Manchester Unity Research Articles

Trust Among Strangers: Friendly Societies in Modern Britain. By Penelope Ismay (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 229 pp. $105.00 cloth $29.99 paper

This stimulating history of friendly societies in Britain provides an account of their development from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century, exploring their role in the cultural and moral dimensions of economic life. Ismay is especially interested in the ways in which mutual-aid societies generated social trust in a period of rapid population growth and urbanization, which ostensibly worked to atomize and isolate the individual.The book consists of a series of chronologically overlapping analytical narratives. Chapter 1, “Friendly Societies before Friendly Societies,” examines the early modern history of the term friendly society. Consulting texts from Myles Coverdale to Daniel Defoe, Ismay demonstrates how the term’s usage exhibited an overlap between a particular kind of organization and a larger moral vision of how societies ought to function through friendly relations among its members.Chapter 2, “Friendly Societies and the Meaning of the New Poor Law,” stresses the importance of contributory schemes and mutual-aid societies in the Poor Law debates at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, arguing that failing to take account of this dimension misses the complexity of these discussions. Chapter 3, “The Battle Between Savings Banks and Friendly Societies,” explores the contrasting individualist rationale for savings banks articulated during the political debate surrounding the passage of the 1817 Savings Bank Act and the emergence of the New Friendly Society in its aftermath, which retooled and preserved the mutually supportive dynamic of mutual aid. Chapter 4, “Trusting Institutions: Making the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Manchester Unity,” turns to a detailed examination of the history of the Odd Fellows, one of the largest and most important nineteenth-century mutual-aid societies. Ismay traces its emergence as a model for the Affiliated Order, a new type of friendly society that came to dominate after the 1830s, extending the geographical reach of these organizations through multiple branches. Ismay emphasizes how maintaining the original convivial character of the Odd Fellows proved crucial for the maintenance of social ties among the membership, providing the cultural resources for the reciprocity necessary for the success of a mutual aid society.The final chapter, “Trusting Numbers: Sociability and Actuarial Science in the Manchester Unity,” examines the mid-nineteenth-century worries about the solvency of friendly societies and the increasingly sophisticated application of actuarial science that informed the shift from managing “providence” to managing “risk.” Again, mutual-aid societies proved resilient in the face of this challenge. Not until the passage of the 1911 National Insurance Act did they go into a long-term decline.Methodologically, this study depends upon the traditional tools of the historian, utilizing a close attention to printed texts, Parliamentary debates, government reports, and the archival materials preserved by the Odd Fellows. The interdisciplinary dimensions of the study are found in the larger theoretical context of the analysis, which addresses the nature of modernity and the concept of social trust—issues explored from a historian’s persective by Vernon, from a sociologist’s perspective by Giddens and Misztal, and from an anthropologist’s perspective by Scott.1 The footnotes document the range of primary and secondary works that form the foundation for this study, but the lack of a formal bibliography sometimes makes it difficult to keep track of Ismay’s different historiographical strands, especially given the absence in the index of important theoretical and historiographical matters treated in the notes. Ismay’s discussion follows an arc from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, draws out the mutually constitutive roles of contingency and individual agency at important points of departure in the development of friendly societies, and complicates our understanding of the distinction between the modern and the early modern. Ismay’s fine work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this period and serves as a rich pre-history of the welfare state.

The friendly planet: ‘Oddfellows’, networks, and the ‘British World’c.1840–1914

AbstractBritish clubs and societies spread around the English-speaking world in the long nineteenth century. This article focuses on one particularly large friendly society, the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows (MU), which by 1913 had more than a thousand lodges around the world, especially concentrated in Australia and New Zealand. The MU spread so widely because of micro-social and macro-social forces, both of which this article investigates. It also examines the transfer of members, funds, and information between different districts of the society, and argues that such transfers may have smoothed internal and long-distance migration.

WITHIN THE SHELTER OF THE OLD ELM TREE: ODDFELLOWSHIP AND COMMUNITY IN NORTH OXFORDSHIRE, 1871-2002

In recent years the focus of friendly society history has shifted from preoccupation with organizational and legislative issues towards evaluation of societies’ relevance to the communities of which they were part. But although the I9th century has received considerable attention, much less research has been undertaken into the period after the commencement of compulsory state sickness insurance in I9I2, and almost no interest has been shown in friendly societies’ struggle for survival in the modern era of the welfare state. This study of the Old Elm Tree Lodge of the Independent Order of Oddfellows Manchester Unity, which was established in the Oxfordshire town of Chipping Norton in I87I, contrasts the experience of friendly societies before and after I9I2 and sheds light on their role in the provision of social capital and on their changing community significance in the pre- and post-National Insurance eras and up to the present day.

