RECORD MASTERCLASS
Cadets of Temperance, birth years and ages are often included too, making them particularly useful for researchers. Drinking among children was widespread, whether the alcohol was supplied by adults or purchased with their own wages, and children’s pledges were also meant to be safeguards for the future.
Children generally needed to be over the age of seven and have parental permission to sign a pledge, but examples survive of children being enrolled by their parents at birth, or signing up as early as four. More children’s pledges have survived than those of adults, reflecting the greater numbers in juvenile societies.
Design For A Better Life
The design of pledges became particularly inventive, using symbols suggesting the benefits to be gained by abstinence, such as the central figures of ‘Peace’ and ‘Prosperity’ in the emblem on Rechabite pledges. Other societies chose a range of motifs such as happy family groups, guardian angels and even St George killing the dragon, to reflect the protective nature of the pledge. The images adapted with the times, too; for example, ownership of a car symbolises prosperity in some 20th-century pledges.
The development of printing techniques and distribution networks meant that handsomely coloured pledges were widely, and cheaply, available by the 1880s, and the period from then until the First World War can be considered the heyday of the pledge – as it was of the UK temperance movement. As well as being a source of information, the temperance pledge puts us in touch with what so many of our ancestors believed, and lived by, and offers a real insight into the past.