British Friendly Societies, 1750-1914 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914 Timothy Alborn (bio) British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914, by Simon Cordery; pp. xiii + 230. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, £45.00, $65.00. Throughout the nineteenth century in Britain and most of its settled colonies, friendly societies provided a mixture of recreation, ritual, fraternity, and insurance against sickness and old age for fully half of the male working-class population. Initially restricted to small local sick clubs, often patronized by local clergymen or schoolmasters, these eminently Victorian institutions soon evolved into a bewildering array of forms. Best known, both at the time and to subsequent historians, were the huge federated orders like the Foresters and Oddfellows, each of which boasted over half a million members by 1900. These organizations provided an especially public face for the movement as a whole, with annual feasts and parades, widely circulating journals, and a potent presence in Parliament. By the 1880s, though, the friendly society umbrella also encompassed temperance lodges, burial clubs, deposit or "Holloway" societies (which combined sick pay with savings accounts), centralized societies (which offered sick pay without the ritual), and collecting societies (large mutual burial insurance offices). Additionally, most trade unions provided services that closely approximated those of friendly societies, and many employers set up shop clubs to maintain a loyal workforce. Simon Cordery provides an overview of this multifaceted movement in British Friendly Societies, which the author accurately describes as a "small book...designed to bridge a large gap" (1). This first book-length monograph on the subject since P. H. J. H. Gosden's The Friendly Societies in England (1961) combines a synthesis of a generation's worth of scholarship with substantial original research. While adding nuance to Gosden's largely legislative history, Cordery builds on more recent views of friendly societies as important institutional embodiments of working-class sociability, "respectability," and masculinity. He also does a good job illustrating some of the tensions between these attributes of friendly societies and their ability to provide insurance against sickness and old age. Finally, although in an inevitably limited fashion, he hints at the incredible diversity of Victorian friendly societies, while writing them into the mainstream of British political history. Cordery organizes his book along a series of themes which run in rough chronological order from the late eighteenth century to 1914. Successive chapters examine the roles of gender and ritual in early friendly societies; tensions within early Victorian societies between middle-class patrons and (often radical) working-class members; ambivalent efforts by mid-Victorian politicians and civil servants to regulate the movement; concurrent efforts by club members to define themselves as "respectable"; the actuarial problem of remaining solvent against the backdrop of longer-lived members; and finally the state's extension (after 1900) of old age pensions and sick pay to workers who had been underserved by friendly societies. This organizing strategy makes for some repetition, but allows for a series of revealing cross-sectional peeks into such a complex world. Cordery is on his surest footing in those sections which touch on relations between friendly societies and the governing classes, either in the guise of the state or of employers. A nice vignette, for instance, details an assault by friendly society leaders on the Railway Benevolent Institution, established by transport barons in 1858 to provide pensions to widows of "deserving" railwaymen. This incident reveals clearly that a primary meaning of self-help for the Victorian working man was the correlation between savings and desert, with no outside meddling from middle-class do-gooders. The same holds for [End Page 104] his discussion of state-appointed philanthropic bureaucrats like John Tidd Pratt, whose unpopularity grew with each of the four decades he served as the official guardian over friendly society solvency and sobriety. Cordery is less thorough in exploring contacts between friendly societies and other contemporary expressions of self-help—like savings banks, cooperatives, and building societies—that generated friction in relation to one another at different points during this period. On the more general question of friendly societies' "political" status in the nineteenth century, he takes the line that they were far more potent as a pressure group than people...