply dissociating the mutualist ethos from civil society, which he defines as the liberal values of personal freedom, market exchange and legal equality.43 The Marxist 37 M. Gorsky, "The growth and distribution of friendly societies in the early nineteenth century', Economic History Review, 51,3 (1998), 489-511. 38 Barry, 'Cultural life', 179-81; Felix Farley's Bristol Journal (hereafter FFBJ), 5, 19 Mar., 9 Jul., 6,15,27 Aug., 10,17 Sep., 16 Nov. 1774. 39 Bristol Gazette, 10 Jun. 1806. 40 Supple, Royal Exchange; see also R.J. Morris, 'The middle class and the property cycle during the Industrial Revolution', in T.C. Smout (ed.), The Search for Wealth and Stability (London, 1979). 41 State of the Prudent Man's Friend Society for the year 1814 (Bristol, 1814); Friendly and Benefit Building Societies Commission: Reports of the Assistant Commissioners, Southern and Eastern Counties, by Sir George Young, Bart: PP1874, xxiii, pt. 2 (hereafter Young), 504. 42 L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987), 300,427-8. 43 A. Black, Gilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought (1984), 32,237-41.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 310 Urban History usage of civil society as coterminous with bourgeois society, embracing state and market, also allows for the distinctiveness of mutuality.44 In this reading the friendly society emerged as a defensive reaction to such aspects of capitalist advance as social dislocation, the inadequacy of the Poor Law, and rising occupational health risk, drawing on labour traditions to establish its organizational form.45 It subsequently resisted the state's efforts towards 'embourgeoisment', and retained its character as a class institution.46 None of this is necessarily incompatible with Tocquevillian claims for the virtues of association, but it does raise important questions about the extent to which friendly societies could promote broader solidarities and reconcile participants to liberal democracy. And how important were issues of community responsibility to organizations principally concerned with ameliorating the worst effects of the trade cycle for low-paid workers?

Friendly societies and the public What role did friendly societies play in the public life of the city? The extent of membership in Bristol can be gauged for four years (Table 1) - using two Poor Law returns for 1803 and 1815, the 1874 Friendly Societies Commission and reports of the Registrar of Friendly Societies. Members are shown as a percentage of local population and of families in the census, which suggests that roughly one-third of Bristol families enjoyed friendly society coverage of some kind. Registration data shows that the local, independent clubs were superseded in mid-century by the great affiliated orders, where branches formed a federation with a central body. This trend occurred throughout the country, though there were regional variations in the strengths of each. Bristol was dominated by the Ancient Order of Foresters, the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Manchester Unity, alongside lesser numbers of the United Ancient Order of Druids and the Order of the Sons of Temperance. These allowed migrating members to carry contributions on to another club elsewhere and operated a district burial fund which cushioned individual branches from death benefit claims, but their appeal was augmented by their social and cultural aspects. Dissolutions were only recorded from 1875, but a significant number did fold. Fleeting references to 'insecurity of the ... clubs' in other sources remind us that the disaster of financial collapse dogged the movement in the earlier period too.47 Female friendly societies were a small minority,

44 J. Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (London, 1988), 56-64; E. Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 8. 45 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), 456-69. 46 J. Foster, Class Struggle in the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns (London, 1974), 216-18,341. 47 Lewins Mead Chapel Working and Visiting Society 3rd Annual Report (1837).

a) The extent of membership Members as Number of % of census societies population families

1803 8 35 88 1815 9.5 42 n/k 1874 9 39 191 1891 8.5 39 159 b) Society foundations Local Orders Dissolved Female

pre-1800 26 - - 2 1801-10 22 - - 4 1811-20 16 - - _ 1821-30 8 - - - 1831-40 27 4 - 3 1841-50 21 30 - 2 1851-60 21 24 - 3 1861-70 17 91 - 3 1871-80 5 24 7 3 1881-90 8 30 16 - 1891-1900 2 31 17 2

