Millions of working men paid a few pence a week into a club that would bury them – and the NHS made them obsolete overnight
Friendly Society is a basement bar off Wardour Street with four hundred and sixty-one reviews and a 4.4, and it is named after one of the most important institutions in British history, which essentially nobody has heard of.
What a friendly society was
A club. You paid in a few pence a week.
And if you fell sick, it paid you. If you were injured and could not work, it paid you. And when you died, it buried you – which mattered enormously, because a pauper’s funeral was a humiliation that people were genuinely terrified of.
That is it. That is the whole mechanism. Working men, pooling small sums, insuring each other against catastrophe, and administering it themselves.
The scale
It is very difficult to overstate and almost nobody knows the numbers.
By the early twentieth century, membership of friendly societies in Britain ran into the millions – and by some counts, more working men belonged to one than belonged to a trade union.
They had lodges. They had rituals, and regalia, and initiation ceremonies, and enormous annual parades. They met in pubs, constantly, because the pub was the only building available.
The Foresters. The Oddfellows. The Buffaloes, who are still going. Names that survive on pub signs across the country and mean nothing to anybody under seventy.
And they were run by their members. Not by the state, not by a charity, and not by an employer – by a committee of working men, elected, who kept the books.
What happened to them
The welfare state.
And this is the part that is genuinely difficult, and the Prat is not going to pretend otherwise.
National Insurance, and then the NHS, provided universally and by right what the societies had provided by subscription – and provided it better, and provided it to everybody, including the people who had never been able to afford the subscription in the first place.
Which was an enormous and unambiguous good.
And it removed, at a stroke, the entire reason for a friendly society to exist. Membership collapsed. The lodges closed. And an entire tradition of working-class self-organisation – millions of people, running their own institutions, competently, for a century – simply evaporated within a generation.
What was lost with it
Not the benefit. The benefit got better.
What went was the doing of it. The committee, the books, the argument about the accounts, the sense that this was ours and that we ran it.
A man who received a sickness payment from his lodge was receiving something he had built. A man who receives it from the state is receiving something he is entitled to.
Both are good. They are not the same thing, and the people who lost the first one said so at the time, and nobody listened.
The bar
Small, hidden, unmarked, extremely welcoming, and a fixture of gay Soho for decades.
Verdict
Excellent bar. Go, and raise one to several million men who insured each other because nobody else would.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
