The Penny -a-Week Fund …… the Ashton-Under-Lyne Committee .... and a neglected history book

Now the Tiger Kills, was one of the books I bought from Bryan the Book on Beech Road sometime in the 1980s.

It was already almost 40 years old and was one of a series published by HMSO telling the story of the Second World War.

Soldiers of the Indian Divisions, 1944

A modern historian may be careful about their lack of objectivity and the accuracy of some of the detail given wartime censorship, but they remain a fascinating contemporary insight into those six years.

I have a few, but despite their length in my custody, I have to admit to never reading them, and only writing about one.*

But today I brought down The Tiger Kills, which came out in 1944, and was “The story of the Indian Divisions in the North African Campaign”.

‘The first formations to go overseas from India were the now renowned 45y and 5th Indian Divisions.  The story of their deeds up to the destruction of Italy’s East African Empire and the expulsion of the Vicy French from Syria was told in the Tiger Strikes which was published in India in 1942.  [while] the Tiger Kills tells the of the fighting against the Germans by Indian and British soldiers who together composed the formidable fighting formations which went from India to the Middle East.  

The story is one of further successes, of desperate defence and then final victory in North Africa,  [with] their dash and courage in attack, and their steadfastness and tenacity in defence.’”**

So I rather wish I had read it earlier, not least because of its emphasis on the contribution made bu soldiers of whay was then the Empire and now the Commonwealth.

The Penny-a-Week- Fund, circa 1944

Nor is that all, because just inside the book were three sheets of headed note paper for the Penny-a-Week- Fund, H.R.H., The Duke of Gloucester’s Red Cross and St. John Appeal.

According to one source, "it was launched in September 1939 to raise funds for those affected by the Second World War. By 1946 the appeal had raised £54,324,408, which is the equivalent of £7,700,000,000 today, making it the largest charitable fund ever raised in the UK. The proceeds of the fund went to the Red Cross and St John War Organisation.

The fund committee decided to run appeals targeted to particular sections of the community.

The penny-a-week fund was a scheme created with the co-operation of the TUC and Employers’ Organisation to collect a penny week from workers, which was deducted from their wages. The fund raised £17,663,225 (£2.5 billion today) – all in pennies. Its success was credited to the idea of collecting a small amount of money from a large number of people. 

Detail of the Penny-a-Week-Fund, circa 1944

The amount did not make a significant difference to the donor’s weekly budget but the pennies added up to raise more than one third of the entire Duke of Gloucester’s Appeal. 

This was the precursor to payroll giving as we know it today. In 2011/12 £118 million is donated through payroll giving in the UK currently 2, a mere 34 per cent of what the penny-a-week fund collected annually during the war years.”***

I must confess  to having come across it before, and having read about the Spitfire Fund, but like the Great War charities raised vast amounts of money during the six years of the war.

But I am drawn to the Ashton-Under-Lyne Committee, partly because I lived in Ashton in the early 1970s, and so went looking for 51, Hutton Avenue which was home to Jim Timperley, who was the Honourable Secretary of the branch.

Into Battle- British and Indian Together, 1942

He was living in Hutton Avenue by 1939, described himself as a “shop manager, tailoring” had been born in 1910 and was active in the Auxiliary Fire Service.  He was married but as yet the name of his wife has yet to be discovered.****

And the house is still there just up from Beaufort Road a short walk from Stamford Park close to the Sycamore pub, a place we regularly visited.

So that is about it, but presents more research opportunities connected with the Ashton Committee, and The Penny-a-Week Fund, along with anafternoon reading about the contribution of the Indian Divisions.

*The book and the personal story …..... Greece in 1941, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-book-and-personal-story-greece-in.html

**General Sir Claude Auchinleck, G.C.I.E, C.B., D.S.O., A.D.C., Commander-in-Chief in India

*** British Red Cross: the £7.7 billion appeal that changed British fundraising forever, SOFII,  https://sofii.org/case-study/british-red-cross-the-7.7-billion-appeal-that-changed-british-fundraising-forever

****1939 Register

Stories of Nazi persecution, Russian emigres and a wartime crime ............. Nuremberg, Didsbury, Minsk and Liverpool

Now, the thing about researching the past, is that you can never be quite sure where you will end up.

Manchester Guardian, 1940

So, the story of the man from Didsbury, sentenced to six years hard labour in 1940, for contravening the Official Secrets Act, led to  a Jewish refugee, fleeing Nazi persecution and by degree led me to Liverpool and a family of Russian emigres.

Of course, the journey was not as undirected as it seems, because you make choices in the course of the research.

I could have chosen to follow up on the young woman who arrived in Britain in March 1939, and tried to track her early years living in Nuremberg where she was born.

Queens Court, Didsbury, 2020

But instead I chose to follow Mrs. Cashdown of 10 Ducie Street, in Liverpool who gave the young woman a job as a domestic servant in the October of that year.

Just how  long she stayed with Mrs. Cashdown is unclear but by the March of 1940 she was working for a new couple who lived in Queens Court in Didsbury, and as these things sometimes go, fell in love with her employer, who later would be tried and found guilty of breaking the Official Secrets Act.

He left his wife, and they set up home in a house in Old Trafford, and her failure to inform the Police of her change of address, led to her arrest and the discovery that her partner who as an “aircraft examiner” had made copies of classified material.

And there the story goes cold, she may have been interned because of that failure to give notice that she had moved.  If so this in itself was a personal tragedy given that in the October of 1939, a tribunal had judged she shouldn’t be interned because it was decided she was  “a refugee, fleeing Nazi persecution”.

With time I might find out more, but I doubt it.

As for the man, he too pretty much vanishes from history, although there are a few possible candidates in the records who might be him.

All of which led me out of curiosity to Mrs. Cashdan.  She and her husband were from Russia, and arrived in Britain sometime between 1905 and 1908.  In 1911, they were living at 73 Great Newton Street, and he is described in the local directory as a “Poulter”, adding a few months later on the census that he was a "Shocket (Jewish Butcher)” who slaughtered animals in conformity with Jewish religious practices.

Manchester Guardian, 1940

As such he was an important member of the community, and his sons followed his occupation with one of them describing himself as “a Minister of Religion and a Slaughterman”.

Sadly, nether of the two houses they lived in have survived.  73 Great Newton Street is now underneath one of the buildings belonging to Liverpool University, while Ducie Street was demolished sometime between 2009 and 2012.  Looking at pictures predating the demolition, no 10 looks to have been a fine town house.

And back in 1911, the street could boast a “foreign correspondent," a ship owner, a merchant, and a manager, along with a “glass and china merchant”, two “dental manufactures", a brewer, a solicitor and a "coffee merchant”.

Leaving me to reflect that in a short few hours of research I entered the world of the first half of the last century, touching on the war, Nazi persecution, and the lives of a Russian émigré family.

Pictures; headlines from Manchester Guardian, 1940, and Queen's Court, 2020, from the collection of Barbarella Bonvento

Sources; Manchester Guardian, March- July 1949, census records for 1911, the 1939 Register and Internment Tribunal, 1939