Sources: Abstract of answers and returns pursuant to: 'An Act for procuring Returns relative to the Expence and Maintenance of the Poor in England, PP 1803-4, xiii, PP 1818, xix; Young, 491-2, CR's Reports, 1875-1900; BRO QS; PRO FS 1 & 2 Gloucestershire; Census of Great Britain, Population, 1801,1811,1821.

accounting for some 17 per cent of total members in 1803. Several new women's clubs were founded in mid-century and the 1874 Commis- sioners described "The United Sisters' and 'Female Dolphins' who 'go in largely for regalia and finery, even more so than men'.48 The friendly society presence in the city was most obviously identified with its pubs, in which the vast majority held their meetings until the end of the century when the orders opened their own halls. Pubs were the preferred venue for benefit societies not only because of the alehouse's traditional role in catering for clubs, but also because of their economic interdependence. Bristol evidence shows that there were land- lords who had founded friendly societies and it was usual, at least before the trustee savings bank took hold in the 1820s, for the pub to store the box, sometimes guaranteeing the funds with a bond supplied by a local

48 Young, 502.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 312 Urban History brewer or victualler.49 If the promotion of clubs was a business strategy of the drinks trade, for the ordinary member a greater significance was attached to the society's 'house'. In the suburbs the survival of brass pole-heads (Figure 1) indicates an ongoing attachment between society and pub - the brasses were carried in the annual club walk and at members' funerals, and represent the pub name - The Sun, The Bell, The Salutation, and so on. This in turn suggests that membership of suburban or village clubs also marked identification with the local residential community. In the city centre matters were different, with a greater tendency to change pubs and for a few large houses to host several different clubs. Here the essence of monthly club night was the occasion it presented for masculine alehouse sociability. Though rulebooks frowned upon excessive alcohol consumption, the sums committed to 'victuals' - typically 3d against Is a month to the box - speak for themselves. Club rules forbidding 'foul language' and 'indecent songs' on occasions when wives were in the room hint at the atmosphere that prevailed in their absence.50 In addition to their role in the city's social life, the friendly societies were integral to local medical provision. They offered an alternative to the Poor Law medical service with its taint of pauperism, and to voluntary institutions, which required subscriber patronage for non- emergency cases. From about 1840 the surviving rulebooks show that sickness benefit was no longer just a cash payment, but that many clubs employed a doctor to certify and treat illness. By the 1890s the Foresters and Shepherds had opened their own dispensaries to allow them to secure preferential treatment for their members on favourable terms.51 By this time one in ten Bristol doctors was engaged in club practice. Club attendants tended to be those who had lacked the connections to secure more prestigious appointments and sought an entree to a competitive profession by catering to the lower end of the market.52 In contrast to other towns Bristol societies did not subscribe much to local voluntary hospitals, preferring to contribute to Hospital Sunday collec- tions and to donate profits from their annual festivals - modes of giving which bought no subscribers' rights.53 Probably these were rendered unnecessary by the comparative accessibility of the city's two teaching hospitals and various specialist institutions, which were supported by relatively high levels of charitable funding, not least through employers' subscriptions.

49 BRO QS To, 7c, 15, 30c, 32a, 33a and b; see P. Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England 1700-1830 (Cambridge, 1959), xxiii, ch. 4, 277-8; Fuller, West Country Friendly Societies, 53,58-60,103-5. 50 PRO FS1 Gloucestershire 581. 51 PP1883, lxvii, CR's Report 1880, part 2. 52 The Medical Directory for 1891 (London, 1891). 53 BRO 35893/21/e-i, State of the Bristol Infirmary, 1846-1903.

f*% '0

g) ^^^™ h) Figure 1: From the Rural History Centre, University of Reading, catalogued in Fuller, West Country Friendly Societies, nos: 164 (a). The Full Moon, 165 (b), The Star, both in Fishponds; 249 (c), The Bell, Stapleton; 149 (d), Redland Union Benefit Society, Black Boy Inn; 149 (e), Salutation Inn, Mangotsfield; 112 (f) and 225 (g) both from Filton; 113 (h) The Crown and Horseshoe Inn, Hanham; 245 (i), The Masons, Stapleton; most West of England pole-heads were produced in Bristol brassworks, see 119-20.