Estimating Per Capita Expenses in Multiple State Models of Permanent Health Insurance

AbstractThe aim of this work is to present a method to compute the expected amount of annual claims in the health insurance. (A more detailed analysis of the method can be found in Kovářová (1998).) We will be especially concerned with the permanent health insurance and compare our numerical results with those computed and published for the permanent health insurance in C.M.I.R. (1991). At the same time we will give a general methodology applicable not only to the permanent health insurance but for other types of health insurance as well.The methods used today can be divided into three groups: the method of the decrement tables, the Manchester Unity method and the multiple state model. We would like to describe a simple method to compute from the data of the multiple state model the bases for the Manchester United and for the decrement tables methods.

Risky Business: Codifying Embodied Experience in the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows

Abstract Foucault's theorising on power/ knowledge is combined with recent feminist work on the importance of analysing embodied experience in order to re‐examine the conventional interpretation of nineteenth century ‘friendly society’ insurance history. In contrast to conventional accounts which interpret the eventual adoption of life insurance tables as the belated acceptance of sound, scientific principles, this article argues that such a transformation also represented the destruction of a prior cultural organization of health care via the imposition of the mundane ‘disciplinary’ technique of ‘counting.’

Some aspects of the modelling of permanent health insurance

1.1 The traditional approach in the United Kingdom to the analysis of permanent health insurance (PHI) data and to the rating of PHI business has been the Manchester Unity approach. This approach, which has its origins in Friendly Society business, is in some ways unsuitable for modern PHI business. (An interesting discussion on this subject can be found in Report No. 7 of the Continuous Mortality Investigation Bureau (C.M.I.R. 7, §4 (1984). For this reason the PHI Sub-Committee of the CMIB has recently been investigating the possibility of using a different approach, involving the use of a multiple state model, for analysing PHI data. A full report on the Sub-Committee's investigation will be published soon as C.M.I.R. 10.

Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statistics

T HE POLITICAL ARITHMETIC of John Graunt and William Petty was predicated on nominalist assumptions about the nature and sources of order in both society and the physical world. Where later statisticians routinely presumed that natural and social phenomena were susceptible to quantitative study only because and insofar as they were ordered by inherent causal laws, Graunt and Petty viewed the world as made up of discrete entities with no intrinsic relations obtaining among them. They regarded causal laws as constructs of the human mind, and they conceived the uses of mathematics in terms of creating order rather than discovering its immanent principles. These presuppositions help to fix political arithmetic's place in the spectrum of English thought during the decades immediately after the Restoration, and they also illuminate the changing social and political significance of important nominalist currents in the natural philosophy of the age. Within the framework of seventeenth-century nominalism, the relations between social order and the order of nature, and between natural and social philosophy, could be construed in several ways. Graunt and Petty stated the issue primarily in methodological terms: quantifying is important because it provides a form of knowledge free from the distorting effects of controversy and conflict; and the natural philosophers' primary claim on our attention is that, as a group, they offer an example of how consensus about explanatory principles and concepts makes for social harmony. Underlying this view was a further argument-that the conditions for social order ultimately must be self-imposed by individuals as well as enforced by public authority. Again natural philosophy provides the compelling example. With its conception of knowledge as the product of a sustained application of human reason to the phenomena of the physical world, and with its emphasis on the industriousness and self-discipline required of experimenters and investigators, the new science represented a form of social practice which in itself would make those who took it up virtuous. This line of argument was frequently incorporated into a broader set of claims which Petty and Graunt do not make. Robert Boyle, for example, found it reasonable to combine a nominalist epistemology with the view that the

VI Non-Cancellable Disability Insurance

There are two methods of dealing with the actuarial features of sickness insurance—the collective method and the reversionary method.Unfortunately, perhaps the two methods have developed quite independently of each other, for historical reasons.The collective method was used in Great Britain to investigate Friendly Society experience. The pattern for all subsequent investigations was set in the 1820s and brought to its culmination of refinement in Watson's Manchester Unity Experience still in the Institute's examination syllabus, 66 years after publication. No investigation of insured lives has yet been made in Great Britain. In the rest of this note the term ‘Manchester Unity method’ will be used to describe the collective method.

Manchester Unity Dental and Optical Benefits Fund.

Manchester Unity Dental and Optical Benefits Fund.

Rural Districts Male Mortality, 1920–22, Combined with Manchester Unity Sickness Experience, 1893–97, Occupation Group A.H.J.

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Sickness Expectation and Experience, by T. G. GRAHAM, President of the National Conference of Friendly Societies and Past Grand Master of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows

Sickness Expectation and Experience, by T. G. GRAHAM, President of the National Conference of Friendly Societies and Past Grand Master of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows

Eastern Counties Rural Districts Male Mortality 1920–22, Combined with the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity Friendly Society Sickness Experience 1893–97, Occupation Group A.H.J.

