Informal mutual aid
Introduction
Victorian Bournemouth (230) explores annual medical insurance schemes run by pubs and clubs during its last two decades. These once independent schemes, combining community self-help with commercial opportunity, became absorbed into the corporate culture of charity donations that flourished in the town. Their ambiguous nature attracted the attention of local Temperance watch-guards. A slate displayed in the pub bore the club’s financial details.
Victorian Bournemouth (230): design and finances
Architecture
Slate clubs comprised collections of people, centred on a public meeting place, who combined to make regular voluntary financial payments towards personal health insurance. The schemes ran for a year, managed for the most part by a pub or a political club. In December, each year, ‘share night’ occurred, marking the end of the current scheme. On that occasion, after deductions for sick payments and burials, the remaining funds, collected over the year, augmented by bank interest, became dividends. If no payments had occurred, subscribers hoped to receive more than they had paid. Slate clubs, therefore, answered several needs within one design. In addition to pre-paid medical care, payments became investments, or, at the very least, a form of savings. To the organising pub or club, however, the operation represented a commercial opportunity. Members visiting each week to make their deposits became potential customers for drinks or food.
Financial details
According to the financial details reported on some share nights, members appeared to receive dividends of about ten shillings each. In 1885, just over 90 members of the Pembroke Arms club received 11/3 after expenses. Two years later, the two hundred members of the Excelsior, based at the South-Western hotel, collected about the same. 198 cabbies received 12/6 each in 1895. Income consisted of subscriptions and honorary contributions. Just under a quarter of this fund went against medical expenses that year. Three widowers received £5 each after their wives died, while a widow collected £10. The money also paid administrative costs. The sums may have seemed small at the time, but an editor put this into context: ‘the yearly dividends are a great help to the working man, and many a family get a good Christmas dinner with father’s share, who otherwise probably would have to go without it’ (1898).
Victorian Bournemouth (230): for and against
Benefits and popularity
At their 1886 share night, the Pembroke Arms club heard the Reverend R. J. Pretyman speak. In addition to his clerical perspective, Pretyman’s speech benefited from experience as an Improvement Commissioner and deputy chairman of the Christchurch Union. For him, a slate club combined two virtues. First, they encouraged prudence, ‘the foundation of all success in life’. Second, they made an important financial contribution to society, for they reduced the amount needed to fund poor relief. According to the secretary of the Excelsior, slate clubs ‘worked hand in hand with the permanent societies, but touched a little lower on the social scale’. He thought a key benefit lay in a member, at death, remaining ‘independent to the aid of the parish’, a permanent fear amongst the indigent. Thus, this financial instrument offered an acknowledged benefit to one section of society. Their appeal contributed to wider propagation in Bournemouth.
Popularity and criticism
Nevertheless, their success attracted various criticisms from some quarters. These included comments about their structural shortcomings. A club’s phoenix-like annual revival after payments presented problems. People already sick could not join (‘pre-existing conditions’ notable in the modern medical insurance business). Furthermore, no payments would occur within the first six weeks, a period when severe weather often created a dangerous environment for poorer people. Others attacked the clubs’ parochial nature, calling for a framework covering the town or noting their association with pubs. Temperance people had an ambivalent attitude. The clubs promoted saving and self-help, but did so within the context of alcohol use. Clubs which sponsored Sunday excursions, for example, on a steamboat, incurred criticism for acting against Christian principles, as well, perhaps, as providing a context for extended drinking. Although some clubs managed hospital donations, this drew them into comparison with Friendly Societies, considered superior because of their permanence.
Victorian Bournemouth (230): developments
Transformation
In 1885, for the Coronation Day celebrations, Henry Haskell, perhaps a local bricklayer, persuaded seven slate clubs to participate in holding a fete and gala. Each represented a local pub. They assembled under the banner of the Bournemouth Amalgamated Slate Clubs. The exercise aimed at raising money to support local dispensaries. At the celebratory dinner, listeners heard several speeches. These shared the theme of how slate clubs and friendly societies, for example, Oddfellows and Foresters, shared similar charitable objectives, despite structural differences. Thereafter, according to newspaper reports, individual slate clubs held events to raise money to support local medical institutions, for example, Hospital Sundays, as well as other occasions. Thus, slate clubs, which had functioned for the sole financial benefit of their members, now raised money for purposes having no direct connection. They lost their local reference point and became attached to the wider community.
Woodwork
Press coverage of individual slate clubs declined during the 1890s. References still occurred, but they talked about slate clubs as a category. They would mention them in the same sentence as friendly societies. Many social hubs seem to have run them as a matter of course. Once a characteristic of public houses and political clubs, a wide range of groups participated in the process. The activity reached into local churches and even Temperance groups. At their 1898 share night, teetotal members of the Total Abstinence Sons of the Phoenix Slate Club celebrated only two cases of sickness that year. At one point, Langton Slate Club, meeting at the Red House Coffee Tavern, Wyndham Road, Springbourne, had acquired 165 members. The well-established structure which supported the local military volunteer regiments also ran slate clubs. Thus, behaviour, once having a tight local focus, moved beyond the parochial into an institution.
Takeaway
Victorian Bournemouth (230) has traced the activities of slate clubs as reported in the local press during the last two decades of the century. Once a feature expressing the personality of their sponsoring local pubs, this form of behaviour became institutionalised to take its place amongst Bournemouth’s other charitable bodies.
References
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