I completed my research on Friendly Societies of the 19th Century today and tidied up my piece on the 1882 Preston Guild Medal worn by members of the Independent United Order of Mechanics. They were prone to schisms, sometimes over doctrine, sometimes over money, and a government report of the time says, with the air of a disappointed parent “it is very difficult to distinguish the different orders of Mechanics”. Tell that, I thought, to the members of the Free and Independent United Order of Mechanics, who were mainly based in the Lake District. Is it me, or are the words “Judean People’s Front” drifting in you mind now?

When I say “completed”, I mean completed it enough for the purposes of writing an article about a medallion. The full story of the Friendly Societies will probably never be known.

I’m now researching the 1914  medal issued by the town of Northampton to the children who had fathers serving in the Army or Navy. It’s associated with the Poor Children’s Dinner Fund and I’m having trouble disentangling the two things. They made 3,100 medallions for distribution, but they were lost by the railway company and not given out until mid-January.  There were 2,914 children who qualified, including 80 who, by 1914, had fathers who were either dead or “missing”. Considering that many of the early recruits were unmarried, this is a lot of kids. It would, of course, get considerably worse.

There were 879 Christmas hampers for the Fund to distribute in 1914, about 500 less than in 1913. The boot trade (Northampton’s main trade) had picked up in 1914 due to the need for military boots, so there were fewer poor people needing help. Seventy percent of British Army boots used in 1914-18 were made in Northampton, with one manufacturer doubling in output and many women involved in the wartime trade. they also made boots for the Russian Army.

This is a multi-purpose article, as it will do, with slightly different slants, for several different places. I’ve already used it to fill half a blog post. It will go on the Numismatic Society Facebook Page as an example of a medallion and on the research page of the Peterborough Military History Group. Peterborough was in Northamptonshire in 1914.