Text of Talk to Scots’ Charitable Society of Boston at Hilltop Restaurant, Saugus 27 March 2003
Justine Taylor
Royal Scottish Corporation, London
Thank you.
I’d like to thank Tom Smith for inviting me to your meeting this evening and for giving me the opportunity to tell you about the Royal Scottish Corporation, a charity that has been helping Scots in London for around 400 years.
I would also like to thank especially Bill Budde for making his original contact, and for seeing to the arrangements for my visit. Although, we had heard about your society from Professor Allan Macinnes of Aberdeen University (who has in fact used your archives), Bill’s email was of much interest to the London charity – many of whose governors did not realise that they had such a sister here in New England.
As you have heard from Bill…I was commissioned to write the history of the Corporation around last August and have, after a quick period of research and writing, now finished and it is just about ready to go to its Scottish publisher. We plan to publish during October, in time for an anniversary dinner on St Andrews Day. Bill Budde has in fact provided me with a brief outline of your society which we plan to include as an appendix. The book will be sold for charitable purposes via the Corporation and its website and also distributed by the publisher – though its niche subject obviously means rather small quantities. 2,000 books is the plan.
I thought I would first of all do a quick race through 400 years of the charity and the circumstances and men who shaped it. And then I can give you a quick outline of its current operations and finally tell you a little bit about the future strategy that is being implemented as I speak.
The Royal Scottish Corporation is the working name of ‘The Scottish Hospital of the Foundation of King Charles II.’ First incorporated by royal charter in 1665 and dating its origins from 1603, the Royal Scottish Corporation is the oldest Scottish charity outside of Scotland and one of the oldest charities in London and the UK.
The incorporated charity had itself evolved from an earlier mutual-aid society or box club for London Scots called the ‘Scots Box.’ This had been established soon after the accession of James I in 1603 to help impoverished Scottish merchants and craftsmen. The Corporation’s 1665 charter, originally intended to provide a workhouse for poor Scots artisans, was followed by three more royal charters in 1676, 1775 and 1974. These royal charters, a number of significant leaders and other benefactors throughout its history, and sound property deals and equity investment decisions since the late eighteenth century, have ensured the charity’s survival for nearly 400 years.
Although no definite date has yet been found for its establishment, we know from an account taken from old archives that it was certainly in existence by 1613. In its foundation, the Scottish box club may have followed a tradition of late sixteenth-century sea insurance or ‘sea box societies’ for sailors established in London at the time of the Armada and also active on Scotland’s east coast by the 1590s. In addition, it was described in 1739 as having been, when originally established, ‘the first of its kind in the city.’ It was probably also a networking and drinking club and the charity met in a number of taverns around London’s Covent Garden.
The impetus for the charity’s first royal charter in 1665 was provided by a Scotsman (probably from Edinburgh) who was also a London citizen, a master weaver and a merchant called James Kynnier. He had survived a serious illness in 1664 and, wishing to thank God for his recovery, wanted to donate a substantial sum of money to provide for Scots who were less well off, and ‘for all time.’ As the first benefactor, James Kynneir then became the charity’s first annual master. The first two charters also established 8 governors and 33 assistants to manage the hospital and allowed it to hold land in Westminster and the City of London.
Once incorporated as the ‘Scottish Hospital’ the Corporation had to wait until after the Great Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire in 1666 before it could start to lay out its foundations for the first of its buildings – this was in a burnt out area in the City of London near the river called Blackfriars in 1669 and it opened for business in 1673.
A hundred years later the third charter in 1775 was a re-incorporation after a period of decay which instituted a presidential system and a greater number of governors.
The Royal Scottish Corporation continued to grow in stature during the nineteenth century, surviving a near fifteen-year fraud (discovered in 1862) and also a devastating fire in November 1877. Its premises were rebuilt and re-opened in 1880, and then sold up once more to release capital for charitable housing activities in 1973, and it then moved to its present site back in Covent Garden.
The charity’s management has for the most part provided careful administrative and financial stewardship, especially during crucial dates of change, and its mostly masculine leadership has been drawn from the ranks of many eminent first- and second-generation Scots in London. Initially its governors were Scots gentlemen and merchants who were also livery company men (weavers, merchant taylors, goldsmiths and apothecaries in particular); from 1775 the Scottish nobility became a presidential fixture; from 1837 a number of the more active men in the Caledonian Society of London began to take control. During the later twentieth century a few women additionally began to take up places on the Corporation’s committee of management, although a number had donated to the charity as patronesses since its earliest days.
