Cuckfield Museum
CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME
Our new display for Spring 2024 shows some of the ways in which this community supported its poorer members in the days before the introduction of the welfare state and old-age pensions.
Successive vicars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries constantly urged members of their congregation to be generous in supporting various practical schemes to help the “poor and needy”. In July 1907, Holy Trinity’s then incumbent Canon Cooper writes “I trust you will not hate giving as much as I hate begging.”
Parish magazines dating back as far as 1879 record the ways in which charity really did begin at home: blankets could be borrowed over winter: a Coal Club bought supplies in bulk to secure best prices for members and, by 1907, “36 loaves of good bread” were given out every Friday morning “to those widows and aged people who are in the greatest need of such help.”
Contributors to the Boot and Shoe Club ensured that no child need go to school barefoot and a Clothing Club was quickly set up in conjunction with it.
In fact, those long-ago parish magazines make very interesting reading for anyone studying social history.
An archived document on display dates from 1909 and reveals how well the Cuckfield branch of the Oddfellows Friendly Society looked after its tradesmen members, including a Savings Bank from which contributing members could draw if out of work and an old age fund to “keep them from the workhouse”, an ever-present fear of those who had been dependent on tied cottages all their lives and were now too old to work.
Perhaps the most successful charitable initiative from Victorian times was the appointment in 1891 of Miss Mary Stoner, then aged 36, as Cuckfield’s first District Nurse with her wages being funded by subscribers to a Nursing Fund. You can read more about this remarkable woman here
If you are interested in this or any other Cuckfield topics, why not visit us in the museum.