Friendly societies and social capital The friendly society was therefore a prominent form of associational life in Bristol, even if it differed in several respects from middle-class

54 FFB], 1 Jul. 1797. 55 W. Dobson and J. Harland, A History of Preston Guild (Preston, 1862), 54-71. 56 FFBJ, 27 Jun. 1846; Bristol Mercury, 3 Jul. 1858. 57 M. Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns 1790-1835 (Cam- bridge, 1988). 58 Bristol Mercury, 24 Jul. 1858. 59 St George's Brandon Hill Log, 28 Jul. 1871, cited in S. Humphries, 'Schooling and the working class in Bristol, 1870-1914', Southern History, 1 (1979), 187.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 of use, available at Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms . Open University Library . https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 , on 05 Feb2017 at22:07:20

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Figure 2: Detail from Robert Greethead's The Procession in Bristol celebrating the Coronation of William IV and Queen Adelaide (1831), courtesy of Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery 316 Urban History

Figure 3: UAO Druids Demonstration, Bristol Biennial Meeting, 12 June 1905,1st Prize Tableau & Committee of Court 'Lady Christabel', AOF, courtesy of Ancient Order of Foresters Heritage Trust

voluntarism, but to what extent did mutual aid societies foster 'social capital'? This section turns first to the question of whether they enhanced working-class solidarity. On the one hand the Bristol evidence does suggest that membership extended beyond the labour aristocrat to include the unskilled, and it is also clear that the white-collar member was a rarity. For instance, a survey of occupations of local Shepherds between 1858 and 1899 drawn from death benefit records reveals a membership of 31 per cent unskilled, and a mere 4 per cent white-collar workers. The most typical minimum wage limits required for membership as stipulated in local society rulebooks up to 1845 were 12s or 14s, sums markedly below the wage rates commanded by skilled artisans: for instance, carpenters could earn 18s-20s a week and shipbuilders 24s-30s.60 As elsewhere, then, the friendly society was not an exclusive preserve but potentially open to all workers.61 On the other hand there were several factors which promoted division and disunity. Table 1 suggests that large numbers were unable to join from irregular or

60 M. Gorsky, 'Charity, mutuality and philanthropy: voluntary provision in Bristol 1800-70' (unpublished University of Bristol Ph.D. thesis, 1995), ch. 6. 61 D. Neave, Mutual Aid in the Victorian Countryside: Friendly Societies in the Rural East Riding 1830-1914 (Hull, 1991).

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 Friendly societies in Bristol 317 insufficient earnings: if it is assumed that the middle-class families accounted for some 20 per cent of the city's population, this would leave perhaps 40 per cent with no support other than the Poor Law.62 In addition, different clubs catered to different status groups within the working class. As a Bristol Shepherd explained, 'the O.F. don't want the working class. They are a cut above us; they don't seem anxious to extend in these parts'.63 Another type of exclusion was the ethnic benefit club, like the Irish Hibernian Society.64 There was also the low level of female membership, reflecting the rise of housewifery, the masculiniza- tion of skilled work and the belief that women's health was a bad insurance risk. This contributed to a gendering of leisure activities and promoted a normative construction of manliness which held provision for dependants as the male role.65 These contradictory tendencies to promote and undermine class solidarities are matched by the ambiguities of friendly society politics. On the one hand, the 'no religion, no politics' clauses in the early friendly society rulebooks seem to set them in the integrative and non-partisan tradition of eighteenth-century associations. Loyalism is evident in the naming of clubs and branches throughout the period: the Loyal Nelson, the Royal Regent, Court Loyal Albert and so on. By contrast the reform era found the Bristol benefit societies petitioning Parliament against the bill of 1828 which sought to strengthen the supervisory powers of local magistrates over the clubs.66 This stance situates them in the radical camp of city politics, which regarded the unelected and unaccountable aldermanic bench as one of the worst manifestations of Old Corrup- tion.67 Later there are links with Chartism. For example, Felix Simeon, one of the leading Bristol Chartists was a prominent Oddfellow, while another, Henry Morrish, acted as secretary and treasurer to thirteen different societies.68 Amongst these was the local Owenite Hall of Science - an institution that was actually constituted and registered as a friendly society, and opened in 1840 with an address from Owen himself.69 The friendly society could serve as a training ground for activists who also engaged in political association, but what was the attitude of the broad mass of members? Like the guilds before them, the societies did

