The Full Story
Before welfare states, before government safety nets, British workers created their own. They called them friendly societies.
From the 17th century onward, ordinary working people pooled small weekly contributions into mutual funds. The Oddfellows. The Foresters. The Hearts of Oak. The poor law returns of 1801 to 1803 recorded around 700,000 members; by 1911, registered membership had grown to around 6 million. Rose's Act of 1793 gave registered societies legal protection, and they flourished.
Every week, a working man would put a few pennies into the pot. In return, he got sick pay when he couldn't work, death benefits for his family, and the guarantee of a decent funeral. The societies were run by their members, for their members. No charity. No patronage. Mutual aid.
They had rituals, passwords, meeting halls. They looked like secret societies, but their secret was simple: working people could look after each other better than anyone else would.
When the National Health Service was created in 1948, it didn't come from nowhere. The friendly societies had been providing healthcare and social insurance for centuries. Aneurin Bevan built the NHS on foundations that working people had already laid.
The NHS wasn't invented by politicians. Working people invented it first.
Why This Matters
Britain's friendly societies pioneered mutual aid, social insurance, and healthcare provision centuries before the welfare state. The NHS was built on principles that ordinary working people had already established.