Eastern Counties Rural Districts Male Mortality 1920–22, Combined with the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity Friendly Society Sickness Experience 1893–97, Occupation Group A.H.J.

Some Aspects of a Fall in the Rate of Mortality as Affecting the Liabilities of a Friendly Society

Synopsis of PaperThe Paper draws attention to the loss arising on the sickness funds of Friendly Societies as a result of the steady fall in the rate of mortality amongst the general population in recent years. To set against this loss there are possible sources of profit such as a gain from favourable rates of sickness actually experienced or from excess rates of interest earned ; and if a Society grants a funeral benefit in addition to sickness benefit (as is commonly the case) the gain from light mortality under the former will help to offset the loss from light mortality under the latter. The relative periods of full and reduced benefits and the limiting age up to which sickness benefit is payable (whether granted throughout life or restricted to members below a certain age) are also of importance when the question of mortality loss is under consideration.Notwithstanding the period that has elapsed and the improvement in mortality that has taken place since the date of publication of the tables based upon the experience of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows during the years 1893-97, these tables are still employed as the standard tables for much Friendly Society work. The object of the Paper is to consider how the loss arising from certain assumed reductions in the rate of mortality may be set against gains from other sources, so that standard reserves may be set up without profit or loss accruing.

Club Practice in New Zealand.

Whangarie, New Zealand, July 7, 1904. To the Editor: —In a recent issue ofThe JournalI noticed remarks on club practice. Permit me, as one who has passed through the experience, to express myself. I am now in a country in which there are many of these friendly societies. They are in some respects a very good thing for the workingman, and can even provide for an old age pension. In Auckland there are about 3,000 lodge members; many of these are married and have children; every child under the age of 18 comes on the physician's list. Take, for example, a man 31 years of age who joins the Manchester Unity of Odd Fellows; he pays £3 10s. ($17.50) per year; this covers all fees; 6 shillings ($1.50) goes to the chemist. 14 shillings ($3.50) goes to the doctor. The first fee of £3 10s. ($17.50) also acts

Sickness and Mortality Experience (1893–97) of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows. An account of an Investigation of the Sickness and Mortality Experience of the I.O.O.F., Manchester Unity, during the five years 1893–1897, by Alfred W. Watson, F.I.A., F.S.S., with tables. Published by the Grand Master and Board of Directors, 97, Grosvenor Road, Chorlton-upon-Medlock, Manchester, and by C. & E. Layton,

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On The Graduation of the Rates of Sickness and Mortality Presented by the Experience of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows during the period 1893–97

In considering the various methods of graduation open to us, we were impressed, having regard to the large number of series to be dealt with, by the great facility and rapidity with which formulæ of summation can be applied with the certainty that the results obtained will conform closely to the unadjusted facts. For the Sickness Tables the summation method is especially suitable, since the average number of weeks (or rate) of sickness at any age is necessarily separable for practical purposes into “periods of attack”, e.g., in the case of the Manchester Unity Experience, 1893–97, “First 3 Months”, “Second 3 Months”, “Second 6 Months”, “Second 12 Months,” and “After 2 years”, the successive values of each of which must form a regular series, whilst the sum of any two sections forming a “period of attack” in general use (e.g., First 6 Months = First 3 Months + Second 3 Months) must be equally regular in progression. It is obvious that if a summation method be adopted, and the same formula be used throughout, a combination of any two or more of the graduated series will be itself a graduated series, and will, indeed, be identical with the result of an independent graduation of the combined unadjusted rates.

The Methods of Analyzing and Presenting the Mortality, Sickness and Secession Experience of Friendly Societies, with Examples drawn from the Experience of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows

The publication of the Sickness and Mortality Experience of Registered Friendly Societies, the work of our late distinguished member, Mr. W. Sutton, has directed the serious attention of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows to the question of the continued reliability of the Tables on which the Society has been accustomed to base its financial estimates, and as the result of the interest thus awakened, the Actuaries of the Order have been instructed to make a complete investigation of its experience during the five years 1893–97. From the immensity of the data to be handled in this investigation (these being contributed by about 3,500 branches and comprising, inter alia, some three million years of life and 40,000 deaths) it has been necessary, at the outset, to closely consider the methods of tabulation and classification to be adopted, and preliminary experiments on a somewhat elaborate scale have accordingly been required. The results of these experiments appear to possess a definite value in relation to the subject of friendly society experience, and I am emboldened on this account to offer the following notes respecting them for the consideration of this meeting.