62 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 23-4. 63 Young, 494. 64 Bristol Gazette, 26 May 1836. 65 K. McClelland, 'Masculinity and the "representative artisan" in Britain, 1850-80', in M. Roper and J. Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991). 66 House of Commons Journal, 2 Jun. 1828; I. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth Century London (Chatham, 1979), ch. 12. 67 G. Bush, Bristol and its Municipal Government 1820-1851 (Bristol, 1976), 55-8. 68 FFB], 24 Oct. 1846; Young, 501. 69 PRO FS1 Gloucestershire 561; E. Jackson, A Study in Democracy: Being an Account of the Rise and Progress of Industrial Co-operation in Bristol (Manchester, 1911), 18-24.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 318 Urban History hold annual elections to office, but whether this made them nurseries of democracy is less clear. Elections to the post of club surgeon could take place as regularly as every six months, though the extent of voter turnout is not certain: Riley has investigated a Welsh club where, in 1880, 26 members voted on which doctor to hire, at a time when parliamentary returns found total membership was 260.70 Minute book evidence of elections to ceremonial and administrative positions is unrevealing - that of the Foresters' Court City of Bristol, for instance, suggests inconclu- sively that honorary positions were contested but by a small elite within the club, and that overall attendance often fell to two-thirds of members.71 Evidence from elsewhere cautions against overstating popular participation. In nearby Exeter the 1874 Commission reported a branch mat was often inquorate, where monthly meetings drew a nucleus of a dozen committed men out of 150, and where, when subscriptions came due each quarter, members sent wives or friends to pay in their place.72 It may be that in some areas, post-Risorgimento Italy perhaps, the internal democracy of mutual associations really did cultivate anew the habit of political involvement. But this seems unlikely to apply to a city like Bristol, where a wide freeman franchise and robust popular participation in election ritual stretched back deep into the eighteenth century.73 The argument for the outward diffusion of democratic habits from civil society must also take account of the persistence of the deeply embedded electoral behaviour which Joyce and Vincent have shown amongst urban voters, relating to occupation, ethnicity, religion and paternalist loyalty.74 These problems of reading the surviving record figure again in the question of whether friendly societies were virtuous associations of moral actors - in other words whether members consciously preferred individual responsibility for their welfare to dependence on the Poor Law. Self-reliance was certainly the objective of government, which hoped to achieve this by making the Poor Law unattractive and giving the friendly society a secure legal basis, and it was also the case that artisan rhetoric from the early nineteenth century laid great emphasis on independence from the rates.75 Gosden tentatively pointed to the rise in the formation of branches of the affiliated orders in the 1830s and 1840s as evidence of the strategic impact of the Poor Law Amendment, but this