Medieval monasteries had long provided care and relief for sick and poor Londoners but after their dissolution much more city help was needed and new poor relief acts were passed under Elizabeth I in 1599 and 1601. The Scots who arrived with James I from 1603 would not have been entitled to this new parish relief as a result of these acts that restricted aid to natives of a parish. The Scots Box filled this welfare gap.
It is likely that the Scots Box donations had continued once the hospital and workhouse had been established. When it closed around 1700, merchants, mechanics, craftsmen and sailors were encourage to take up the subscriptions and these were eventually phased out. A general charity was then established (probably from 1782) to help all first- and second-generation Scots and their families in London. As the Royal Scottish Corporation, the charity has since evolved following and complementing, but not subsidising, parish relief and later welfare services for Scots in London when they have been in need, hardship or distress. Those helped by the charity, according to its earliest tenets had to be ‘sober and industrious’ rather than ‘idle and extravagant.’ The many cases throughout this period show how the Corporation has become closely involved with evolving social issues and trends in London, especially those affecting immigrant workers, widows and children. By the twentieth-century many of its female pensioners were ageing domestic servants. We estimate that it has helped around 1 million Scots and their families during its history.
You might be interested to know that Education has been one priority and the Corporation started the training of orphans and the able-bodied Scots poor ‘for manual occupations’ and ‘for the advancement of trade’ in its 1673 workhouse. It educated other Scots children in the early 1800s, including an 1812 ‘school fund’ established with donations from Scots in India and East India Company directors, and paid the fees of a number of children attending schools run by the Scots churches in London until the 1880s. Today the Corporation awards student and other training grants and gives money to the Royal Caledonian Schools Trust, another educational charity for Scots in London.
The Royal Scottish Corporation also administers two charities for Scottish servicemen and women. Scottish soldiers and prisoners of war were also helped by the Corporation during the First World War when the charity’s management ran the Federated Council of Scottish Associations, sending ‘comforts’ to frontline troops and prisoners of war from Scottish regiments. It’s members also visited wounded Scots soldiers in the hospitals of London and south-east England.
I’d like to tell you a little about Scots Abroad and the few Corporation Scots in North America that I have found…
As early as 1677, the Corporation was advertising itself as a place for potential overseas bequests from wealthy merchants abroad, being, as it said, ‘likewise by our Patent enabled to be serviceable to our Country-men beyond the Sea, in performing the Wills of the Dead as Executors, and distributing their Legacies amongst our Friends as we shall appoint.’
The early donor lists of the Corporation from 1665 show a number of Scottish emigrants in continental Europe with contributors from Paris, Stockholm, Riga, St Petersburg and Danzig. But colonial connections and emigration go wider and both east and west. Nova Scotia had been first founded in 1624 by William Alexander, Earl of Stirling – who was a possible early Scots Box supporter. He was keen on encouraging colonialism and also needed a place to accommodate surplus Scots. The Scottish Hospital building fund was later to benefit from this Scottish colony connection in 1668 when Charles II was said to have sold two baronies in Nova Scotia to help pay for the building. William Alexander’s grandson Henry, Earl of Stirling, became a master of the Scots Corporation in the 1680s.
I have found only a couple of references to American Scots in the Corporation’s early accounts. One early reference, from between1714-1730, in the London Corporation list of benefactors points to a Boston Scot. John Borland was listed as a merchant in New England who gave £5 to the Scots Corporation. Bill Budde has also found Borland to have been a Scots’ Charitable Society of Boston supporter. Another Scottish merchant in Pennsylvania, William Trent, is also listed as having earlier given the Corporation £5, a few years earlier, by 1714 [also since found by BB to have been a Scots Charitable supporter from 1696]. Scots benefactors living in the West Indies gave money too - the Honourable Brigadier (later General) Robert Hunter, the colony’s governor who was also master of the Corporation in 1721. In Barbados, merchants, ministers and the colony’s governor also sent back donations.
As well as the more usual passages back to Scotland, the Royal Scottish Corporation later provided help with late nineteenth century emigration to North America. At an examination of cases in June 1882, one case of a mother wanting to join her daughter in America was examined. She was already a petitioner receiving 10 shillings a month and the committee agreed to give her £3 3s. towards her passage across the Atlantic. The Corporation also aided emigration to Canada with a special project to give grants and clothes to those individuals and families preparing for their new life there, especially in 1910-11. A Scottish network in Canada reported back to the London charity on the welfare of the Scottish emigrants for the benefit of governors who wanted to support them.
This sense of world-wide kinship in the Scots diaspora shows up in the St Andrew’s and Caledonian Societies that still exist today in many parts of the world. Many of them long supported the Royal Scottish Corporation. That the Scots were an asset to new colonial enterprises has often been said, and as one Caledonian Society of London and Corporation supporter of 1905 added, ‘If new lands are to be annexed or new nations built up, the Scot is not usually the last man to dig in his spade or put on his apron.’ In fact, he said, ‘the finest road for any Scotsman worthy of the name is the one that leads to where he can be freest and most independent.’
