200th meeting of benevolent club

A CONSIDERATE Kintyre group dedicated to helping the elderly has met for the 200th time. The Campbeltown Benevolent Society (CBS), founded in December 1816 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, held its bicentennial annual general meeting at the start of February.

Originally known as the Society for the Relief of the Poor, it addressed the appalling poverty which existed in Campbeltown at the time, feeding the hungry and bringing succour to the ill and dying.

Minutes from the first committee meeting, held on February 4, 1817, detail the squalor in which some Campbeltonians lived.

The society’s president at the time, Mrs McGregor, and Miss Ann Campbell reported that they had visited a property and found all the occupants to be ‘in a most wretched state of health, all being confined in bed except four, and some of them seemingly in a dying state’.

The committee agreed to support these and other unfortunate people in the community by supplying them with food, coal and cash.

As the years passed, CBS’s reports became more positive, although much of the 19th century was tempered by the practice of trucking, when employers paid their workers, either in full or in part, with tokens which could only be changed in the company’s own store, often at highly inflated prices.

This was practiced widely by some distillery owners in Campbeltown, where some employees would end up consuming their entire wages in the distillery’s whisky store, leaving their families destitute and reliant upon CBS for assistance.

In the past century, the welfare state gradually assumed CBS’s functions, and so today it is an organisation dedicated to supporting Campbeltown’s elderly residents.