70 J.C. Riley, Sick Not Dead: The Health of British Workingmen during the Mortality Decline (London, 1997), 112-13; CR's Report 1888, PP part 2,164. 71 Minute Book of Court City of Bristol A.O. F., passim. 72 Young, 482; see also 547-8,576. 73 L. Tomassini, 'Mutual benefit societies in Italy, 1861-1922', in M. van der Linden (ed.), Social Security Mutualism: The Comparative History of Mutual Benefit Societies (Beme, 1996), 225-71, esp. 237. 74 P. Joyce, "The factory politics of Lancashire in the later nineteenth century', The Historical Journal, xviii, 3 (1975), 525-53; J.Vincent, Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted (London, 1967). 75 For example, The Trades' Newspaper, 20 Aug. 1826.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 Friendly societies in Bristol 319 is not conclusive.76 The apparent rise in membership of the orders might represent erstwhile members of local clubs switching to the federal system, with some societies simply converting wholesale into affiliated branches, and new members attracted by the more sophisticated benefit arrangements and the trend towards medical attendance.77 When government did attempt to discover if the principle of less eligibility fostered self-reliance the findings were indecisive. Respondents to the 1870s Friendly Society Commission were extremely diffident on whether friendly society members were less likely to 'have recourse to the rates', and Poor Law guardians reported large numbers of ex-members claiming relief in some unions. Other evidence suggests the boundary between mutual and state provision was permeable, with the poor adopting an instrumental attitude that treated the friendly society as the first resort for unemployment risk and the Poor Law as the ultimate safety net, particularly in old age.78 In Bristol foundation figures (see Table 1) show a surge in the 1840s and 1850s marking the arrival of the orders. New establishments were most numerous in the early to mid- 18605, a period in which out-relief remained at the same level as in the 1850s, suggesting that spur to participation was as likely to be levels of real income as fear of the workhouse.79 The city's relief arrangements point up the difficulty of disentangling pragmatic self-interest from ethical self-help in motivating avoidance of the Poor Law. Before 1834 deterrence was deliberately promoted by workhouse uniforms, the low level of out-relief in comparison to the pay rates for unskilled labour (Is 6d-2s 6d compared to 10s-12s a week), and the five days of stone- breaking which able-bodied males had to undergo as a labour test. Later, citizenship rights were forfeit, as paupers lost the right to claim on the city's unusually large number of endowed charities, such as parish doles and almshouses; these restrictions led in turn to an under-use of the Poor Law medical service, which was lamented as damaging to public health.80 It is true that themes of altruism and duty to family, fellow members and the wider community were prominent in friendly society literature. But was this as a reflection of solidarity and mutual trust or an attempt to foster it in its absence? No friendly society could rely on mutual trust alone. There was the problem of adverse selection - faced, for instance, by a Bristol Foresters' branch which spied on, then expelled, an alcoholic 76 Gosden, Friendly Societies, 205-10. 77 Ibid., 113; J. O'Neill, 'A search for independence? Friendly societies in Nottinghamshire 1724-1912', Bulletin of Local History, East Midland Region (1988), 12; Young, 498. 78 Friendly and Benefit Building Societies Commission, Reports of the Assistant Commissioners, Cheshire etc, 316-17; 4th Report, Appendix xiii, 1-9, 3rd Report, 110-11; also CR's Report 1881, PP1882, lxvi, 8. 79 I. Archer, S. Jordan and K. Ramsay, Abstract of Bristol Historical Statistics Part 1: Poor Law Statistics 1835-1948 (Bristol, 1997), 15. 80 Appendix to the First Report from the Commissioners on the Poor Lows, Town Queries, Bristol, no. 32, PP 1834, xxviii, 512; PP 1854, xii Select Committee on Medical Relief, 503-5.

a) Days benefit paid per member five years ending: 1860 1865 1870 1875 Foresters 30 27 43 48 Odd Fellows 42 49 60 62 b) Correlation coefficients (Pearson's) between age of society and per capita benefit 1860 1865 1870 1875 1881 1886 r 0.33 0.65 0.70 0.66 0.68 0.66 n 30 59 44 43 80 147 Note: per capita benefit = days paid per member 1860-1875, £ paid per member 1881,1886 c) Valuation of branches, 1886 number in: Surpluplus Deficit Foresters 3 54 Shepherds 0 50 Oddfellows 10 6 Druids 0 14 d) Annual % of members lapsing five years ending: 1860 1865 1870 1875 1881 1886 8 4 n/k 5