Twentieth-century support from North America continued periodically to come to the Corporation from such free and independent individuals and their Scottish societies in both Canada and the United States. In 1946 I see that greetings were sent from the Scots Charitable Society of Boston and the St Andrew’s Society of Ottawa among others abroad. The Scottish Clans Association, a regular American supporter, gave £257 in 1952 and more in future years. In addition in 1967-68 £175 was received from the St Andrew’s Society of the State of New York.
Current overview and future strategy
The management of the Corporation’s charity caseload has mirrored the history of the development of London’s parish relief, private philanthropy and state social welfare for 4 centuries. Creating the niche where the charity can continue to flourish will be crucial to the Corporation’s future survival.
The passing of centuries has not brought a lessening of hardship for the capital’s poor Scottish community. In 2002 the charity provided help to nearly 1,300 Scots in London, ranging from student grants to pensions for the elderly and disabled. The charity spent some £1.3 million on relief, including weekly allowances for 269 pensioners, and owned 78 sheltered flats in three parts of London. It also provided various other welfare services and grants for a large number of more Scots in need. Although the charter limitation means that help can only be given to first- or second-generation Scots, such relief means that these people become ‘less of a burden’ on the London taxpayer in general.
After a review by a consultant in 2001, the members of the committee of management were encouraged to bring in a younger and less male management, to focus on strategic issues affecting the charity and to leave the day-to-day running of the Corporation to salaried staff. In 2002 to carry through the changes, a new chairman was appointed and an experienced chief executive was hired from the charity sector.
In 2003 the Queen is still patron of the Royal Scottish Corporation and Sir Thomas Macpherson was appointed its new president this February. The president and treasurer are joined by six vice presidents and three levels of governors. Fifteen of the life managing governors are (along with the Corporation’s chairman, vice presidents, two honorary chaplains, three physicians and four surgeons) members of the charity’s committee of management. This governing body of trustees meets once a month and goes through the welfare cases and the business of the Corporation. Members of the committee of management are elected for a three-year period by a now (I think) annual court. A number of sub-committees, each with their own chairman, report to the committee of management and cover the subjects of finance, welfare and public relations. And, in a frequency unusual for a charity, the finance sub-committee meets twice a month to check its investment position with external advisers. A team of 17 full and part-time staff support the organisation.
In preparing for its twenty-first century future, the Royal Scottish Corporation has a new strategy to implement. It now envisages a community of ‘Scots in London providing and benefiting from mutual support.’ It also has a restated aim ‘to offer a helping hand to reduce or remove need, hardship or distress, in a manner that empowers our clients to help themselves.’
By 2006 the charity plans to be a more modern and well-known institution, and to have increased its beneficial impact on the poorer Scots community. Even though its funding will be more diversified, the Corporation plans to continue to preserve its inherited capital by providing greater value for money. Its efforts will be focused on low-income individuals in three groups: 1. older people and people with disabilities, 2. people of working age and 3. students. These ‘clients,’ as the charity calls them, will be encouraged to maintain a sense of independence. Access to a help line called ‘Scotsline;’ an assessment of their present and future needs (including training and personal development plans); help with finding appropriate existing services outside of the Corporation and access to social, leisure and cultural events. A team of five or six welfare staff will support these focused activities as well as organise and manage a volunteer programme to visit the charity’s pensioners.
The Royal Scottish Corporation is not a fashionable charity and has, as it says, certainly ‘kept its light under a bushel for many, many years.’ And ask people, for example, “What’s the Royal Scottish Corporation?” They say, “The Royal Scottish what?”’ Furthermore, the Corporation has yet to cut its teeth on the more serious publicity and fundraising, although this is planned. It will also set up a group of ‘friends’ to encourage Scots in London and elsewhere to subscribe to its worthy cause, and for some to act as volunteers.
I will finish by saying that the Royal Scottish Corporation, the oldest Scottish charity outside of Scotland, was once rather picturesquely described ‘as a small seed planted in an alien soil.’ But it has grown steadily and proved the point that for four-hundred years rich and poor Scots have never been far apart. Above all, as the fifth Earl of Rosebery wrote in 1927, the Royal Scottish corporation is a charity ‘which for history and antiquity is not easily equalled.’ To this thought he also added a few more fitting words which are also worth repeating in 2003 as the Corporation enters its fifth century. And I think these words fit the Scots’ Charitable Society of Boston too:
May it grow and prosper.
Thank you.
End.