ABSTRACT
A friendly society, in the first Act of Parliament which used that term, was described as “a society of good fellowship for the purpose of raising from time to time, by voluntary contributions, a stock or fund for the mutual relief and maintenance of all and every the members thereof, in old age, sickness, and infirmity, or for the relief of widows and children of deceased members.” The history of friendly societies begins long before Rose’s Act. Friendly societies were and are creatures not of Parliament but of brotherly feeling and felt need in small groups of ordinary men throughout the length and breadth of Britain. The Royal Commission dwelt with equal interest on the “four peculiar clubs” of a different type in Cheshire—the unregistered Sunday-School Dividing Societies, by which the children of the small town of Nantwich, according to their religious persuasions—Church of England, Wesleyan, Baptist, Independent—were organized into providing for their own funerals and their doctoring.