Sources: Abstract of the Quinquennial Returns of Sickness and Mortality experienced by Friendly Societies for the Periods between 1855 and 1875, PP 1880, lxviii; CR's Report 1881, PP 1884, lxxvi, 1888, PP 1889, lxxi, pt n.

member.81 There was the problem of moral hazard - the risk that healthy members might recoup their savings through duplicitous claims. Trust and peer visiting could not obviate these difficulties: only the employment of club doctors could do so. There was the demographic problem, for clubs tended to form around a particular age cohort which then grew old together, pressuring the fund unevenly. This was demonstrated in quinquennial returns to parliament (Table 2a) which show a per capita rise in the number of days for which benefit was paid following the spate of formations in the mid-century. Correlation coefficients between age of society and benefit rates (Table 2b) remain at a fairly significant level, confirming the likely relationship between age and risk. A further problem was unfeasibly low subscription rates: valuations of 1886 revealed that 90 per cent of Bristol clubs were in deficit of anticipated assets against liabilities (Table 2c). The quinquennial returns also high- lighted the scale of membership lapses (Table 2d). Bristol's experience

81 Minute Book of Court City of Bristol A.O. R, Feb. 1845.

Conclusion The argument advanced here stresses the problems of establishing whether friendly societies generated social capital. Society literature and government reports are partial, ambiguous or contradictory, and the meagre references in working-class autobiography are insufficient to offset this.86 It is probable that for a core of members their involvement strengthened social networks, introduced them to political activism, and gave them a claim to inclusion in the urban civil society typified by middle-class voluntarism, at least in their public events. At the same time, evidence for apathy, membership lapses, club dissolutions and a

82 Annual Rqjort of the Hampshire Friendly Society, passim. 83 Young, 492-3. 84 Ibid., 468. 85 PRO FS1 Gloucestershire 596. 86 J. Burnett, D. Vincent and D Mayall, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Biography. Volume 1,1790-1900 (Brighton, 1984); only 19 of 1,028 entries mention friendly societies.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 05 Feb 2017 at 22:07:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926800012931 322 Urban History pragmatic, rather than moral, attitude towards the Poor Law points to a periphery of members whose engagement was less complete. We can be more certain of the pattern of institutional development. Here the dynamic of change demonstrates that solidarities of small, personal associations could not in themselves successfully ensure against social risk. The Bristol case shows the response: the move to a federal structure, the employment of doctors as gatekeepers of the insurance fund, and ultimately greater size, bureaucracy and impersonality. By the end of the century rising life expectancy posed new problems: claims in old age became more extensive, and, if Riley is correct, the duration of sickness throughout a member's life increased due to 'insult accumulation'.87 The move from voluntarism to compulsion in the Liberal welfare reforms was, in a sense, one further step in this quest to minimize risk, and despite the objections of the leadership the members themselves fa- voured the introduction of state old age pensions.88 If a Tocquevillian 'shaping of public discourse' is to be attributed to the nineteenth-century friendly society, then its key role lay not in creating social capital but in establishing and popularizing the principle of contributory insurance for sickness/unemployment benefit, and it coloured the approach of subsequent legislation accordingly.89

87 J.C. Riley, Sickness, Recovery and Death: A History and Forecast of III Health (London, 1989), ch. 6. 88 Treble, 'Attitudes of friendly societies'. 89 R. Wuthnow, 'The voluntary sector: legacy of the past, hope for the future?', in idem, (ed.), The Voluntary Sector in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, 1991), 22-5; E.P. Hennock, British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance 1880-19U (Oxford, 1987), 114-15,121,140-1,174-9,188-95,198,204-5.